Badiou's Numbers

Badiou's Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology
Author(s): By RicardoL.Nirenberg and DavidNirenberg

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Summer 2011), pp. 583-614
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Badious Number: A Critique of Mathematics
as Ontology
Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David Nirenberg
Pour peu quon y prete attention, elle [cette verite] cre`ve les yeux les maths a`
grosses doses epaissit.
Alexandre Grothendieck, Re coltes et semailles
1
1. Being and Event
When an English translation of Being and Event appeared in 2005, Alain
Badiou took the opportunity to reminisce about the initial French publi-
cation some twenty years before: at that moment I was quite aware of
having written a great book of philosophy. He located that greatness in
four afrmations and one radical thesis. Afrmation one: Situations
are nothing more, in their being, than pure multiplicity. Two: The struc-
ture of situations does not, in itself, deliver any truths. By consequence,
nothing normative can be drawn from the simple realist examination of
the becoming of things. . . . A truth is solely constituted by rupturing with
the order which supports it, never as an effect of that order. This type of
truth-constituting rupture Badiou calls the event. Three: A subject is
nothing more than an active delity to the event of truth. Four: The
being of a truth, proving itself an exception to any pre-constituted predi-
cate of the situation in which that truth is deployed, is to be called ge-
neric. A truth is a generic procedure. And to be a Subject (and not a
simple individual animal) is to be a local active dimension of such a pro-
cedure. Finally, the radical thesis: Insofar as being, qua being, is noth-
ing other than pure multiplicity, it is legitimate to say that ontology, the
science of being qua being, is nothing other than mathematics itself.
2
The thesis is indeed radical. Using language borrowed from set theory
(Georg Cantors multiplicity, Paul Cohens generic) Badiou is, throughout,
asserting that sets and their properties are there, regardless of whether
The authors thank Lorraine Daston, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Jonathan Lear, Isabel Nirenberg,
Josef Stern, William Tait, and Harvey Yunis for their generous criticism.
1. Alexandre Grothendieck, Re coltes et semailles: Re exions et te moignage sur un passe de
mathe maticien, www.math.jussieu.fr/leila/grothendieckcircle/RetS.pdf, p. 222. Re coltes et
semailles has long circulated in photocopy, a sort of mathematical samizdat. We have consulted
it on the web, but see Grothendieck, Re coltes et semailles: Re exions et te moignage sur un passe de
mathe maticien, 7 vols. (Montpellier, 1985).
2. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London, 2005), pp. xi, xiixiii;
hereafter abbreviated BE.
Critical Inquiry 37 (Summer 2011)
2011 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/11/3704-00011$10.00. All rights reserved.
583
anyone thinks them or not. Thus far his radicalism is familiar and goes by
the name of mathematical realism or Platonism. Unlike mathematical
formalists like David Hilbert, for whom truth or falsity depends on the
axiomsystemone chooses to deal with, just as, in a game, a certain move is
allowed if it doesnt violate the rules; unlike intuitionists such as Henri
Poincare, L. E. J. Brouwer, or Hermann Weyl, who handle innity with
pincers and refrain from proofs by contradiction; unlike post-Tractatus
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Badiou is a Platonist for whom the huge universe of
set-theoretical objects is actually real. In this he is like many nonphilo-
sophical working mathematicians, who simply take for granted the re-
ality of what they spend so much time thinking about, much as a gambit
may seem as real as a maple tree to a chess player. But unlike any mathe-
matician we know (and herein lies the real radicalism) for Badiou those
set-theoretical objects, those multiplicities, are not only real, they are the
only real, the only objects that are, the only basis for ontology.
3
Given the horric academic destiny of specialization that Badiou be-
moans in that same preface, and given the fact that his writings are far
more popular outside the world of mathematics than within it, we may
assume that the mathematical apparatus he placed at the service of his
afrmations has received less attention than those afrmations themselves
(BE, pp. xiv, xiii). For the same reasons we may doubt that much critical
attention has been paid to the relationship between Badious mathemat-
ical formalism and the radical thesisontology is nothing more than
mathematics itselfthat he developed in order to support that formal-
isms intervention in the science of being qua being. This lack of at-
tention is problematic, not only because Badious assertions depend, by
3. This classication (formalists, intuitionists, realists) is today standard in the philosophy
of mathematics. See, for example, Roman Murawski, Recursive Functions and Metamathematics:
Problems of Completeness and Decidability, Gdels Theorems (Dordrecht, 1999), pp. 118. Badiou
criticizes intuitionists for drawing their criteria from a doctrine of mentally effective
operations. . . . Intuitionism is a prisoner of the empiricist and illusory representation of
mathematical objects (BE, p. 249). For Wittgensteins skepticism about set theory, see his
Philosophical Grammar, trans. Anthony Kenny, ed. Rush Rhees (Berkeley, 1974), pp. 460 ff.
RI CAR DO L. NI R E NB E R G is a retired mathematician and the editor of the
literary journal Offcourse.org. His latest book is the novel Wave Mechanics: A
Love Story (2008). David Nirenberg is the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta
Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought in the Department of History and
the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His most recent
book is (with Herbert Kessler) Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the
Catacombs to Colonialism(2011). The authors are father and son.
584 Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David Nirenberg / Badious Number
the logic of his argument, on the truth-value of his interpretations of the
mathematical formalism, but also because Badiou presents his mathemat-
ical ontology as an important achievement and one that needs to be un-
derstood within the history of philosophy: There is no difference between
what I have done and what such philosophers as Plato, Descartes, Leibniz,
or Hegel have done (BE, p. xiv).
It is for these reasons that our essay approaches Badious ontology
through his mathematics.
4
He does not always welcome this type of en-
gagement. Already in the French introduction of 1988 he moved to deprive
mathematicians of any special authority they might have in judging the
quality of his work. He especially mocked what the Americans call work-
ing mathematicians (BE, p. 11) as particularly resistant to reection about
their discipline.
5
And inthe 2005 preface, he warns that one cannot corner
me in some supposed ignorance, neither in the matter of the formal com-
plexities I require, from Cantor to Groethendieck, nor in the matter of
innovative writing, from Mallarme to Beckett (BE, p. xiv). But we do not
seek to corner Badiou, if cornering means showing (as Alan Sokal and
Jean Bricmont did in the cases of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and oth-
ers)
6
that he does not understand the math concepts he deploys. On the
contrary, we wishto engage his set-theoretical commitments seriously. We
will therefore focus our critical attention precisely on the part of mathe-
matics at stake in his argument in which it is historically pronounced
that every object is reducible to a pure multiplicity, itself built on the
unpresentation of the void: the part called set theory (BE, p. 14).
7
Our rst goal will be to demonstrate that Badious set-theoretical mod-
els for ontology are at best a priori commitments rather than necessary
truths of the set theory within which they are made. Here we do not mean
his general a priori commitment to realism but his commitments to spe-
4. For the purposes of this essay we have concentrated our analysis on BE; on the collected
essays published as Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge, 2008); and on
Mathematics and PhilosophyThe Grand Style and the Little Style, Theoretical Writings,
trans. and ed. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London, 2004).
5. Badious animus toward American philosophical uses of mathematics (which he calls
Anglo-Saxon linguistic sophistry) is marked, even though the named target of his ire is the
French mathematician Jean Dieudonne. Badious mocking phrase about working
mathematicians may be an allusion to the title of Saunders MacLanes book, Categories for the
Working Mathematician (New York, 1971). Category theory is another basis for mathematics,
competitive with set theory.
6. See Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse
of Science (New York, 1998).
7. There is already a good deal of ontological bad faith in this last citation, both in the
scare-quotes around object, and in the claim that every object is reducible to pure
multiplicity, which will merely end up dening those that are not so reducible as not being; see,
for example, the conclusion of Meditation 12: Nature does not exist (BE, p. 140).
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2011 585
cic models and the reduction of number to set theory. We will then show
that, in deducing philosophical and political consequences from his set-
theoretical arguments, Badiou confuses contingent attributes of informal
models with necessary consequences of the axioms (we will call this type of
confusion a Pythagoric snare). The politico-philosophical claims that re-
sult have no grounding in the set theory that is deployed to justify them.
Finally, we will show that it could not be otherwise, for the axioms of set
theory themselves dictate strict limitations on the kinds of objects they can
and cannot be applied to. Any rigorous attempt to base an ontology upon
themwill entail such a drastic loss of life and experience that the result can
never amount to an ontology in any humanly meaningful sense.
But, before we begin, we want tooffer a note of explanationabout audience
and language. Our critique is not addressed to working mathematicians
familiar with formal logic and set theory. Though such mathematicians are
often realists, they have proven quite immune to this type of ontology,
and this not from indolence or arrogance, as Badiou would have it, but
rather because they are trained to recognize and reject Pythagoric snares.
Neither are we addressing those whose commitment to Badious philoso-
phy is suchthat it canremainhappily independent of any knowledge about
the system of thought upon which that philosophy claims to be based. We
are addressing critical readers who feel the need to understand the basis of
Badious ontology. Because that ontology is cast in set-theoretical terms,
our exposition must take up those terms as well. We will keep our set-
theoretical illustrations few and simple and everywhere attempt to trans-
late theminto natural language examples. But since there are limitations to
such translations, we will, like Badiou, require some formal complexi-
ties. We urge nonmathematical readers not to be intimidated by strange
symbols or to skip the formal- or semi-formal-language sections but to
persevere through them, for we have provided the few denitions neces-
sary to decode them (both in the text and in the appendix, an explanation
of logical and set-theoretical symbols), and from that decoding itself there
is a good deal to be learned about the many seductions of set-theoretical
ontologies like Badious.
