ISSN 1393-614X Minerva - An Internet
Journal of Philosophy Vol. 13 2009
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Ontological Excess
and the Being of Language Robert Platt |
This paper engages in
a close reading of Badiou’s Being and
Event as an occasion to investigate the ways in which being and language
may be related and does so by focusing upon his idea that mathematical
language, in the form of set theory, is capable of managing the ‘ontological
excess’ which he associates particularly with poetic language. Because, he
argues, poetic language involves a sort of willful engagement with the
‘one-effect’, the presencing of multiplicity, and thereby the only possibility
for being’s emergence, is made unfeasible. The paper locates some of the
affects of excess in the experience of modernism, and specifically in the
poetic language of Mallarmé and Baudelaire. By considering what might be
involved in ‘the saying-showing power of language’, as this idea is developed
by both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the paper seeks to show how excess is the
very source of beings’ appearance in language, given that this appearance is
silent and hence unsayable.
Introduction
This paper is concerned with examining the relationship between the one and
the many as a ubiquitous problem for philosophical thinking generally and for
ontology particularly. It engages in a close reading of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event because this text offers
a detailed analysis of how we might try to think about the relationship.
Badiou’s text is treated as an occasion, in the most respectful sense, to
address how thinking, writing or speaking could come to terms with the issues
that he raises. At stake is whether ‘the one-effect’ may be conceived in its
completeness and, in particular, whether mathematics, specifically set theory,
is the means for achieving this end.
The difficulty lies with the need to render, or designate, individuals as
parts of a totality, given that ‘rendition’ or ‘designation’ ― in
whatever form ― generates a surplus or excess over the totality. The
designation creates a one-effect in what will be called its mode of
transcendence. Excess transcends the totality that rendition sought to
designate. But equally, each individual constitutes a totality of its own
parts, where each part is one. This is
the one-effect in what will be called its mode of reduction.
Since the question of the one and the many concerns itself with a
relationship, issues of structure call for consideration. Any words that could
be found which might begin to outline such a structure would need to address
themselves to the processes of transcendence and reduction. Transcendence
arises in the implication that any naming of the one - by the act of naming
itself - would point to an entity greater than the sum of its parts. Hence, it
is generally accepted that ’society’, or ’the human body’, has qualities which
cannot be found in the aggregate of parts. Furthermore, these qualities are
likely to be interpreted as the animating ones which make conception possible
in the first place. It is already apparent, through the act of ’naming’, that
the use of language has significant implications for the production of the
one-effect. It is the aggregate, or sum,
which has traditionally been identified as ‘the many’; the many are, at least
potentially, the countable constituents of any totality. Accepting that the
body has a finite number of countable parts allows us to think that we know
when the body is complete or whole.
But, in the greatest effort to determine that which exists on the basis
of that which can be counted, what should count as one part remains entirely
uncertain. While language insists, if language-users are to be consistent and
communicative, that what is called an arm is part of what is called a human
body, there is no such insistence that the former is an irreducible part; that
it is not itself composed of other parts. So what is to count as one part is,
potentially, infinitely reducible.
It seems, then, that there are two ones: a one that is greater than the
sum of its parts constituted as an infinite animating excess over and above a
countable totality; a one that is infinitely reducible within a countable
totality. Infinitude here marks the potentially limitless scope of excess, or
expansion, and reduction: the space between galaxies and quanta. At the same
time, it sets the limits for the countability of a totality by establishing the
boundaries of a finite space.
But how might these two ones be related? What structure draws them
together? Of course, one answer to these questions is that they are both one.
But how can ’they’ be one? Surely, only one is one. How can the one be
something else, something other than itself? How can the one be not-one?
Would it suffice to say that the one is a member of itself, that it is
included in and belongs to itself? But Russell showed that “under certain
circumstances a definable collection does not form a totality” (Jager, 1972,
157), so that the one could not belong to the definable collection of the
totality without paradox; that the condition for the belonging of the one to
itself is its exclusion from itself.
The conclusion that the condition for the one’s self-membership is its
exclusion from itself was reached by Parmenides in the eponymous dialogue,
according to Plato’s account (see, for instance, Plato, 1961). While holding
that ‘reality is one’, Parmenides denies that the one can be predicated in any
way. Each of eight antinomies denies the possibility of saying anything about
the one, of giving it shape, place or movement, of rendering it the same or
different from itself, or of it being in time. Generally, the antinomies argue
that whether the statement ’the one is’ is either denied or affirmed, an
interlocutor must simultaneously deny and affirm contradictory predicates.
Parmenides’ statement also originates (or so a conventional history of
ideas accepts) ontology - the logos of being. Hence, from the outset, a concern
with the nature of being was impelled by the contradictions that are embodied
in the antinomies. It was, perhaps, for this reason amongst others that
Heidegger conceived ontology in the mode of questioning, as Seinsfrage (in
Heidegger, 1962). The Seinsfrage refocused the question originally asked
by Leibniz in 1714: why is there something, rather than nothing? Even so,
ontology has probably been more concerned with what is and how it
is: what does being entail and how is it manifest? Both of these questions
arise in the thought that ‘the one is’.
For Alain Badiou, these questions receive their most rigorous and
promising address through mathematics and, specifically, set theory. Badiou is
apparently unsettled by what he continuously refers to as the ‘impasse’ of
conventional ontology:
the
revolving doors of Plato‘s ‘Parmenides‘ introduce us to the singular joy of
never seeing a conclusion arrive. For if being is one, the multiple, is not.
But this is unacceptable for thought because what is presented is multiple and
one cannot see how there could be an access to being outside presentation.
(Badiou, 2005, 23).
Accordingly, he embraces the idea
that mathematics is the ‘generic truth procedure’ of ontology and its
traditional questions. It is in the (mathematical) understanding of
multiplicity (the term that he uses for ‘the many’) that Badiou seeks to free
himself from the revolving doors. Movement forward is secured by the decision
to abandon the thought that ‘the one is’ in favor of an acceptance that ‘there
is oneness‘. This distinction makes it possible to ask: what could there be,
which is not? Because it is multiplicity
which presents itself, any access to being would arise in and through a
consideration of multiplicity: multiplicity is presentation itself. But
difficulties emerge from what might be involved in any ‘consideration’.
