Materialism of Immortality in Badiou’s Logics of Worlds

Abstract

The theory of worlds is a project concerned with the logical configurations of worlds, a new theory of the object, and the relations of objects in the world. Logic, as a specific rationality of the appearance of being qua being, enables the independence and the intelligibility of singular worlds. Inflexible and immobile, the theory of worlds assumes a position radically separated/distinct from that of the theory of change. This essay is centred on two questions: in what way can materiality itself become something more than “bodies and languages”; and, second, in what way can the finitude and the stasis of this worldliness support radical change and eternity. Remaining within the limits of the theory of worlds, the author tackles the question of how a world can support a change without being itself the source of the change. Similarly: how can a world ‘re-instate’ the truth, when nothing in that world demands the truth? In a word, what happens to a world when immortality desires to become material?