Badiou Alain - The politics of logic : Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the consequences of formalism

Very few philosophers can boast, not only of Paul Livingstons breadth, but of the charity with which he takes stock of our present philosophical situation. In showing how this situation counts as one, he does not merely sum it up; rather, he produces within it what should be seen as a major philosophical event.

Prof. Andrew Cutrofello

Department of Philosophy

Loyola University, Chicago

The Politics of Logic

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

1 Email and Ethics

Style and Ethical Relations in Computer-Mediated Communication

Emma Rooksby

2 Causation and Laws of Nature

Max Kistler

3 Internalism and Epistemology

The Architecture of Reason

Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew

4 Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity

Edited by William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith

5 Epistemology Modalized

Kelly Becker

6 Truth and Speech Acts

Studies in the Philosophy of Language

Dirk Greimann & Geo Siegwart

7 A Sense of the World

Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge

Edited by John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci

8 A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy

Robert B. Talisse

9 Aesthetics and Material Beauty

Aesthetics Naturalized

Jennifer A. McMahon

10 Aesthetic Experience

Edited by Richard Shusterman and Adele Tomlin

11 Real Essentialism

David S. Oderberg

12 Practical Identity and Narrative Agency

Edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Kim Atkins

13 Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy

Heather Dyke

14 Narrative Identity and Moral Identity

A Practical Perspective

Kim Atkins

15 Intergenerational Justice

Rights and Responsibilities in an Intergenerational Polity

Janna Thompson

16 Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice

Themes and Challenges

Edited by Stephen de Wijze, Matthew H. Kramer, and Ian Carter

17 Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality

Logi Gunnarsson

18 The Force of Argument

Essays in Honor of Timothy Smiley

Edited by Jonathan Lear and Alex Oliver

19 Autonomy and Liberalism

Ben Colburn

20 Habermas and Literary Rationality

David L. Colclasure

21 Rawls, Citizenship, and Education

M. Victoria Costa

22 Objectivity and the Language-Dependence of Thought

A Transcendental Defence of Universal Lingualism

Christian Barth

23 Habermas and Rawls

Disputing the Political

Edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Fabian Freyenhagen

24 Philosophical Delusion and Its Therapy

Outline of a Philosophical Revolution

Eugen Fischer

25 Epistemology and the Regress Problem

Scott F. Aikin

26 Civil Society in Liberal Democracy

Mark Jensen

27 The Politics of Logic

Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism

Paul M. Livingston

The Politics of Logic

Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism

Paul M. Livingston

First published 2012

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2012 Taylor & Francis

The right of Paul Livingston to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Livingston, Paul M., 1976

The politics of logic : Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the consequences of formalism / Paul M. Livingston.

p. cm. (Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy ; 27)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

1. Political sciencePhilosophy. 2. Badiou, Alain. 3. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 18891951. I. Title.

JA71.L595 2011

320.01dc22

2011006207

ISBN13: 978-0-415-89191-2 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-80663-0 (ebk)

, , , ,

And the people of old, superior to us and living in closer proximity to the gods, have bequeathed to us this tale, that whatever is said to be consists of one and many, having in its nature limit and unlimitedness. Since this is the structure of things, we have to assume that there is in each case always one form for every one of them, and we must search for it, as we will indeed find it

(Plato, Philebus, 16cd)

.

But although the Logos is common the many live as though they had a private understanding.

(Heraclitus, fragment 2)

Methodological Preface

The aim of this book is to interrogate formal structures and results to determine their bearing on todays leading questions of social, linguistic, and political life. Because of the great scope and generality of this bearing, and its application across areas of contemporary thought that are often kept rigorously separate, this involves me in a project whose commitments may be heterodox in several ways. For one, the aim of interpreting formal-logical and metalogical results as bearing fundamentally on the structure of intersubjective language and collective life has suggested a traversal of the problems of political and social organization that is both a retrieval and a displaced repetition of the twentieth-century linguistic turn, nowadays so often and triumphantly dismissed. This means that here, as elsewhere, I have attempted to understand the implications of the twentieth-century philosophical recourse to language, its constitution and pursuit as a determinate object of investigation. But since the nature of language is not self-evident, I have nevertheless aimed never to assume a substantial being of language, or a specific determination of its forms, until and unless such determinations are clearly motivated by the formalisms themselves.

It may be helpful to state more generally some of the (primarily negative) principles that determine the method of this book with respect to the analysis of language and reflection on its forms.

1. To begin with, I have not assumed any simple outside to language. For whether it is understood as the place of mute presentation to a simple aesthetic seeing beyond words, or the transcendental domain of an exemplary presence, the assumption of such an outside prejudices the problem of the limits of language, with which the present inquiry is much concerned. I have thus attempted never to foreclose this problem by allowing the formal analysis to submit to constraint from beyond by means of any simply assumed exterior. This is also, I believe, the key to purging contemporary critical thought of the remaining elements of theology or, equally, what has been called onto-theology, both of which characteristically operate by positing a privileged being beyond language as its external constraint and ultimate delimitation.