Alain Badiou. The Event as Creative Novelty 2009 7/13

http://www.egs.edu/ Alain Badiou lecturing about mathematical logic in relation to Aristotles book 4 of the Metaphysics, in particular on the proposition of the excluded middle and its relation to the event as creative novelty. He proposes that of the four types of logic it is the fourth type of negation—the negation that obeys neither the principle of non-contradiction nor the principle of the excluded middle—is in fact the total destruction of any power of negativity. It is the null point of the first three propositions in which negation finally exists only as the negated. Badiou uses this proposition to illustrate his ontology that a thing—be it physical, biological, scientific, philosophic or juridical— is a pure multiplicity without any qualifying determination. The laws of the world are not laws of things themselves but instead laws between the relationships of things. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2006 Alain Badiou.
Alain Badiou teaches at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and holds the Réné Descartes chair of Philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Though renowned for his extensive contributions to philosophy, Badiou has also written several plays, novels and political essays. Badious political life has been greatly formed by the events of 1968 and its aftermath; he remained a committed Maoist until the end of the 1970s. In 1985 he formed along with Sylvan Lazarus and Natacha Michel, L'Organisation Politique, a post party organization dedicated to direct popular intervention and the representation of the unrepresented. His book, The Meaning of Sarkozy, addresses directly the significance behind the election of the vulgar by a reactionary public.
Badious philosophy begins with the event—seen as a break with a world highly ordered and structured and which is constituted by language and determined by relations to power—that allows one, or many, to free themselves from commonly held beliefs or assumed truths, doxas, if only momentarily. Through this brief event however, through its taking up, one gives the event the chance to persist—indeed, there is the formation of an ethical obligation here—and allows one the opportunity to move beyond mere knowledge, doxa, and into the field of truth. Truth, for Badiou, is the passionate, all consuming process of searching taken up by a subject fleeing the ordinary, state of affairs, the standard.
Different however from the ethics of previous thinkers, Badious ethics is not devoted to turning us all into good people. Instead, it is an ethics which desires what is good, moves towards what is good. In describing an event, or in persisting in an event, Badiou subscribes to what could be called three virtues—discrimination, perseverance, and moderation—in an attempt to stave of the evils of betrayal or misunderstanding. To fail to discriminate is the first ethical pitfall; to assume that a historical occurrence like National Socialism is an event is to not see the self serving aspect of the belief. National Socialism galvanized one set of people while leaving another—or several others be they Jew, Gypsy, Homosexual—out in the void. One must identify an event instead as free from set criteria and without verification procedures; the event must be open. The second pitfall is the lack of perseverance; ethics acts as a a support for a subject during its investigation of an event. Ethics entreats a subject forward in persisting. Finally, ethics also acts to keep the subject from going too far; the subject in its enthusiasm, seeks to name the entire situation, to make the multiplicity singular, inevitably closing down all other situations, conversations, opinions, dialogues. For Badiou, philosophy is always under the condition of art, science, politics and love. Ethics is the means by which each condition pursues its unique truth. The task of philosophy is to work under these truths, to seek, and to identify within the limits of these truths.

Alain Badious english translations are Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1999), Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2000), On Beckett (2003), Being and Event (2005), Number and Numbers (2008), Logic of Worlds: Being and Event, Volume 2 (2009), Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy (2009). His most recent book, Theory of the Subject was released in July 2009.

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[foucauldian]

and then there's the dude with the hand actions...

[egsvideo]

@foucauldian thank you for the comment. the "dude" you are referring to, is one of our most stimulating "students" ... they sometimes sit in the lectures, from within they develop their own ideas, preparing a new speeches, books, or theories ...

[clarinetato]

Zizek! Much love for the two of the greatest philosophers alive.

[acawhat]

So nice to have some light sexism after such a lecture. Zizek: "I admit my relative ignorance in the domain of formal logic, so I will try to do something very feminine, if by feminine we understand this in a male chauvinist way of women cannot think in abstract terms." Why is he asking us to understand something in a male chauvinist way? And why do the audience find it funny? Swap 'feminine' for 'black' and 'male chauvinist' for 'racist' and see if people still laugh.

[D2NNY]

can someone explain what the fuck they are talking about

[Krelianx]

@DaimonTheFallen Actually, even Zizek acknowledges it. See his reference to Badiou as Parmenides; and his latest lecture where he says he is the hysteric and Badiou is the Master, and he likes it that way. And it is funny how Zizek sits on all of Badiou's lectures while Badiou hardly ever is there.

[foucauldian]

an then there's the dude with the hand actions...

[DaimonTheFallen]

Wouldn't necessarily link Zizek and Badiou as student and Master. Although they do have theoretical similarities, its not as if Zizek studied under Badiou or anything.

[darkprose]

"Finally, it's a logical framework. The theory of life is a logical framework. And we cannot oppose a theory of life to logic. Logic is absolutely a form of the world, so it's something which is concrete. There is not the existence of two separate worlds."

Very well said.

[Krelianx]

It's wonderful to see Zizek as a student. His respect for Badiou is a wonderful example of the philosophical relation between master and disciple.