2. The One and the Multiple
Already the rst meditation of Being and EventThe One and the
Multiple: Apriori conditions of any possible ontologyannounces a rev-
olution. Since its Parmenidean foundations, ontology has been built on
the axiom that what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents
itself is essentially one. The reciprocity of the one and being is certainly the
inaugural axiomof philosophy . . . yet it is also its impasse. Howto escape
this impasse? We nd ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to
break with the arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is
born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption. This decision
can take no other form than the following: the one is not (BE, p. 23).
Badious procedure here itself emits a whiff of sophistry: identify a po-
larity, then wager everything on one term. The goal of Badious wager is to
overthrow the monarchy of the monad and end the preeminence of the
One in the long history of theology and ontology. But kings are not killed
by decision alone. How precisely will the One be eliminated?
Decision is followed by declaration: What has to be declared is that the
one, which is not, solely exists as operation. In other words: there is no one,
only the count-as-one. The one, being an operation, is never a presenta-
tion. And then: In sum: the multiple is the regime of presentation; the
one, in respect to presentation, is an operational result; being is what pres-
ents (itself). On this basis, being is neither one (because only presentation
itself is pertinent to the count-as-one), nor multiple (because the multiple
is solely the regime of presentation) (BE, p. 24).
The treatment of the One as an operation rather than an entity has
venerable metaphysical precedents, which Badiou does not mention.
8
What is newis the ontological demotion this is taken to imply. He explains
further: The multiple is retroactively legible therein [in every situation,
that is, any multiplicity with its operation of count-as-one] as anterior to
the one, insofar as the count-as-one is always a result (BE, p. 24). And the
one, which is not, cannot present itself; it can only operate (BE, p. 25).
Badiou then divides multiplicities into two species:
The multiple evidently splits apart here: multiple is indeed said of
presentation, in that it is retroactively apprehended as non-one as
soon as being-one is a result.Yet multiple is also said of the composi-
tion of the count, that is, the multiple as several-ones counted by the
action of structure. There is the multiplicity of inertia, that of presen-
tation, and there is also the multiplicity of composition which is that
of number and the effect of structure.
Lets agree to term the rst inconsistent multiplicity and the second
consistent multiplicity. [BE, p. 25]
Some of Badious vocabulary here (inertia, presentation) is opaque, but his
key concept is borrowed from Georg Cantor, who in a series of letters
8. Some Islamic mystics, for example, stressed the Unique, or Unier. For them
(according to Henry Corbin, LHomme de lumie `re dans le sousme iranien [Paris, 1971], p. 46)
the One is not the one of 1 1, but the one of 1 1 1 . . .
dened inconsistent multiplicity as one for which the assumption that it
is a set leads to contradiction. It is this contradiction, later formulated by
Bertrand Russell as a paradox, that precipitated the crisis in the founda-
tions of mathematics, necessitating new projects of foundation such as
Russell and Alfred North Whiteheads Principia Mathematica, and (much
more useful for mathematicians) the axioms of Ernst Zermelo and Abra-
ham Fraenkel and other sets of axioms such as those due to John von
Neumann, Paul Bernays, and Kurt Gdel.
9
Today, an inconsistent mul-
tiplicity is usually referred to as a class which is not a set.
Badious strategy, then, is to base ontology entirely on classes and sets:
If an ontology is possible, that is, a presentation of presentation, then it is
the situation of the pure multiple, of the multiple in-itself. To be more
exact; ontology can be solely the theory of inconsistent multiplicities as
such. And:
What will provide the basis of [the multiples] composition? What
is it, in the end, which is counted as one?
The a priori requirement imposed by this difculty may be sum-
marized in two theses, prerequisites for any possible ontology.
1. The multiple from which ontology makes up its situation is com-
posed solely of multiplicities. There is no one. In other words, every
multiple is a multiple of multiples.
2. The count-as-one is no more than the system of conditions
through which the multiple can be recognized as multiple. [BE, p. 29]
Badious language is obscure, but his intentions are fairly clear, as is his
metaphysical stance. Multiplicities are real, they are the only real, and set
theory is the only path to the real, the only science of being, the only
ontology. More precisely, for Badiou one particular axiomatization of set
theory provides the legislative Ideas of the multiple (BE, p. 59), the rst
principles of being (BE, p. 60), the law of Ideas (BE, p. 66): the
Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms, to which we must therefore turn.
10
9. Cantor discusses inkonsistente Vielheit in, among other places, his letters to Richard
Dedekind, 28 July 1899 and 3 Aug. 1899, Gesammelte Abhandlungen mathematischen und
philosophischen inhalts, ed. Ernst Zermelo (Berlin, 1932), pp. 443, 445, 447. On the relationship
between Cantors awareness of this inconsistence and its later crystallization into a paradox
necessitating a paradigm shift, see Olga Kiss, Incommensurability as a Bound of
Hermeneutics in Science, in Hermeneutics and Science, ed. Marta Feher, Kiss, and Laszlo
Ropolyi (Dordrecht, 1999), pp. 12535. On the history of the crisis more generally, see Ivor
Grattan-Guinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots 18701940: Logics, Set Theories, and the
Foundations of Mathematics from Cantor through Russell to Gdel (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
10. Hereafter referred to as ZF axioms, or ZFC if the axiom of choice is included. We will
state only those needed for our discussion, but full treatments are easily available. See, for
We should begin by reminding ourselves (see also the explanation of
logical and set-theoretical symbols) that the objects of the theorywe will
designate them by the letters x, y, z, A, B, . . .are always sets; we dont
have elements as against sets. Rather, all objects are sets. But one set x may
belong to another set y, and this is written xy. We say that x y when
zx if and only if zy; this is called the axiom of extensionality. It follows
that there is only one set such that no object belongs to it (for every x,
x): the empty set . In other words, the only atomic set, the only set
with no elements, is the empty set. If it werent for the axiomof extension-
ality, there could be many different empty sets, just as there are many
empty bottles. Let us repeat: all objects in ZF set theory are sets. This is
what Badiou means by his (1) above: the multiple . . . is composed solely
of multiplicities, and so on. But the ZF axioms (specically, the axiom of
unordered pairs) allow us, given any two sets x and y, to afrm the exis-
tence of a set whose only elements are x and y, namely {x, y}. From which
we can, given any x, dene the singleton {x} as {x, x}, the pair consisting of
x and itself.
This bracketingthe operation of writing left bracket, then x, and -
nally right bracketis what Badiou calls, somewhat mysteriously, the op-
eration count-as-one. And, he protests, that is the only One he will accept
(see BE, p. 24). Therefore his declaration (2): the brackets {,} signal that we
are in presence of a multiple. And a singleton {x} he calls a one-multiple.
We could say to Badiou that no matter how hard he tries to eliminate
the One, it shows up right at the start, in the formal language upon which
set theory is based; for without our taking or distinguishing or counting
the sign as one, and the sign x as another one, and so on for the other
signs, we would be utterly unable to beginwith set theory or with any other
theory. He would no doubt reply that the ideas of set theory are prior to
their expression in symbols or our ability to read them. Badiou is not a
formalist, that is, he doesnt believe that set theory is a game played with
symbols following strict rules; for him, ideas are there independently of,
and prior to, us or our symbols. He is a Platonist, but not one whom Plato
would have recognized, for he is a Platonist without One and without
example, Kenneth Kunen, Set Theory: An Introduction to Independence Proofs (Amsterdam,
1980), and Olivier Daiser, Einfuhrung in die Mengenlehre (Berlin, 2002). Paul J. Cohen also
provides a complete list, with comments, in a book that is the source for Badiou: Set Theory and
the Continuum Hypothesis (Mineola, 2008). Raymond M. Smullyan and Melvin Fitting, Set
Theory and the Continuum Problem (New York, 2006) gives a simpler treatment of the
continuum problem, using modal logic.
Good.
11
Badious heaven of ideas contains only the ZFC axioms plus all
objects that can be logically derived from them.
3. Cantors Pleroma
When we say contains only we do not mean to imply that Badious
realm of being is scanty; on the contrary, no angelology has ever ap-
proached such richness, nor the sum of all the stars in the sky such pleni-
tude. In order to grasp the riches of this realm of being we will need to
plunge a bit more deeply into set theory, though, to repeat, we will try to
use a minimum of formal language.
After setting down some of the ZF axiomsaxiom of extensionality
(already dened), axiom of set of subsets, axiom of union of sets, scheme
of axioms of separation or comprehension and of replacement (to be de-
ned below)Badiou writes:
We denitely have the entire material for an ontology here. Save that
none of these inaugural statements in which the law of Ideas is given
has yet decided the question: Is there something rather than noth-
ing? . . . The solution to the problem is quite striking: maintain the
position that nothing is delivered by the law of the Ideas [that is, the
ZF axioms], but make this nothing be through the assumption of a
proper name. In other words: verify, via the excedentary choice of a
proper name, the unpresentable alone as existent; on its basis the Ideas
will subsequently cause all admissible forms of presentation to pro-
ceed. [BE, pp. 6667]
And Badiou proceeds to nameto postulate the existence ofthe empty
set, the set such that for every x, x does not belong to . This is his sixth
axiom. Out of nothing (which Badiou interprets the set to be) the whole
cosmos, he will show us, will be created or rather deduced. But if we are
logical readers rather than dogmatic ones, we will pause to note that there
is nothing necessary about such an origin ex nihilo.
