Limited, Inc.

It’s a sad day at Limited, Inc. All the staff left early today: boss is out of town. None of them, though, left to get an early start to reveries for St. Patrick; no, theirs are somber drinks tonight: Lil’ Kim was convicted of perjury. In lieu of an introduction, I will jump to the conclusion: “For a long time, the chapter I have just written was at the tip of my pen, but I kept rejecting it. I had promised myself that in this book I would display only the cheerful aspect of my soul; but this plan slipped out of my hands, like so many others: I hope that the sensitive reader will forgive me for having asked a few tears of him; and if anyone finds that in all truth I should have cut this chapter, he can tear it out of his copy, or even throw the book on the fire.” Xavier de Maistre – A Journey Around My Room This is not LI. This is odd. If R. is to LI what Johnny Carson was to The Tonight Show, then….. I am, as a guest host, seated behind the familiar desk…. who? John Davidson? Joey Bis

Badiou (the end, temporarily) LI is going to pick up the thread of the Badiou posts next week. Since we are taking a vacation, our friend, T., has agreed to put together a few LI posts. This should shake up this site, which suffers a bit from the arteriosclerosis of our egotism. Okay, a few more notes. The sensible is transformed into the Event of the Idea in Art. So it stands written. One wants to know: 1. What is the function of the sensible, here? Here, surely, we have wandered into the very traditional categories of aesthetics, in which one way of working with the sensible – say, measuring the sensation of sound – is taken to be science, while another way of working with it – say, creating an opera with those sounds – is taken to be art. The difference is not, however, in the measuring, surely – in the techniques. Mozart has to measure sound to achieve his goal as surely as an audiologist has to measure his sound to achieve his goal. And then there is the problem of those forms of

Events "Thesis 3: The truth of which art is the process is always the truth of the sensible qua sensible. Which means: transformation of the sensible into the event of the Idea." - Badiou We don’t have much time today. So: a few notes about events. Which, in a later post, we will tie in with Badiou. … LI has an idea about a certain dissatisfaction we feel with analytic philosophy. Here’s the problem: In Physics, it is true that what Wenger famously called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences has been borne out by the success of physics. That success – the applicability of mathematics, it turns out, to not only describe relations in nature, but to describe it in such a way that it can be built upon and can make predictions possible. Mathematics is different, in that sense, from any other instrument we know of – it is like a human tracker, it seems to have an intuition for its prey. It was natural, back in the days when logicians were keen abo

LI urges readers to go to the article about Arthur Ransome in the Guardian. Ransome is in the heroic line of English children’s book authors – but he is rather unknown in the United States. More interesting, from the American point of view, is that he saw the heroic core of the October Revolution and helped the Bolsheviks out in their wholly just war against the White Reactionaries. Applause all around. He also – being a son of the British governing class – informed the British secret service of what he was doing. Well, you can only stretch your character so far… In a comment on a recent post, LI’s perpetual friend and foil, Mr. Craddick, asked our opinion of the Soviet Union’s level of barbarity. We cheerfully gave it – nobody should ever diminish the evil of the Gulag. However, there is another side to our opinion of the Soviets. That side is that the world does not need superpowers. It does not need leadership. And the U.S., while not a particularly bad country – in fact, a very

LI received a letter from a friend yesterday. We’d asked what he thought about the Badiou posts, and he said he’d comment after he knew where we were going. Where are we going? As we said before, the thing that concerns us here is what Badiou could mean, as a philosopher, by claiming that there are four independent domains that generate different truth procedures. These domains are: science, politics, art, and love. Now, whether or not one thinks that science is defined by its truth procedures, it is easy to figure out what that claim would mean. Whether you take truth to be correspondence to an object – hence, the fight over whether realism, which claims the objects of science are real, or anti-realism, which claims that they are somehow artifices – or whether you take truth to be correspondence – thus, the debate over whether science consolidates its ‘discoveries” in such a way that coherence with previous discoveries and theories is preserved, or whether it proceeds by discontinuous