Badiou and Indifferent Being

William Watkin is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Philosophy at Brunel University, UK.

• prefaceacknowledgementsIntroduction:Subtractive Being; Nonrelationality; Indifference; Set Theory; Retroactive Axiomatic Reasoning; Transmissibility, Intelligibility and Communicability; Theory of the SubjectChapter One: Being: The One and the MultipleHow to Prove that the One Is-Not (Meditation One); The One as Operational Counts-as-One; The Ancient Problem of Classes; Situations and Structures; The Multiple; Presentation of Presentation; Reasoning on Being by Means of Axioms; How to Accept that Being Is-NotChapter Two: Being: Separation, Void, MarkMeditation Two; Set Theory and Aggregation as Collection (Meditation Three); Axiom of Separation; Notation and Self-Predication; The Pure Multiple is Real; The Void: Proper Name of Being (Meditation Four); The Void and Nothing; Void as Nomination; ZF+C: The Nine Axioms of Contemporary Set Theory (Meditation 5); Axiom of Extensionality; Axiom of Replacement or Substitution; The Void Set and In-Difference; Meditation Six: Aristotle; Conclusion: Pure Multiple and the VoidChapter Three: Being and ExcessPowerset Axiom (Meditation Seven); Point of Excess; Void as Name; Four Kinds of One-ness: One, Count-as-one, Unicity, forming-into-one; The State (Meditation Eight); Threat of the Void; Belonging, Inclusion and Parts; Typologies of Being; States and Indifference (Meditation Nine)Chapter Four: Nature and InfinityNature is Normal (Meditation Eleven); Transitive Sets: Cardinal and Ordinal (Meditation Twelve); Nature and Minimality; Nature and Intrication; The Inexistence of Nature; Potential and Actual Infinity; Proving the Actual Infinite; Doubling and Dedekind Infinites; Frege and EquinumerosityChapter Five: Infinity, Limit and SuccessionThe Limit; Succession and Limit; The Upper or Maximal Limit; Succession; Infinite Thought: Problems of Procedure (Meditation Thirteen); In-Different Other: The Second Existential Seal; There is some infinity in natural multiples (Meditation Fourteen); Conclusion on BeingChapter Six: The Event: History and Ultra-OneHistorical Singularities (Meditation Sixteen); Historical Singularities, and Evental Sites: Examples; Primal Ones and the Edge of the Void; Singularity vs. Normality; Self-Predication: The Matheme of the Event (Meditation Seventeen); The Problem of Naming; Axiom of Foundation (Meditation Eighteen); Implications of Foundation; Coda: Un-RelationChapter Seven: The Event, Intervention and FidelityThe Wager: yes or no (Meditation Twenty); Intervention; Seven Consequences of the Event; Axiom of Choice (Meditation Twenty Two); Choice is Indifferent; Due to Choice, Singularities Exist and they are Indifferent; Fidelity, Connection (Meditation Twenty Three)Chapter Eight: The GenericContinuum Hypothesis: (Meditation Twenty-Seven); The Thought of the Generic (Meditation Thirty-One); Truth and Knowledge: The Indifference of Avoidance; Generic Procedure; The Matheme of the Indiscernible (Meditation Thirty-Three); Easton’s Theorem (Meditation Twenty-Six); Conditioning the Indiscernible; Indiscernible or Generic Subsets; The Existence of the Indiscernible (Meditation Thirty-Four); Extension; Is there a name for the discernible such that it can be said to exist?Chapter Nine: Forcing: Truth and SubjectTheory of the Subject (Meditation Thirty-Five); Subjectivization; Chance; Faith; Names; Forcing (Mediation Thirty-Six); Leibniz’s Identity of Indiscernibles (Meditation Thirty); The Proof of Forcing (Meditation Thirty-Six); From the Indiscernible to the Undecidable; Conclusion (Meditation Thirty-Seven);bibliographyindex

A remarkable achievement and a distinctive contribution to our knowledge of Badiou’s thought. For all the skill, and sometimes brilliance, of previous explications, no-one had quite captured the tenor, the character or (a heretical word, perhaps) the feel of Badiou’s ontology; not, at least, in language.