Ontology is already removed from pure multiplicity since it is the
‘presentation of presentation’, or the re-presentation of multiplicity. While,
for Badiou, this applies as much to mathematical ontology, the virtue of this
orientation is that - in the form of set theory - being “is constrained to be
sayable …. within the imperative effect of a law, the most rigid of all
conceivable laws, the law of demonstrative and formalizable inference” (Badiou,
2005, 27). In this regard, Badiou distinguishes mathematical ontology from a
Heideggerian poetics which interprets the history of ontology as withdrawal of
being realized only through an appropriate poetic language.
Badiou’s project, then, is to open up
an access to being qua being by confronting the ‘excess’ that
traditional forms of ontology have always produced, where excess is the
difference between presentation and re-presentation, the ’one-effect’ that
seems to be produced in considering any multiplicity. Although Badiou does not
mention Derrida by name, ‘excess’ is the equivalent of the textual
supplementation that Derrida associates with undecidability. For Badiou, mathematics makes it possible to
be much more decisive about undecidability than one may have supposed, since
set theory offers the means to recognize, control and manage excess itself. The
question that such a position raises in the present context is what manner of
relationship to language does it presuppose? How, at a high level of
generality, does human being’s capacity for, and facility with, language
incorporate excess, whether manageable or not?
Does language which has a recognizably poetic form have a different sort
of relationship to ontological excess than forms whose intent is more
explanatory and propositional? Such questions are themselves part of the
(ontological) tradition.
The Oneness which is Nothing
The thought that ‘there is oneness’
leads Badiou to the conclusion that oneness is pure operation - an operational
result of having a multiplicity. It is
the consequence of the ‘taking place’, the presentation itself, of a
multiplicity in a situation. The structure of a situation gives
to its situation a count-as-one-effect, allowing number to occur within it, so
“What will have been counted as one, on the basis of not having been one, turns
out to be multiple” (Badiou, 2005, 24). Hence, the one, which is not,
structures the multiple; it retroactively gives number to it, allowing it to be
counted as that which is presented. For this reason, multiplicities may be
either inconsistent or consistent: inconsistent prior to the operation of the
count, consistent after the operation. But the play between inconsistency and
consistency does not, of itself, make being qua being more accessible.
While being may be included in any structured presentation, how it could be
presented as being remains problematic. If it was heterogeneous to the one and
to the multiple, it would, like the one, be nothing. On the other hand, if it
was available for the count it would already have been transmogrified. It seems
as though Badiou’s account means that being has to be reckoned as immanence, as
a becoming somewhere between nothing and stasis. Language here provides a means
that might express the torsional retroactivity of this status: the future
anterior. The ‘will have been’ expresses an anticipation of a future from which
a hitherward glance would confirm it.
Badiou wants to claim that axiomatic
set theory has the measure of this problem, since it conditions the operational
effect of the one. The application of a number of ‘unreflexive’ (i.e.
non-self-referential) set theoretical axioms makes ontology mathematical, and
― in doing so ― disassociates ontology from the poetical. The
unreflexive nature of these axioms is also what, for Badiou’s translators,
makes the axioms the “truth procedure(s) for an ontology in which being unfolds
co-extensively with its inscription“ (Badiou, 2005, xxiii). Set theory operates
upon presented inconsistent multiplicities by making consistency an immanent
effect, but “avoids composition according to the one” (Badiou, 2005, 30). While
pure multiplicity is what becomes consistent through the operation, it does so
only on condition that presented multiplicity be regarded as inconsistent. Hence,
Ontology,
axiom system of the particular inconsistency of multiplicities, seizes the
in-itself of the multiple by forming into consistency all inconsistency and
forming into inconsistency all consistency. It thereby deconstructs any one
effect; it is faithful to the non-being of the one, so as to unfold, without
explicit nomination, the regular game of the multiple such that it is none
other than the absolute form of presentation, thus the mode in which being
proposes itself to any access. (Badiou, 2005, 30).
Badiou shows how, in different
Parmenidean antinomies, Plato contemplates the supposition both of inconsistent
multiplicity and of the unavoidable necessity of the one for any concept of multiplicity.
Whereas ‘dissemination without limits’ into the very atoms of being (what was
earlier referred to as ‘infinite reducibility’) marks the pure presentation of
inconsistent multiplicity, without the one such multiplicity is nothing (‘If
the one is not, nothing is’). Counting this a nihilistic conclusion, Badiou
re-configures it … “if the one is not, what occurs in the place of the ‘many’
is the pure name of the void, insofar as it alone subsists as being” (Badiou,
2005, 35). It is this insight which ties Badiou’s thinking to the Cantorian
logic of set theory, given that therein ‘the void’ has a name ― the empty
set ― and a mark. Since no other explanation is given for why inducing
the void is not also nihilistic, it is presumably the linkage to mathematics
which makes nihilism avoidable.
The Name of the Void
Giving the name of the void to the
nothing of inconsistent multiplicity in the domain of pure presentation cannot
afford to make nothing a term, for then it would be drawn into the count as what
was, or could be, presented. Hence, the nothing of the void must remain
inchoate. Just as the one was said to be nothing but the operational result of
the count, the void is itself an uncounted aspect of that structured operation.
Because it can be said that nothing can be subtracted from any presentation,
any inconsistent multiplicity, the void is ’defined’ as ’the subtractive suture
of being’. Using a different terminology, one might say that the void could
only ever be ‘trace’, a mark remaining from the un-presentation of being.
Being co-extensive with the one
(which is nothing), the void likewise has infinite extension and infinite
reducibility. It could be said to be both local and global, but equally that it
is neither of these “…..but scattered all over, nowhere and everywhere: it is
such that no encounter would authorize it to be held presentable” (Badiou,
2005, 55). Only in the event of the befalling of a particularly ‘hazardous
situation’, might the void become ‘retroactively discernible’.
From the perspective of ontology,
thinking necessarily encounters, but without being able to count, the void. In
Badiou’s analysis, the void has to be the ‘first’ multiplicity ― a
conceptless multiple of nothing ― because, otherwise, it would be subject
to the one-effect. Hence the ‘inaugural appearance of the void’ engages an act
of ‘pure nomination’ which, in turn, consumes itself:.
In
ontology, however, the unpresentable occurs within a presentative forcing which
disposes it as the nothing from which everything proceeds. The consequence is
that the name of the void is a pure proper name which indicates itself,
which does not bestow any index of difference within what it refers to and
which auto-declares itself in the form of the multiple. (Badiou, 2005, 59).
