213
* CUNY Graduate Center
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLI | Number 1 | 2020 | 213–248 | doi: 10.3986/FV.41.1.09
Ekin Erkan*
For a Rationalist Politics of the Event: 
Zermelo–Fraenkel Set Theory and Structuring 
the Multiple
Introduction to Badiou’s Universalist Politics and the Axiomatic 
Method
The first version of Migrants and Militants was presented as a lecture given at 
the Maison de la Poésie in Paris on December 12, 2018. Nonetheless, the text, 
given its survey of migrants and neoliberal capitalism, reads as a perfectly sit-
uated critique given the contemporary political climate that we are currently 
imbricated in. Just in the United States, Black Lives Matter protests continue 
to vehemently challenge unbridled police violence while nascent authoritarian 
leaders (e.g., Donald Trump, Victor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Jair Bolson-
aro) attempt to stymie any structural economic agenda, automatic stabilizers, 
or universal single-payer healthcare program that would counter the effects of 
COVID-19 while, simultaneously, relieving corporations of any financial pres -
sure. While Badiou’s intervention is at the level of a rather specific issue—migra-
tion and ethics—the text is galvanized by a more general critique of globalized 
neoliberal capitalism. Historically situated, Badiou’s project is unique insofar as 
he attempts to demonstrate that many of the putative “trends” associated with 
contemporary neoliberalism (e.g., globalization) have haunted the logic(s) of 
capital and capitalism since its inception.
This text and its philosophical current follow a general interest that Badiou, 
since Being and Event, has concerned himself with, including problems of rep-
resentation, the relation between natural language and being, as well as the 
relation between natural-scientific languages and mathematical formalization. 
That is, despite neither the problem of “being” nor the traditional parlance that 
accompanies it directly transpires in the pages of Migrants and Militants, Badi-
ou’s historically-moored project and its universalist formula follow from a great-
er interest in mathematics as coordinated movement “coextensive with being”.
1
 
1
 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. by Oliver Feltham, Continuum, New York 2006, p. 48. 

214
ekin erkan
For, just as set-theoretical ontology is indifferent to the distinction between 
thinking and being insofar as everything is in its being is a “pure multiple,” for 
Badiou the topological ordering of worlds indicates that the coordination be-
tween being and appearing no longer depends on epistemological operation(s). 
In flattening epistemological problems to the coordination between different 
formal domains, mathematics traces the coordinated “movement of thought, 
coextensive with being,” such that saying “mathematics thinks means in par-
ticular that it regards the distinction between a knowing subject and a known 
object as devoid of pertinence”.
2
 In turn, Badiou produces an ontological sepa-
ration of the event from being. Following Plato, for Badiou mathematics demon-
strates the distinction between a knowing Subject and known object as having no 
permanence; the regulated movement of thought is coextensive with the being 
that it embodies, such that discovery and invention are indiscernible from the 
idea and its ideatum. 
This means that every thought initiates decisions from the standpoint of the un-
decidable of non-deducible inference. Badiou’s political writings are no excep-
tion, as they are, in similar fashion, mathematically tethered. Badiou’s commu-
nist program begins with indecision and prompt us into a philosophy of action. 
This will not only become particularly pellucid when we consider his critique of 
Derrida’s Of Hospitality but also when we examine how Migrants and Militants 
operates at the level of style: that is, this little book, like so many of Badiou’s 
politically exigent texts, is programmatic, written as a manifesto. In turn, the 
text is rather short, accessible, and meant to galvanize what Badiou often terms 
a “new Communism” of universalist stripe.
3
 
Subjectivity and The Event
Science can be bifurcated into so-called “natural” science (physics, chemistry, 
biology, and other such science founded upon experiment) and “mathematical” 
science (those areas of pure mathematics, formal logic, and computer science 
that are independent of experiment). For Badiou, mathematics is not merely 
tethered to mathematics objects—mathematics is equally concerned with (pri-
2
 Ibid.
3
 Thus it should serve as no surprise that, contra academic convention, Badiou does not 
hesitate to liberally quote Marx’s Communist Manifesto. 

215
for a rationalist politics of the event
mal) structure. Badiou here recalls Hegel, for whom logic is natural, our spoken 
languages containing normative force with substantives and predicates express-
ing the self-reflexive and dialectical nature of thought; more recently, thinkers 
like Graham Priest have also made the case that we should consider terms like 
'being' and 'nothingness' as substantives rather than quantifiers, therein treat-
ing. Thus, Badiou espouses the position that mathematics is neither excluded 
from metaphysics nor from ontology but, instead, is a crucial component of the 
architecture of the structure of reality.
Badiou’s systematically developed meta-ontological narrative identifies ontol-
ogy with the theory of inconsistent multiplicity, and the latter in turn with Zer-
melo-Fraenkel axiomatized set-theory. In relation to the ontological order of the 
pure multiple and the objective order of presentation, becoming or subjectiva-
tion emerge as interruptions of the stability and stasis of the ontological order. 
This implies the process which Badiou names an “event,” and which initiates 
a creative process of construction, or “truth-procedure(s).” For Badiou, “Truth 
Events” manifest in ordinary situations or “worlds” across four domains of 
thinking and practice, functioning as the “conditions” which philosophy aims 
to think together, relative to its historical moment: science, art, politics, and love. 
Within each of these four domains, truth is an exception to knowledge or rep-
resentation, in the sense that truth disrupts the objective distribution of “bodies 
and languages” through which one discerns coherent parts within a situation or 
“world.” In Badiou’s most recent texts, the Truth Event signals the emergence 
of a “strong singularity,” making the “inexistent,” or nil-intensity, of a world 
appear with maximal intensity. According to William Watkin, the program of 
Badiou’s post-Marxist politics is to delineate that which separates us from our 
age, our present, our real. Badiou, vis-à-vis offers category theory, identifies the 
greater logic of appearance in worlds, or the “order of representation”, with an 
indication of the failure of images to capture that which they purport to index, 
our present. The subsequent question then becomes one concerning the inten-
sity of relational identity, as category theory strips power of its univocal promi-
nence by allowing us to stage the evental response.
4
 
4
 Alain Badiou, The Pornographic Age, trans. A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens, Bloomsbury 
Press, London and New York 2019, p. 108. 

216
ekin erkan
In his prudent monograph, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, Badiou draws our 
attention towards the (logical) “form of the act”.
5
 Setting the stage via Wittgen-
stein’s understanding that neither philosophy nor science can explain the act, 
Badiou queries if we can even have such a “logic of the act”? Turning to psy-
choanalysis and mathematics, Badiou identifies the Truth Event with an abrupt 
interruption that involves an axiomatic declaration of the occurrence of the im-
possible. The “act” in question, empowered by its endorsement of impossibility, 
inaugurates an evental break: the becoming of the subject of materializes vis-à-
vis historical construction. Thus the Badiouian Event, as a making-archaic, ex-
acts a rupture in the now-bygone mode of looking at all past events and, accord-
ingly, the past writ large—this act is an evental interruption of truth qua truth. 
Nonetheless, the Event is not true or false as a proposition’s truth-value is true or 
false. Rather, there can, indeed, be a false Event, something that presents itself 
as a truth but, in the end, merely reinstates classical ways of being and power 
hierarchies (as has been the case with many historical attempts at revolutionary 
political change, for instance). The false Event is, in the last instance, no Event 
at all but merely a “reactive formation, a way of betraying the modernist break, 
of re-integrating its achievement into the dominant field”.
6
 Thus, Slavoj Žiźek, 
recalling Schoenberg’s atonal revolution—after which all tonal music would 
lose its innocence, relegated to the crevices of nostalgia—underscores how the 
Event must radically change meaning and, therefore, function as a negation, 
mediating all that precedes it. After such an Evental breakage, “one simply can-
not return to the past, or go on as if nothing happened—even if one does, the 
same practice will have acquired a radically changed meaning”.
7
 
The criterion between a true or false Event is not contingent upon a verification 
feature but with a breakage in the order of sense. While propositional truth-val-
ue deals with empirical observation, “[s]ense, on the other hand, rooted in the 
substantial eternity of possible-multiples, of combinations of objects, is reada-
ble in the very structure of the proposition, in the immediate fact that we under-
stand it independently of all external verification”.
8
 How does this relate to Zer-
5
 Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels, Verso, New York 2008, 
p. 79. 
6
 Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Verso, 
New York 2012, p. 190. 
7
 Ibid., p. 145.
8
 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, p. 106. 