12
To assume the exis-
11. In Meditation 2, Badiou recruits Plato to his cause by (tendentiously) mapping the set-
theoretical language of inconsistency and consistency onto the vocabulary of Platos
Parmenides, claiming that alone merits to be translated as multiplicity, the
inconsistent multiple, while Platos designates the many, plurality, the consistent
multiple (BE, p. 35).
12. Badious own readings are often dogmatic. In one example, noticed for us by William
Tait, Badiou writes, On zero: Dedekind abhors the void and its mark, and says so quite
explicitly: [W]e intend here for certain reasons wholly to exclude the empty system which
contains no elements at all (Badiou, Number and Numbers, p. 14). But in fact Dedekinds
sentence continues: although for other investigations it may be appropriate to imagine such a
system. There is no abhorrence here. (As for Badious move from Dedekinds the empty set
tence of the empty set as an axiom is merely a technically convenient
choice. In fact, in many logical axiomatics, which logically precede the ZF
axioms of set theory, the existence of some set A is guaranteed: there is a
set x is axiomatic rather thanthere is anempty set. For once we have any
set x, we can secure the existence of the empty set by applying the
separation or comprehension axiom, namely: for any formula p with a free
variable x (see the list of symbols for the meaning of this), and for any set
A, there is another set B such that the elements of B are precisely those
elements x of Athat make true the formula pwhenreplacedfor the variable
x. So, to prove the existence of the empty set we pick a formula p such as
x x (which is false for all values of x), pick any set A whose existence is
axiomatic, and apply the comprehension axiom to A and p.
13
The important point to note here is that the solution Badiou presents
to the question, is there something rather than nothing, the verica-
tion of the unpresentable alone as existing, is an assumption, a matter
of choice, not of mathematical or logical necessity. And as we will see,
something similar happens when he proceeds to build more sets. For of
course the empty set is not enough. For a fuller ontology, one needs more
objects, more beings.
In order to demonstrate the procedure, let us start with the most im-
mediate objects of this type, the natural numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on. We
will start fromthe empty set and call it 0. We will then use the bracketing
operation, which Badiou calls count-as-one: {}, meaning take the set of
(based onthe axiomof unordered pairs). We take the set consisting only of
, namely {}. We will call it 1. Next we will take the two objects already
dened and form a set with them: {, {}} (the set consisting of two
elements, namely, the empty set and the set containing only the empty set).
We call it 2. We continue in the same way: the next, 3, will be {, {}, {,
{}}}. And so on. We call this sequence of sets S. Notice that the number of
brackets} at the endalready tell youwhichnumber youare dealing with. So
for example 3 could be written: }}}.
to the void and its mark, this is an example not of misreading but of a Pythagoric snare, on
which see section 7 below.) Badious selective reading strategy is quite general. See for example
his similarly partial quotation from rule 2 of Rene Descartess Regulae and from Baruch
Spinozas appendix to part 1 of the Ethics (a text, says Badiou, dear to Louis Althusser), as
well as his tendentious translation of Platos Republic 525c (Badiou, Mathematics and
PhilosophyThe Grand Style and the Little Style, p. 8).
13. This is Kunens choice in Set Theory, pp. 1011. Cohen, instead, takes the existence of
the empty set as an axiom, like Badiou; see Cohen, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis, p.
51. It is worth noting here that both Kunen and Cohen are among the sources cited, elsewhere,
by Badiou.
To prepare our leap into innity, we need two more ZF axioms. The
axiomof union says that given any set x of sets y, there is another set, z, that
consists exactly of those objects wbelonging to y for some y in x. In formal
language:
@x?z@w(wz7?y(wy &yx)). The unionof x and y will be writtenx y.
The axiomof innity, which says that there is an innite set, can then be
stated in many equivalent ways. We may, for example, state that there is a
set containing all natural numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on. Or, using our
denitions that start fromthe empty set , and noticing that, as we can see
above, each natural number is the union of all the previous ones (so for
example 3 {, {}, {, {}}} is equal to the union of 0 and 1 {}
and 2 {, {}}), we can state the axiom of innity formally as follows:
?x (x & @y(yx 3y{y}x)).
This is equivalent to stating that 0 belongs to x and that if any y belongs to
x, then the successor of y, or y1, also belongs to x.
We have dealt so far with the nite numbers, nite ordinals. We can
now dene , the rst innite ordinal, as the set x whose existence is
warranted by the axiomof innity. Notice that the elements of are ordered
ina row(linearly ordered) as follows: 0123 . . . . We goon. We dene the
ordinal 1 as {}. This amounts toplacinga newelement {} at the end
of 0123. . . . Hence, using right brackets only, could be written
}}}. . . and 1 could be written }}} . . . }. We can dene , which
couldbe written}}} . . . }}}. . . . Notice, by the way, that 1 is not equal to1
. This last, indeed, is thesameas becauseaddinganextraelement, say-1, at the
beginning of 0123. . . only produces anorderedset isomorphic to.
In similar fashion, one denes new, more complex ordinals like ,
, and so forth.
14
All those innitely many innite ordinals, however, are
so far countable, or, in other words, their cardinality is aleph-zero, which
means that each of them, as a set, disregarding their order structure, may
be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the set of natural numbers.
But noncountable ordinals also play animportant role inmathematics and
therefore in Badious mathematics as ontology. In order to get those we
need another ZF axiom, the axiom of the power set. A set y is said to be a
subset of x when any object in y is also in x. Formally, @z (zy 3zx). For
short, and to avoid having to write that formula all the time, we write y x.
Now, the axiom of the power set states that for any set x there is a set P(x)
14. For a clear presentation of these objects, see John H. Conway and Richard K. Guy, The
Book of Numbers (New York, 1996).
consisting of all the subsets of x.
15
Cantor had already proved that givenany
nonempty set x, there can be no one-to-one correspondence between x
and P(x). In particular, if x is innite but countable, P(x) is not countable
(to speak loosely, P(x) is more innite than x; or, more formally, the car-
dinality of P(x) is greater than the cardinality of x). With that, one can
venture into the ocean of noncountable ordinals, the rst of which is called
. But it must be emphasized that ocean, universe, or any other words not
belonging to the formal language of set theory are ridiculously inadequate
metaphors for the immensity of the row of ordinals.
That is Cantors pleroma, and those are some of the denizens of
Badious realm of being. He adds others (such as John H. Conways
surreal numbers), but we need not follow him there.
4. Is Any of It Necessary?
According to Badiou, not only is Cantors pleroma, the realm of being,
independent of us and our symbolic thoughtalbeit open to our
glimpsebut its cosmogony, the process of its logical creation, is given
step by step and could not be otherwise. He insists again and again on two
aspects of this creation out of the ZFCaxioms: that it is ex nihilowe have
already shown that it isnt necessarily soand that it proceeds by means of
the sequence S dened in the previous section, that is:
, {}, {, {}}, {, {}, {, {}}}. . . .
Let us focus for a moment on this sequence. The rst thing to notice is that
Cantor dened the ordinals differently, as equivalence classes of well-
ordered sets, and he dened the cardinal numbers as equivalence classes of
sets with no order. The idea of using the above sequence for the construc-
tion of the ordinals is due to von Neumann (circa 1920) and turned out to
be of great value for the later work of Gdel and Cohen. But when it comes
to dening numbers in terms of set theory, the sequence S is far frombeing
unique or particularly distinguished. As Paul Benacerraf pointed out long
ago, if there is one reduction of number to set theory, there are innitely
many, and there is no particular reason why one such should be preferred
to another.
16
Instead of the sequence S we could choose the sequence T: ,
15. The reason P(x) is called the power set of x is that, in the case when x is nite and has n
elements, P(x) has 2 to the power n elements. For example, a set with three elements has exactly
eight subsets (counting the empty set and the set itself as subsets). Badiou, as we will see,
extracts political consequences from this.
16. See Paul Benacerraf, What Numbers Could Not Be, The Philosophical Review 74
(1965): 4773; rpt. Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings, ed. Benacerraf and Hilary
Putnam (New York, 1983), pp. 27294. See also Philip Kitcher, The Plight of the Platonist,
Nous 12 (May 1978): 11936.
{}, {{}}, {{{}}}. . . . Or we could take T: , {{}}, {{{{ }}}}. . ., or
innitely many others. The important thing is that we know how to go
from any stage to the next and that we can do so forever, and in that sense
the usual sequence 0, 1, 2, 3, . . . will do nicely enough. All of mathematics
can be encapsulated in the Yiddish blessing: Got zol gebn az vos ir vet
o nheybn tsu ton, zolt ir ton on a sof. (May God grant you that whatever
you start to do you may do endlessly.)
So, whats the specic advantage of the sequence S, which plays a pro-
tagonist role in Badious cosmogony? Von Neumann noticed the follow-
ing important property of all the sets in the sequence S, namely, that they
are transitive. A set x is said to be transitive when for any y belonging to x
and any z belonging to y, z must belong to x. Formally:
@y@z (yx & zy 3zx)
(The name transitive was picked by analogy with the well-known transitive
property of equality: (a b & b c) 3a c.) Now, recall the abbrevia-
tion introduced in the previous section: yx means the same as @z (zy
3zx) and yx means that yx but y x. With these two formulas we
may now express the denition of transitive set in a slightly different way:
x is transitive means that
(*) @y (yx 3yx).
Of the above denition Badiou has this to say: transitivity represents the
maximumpossible equilibriumbetweenbelonging andinclusion. . . .[It] is
the ontological schema for normality (BE, p. 524). And further: Atermis
normal if it is both presented in the situation and represented by the state
of the situation. It is thus counted twice in its place: once by the structure
(count-as-one) and once by the metastructure (count-of-the-count). . . .
