There's Alain Badiou, sitting all alone. We should go and talk to him, says W. You talk to him and I'll listen, I tell W. I want to hear W.'s French again, he knows that. He knows I think he becomes a better person when he reads French – kinder, gentler.
But why should Alain Badiou want to speak to us? He's a man of rigour and mathematical precision, of course. He's a man of politics, of real political commitment! And what are we?
Badiou has lived through things, experienced things, but we've experienced nothing. He is a man of exceptional rigour, of dispassionate mathematical thought, whereas we are men of exceptional vagueness, of pathos-filled would-be religious thought, which, in fact has nothing to do with religion, which has its own rigour, its own precision.
What would Alain Badiou make of us? What would he conclude? Enemies, he would think. No, not even enemies, he would think. Pas enemies. Les tosseurs. But perhaps he wouldn't think anything at all. He'd just look through us, he couldn't help but look through us, a man of mathematical rigour wouldn't find anything in us with which to engage. It would be as if, like evil for Plato, we didn't really exist.
For the mathematical philosopher, vagueness doesn't exist, not really; it's only a deficiency of precision. And pathos doesn't exist either, unless it is the glint of starlight, impersonal and remote, on the eyeglasses of the militant, brick in hand, facing the police.
Lars Iyer's Blog 