Badiou’s Conception of Truth: A Mathematical-ontological Perspective

Abstract

Alain Badiou, one of the most influential French philosophers, weaves together mathematics, subject, and truth, taking mathematical ontology as his point of departure to articulate a distinctive conception of truth within the postmodern intellectual landscape. Beginning from the category of contingency, he argues that within the dominion of the one, uncontrollable events erupt, and it is precisely at such sites that truth makes its advent. As the truth procedure unfolds in the wake of a contingent event, the individual—through fidelity to the event—becomes a constitutive element of this procedure and participates in shaping the new body of truth. Badiou inherits the materialist core of Marxism while, against the prevailing currents of pluralism and relativism, reaffirming the existence of truth.