217
for a rationalist politics of the event
melo-Fraenkel systematization? Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory’s axioms assert an 
exclusive foundation, grounding the existence of an empty set where operations 
(e.g., the subset axiom, the power set axiom, the axiom of infinity) allow for the 
generation of an entire numerical universe. Critically, Zermelo-Fraenkel’s axi-
oms preclude the existence of sets that belong to themselves, thereby avoiding 
Russell’s paradox. As Peter Hallward remarks, “axiomatized, set theory as such 
refers to nothing outside its own internal and purely abstract consistency; its 
subsequent, and perfectly legitimate, application to other (physical) domains 
is not itself considered properly mathematical at all…. One consequence is the 
suspension of claims to truth and reality in the familiar sense”.
9
 As a formali-
zation of possibility, Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory diagrammatizes interruption 
qua mediation, a tabula rasa upon which Truth Events can be coded and recod-
ed like a palimpsest. Illuminating Badiou’s theory of change vis-à-vis politics, 
there are but incommensurate historical moments that have no directionality. 
The “illegal” Event—to borrow Badiou’s parlance—is, in turn, a self-belonging 
multiplicity that decries any progressive/teleological character or historicist 
justification. To do so would be to merely trade in that which Žižek terms “mo-
bilism,” “the motif of the fluidification or historical relativization of all forms 
of life”.
10
 Rather, Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, as a transcendental logical ar-
chitecture, maps historical thought proper to the constellation of being. These 
Events do not occur within the the causal order of the empirical world but the 
actual world, which contains infinite sets of every possible combination within 
it—that is, the real existence of absolute possibility. Nonetheless, much of these 
possibilities that are contained by absolute necessity remain inaccessible to the 
world-itself; possibility, for Badiou, requires the process of emergence vide dia-
lectics in order to become fully present in actuality. Thus, in Hegelian fashion, 
Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory avoids the problems of modal indeterminacy by 
unspooling a one-world modal theory.
11
 This concept of possibility inherently 
9
 Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 
2003, p. 73.
10
 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, p. 145.
11
 According to Hegel and as evidenced by the Actuality chapter of the Logic, there is but 
one world, which contains infinite varieties of other world-like composites which are not 
exterior worlds transcending the actual world but, instead, layered and immanent part(s) 
of the constitution of actuality. That which modal theorists may term “alternative possible 
worlds” are, for Hegel, embedded in the determinate content of this world—the actual 
world contains infinite sets of every possible combination within it—the real existence of 
absolute possibility.

218
ekin erkan
contains negativity: what is possible both can be and cannot be. Contra those 
who insist upon potentiality as a primary and immanent concept, possibility for 
Badiou’s Truth Event is not freighted by connotation(s) of power, capacity, real 
determinateness, and teleological design. Rather, possibility refers to formal as-
pects of modality.
The difference between the being of the pure multiple, the objectivity of con-
sistent multiplicity (i.e., “ordinary situations”), and the subjective disruption of 
the “Truth Event” (“evental situations,” “strong singularities”) forms the basic 
conceptual triad that organizes Badiou’s philosophical system. This is initiated 
in his estimation of a “third phase” in the history of dialectics, following the 
completion of its first two defining moments with Plato and Hegel. In his 2016 
article, “Affirmative Dialectics,” Badiou writes that:
The fundamental problem in the philosophical field today is to find something 
like a new logic. We cannot begin by some considerations about politics, life, 
creation or action. We must first describe a new logic, or more precisely, a new 
dialectics. This is the way of Plato, but after all, it is also the way Karl Marx pro-
posed. The work of Marx is not first a new historical vision, a new theory of class 
struggle, and so on, but from its very beginning a new general logic in the wake 
of Hegelian dialectics. Marx was perhaps the first, maybe after Plato, to create an 
explicit relation between revolutionary politics and a new dialectical framework. 
We have the same problem today. To be sure, we have to rectify something after 
two centuries of successes and failures in revolutionary politics, and, in particu-
lar, after the failure of the State-form of socialism. But we also have to find a new 
logic, a new philosophical proposition adequate to all forms or creative novelty. 
Thus the question of dialectical and of non-dialectical relations is a pressing dif-
ficulty. If you want, our problem is the problem of negativity.
12
 
This new “logic” ought not to be understood vide a deductive order or calcu-
lus but as the rational articulation of being and appearing in relation to the 
constitution of a subject. We cannot begin with considerations about politics, 
life, creation, or action. Similarly, we cannot search for some beginning of phi-
losophy via history. For Badiou, this “new logic” must accompany “a new way 
12
 Alain Badiou, “ Affirmative Dialectics: from Logic to Anthropology”, The International Jour-
nal of Badiou Studies 2 (1/2016), p. 1. 

219
for a rationalist politics of the event
of thinking” and, consequently, “a new definition of philosophy itself”—i.e., a 
“new dialectics” where the affirmation, or the positive proposition, comes be-
fore the negation instead of after it.
13
 In forging the conditions for this “new way 
of thinking” which would imply a recommencement of philosophy, and against 
the idealist dialectic, Badiou rejects the reduction of subjective becoming to the 
movement of “radical negativity” as in Hegel. Insofar as the Truth Event occurs 
precisely against the rational regulation of the axiomatic-ontological order, the 
concrete negation of the ontological and objective orders involves an affirma-
tive act that grounds it. For Badiou, philosophical recognition is an “affirmative 
act” that conditions the constitution of the “subject of truth” and requires an 
inaugural “meta-ontological decision” by virtue of which philosophy historical-
ly intervenes in the arcana of the One and the multiple. This affirmative act, the 
“decision,” is of pure multiplicity. As this relates to the migrants and the varie-
gated ethnic groups that Badiou mentions in Migrants and Militants, this means 
that we ought not eliminate difference and strive for an ideal but, instead, affirm 
difference by way of a mediating principle that draw as forth the non-being of 
the One and the being of the pure multiple. For Badiou, this will transpire via a 
pure politics of universalism, which precedes and conditions difference.
For Badiou, “[s]ubjective induction knows the sources of the compatibility be-
tween the elements of a body, and thus of its practical cohesion”.
14
 The relation-
ship between an element and the evental trace is directly linked to questions of 
imputed consistency. Thus, following Mao, Badiou extols a doctrine of “perma-
nent discussion, assemblies, [and] ‘political education,’” with particular inter-
est in future efforts of a conjoined “working class and … peasantry”.
15
 Within 
any polis, cohesion depends of the making of a “new present” that is subjec-
tivated to the point of attaining its immanent eternity; only by breaking forth 
from the body of cohesion can an entirely new and singular idea of politics and 
revolution evolve that distributes a transcendental political intensity.
For Badiou, subjectivity grounds his Marxist prescription and its universalist 
aim seeks to move beyond the conception of politics as activism, which is, ac-
13
 Ibid.
14
 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Albert Toscano, Continuum, 
New York 2008, p. 497. 
15
 Ibid.

220
ekin erkan
cording to Badiou, carried by the transitory objectivity of a movement. While 
the sequences of such a universalist subjectivity may not wield the teleological 
goal of illuminating pure objective reality, Badiou’s politics serve a much milder 
goal: truth as what occurs in history via subtraction. In Migrants and Militants, 
as with his earlier political texts, Badiou seeks to remedy what he sees as the 
mistakes of dogmatism (especially the dogmatisms of 1968 and movements 
such as the Maoists of the Gauche prolétarienne), with Badiou’s post-Maoist 
work instrumentalizing the equipollence between mathematics and the onto-
logical situation. For Badiou, ontology is what is sayable of being—i.e., what can 
be articulated without reference to qualities—and philosophy has meaning for 
politics because it does not arise from its own capacities but from the capacities 
of thought in its heterogeneous instances of production and subjectivation.
16
For Badiou, problems of being deals with the inconsistencies underlying all 
“consistent” situations proper to artistic, political, or amorous worlds. But what 
criteria establish that a given mathematical, or in this case universalist, theory 
actually captures the “being of ordinary situations,” other than by analogically 
mapping formulae, axioms, and theorems into a conceptual program of descrip-
tions and explanations? Since Badiou adamantly rejects the Pythagorean thesis 
according to which mathematical idealities constitute the world as such, it fol-
lows that set-theory is the “presentation of presentation” just to the extent that 
it is said to re-present something like the general form of all ordinary presenta-
tions in the world(s). This is to say that the consistent presentation of the being 
of beings, ontology, can be nothing other than the re-presentation of the general 
form proper to all non-ontological situations. For if set-theoretical mathemat-
ics is more than just an abstract axiomatized order and inherently ontological 
in scope, it is because it is the unique situation that—grounding itself in the 
void—thinks the irreducible, latent “inconsistency” which subtends the struc-
tural consistency in all ordinary “presentations.” Conceptually speaking, Badi-
ou’s set-theoretical method of universality lays forth the invariant structures of 
inconsistent multiplicity, and so functions as the general theory of presentation 
as such, analogizing “the presentation of presentation.” As it relates to Migrants 
and Militants this will specifically mean that Badiou’s set-theoretical system 
demonstrates the inconsistency in the West’s treatment of migrants, reducing 
16
 Alain Badiou, Migrants and Militants, trans. Joseph Litvak, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK 
2020, p. 267. 