Since ontology retroactively ‘forces’
the void as a space within the multiple, it is difficult to associate this with
what seems here to be interpreted as an originary name belonging to
presentation itself. The proper name has the power of appropriation but the
need is to imagine a past (not a future anterior) when something like a
self-consuming arche-word rendered the void as void. This would be equivalent
to the thought in John’s gospel, but modified: in the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with the void and the Word was the void. If the power of
appropriation might more properly be seen as the power of language, the
question which Badiou’s analysis raises draws one into considering how the
void (which is ‘everywhere and nowhere’)
appears in language. As the void must thereby be entangled with any ‘making in
language’ (poiesis) , the interest is to work through how this entanglement
might be understood. Furthermore, the intersection of the void with the excess
occasioned by re-presentation, and its proposed management within mathematical
ontology, would call for consideration.
Excess and the Need for Metastructure
The manageability of the excess which
is produced within and by the structure of the one-effect requires another
level of structure. While a retroactive perspective, expressed in the future
anterior, may provide a means for conceptualizing how the elements of a
multiplicity will have become subject to a count, it can not address itself to
the excess that is thereby generated. Belonging and inclusion are the
different, but related, functions the operation of which give structure to
multiplicities. How the two functions are connected in any particular instance
has consequences for the generation of excess such that, Badiou thinks, the
rendition of a metastructure is necessary.
Belonging, which Badiou interprets as
‘originary’, operates when a multiplicity is counted as an element in the
presentation of another multiplicity. Inclusion operates when a multiple is a subset
of another multiple. One multiple belongs to another if it constitutes an
element which can be counted within it. One multiplicity is included in another
when every element within the first is also presented by the second. Russell’s
observation that ‘under certain circumstances’ a definable collection does not
form a totality can be re-configured in terms of belonging and inclusion, so
that a multiple may not be included in a totality to which it belongs. This distinction is ‘built into’ set theory in
the form of the powerset (or set of subsets) axiom, which establishes an
operational difference between the idea of the existence of a set and the
existence of a set of all the first set’s subsets, such that if a set exists so
does the set of its subsets. The multiples that belong to a set are
nothing more than the set itself; the set of multiples included in a set
constitute a new set. The concept of the set of a set’s subsets appears to be
imperative because it authorizes the notion that there are ’multiplicities of
multiplicities’. But it is precisely the function of the powerset axiom which
creates a double counting: the counting of a multiplicity when its multiples
are taken to belong to the set; the counting of a multiplicity as it is
re-presented when the subsets of the multiplicity are included in the count.
The double counting is the site and cause of excess. In any set, the subsets of
all the sets included in that set is in excess of it; this subset never belongs
to the set. The set of subsets is the one, so the one is pure excess (up to the
point that metastructure ’constrains’ it) never belonging to the set whose
subsets it collects. But the one is nothing, it is the void. It is because any
and every set generates its own excess that it was said that the void is
everywhere (and nowhere).
Badiou is concerned to control excess
by designating a metastructure which subsists in a state of the situation.
Metastructure collects the set of subsets, the ‘re-presentation’ of what a set
presents, so that this set may not only be included in a count but belong as
well. Of course doing this simply repeats, or ― in relation to time
― one might say ‘defers’, the point of excess. Now excess emerges when
one contemplates the set of subsets that are included in the
metastructure. Again this set is
included in the count, but does not belong.
Recognizing this, Badiou gives the
name excrescence to metastructural excess. Accepting that there are
techniques for controlling, by way of minimalizing, any form of excess, he
embraces the idea of hierarchy. A hierarchy of sets, in which each level of the
hierarchy could only collect multiplicities, or elements, from the level below
it would, he thinks, serve this purpose. The problem with such hierarchies, as
with Russell’s theory of types, is that whatever is expressed as belonging to a
set must not be one of the set, so if the idea of metastructural hierarchy is
itself part of set theory it is an idea about itself. If self-reference is
eliminated the idea of metastructural hierarchy is eliminated. In consequence,
because Badiou’s analysis is inevitably a representation of set theory, it
doubles it, so that while being included, it does not belong to it. It is
excessive. Furthermore, what is excessive is mathematically errant. It
undermines the very concept of the count since the aporia between a ‘situation’
and its state (prescribed metastructurally) opens up the infinity of the void.
The idea of metastructural hierarchy is further confounded, as will be
considered, by the way in which the language of its exposition constitutes a
double counting.
The Axioms of Set Theory
In addition to the powerset axiom,
set theory recognizes eight other axioms (extensionality, union, replacement, separation,
foundation, infinity, void and choice).
They constitute operational rules for showing how multiplicities, and
multiplicities of multiplicities, can be related particularly through belonging
and/or inclusion. With the exception of the axiom of choice, they do not
― and do not need to ― presuppose existence because they are
conditionals of the ‘if ….then’ sort. Nevertheless, whether and, if so, how,
the axioms constitute a language remains open to question. If the creation of
excess is somehow foundational to language then, as the following argument will
indicate, set theory is clearly a language in this sense. These questions
become most unrelenting in a consideration of the axiom of the void set.
Variously inscribed by Badiou, it nominates a state where “there exists that to
which no existence can be said to belong” (Badiou, 2005, 67) and, with regard
to it, “being lets itself be named, within the ontological situation, as that
from which existence does not exist” (Badiou, 2005, 68). The paradoxical
quality of both these statements arises from an endemic excess: the excess
which is generated by the difference between existence and non-existence, but
also in relation to the being of the statements in the light of what they
proclaim. While the void set is unique, its function most ineluctably belongs
to language: its cogniscence relies entirely upon the proper name given to it.
Its symbol, the “old Scandinavian letter, Ø …. zero affected by the barring of sense” (Badiou, 2005, 69)
while marking a region ‘liminal to language’ is also made effable by it.
The single existential axiom, the
axiom of choice, holds that whichever particular elements belonging to a
multiplicity can be accepted as standing for it is always a matter of
operational choice. So choice is an operational principle in relation to the
substitutability of elements, but it also appears to be relevant in terms of an
original decision about belonging itself. While the axiom of extensionality
makes it possible to show how multiplicities can be differentiated, questions
related to membership itself appear to be left to the axiom of choice. The
axiom of choice is formulated on the basis of ‘intervention’. One has to make a
choice in order to begin the game and, somehow, the act of choosing must be
declared in and by the game, even though there can be no procedure for
displaying the functioning of the choice. What has to be recognized is that the
choice, any choice, is ‘illegal’ in that a decision is being made about
something already understood to be undecidable. Badiou claims that such a
decision is desirable because it “ultimately function(s) in the service of
order and even … of hierarchy” (Badiou, 2005, 231). If the grounds for
belonging are made variable by the operation of the axiom of choice, and by its
effect upon other axioms, it is the void set particularly for which this has
consequences: in the void set belonging breaks down completely; in the void,
nothing belongs.
