anyway, as for jeff's comment below: ha. ha.
I poked around to see if anyone has written about both buchler and badiou: http://sprouts.aisnet.org/70/1/2006-16.pdf
Title: "Badiou qua Badiou, or vanity of void ontology"
I am amused that I'm not the only one who is finding the translation just horrendous. It is not because Badiou writes so badly and ridiculously in the original. it's the translator's attempt to translate precisely from french to english without relying on u.s colloquialisms.
i will have to pluck them out and quote them to show what i mean. but i'm amazed that there isn't more complaints about this. it is rather distracting. makes me appreciate translators who don't suck even more than I did before.
meanwhile, i have read that whole paper, but it made me laugh at this part:
badiou: "It is the philosophico-mathematical nexus—legible even in Parmenides’ poem in its usage of apagogic reasoning—which makes Greece the original site of philosophy, and which defines, until Kant, the ‘classic’ domain of its objects. At base, affirming that mathematics accomplishes ontology unsettles philosophers because this thesis absolutely discharges them of what remained the centre of gravity of their discourse, the ultimate refuge of their identity. Indeed, mathematics today has no need of philosophy, and thus one can say that the discourse on being continues ‘all by itself’. Moreover, it is characteristic that this ‘today’ is determined by the creation of set theory, of mathematized logic, and then by the theory of categories and of topoi. These efforts, both reflexive and intra-mathematical, sufficiently assure mathematics of its being— although still quite blindly—to henceforth provide for its advance.
<...>
Author: " It seems Badiou complains about not being taking seriously by established mathematicians. I would say that the veil drops from his megalomania where he insists that he “actually knows” about mathematics’ true, that is, ontological destiny. Through his “revelation,” he is delivering mathematics. It sounds rather peculiar.
And is there really anyone who claims to understand “that it is of the essence of ontology to be carried out in the reflexive foreclosure of its identity”? As I said, I haven’t consulted the French original but I cannot help feeling worried about the translator. How is it possible to keep sane when translating, except as a strictly mechanical exercise, muddled sentence after muddled sentence?
If ontology’s identity is indeed foreclosed, which I understand as it being immediately proclaimed out the conceptual framework in question, how can Badiou possibly devote a whole book to establishing foreclosure? Isn’t the whole point of foreclosure that its establishment is immediate, rather than developed at length? And not just foreclosure, but even reflexive foreclosure. Why doesn’t Badiou simply state his assumptions, and get it over with? ..."
*chuckle*
Jeff Fisher:
>> lol
>>
>> nice
>>
>>> santayana, james, dewey, whitehead, justus buchler.
Eric Beck:
>> Those people are way too empirical for Badiou.
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