221
for a rationalist politics of the event
them to the arrival and productive subjugation. Yet this is merely a (false) ap-
pearance, a representation which Badiou seeks to negate via underlying affir-
mation (the pure multiple). For Badiou, just as the “there is” is pure multiplicity, 
then truth is the “radical interruption” of the ubiquity of the One, such that the 
only way to think a political revolution, an amorous encounter, an invention of 
the sciences, or the creation of art is to regard them as distinct infinities brought 
into common by suggesting something outside of appearance.
17
 
Badiou Contra Deleuze: on the Nomad
Deleuze and Badiou share a few fundamental philosophical concerns. Chief-
ly, Badiou’s philosophical project, in continuity with Deleuze’s, aims to forge 
a materialist ontology of multiplicity in which subjectivity plays a fundamen-
tally creative role, rather than solely an epistemic one. Both thinkers also agree 
that overturning the priority accorded to representation-as-model-for-thinking 
means the obverse of overcoming the essentialist metaphysics following from 
Aristotle, which has been reiterated throughout the epochs of Western philo-
sophical history. That is, by upholding the priority of multiplicity against “One-
ness” or substance, both Badiou and Deleuze’s materialisms do not only seek 
to overcome critique in its Kantian form, but to respond to the Heideggerian 
injunction against “ontotheology,” and so to the radicalization of critique in the 
20th Century against metaphysics, resisting metaphysics’ forecasted historical 
closure, or death.
17
 It is perhaps quite fair to say that Deleuze’s disjunctive synthesis is often over-designated as 
the fruit of Badiou’s critique (with Badiou eliding the connective first system and especially 
ignoring the conjunctive synthesis). This is, in fact, what Badiou’s book on Deleuze, De-
leuze: The Clamor of Being, makes clear, as for Badiou the disjunctive synthesis lays claim 
to how relations work. According to Badiou, relations are rooted in a universal and open 
Whole that reintroduces a universal one. The eternal return is understood as the formal law 
posed on chaos; the universe thus being an outcome of the struggle between dissolution 
and return, where Being is prodded forth via conjunction and dissolution: “[t]he reascent 
of the virtual would be the return, or the engagement of the One in the simulacra or beings, 
while the beings themselves, in their subjection to the disjunctive synthesis, would signify 
heterogeneity and dissolution”. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise 
Burchill, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2000, p. 68. Badiou reduces Deleuze’s 
philosophy to essentially contemplative rather than productive, foregoing thought’s con-
version from contemplation to production (which is what the third synthesis achieves).

222
ekin erkan
As a Platonist, Badiou commits to an abstract yet prescriptive polis of the (Pla-
tonic) Idea – transcendent, universal, and eternal. Nonetheless, this is a lim-
it-condition and an asymptote, whereby representative democracy reproduc-
es itself interminably as a relation to impossibility. For Badiou, politics must 
always strive beyond representation and deal with the idea, which is always 
outside of the image. Deleuze’s earlier transcendental empiricism, expropriat-
ing the subject of its synthesizing role and its reworking of Kantian problematic 
ideas, as well as the aforementioned “machine ontology” which more explicitly 
colors Deleuze’s later work on systems of influence/becoming, is inextricable 
from politics, because it invariably invokes circuits of influence and common-
ality. Badiou’s dialectical construction of an “alternative” systematically devel-
ops a meta-ontological narrative which identifies ontology with the theory of 
inconsistent multiplicity. In relation to the ontological order of the pure multiple 
and the objective order of presentation, becoming and subjectivation emerge 
as interruptions of the stability and stasis of ontological order, implying a pro-
cess which Badiou names an “event.” “Events” as such initiate a creative pro-
cess of construction or “truth-procedure.” For Badiou, “Truth Events” manifest 
in ordinary situations or “worlds” across those aforementioned four domains 
of thinking and practice that function as the “conditions” which philosophy 
aims to think together, relative to its historical moment. Within each of these 
domains, truth is an exception to knowledge or representation, disrupting the 
objective distribution of “bodies and languages” through which one discerns 
coherent parts within a situation or “world.” Badiou’s Truth Event signals the 
emergence of a “strong singularity,” making the “inexistent” of a world appear 
with maximal intensity. This “making” anchors Of Migrants and Militants and, 
more broadly, Badiou’s concept of change. 
Badiou seeks to suspend the inaugural equation of being with the “One”—re-
jecting Leibniz’s axiom, according to which “to be a being is to be a being”—
which leads to the identification of being with “inconsistent multiplicity,” and 
of set-theoretical mathematics with its inherent expression. According to Leib-
niz’ monadology, monads are regarded as “neither substance nor accident” and 
“have no extension, no shape, and cannot be divided”.
18
 Leibniz explains di-
18
 Gottfried W. Leibniz, “The Principles of Philosophy, or, the Monadology” [1714] in Philo-
sophical Essays, trans. and ed. Rorger Ariew and Daniel Garber, Hackett, Cambridge, MA. 
1989, §7.

223
for a rationalist politics of the event
versity and change by positing that monads do have relational properties “that 
express all the others, so that each monad is a perpetual living mirror of the uni-
verse”.
19
 In turn, Leibniz’ monadology conceives of absolute isolation in com-
bination with total relationism, where each monad’s Being partially comprises 
an expression of the world’s totality—that is, external difference is premised on 
internal reality. 
Deleuze’s treatment of Spinoza is more variegated: it is from Spinoza that 
Deleuze inherits Oneness (albeit sans divine connection) and from Leibniz the 
thesis of the multiple.
20
 Consequently, it is here that Deleuze is clearly influ-
enced by Leibniz, although the fact that each monad entertains an internal rela-
tion with the entirety of the world leads Deleuze to also reject Leibniz elsewhere, 
as, following the logic of the monadology, reason is equated with representation 
for Leibniz. For Deleuze, this is a fatal flaw and reifies the seductive pull of Pla-
tonism which he so adamantly resists, as “any given machine and every picture, 
drawing, description, or theorization is an irreducible entity with a private real-
ity […] uncoupled and deterritorialized […] ‘extra-relational’”.
21
 Contra Platonist 
essentialism and Leibniz’ monadology, for Deleuze univocity does not “mean 
that there is one and the same Being; on the contrary, beings are multiple and 
different […] That of which it is said is not at all the same, but Being is the same 
for everything about which it is said”.
22
 
While Deleuze may treat Leibniz ambiguously, he outright rejects Platonism. If 
Platonism is the doctrine that the being of some or all entities is secondary, it 
is because principles, truths or essences are found in a “something else” which 
we can engage with through interaction. Deleuze’s machine ontology inverts 
this idea and seeks to replace the “Idea as the goal of reminiscence” and, there-
fore, the Platonic “stable Essence” by reorienting Ideas as they are conceived of 
19
 Ibid., §56
20
 Note: it is also by way of Husserl that Deleuze is interested in qualitative distinction re: 
objects demarcated from their semblance via subjective, relational, or actual encounters, 
events, or experiences.
21
 Arjen Kleinherenbrink, Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism, Edin-
burgh University Press, Edinburgh 2019, p. 74.
22
 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense [1969], trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, Columbia 
University Press, New York 1990, p. 179.

