There is, let's say, a difference between Badiou and Deleuze on the
matter of univocity; Badiou's book on Deleuze, "The Clamor of Being",
addresses this at length.
For Deleuze (according to Badiou), Being is univocal, a virtual
univocity that distributes itself in immanence according to all the
manifold figures of the actual.For Badiou, Being is pure inconsistent
multiplicity, and there are only one-*effects*, "one"s retroactively
posited as results of the operation of the "count-as-one" (gathering
into a consistent multiplicity, a set or ensemble): there can be no
universe of sets, and hence no consistent thinking of the One-All.
I'm not sure that the diagonalisation of a situation (Badiou's name
for a consistent multiple, itself counted-as-one by the superstructure
of the State) aims at a transcendental as such. Diagonalisation
extends a situation by composing a new consistent multiple out of the
resources already found in the situation. (I should add that by
"diagonalisation", I mean the kind of "fancy diagonalisation"
indicated by Badiou's discussion of "forcing", which for an inhabitant
of the situation is a local and aleatory procedure rather than the
immediate revelation of a new horizon). On the face of it, this is a
little different from positing the conditions of possibility for
reason.
I'm not aware that for Badiou a poem is anything other than a being -
that is, a consistent multiple.
Dominic
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