The Constructible Universe
The logic of set theory relies upon a
particular orientation to language. Badiou recognizes the ‘sovereign power of
language’ by identifying set theory’s use of a radical nominalism. If linguistic nominalism, specifically in the
form of its usual polarization from realism (or from ‘essentialism’), means
that everything that can be communicated in and by the sharing of language is
achieved by the power of names and naming, then nothing essential belongs to
the things to which the names refer. Indeed, a thorough-going nominalism holds
that there is nothing in language but the names, or ― more
generally ― the words. From this
perspective, language can be viewed as a neutral system lying ready-to-hand and
awaiting use. While contemporary nominalism drew much of its resources from the
later Wittgenstein’s work in which meaning in language is construed as use, by
the same token a certain utilitarianism is reflected in its orientation. It is
for this reason that Badiou is able to associate nominalism with the philosophy
of constructivism and ― drawing specifically upon Godel’s original
conception ― the idea of a constructible universe. The association is
also influenced by the author’s nominalist reading of Leibniz‘s philosophical
system.
Although having reservations about
Leibniz’s thought, its constructivist character recommends itself to Badiou in
that language has ‘sovereign power’ through the capacity to balance the
multiplicity of infinitely divisible being with ‘intrinsic nominations’
provided by language. What is implied, then, by ‘the sovereign power of
language’ is not that language may be overwhelming, but that its power can be
manipulated by language-users in order to construct a universe appropriate to
their will.
Specifically, Badiou accepts that the
capacity of language to assign properties and to bestow names ― by way of
formulae, variables, parameters, etc. ― is indicative of a ‘logical
grammar’ which allows one to define the ‘interiority’ of a situation. On this basis, any excrescence which doubling
generates in the difference between a situation and its current state can be
known and controlled. The creation of ‘constructible sets’, in which a
multiplicity can be shown to belong to one level in a constructible hierarchy,
is conceivable when the naming power of language is used appropriately. Hence,
the acceptance of the ‘sovereignty of language’ facilitates the construction of
a universe in which the several axioms of set theory are true in that universe.
This means, Badiou asserts, that the truth of the axioms is relative to the constructibility
of a universe but also absolute within it. For the same reason, the coherence
of such a universe is purely ‘internal’; like the programming that constructs a
video game its rules are indefeasible, the ‘truth procedures’ that govern the
game making possible the range of choices that arise within it.
One consequence of holding to the
linguistic nominalism which underpins constuctivism is that language is
interpreted as a self-enclosed system. But if it is self-enclosed the defining
feature of language must be its self-referentiality. It is a quality which
coincides with the ‘interiority of a situation’, so that this aspect of the
situation becomes conceivable precisely because language itself, in its
self-referentiality, is taken to be an ‘interiorized’ system. Yet, in claiming
that the axioms of set theory are conditionals (“if….then”), their
self-referentiality is not only specifically denied by Badiou and his
translators, but the axioms’ status as truth procedures for an unfolding of
being co-extensive with their inscription is accepted. The situation is highly
complex: with the exception of the axiom of choice, the axioms do not appear to
rely upon any givens - they are not formulated as propositions whose
predicates simply repeat their subjects in an act of self-reference.
Nevertheless, in being the bounded constituents of a constructed universe, they
have nothing outside themselves to which to refer, so as the indexical markers
of their universe they are self-referential; the orientation of ‘radical nominalism’ towards language ordains
it as a self-referential, interiorized system - the same qualities that are
objectivized in and as the constructed universe of set theory. The doubling
that seems to occur here has the quality of a reflected perception: a
narcissism in which the language used to inscribe the truths of set theory
appears to repeat itself in its own structure. This is a reflection which
constructs the very escape route from double counting; that is, double counting
is double counted and the hierarchy which was supposed to minimalize it allows
it to flourish.
Poetry and the Contingency of Events
Because Badiou accepts that the task
and accomplishment of mathematical ontology is to minimize excess, he considers
that it cannot conceive of historical rupture nor, therefore, of the events
which can occur with such disruption. Just as the presentation of
multiplicities generally was taken to be incoherent up to that moment when the
one-effect, retroactively conditioned, makes them coherent, events ―
arising from ‘evental sites’ ― are unpredictable and contingent. Mathematical ontology “demonstrates that the
event is not” (Badiou, 2005, 190) because it judges that these properties are a
consequence of the self-referentiality of events, when the happening of the
event is filtered through the consciousness of those affected (the example
given is the French Revolution), lending to what transpires an element of
self-belonging and thus generating the double count which promotes excess.
Hence, for mathematical ontology, evental sites resist pressures of coherency
and order: they are ‘singular multiplicities’ which belong in a situation but
are not included in it, presented but not represented. The origin of events in
evental sites means that when events do arise their occurrence reflects a
contingency which can be equated with the operation of chance.
Badiou values poetic language, and
particularly the poetry of Mallarmé and Hölderlin, because it mirrors these
qualities. A close reading of Mallarmé’s A Cast of Dice enjoins a poetic
vision of chance and undecidability (for an earlier analysis of Mallarmé’s
relationship to undecidability see Derrida, 1981):
If
poetry is an essential use of language, it is not because it is able to devote the latter to Presence;
on the contrary, it is because it trains language to the paradoxical function
of maintaining that which ― radically singular, pure action ― would
otherwise fall back into the nullity of place. Poetry is the stellar assumption
of that pure undecidable, against a background of nothingness, that is an
action of which one can only know that it has taken place inasmuch as
one bets upon its truth. (Badiou, 2005, 192).