Normality is anessential attribute of natural-being (BE, pp. 51516). Here,
then, yx (y belonging to x) is interpreted as y being presented in the
situation x, or being counted by the structure, while y x (y being a
subset of x) is interpreted as being counted by the metastructurethe
structure is x while the metastructure is P(x) (the set of parts of x or
power set of x, dened above).Being counted twice, as in formula (*)
above, means for Badiou being normal, and natural-being or natural
situation means that all [its] terms are normal (BE, p. 515). Henceforth,
Badiou will talk of nature and say, for example, that nature does not
exist. . . . There are only some natural beings (BE, p. 140).
Linger for a moment on the link between formula and natural language
here. At the level of language, we could ask: if formula (*) represents the
maximum possible equilibrium between belonging and inclusion, then
why not say that transitive sets are balanced or equilibrated rather
than normal, whence natural? What is natural or normal about
formula (*)? At the level of mathematical formula, we could object that it
is simply not true that formula (*) represents the maximum possible
equilibrium between and . The following formula has even more
equilibrium:
(**) @y (yx 7yx),
since the double arrow (if and only if, or implication both ways) is more
symmetric than the simple arrow of (*). The sets satisfying (**) are cer-
tainly transitive, but not all transitive sets satisfy (**); in particular, the sets
in the sequence S (see above), starting with the third, do not. But if Badiou
were to call normal and natural those sets satisfying (**), then the
ordinals, dened by S and that he considers the epitome of natural,
17
would not be natural at all.
Briey put, there is nothing logically or mathematically obligatory (or
even meaningful) about the claim that (*) is the ontological schema for
normality, or that normality is an essential attribute of the natural
being, or that nature does not exist, despite the couching of these claims
in mathematical symbols. Imagine someone saying, the number eight
stands for standing innity, because when 8 lies down to sleep it be-
comes . That statement may sound more absurd but is no different
in nature from the statement that transitivity is normal and natu-
ral.
5. The State
The state makes its appearance as metastructure in Meditation 8,
which seems haunted by the (unacknowledged) spirit of Charles Baude-
laires sonnet Le GouffrePascal avait son gouffre, avec lui se mou-
17. An ordinal ontologically reects the multiple-being of natural situations. This
mappingarbitrary as we have shown it to beis crucial to Badious ontology: This concept
literally provides the backbone of all ontology, because it is the very concept of Nature (BE, p.
133). A few further moves allow him to say that it is thus true that nature and number are
substitutable. What Badiou means by Nature does not exist. . . . There are only some natural
beings is that the class of all ordinals (Badious all natural beings) is not an ordinal, not even
a set. Of this well-known set-theoretical fact Smullyan and Fitting have this to say: This
theorem bears an amusing similarity to a saying of the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tse,
who, when speaking of the Tao, said: The Tao is that through which all things have come into
being, hence the Tao is not a thing (Smullyan and Fitting, Set Theory and the Continuum
Problem, p. 17). Notice the lightness of an amusing similarity, compared to Badious
portentous identications. In that difference there yawns a theologico-political gulf.
vant./ . . . /Ah! ne jamais sortir des Nombres et des E
tres!
18
and by the
(openly embraced but arbitrarily chosen) fact that the sequence S is
formed on the basis of just brackets {} and the empty set, which is here
called the void. Badiou asks, if the void is the being of all multiple-
presentation, how is it that presentation does not encounter its own void,
which would be the presentational occurrence of inconsistency as such,
or the ruin of the One? (BE, p. 93). How is it, in other words, that being is
not given to us as Chaos? His answer is that structure must be structured:
something must secure structure against any xation of the void. There
must be a count-as-one of the operation itself, a count of the count, a meta-
structure (BE, p. 94). Due to a metaphorical afnity with politics . . . I will
hereinafter term state of the situation that by means of which the structure
of a situation . . . is counted as one (BE, p. 95). But however metaphorical
the afnity, Badiou takes it also to be a mathematical truth, expressed (not
surprisingly) by the axiom of the power set (see P(x) above: the set of all
subsets of a set).Representation by the state, count of the count, me-
tastructure, these are all aligned with the power set (see Badious table on
BE, p. 102) that banishes . . . the peril of the void and establishes the
reign . . . of the universal security of the one (BE, p. 98). There is no
mathematics here: the alignment is one based solely on afnities of natural
language. We have already noted (footnote 15 in section 3) that the reason
P(x) is called the power set of x is that 2 multiplied by itself n times is
called two to the power n. Politics becomes the power set through puns.
A similar procedure suggests to Badiou that Zermelos axiom of choice
has somehow something to do with freedom.
19
That axiom says that if we
are given a nonempty set Aof nonempty sets x, then there exists a function
f fromAto the union of all the xAsuch that f(x)x. In other words, one
can pick or select an element f(x) from each nonempty set x. That this can
be done when all sets are nite may be intuitively clear, but nothing in the
other ZF axioms or in rst-order logic allows us to conclude that it can be
done for innite sets. The history of the axioms reception is more com-
plicated than that of the other axioms; for a time mathematicians were
doubtful about the legitimacy of assuming it, but, especially since the proof
(by Gdel and Cohen) of its independence from the other axioms, most
mathematicians accept it. The axiom of choice can be shown to be equiv-
alent to other statements of very different form; for example, it is equiva-
lent to the axiom of well-ordering, which says that any set x can be
18. Charles Baudelaire, Le Gouffre, Oeuvres compltes, ed. Claude Pichois and Jean
Ziegler, 2 vols. (Paris, 1975), 1:14243.
19. Compare Julia Kristevas treatment of the axiom of choice in : Recherches
pour une se manalyse (Paris, 1969), p. 189.
provided with a linear order (a relationbetween its members such that
for any z and y and winx we have either yz, or zy, or zy, and so that
is transitive, that is, yz & zw 3yw), and in such a way that any
nonempty subset of x will have a rst element (y is the rst element of x
means that yx and zx & zy 3yz). This, in particular, says that a
well-ordering of the real numbers can be found, a point that is, as we shall
see in a moment, important for set theory generally and for Badiou in
particular. But let us stress that although it makes logical sense within ZFC
to say that a well-ordering of real numbers can be found, that sense is
strangely unintuitive. Even if we were immortal and we spent our whole
lives trying to describe such an ordering, we could not succeed. That was
the basis of Poincares objection to the ZF axioms in his Dernie `res pense es
(1912). What human sense can there be, he asked, in saying that something
exists when that something cannot possibly be identied in any nite
number of words, not eveninany innite but countable number of words?
Badiou has no sympathy for that objection. Rather, he revels in the
seeming paradox in order to conclude:
In the last resort, the key to the special sense of the axiom of choice
and the controversy it provokedlies in the following: it does not
guarantee the existence of multiples in the situation, but rather the
existence of the intervention, grasped, however, in its pure being (the
type of multiple that it is) with no reference to any event. The axiom
of choice is the ontological statement relative to the particular form of
presentation which is interventional activity. . . . The consequence of
this empty stylization of the being of intervention is that, via an admira-
ble overturning which manifests the power of ontology, the ultimate ef-
fect of this axiomin which anonymity and illegality give rise to the
appearance of the greatest disorderas intuited by the mathemati-
ciansis the very height of order. There we have a striking ontological
metaphor of the theme, nowbanal, according to which immense revolu-
tionary disorders engender the most rigid state order. [BE, p. 230]
The appearance of the greatest disorder is Badious way of depicting the
uneasiness of Poincare andsimilarly mindedmathematicians over the axiom
of choice, and Badious very height of order and most rigid state order is
his interpretationof the equivalent axiomof well-ordering. Again, we should
beware of the snare: those axioms bear no pertinent relation to the
political concepts (revolutionary disorders, rigid state order) that
are here presented.
In the previous two examples, mathematical structures are meta-
phorized into empirical ones, but the snare works in reverse as well. Per-
haps the most blatant example comes in Meditation 17, The Matheme of
the Event, in which Badiou articulates one of his most popular concepts.
His goal here is to apply a constructive argument of the kind usually
reserved for conceptual structures (that is, mathematical objects) to some-
thing that is ordinarily rejected into the pure empiricity of what-
happens: the event (BE, p. 178). The approach requires an analogy
between the ways in which we experience the world, empirically and his-
torically, and the mathematical models of Badious ontology: in this case,
between innite multiples and the French Revolution. The French Rev-
olution, Badiou explains, is an innite multiple that includes every-
thing delivered by the epoch as traces and facts. The historical approach
cannot therefore capture the one of the event because it is merely an
inventory of all the elements of the site, losing the event in the forever
innite numbering of the gestures, things, and words that co-existed with
it (BE, p. 180). To capture the one-mark of the event therefore requires
Badious set-theoretical instrumentation of the innite, in this case his
matheme of the event:
e
x
{xX, e
x
}
[BE, p. 179]
Historians will have their own reasons for objecting to this character-
ization, but to mathematicians two problems will be obvious. The rst is
the application of the word innite to history. From a mathematical point
of view even the sum of all the facts, traces, gestures, ideas, and dreams of
human history is nite rather than innite. This was precisely the sub-
stance of Poincares objection to Cantors pleroma in the early twentieth
century. Certainly the world is complex, far too complex to be captured in
its entirety by historical or any other human tools. But to call the French
Revolution or any other politico-historical event an innite multiple is
to deliberately obscure the basic ontological differences that made the
modern discovery of innity such a revolutionary event in human
thought. And the second is Badious set-theoretical formulation of the
event. His set e
x
contains an inventory, or the historical approach
namely, xXbut also, as we can see, something else: it contains itself.
Rather than being dened in terms of objects previously dened, e
x
is here
dened in terms of itself; you must already have it in order to dene it. Set
theorists call this a not-well-foundedset.
