The Mathematization of Being and the Pathos of the Event

Abstract

The article develops the thesis that Badiou employs mathematics as a methodological tool which liberates philosophy from the impasse of epistemology. Thus, Badiou is linked to a number of his philosophical predecessors: historically, in the systems where the epistemological passive subject has become an active, practical subject of self-invention and self-creation (as with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger), being does not need to be framed as one. Wherever philosophy set the conditions of allowing the new to emerge, the criteria of the immediate evaluation of being are loosened, and being claims the right to dissolve from one to a meaningless, incomplete, purposeless multiple. Badiou is hereby placed in a certain tradition of the history of philosophy that started with German idealism and continued with Nietzsche and Heidegger.