The weight thrown upon ‘knows’ and
‘bets’ marks the distance, for the author, between mathematics and poetic
language. In regard to making being accessible, the truth procedures of set
theory constitute a knowing because they co-inscribe being and truth. Poetic
language mirrors pure chance so the possibility of its encounter with being
consists in a cast of dice. And yet….. if events themselves are contingent and
unpredictable, poetic inscription could be said to witness a more measured
response. If poetry lives in and with the excesses that its configuration brings
into being, a consequent ‘availability for interpretation’ may be the occasion for ‘poetic undecidability’,
but surely not of a quality which would lead one to think that Badiou’s
deployment of Mallarmé’s poetry was itself a matter of chance, or that he had
‘bet upon its truth’. Expressed differently, one may quite legitimately ask of
a poem for the form and origins of its truths ― whether or not these
reside in the excesses of a revelatory call ― without recourse to notions
of chance. Presumably, the hearing of such a call would be the prime purpose of
any close reading (including Badiou’s).
Even so, the author feels the need to
place a bet. Indeed, one can only know, he says, on condition of the
bet. On this reading, poetry is revelatory precisely in its witnessing of
undecidability and therein, presumably, lies its being. It shows what has to be
transcended by an act of pure courage so that one ‘decide(s) from the
standpoint of the undecidable’.
The making of a decision constitutes
a ‘forcing’ which commits a subject to the ordering and coherence associated
with a hierarchical ranking. Whether poet or reader, “we are submerged in the
mother tongue without being able to contort ourselves to the point of arriving
at a separated thought of this immersion” (Badiou, 2005, 376) and, again, the
only remedy for this is the construction of a hierarchy in which terms are
assigned to a ‘nominal rank’. Badiou’s
reading of Mallarmé’s poetry is made possible by just such an identification.
Quoting the poet himself, Badiou attests that Mallarmé recognizes the site of
his own work in the context of a particular literary situation marked by the
‘crisis in verse’ which arose after Hugo, and that the poet’s self-placing
categorizations will become veridical “in the situation to-come in which this
truth exists (that is, in a universe in which the ’new poetry’ posterior to the
crisis in verse, is actually presented and no longer merely announced)”
(Badiou, 2005, 404-5). Interestingly, this account of ordering and making
coherent eschews the future anterior in favor of a simple predictive sense of
‘things to come’. But can poetry live in the time of its making only as
‘announcement’ of a hypothesized future? Can it work as poetry if its only
function is to mark a desire for its own flowering in a future which alone
would complete it? An account which defines poetry only according to its
sitedness, sacrifices every possibility of an interpretive reading for a notion
of self-actualization in and as an event.
For Badiou, it is also what makes a
subject possible, this possibility arising when the self is actualized in/as
the event:
A
subject uses names to make hypotheses about the future. But, given that it is itself a finite configuration of the generic
procedure from which a truth results, one can also maintain that a subject uses
names in order to make hypotheses about itself….. Here, language (la langue)
is the fixed order within which a finitude…. practises the supposition of
reference to come…… Nomination is solely empty inasmuch as it is full of what
is sketched out by its own possibility. A subject is the self-mentioning of an
empty language. (Badiou, 2005, 399-400).
Mallarmé, it appears, was just such a
subject. It may be re-assuring to learn that the wager placed from the
standpoint of the undecidable can be made with confidence, but ― if so
― the metaphorical significance of a cast of dice becomes dubious. It
does so because any decision will do the job of ending the paralysis
conditioned by undecidability. Any decision constitutes a forcing in which the
subject’s being is realized and ― further ― realized in truth. Badiou apparently provides no way of
preventing the trivialization of the processes and procedures that he analyzes:
one asks oneself if one’s needs will be met by shopping or mowing the lawn and
the decision to engage in either activity ensures its truth and one’s being,
where one’s expectation of a future state of fulfillment is negotiated by
nomination in ‘an empty language’. So what is true is what happens (the event)
and what happens is the true, brought into being by the ‘forcing decision’ of a
subject “…at a point where language fails” (Badiou, 2005, 430)
Different senses of language seem to
be at play in Badiou’s analysis without being fully explicated. They come to
the fore when the idea of a radical nominalism is contrasted with the
interpretation embedded in the quotation above from pp. 399-400, where language
(la langue) is the fixed order of an empty system (in this sense, of
course, language cannot ‘fail’). Saussure’s distinction between langue
and parole, where the latter comprises the multiple possibilities of
speech for which langue is generative, could be usefully applied to the
senses of Badiou’s conception. Foucault’s separation of language as experience
and language as use would be similarly relevant, the former referring to the
subject’s orientation to the essential absence, consequent upon the death of
God, of anything in language, apart from its sovereign power; the latter
to particular applications of that power in practice (see particularly
Foucault, 1994)
Indeed, the binary distinctions
identified above can be seen as having the same phenomenal form as the
relationship whose unraveling lies at the centre of Badiou’s work: the
relationship of multiplicity (the many) with the one. From this standpoint the
one is la langue: the voidal structure which authorizes and gathers up a
multiplicity of particular acts of speech, writing and non-verbal
communication. To make such a claim
would involve accepting that there was no essential difference between the
one/many and the language/speech relationships. There is no compunction to
think that either one of these is originary.
It is beyond the scope of this paper
to trace the resonances of the one/many in the language/speech relationship,
except to suggest that the tropological character of language ―
specifically in the workings of synecdoche and metonymy, and in the more general
connection between these and metaphor ―
functions as re-configurations of the one/many relationship.
If it might be said of the general
power of language that it enfolds as it unfolds, some sense of one’s belonging
to language needs to resonate alongside the sense of utilitarian nominalism
which, despite his acceptance that “we are submerged in the mother tongue
without being able to contort ourselves to the point of arriving at a separated
thought of this immersion” (Badiou, 2005, 376) dominates Badiou’s thinking and
the desire for nominal ranking.
Being-in-Language
Commenting upon the supposed
contradiction in Sausserian linguistics which suggests that speakers and
hearers of a language would have to know it in order to learn it, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty argues that
the
objection is the same kind as Zeno’s paradoxes; and as they are overcome by the
act of movement, it is overcome by the use of speech. And this sort of circle,
according to which language, in the presence of those who are learning it, precedes
itself, teaches itself, and suggests its own deciphering, is perhaps the marvel
which defines language. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, 39).
Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the
circular trajectory of language gives it the character of the pregiven, but
there is also the suggestion that a consequent generation of paradox might at
least be suspended by the act of speaking (or, presumably, writing). This is an
idea which does not recognize that circularity may promote the doubling which
Badiou’s interpretation draws out. But neither, therefore, does it conceive of
a constant production of excess, the very source of paradox, nor of the
remedial need for hierarchical ranking .
