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Hmmm, I don't think Badiou "evacuates experience" - bear in mind that events always occur at an evental site in a historic situation, they do not just appear "out of the blue". I'd agree that Badiou hasn't so far given a particularly satisfactory account of the relationship between the event and...

Here's the man himself (from "Ethics", pp72-73): When the Nazis talked about the 'National Socialist revolution', they borrowed names - 'revolution', 'socialism' - justified by the great modern political events (the Revolution of 1792, or the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917). A whole series of...

Also, for the record, Badiou's four truth procedures are: art, science, politics, love. Philosophy is *not* a truth procedure, it does not produce truths directly and is entirely dependent on its four conditions for its existence.

This point is treated at length in "Ethics" - Badiou's basic argument is that fascism is not universalisable (it is based on plenitude rather than the void, its "subject" is the "German nation" rather than the international proletariat), consequently it is a simulacrum of an event, specifically...

Dominic, my point was simply that mathematics is central to Badiou's project and that it is quite witless to dismiss this engagement as a "veneer". Given that you've conceded this very point, I'm at a loss to understand your protests that I am being haughty, unhelpful, failing to provide...

That's an absurd thing to say. Badiou's work for the past two decades has been intricately, intimately, unyieldingly involved with mathematics. To dismiss this as a "veneer" is sheer philistinism. I suspect there may be some wishful thinking going on here, after all, Badiou would be an awful...

Yes. Religion is mystified politics. Not sure what you mean by "anti-theist" here, nor what is "anti-theist" about Spinoza: God is a central category in his works, surely? Badiou argues that Spinoza's ontology is fundamentally "closed", that it conflates certain crucial distinctions (eg...

Her New Statesman "media" column is really dreadful (worse even than the rest of the pisspoor magazine), dull, snobbish and crassly misogynistic.

One could add that it has little to do with democracy in any meaningful sense.

Do you have a reference for Badiou talking about Sartre? One of the reasons I'm somewhat suspicious of the Badiou-as-Sartrean line is that I've never read anything by him that discusses Sartre at any length. Contrast this with, for instance, his intricate engagements with Rousseau (who I'd say...

Agreed, but I'd stress the "little". I'm increasingly thinking that the recent English language reception of Badiou overstates the Sartrean influence, placing too much emphasis (or the wrong emphasis) on the "void". This tends to reduce Badiou's ontology to a latter day negative theology, and...

Hmmm, not quite. Philosophy doesn't produce truths for Badiou - truths are always scientific, political, artistic or amorous (the four "conditions" of philosophy). Philosophy's function is rather to create a "space of compossibility" where these truths can be thought together. In "Being and...

This isn't quite right. Mathematics is very much on the side of truth rather than knowledge for Badiou, in fact the great achievements of mathematics (eg Galois, Cantor, Godel) are almost paradigmatic examples of evental truths. Also, mathematics for Badiou is ontology, it directly articulates...

In recent interviews Badiou has moved away from stressing the dangers of "forcing the unnameable" - he now says this formulation conceded too much to a prevailing liberal climate prone to fretting over "totalitarianism". But many details of his system are currently being reworked for his new...