a friendlier Badiou-related email from early today

“but I can’t help being stumped by this objection that you make to the knowledge/presentation problematic because it is quite clear that Badiou thinks that mathematics can present and not simply represent things.”

The fact that Badiou thinks he can draw this distinction effectively does not mean that he can.

To be something is not the same as to be represented *or* presented. To be is simply to be. To be a tree is to be a tree, and to be the presentation of a tree is something quite different.

This is what I mean about the failure to assimilate Heidegger adequately. There is still a deeply Hegelian assumption here, and I have argued in print a number of times that it doesn’t work.

But it’s not just in the Hegelian strand of contemporary thought that we confront this problem. The same holds for continental scientism and its triumphalistic claims on behalf of third person over first person descriptions. But the fact is… Things are things. They are not descriptions, whether of the first person or the third person variety.

Thus, any description is only a translation of what it describes, not the thing itself. Whether you call it a representation or a presentation changes nothing. Adopting the second term rather than the first does not give you the magical ability to bring the thing itself before thought.

While this is not true of the correspondent quoted above, I also often have the worry that Badiou sometimes gets a free ride on his ontology because some people so badly want his politics to be true, and so badly want that politics to follow directly from his ontology. There is a certain aggressiveness to many of his devotees.