Merleau-Ponty’s comment draws attention
to an experience of being-in-language. But to say that one is in
language would indicate a twofold ‘directionality’ embodied in a recognition
that one is in the midst of a definable collection which does not form a
totality. One recognizes oneself as a sentient being, as a one within whom a
certain life world, certain habits and thought patterns are collected and also
re-collected. This is a world that one knows intimately, that breeds the
familiar; it is … oneself. But the self that one is creates a double through
re-collection, a double whose words echo down the empty corridors of language
resonating in untold ways, untold and so beyond one’s means to totalize. One
might say that one belongs to a totality, the totality of one, in which one is
not included as one … until, perhaps, one speaks again and totality is
temporalized, momentarily suspended as self-identity is re-made through
inclusion. The experience of
being-in-language hence confers self-identity, one’s oneness, while ― and
perhaps simultaneously ― revealing the essential incompleteness of the
one, burdened with excess, who enunciates. How else to hope for completion
except through another round, another accounting?
The humors transposed here may
provide a point of recognition for entering poetic language. Gerald Bruns shows
how such concerns lie at the heart of the poetic experience of modernism.
Identifying “two genealogies”, Bruns (2006) traces, within the French context,
the differing responses of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, given that the contemporary
displacement of the subject provides a shared motif. For Baudelaire, such
displacement is founded in the non-identity of the poet; this is the poet as flaneur,
a figure completely absorbed into the life of the street where transience and anonymity
condition existence, as they characterize the literary work. By contrast, the
subject’s displacement is, for Mallarmé, the source of a mystical ecstasy consequent, as well, upon
the poet’s struggle with a God who is defeated or disappears from language, so
that words are no longer symbols but ‘agents of their own activity’. Bruns
shows how the experience of subject displacement inflects the voices of others,
including Bataille, Blanchot and Foucault:
Forgetting,
waiting, attention, suffering, exhaustion, fascination, abandonment, dying,
madness - and poetry… These are the canonical forms of experience explored by
Bataille and Blanchot … (so that) the experience of language is not a
first-person experience; it is an experience of obsession - of being besieged
or gripped by language as by something that cannot be got rid of, like the
immanence of death.
(Bruns, 2006, 74-75).
So what appears to typify the
modernist experience, as Bruns sees it, is an acceptance that language uses us,
that it constantly reinforces the subjecthood of the subject: the usual sense
of what it means to be a ‘language-user’ is inverted. The modernist response is
then to do what one can to free oneself from this occupying power, whether
through self-effacing immersion or by an ecstatic transformation enacting the
desire to let the words play among themselves, to give language back to itself
so that it recovers from its contemporary estrangement and, in doing so,
removes its hold.
The contemporary experience of
being-in-language can be configured as a conditionality borne of excess. The
connection between all of the arts and excess is Dionysian. While this may lead
the poet to celebrate language as the fecund ground for ecstatic invention, so
that excess itself is equally celebrated, Nietzsche’s thought that words have
passed through too many lips to any longer contain the truth about anything
seems also to be a rendering of excess. More recently, the literary response to
excess seems to run the gamut of feelings that Bruns outlines. Excess breeds a
poetry in which ‘meaning’ becomes opaque, so that the words have no relation to
anything but themselves - akin to a poetizing species of nominalism.
‘Wordedness’, perhaps in the form of vocability, contains the poem’s entire
sense, as in ― it may be suggested ― Charles Bernstein’s writings.
But equally, excess is the measure of
the distance between writerly desire and the words themselves, so ― in
the inability to imprint one’s desire ― all is lost. The relationship
between language-use and the experience of loss is profound, as Lacan has
shown. Bruns shows that, for Bataille, poetry is creation by means of loss,
figured as ‘a non-productive expenditure of language’, where expenditure ceases to be symbolic but
is given over to a representational function in which one’s life becomes
assumed into the materiality of language (Bruns, 2006, 73).
Both responses to excess constitute,
at the same time, an orientation to the void. In a poetry which accepts that
there is nothing but the words, the void is emergent in the disavowal of
anything extrinsic, in the intent that nothing is meant, as well as ―
locally ― in the space between words. Polarities seem reversed in the
thought of poetry as loss since the void rests in a memorialization from which,
infusing itself in the materiality of language, it comes. As the other side of
excess, in either case, the void may hold its own attractions, itself the
source of a desire which impels speaking or writing; or, indeed, silence.
If these are forms of life that
modernism discovers in relation to language, then the question of how it is
possible to live a life so formed, accepting that the mathematical language of
set theory turns out to be inimical to this challenge, remains unaddressed. What understanding of, or orientation to,
language would offer some relief from a self-negating that seems embedded in
the modernist perspective? Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger contemplate, in
thinking about language as a saying-showing, a domain in which some forms of
experience, whilst unsayable, nevertheless silently appear: a thinking which
may be fruitfully linked to Badiou’s account of excess, voidedness, belonging,
inclusion and being.
Language as Saying-Showing:
Wittgenstein
Badiou’s contention that the presentation
of presentation (ontology) is always different from what presents itself as
multiple being appears to leave him indifferent to the thought that such
difference is, in turn, a product of identity. As a theory of ontological
difference, it pays little or no heed to ontological identity, or therefore to
the belonging-together of difference and identity.
Expressing the question concerning
identity in metaphorical terms, one may sensibly enquire of a picture the
degree of its ‘likeness’ to its referent object while accepting that it is
different from what it pictures. Indeed, difference is a condition for making
judgments of pictorial likeness at all. This issue of resemblance,
correspondence or ― in semiotic terminology ― iconicity has a
primary significance in Wittgenstein’s theory of language as it emerges in the Tractatus.
What has been called Wittgenstein’s
‘picture theory of language’ relies upon the interpretation that the world, the
thoughts that conceive it, the propositions that make claims about its nature
and the language in which these are expressed have the quality of ‘facticity’
since they exist in a correspondential relationship with each other.
Collectively, they constitute a picture of reality as such and, hence, provide
the basis of any sensical claim that may be made about it, where such claims
are also the subject-matter of logical analysis. But these qualities pertain
only to what the language can be used to say. Given that the theory is
pre-committed to the metaphorical value of
‘the picture’, this trope confers
the power to say how other things might be related in certain ways, but at the
cost of not being able to say anything about itself; ‘the picture’ ― or
more precisely, its metaphorical value ― is confined entirely to a
showing. Aware of the difficulties
caused in Frege’s and Russell’s logical systems by self-referential
propositions, Wittgenstein was led to make a distinction between saying (sagen)
and showing (zeigen):
What
expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of
language. Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display
it…. What can be shown, cannot be said. (Wittgenstein, 1997, 4.121 - 4.1212).
