IRCAM - 1

Panel at IRCAM, June 7, 2019.  Left to right:  François Nicolas, Yves André, Fernando Zalamea.  Alain Badiou is seated in the audience on the left.

To celebrate the publication of the third and final volume of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event trilogy, the organizers of the Paris MAMUPHI seminar — MAthématiques, MUsique, PHIlosophie — devoted a two-day conference at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), under the title L’hypothèse du contemporain.

For the 20th anniversary of the Mamuphi seminar (mathematics-music-philosophy), these encounters are dedicated to L’Immanence des vérités, the latest work by the philosopher Alain Badiou, and, more particularly, to his theory of “works-in-truth”. How are works distinguished from “waste” and, incidentally, “archives”? The final part of the work by Badiou formalizes a limitless alternative to the oppression of finality. These days in June gather together mathematicians, musicians, philosophers, and the author to formulate their own hypothesis in the shadow of their reading of the contemporary in the 21st century.

Yves André invited me as one of the mathematicians, and because of my deep respect for André’s writings about mathematics — and of course for his mathematical work — I was pleased to accept the invitation.

Badiou’s three-volume system is heavily based on set theory and much of the third volume is devoted to the theory of large cardinals, with chapters on ultrafilters, theorems of Scott, Jensen, and Kunen, 0#, and much more.  I have no idea what the upcoming Columbia graduate workshop will make of all this.  My own presentation had nothing to do with set theory; my aim was to explain why Badiou was wrong to hint in his book, in passing, that the mathematics of Andrew Wiles belonged with the “waste,” or at best the “archives.”  You can watch my talk or you can read it (preceded by a couple of pages explaining my misgivings about the theme of the conference).

I have to confess a less highbrow motivation, though.  Here is an excerpt from a review by Stanley Chang of Mathematics without Apologies that appeared in Society, dated June 25, 2018.

Other reviewers, both academics and nonacademics, have quite forcefully deprecated his use of ideas without context, the irrelevancy of various sections, an unreadably poor organization, and a purposely opaque stream-of-consciousness that prohibits understand [sic] rather than encourages it. One of my own friends, an anthropologist in academia, laughingly said that his treatment of Badiou is something that you would expect from a bad first-year philosophy essay from a bad student at a bad university.

Although Chang gave excellent reasons for his evident dislike of the book, he went out of his way to give it a fair reading, and I have no problem with his review.  But why did he make up this part about Badiou?  MWA contains no “treatment of Badiou.”  According to the index, Badiou’s name appears three times, and only in endnotes.  Two of the references are direct quotations, without anything that can be construed as a “treatment,” and the third quotes Juliet Flower MacCannell’s comments on a quotation by Badiou regarding Lacan’s theory of love, along with Vladimir Tasić’s gloss on the quotation and the comments.

In the Q&A following my talk in Paris I got a laugh from Badiou by suggesting that the mere mention of his name would provoke the laughter of many American philosophers, not to mention anthropologists.  But I don’t think that explains Chang’s sentence.  Maybe he was confusing Badiou with Bourdieu?  Or maybe the treatment in question was on this blog, for example here?

I would fault the editors of Society for allowing the publication of that last sentence, or any sentence, on any subject whatsoever, that quotes an anonymous anthropologist — laughing no less — for the sole purpose of taking a cheap shot.  But in fact I have no idea what the sentence is about.