Metaphysics

Being and Event

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Alain Badiou

1988

Being and Event (L'Être et l'Événement) is Alain Badiou's magnum opus and one of the most ambitious philosophical works of the twentieth century: a systematic ontology grounded in Cantor's set theory, coupled with a theory of the event, the subject, and truth that challenges both analytic philosophy and poststructuralism. Badiou's foundational claim is that mathematics — specifically axiomatic set theory, as developed in the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms — is ontology: to be is to be a set, a multiple, and the discourse of pure being is the discourse of mathematics. On this basis, Badiou reconstructs a sequence of metaphysical categories: being as pure inconsistent multiplicity, situations as consistent presentations, the state of a situation as the re-presentation or counting of the situation's subsets, and — most crucially — the void, which every situation includes but never presents. An event is a happening that makes the void visible: it is a supplement to a situation, arising from its edge, that cannot be recognised by the situation's own counting procedures. A subject is what emerges when a human being commits to an event — wagers on its truth and pursues the consequences of that wager with fidelity. Truth is the infinite procedure of fidelity, the transformation of a situation according to the event. The four truth procedures Badiou identifies — science, art, politics, and love — are the only domains in which events and truths occur. Being and Event is the foundation of Badiou's entire philosophical system.