In the example of the picture, it is
apparent that what cannot be said but only shown is what is essential to the
theory: the metaphorical value of the picture, metaphoricity itself. Generally,
Wittgenstein held that what was essential to any proposition could only be
shown, never said. Hence, whatever is taken to be ‘the essence of mathematics’
cannot be propositionally expressed, but only shown performatively. This is why
a ‘theory of set theory’ can never say anything about set theory. Of course,
this would equally apply to the present writing: writing which proclaims that
its theme is ‘the being of language’ can say nothing about language, only show
it through its writing practices. That which exegesis can say nothing about
must be found unsayable and unsayability is the occasion for silence.
Wittgenstein construed this in the now well-known saying that “Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Wittgenstein, 1997, 6.55). But that
about which one can only be silent is that which the essential is. The thought
that only what is essential can be associated with what can only be silently
shown has implications for a re-conceptualization of the one, as will be shown.
The being of silence will also need
to be considered. Wittgenstein’s analysis emphasizes that silence is a
consequence of unsayability ― that what is shown cannot be said ―
but what also calls for recognition is that something must be said in
order for anything to be shown. Silent showing cannot occur without saying, so
the quality of the silence being considered is likely to be different from a
silence arising from the absence of any saying at all. It is simply that what
is said fails to capture what, in being said, it shows - and this is the work
of pure excess. Showing always exceeds the saying that gave rise to it, so what
was said always misses what it shows. Hence, the being of silence in silent
showing calls for a careful listening to the saying from which it arose.
Language as Saying-Showing: Heidegger
Although Heidegger’s own analysis of
language is of course written in prose form, its topic and resource is poetry.
In his consideration of Trakl’s poetry he is led to the conclusion that
The
poet’s statement remains unspoken. None of his individual poems, nor their
totality, says it all. Nonetheless, every poem speaks from the whole of the one
single statement, and in each instance, says that statement. From the site of
the statement there rises the wave that in each instance moves his Saying as
poetic saying. But that wave, far from leaving the site behind, in its rise
causes all the movement of Saying to flow back to its ever more hidden source”
(Heidegger, 1971a, 160).
For Heidegger, all of Trakl’s poems
point back to one poem which is never spoken; but poetic Saying is constantly
at work, as the language bends back into itself enriching the unspoken ‘poet’s
statement’. Furthermore, it is this one poem which is the meaning of all the
poems that are spoken. Heidegger locates the site of this one poem as apartness
(die Abgeschiedenheit).
In the poetry, Heidegger finds the
saying of the poet‘s need and determination to follow ‘something strange’. What
is strange is embodied as the stranger (Abgeschiedene):
through
the silvery night there rings the footfall of the stranger. (Trakl, G Summer’s
End, quoted by Heidegger 1971a, 165).
The stranger leads the poet away from
the well-trodden paths of ordinary conversation, of idle talk, towards the land
of evening (the occident, Abendland). Evening presages night. Night
metaphorizes both an end and a (new) beginning. The withdrawal of light which
marks the limit of day also precedes day. Night, and in Trakl’s poetry
particularly “blue night”, is the origin and end of everything that is.
In Heidegger’s estimation, Trakl’s
poetry engages silence in two ways. The silence of the one unspoken poem is
matched by a silence metaphorized as
night and towards which the poet’s path leads.
As in Wittgenstein’s account,
Heidegger seems to accept that what is spoken or written can never capture the
infinitude of language, even though language empowers saying and is instanced
in and by it. Equally, it is for this reason that language and silence can be
said to be one and the same. Therefore, for Heidegger, the only question to be
asked of a poem concerns its propinquity to its origin and end in the silence
of language and concerns, for this reason, the poet’s listening:
The
more poetic a poet is ― the freer (that is, the more open and ready for
the unforeseen) his saying ― the greater is the purity with which he
submits what he says to an ever more painstaking listening. (Heidegger, 1971a,
216)
Finally, it is the task of the
thinker who authors an exegesis to withdraw into what will become another
silence …. “the most difficult step of every exposition consists in vanishing
away altogether with its explanation in the fact of the pure existence of the
poem” (Heidegger, 1967, 234-5).
There is a difference of tone and
style, as well as evaluation, between the two interpretations of language and
silence. Whereas Wittgenstein’s own language reflects an epistemic tradition
grounded in logic and propositional analysis, Heidegger’s is responsive to a
classical and literary one. It is for this reason that Heidegger identifies
(poetic) saying as a grounding mode for human dwelling on earth (see particularly the essay Poetically Man
Dwells) inimical to its
definition as a source of disjuncture or
errancy, although these may be qualities consistent with a ‘technological‘ use
of language.
In Heidegger’s thought that the word
gives being to the thing, the work of language ― strikingly conceived in
saying ― is to cast an enlivening luminescence on ordinary things, so
that they appear in their explicitness and in their fullness. The task of
language here is to avoid a naming which would be fully satisfied by making the
thing disposable, or by designating it as a mode of equipment for human
use. Because the word cannot say the
thing in its specificity, the being of the thing is given as a gift through the
word’s power of showing and, since this is silent, human being is free to let
be the thing in its own mode of being. The showing constitutes the thing’s
appearance both as its semblance, outward aspect or ‘look’, and as its coming
into being.
The interpretation of language that
Heidegger develops in thinking about the relationship between saying and silent
showing belongs in a broader understanding in which thinking, language, human
being (Dasein) and being as such belong-together. Humans are the beings
for whom thinking makes being an issue, and this thinking is accomplished
through the saying and silent showing of language. The belonging-together which
occurs here is an event of mutual appropriation (Ereignis). Of course,
Heidegger’s injunction to listen cannot guarantee the authenticity of
what will be heard since what is shown will be unsayable: showing is not a
concrete or empirical matter which can be made accountable in terms of what is
shown.