224
ekin erkan
by a subject, utilizing “qualitative transition” and “mutual fusion.
23
 To “over-
turn Platonism” necessitates removing all traces of “full presence,” “reduction-
ism,” and “relationism” by liquidating stable and eternal “general essences,” 
replacing them with individual and malleable distributions capable of forming 
singularities.
24
 For Deleuze, all resemblances that exist are merely productions 
between machines instead of (Platonic) predetermined identities. Resemblanc-
es are simulacra, retaining a difference in kind between “what they are in their 
virtual becoming” and that which they “manifest to others,” i.e., the machinic 
becoming of actuality and appearance. This also is precisely why the Deleuz-
ian machine necessarily produces images without resemblance, finding itself at 
odds with Platonism, where the copy is an image with resemblance.
Nonetheless, one may read Deleuze’s oft-utilized term “nomadism” in Badiou’s 
work on migrants and nomadism, but we ought to underscore that, for Badiou, 
the term “nomad” does not designate (Deleuzean) becoming. In fact, Badiou’s 
project is in direct contrast to Deleuze, as Badiou aligns his ontology to the ra-
tionalist priority accorded to thinking “over the aesthetic under the dialectical 
method,” as he avows the explanatory priority accorded to being over becom-
ing.
25
 This arguably “revisionary” rationalist materialism gives way to a concep-
tion of what Badiou names “inconsistent multiplicity,” which takes axiomatized 
set-theoretical mathematics as its formal paradigm, and which contrasts the 
“problematic” conception of multiplicity derived from the differential calcu-
lus advocated by Deleuze. Thus, for Badiou multiple being is not an “intensive 
spatium” of “virtual Ideas,” but is instead defined within a purely extensional 
order, riven from dynamicity, and partitioned qualitative and modal specifici-
ty. Challenging Deleuze’s identification of multiplicity with intensity, Badiou’s 
rationalism opposes empiricism’s deliverances of the senses to the present, 
for empiricism—even in Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism—reduces being 
to experience. Badiou holds that the invariant forms of the multiple must be 
conceived of irrespectively from any process supported in aesthetic synthesis or 
experiential mediation. This bolsters Badiou’s universalism, where the nomad 
23
 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs [1964], trans. Richard Howard, University of Minnesota 
Press, Minneapolis 2000, p. 109.
24
 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968], trans. Paul Patton, Columbia University 
Press, New York 1994, p. 53, p. 59; Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 253.
25
 Daniel Sacilotto, Saving the Noumenon (Under Review) 2020, p. 62.

225
for a rationalist politics of the event
does not signify “a line of flight” or ascent but, instead, deals with the subtrac-
tion of being from representation; we are all nomads in the last instance, deni-
zens of a world without borders. 
Contrast this to the Deleuzean “problem,” which not only refers to the genetic 
conditions of any item or body but also all the entangled ecological relations 
relating to the environment around it—i.e., in considering, say, an acorn’s “be-
coming” a tree in Deleuzean fashion, we must similarly conceive of an empiri-
cally poised “problem” by way of “soil conditions, plant and animal wildlife in 
the vicinity of the seed, altitude, humidity, the amount of sunlight the seed is 
exposed to, and so on”. As the acorn seed integrates these singularities and their 
entangled relations, a unique “solution” is produced as the acorn generates a 
tree that is distinct from all other trees. Deviation from normalcy is indexed by 
how modes of existence articulate themselves for Deleuze and, conversely, how 
externality and the body without organs guarantee that a multiplicity can never 
be reduced to the circumstances that this system proffers. As an articulation of 
the machinic nomad, “lines of flight” indicate how the body exacts sufficient 
reason for the possibility of breaking with current relations. Deleuze’s nomad 
is wrapped within a double etymology referring to dividing, distributing, and 
allotting lands but also to roaming, roving, and wandering. For Deleuze, to be a 
nomad is to never settle within a relation, a “local absolute, an absolute that is 
manifested locally”.
26
 The Deleuzean nomad is thus, an experimenter actualiz-
ing virtualities by contracting them into incessant becoming—therefore, it fol-
lows that, for Deleuze, “what counts the most is a certain idea of the event that 
in the end makes philosophy … ‘experimentation’”.
27
 History is the ingredient of 
possible material experimentation and the nomad is the essence of practice—
thus, what is “radical” for Deleuze is the legislation of the imagination vide 
invention.
28
 The nomad is where particular points and the relations of forces 
between these points are tossed about, an informal battle.
29
26
 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1972], 
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, University of Minnesota Press, Min-
neapolis, 1983, p. 382. 
27
 Gilles Deleuze, Letters and Other Texts, trans. Anna Hodges, Semiotext(e), South Pasa-
dena 2020, p. 90.
28
 Ibid., 120. 
29
 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault [1986], trans. Seán Hand, University of Minnesota Press, Minne -
apolis 1988, p. 121.

226
ekin erkan
How, then, does Deleuze’s concept of change transpire if it is always situated 
within a modality of relation-becoming? In Anti-Oedipus we see the disjunctive 
synthesis coming into its full form, prodding forth material affect(s) and imply-
ing a counter-actualisation, a “becoming” of that which it was previously not. In 
such later work, the logic of Deleuze’s disjunctive synthesis is demarcated within 
the machine ontology as the second synthesis, following the contractive (first) 
synthesis of connecting relations and followed by the conjunctive (third) syn-
thesis, which creates externality and residual relations of novelty. According to 
Deleuze’s disjunctive synthesis, entities are endowed with a gradient or register 
of “receptivity” upon which traces of encounters (regarding internal matters of 
alteration) record themselves, resulting in the “change that is substance itself”.
30
 
Deleuze recalls Kant’s three syntheses of: i) apprehension (the synthesis or 
“synopsis” of the present); ii) memory (recollection “of the thought object and 
its recognition by a thinking subject” in the sense of the capacity to reproduce, 
i.e., the synthesis of reproduction); iii) final recognition (knowledge, or the ca-
pacity to subordinate memory under concepts). For Deleuze to combat Kantian 
understanding he distinguishes how, after memory, one does not encounter 
judgment and recognition but, instead, encounters something that breaks from 
representation, moving towards the production of the future – that is, “the pro-
cess of prediction”.
31
 At the beginning of Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari out-
line the machine ontology: 
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and 
starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever 
said the id. Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines 
driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the 
necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an ener-
gy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts.
32
 
 
Accordingly, machines operate via fluxes (including energy, desiring energy, mat-
ter, money, and so on) by stopping, using, transforming, and releasing them. For 
30
 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Zone Books, 
New York 1991, p. 36.
31
 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 226.
32
 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 1.

227
for a rationalist politics of the event
example, Western society responds to the abstract machine of capitalism, which 
itself organizes the work of all the other machine by transforming the fluxes of 
Capital. Capital is the Body without Organs upon which the concrete machines 
are attached/connected in order to transform and to create an economy from the 
flux of money. So, not only is there a distinction between fluxes and machines 
in the machine ontology but any machine and every machine is operates spe-
cifically with respect to the way in which it uses a particular flux and releases a 
transformed flux to the (other) connected machines. However, this is not entirely 
a rejection of Kant as it is a transformation of Kantian thought; Badiou does to 
Kant what Deleuze does to Plato. Following Hegel on this front, Badiou opposes 
the Kantian representational account of thought, along with the emphasis of fini-
tude which dominates the latter’s work, and that of his phenomenological and 
neo-sophistic successors in the twentieth century. For Badiou, the fact that the 
Kantian conception of thought had to remain at the analytic level means that it 
fails to rise to what Plato already identified as dialectical thinking.
As outlined in Empiricism and Subjectivity
33
 Deleuze’s empiricism must think of 
the subject not only as a “passive self” but as something “larvally” produced 
within the natural world; as a consequence, “the construction of the given 
makes room for the constitution of the subject. The given is no longer given to 
a subject; rather, the subject constitutes itself in the given”.
34
 A problematic 
“double genesis” of being and thinking, of the virtual and its actualizing agent, 
seems to be thus at work, by virtue of which intensity shocks the subject which 
encounters it, but at the same time is unintelligible as being independent of 
the subject’s production of it. Accordingly, Deleuze’s constructivism renders the 
receptivity associated with sensibility inscrutable, as he flattens the spontaneity 
of thinking into a purely semiotic-structural register or protocol of exchange. 
This quandary leads to crucial methodological consequences for Deleuze’s con-
ception of philosophy as “conceptual creation,” and of transcendental empir-
icism as inculcating a method of division commensurate to lived experience. 
For Badiou, lived experience and its consequences are deracinated while, for 
Deleuze, having flattened thinking into a problem-solving protocol occurring 
at the pre-discursive level, the relation between the conceptual creation that 
33
 Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature 
[1997], trans. Constantin V . Boundas, Columbia University Press, New York 1991. 
34
 Ibid., p. 87. 