20
This kindof set never appears in
mathematicsnot least because it produces an unmathematical mise-en-
20. See, for example, Kunen, Set Theory, pp. 9495.
ab me: if we replace e
x
inside the bracket by its expression as a bracket, we
can go on doing this foreverand so can hardly be called a matheme.
6. What Is Truth?
You will recall that the fourth afrmation of Badious preface adum-
brated an answer to this question.The being of a truth, proving itself an
exception to any pre-constituted predicate of the situation in which that
truth is deployed, is to be called generic. Atruth is a generic procedure.
And to be a Subject (and not a simple individual animal) is to be a local
active dimension of such a procedure. The elaboration of that answer repre-
sents the climax of Being and Event andconsumes part 7, The Generic: Indis-
cernible and Truth. The EventP. J. Cohen. That section begins:
We nd ourselves here at the threshold of a decisive advance, in
which the concept of the genericwhich I hold to be crucial, as I
said in the introductionwill be dened and articulated in such a
manner that it will found the very being of any truth. [BE, p. 327]
The concept of the generic on which Badiou founds the very being of any
truth is found on page 111 of Paul Cohens famous proof that the axiomof
choice and the continuum hypothesis are not provable from the Zermelo-
Fraenkel axioms (Gdel had taken care of the other direction, proving that
they were not disprovable). By that point, in a quite compressed book of
some 150 pages, things have become rather technical. To give an idea of Co-
hens concept of generic set insimple terms, we will needtospeakof models for
ZF set theory. Those interested in the complete presentation may turn to Co-
hens book.
By a model M for ZF one means the existence of some set M of objects
we call sets and a relation between themthat corresponds to (belonging
to), such that all the ZF axioms become true in M. Let us note rst that the
existence of such a model for the ZF axioms is far from being a settled
matter of logical fact. Most mathematicians go along with it without much
thought, but in the nal analysis it is a matter of logico-ontological choice.
For example, one way to assure the existence of such a model is to assume
the existence of a cardinal so large (a set so innite) that it cannot be
reached by taking P(x) (the power set) of any set of smaller cardinality. The
existence of sucha cardinal or set is not guaranteed by the ZFCaxioms, nor
is it easier to imagine than a Deus absconditus or a hidden Imam. In short,
the mathematical basis upon which Badiou builds is conventional, and
therefore whatever ontology results will be similarly conventional, even if
it be a purely mathematical ontology, let alone the more general ontology
Badiou proposes.
But assuming the existence of some model M for ZF, the Lwenheim-
Skolem Theorem
21
asserts that there is also a model N for the ZF axioms
that is countable (that is, can be put into one-to-one correspondence with
the natural numbers) and such that all its objects are countable. Here we
encounter a (seeming) paradox: the model N contains the natural num-
bers, ; hence, by the axiomof the power set, it must contain P(), which,
according to Cantors theorem mentioned in section 3, is not countable
how can a countable set N contain an uncountable set together with all its
members?
22
A way out of this paradox, already envisioned by Thoralf
Skolem, is to relativize the notion of uncountable. Indeed, to say that a set
x is uncountable is to say that there is no one-to-one correspondence
between x and . But one-to-one correspondences are functions, and
functions are themselves sets,
23
so when we have a model N it may happen
that many functions are not available in N because they are not there as
sets. In particular, it may happen that a set x in N is uncountable in N
merely because there is no one-to-one correspondence in Nbetween x and
, while for an observer placed outside of N it may be obvious that there is
such correspondence and hence that x is countable.
Cohens concept of generic arises when he wants to add a new set a to
the model N in order to get an enlarged model M. Of course, all the sets
obtainable froma and fromother sets already in Nby using the ZF axioms
must also be added to N together with a, but a problem would arise if the
set a, contained new information not already in N, that is, if adding a to N
implied that a newordinal, larger than the ones already in N, is introduced
into the enlarged model M. Cohen calls the set a generic if that problem
does not arise. Badiou takes up the concept and puts it to snaring work:
Generic and indiscernible are concepts which are almost equiva-
lent. . . . The term generic positively designates that what does not
allow itself to be discerned is in reality the general truth of a situation,
the truth of its being, as considered as the foundation of all knowl-
edge to come. . . . The discernible is veridical. But the indiscernible
alone is true. There is no truth apart from the generic, because only a
faithful generic procedure aims at the one of situational being. A
21. Cohen, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis, pp. 1720.
22. This is Thoralf Skolems paradox, from 1922. See his Some Remarks on Axiomatized
Set Theory, in From Frege to Gdel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 18791931, ed. J. van
Heijenoort (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 290301. Skolem concluded that set theory was not a
good foundation for mathematics.
23. For instance, the function which consists of squaring natural numbers, f(n) nn,
can be thought of as the following subset of the set of all ordered pairs of natural numbers:
{(0,0), (1,1), (2,4), (3,9) . . . }.
faithful procedure has as its innite horizon being-in-truth. [BE, pp.
327, 339]
We can take a guess at why a generic set is called indiscernible by Badiou:
its addition to the original model N does not change the rank of the ordi-
nals already in N. And the generic set added to N generates the new, en-
larged model M where Cohen forces a certain property (such as the
negation of the continuum hypothesis) to hold. Hence the generic set a is
called by Badiou the foundation of all knowledge to come. But why N
plus a nongeneric a (which would not even constitute a model for ZF)
should be connected to the veridical and M (the enlarged model gotten
fromNplus a generic a) be connected to the truth, eventhoughas such,
love, art, science and politics generateinnitelytruths concerning sit-
uations; truths subtracted from knowledge which are only counted by the
state in the anonymity of their being (BE, p. 340)and why all this is
connected with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his social contract (see BE, p.
344 and following), that remains to us as mysterious as the reason why
ancient Pythagoreans forbade the eating of beans.
7. The Pythagoreans
The Pythagoreans serve us here as shorthand for an ancient tendency in
the history of thought: basing claims on contingent aspects of mathemat-
ical models or heuristic aids. This error takes many forms and was by no
means a monopoly of that nebulous movement designated Pythagorean.
Withinthe history of mathematics, perhaps the most important case is that
of the rst proposition of Euclids Elements. To construct an equilateral
triangle on a given segment AB, Euclid takes two circles with radius AB
centered at A and B respectively and then considers their intersection
point(s). Euclids axioms, however, do not warrant the existence of inter-
section points; it is only his modellines and circles drawn on tablet,
paper, or sand
24
that suggests to eye and mind that such points must
exist. Centuries passed before the unwarranted assumption was remarked,
and more than two thousand years passed before Hilbert was able to prove
Euclids rst proposition rigorously from a complete set of axioms.
In the case of Euclids rst proposition, we might say that the problem
remained in-house; false or unwarranted mathematical conclusions were
drawn from contingent aspects of the model. But here we are more con-
cernedwithexamples inwhichcontingent aspects of mathematical models
24. Here we talk of models rather loosely. Neither a wax tablet nor a sandy beach is,
properly speaking, a model for Euclids axioms, since lines upon them cannot be indenitely
prolonged. But the geometer easily imagines the borders away and prolongs as needed.
are used to reach cosmological or ontological conclusions. The example of
the child who studies Euclid by drawing with black pencil on a white sheet
of paper and concludes that the sides of a triangle must be black and
villainous and the angles must be white and virtuous might strike us as too
silly. Yet it is not different in nature from Badious assertions about the
naturality of transitive sets or about well-ordered sets being examples of
a rigid state order. Imagine, for example, the following dialogue among
a group of ancient Pythagoreans.
Pythagorean 1. We have discovered that given any natural number n we
can nd another number m, such that either n mm, or n m
m1. In the rst case we say that n is even; in the second case we say
that n is odd.
Pyth. 2. I see what you mean. The even numbers are those we can split
evenly, like this, half to the left, half to the right. With odd numbers,
instead, we get something left here in the middle.
Pyth. 3. In other words, the even numbers have a gap, a chasm at the
center. In odd numbers, instead, theres something sticking out.
Pyth. 4. Then we should say that the even numbers are female, and the
odd numbers are male.
Pyth. 5. Well and profoundly put. And therefore in the number 5 we
have the model for marriage and procreation, which we might call the
nuptial number, since it consists of 2 (the rst female) plus 3 (the rst
male).
From our modern, logico-mathematical point of view, what Pythago-
rean 1 says is unimpeachable and is deduced fromany set of axioms for the
natural numbers, such as Giuseppe Peanos. Pythagorean 2, however, tac-
itly introduces a model; in the event, the ancient model for the natural
numbers consisting of dots on a tablet or holes in sand. Thus the evenness
of 4 is pictured as .. .., and the oddness of 5 as .. . ... The trap is set. With
Pythagorean 3, the trap has snapped closed, and concepts that make sense,
if at all, only in the modelsuch as gap or sticking outare now
referred back to the numbers themselves. After this, Pythagorean 4 and
Pythagorean 5 are off and running, ascribing to numbers features of the
human, and vice versa.
There is nothing hypothetical about this scenario; perhaps its most fa-
mous offspring is Glaucons explanationin book 8 of Platos Republicof
why political discord arises even in the ideal polis: the difculty of calcu-
lating the nuptial number that should govern procreation (see Republic
545d and following). Platos example also reminds us that there is not a
very sharp difference between the work done with numbers by philoso-
phers identied by the tradition as followers of Pythagoras and that done
by their contemporaries who are today not thought of as Pythagoreans.
