Beyond Recognition: Badiou’s Mathematics of Bodily Incorporation

Abstract

In Being and Event, Alain Badiou disconnects the infinite from the One and the Absolute, thus recasting the basis from which to craft a new theory of generic subject, the existence of which is demonstrated through set theory. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou turns his attention to the modes by which this subject appears in a world. It does so by being incorporated as a subjectivizable body, a body of truth. As opposed to Being and Event, the demonstration of this argument takes shape according to two distinct levels, that of a “calculated phenomenology” and that of a formalism in which category theory provides a general logic, the combination of which delineates an “onto-logic”. In this essay, we trace Badiou’s derivation of the notion of body of truth and evaluate the innovative phenomenological methodology applied to explain its association with a world.