228
ekin erkan
ordains philosophy and the world becomes notoriously difficult to adjudicate. 
For Deleuze the question arises about just how, exactly, the transcendental em-
piricist concepts and the formal paradigms it champions suffice to theoretically 
track the domain of difference and its subjectivation, without supposing a rep-
resentational account of thinking which “reflects” upon the real as its domain 
of investigation. Formulating an implicit response, Deleuze reiterates that on-
tological univocity implies a strict equivalence between sense of the expression 
and the expressed.
For Deleuze, nomadic reality transpires as a “schizo-phrenia”—an inverted 
mereotopology where private reality is prioritized over the relations between 
them.
35
 Therefore, Deleuze’s nomad is equipollent to the schizophrenic machine 
comprised of parts and elements of various pre-existing machines, rather than 
indicating universality—“the schizophrenic is a functional machine making use 
of left-over elements that no longer function in any context and that will enter 
into relation with each other precisely by having no relation”.
36
 For Deleuze, fol-
lowing Husserl, essence refers not to a simple object of experience but to the 
body’s internal reality, distinct from “sensible things” and, in turn, “morpho-
logical,” “nomadic” and “vagabond.” Detachment from the immediate produc-
tion of actuality gives rise to a new nomadic machine in many instances, as, for 
example, “whenever someone makes love […] that person constitutes a body 
without organs, alone and with the other person or people”.
37
 Every synthesis 
necessitates two former syntheses, and every connection invariably involves the 
“eternal return’s” production of a non-productive, irreducible body without or-
gans undergoing virtual becoming, delegating the becoming of a conjunctive 
machine, wrapped up in autonomy and novelty.
Historically mediated affirmation trumps epistemic foundationalism for Badi-
ou; as a consequence, the decision exacts a historical cut, and this is what Ba-
diou identifies with all political acts, which function as “events,” proper (cuts in 
the cloth of history). The “decision” is therefore characterized metaphorically as 
an “axiomatic” act, which interrupts the monotonous oscillation of metaphysi-
35
 Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus [1980], trans. Brian Massumi, University of 
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2005, p. 34.
36
 Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness—Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, trans. Ames 
Hodges and Mike Taormina, Semiotext(e), New York 2006, p. 18. 
37
 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 30.

229
for a rationalist politics of the event
cal history. Badiou’s claim that “the One is not” is not the result of a derivation 
or proof, but enables subtracting ontology from onto-theology, and the dialectic 
from idealism. Accordingly, from this fundamental statement Badiou draws two 
immediate theses, in terms of which a dialectical resolution of the contradiction 
between the One and the Multiple is said to follow:
(1)  to say that the One is not is not to say that there isn’t Oneness; 
(2)  to separate the non-being of the One and its “being-there” we must under-
stand the One as an operation rather than as a given product, i.e. “there is 
oneness” since pure multiplicity is presented in a situation as a result of the 
“count-as-One.” As a consequence, Badiou writes that:
…the multiple is the regime of presentation; the one, in respect to presenta-
tion, is an operational result; being is what presents (itself). On this basis, 
being is neither one (because only presentation itself is pertinent to the count-
as-one), nor multiple (because the multiple is solely the regime of presenta-
tion) …. I term situation any presented multiplicity. Granted the effectiveness 
of the presentation, a situation is the place of taking-place, whatever the 
terms of the multiplicity in question. Every situation admits its own particular 
operator of the count-as-one. This is the most general definition of a structure; 
it is what prescribes, for a presented multiple, the regime of its count-as-one.
38
Badiou completes the basic dialectical maneuver by drawing the necessary link 
between the non-being of the One and the being of the pure multiple: since the 
One is not, it is nothing; but to “be nothing” must not be thought negatively, but 
positively as the being of “inconsistent multiplicity,” which remains the latent 
void of inconsistency in every structured situation, and over which the count-
as-One operates. Only at this point does the equation of ontology with axioma-
tized set-theoretical mathematics become intelligible: set-theory is the singular 
situation which, affirming the void as its first existential axiom, “grounds” its 
discursive apparatus on the abyss of presentation, and thus thinks “intrinsi-
cally” of inconsistent multiplicity: In affirming that “there exists a set to which 
nothing and belongs,” a pure mark with an empty extension structures and pre-
sents nothing becomes the axiomatic ground on whose basis every consistent 
presentation is successively conceived, in conjunction with the other axioms. 
38
 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 24.

230
ekin erkan
Set theory thus constitutes the register in which one thinks consistently of in-
consistency, presenting the form of inconsistency that underlies all consistent 
presentation.
Badiou accords priority to affirmation over pure negation. This not only desig -
nate the origin of a subjectivation or evental change across the four conditions, 
but, crucially, the methodological lever by virtue of which philosophy coordi-
nates the axiomatic formalism of set-theory to meta-ontological concepts, so as 
to identify the former with ontology i.e., “multiplicity,” “presentation,” “struc-
ture,” “situation,” “the count-as-One,” “the event,” “truth,” etc. With this said, 
in order to secure the ontological role played by mathematics in general and 
set-theory in particular, and so the correspondence between meta-ontological 
concepts, ontological formalization and the real of materiality, Badiou avows 
that mathematics grants a kind of an “intrinsic access” into the being of the 
multiple, within which the difference between thinking and being becomes in-
operative, and the problematic of access is overcome.
Badiou’s identification of mathematics with ontology rests on the agency of a 
self-determining philosophical subject whose grounding gesture he names the 
“historical decision.” Badiou’s deferral to this “historical decision” determines 
both the condition to think of the evental interruption in the wake of the event 
as well as the structural basis on which philosophy as meta-ontology identifies 
mathematics as the discourse that thinks being qua being directly, i.e., without 
the detours of sensory, genetic, or linguistic experience. Badiou thus seeks to 
free philosophy from the detours of representation. Rather than instantiating 
being qua becoming, as with Deleuze, Badiou’s engagement with being qua be-
ing underlies a more programmatic understanding and aspiration for a politics 
of the nomad that defies liberal pragmatism, where nomadism is defined nei-
ther through an order of relations or by way of what the nomad does. Instead, 
Badiou affirms the nomad as an extrinsic condition that precedes any signifying 
order grounding it. Here, Badiou’s “axiomatic method” produces a subtractive 
ontology where the exceptional agency of a philosophical ur-subject affirms the 
“historical decision.”

231
for a rationalist politics of the event
Migrants, Militants, and Universalist Ethics: Badiou’s Platonist Politics
Recall how Plato’s ontological project reshapes Parmenides by articulating our 
relation to the “Way of Truth” as a moral one;
39
 for Plato, the atemporal realm 
becomes a whole congeries of moral values (of eidē) and not a perfect unity but 
a set of Forms. Our political task is, thus, to rise intellectually from the thing-
which-becomes (ta gignomena) to the contemplation of unchanging truths. How 
do the world of unchanging Forms and the one of “things that become” relate to 
one another? For Plato, this is imbricated with moral value: Forms make up our 
world but their most important role is to be what we are to seek; we cannot know 
the Forms in detail until we are dead and their moral function is to call us else-
where, their ontological function is to be elsewhere. They communicate, they 
engage in exhortation(s). Through axiomatized set theory, this communication 
is relationally diagrammatized; just as there are no subjects without events, 
there is no truth without the collective (re)orientation of possibility. This is why 
for both Plato and Badiou, mathematics is the condition for staging the Idea 
and, thus, the grounding for philosophy. Ontologically, the subject is a finite 
enquiry of an infinite truth procedure, which always follows an event. Mathe-
matics assumes an ontological role, subtracting thinking from the qualitative 
determinations represented by sensible intuition. Badiou’s tripartite Platonic 
gesture, of “orientation, situation and trajectory”,
40
 is knotted together via par-
ticipation, which formalizes the subject’s political satisfaction and activates the 
Idea of thought. The “decision” is, thus, conditioned on a historically mediated 
affirmation rather than an epistemic foundation, characterized as an axiomatic 
act which interrupts the monotonous oscillation of metaphysical history (with 
neoliberalist democracy serving as its most contracted point).
39
 For Parmenides the Way of Truth could only be bifurcated into “itself-as-it-was-before-
the-change” and “-itself-as-it-is-after-the-change”; this internal opposition is incompat-
ible with true Being, so the “Way of Truth,” or the “One” of Parmenides, never changes 
in-itself (it is atemporal). Unlike the One, we are not unified or atemporal for Parmenides 
but dikranoi, two-minded, wandering along a “way of Seeming”. On this “Way of Seem-
ing” everything is in a process of change and, thus, exhibits internal opposition; beyond 
this path is the “Way of Non-Being,” which is without unity and cannot even be spoken of. 
John McCumber, Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought, Acumen Publish-
ing, Durham, UK 2011, p. 4.
40
 Badiou, Migrants and Militants, p. 50. 