When, for example, Plato implicitly criticized Archytas of Tarentum (di-
versely treated by the tradition as Platos teacher, friend, and student) in
book 7 (for example, see Republic 530d), it was not because he thought that
the researches of Archytas and other Pythagoreans in the mathematics of
harmony were beside the point; onthe contrary, Plato was perfectly willing
to derive the world from mathematical principles (such as geometric sol-
ids). Platos criticismwas rather (and here he sounds a bit like Badiou) that
the mathematician missed the ontological implications of his own re-
searches because he did not recognize the critical questionin this case the
distinction between the sensible and the intelligible world. Aristotle, on the
other hand, foundArchytass teachings attractive(hedevotedat least threelost
books to them) precisely because the mathematician had refused that on-
tological split, and he placed Archytass arithmetic and geometric propor-
tions at the heart of his own physics, ethics, and politics. Number was
everywhere inGreek philosophy. Nevertheless over time it was the name of
Pythagoras that came to be associated, by both detractors and admirers,
with the leap from mathematics to cosmology, ontology, and theology.
The second-century satirist Lucian put it with characteristic wit in his
Philosophies for Sale, where he characterized Pythagorass wares as
arithmetic, astronomy, charlatanry, geometry, music and quackery.
25
But of course there were also those who welcomed the confusion that
Lucian ridicules. Confronted with the crush of Christianity a century or
two after Lucian, some pagan philosophers embraced the mystical teach-
ings associated with Pythagoras as a bulwark against those of the upstart
Jesus. Some Christian saints, on the other hand, adopted him as a pro-
phetic forerunner of their own savior: a student of Moses according to
Clement, a Jew according to Ambrose. Each of these polemics deserves its
own history, but their cumulative result was that Pythagoras became a
gure for the moveobject of mockery for some, of messianic fervor for
25. Lucian, Philosophies for Sale, in Lucian, trans. A. M. Harmon, 7 vols. (Cambridge,
Mass., 1960), 2:453. On Archytas, see Carl A. Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean,
Philosopher, and Mathematician King (Cambridge, 2005). On the relationship between
Archytass, Platos, and Aristotles philosophies, see pp. 8389. On Aristotles use of
proportions, see the bibliography given in David Nirenberg, The Politics of Love and Its
Enemies, Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007): 58793. Plato, though perfectly aware of the
political claims made by Archytas (in Fragment 3 and elsewhere) and others for mathematics
(see Socratess comment to Callicles on geometric equality in Gorgias 508a), does not develop
such claims in his own politics, as Aristotle will.
othersfrom mathematics to other mysteries. Hence our coining of the
phrase Pythagoric snare to designate such mathematically unjustiable
leaps.
26
Many ages have generated such fantasies, and many branches of math-
ematics have nourished them. In the fteenth century, for example, the
humanistic rediscovery of the ancient Pythagorean corpus combined with
the Hebraists development of cabbalistic numerology to feed Girolamo
Savonarolas revolutionary Christianpolitics.
27
There are negative versions
of the snare as well: that is, criticisms (like Platos criticism of Archytas) of
certain kinds of mathematics producing the wrong ontology and therefore
the wrong politics. Thomas Hill, president of Harvard in the 1860s, praised
the Greeks (and specically Plato) for understanding that he who studies
geometry is holding communion with the divine and explained that the
ruinous heresy of the Latin race, that of regarding geometry as the mere
science of measurement, had not only brought about the decline and fall
of their empire, but hadcast the longshadowof the darkages over the whole
of Europe.
28
The most notorious of these negative versions are those pro-
duced by Germanys National Socialists in the rst half of the twentieth cen-
tury, for whomentire branches of pure mathematics were labeled as Jewish
and declared dangerous to the Reich.
29
It may be, as Leon Brunschvicg once suggested, that every time one of
the great disciplines of mathematicsarithmetic, geometry, innitesimal
analysishas achieved denitive consciousness of itself, we have seen
constituted a systemthat attempts to base on that mathematical discipline
a universal view of things: Pythagoreanism, Spinozism, Leibnizism. Cer-
tainly it seems that symbolic logic and set theory hold a special attraction
for the Pythagoric yearnings of our age. We might say that these disciplines
were born already ensnared, for George Boole, the father of pure mathe-
26. On anti-Christian philosophical adoptions of Pythagoras, see among others H. D.
Saffrey, Allusions antichretiennes chez Proclus le diadoque platonicien, Revue des sciences
philosophiques et the ologiques 59 (1975) : 55363; Clement, Stromata, in Die griechischen
christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte, ed. O. Stahlin, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1906), 5.5,
2:34246; Ambrose, Mediolanensis, prima classis, vol. 16 of Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne
(Paris, 184445), coll. 109598. Early modern scholars such as John Selden also credited the
view that Pythagoras was Jewish. Pythagorass prohibition on the eating of beans, mentioned
above, was interpreted by Origen as an admonition not to engage in politics; see Origen, Contra
haereses, vol. 16 of Patrologia Graeca, ed. Migne (Paris, 1860), col. 3232.
27. See Christopher S. Celenza, Piety and Pythagoras in Renaissance Florence: The Symbolum
Nesianum (Boston, 2001).
28. Quoted in Daniel J. Cohen, Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith
(Baltimore, 2007), p. 73.
29. On National Socialist classications of mathematics, see Sanford L. Segal,
Mathematicians under the Nazis (Princeton, N.J., 2003).
matics (the title was awarded by Bertrand Russell) had his eyes set beyond
the horizonof number. Inthe words of his wife Mary Boole: Mathematics
had never had more than a secondary interest for him; and even logic he
cared for chiey as a means of clearing the grounds of doctrines imagined
to be proved. . . . But he had been endeavoring to give a more active and
positive help . . . to the cause of what he deemed pure religion.
30
Cantor,
who discovered the Paradise or pleroma of transnite numbers with
which these pages, like Badious, have been concerned, was famously ob-
sessed with the theological implications of his ndings, which he was con-
vinced had beenrevealed to himby God. Skeptics of his set theory were not
wrong in pointing out that some believers in set theory are scholastics
who would have loved to discuss the proofs of the existence of God with
Saint Anselm and his opponent Gaunilon, the monk of Noirmoutiers.
31
Later generations of set theoreticians mapped their work onto the rel-
evant ontological distinctions of their age. Nikolai Luzin, cofounder of the
great Moscow school of mathematics in the 1920s, was inspired by the
teachings of his friend the monk Pavel Florensky. Florensky apparently
believed that because a set is not an ontologically existing object but rather
an entity named according to an arbitrary mental system (that is, the op-
posite of Badiou), set theory could provide the basis for an antimaterialist
mathematics that would rescue mankind from deterministic modes of
analysis. It is unclear to what degree the set-theoretical researches of Luzin
and his many students were inspired by such Pythagoric dreams, but what
is clear is that Luzins enemies shared a negative version of the same logic.
When Ernst Kolman denounced his former teacher as an enemy of the
revolution in 1931, it was on the grounds that Marxist mathematics must
remain within the framework of philosophical materialism. Deploying the
mathematical arguments developed by earlier mathematicians like E
mile
Borel against Cantors transnite numbers, he criticized Luzins inability
to understand the unity of continuous and discrete and denounced him
for teaching that numbers exist as a function of the mind of the mathe-
30. Leon Brunschvicg, Les E
tapes de la philosophie mathe matique (Paris, 1912), p. x; our

trans. On Boole, see Daniel Cohen, Equations from God, p. 77. Incidentally it provides a curious
point of comparison with Badiou that Boole seems to have been drawn toward Judaism as the
ideal religious expression of the mathematical ontology expressed in his Laws of Thought (see
ibid., pp. 9799) whereas Badious mathematical ontology inclines him to see Judaism as a
particularism resistant to the revolutionary potential of the universal, exemplied by St. Paul.
31. E
mile Picard, writing in 1909, quoted in Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor,
Naming Innity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity (Cambridge,
Mass., 2009), p. 59. On Cantors theology, including his correspondence with Pope Leo XIII, see
Joseph W. Dauben, Georg Cantor and Pope Leo XIII: Mathematics, Theology, and the
Innite, Journal of the History of Ideas 38 (Jan.Mar. 1977): 85108.
matician. Only Josef Stalins direct interventionsaved Luzinfromsharing
the fate of his friend Florensky, freezing to death in Siberia.
32
In sections 4 and 5 we described several examples of this formof fantasy
in Being and Event, and there are many more. The same is true of Badious
effort to think Number in Number and Numbers, an effort he believes
restores us . . . to a supernumerary hazard from which a truth originates,
always heterogeneous to Capital and therefore to the slavery of the numer-
ical.
33
Indeed if it is true, as Badiou claims in Mathematics and Philoso-
phyThe Grand Style and the Little Style, that it is by donning the
contemporary matheme like a coat of armour that I have undertaken,
alone at rst, toundothe disastrous consequences of philosophys linguis-
tic turn; to demarcate philosophy from phenomenological religiosity; to
re-found the metaphysical triad of being, event and subject; to take a stand
against poetic prophesying; to identify generic multiplicities as the onto-
logical formof the true; to assign a place to Lacanian formalism; and, more
recently, to articulate the logic of appearing, then the battles he thinks he
has won will all turn out to be empty victories, leaps from the matheme
into an unfounded faith, and this no matter how good his mathematics.
34
8. The Limits of Set Theory
The limits of set theory are such that even if our logic were impeccable,
and even if we never leapt beyond its reach, we could not generate a set-
theoretical general ontology worthy of the name. These limitations ow
fromthe axioms themselves. ZF set theory admits objects and sets of a very
restricted sort: numbers, structures, and in general those objects that are,
or are taken to be, always the same and not affected by any conceivable
event. It does not so much matter here whether we assume such objects
and sets as given and independent of our minds (the stance that is usually
calledPlatonism) or as products of our mind. The important feature is that
those objects must be (if we are allowedtoaddtothe traditional Pythagoric
virtues of being perfectly determined and abiding) apathe s, unaffected,
inertlike Leibnizs monads or like the atomic facts in the logical space of
Ludwig Wittgensteins Tractatus.
