The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy) by Livingston Paul

Author:Livingston, Paul [Livingston, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-03-22T05:00:00+00:00

It only remains to formulate our ‘postulate of materialism’, which authorizes a definition of the object. As we know, this postulate says: every atom is real. It is directly opposed to the Bergsonist or Deleuzian presupposition of the primacy of the virtual. In effect, it stipulates that the virtuality of an apparent’s appearing in such and such a world is always rooted in its actual ontological composition.57

The axiomatic postulate of materialism thus ensures the ontological consistency of any world by means of the isolation of its atomic elements, thereby also blocking, as Badiou makes clear, the hypothesis of any “virtual” structuring of existence by language or the phenomenal dimension of appearance in excess of its ontological substrate. Any such structuring will thus, for Badiou, always be the outcome of processes that are simultaneously phenomenological and ontological; in fact, the underlying identity of phenomenal objects and ontological multiplicities that is assured by the “postulate of materialism” leads to the primary innovation of Logics of Worlds’ new theorization of evental change.

This is the idea of a specific “retroaction” of appearance on being, whereby the fact of the phenomenal appearance of a particular (ontological) set within a structured world brings about a train of changes which will ultimately transform the transcendental structure of the world itself.58 This strange retroactive effect of appearing on being, which defines the structure of the event, is possible only through a paradoxical effect of self-reference or self-belonging. In particular, for an event to occur, it is necessary not only that a certain set (a multiple in being) be a member of itself, but also that this particular being appear, in a world, as an element of a transcendental indexing that again indexes that very being. More specifically:

… it can happen that multiple-being, which is ordinarily the support for objects, rises ‘in person’ to the surface of objectivity. A mixture of pure being and appearing may take place. For this to happen, it is enough that the multiple lays claim to appearing in such a way that it refers to itself, to its own transcendental indexing. In short, it is enough that a multiple comes to play a double role in a world where it appears. First, it is objectivated by the transcendental indexing of its elements. Second, it (self-)objectivates, by figuring among its own elements and by thus being caught up in the transcendental indexing of which it is the ontological support. Worldly objectivation turns this multiple into a synthesis between the objectivating (the multiple support and referent of a phenomenality) and the objectivated (belonging to the phenomenon). We call such a paradoxical being a ‘site’.59

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