The Century

Philosophy's radical impotence when confronting the crimes, the macabre of the last century, and whatever we have in the present is well known as some forms of escape, those of vitalisms Deleuze, hauntologies/ Derrida and Zizek into various endless cognitive duets between Hegel-Lacan ad nausea.Badiou's ontology circumvents much the philosophy practiced,he made bouts, settled scores with Old Sartre and some ontologies around the term anti-philosophy, for which all the above aspire to, to practice within the gap, of infinity and finite representations, or some refer as the Freudian "unconscious", all have their own terms lexicons to describe this eternal GAP....(what we have now) .Whether this had produced some epistemological orientation is anyone's guess in that all have'' danced'', " have had ''love triangles'' with the Century's cultural products, the "jouissance" of Plays, cinema, literature, paintings and poetry.Badiou's system of Being/ Event/World, has a more calculated, un-impassioned premise..and is hard-wired for massive excursions and contemplations on the multiplicities of the century, the large cosmological expanses of infinity and time, of duration endured by the human creature, the others have all arduously tried as well to embrace infinity, Zizek with his tenuous superficial trots into the parallax and quantum decoherence.Badiou begins to ask what can we know of the last century?, and if anyone cares today with the impassioned Unicorns- tech singularities fast approaching control over how we think act, and create.... how can we wipe away the layers of filth, the horrific, the genocides and hypocrisy, the variegated feints of complexities of war and meltdowns, depressions controllable famines and conflicts... that lead where? We still would like to know.The century then was what Badiou simplifying was a "passion for the Real" this is how we must begin, what was possible,immediately, acts of desperation really.The century we learn made no promises; Goebbels once told the German, emaciated masses that. . . . . all remained was more suffering, work for the future ,the '' Nibelungen'' still need to inhabit the bowels of the earth before victory. Badiou solicits the ''aesthetics'' of the century as a guide. . . . . ..although he has his own concept of aesthetics, that of in-aesthetics; a vibrant safe well-trodden place for him (he has written Plays and poetry) in well analytics of literature. He does a deep analysis of single seminal works of Mandelstam, de Campos, Pessoa, Brecht (a play on Leninist Party-Building), Genet and Celan, all had something to vent, reflect on how the century unfolded; poetry recall can say anything, and Badiou loves this freedom, one of the last that capitalism has provided.. . . , But simple fragments on the real are far from the totalized tale, He even utilizes his algebraic thinking to adopt a "destructive/subtractive art has rendered, artist subtract themselves from the stream of the "destructive" of the Century and the realms, the registers that plagues humanity... Beckett is a seminal figure for Badiou,the "word-calcualtions" practiced in his Plays, as the "diamond-cut"almost silent music of Anton Webern, or we have Malevich's "White on White" from the Bolshevik period...;artists, all had conceptual limitations, that must be part and parcel of the algebra for contemplation herein.... on what they see, their visibility is sometimes quite poor and undeveloped..that must be a "negative'' within Badiou's calculus".Contexts,many times are subjected to mathematical formulations what is included within a situation is like what is included again in an algebraic formulation, or problem..., this is the substance of Badiou's great edifice.... the situations in which they had lived are like materials, items, intensities, in a Set Theory formulation, the time they inhabited is accounted for with some operative, a Hermitian (A-plus-A-minus), or La Grange theory of orbital spaces....Badiou has his own lexicon for how he applies his thought, his edifice......we fall then into confusions, impasses, into quagmires of darkness-es for this is the negative side of the problem positive/negative.. . . .. The "beasts" then were unleashed in the 20th Century with no reconciliations, and no way forward except to perhaps save capitalism from great cycles of depressions, stagflation, meltdowns, and pandemics,(( It's curious that all the billions-$$ spent on Doomsday algorithms, that there was not one single one for the current Covid-19 Pandemic....)).We wonder then what we have learned from the last Century, in that we face yet another darkness the one just mentioned, the unknowns of this, the reality re-done, re-altered in ways we can only predict, words then like austerity, lockdowns, bailouts, crushing debts, unemployment;bankruptcies, all now take on differing contexts. Badiou does not provide a context to see where we have been with current reality, much like the "stalker" a metaphor he utilizes to describe the last century(also recalls Tarkovski's brilliant film of the same name, where Truth remains unattainable in the ZONE, the forbidden place. So whether we are not concerned or concerned with the evaluations of Truths remains an open question, for we are inside the "belly of the Beast", Badiou's brilliant attempts at clarifications, circumventions of philosophy's eternal quagmires, impasses is admirable....He offers, transmissions, formalizations of what he refers to as World, Being, and Event.Access to the real, and its passions are form an access to its multiplicities..., these remains to be deciphered by humanity and are only secured through set theory-like forms, through algebraic designs of time and hopefully space where humanity resides..He says the Century was one of Univocity, universality without remainders, there a "formulation" ready for a+b=y+z=2-5; his ultimate question/ that can we still think of the last century at all is a path forward, or has its dramas, cultural products and forms, its poetry receded into a mire of the inconsequential, for we have distributions and circulations of wealth to attend to in the time we live right now. Yet is this enough? For a century is like an infinity?

Osirus is a black god.