35
An ontology that takes ZF set theory as
32. Quoted in Graham and Kantor, Naming Innity, p. 147; see also pp. 89, 97, and 148, and
following.
33. Badiou, Number and Numbers, p. 214.
34. Badiou, Mathematics and Philosophy, pp. 1617.
35. The list of Pythagoric goods given by Plutarch includes to` he n (unity, the one, one), to`
peperasme non (the perfectly determinate), to` me non (the abiding), to` euthu (the straight), to`
peritton (the odd), to` tetragonon (the square), to` son (the equal), to` de xion (the right-handed),
to` lampron (the bright). Under the category bad he set: te `n duada (the two, duality), to` apeiron
(the indeterminate), to` pheromenon (the moving), to` kampulon (the curved), to` artion (the
its basis must deny reality to that which is affected; it must take math as the
only real knowledge and mathematical objects as the only real beings, as
Badiou himself repeatedly asserts. On these grounds alone we feel justied
in calling Badiou more of a Pythagorean than a Platonist.
36
Although Badiou does not pause at the price, such neo-Pythagorean
ontology requires enormous sacrice. To demonstrate why, we need to
revisit for a last time the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel. One of the ZF axi-
oms is that for any two sets x and y there is a third set xy such that zx or
zy if and only if zxy. For the union to exist as stipulated, the elements
of x and the elements of y must be such that they dont interact, meaning,
nothing happens (apathe s) to the elements of x or the elements of y when
we bring them together: no change in identity.
37
This works well when we
have sets of numbers, for instance: putting together the set {0, 2} and the
set {0, 3} gives the set {0, 2, 3}, and each of the members0, 2, and 3
remains identical to itself throughout the operation. But this does not
work with physical objects. For example, if we interpret sets as bottles
containing molecules, and if x is a bottle containing caustic soda and y is a
bottle containing muriatic acid, it will be hard to get all those molecules,
unaffected, into a single bottle.
Of course chemistry can preserve the unaffected (and mathematizable)
aspect of matter by hypostasizing atoms as the component parts of mole-
cules, so that caustic soda became NaOH and muriatic acid became HCl.
H, Cl, Na, O: these emerge unrufed fromthe explosive interaction of our
molecules, as NaCl and H
2
O. But what about those circumstances when
atoms themselves fail to preserve their identity? At that point physics,
even), to` heteromekes (the oblong), to` anison (the unequal), to` aristeron (the left-handed), to`
skoteinon (the dark); see Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, in Moralia, 16 vols., trans. Frank Cole Babbitt
(New York, 1936), 5:11819. Compare Aristotle, Metaphysics, 986a22.
36. Conversely, Simone Weil emerges from her Commentaires de textes pythagoriciens
as more a Platonist than a Pythagorean; numbers, for her, are a mediation, indeed the model of
a mediation, between us and ho` theos; see Simone Weil, Commentaires de textes
pythagoriciens (1942), Oeuvres, ed. Florence de Lussy (Paris, 1999), pp. 593627. Closer to
Badiou in this regard was Rudolf Carnap, whose Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (Berlin, 1928)
utilized Russells and Whiteheads Principia, and the theory of relations and the theory of types
therein, to describe a construction of all concepts, or objects, starting from basic elements. The
model for Carnap was the way mathematicians construct the real numbers starting from the
natural numbers (rst the integers, then the rational numbers, then the real numbers). As
opposed to Badiou, however, the most basic elements of Carnaps ontology (he called it rather
Gegenstandstheorie) are psychological and not mathematical.
37. This permanence of identity or apathe a is already implicit in the rules of the
propositional calculus. For example, when we bring two propositions p and q to form a new
proposition p q, it is understood that p and q remain unchanged. The same applies to the
operation of negating a proposition twice: not-(not-p) is taken (pace Hegel) to be identical to p.
another mathematical science, must take over. But even at this level matter
and quiddity remain affected by interaction and resist the full reduction to
unchanging number. In the two-slit experiment, the most basic and well-
known experiment in quantumphysics, the bringing together of a beamof
electrons, a plate with two parallel slits close to each other, and a screen to
receive the electrons, has the following result: if one of the slits is closed, the
electrons behave as regular particles, but when both slits are open, the
electrons behave as waves. Bringing electrons, the plate with the two slits,
and the screen togetheror bringing the electrons together with two slits
and a detecting consciousnesschanges the identity of the electrons.
Mathematically this is a paradox (the presence of pathic elements), and,
indeed, it is the basic paradox of quantum physics.
We will have similaralbeit less explosive, less paradoxical, and more
familiarproblems if we attempt to interpret sets and elements so that
they correspond to our most immediate experiences, our conscious
thoughts. I wake up in the morning, for example, and I think, I had a
dream, but cannot remember any details. Then I reach with my hand and
I touch something: the book I was reading before I fell asleep. I think, a
book. At once the union of those two thoughts, I had a dream and a
book, produces a sequence of other thoughts, memories of my dream. I
dreamt that I was supposed to read froma book before a big audience, but
I had forgotten the book, and then . . . and so on. Some of the episodes in
my dreamare nowre-created, brought out of nothingness as it were, while
awake. Thus the bringing together of two thoughts produces a whole prog-
eny of other thoughts, so that the union will contain many more
thoughts than the two original ones.
More basically, the bringing together of two thoughts may alter both of
them. Imagine Oedipus arriving in Thebes after the killing of Laius, seeing
Jocasta in all her nery and thinking, Wow! Then Teiresias whispers in
his ear, That woman happens to be your mother, whereupon Oedipus
thinks again, Wow! But the rst and the second wows are of an entirely
different character, and henceforth Oedipus will not be able to bring to
mindto presencethat rst wow of sexual arousal. It would be dog-
matic to insist that, nevertheless, Oedipuss rst wow is there intact and
unchanged, as a memory of a past event, sothat the rst wowemerges from
the union as unscathed as the number 2 emerged from the union we
performed before. We mean dogmatic in the sense of a previous, unexam-
ined commitment to the ontology implicit in the ZF axioms.
Or take the ZF axiom of the power set, warranting the set of subsets of
a given set. Is it the case that a portion of our thoughts remain unaffected
if we remove the rest of them from our consciousness? Hardly. I was de-
jected until, a moment ago, I found out that E
va loves me, and now the

world shines with unusual splendor. Now, remove the thought E
va loves
me: will my other thoughts remain unaffected? Surely not. Set theory
cannot account for mood. Nor can that sort of ontology account for met-
aphor.
38
It is for those reasons, among others, that poem and matheme
remain irreconcilable to this day, and not for lack of trying.
39
It is therefore
perverse to maintain, as Badiou does in his Meditation 11, that the
[Greeks] interrupted the poemwith the matheme, aninterruptionhe calls
the Greek event (BE, p. 126).
None of these are difculties for set theory or for math, both of which
simply reject the introduction of pathic elements. But such a rejection of
the pathic is catastrophic for a general ontology, since it deprives us of the
reality of most of our thoughts, which is to say of our humanity.
40
In 1972, the older one of us, who had met Grothendieck in Pisa a couple
of years before, asked the famous mathematician what he had liked best in
Italy.I saw nothing, Grothendieck replied; at that time all my thoughts
were mathematical. By 198385, when he wrote his Re coltes et semailles,
Grothendieck was back doing math, but now alternating it with what he
called my other passion, meditation. Grothendiecks meditations most
often dwelt on his dealings with people, mathematicians and others: on
affective, pathic subjects.
Badious ontology would force us back to the Grothendieck prior to
1970. In Being and Event Badiou poses what he calls a crucial question:
Where is the absolutely initial point of being? Which initial multiple has
its existence ensured such that the separating function of language can
operate therein? (BE, p. 48). We might want to answer, with Descartes,
that the only initial multiplicity whose existence is indubitable to me is that
of my own thoughts. But this initial multiplicity cannot be counted in a
set-theoretical ontology, for its objects are not of the apathetic kind, and
the ZF axioms will not be veried. It seems to us, as it seemed to Descartes,
38. Against set-theoretic attempts to dene metaphor, like those of Max Black, see Ricardo
L. Nirenberg, Metaphor: The Color of Being, in Contemporary Poetics, ed. Louis Armand
(Evanston, Ill., 2007), pp. 15374.
39. Among the French poets/mathematicians who tried to marry poetry and math, Jacques
Roubaud stands out. His collection (Paris, 1967) bore the set-theoretical title .
40. Our point here is akin to Martin Heideggers. According to Heidegger, Descartess
ontology completely fails to apprehenddoes not even seek, passes overthe phenomenon
of the world, since as intellectio, in the sense of the kind of knowledge we get in mathematics
and physics, it can apprehend only those things which always are what they are,
whichconstantly remain. In such a system, only that which enduringly remains, really is
(Martin Heidegger, Hermeneutical Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the World,
Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York, 1962], I.3.21, pp.
12830).
that any other multiplicity whose existence is indubitable will require a
leap of faith. So we could put the question this way: why should we prefer
a leap into Badious void of Number over the reality of our own thoughts?
