The Pornographic Age by Alain Badiou;

Author:Alain Badiou;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350014800
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

Relation

To think of one thing in terms of another has ever been the task of the philosopher, which is why Badiou’s choice of category theory as the logical/mathematical base for his logics of appearing, his objective phenomenology, and his precondition for the manifestation of that rare beast, the event, is both prescient and historically grounded. For a category is nothing other than the mathematics of meta-structural relation between objects in the same world that, however, solves the logical paradoxes, impasses and aporias attendant on philosophies of the immanence of beings in a world since the Greeks. The real philosophical question, we glean from categories, is not to think of one thing in terms of another as regards properties they share in common in relation to a being that they do not, but rather to think of one thing in terms of how it acts on another, and how this functional relation defines worlds such as they are and differentiates beings not in terms of what they are, but what they do to each other.

A category is a transcendental function located in the least largest position above all of its components, these are called diagrams. It oversees the degrees of relationality between the objects in its line of sight, gifted to it by its position of only-just superiority, and is defined solely by being the transcendental least largest position from which all diagrams of a world can be related to by at least two objects: the object in relation to itself and the category the object is included in. Being visible is a function, the archetypal function. It means being held in a functional relation with at least one other object, such that this larger object acts on you with a basic existential operation: as a being, you exist, to some degree of intensity, in this world, relationally speaking. A category structures relations, between the diagrams it oversees, and between itself and all its diagrams, even if, within the world, these varied diagrams do not all relate to each other. The technical name for this vantage point of existential clumps is a partially ordered set, or POSet.

Which is why thinking about worlds rather than being is, by definition, political. To inspect, to monitor, to surveil, is always to create a functional relation of force from which a quanta of power emerges. In addition, the mode of regard enacts a functional change on its object. To treat one thing from the perspective of another, to think of the relation between things, not simply because they are differentially similar, but rather in terms of the spheres of influence between objects, subjects, statements, states, how one acts on another, how these two act on a third and how all three are corralled by a distant, perhaps infinite fourth, has surely always been the basis of a lasting idea of Realpolitik. Categories structurally compose power, not sovereign or revolutionary power, but something more akin to regulatory, managerial, indeed anonymously technocratic, low-level coercion. Such that if

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