Collected essays of a 2d-tier postmodern paladin, demonstrating French philosophy has run itself up the political dead ends of power as determinative and nihilism. Badiou asserts 20th-century existentialism – from Sartre in the 1940s to Deleuze in the 90s, including Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan – rivals ancient Athens and 19th-century German idealists (but not Republican Florence, which says something of the political bent).
Finitude is intended to deprecate the possibility of universals. Truth is a process or labor, not the pursuit of veracity of proposition. Postmoderns confuse scientific advances and consequent revision with the impossibility (futility) of settlement, and so surrender to nihilism (the point at which ‘enjoyment and dying are indistinguishable’). That calculus advances does not compromise arithmetic. But postmoderns prefer to seek profundity in paradox, though enigmas borne of logic chopping are not signposts to wisdom.
Consciousness implies unconsciousness, which is to be considered part of the subject and its intentions; subject do not imply objects. Plato’s subject is detached from ideas; Descartes’ is not because reason (thinking) is required. If we deemphasize the humanity of the subject we should not ne surprised activities such as politics are becoming inhuman.
Badiou’s though moved from dialectical (in which the event identifies the subject) to mathematical (formalism). His primary interlocutors are Plato and Hegel; his opponent Kant. A Maoist, he seeks to make a virtue, a practical theory of irrational behavior of the mob: several essays lament the ‘failures’ of 1968, when the French failed to follow the Red Guards; the ‘actually existing’ didn’t conform to the philosophy of history. Interestingly, deconstruction was a disaster for philosophy, a preoccupation with words and etymology overlooks that French language depends on syntax.
On the basis of implications, there is ever so much to disagree with – the margins are littered. In fairness, however, this book isn’t a postmodern primer.