brief response to Jackson’s recent post

Rob Jackson has a post ABOUT UCLA here.

He’s right that Badiouianism seemed to be the main source of opposition to OOO in the room, but I view that more positively than Jackson does (if he knew the people in question, so would he).

The main Badiouian objections were coming from Nathan Brown (UC-Davis), organizer Ken Reinhard (UCLA), and Daniel Sacilotto (UCLA), who are all extremely bright people who simply happen to be more favorable toward Badiouian ontology than I am.

They also have a good point: there hasn’t been an OOO response to the theory of objects in Logics of Worlds yet. That’s simply an accidental result of the fact that I haven’t yet found a window of time yet in which to do it. But it’s a top priority for 2011, and I plead guilty to not having done it much earlier. It would be an extremely interesting debate, I think.

But before people are too quick to hold me to blame for that, please note that Badiou also doesn’t do a very thorough job of dealing with rival theories of objects. He simply says he thinks he has a new and original theory compared to the old conservative ones, but then gives no account of those old conservative ones. He doesn’t mention Husserl’s theory of intentional objects and I don’t recall any detailed account of Aristotelian primary substance, and I would be shocked if Badiou had any familiarity at all with the Austrian tradition on objects other than Husserl.

So, all I ask is that I not be held to a stricter schedule of interchange than Badiou himself.