Covering Part 6 of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event on “The Impasse of Ontology,” Alex and Andrew discuss Badiou’s critique of the discernible and constructible as foreclosures of the event.

Guest Calvin Warren thinks the catastrophe through the post-metaphysics of anti-math and the problem of the one. Warren is a professor of African American Studies at Emory University. His research interests include Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Black Philosophy, Afro-pessimism, and theology. He is the author of Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Duke University Press).

Concepts related to The Impasse of Ontology

The Cantor-Gödel-Cohen-Easton Symptom, Events as Decisions, James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State, The Impasse of Ordinality/Cardinality Set/Number Situation/State and Belonging/Inclusion, Errancy and the Immeasurable, Cardinality, Diagonalization and Cantor/Continuum Hypothesis, Kurt Gödel and Paul Cohen, Jacques Lacan and the Impasse of Formalization, The Power Set and the Size of the State, The Subject and the Abyss, Critiques of Leibniz’s Discernible and Constructible Worlds (and Analytic Philosophy’s Symbolic Thought), Rousseau’s General and Undifferentiated  Being of Truth (and Paul Cohen’s Absolutization of Errancy), and all Classic Metaphysics that includes Communist Eschatology (and Large Cardinals, the Virtual Being of Theology, and Transcendence).

Interview with Calvin Warren

Qui Parle on The Catastrophe, Ontological Terror, Alain Badiou and the One as Anti-Black, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Pure Form as Pure Violence, Black aesthetics, Katherine McKittrick, The Ledger as Both the Inclusion of Black Death and the Concealment of Black Life, Catastrophe, Abyss, Nihilism, Nothingness, Pessimism, Post-Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon and the Zone of Non-Being, Subtraction, Aesthetics, Romanticism, Afrofuturism

Links

Warren profile, https://aas.emory.edu/people/bios/warren-calvin.html

Warren papers, https://emory.academia.edu/calvinwarren

Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation, https://www.dukeupress.edu/ontological-terror

Warren, "The Catastrophe: Black Feminist Poethics, (Anti)form, and Mathematical Nihilism," https://muse.jhu.edu/article/749148/pdf