232
ekin erkan
How, exactly, does this affirmation of truth function within a case study? Let 
us thus turn to Badiou’s most recent work for an answer. Badiou’s short and 
programmatic text, Migrants and Militants, is bookended by references to the 
Yellow Vests Movement in France. According to Badiou, the Yellow Vests are 
a mass response to the specter of pauperization/proletarianization that now 
haunts a suburban lower-middle class that was reared on the liberalist dream of 
commodity fetishism and materialist accrual. Badiou recalls Marx’s aphorism 
that “proletarians have no homeland” which is truer today than it was in Marx’s 
time, for “our homeland is the world, and our compatriots make up working 
humankind in all its diversity”.
41
 Despite this vision of compatriotization, the 
migrant has come to represent the arrival and presence of that which comes 
from elsewhere. “We,” being those prodding forth the communist politics of our 
time, must expatriate ourselves in the direction of the expatriating—“we” have 
no common land other than the one demanded by our common work. In turn, 
Badiou motivates us to universalize “we” into a horizontal condition. 
Badiou turns our attention to how the term “migrant” has been introduced rel-
atively recently within our common lexicon, particularly to describe Africans 
coming to Europe. Badiou dons a historical-etymological cap and surveys sev-
eral moments:
i) 1950s – 1970s: During this era, France’s industries began to burgeon and, 
thus, with parallel vigor, so too did the import of a foreign labor force. Badiou 
calls our attention to how over a million Portuguese came to France at this 
time, Yet, curiously, no one spoke of immigration as a problem at the time. 
Instead, all those who came to France were spoken of and termed “workers” 
in univocal fashion, with workers’ hostels erected to house this labor force. In 
turn, an international proletariat of France advanced, with industries such as 
the Bank of France, and factories such as Renault Billancourt directly owned 
and managed by the states. 
ii) 1970s – early 1980s: At this time, the pressures of the global market began 
to increase on a now-diminished imperial France. This resulted in the dis-
mantling of state-monopoly capitalism. Accordingly, France saw its epoch 
of privatization accompanied by massive deindustrialization. This mean the 
disappearance of great factories and the eventual outsourcing of jobs. Badiou 
41
 Badiou, Migrants and Militants, p. 5. 

233
for a rationalist politics of the event
notes that, with this moment, “[p]eople now start talking not about workers 
any more, but about immigrants”,
42
 with the understanding that “they”—the 
immigrants—are not, and cannot, be “we,” the inhabitants of France. This 
also meant that immigrants were not seen as deserving of the same rights as 
those French denizens.
iii) 1990s – today: Now immigrants and immigration are deemed to be a major 
political problem. It is only in this contemporary moment that the word “mi-
grant” appears after “worker” and then “immigrant”; the term “migrant” is 
accompanied by quasi-racial threats, with supporters of this “counter-revolu-
tion” portraying the situation as that of an invasion of civilized countries by 
hordes. Workers’ hostels are closed and young people in working class sub-
urbs are placed under constant police surveillance. Deportation becomes a 
norm while obtaining residence permits becomes increasingly difficult. New 
laws regulating immigration and citizenship are instituted.
43
For Badiou, this historical development evidences that the word “migrant” in-
vokes an ambivalence between the stable identity of the worker and the provo-
cation that the arrival of the other represents for it. Citing Patrick Chamoiseau’s 
poetic call to action, Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity, 
Badiou claims that the contemporary historical moment presents us with a 
“cause” upon which we must act. Specifically, Badiou encourages us to reject 
both the fundamental conception of the “migrant” as the “other” and the ac-
companying essential norm of this orientation, an ethics of hospitality. For 
Badiou, this rejection of hospitality is rooted in a communist vim, as the fun-
damental concept that belongs to the proletariat and its essential norm is trans-
national organization.
44
Following this ethical orientation, Badiou prods us to not simply welcome the 
foreigner but to regard “welcoming” as a duty that transcends all other dis-
positions. Badiou’s choice of the word “duty” in specific invokes the Kantian 
categorical imperative, albeit Kant’s name is absent from the text. Nonetheless, 
Badiou is similarly working towards a kind of unconditional and universalist 
moral realism. According to Kant’s categorical imperative, morality is univer-
42
 Ibid., p. 9. 
43
 Ibid., p. 10.
44
 Ibid., p. 13. 

234
ekin erkan
salizable because self-legislation has a universal foundation, as it allots us with 
being a standpoint shared by all human beings cum rational beings. This capa-
bility of a universal standpoint in cognition allows us to access the particular 
reasons we may have to act in one way rather than another, as well as claiming 
normative validity in willing (which, for Badiou, transpires in tandem with “act-
ing”). For Badiou, there is a relation of necessity between the one who arrives 
and the one already “living here,” such that welcoming the one who arrives is 
an ethical obligation and is unconditional. 
Given Badiou’s marked philosophical differences with Jacques Derrida, it is no 
surprise that he summons in Derrida’s “law of unlimited hospitality” to spar 
with Derrida’s ghost. For Badiou, it is absurd to even question the ethical ori-
entation of saying “yes” to the one who arrives and we must affirm the arriver, 
regardless of whoever that person may be and before any identification; Der-
rida’s logic of hospitality exists as something akin to the sin of neoliberalism, 
making-diffuse the logic of neoliberalist globalization by reifying borders, sep-
arations, and ethnic/racial essentialisms. Nominally, Badiou is in agreement 
with Derrida on one point, as both see the welcome of the other as an absolute 
necessity, this absolute necessity juxtaposed with the relative necessity of the 
laws of state. However, Badiou is arguably much more discerning than Derrida, 
as he launches a tripartite critique on Derrida’s Of Hospitality:
45
 
1) For Derrida, the other is the one who arrives and this not only imposes a kind 
of “serious limitation” but also subtly heartens racism, xenophobia, and oth-
er types of hostility to the other. For Badiou, to focus on the person’s arrival 
means that we do not, with equally interest, concern ourselves with the oth-
er’s presence over the long term—the coexistence of customs, cultural habits, 
and children. Thus, Derrida’s focus on the “welcome” and thresholds of pas-
sage is not only inadequate and myopic but is politically feeble.
2) The identity of the other, as Derrida conceives of it, does not impose a limit on 
the concept of nationalism; Derrida’s “law of unlimited hospitality” and jin-
goism can mutually coexist, as the former does not negate the latter. For Der-
rida, “[w]hether the arriving person is a God, a man, a woman, or an animal, 
45
 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites 
Jacques Derrida to Respond, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2000.

235
for a rationalist politics of the event
otherness imposes a law of welcome.”
46
 For Badiou, this absolute imperative 
is dangerous as it is undiscerning—how can we accept this absolute impera-
tive if the other is, say, “a supporter of slavery, or a Zionist preying on Pales-
tinian Land?”.
47
 However, it is not that Badiou thinks we should be more dis-
cerning about who we welcome but that framing hospitality in terms of who is 
welcome is already poisoning the well from the start. Such an imperative like 
Derrida's, which makes an event of the welcome also encourages exploitive 
international tourism, the predatory delight of “rich westerners going to take 
the sun in the territories where the most extreme poverty is massive”.
48
 
3) As Derrida notes, the relation between absolute imperative and particular 
laws remains indeterminate. With such indeterminacy in mind, Badiou con-
siders those laws that deal with poor migrants arriving into rich countries as 
well as laws which invoke identity, integration, and assimilation. Badiou re-
marks that these laws function with the goal to accept only those who are 
already prepared to obey the norms of the dominant country, ready to make 
themselves as invisible as possible outside the designated work that they are 
required to provide. For Badiou, this absolute law of hospitality is, in reality, 
funded by relative laws which enforce submission and maximum invisibil-
ity. Derrida’s framework and the logic of the welcome/hospitality reduces the 
new arrival to their being a migrant-as-nomad without calling into question the 
dialectical relations between this person’s coming and the conditions that mo-
tivate them to come. Derrida’ logic of the welcome and hospitality enforces 
submission and maximum invisibility, reducing the arriver into the laws that 
determine this person’s acceptance or rejection, which supervene on all else.
Derrida’s Of Hospitality invokes the idea that the poor, mistreated, and humil-
iated constitute a kind of “gift” for us rather than engaging with what migra-
tion “allows us to see”. Citing Laurent Gaudé’s poem “Regardez-les” (“Look 
at Them”), Badiou remarks that Derrida is not alone in this conception of the 
other-as-gift, for it also characterizes Gaudé’s attitude towards the nomad. In 
response, Badiou notes that we must engage in rational analysis of what the 
word “migrant” captures at the surface level: “forced travel, wretched families, 
their arrival, the gift that this arrival constitutes for us. The poem, just like the 
46
 Ibid., p. 17. 
47
 Ibid.
48
 Ibid., p. 17–18. 

