events are external to thought, consider the fourth burp by badiou. did he
have a brainburp or burped?
hence no salvation
palma, apgs
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 7:45 PM, T Fjeld <t.fjeld1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Just a reminder of Nick the Cave man's ditty from The Good Son...
Foi na cruz, foi na cruz
Que um dia
Meus pecados castigados em Jesus
Foi na cruz
Que um dia
Foi na cruz
Love comes a-knocking
Comes a-knocking upon our door
But you, you and me, love
We don't live here any more
...which brings to the fore our need to unpack the gift provided by Alain
Badiou in his conclusion to the book on Wittgenstein as Antiphilosoph,
where he (Badiou) writes:
Salvation, which is of the order of an interior event of within its own
thought, must be attached to the semantic constellation organized [this
translation utilizes the American version of the English tongue]by the word
God, which is the word of the absence of words.
Let us note first that Badiou's comment comes on the heels of a discussion
where he points to the double reference to salvation in Heidegger and
Wittgenstein: to the latter it is clear that salvation comes at the
beginning of knowledge -- 'first you must be redeemed .. then everything
will be different, and it will be "no wonder" if you can do things that you
cannot do now' -- while to Heidegger salvation is encountered at the end.
In his final word to the public, recorded in 1966 under the clear condition
that it would be published only after his demise, Heidegger proclaimed that
his philosophy was granted on condition that 'Only a God can save us.'
So in other words, redemption: how is it with such a notion in Badiou?
From the quote above we should allow for three important distinctions:
first, Badiou grants that there is an order of the EVENT, which here takes
the form of salvation; second, there is the order of THOUGHT, which has an
event (salvation) given as internal to itself, that is to say that
redemption lies on the interior of thought; and, third, thought has some
relation (Lacan's poinçon and its 'one hundred relationships' comes to
mind) to a SEMANTIC constellation, i.e. words.
Crucially, Badiou identifies as sophistic those approaches that REDUCE the
second order to the third. Thought and language are relatively DISTINCT
fields in Badiou.
What seems to be clear is that the route from semantics to event is
muddled, and in so far as events are INTERNAL to thought, its trajectory
can only be chartered by way of a detour: we need to allow our words the
capacity to THINK before they can grasp the relevant EVENT.
Mvh. / Yours sincerely,
Torgeir Fjeld, PhD
http://torgeirfjeld.com/