Writing about Husserl, Derrida (1973)
has subjected the idea of the ‘silent phenomenological voice’ to a
deconstructive critique because, for him, it constitutes a mode of pure
auto-affection in which the self becomes idealized. The soundlessness of the
voice bestows an apparent transcendence since the absence of sound is a
manifestation of the voice’s interiority and hence the guarantor of
self-presence. Applied to Heidegger’s thought, this critique bolsters Derrida’s
sense that that thought constitutes a metaphysics of presence. But like
Heidegger, Derrida interprets the absence of sound as an injunction that
“(Here) we must listen” (Derrida, 1973, 74). What might be heard if one were to
listen closely to Heidegger’s own, and frequently criticized, silences is an
expression of the tragedy of Dasein.
The Language of Ontological Excess
The interpretation that human being,
thinking, language and being as such are mutually appropriated in a relationship
of belonging-together does not receive much succor from Badiou’s contention
that
If
poetry is an essential use of language, it is not because it is able to devote the latter to Presence;
on the contrary, it is because it trains language to the paradoxical function
of maintaining that which …. would otherwise fall back into the nullity of
place (Badiou, 2005, 192).
Presumably Badiou accepts that an
‘essential’ use of language is feasible, even if poetry fails to embody it, but
this suggests that language ― if not poetry ― can be the bearer of
essences. In circumstances where poetry might involve an encounter with
essence, however, a devotion to presence is not achievable: an essential use of
language always entails its ‘training’ so that language is commanded to bring
into the being of a recognizable place what, without it, would have fallen back
into nothingness, into the void. Hence, ‘essential language’ ― or it may
be preferable to think of ‘the essence of language’ ― performs the double
(and therefore paradoxical) work of both creating a place where its work is
done (one may wish to think of this work as the opening of a ‘clearing’ - die
Lichtung) and which, at the same moment, broaches the nothingness from
which it came and which borders it.
Badiou’s criticism seems to be that
poetry willfully encourages paradox, at least to the extent that it
‘trains’ language to produce it. This complaint would be a predictable
emanation of an account which sought to rationalize and manage the excesses of
language, and ― of course ― this is exactly what a training regimen
would wish to achieve. But, as has been suggested, excess can be experienced as
Dionysian vigor and fecundity, even though this may only be released in a
silent showing. Badiou’s own use of language (use by language) may be
experienced in just such a way: the uncovering of its inherent paradoxes opens
up an extraordinarily fruitful terrain. This is a landscape in which essential
and historically germinated ideas and processes spring into newly variegated
forms of life so that a reader is drawn into the language-field in unsurpassed
ways.
Exploring this terrain allows one to
understand, from its vantage points, how the ‘presentation of multiple being‘,
in its incoherency, is always already in language and hence coherent, not only
through the torsional activity of the future anterior but as an affect of language as a whole. This immersion has
already doubled presentation in the shadowplay of saying-showing, and this then
re-doubled into silence in the two senses of showing’s appearance.
If the import of Heidegger’s
statement that the word gives being to the thing is taken, then the excess
produced by this doubling, far from making being inaccessible, is its very
source.
Language is unavoidably
self-referential, even if the work of showing (what a language-user was never
able to say) is inevitably work for Other; so it is in language’s power of
bending-back that essences are silently shown. Wittgenstein’s insight that what
is essential (to any proposition) can only be shown attests to the gift of
being made by the word.
Excess, now realized in and as the
difference between what is shown and what is said, remains the site of
undecidability. Badiou’s contention that what undecidability shows is only that
a decision, nevertheless, must be made stands its ground. In the
understanding that undecidability, in the form of paradox, is a relational or
structural problem, it resides in the interplay of belonging and inclusion as
these are now re-focused in the saying-showing relationship. What is shown in
any saying belongs to it in the sense that only this saying could have
shown it; but what is shown is in excess of anything that was said, so is not a
part of it, is not included in it.
Badiou’s concern to put a name to the
void and to conceive of it as ‘the subtractive suture of being’ can also be
used to consider how saying-showing works. If the name of the void is the
nothing of inconsistent multiplicity in the domain of pure presentation then
words ― the unstructured, random multiplicity of words ― could be
said to be the bearer of sutured being in the gap between saying and showing
(although a stitchless suture, perhaps a furrow, would best image the
relationship). His characterization of the void (“scattered all over, nowhere
and everywhere: it is such that no encounter would authorize it to be held
presentable” (Badiou, 2005, 55)) can equally be applied to silent showing.
Expressed more directly, the absence of sound ― indeed of everything but
space ― marks the silence of the void, so that the void is silence
itself, and this reigns ‘nowhere and everywhere’ - in and as language qua
language, between saying and showing, in the revelatory qualities of showing
itself, in the space between words.
If these are the terms upon which the
relationship between the one and the many rests, upon which any rendition or
designation relies, but cannot speak, then the dominant metaphor of structure: situation,
state of the situation, metastructure, nominal ranking seems to carry a meaning far too rigid to reveal the play of transcendence and
reduction which reflects its movement.
In this sense, one may say
that Badiou’s writing gives silent voice to the possibility of untrammeled
journeys through its furrowed land, where one and many may be differently
experienced.
REFERENCES
Badiou, Alain, 2005.
Being and Event, London: Continuum University Press.
Bruns, Gerald L, 2006. On the Anarchy of Poetry and
Philosophy New York: Fordham
University Press.
Derrida, Jacques, 1973. Speech and Phenomena and
other essays on Husserl‘s theory of signs, Evanston: Northwestern
University Press.
Derrida, Jacques, 1981. The Double Session in Dissemination, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Foucault, Michel, 1994. The Order of Things, New York:
Vintage.
Heidegger, Martin, 1962. Being and Time Oxford:
Blackwell.
Heidegger, Martin, 1967. Remembrance
of the Poet in Existence and Being, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Heidegger, Martin, 1971a . Language in the Poem in On the Way to Language, New York:
Harper & Row.
Heidegger, Martin, 1971b. Poetically Man Dwells in Poetry, Language, Thought, New
York: HarperCollins.
Jager, Ronald., 1972. The Development of Bertrand Russell‘s
Philosophy, London: Allen & Unwin.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1964. Signs, Evanston: Northwestern
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Plato, 1961. Parmenides and other dialogues,
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Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1999. Logico Philosophicus
Tractatus, New York: Dover Publications.
Copyright © 2009
Minerva
All rights are reserved, but fair and good faith use with full
attribution may be made of this work for educational or scholarly purposes.
Robert Platt is
an adjunct professor at Roger Williams University, Bristol, Rhode Island, where
he teaches courses in Philosophy and in Sociology.
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