236
ekin erkan
philosopher of hospitality, does not really name the larger context in which this 
tragedy of wandering is being enacted”.
49
 Arguably, Derrida and Gaudé’s frame-
work—albeit Badiou does not use this terminology—function as auxiliaries to 
neoliberal ethics, scoring the circuits of trade and travel rather than dealing 
with what underpins these structures. 
More broadly, and unlike Derrida, Badiou upholds what he sees as the genuine 
humanism of equality, which erases genealogical, anthropological, or social 
differences (e.g., Jewish/Greek, nomad/denizen, man/woman, master/slave). As 
Balibar remarks, Badiou’s “true universalism” is contrasted by “a universalism 
proceeding from Christianity and later secularized by modern republicanism 
[…] a ‘simulacrum’ of universalism […] namely, the universalism of the liberal 
world market (or perhaps the liberal representation of the world market), which 
is based not on equality but on equivalence and thus incorporates into its for-
mal homogeneity the permanent reproduction of rival identities”.
50
 Derrida’s 
logic hospitality reinforces the universalism of the (neo)liberal world market, 
constructed around differences such as the “arriver” and the “denizen”—arbi-
trary differences, as evidenced by the arbitrary border that is crossed by the pu-
tative “nomad”. Badiou, as an opponent of postmodern thought and relativism, 
upholds a totalizing and extensive “universalism of equality” that erases genea-
logical, anthropological, and social differences which are opposed to the “false 
universalism” of the world market and its representation.
Despite Badiou’s analysis does not engage with digital modalities of control and 
platform capitalism, glazing over the politics of data,
51
 he does trenchantly un-
derscore how the possibility of production, writ large, occurs on a worldwide 
and earth-wide scale. Badiou roots his case study in the manufacturing and 
49
 Ibid., p. 20. 
50
 Étienne Balibar, On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Commmunity, trans. Josh-
ua David Jordan, Fordham University Press, New York, 2020, p. 88.
51
 Or what Colin Koopman calls “infopower,” which deploys techniques of formatting/for-
mats in order to fasten and speed up datafied “informational persons”— while this logic 
precedes digitality (e.g., birth certificates and auditing), “infopower’ has become ubiq-
uitous through digital platforms and, arguably, is due analytic credence given Badiou’s 
penchant for universalist proletarianization. As unwitting metadata creators, we, as social 
media surfers, have all become our “data,” which is circulated and sold by advertising 
companies. Colin Koopman, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational 
Person, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2019.

237
for a rationalist politics of the event
distribution of cell phones, which “require calculations made in California, fi-
nancing carried out in US dollars, German technical adjustments, the violent 
plunder of rare metals in Africa and the South Pacific, painstaking assembly 
work in vast Chinese factories, and networks of communication established 
everywhere”.
52
 Rather than reify the platitude that “neoliberalist capitalism a 
novel global phenomena,” Badiou once again dons himself a historical-mate-
rialist cap and directs our attention to how globalization is by no means a con-
temporary occurrence. In fact, Badiou notes that the capitalist vision and the 
bourgeois oligarchic order was born from this global vision, as capitalism was 
established from the outset by international commerce (e.g., in Venice or Hol-
land) where fortunes were made through the mediation of bankers and owners 
of fleets of ships on the basis of products imported from the Far East, Africa, or 
the Americas. 
This accumulation of primitive capitalization and its mooring to globalization 
and cosmopolitanism was, as Badiou correctly notes, pointed out by the young 
Marx.
53
 The production of capitalism and its instruments of production have, 
since the very beginning, relied on the subjugation of provinces and countryside 
to cities and capitals, subordinating all that has anything to do with the rural 
world and, as technologies allow for it, increasingly moving outwards. This also 
resulted in those whose raw materials were plundered becoming “other,” such 
that their provinces, countries, and economies became dependent. Badiou prof-
fers that we must propose a different organization of the global apparatus of 
production. 
Following his distinguishing “worker” from “migrant,” Badiou here makes a 
further distinction between “worker” and “proletariat,” wherein the former ref-
erences someone who works in a factory organized by capital which, historical-
ly, has accompanied industrialization. The “proletariat,” on the other hand, has 
a much more vast designation, for it deems the mass of those denizens who, 
solely to survive, must attempt to become workers, or those who already are 
workers; a proletarian has only their labor power to offer by way of work. So 
52
 Badiou, Migrants and Militants, p. 20. 
53
 Badiou points cites passages from Communist Manifesto of 1848 that underscore how raw 
material is drawn from remote zones and variegated quarters of the globe, such that the 
production of capitalism is always an international initiative.

238
ekin erkan
while the “worker” refers to “work” that is localized and determinate, “pro-
letarian” is the general condition of someone who has no other possibility of 
survival than finding work, hitched to the vicissitudes of competition and the 
fluctuations of the market.
54
 Despite he does not offer an economic program, it 
would appear that, for Badiou, the universalization of the proletarian condition 
will mollify the subservience of the proletarian to the appendages of capitalist 
circumscription. 
Returning specifically to the conditions of the migrant, Badiou underscores 
that, today, the market is organized by planetary oligarchy with whole regions 
where there are no jobs to be had, forcing young people to travel.
55
 Insofar as 
they have not found work, the would-be worker is reduced to a state of nomadic 
proletarian wandering; Badiou remarks on how the migrant’s historical essence 
is the result of a capitalist order at the peak of oppressive inegalitarianism. As 
a consequence, our duty is not to welcome this person in the name of an eth-
ics of hospitality but, instead, our duty is to “organize ourselves with him or 
her and with everyone like him or her, if possible at an international level, to 
prepare the end of the oligarchic world order whose result is his or her being 
as nomadic proletarian.”
56
 Contra predetermining and essentializing narratives 
that deal with systematic issues superficially—with such programs increasingly 
being prodded forth by the likes of bias training and diversity consultants, im-
plemented by corporate office training workshops (e.g., Robin DiAngelo’s White 
Fragility and its appendages) —Badiou motivates how our duty is to think and 
prepare with the nomadic proletarian in facilitating a new communist politics. 
China and the Worker-Poet
Badiou turns to the case study of China and, specifically, the poetry of workers/
the genre of the worker-poet, which he sees as best capturing the epic of the 
nomadic proletariat. Such poets tell the story of their migration from remote 
rural provinces that have been deserted as they venture towards the “penal col-
onies”
57
 of Chinese factories where a prodigious quantity of the consumer prod-
54
 Ibid., p. 30. 
55
 This is exceedingly true even on a local level, as evinced by oil “boomtowns” in the USA.
56
 Ibid., p. 31. 
57
 Badiou uses the term “penal colony” to historically invoke the English nomadic proletar-
ians who lived and worked a century and a half ago.

