...there is something about badiou that is... effed up. he is irritating for one. he sets up his grand insights and you get to it and you're like, 'um, oh? really? ok. wow. impressive."
put it this way, there is something about badiou that reminds me of that kid in class. the one that raises his hand. when you are a new teacher, you are ever so grateful *someone* has something to say, rather than you always having to say something.
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The work is easily misinterpreted.
I suggest a reading guide:
_Badiou's Being and Event_ by Christopher Norris.
The irritation you're expressing reminds me of the first time I read physicist David Bohm's _Thought as a System_. At first go, it seemed like re-heated cirricula leftovers from a Learning Annex seminar on Buddhism.
I shared my smart-ass disdain with a friend, who, as it happens, is a physicist.
He looked at me for a long time, then said: "do you really think that Bohm was an idiot or a phony, so easily grasped you can do a critique after staying up late a few nights to take in some chapters?!" I felt like a tool because yes, as you say 'up with clay feet' and all that. But Bohm deserved a careful reading. If it took months, if I reserved opinion for months or even years...well, that seemed proper somehow.
The point, of course, wasn't achieving slavish, total agreement, but acknowledgment of the scope of the work I claimed to have mastered (a claim implied by my application of hand wavium cream to the subject).
Needless to say, I feel pretty much the same way about Badiou. You may feel differently, even after completing the book.
That's okay. We'll work out our differences using Nerf bats or, if debate persists, Metis-M anti tank rockets. The choice of philosophers everywhere.
.d.
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"Careful fromage. One more word and I'm sentencing you to a lifetime of terror on Monster Island!"
Oliveras, to his son