On Logic and the Theory of Ensembles: Formalism and Alain Badiou’s Experience of Politics

Alain Badiou’s mathematical ontology is famously obscure and disavows any political stakes. This paper begins from the suspicion that for such an avowedly communist philosopher, the question of collectivity posed by set theory cannot be unrelated to the question of political collectives. I argue that Badiou’s turn to mathematics directly responds to what he diagnoses as two problems of representing political will: institutional dilution on the one hand and post-structural temporizing on the other. His formalism, by contrast, offers a language of political solidarity that in its immediacy refuses the interval between collective representation and collective action.