Felix Guattari's process of chaosmosis (from Joyce's chaosmos) describes eternal flux of contraction/expansion. Badiou's ontological development of Cantor's set theory provides another glimpse of an old esoteric cosmology of this nature. A set is a contraction from the infinite. One could say that the real is too full for us (as limited sets) or any other set to grasp and if experienced this fullness would only appear to be meaningless or mad chaos from the point of view (or perspective) of our set.
I believe that the continuum hypothesis is an attempt to grasp the real as one-all which Badiou describes of Deleuze. This position requires something similar to what Christians call faith. In moving from our limited set to the real, one must posit it. It cannot be proved or empirically experienced without a danger of dissolution - horror, fear, madness - as was the case for Cantor, Hegel, Descartes, Einstein, and others who at a certain point instituted a new theory to stop up the void. What I mean by void is but another name for the fullness of the real from another angle. Void for Badiou is the inbetween sets which alone are contracted logoi. What is always outside/inbetween sets could be experienced as void or one-all depending on your perspective. Badiou-Bataille and Deleuze-Guattari take different angles but essentially are on the same track even if the understanding of how fullness and emptiness are the same is one of the final impossible experiences.
Deleuze assumes the one-all and the continuum like a priest of faith.
But similarly Nietzsche and Artaud become the one-all by leaping beyond the closure of the ego-set. Their experience should be celebrated and followed not feared and vilified. The closure of our current set contracts our logos into stifling stagnation suffocating what we are capable of, squeezing us into neurotic decay.
Badiou and Lacan construct political and psychoanalytic practices of resolving this stagnation, whereas Deleuze (and in the end Bataille too) sing how we are already there for "ecstasy scarcely differs from any other state."
Posted by scott at April 23, 2004 01:00 PM | TrackBack