Badiou's conceptualization of truth

Abstract

The article delineates basic contours of Badiou's theory of truth and shows some of its consequences. Truth is for Badiou the central concept of every possible philosophy. It is neither something given nor transcendent, but rather »immanent rupture« of a situation (as defined by Badiou, of course), but nonetheless universal and eternal. On the other hand it is fidelity to what surpasses, exceeds, supplements, »interrupts« the situation and what Badiou calls event. Event is contingent and incalculable, as soon as it emerges it vanishes, it is real in the Lacanian sense. Therefore Badiou claims, that »there is no formula of the truth«, that there is no guarantor of the truth. The task of philosophy is to ensure the place where compossibility of four truth procedures or conditions of philosophy would be possible, and always to bear witness to the inconsistency of a situation. Although truth is for Badiou omnipotent, philosophy must stop at its point of »unnamable«, impossible, real in the Lacanian sense. In this sense the ethics of truth is the ethics of the real.