{"id":9801,"date":"2012-11-18T11:57:16","date_gmt":"2012-11-18T16:57:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9801"},"modified":"2012-11-18T16:45:56","modified_gmt":"2012-11-18T21:45:56","slug":"pluth-badiou-theory-of-the-subject","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/18\/pluth-badiou-theory-of-the-subject\/","title":{"rendered":"pluth Badiou theory of the subject 3\/4"},"content":{"rendered":"

A table from Alain Badiou\u2019s Theory of the Subject<\/em> is very helpful for gaining clar-ity on the nature of this debate and where I wish to take it\u2014toward a position that I would describe as some variant of dialectical materialism<\/span>. [Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009) 117.]<\/p>\n

Nor is it the point of a dialectical materialism<\/span> to claim that being and thinking are really one (\u00e0 la Parmenides). Rather, what is desired is a theory in which the actual reciprocity and strong mutual influence between thinking and being, theory and practice, at least in some domains of human life, is accounted for; a theory in which there is no absolute barrier between thinking and being (and also not between saying and showing) that would require us to adopt silence as the most appropriate philosophical attitude (and therefore devaluing thought itself).<\/p>\n

As Georg Luk\u00e0cs put it in History and Class Consciousness<\/em>, when contrasting dialectics to what he called metaphysics, \u201cin all metaphysics the object remains untouched and unaltered so that thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical; while for the dialectical method the central problem is to change reality.\u201d Obviously, the merely contemplative status that thinking must have in mathematics is one of the things that concerns me about Meillassoux\u2019s attempt to refute correlationism.<\/strong> Much better, it seems to me, is to reconsider what a dialectical materialism<\/span> can do.<\/p>\n

In response to my points here, Meillassoux may be able to assert that mathematics does have effects on being too. The natural sciences have assisted, after all, in the creation of new material beings, as well as new types of beings, and have certainly given us an effective \u201cknow how\u201d with the real<\/span>. While this is certainly practical, and suggests that mathematics is something other than merely contemplative, it does not allow us to assert that any change in the nature of being itself has come from mathematics (or from any of the hard sciences). In fact, it is difficult to see how the hard sciences could offer us any examples of the kind asserted by a dialectical theory in which being and thinking would be mutually influencing each other (unless one adopts an undesirable \u201cquantum mysticism\u201d). And therefore it is difficult to see how the hard sciences can offer a model for how thinking and being are actually unified, along the lines of the Parmenidean thesis<\/strong> Meillassoux himself wishes to rehabilitate. It would seem that Meillassoux\u2019s position is, by Luk\u00e0cs\u2019 standard, metaphysical rather than dialectical, even though it does qualify as a philosophical materialism.<\/p>\n

My study of Milner\u2019s interpretation of the notion of lalangue<\/span> in Lacanian theory in the next section will give us an example of what is desired: something like a dialectical materialism on the question of the relation between thinking and being. Yet lalangue<\/span> also plays a key role in what Milner considers to be the impasse in Lacan\u2019s materialism, because Milner ultimately concludes that what is going on in lalangue<\/span> cannot be called a thinking at all. Thus, it functions as a \u201csilent\u201d real<\/span>, and the barrier between thinking and being is reinstated. This is the point I will question in my conclusion.<\/p>\n

Lacan introduced the term lalangue<\/span> in the 1970s to address what there is of the real<\/span> in language \u2014 something like the very sound of a language, such as phonemes considered apart from the creation of sense. The phrase lalangue<\/span> is itself written in a way that is supposed to get us to pay attention to the sound of language under or alongside its meaning, which is the very thing the term is about. Bruce Fink uses “llanguage”<\/span> as an English translation for this, in which the graphically repeated,and in speech a bit elongated \u201cl\u201d gets us to hear the word differently, having basically the same effect\u2014 calling our attention to the thing the concept is supposed to designate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A table from Alain Badiou\u2019s Theory of the Subject is very helpful for gaining clar-ity on the nature of this debate and where I wish to take it\u2014toward a position that I would describe as some variant of dialectical materialism. [Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009) 117.] Nor is … Continue reading “pluth Badiou theory of the subject 3\/4”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badiou","category-dia-mat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9801"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9813,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9801\/revisions\/9813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}