clarification based on a piece of reader mail

A very sharp reader (whose emails are always sharp) makes this point among others in an email of this afternoon:

“Finally, correct me if I am wrong, but when you introduced concepts like set, aggregate and event in your discussion, these fall under the heading of pseudo or sensual objects, and hence, in the way I understood you, are technically less real, less independent, have less ontological weight than objects do. If I am right, this might not be a point that Vitale and Ivakhiv is getting. It seems that, for them, those things are more real or just as real as objects.”

I thought this went without saying, but then I remembered that Ivakhiv said he hadn’t watched the UCLA video yet and so might have been misunderstanding what it meant that I mentioned sets on December 1.

Yes, just as the emailer says, when I used the terms aggregate, set, event, and impact at UCLA, they were as terms for pseudo-objects.

In other words, any citation of Badiou in that context was purely critical. In no way is my position moving towards Badiou’s. Quite the contrary. I’m moving toward a full-fledged critical engagement. Just be patient, because I have a few other projects with more urgent deadline on my plate right now. Badiou is a project for the second half of 2011, not the first half.

First comes Treatise on Objects (which will be very popular despite the dry title), then comes Lovecraft (which will be appropriately weird), along with assorted articles and lectures to which I have already committed. Then comes Badiou, at about the same time as McLuhan– second half of 2011, that is.

It simply seems to me that many of the remaining objections to OOO can usually be found somewhere in the Badiouian vicinity, so it’s time to confront them before Badiou becomes the next “Derrida the Untouchable” figure in continental thought. (Derrida managed to establish a market niche by about 1990 where you couldn’t even disagree with him without looking like an automatic philosophically reactionary dupe. It didn’t help, admittedly, that many of Derrida’s opponents at the time were philosophically reactionary dupes. Derrida was certainly the good guy in a number of those fights, but not in all or even most.)