9. Why Numbers Now?
After all, the last century of so-called continental philosophy can hardly
be characterized as neo-Pythagorean. Quite the opposite, if we take Martin
Heideggerwhom Badiou takes to be the last universally recognizable
philosopher (BE, p. 1)as a founding father. There are similarities be-
tween the two men. Both called upon not-being, or nothingness, to re-
found metaphysics, and behind the ontological pursuits of both there lies
anabiding preoccupationwith number and symbolic logic. But for Badiou
the preoccupation is one of embrace and identication, whereas for Hei-
degger it was one of rejection and contradiction. Recall how, in Was ist
Metaphysik? his Freiburg Antrittsvorlesung of 1929, Heidegger dened
nothingness in a way meant to quarantine it fromthe reach of logic, as that
of which it can be said that it is no existing thing, a dening property that,
he pointed out, violates the rules of logic.
41
Since Heidegger wanted to distance his philosophy as far as possible
from Logistik, he did not use more formal terms (of the sort favored by
Badiou) to explain why logic refuses to admit the possibility of considering
nothingness, though he easily could have. If N represents nothingness,
then the denition is: for any x, if x exists then x is not equal to N. There-
fore, putting Nin the place of x, we get: if Nexists, then Nis not equal to N.
Conclusion: either N does not exist, or it is not equal to itself, which vio-
lates the most important logical principle, identity. (Note, incidentally,
that Nis not the same as Badious empty set , which is dened as follows:
for any x, x does not belong to . The difference between N and is that
between being equal to and belonging to, which in this case is also the dif-
ference between contradiction and noncontradiction.)
And yet despite this logical impossibility of nothingness it is a fact, says
Heidegger, revealed to us by the feeling of anguish (roughly speaking the
feeling that had been Sren Kierkegaards theme), that nothingness is
there. Nothingness as revealed to us by anguish founds the basic logical
element of negation, the logical constant no, and not the other way
around. The fact of anguish is prior to logic. Our heeding the call from
anguish and the recognition of nothingness opens up the possibility for
41. See Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), p. 107 and following. Badiou
articulates his view of one difference between his and Heideggers founding the position of the
nothing in BE, p. 173.
authentic scientic activity, and not the other way around. For Heidegger,
the human is prior to science, prior even (or especially) to mathematics
and formal logic. Badiou, too, takes what he calls nothingness as the orig-
inal ens, but he nds his nothingness not in the contradiction of human
anguish but in the formal denition of the empty set. And while, with
Heidegger, we are free to heed or to ignore the call, Badiou would have us
believe that if we wish to be a human Subject, rather than a simple indi-
vidual animal, our only choice lies with the axioms of set theory.
Despite this important difference, Badiou sees himself as Heideggers
heir.
42
Not so with Heideggers other famous son of the same French gen-
eration, Jacques Derrida, whom Badiou seeks to supplant, not succeed:
and it is by donning the contemporary matheme like a coat of armour
that I have undertaken, alone at rst, to undo the disastrous consequences
of philosophys linguistic turn. Where Derrida spent his life showing
that presentations never achieve the goal of reaching the real thing,
presence or truth, Badioutakes presentations, at least those of set theory,
to be the embodiment of presence and truth. Derrida deconstructed Plato,
Badiou hyperstructures him. For Derrida all is deferment, diffe rance, and for
Badiou all is immediate (at least when it comes to the signs of math and set
theory). In a sense, Badiou returns us to a prepoststructuralist stance: to a
French structuralism (such as that of Lacan at certain stages of his thought)
heavily inuenced by French mathematics, especially Nicolas Bourbaki.
AParisian prosopography might explain this enantodromia in terms of
the intergenerational rivalries (we will not undertake one here). We could
also nd sociocultural explanations for French metaphysicians enchant-
ment with mathematics, such as the subjects prominence, since 1795, in
the exams through which the French state denes intelligence and selects
its intellectual elites. What is much more difcult to understand is why
42. We suspect that Heidegger would not have agreed, and not only because of his criticism
of Cartesian ontology in Being and Time (see note 38, above). In a 1935 draft of his Introduction
to Metaphysics, writing about the logical bent of Rudolf Carnap and the journal Erkenntnis (in
which Carnap had published in 1932 The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical
Analysis of Languageamong other things an attack on Heideggers philosophy), Heidegger
characterizes this mathematization of philosophy as the conclusion of Descartess mode of
thinking. . . . in which truth is rather diverted into certaintyto the mere securing of thought,
and in fact the securing of mathematical thought against all that is not thinkable by it. The
conception of truth as the securing of thought led to the denitive profaning [Entgtterung] of
the world. Heidegger adds: it is . . . no accident that this kind of philosophy stands in
internal and external connection to Russian communism. And it is no accident, moreover, that
this kind of thinking celebrates its triumph in America (quoted in Michael Friedman, A
Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger [Chicago, 2000], p. 22). Badiou might not
object to the rst association, but his own remarks about Anglo-Saxon philosophy suggest he
would be offended by the second.
those enchantments should exercise such powerif the popularity of Ba-
dious writing is any guidein the broader world of contemporary critical
thought.
We suspect that the popularity of Badious ontology among intellectu-
als owes something to the yearning for an ontology capable of generating a
politics robust enough to motivate revolutionary engagement with the
dominant statist and capitalist world order. Badiou seems to promise a
renewal of scientic communism, this time built, not upon nineteenth-
century notions of matter and energy such as those Friedrich Engels had
used in his 1883 Dialectics of Nature but on the new physical conceptions,
where the quiddity of matter fuses into mathematical structurenothing
less than a Marxian aggiornamento, this time coupled not with Freud but
with Lacan.
The promise is all the more alluring to those who watch with mounting
anxiety as the arts and humanities seem increasingly pushed aside by the
expanding power of science. Badious formal complexity offers cultural
studies a way to imagine that it is narrowing the distance between the two
cultures, that is, between the humanistic disciplines with which we ad-
dress the fearful freedom of choice and the scientic ones in which we
speak a language of (at least apparent) necessity. Perhaps, then, we should
explain the popularity of Badious postmodern Pythagoreanism in terms
similar to those used to explain the rise of its ancient precursors; according
to Max Weber, Pythagorean movements expressed the eschatological
mentalities of intellectual elites that felt themselves removed frompolitical
power.
43
Perhaps. It is not our place to explain why one might choose Badious
vision. We wish to insist only on this: since Plato it has been the task of
philosophy to help us distinguish, in their various contexts, between ne-
cessity and contingency. The difference need not be absolute; still, in the
discovery of, and respect for, that difference lies whatever we may mean by
freedom. Alain Badiou calls himself a Platonist and proclaims the revolu-
tionary political power of his philosophy of numbers. But insofar as his
mathematical ontology disguises the contingent in robes of necessity, it
can only diminish our freedom. We can embrace the politics if we so wish.
But we should not confuse this choice with mathematics, nor can we call it
philosophy.
43. See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. and ed.
G. Roth and C. Wittich et al., 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1978), 1:500. Webers perspective was fruitfully
extended to the Late Antique world in Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical
Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 18695.
List of Symbols Used in the Text
Logical Symbols
p, q, r, and so on stand for propositions, which may be true or
false, but not both.
Sometimes x, y, z, and so on stand for variables. A proposition
may depend on one or more variables; for example, let x run
through all the tree leaves in the world and p(x) mean x is a
maple leaf. The p(x) is true if and only if x is a maple leaf.
means equal. It is understood that for any symbol x in a
formula, x x. means not equal.
For any proposition p,

p or not-p stands for the proposition
which is false whenever p is true, and vice versa.
If p and q are propositions, p q is another proposition, p or q,
which is true whenever p or q or both are true, and false only when
p and q are both false.
If p and q are propositions, p q, also noted p & q, is another
proposition, p and q, which is true only when both p and q are
true, otherwise it is false.
If p and q are propositions, p 3q is another proposition, p
implies q, which is true unless p is true and q is false.
If p and q are propositions, p 7q is another proposition, p equiva-
lent to q, or p if and only if q, which is true whenever p and q are
true or false together, or in other words, when (p 3q) &(q 3p).
?, there exists, is prexed to a variable to mean that there is, or
there exists, a value of that variable making a proposition p true. For
example, if p(x) is, as before, x is a maple leaf, then ?x (p(x))
means there is some tree leaf in the world which is a maple leaf.
@, for every, is prexed to a variable to mean that for all values
of it the proposition is true. In the example above, @ x (p(x))
means every tree leaf in the world is a maple leaf.
When a variable x in a formula never appears preceded by the
there exists or the for every symbols, we say that the variable x
is free in that formula.
Set Theoretical Symbols
x, y, z, and so on generally stand for sets.
xy, x belongs to y, is the basic, undened, relation in set
theory. x y means x does not belong to y.
Brackets { } are used to dene new sets. For example, given sets x
and y, {x, y} is the set consisting in the sets x and y, or, in other
words, the set whose elements are the sets x and y.
The empty set is the set dened by: @ x (x ), for every x, x
does not belong to the empty set.
yx, y is contained in or equal to x, or y is a subset of x,
means that any element of y is an element of x. Formally, @ z
(z y 3z x). The empty set is a subset of every set. Every set is
a subset of itself.
Two sets x and y are equal, x y, means that (y x) & (x y).
y x, y strictly contained in x, means that (y x) & (y x).
Given any two sets x and y, the union of x and y, x y, is the set
containing all elements either of x or of y. Formally, (z x y)
7((z x) (z y)).
P(x), the set of parts of x, or the power set of x, is the set
whose elements are all the subsets of x, including the empty set
and x itself.

Badiou's Numbers

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Badiou's Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology

Author(s): By RicardoL.Nirenberg and DavidNirenberg

tapes de la philosophie mathe matique (Paris, 1912), p. x; our

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