Badiou's 'Being and Event': A Reader's Guide

Author’s Note
1. Context
2. Overview of Themes
	1. POINTS OF DEPARTURE: AGAINST THE CULTURAL TIDE
	2. TRUTH, MATHEMATICS AND THE SUBJECT
	Discussion points
3. Reading the Text
	PART I. BEING: MULTIPLE AND VOID. PLATO/CANTOR
		1. The one and the many: Plato to Deleuze
		2. Cantor: ‘theory of the pure multiple’
		3. Plato and the unpresentable
		4. Plenum and void: why Aristotle hated a vacuum
		Discussion points
	PART II. BEING: EXCESS, STATE OF THE SITUATION, ONE/MULTIPLE, WHOLE/PARTS OR ∈/⊂?’
		1. Inclusion, belonging and the count-as-one
		2. State, subject, representation
		3. Spinoza: foreclosing the void
		Discussion points
	PART III. BEING: NATURE AND INFINITY. HEIDEGGER/GALILEO
		1. The Greek inauguration: poetry or mathematics?
		2. Hölderlin: poetry, nature, history
		3. Mallarmé: poem as event
		4. Versions of infinity: Galileo to Cantor
		5. Rule-following and the axiom of choice
		6. Hegel: how not to think about the infinite
		Discussion points
	PART IV. THE EVENT: HISTORY AND ULTRA-ONE
		1. History, politics, evental site
		2. Representing history: truth and event
		Discussion points
	PART V. THE EVENT: INTERVENTION AND FIDELITY. PASCAL/CHOICE; HÖLDERLIN/DEDUCTION
		1. Pascal: mathematics, miracles and ‘infinite thought’
		2. Fidelity, choice, ‘State of the Situation’
		3. Logic and truth: against anti-realism
		Discussion points
	PART VI. QUANTITY AND KNOWLEDGE. THE DISCERNIBLE (OR CONSTRUCTIBLE): LEIBNIZ/GÖDEL
		1. Reckoning with the infinite: on the limits of naturalism
		2. Orientations: mathematics, ontology and multiple-excess
		3. Leibniz: logic, language and the plenitude of being
		Discussion points
	PART VII. THE GENERIC: INDISCERNIBLE AND TRUTH – THE EVENT: P. J. COHEN
		1. Forcing, the generic and subtractive ontology
		2. Subject, situation and post-evental truth
		3. Rousseau’s Social Contract: subject, citizen, general will
		4. Truth beyond knowledge: indiscernibility, generic extension
		Discussion points
	PART VIII. FORCING: TRUTH AND THE SUBJECT. BEYOND LACAN
		1. Truth, indiscernment and the impasse of being
		2. Descartes and Lacan: the subject at stake
		Discussion points
4. Further Reading
	1. OTHER BOOKS BY BADIOU AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
	2. ARTICLES BY BADIOU IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
	3. ENGLISH-LANGUAGE BOOKS AND ARTICLES ABOUT BADIOU