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Alain Badiou, Commie in love

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Badiou: A Philosophy of the New. Rancière, for Dummies. By Ben Davis Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 116 pp., Continuum, 2006, $12.95. The 66-year-old French philosopher Jacques Rancière is clearly the new go-to guy for hip art theorists. Artforum magazine’s ever-sagacious online "Diary" has referred to Rancière as the art world’s "darling du jour," and in its recent issue, the magazine itself has described digital video artist Paul Chan as "Rancièrian" -- as an aside, without further explanation, no less! For anyone looking for a primer, Rancière’s slim The Politics of Aesthetics has just been published in paperback. Rancière has the undeniable virtue, for the esoterica-obsessed art world at least, of being something of an odd duck. The Politics of Aesthetics is a quick and dirty tour of a number of these themes. Politically, Rancière favors the concept of equality. Back-to-back with this "esthetics of politics," in Rancière’s thinking, is a "politics of esthetics" itself.

BEN DAVIS is associate editor of Artnet Magazine. Alain Badiou - Number and Numbers - Reviewed by John Kadvany, Policy & Decision Science/johnkadvany.com - Philosophical Reviews - University of Notre Dame. Like many philosophers, Alain Badiou relies on technical systems of mathematical logic as a foundation for philosophical exploration. Donald Davidson used Tarski's theory of truth for formal languages to ground his approach to natural language semantics. Modal logic is frequently used to discuss problems of necessity, time, or belief. W. V. O. Quine made the reduction of mathematics to set theory a paradigm of "ontological commitment," such that an idealized formalization of physical science identified the entities needed to ensure the theory as fundamentally "real.

" Indeed, Badiou's project is exactly in this Quinean mode, with set theory his preferred tool. This review follows those two themes. Badiou's vision in brief: he despairs the lack of objectivity and relativism implicit in the "linguistic turn" -- whether of Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, but probably equally much Rorty or Searle -- and so seeks a directly ontological alternative, somehow avoiding constructivist methods. Set Theory > Basic Set Theory. The following basic facts are excerpted from “Introduction to Set Theory,” Third Edition, by Karel Hrbacek and Thomas Jech, published by Marcel Dekker, Inc., New York 1999. 1. Ordered Pairs We begin by introducing the notion of the ordered pair. If a and b are sets, then the unordered pair {a, b} is a set whose elements are exactly a and b.

The “order” in which a and b are put together plays no role; {a, b} = {b, a}. As any object of our study, the ordered pair has to be a set. Definition. If a ≠ b, (a, b) has two elements, a singleton {a} and an unordered pair {a, b}. Theorem. Proof. With ordered pairs at our disposal, we can define ordered triples (a, b, c) = ((a, b), c), ordered quadruples (a, b, c, d) = ((a, b, c), d), and so on.

(a) = a. 2. A binary relation is determined by specifying all ordered pairs of objects in that relation; it does not matter by what property the set of these ordered pairs is described. Definition. It is customary to write xRy instead of (x, y) ∈ R. 3. Lemma. 4. Alain Badiou « Verso UK's Blog. Alain Badiou on BBC HARDtalk 24 March 2009. Alain badiou.