Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

THE SECOND ATOMISM: "ATOMISM-OF-STATES": finally, a thinker who is not afraid to take on Wittgenstein as facing the problem of "Being". This is basically a 100 page essay by Badiou on the philosophy of Wittgenstein; taken from the perspective of post-modern thought. Is that possible? "Yes"; and in a remarkable way.what the reader should be aware of is the fact that normally, in post-modern thought, we do not deal with language until very late in the presentation. A great deal of time is spent up front in the "unconscious" and in areas of deconstruction. After "positing" enters the presentation, language gets its fair treatment. So what happens to Wittgenstein? Actually, if we approach him at the very basic level of "being", we will gain tremendous insight that previously had been overlooked because of all the emphasis on "language".Badiou tells us that the "elementary-proposition" is actually the designation for what post-moderns call"writing"; or composing the outline of the ordering of all "singularities- of- meaning" in a situation. It is better to call this the "elementary-proposition-picture". And , this will depict the "state-of-affairs" of meaning that exists as a "possibility" for the situation to become a meaningful "event". All "state-of-affairs" pictures of meaning exist as independent from each other. They are atomic singularities of their own that could make up a larger model. This badiou calls the "2nd atomism"; which tells us we need to re-think the whole "atomic" and "molecular" issue.I have approached Wittgenstein this way for years; so I was glad to get the additional validation.5 stars for the best presentation of Wittgenstein you will ever find.

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I love what is actually written by Badiou, but why, in a book that is 180 pages, is the introduction (not written by Badiou) 66 of those pages? Badiou is pretty straightforward, so I'm not sure the reader needed an intro by the translator that takes up half the book. Just a thought. Otherwise, great.

Badiou at his polemical best. One example of a laugh-out-loud line: "Who does not experience, merely upon hearing the words “transcendental,” “actuality,” “noumenon” or “objet petit a,” the paradoxical feeling of a promise of absolute rigor combined with that delightfully contradictory one of an unfathomable profundity?"

verrry heavy and hard to readI found it

A good half of this book is not Badiou on Wittgenstein but Bosteels on Badiou on Wittgenstein. And it's a good thing too! Bosteels' introduction is a much needed background piece to Badiou's short text. Still this is a book for at least those who are familiar with Wittgenstein - best to have also read Monk on Wittgenstein as well, and Nietzsche. We get great lines like this: "The main subterfuge that philosophers use in order thus to obtain the illusion of objectivity is the reliance on a metalanguage." (Exactly.) What a great quote from the translator who I suspect would know this best. Fully a third of the book is the introduction. How much of Badiou auf English is Badiou a la Francais? Ne znayu. Sorry but I can only think of the English translation of Eco's "Esperienze di traduzione" which is too funny. But "Ne devient pas fou qui veut." - "Not just anyone can go mad who wants to." But we swim in Badiou's thoughts immersed in a sea of Wittgenstein and Nietzsche - and Lacan - and who else? This is wonderful philosophy - or antiphilosophy if you like. Fun with metalanguage. Reading this book is a very nice way to spend the evening if you are familiar with the material.

Alain Bidiou is one of the most innovative and thought-provoking philosophers alive today. He ranks with other living philosophers such as Slavoj Zizek and Simon Critchley. While Bidiou and his colleagues are living, contemporary philosophers, and because of this quality write with flourish, in a lively, sometimes flamboyant, other times exaggerated style, and concern themselves in contemporary issues, many times focusing on politics, the issues which principally concern them are as old as the dawn of Western Philosophy.So is it with the topic of this book. Bidiou takes aim at the most quintessential of all Twentieth Century philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, exposes the essential features of his philosophy, and brings the tension between Wittgenstein's linguistic analysis and Bidiou's own philosophy squarely in the same league with Plato vs. the Sophists.The essential characteristic of Wittgenstein's philosophy is not philosophy at all, but Anti-Philosophy. According to Bidiou, the characteristics of anti-philosophy are the following:1. Any inquiry of truth, the absolute, is rejected and is reduced to a linguistic, logical and/or genealogical analysis of language and/or statements of philosophy;2. All philosophical values are purged.3. The antiphilosopher lives life as an "existential singularity," isolated, either personally or by society, frequently misogynistic and/or anti-social4. The wholesale rejection of traditional philosophical pursuits in logic and mathematics (Nietzsche once famously said that logic is a course of study having no relation to the world as we know it).These characteristics were manifested in the core of Wittgenstein's thought, primarily from the Tractatus:1. That most if not all of philosophical discourse was "nonsensical."2. That philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.3. The personal struggles Wittgenstein during his life to accept his sexual identity.4. Wittgenstein too rejected logic and mathematics, as he did to philosophic discourse, stating that |"mathematics is logical method" but "logic was not a body of doctrine."Bidiou describes how Wittgenstein began as a fully fledged anti-philosopher, but once he arrived at the Philosophical Investigations stage, he states that Wittgenstein simply became a sophist. What could be a more familiar struggle? (Read: Plato and Socrates vs the Sophists).Anti-philosophy is not a new concept, and not an inconsequential one. Bidiou remarks that Heraclitus could have been the first anti-philosopher. And it appears unique enough that there is not an article about it in Wikipedia. The tensions between Anti-philosophy and traditional inquiries of philosophy cannot be more acute, and is as old as when humans first began to make sense of their world. Bidiou offers glimpses of his own interpretation of the pursuit, or rather, the duty to pursue the truth, which Bidiou discusses in the contexts of Wittgenstein's own examination of the Subject, which for him was unknowable. This too revisits familiar ground; but while in the past philosophers and mystics would accept the Unknowable as Transcendent Existence, Wittgenstein just leaves it alone and examines it no further.On the whole this is lively reading, fairly clearly presented, on an interesting subject. This book should be read in conjunction with another book by Boris Groys, Introduction to Anti-Philosophy, where the lives of prominent modern anti-philosophers, such Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others are discussed.