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Keeping Secrets: Approaching Badiou’s (Meta)ontology via Derrida’s Three Levels of Violence

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Notes

  1. This technical term will be unpacked towards the middle of the paper. It pertains to Badiou’s assigning of ontological work proper to mathematicians. Philosophy instead, as Meillassoux has paraphrased it, ‘plays a “meta-ontological” role whose task it is to locate the place in which mathematics effectively manages to speak being’ (Meillassoux 2011: 2).

  2. I’m reminded of the poem by Yehuda Amichai, ‘The Place Where We Are Right’: From the place where we are right / flowers will never grow / in the spring. / The place where we are right / is hard and trampled / like a yard… (Amichai 1986: 34).

  3. It would also be interesting—but beyond the scope of this paper—to explore the strong resonance between the space opened by deconstruction and what Badiou describes as anxiety: ‘the fear of points, the retreat before the obscurity of the discontinuous, of everything that imposes a choice without guarantee between two hypotheses’ (Badiou 2009: 86).

  4. University of Melbourne, Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, Master Class, Alain Badiou, November 24, 2014

  5. For a contained summary of this refutation of Parmenides see Meillassoux 2011: 1–3, or Badiou 2007, Meditations 1 and 2.

  6. See Badiou’s discussions of the Reactive Subject and the Obscure or Occulting Subject (2009: 45ff).

  7. Instead it is marked by the affects of terror, anxiety, courage, and justice—see Badiou 2009: 86.

  8. Badiou writes: ‘Without any particular joy, the materialist dialectic will work under the assumption that no political subject has yet attained the eternity of the truth which it unfolds without moments of terror’ (Badiou 2009: 88, emphasis added).

References

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  1. Literary Studies and Professional and Creative Writing, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

    Antonia Pont

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  1. Antonia Pont
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Correspondence to Antonia Pont.

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Pont, A. Keeping Secrets: Approaching Badiou’s (Meta)ontology via Derrida’s Three Levels of Violence. SOPHIA 55, 83–99 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0523-3

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