Ontological Excess and the Being of Language

This paper works primarily with Heidegger’s Being and Time to situate the presence of language within Dasein’s encounters with being-in-the-world, in order to clarify the nature of the relationship between language and being already at play within his early work. Here, Heidegger situates language within the primordial existential structure of the being of Dasein in a way that grants ontological significance to the ontic phenomenon of speech as Dasein’s factical possibility for authentic shared worldly disclosure. However, Heidegger struggles to secure the relation of language to being, reflected in his unanswered question, “Is [language] an innerworldly useful thing at hand or does it have the mode of being of Dasein, or neither of the two?” This paper will navigate this question by distinguishing the ways in which language presents itself in three particular modes of speech identified by Heidegger: the everyday of discursive speech, the apparent absence of speech in the silence that accompanies anxiety, and the more elusive, mysteriously dubbed “poetic” [dichtende]. Both discursive and poetic speech are so constituted for authentic worldly disclosure, but whereas discourse has the tendency to fall prey to idle talk, Heidegger singles out the poetic as that mode of speech that has the disclosing of existence as its true aim. This paper will argue that it is precisely this tendency of discourse that necessitates something like the poetic to keep open the possibility for authentic shared disclosure via language that is not entirely severed from the everyday. With the help of Robert Bernasconi’s explication of the nothingness (or no-thing-ness) that belongs to language in the absence of speech, the case will be made for the poetic as crucial for preserving the connection to being in everyday language, insofar as it provokes an experience which inverts Dasein’s mistaken dominance with respect to language, foreboding of Heidegger’s later work.

Educational Insights, 2010

This paper is an immanent critique of Alan Badiou's Being and Event II as an interjection of Descartes' First Principles. We examine Badiou's application as a modality of present day technocratics before we look at Badiou's rejection of Deleuze and Kant as an obfuscation of aesthetics so that Badiou can claim a pure truth in the image of his mathematical ontology.

This thesis aims to explore whether and how theorists in the humanities today can talk about truth and universality after the critical and linguistic turns in philosophy. To approach this problem it examines the work of Alain Badiou, who explicitly seeks a theory of truth which is contemporary with these developments. Whether we are talking about analytic or continental philosophy, language came to dominate philosophical enquiry in the past century. In making the heretofore overlooked or obfuscated link between language and thought apparent, this put into question the nature and limits of reason, the autonomy of the knowing subject, and the representational or realist conception of truth. Moreover, it left in doubt the viability of philosophy itself (outside the perennial or self-effacing investigation of language) insofar as it seemed to rest on the solidity of these very tenets. For Badiou, the outcome of this trajectory is a pervasive sense of the finitude and limits of reason, and of the end or completion of philosophy. He seeks to reverse this by interrupting the linguistic turn with his own turn to mathematics. In particular, Badiou is able to discern in mathematics a mode of thought subtracted from its linguistic or finite determination, and able to grasp the real in a way unaccounted for by critical or linguistic philosophy. On this basis (the separation of thought from language or finitude as evidenced in mathematics) Badiou develops a theory of truth as infinite and eternal, whilst nonetheless realised in and through language. In this way, Badiou’s thought aims to account for the linguistic turn, and for critical philosophy more generally, whilst nonetheless subverting them internally. This leaves us with a compelling and original notion of truth, and of the role of truths in historical change, and in addition resituates philosophy as not so much the discoverer of truths, but their standard-bearer and compiler.

Modern Language Quarterly, 1991

The combination of Heideggerian metaphysics and advanced mathematics in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event presents a unique challenge to modern commentary. Badiou’s metaphysical axe-grinding makes his work uninteresting to mathematical logicians, while the humanities scholars who wield his axes often have little grasp of the mathematics on which they are supposed to have been honed. This lacuna helps to explain why Being and Event has been dismissed by some as ‘fashionable nonsense’ and praised by others as “one of the most significant texts in recent European thought”. In proposing to fill this gap I offer an account of how Badiou uses mathematics as an allegorical symbolism for Heideggerian metaphysics, while simultaneously effecting a formalist transposition of this metaphysics. At the centre of this account sits a series of paradoxes that play a structuring role in Being and Event, and function as spiritual exercises for those undergoing initiation into an elite intellectual subculture.

The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics, Robert Tubbs, Alice Jenkins, Nina Engelhardt, editors, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2021

This chapter continues the examination of the relationships between modernist literature and modernist mathematics begun in chapter "Modernist Literature and Modernist Mathematics I: Mathematics and Composition, with Mallarmé, Heisenberg, and Derrida." The previous chapter discussed a movement in literature and mathematics toward independence and self-determination and proposed that the technology of composition can place the ultimate nature of reality beyond a representation or even conception. This chapter continues to address the question of ontology and mathematics in modernism, with a focus on Stéphane Mallarmé's (1842-1898) theoretical ideas and Alain Badiou's (1937-) philosophical work. Mallarmé and Badiou, for whom Mallarmé is a major literary inspiration, share the mathematical groundings of their thinking concerning, respectively, literature, and philosophy. There are, however, significant differences between them in this regard, in the present reading (Badiou reads Mallarmé differently), because Mallarmé's appeal to and use of mathematics are primarily technological while for Badiou, they are ontological. Badiou contends that any rigorous philosophical ontology can only be mathematical, at least as "a thesis … about discourse": "mathematics … pronounces what is expressible about being qua being" (Badiou 2007, p. 8). On the other hand, as discussed in "Modernist Literature and Modernist Mathematics I," Badiou's interest in Mallarmé is equally shaped by Mallarmé's thinking concerning "the power of chance,” and also concerns Badiou’s concept of “event,” always an event of trans-Being placed beyond ontology (in his sense) and thus mathematics.

Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2004

My argument is that poststructuralist and postmodernist theory carries on and intensifies the main lines of a characteristically modern tradition of aesthetics whose most important point of reference is not French structuralism – as the term, ‘poststructuralism’, implies – but the tradition of 18th-century German romanticism and idealism that culminated in the work of Heidegger during the Weimar period in Germany between the world wars and afterward. What characterizes this modernist tradition of aesthetics is its valorization of language as a mode of being possessed of an ‘ontological’ status. I place the term ‘ontology’ in quotes in order to highlight the distinction between ‘metaphysics’, with its Aristotelian and neo-Platonic connotations of a ‘chain of being’, and the more modern term ‘ontology’, which was coined in the 17th century and which became widely used during the 18th century by Leibnizian philosophers Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten; the latter, not incidenta...