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12:23

(In »Truth as an act – the road to the fourth singularity«)

Here Badiou has an important point: hermeneutics is the opium of the academic world. Against the cultural relativist curse of hermeneutics he pits mathematics as an opposite pole and as corrective: only through mathematics does he see contact with the real as possible; only through mathematics can Man think being. Badiou’s obsession with the possibilities of mathematics is a direct consequence of the fact that his master Jacques Lacan insists that language must be regarded as an ontological network that can only lie above, and thus both excludes and acts independently of, the real. Where language is based on an eternal stacking of vague abstractions, mathematics is instead concrete and exact. Not least thanks to its enormous accuracy within quantum physics, mathematics has proven its credibility in the role as a bearer of philosophical realism. Idea and flow are merged in mathematics; the difference between eternalism and mobilism is prised up, the vision of an eternalism that is more than just a temporary freezing in perception is realised, and a model-dependent realism becomes possible.