the question of history

There are quite a few points in Badiou’s thinking that are ambiguous
mainly because they are under-theorized—although this may sound
strange, given the theoretical richness of his thinking. The most
significant among them is the question of history which basically deals
with the relations holding between the elements of a situation. As a
kind of ‘ vanishing mediator’ between Badiou’s ontology and meta-
ontology, it is present yet hidden. One can almost sense its presence
behind the ‘and’ in the very title of Being and Event for there can be
no better ‘ontological definition’ of history than ‘the being of event’!
Badiou says that every ontology is a ‘local situation’ and so it has to
deal not just with ‘pure being’ but also with ‘being-in’. It is clear
That mathematics can not analyze ‘the place of being’ and it is this
very notion that remains un-theorized ( at least up to now, those parts
of next book that I’ve read in Theoretical Writings are still too abstract
and un-historical, despite the fact that history is the substance of
what he calls ‘the logic of appearance’. According to Badiou every
event belongs to a situation, and this means: 1) event is not a miracle,
2) as an element of the situation it is also ‘a multiple being’, and 3) it
can not be presented through the ontological-mathematical operation
of count-as-one. So everything is clear and ready for the introduction
of ‘truth’, ‘subject’, ‘faithfulness to event’, and… But let us ask a
naïve question and see how this consistent, neat, and rational thinking
suddenly becomes useless if not non-sensical. And the question is :
what are we Iranians to do with our 3000 years of ‘event-less’ history?
we can not even redeem its failures by appealing to the messianic
thought of Benjamin, simply because there are no records of its
disasters, revolutions, or even victims. So what can those among us
do who passionately want to turn from ‘mere animals’ into ‘immortal
subjects of truth’, can they become or remain faithful to unknown
events? Reflecting on this question and the somewhat more general
topic of the possibility of ‘eventless’, ‘subjectless’, and ‘truthless’
situations is a suitable introduction to the problem of history’s
absence from Badiou’s Saint Paul and all the limitations imposed
by it on this rare and extremely thoughtful book.