The Politics of the Multiple

Abstract

Lenin famously recommended that would-be Marxist revolutionaries should study Hegel’s Logic. It is hard to say how many militants heeded Lenin’s call; the set of all those who have both read Hegel’s Logic (and understood it) and engaged in revolutionary activity might well be very modest.1 Devotees of Alain Badiou’s monumental L’Etre et l’evenement (fi rst published in 1988) would no doubt update Lenin’s advice. Today’s militants of thought, politics, art and love – to cite Badiou’s four generic procedures of subjective fi delity to truth – might be exhorted to work through Badiou’s extraordinary set of meditations on set theory as an ontology of being understood as the multiple. It is open, of course, what kind of set the readers committed to comprehending Badiou’s demanding set theory ontology of the multiple will eventually compose. As Jill Stauff er has observed, Badiou’s Being and Event “is a book no one is trained to read”.2 It certainly seems to demand an impossibly hybrid kind of reader: a philosophical amphibian, at once analytic and continental, mathematician and poet, who is equally versed in Cantorian set theory and its axiomatic variants (from Zermelo-Frankel to Cohen’s theory of the indiscernible) and in the “continental” repertoire of master thinkers and poets including Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Heidegger, Althusser, Lacan, Holderlin and Mallarme. Th e demands made on the reader are thus considerable. Whether Being and Event succeeds in the much-talked-about “rapprochement” between analytic and continental philosophy – or else demonstrates its practical diffi culties – remains to be seen.