COURSE ON THE ABSOLUTE 1: INFINITY AND WRITING

School of A, as if.

In the final part of Immanence of Truths, Badiou introduces a certain notion of writing; he does so explicitly in the name of ‘Derrida’, a name not only often silenced but effectively suppressed in the body of Badiou’s mathematical trilogy. In fact, in a note attached to a later edition of Logics of Worlds, Badiou refers to ‘a very long period of semi-hostile distance and sundry incidents’ between the two thinkers and an attempt to ‘patch’ things up that took place just before Derrida’s death. The reference to Derrida in Immanence of Truths might be read in light of this comment. More than mere ‘patching’, what arrives late on is a written version of the absolute:

Kunen’s Theorem tells us: The absolute is forever, not without a theory but without a witness.

This can also be formulated as: there are absolute truths, in a precise sense, but there is no truth of the absolute. There is only—as Lacan would say—a saying [un dire] of it, always incomplete. Or, as Derrida would say, there is only a writing of it, always unpresented.

Whereas Badiou tends as if to spend a lifetime working on infinity and ontology (absolute formal ontology), here writing is introduced at a peak moment of belated formulation. In an act of closing in (on the absolute), Badiou is caught retranslating everything he has tried to complete thus far, into: writing and infinity. In other words, at the very moment of ‘approaching’ the absolute and saying how V cannot embed itself in V (i.e. there is a limit to the infinities), there is also a sudden naming of ‘Derrida’, after something like half a century of silence—and, crucially, the naming of something called ‘writing’.

As a general comment, we can observe a similar return of Derrida’s thinking if we re-read Of Grammatology and look out for the word ‘cybernetics’. The word appears there rarely but significantly enough to refresh and disturb any contemporary thinking of what we now often call without thinking ‘AI’. Derrida says that cybernetics can only be understood as writing (not, let us remark, as language); i.e. as a metaphysics, a metaphysics that will have tried to forget at least one thing. What we have forgotten, what we will forget to remember again, is this:

And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts—including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, gramme [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.

We might read this off as follows: ‘AI’ and ‘the absolute’ would be ‘forever’ subject to an older ‘technology’ called ‘writing’. This at least double fact is what we ‘endlessly’ refuse to read. It is part of what Badiou perhaps took too long to say. It is also what may be read, forever, right now, absolutely, perhaps, in the very minimal course on the absolute we will try to develop in fragments here.

The course will be posted as reading prompts or reading-knots. Not as a set of statements, but as a trail of perhaps lesser-known moments in the recentish history of reading and writing. To follow the course, simply read at will, chase up texts, or engage below in comments, where I will answer as I can when appropriate. Yrs, A.