> Anyway, to put it entirely too briefly, and probably incorrectly, at
> least
> on the Badiou side: the deferral of différance seems to correspond
> in some
> important way with Badiou's understanding of the limit of forcing.
> Where I
> am wondering if Badiou improves on Derrida is on having a way of
> framing
> this in terms of truths that is ultimately more useful. That is,
> when I read
> Badiou on this, it felt like a sublime expression of what I thought
> was
> actually kind of the point with Derridean philosophy. But that's me
> and I'm
> probably just a crank.
"Math" in the sense of any mode of reasoning that requires that the "identities" of whatever is being reasoned about to remain stable to the degree the validity of the reasoning requires, is limited in its valid application by the ontological fact of "internal relations", i.e. by the fact that complete self-identity is not maintained where there is any change in relations.
"Internal relations" mean that any individual thing is what it is not, i.e. its essence is constituted by its relations with everything else. If this meant that you couldn't know anything without knowing everything else, you couldn't know anything. Since we can and do know things, this implication, if true, would mean that relations were not internal.
As the phenomenological (in the sense of Husserl) elaboration of such relations by Marx and Engels shows, however, internal relations do not have this implication. They can be conceived so as to be consistent with a degree of stability in the things being reasoned about, e.g. capitalists, to permit of knowledge of those things, a knowledge restricted, however, to the particular set of relations the "identities" in question require.
The idea that a word means everything it doesn't mean is not the idea of internal relations. In contrast to the internal relations idea of say the "capitalist", however, it does make "words" meaningless and incapable of conveying knowledge.
As Keynes points out, "logic" that is immune to a reductio ad absurdum is "Bedlamite". He explains it as a symptom of obsessional psychopathology. He points in illustration to the "remorseless logicians" responsible for what he called "Bedlamite economics", i.e. to the "quants" that since Keynes have come pretty much completely to dominate both economics itself and financial derivative markets.
Individuals who embrace both the idea that there is no truth and the idea that the truth is necessarily mathematical make, as Whitehead said in another context, "an interesting subject for study".
Ted