Exploring Badiou's approach to Religion

Spinoza: The Proper Order of Philosophy, 2015

This paper examines Alain Badiou's critical engagement with religion. It is argued that there are two central points at which religion enters the scene of Badiou's philosophy. First, in his critique, the 'motif of finitude' Badiou repeatedly refers to religion, claiming that 'the obsession with finitude is a remnant of the tyranny of the sacred'. Second, Badiou stages his attempt to regenerate philosophy against the proclamation of its end as a confrontation with the religion, through philosophy's detachment from the poetization of philosophy and its reattachment to mathematics. By examining these two points, the paper aims to encircle Badiou's notion of religion and thus clarify the role it plays in his philosophical system. This paper suggests that his notion of religion is a by-product of his polemics and therefore needs to be 'extracted' from his writings. Hence, the 'critique of religion' present in Badiou's work is not straightforward and explicit critique. Another central aspect of Badiou's critique of religion is related to his effort to separate the concept of truth from the category of meaning, which he understands as the emblem of religion. The paper sheds light on this matter and its setting in Jacques Lacan's considerations on religion.

Critical Inquiry, 2011

In the following paper we explore Badiou’s ontology of the multiple. Drawing upon the major mathematical revolutions that took place at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the French philosopher argues that, contrarily to what the Western tradition has defended, ontology must abandon the primacy of the One in the apprehension of being. Bent on the idea that mathematics is ontology and that Set Theory provides a pathway to the being of being, Badiou affirms that being is multiple and that, accordingly, it is necessary to lay out a new ontology. This assertion leads Badiou to reformulate the notion of truth and, along with it, to rethink the role of philosophy in the sophistic era of feeble thinking and the death of Reason.

2014

In this paper, I present a critical discussion of the mathematical arguments employed in the philosophy of event of Alain Badiou. On the basis of `Being and Event' as well as his other writings, I analyze the main notions of his philosophy such as the indiscernible, the undecidable, and the unnameable. The focus of my analysis is both on their mathematical consistency, and their philosophical consequences. I argue that the mathematical approach developed by Badiou is seriously defective, and, as a result, that it cannot serve as an ontological basis for the concept of event as presented in `Being and Event'.

In this paper, I present a critical discussion of the mathematical arguments employed in the philosophy of event of Alain Badiou. On the basis of `Being and Event' as well as his other writings, I analyze the main notions of his philosophy such as the indiscernible, the undecidable, and the unnameable. The focus of my analysis is both on their mathematical consistency, and their philosophical consequences. I argue that the mathematical approach developed by Badiou is seriously defective, and, as a result, that it cannot serve as an ontological basis for the concept of event as presented in `Being and Event'.