The first critical work to attempt the mammoth undertaking of reading Badiou's Being and Event as part of a sequence has often surprising, occasionally controversial results.
Looking back on its publication Badiou declared: "I had inscribed my name in the history of philosophy†?. Later he was brave enough to admit that this inscription needed correction. The central elements of Badiou's philosophy only make sense when Being and Event is read through the corrective prism of its sequel, Logics of Worlds , published nearly twenty years later.
At the same time as presenting the only complete overview of Badiou's philosophical project, this book is also the first to draw out the central component of Badiou's ontology: indifference. Concentrating on its use across the core elements Being and Event -the void, the multiple, the set and the event-Watkin demonstrates that no account of Badiou's ontology is complete unless it accepts that Badiou's philosophy is primarily a presentation of indifferent being.
Badiou and Indifferent Being provides a detailed and lively section by section reading of Badiou's foundational work. It is a seminal source text for all Badiou readers.
**
Review
Watkin's is a very important book. Much of the commentary on Badiou has tended to move his politics to the centre of his thought. With meticulousness, clarity and rigour, Watkin works rather through Badiou's philosophization of mathematics, liberating the philosopher qua philosopher, the thinker whose awesome achievement has been to recast and transform our understanding of a major set of traditional philosophical terms. This book returns us to what is most gripping about Badiou, his stark, courageous and deeply uncontemporary asceticism. -- Andrew Gibson, former Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
About the Author
William Watkin is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Philosophy at Brunel University, UK.

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33484.indb

Watkin, William

ids

Bloomsbury Publishing Bloomsbury Academic

Taylor & Francis Ltd

I.B. Tauris

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

London, [New York, 2017

1, 2017

producers:
Acrobat Distiller 8.0.0 (Macintosh)

Memory of the World Librarian: Slowrotation

Cover page 1
Halftitle page 2
Series page 3
Title page 4
Copyright page 5
Contents 6
Introduction 10
The consistency of inconsistency 15
Subtractive being 17
Nonrelationality 19
Indifference 20
Set theory 22
Retroactive axiomatic reasoning 25
Transmissibility, intelligibility and communicability 28
Theory of the subject 29
Part One Indifferent Being 34
1 Being: The One and the Multiple 36
How to make intelligible the impossible proposition one is-not (Meditation One) 37
The one as operational count-as-one 38
The ancient problem of classes 40
Situations and structures 42
The multiple 44
Presentation of presentation 45
Reasoning on being by means of axioms 49
2 Being: Separation, Void, Mark 54
Meditation Two 54
Set theory and aggregation as collection (Meditation Three) 55
Axiom of separation 57
Notation and self-predication 59
The pure multiple is real 62
The void: proper name of being (Meditation Four) 65
The void and nothing 66
Void as nomination 68
ZF+C: the nine axioms of contemporary set theory (Meditation Five) 70
Axiom of extensionality 71
Axiom of replacement or substitution 73
The void set and in- diff erence 74
Conclusion: pure multiple and the void 76
3 Being and Excess 80
Powerset axiom (Meditation Seven) 81
Point of excess 83
Void as name 86
Four kinds of one-ness: one, count-as-one, unicity, forming-into-one 8 89
The state (Meditation Eight) 93
Threat of the void 96
Belonging, inclusion and parts 100
Typologies of being 103
States and indifference (Meditation Nine) 107
4 Nature and Infinity 110
Nature is normal (Meditation Eleven) 110
Transitive sets: cardinal and ordinal (Meditation Twelve) 112
Nature and minimality 114
Nature and intrication 117
The inexistence of nature 118
Potential and actual infinity 119
Proving the actual infinite 120
Doubling and Dedekind infinites 122
The limit 126
Succession and limit 129
The upper or maximal limit 130
Succession 133
Conclusion on being 136
Part Two Indifferent Events 140
5 The Event: History and Ultra-One 142
Historical singularities (Meditation Sixteen) 145
Historical singularities and evental sites: examples 147
Primal ones and the edge of the void 152
Singularity vs. normality 153
Self-predication: the matheme of the event (Meditation Seventeen)11 155
The problem of naming 158
Axiom of foundation (Meditation Eighteen) 161
Implications of foundation 164
Coda: un-relation 167
6 The Event, Intervention and Fidelity 170
The wager: yes or no (Meditation Twenty) 173
Intervention 174
Seven consequences of the event 177
Axiom of choice (Meditation Twenty-two) 184
Choice is indifferent 187
Due to choice, singularities exist and they are indifferent 191
Fidelity, connection (Meditation Twenty-three) 193
7 The Generic 198
Continuum hypothesis (Meditation Twenty-seven) 198
The thought of the generic (Meditation Thirty-one) 203
Discernment and classification 204
Truth and knowledge: the indifference of avoidance 205
Generic procedure 208
The matheme of the indiscernible (Meditation Thirty-three) 210
Easton’s Theorem (Meditation Twenty-six) 212
Conditioning the indiscernible 215
Indiscernible or generic subsets16 218
The existence of the indiscernible (Meditation Thirty-four) 221
Extension 225
Is there a name for the discernible such that it can be said to exist? 226
8 Forcing: Truth and Subject 230
Theory of the subject (Meditation Thirty-five) 230
Chance 233
Faith 234
Names 236
Forcing (Meditation Thirty-six) 238
The proof of forcing 242
From the indiscernible to the undecidable 249
Conclusion (Meditations Thirty-six and Thirty-seven) 253
Bridge: from Being and Event to Logics of Worlds 255
Notes 262
Bibliography 280
Index 286

"This in depth exploration is the first part of a two part study of the two volumes of Alain Badiou's seminal Being and Event project. Badiou and Indifferent Being is an original, systematic study of Being and Event that takes into consideration the dramatic modifications to Badiou's philosophy since the publication of Logics of Worlds (2006). In that central elements of Badiou's philosophy, such as the situation, the event and the subject, are incomplete in Being and Event, this is the only fully up-to-date and accurate consideration of Badiou's overall philosophy yet published. At the same time as presenting an up-to-date account of Badiou's overall philosophy, the book is the first to draw out the central component of Badiou's ontology namely its relation to the category of indifference. Concentrating on the use of indifference across all the core elements of ontology, in particular the void, the pure multiple, the concept of set and the event, the book demonstrates that because set theory as such is a mathematics of indifference and for Badiou ontology is mathematics, no account of Badiou's ontology is complete unless it accepts that Badiou's theory of being is a presentation of indifferent being. The book provides a detailed and lively section by section reading of Badiou's foundational work, presenting all his concepts for all Badiou readers from undergraduates to researchers. It is a seminal source text for all future readings of Badiou."--Bloomsbury Publishing

"The first critical work to attempt the mammoth undertaking of reading Badiou's Being and Event as part of a sequence has often surprising, occasionally controversial results. Looking back on its publication Badiou declared: "I had inscribed my name in the history of philosophy". Later he was brave enough to admit that this inscription needed correction. The central elements of Badiou's philosophy only make sense when Being and Event is read through the corrective prism of its sequel, Logics of Worlds, published nearly twenty years later. At the same time as presenting the only complete overview of Badiou's philosophical project, this book is also the first to draw out the central component of Badiou's ontology: indifference. Concentrating on its use across the core elements Being and Event the void, the multiple, the set and the event Watkin demonstrates that no account of Badiou's ontology is complete unless it accepts that Badiou's philosophy is primarily a presentation of indifferent being. Badiou and Indifferent Being provides a detailed and lively section by section reading of Badiou's foundational work. It is a seminal source text for all Badiou readers."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

2024-06-27