239
for a rationalist politics of the event
ucts found all over the world are now produced. Specifically, Badiou references 
the poet Yang Lian (who belonged to the Misty Poets collective, a group of poets 
thematically associated with dialectically traversing objective and subjective 
realism) and the worker-poet Guo Jinniu, who worked at the Foxconn factory. 
Badiou culls Jinniu’s 2015 anthology, A Massively Single Number, referencing the 
poem “Going Home on Paper,” which, given its realist sensibilities, deals with 
nomadic work in brute fashion:
…On the 13th floor, a suicide net is closing up, this is my 
job
in order to make a day’s pay. 
I tighten a screw step by step, counter-sink it clockwise, 
it struggles and fights me in the dark, 
the harder I push, the greater the danger.
58
Another work of Jinniu’s, “A Massively Singular Number,” engages with the 
question of “home” and wandering:
…Our Motherland, it organized me a temporary
Residence Permit
Our Motherland, it accepted the Temporary Residence Fee I handed Over
[….] Someone in the south broke into a rented room
Oh god. It’s a raid to check Temporary Residence Permits.
59
Jinniu’s poem dissolves any stability of “home,” giving recourse to universality 
and nomadism as the universal condition and deals with the infinite singularity 
of what holds an essential truth in reserve: the question of movement and trav-
el. Jinniu’s poem also recalls the ontic process of identity vis-à-vis signification 
by way of identification papers, with the poem concluding in Jinniu’s rented 
room’s being raided by police demanding to check Temporary Residence Per-
mits. While Badiou explicitly invokes the example of Chinese laborers, one may 
readily be reminded of refugees from the Middle East seeking work in Europe or 
undocumented workers from South America working in the United States. Once 
again, Badiou is quick to remind us that the question of documentation, or “pa-
58
 Badiou, Migrants and Militants, p. 33.
59
 Ibid., p. 34. 

240
ekin erkan
pers,” is by no means novel, as the state in nineteenth-century France instated a 
“worker’s booklet” which made the nomadic proletarian subject to surveillance 
and deportation (at the time it affected those nomadic workers living and work-
ing in Paris). Today, in China, there exists such an analogous “worker’s booklet” 
with the Temporary Residence Permit. Rather than evince the intractable na-
ture of archival identification as a precondition for industry and labor, Badiou’s 
historicization seeks to prove that the sole mean of destabilizing the strife of 
displaced nomadic workers is by way of a normative ethics of universality. Such 
unconditional universality, contra the hospitality of the arrival, serves as Badi-
ou’s quilting point writ large. 
The poet Xin You queries: 
… Who, exactly are we?
We, workers,
We who work throughout the seasons
We who are like birds
Migrators who have lost everything.
60
Badiou offers the response that “’[y]ou are and will be, in your land of origin as 
in your adopted land, those who embody universality, those who will help us 
give birth to the unified world of the new communism”.
61
 Badiou here bolsters 
the plenary embodiment of universality vis-a-vis nomadic proletarianism; de-
spite he hesitates from engaging with the parlance of “open borders” and simi-
lar adjacent debates, Badiou’s program undoubtedly pushes for a philosophical 
doctrine of universality first and foremost, for it is only here from which all other 
practical schemas may bloom.
In the final pages of Migrants and Militants, Badiou concludes by noting that the 
very reason he has held reservation over the putative “movement” of the Yellow 
Vests is due to the massive presence and constant reappearance of the French 
flag, which is compounded by the Yellow Vest protesters’ often reciting the Mar-
seillaise, which “too many fascist-leaning nationalisms have struck up for us to 
60
 Ibid., p. 38. 
61
 Ibid.

241
for a rationalist politics of the event
remember its revolutionary origins any more”.
62
 For Badiou, these engagements 
reduce all the Yellow Vest’s discussion of inadequate pensions, cancelled public 
services, and reduced buying power to remarks that solely express the bitterness 
of those who thought that they were superior, and, therefore, “protected from 
the planetary gangsterism of capital,” i.e. a tattered sense of superiority.
63
 Thus, 
Badiou remarks that, “rather than “beware of white men”’—which we should 
be hearing, and by which I mean ‘beware of the system which are invented 
and spread everywhere by force”’—what we are hearing is ‘beware of blacks, 
Arabs, Asians, and “migrants” of all kinds’.”
64
 At the conceptual level, Badi-
ou determines the relationship between the necessary and the contingent, 
revealing the structural isomorphy between axiomatic theories and set-theo-
retical structures (i.e., “domains of interpretation”) as a process immanent to 
mathematical-cum-political production, revealing that formal theories are not 
given but constructed, thereby demonstrating that the constructive activity of 
“inscription” is an inherent aspect of conceptual behavior as a whole. At the 
level of action, Badiou’s message resounds vigorously, layered upon the recent 
Black Lives Matter protests following the police- and state-sanctioned murder 
of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. When Badiou denounces 
the waving of any national flag of any color or stripe as a requirement for one’s 
presence, he is seeking to abolish the conception of a foreign land and extolling 
the universality-ethics of the living world. This is a realist ethics which need 
not a concept of hospitality, for the arrival into an alien territory is necessarily 
dissolved, conceptually dismantled. 
Here, Badiou’s conceptual envelopment recalls the Hegelian notion of simulta-
neous immediacy and mediation, where to say that the “universal” is the “truth” 
of “sensible immediacy” means that the relation between conceptual form and 
matter, thought and being, is not that which lies between abstract determina-
tion and real content. The universal for Badiou, as for Hegel, is illustrated by 
sensory immediacy that remains “in-itself,” utterly empty of content and con-
joined to the evanescence of temporal and perspectival passing. Working in 
such a Hegelian register, Badiou reaffirms the idealist philosophical project of 
62
 Ibid., p. 41.
63
 Ibid.
64
 Ibid.

242
ekin erkan
political exigency par excellence, participating within the inconsistent terms of 
sensory givenness and guiding it towards the universal.
65
 
According to Hegel, we must “reject the opposition between an independent 
immediacy in the contents or facts of consciousness and an equally independ-
ent mediation, supposed incompatible with the former. The incompatibility is 
a mere assumption, an arbitrary assertion”.
66
 In the Phenomenology of Spirit, 
we the notion ‘alienation’ is moored to two German terms that Hegel utilizes: 
‘Entfremdung’ and ‘Entäusserung’.
67
 Although both have often been translated 
as ‘alienation’, in parsing this heteronomy with a sharpened conceptual scalpel 
at hand we ought to note that ‘Entfremdung’ more closely refers to estrangement 
as the process or state whereby consciousness is separated from one or more 
of the aspects required for consciousness to fully understand itself. ‘Entäusse-
rung’, on the other hand, is the process where consciousness externalizes itself 
in an object-ified form and, by way of the object, develops a more adequate un-
derstanding of itself. The former is linked to alienation and the latter external-
ization, proper, as (self)-externalization is the way consciousness learns that it 
is not purely a subject and has an ontological structure that not only incorpo-
rates a relation to objectivity but depends on this relation. In turn, consciousness 
is purposed and re-purposed, deracinated from the subject as it is distributed 
among a community in the form of concrete content—instrumentalized vide the 
form of work and the objects of labor. Thinking, the profoundest aspect of Spirit 
with its highest activity being to comprehend itself, unspools by way of its op-
erations, which direct themselves towards determinate activity, the aims of fini-
tude. Thus, we see how cognitive activity is directed not towards interiority but a 
determinate actuality. For Hegel, the nature of Spirit must particularize itself to 
become true and this is achieved by way of movement towards externalization: 
“consciousness is essentially this process—not a remaining static in the imme-
65
 It is crucial to disjoin the materialist dialectic, the philosophy of emancipation through 
truths, from historical materialism, the philosophy of alienation through language-bod-
ies, with the responsibility of creating a properly de-alienated world tethered to those 
“wild militants”. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, p. xv. 
66
 Georg W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Science [1817], ed. Klaus Brinkmann 
and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2010, §78.
67
 Georg W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], trans. A.W. Miller, Oxford University 
Press, Oxford 1977.

243
for a rationalist politics of the event
diate natural state but a passage through a process in which what is eternal or 
true, as its essence, becomes its object or purpose”.
68
 
For Hegel, the activity of object-ification transfers and converts empty objectivity 
into a manifestation of being in-and-for itself, i.e., self-determination. For “[a]s 
soon as the universal is externalised, it takes on a particular character. In isola-
tion, the inward dimension of the Idea would remain a lifeless abstraction, and 
it is only by means of activity that it acquires real existence”.
69
 Spirit abandons 
its original condition and discovers itself through what it performs, translating 
inner essence into reality by way of externalizing the universal concept and, 
thus, attaining a ‘real’ existence. For Hegel customs, laws, institutions, and sym-
bols of ancient nations were vessels of speculative ideas and products of Spirit 
but the true fruit of Spirit never comes first; the speculative Idea is externalized, 
it is always the manifestation point of rationality upon wordly existence, where 
the potentiality in consciousness, volition, and action finds itself inorganical-
ly excised through its determinate object. Spirit, for Hegel, is not abstract, be-
cause “it is consciousness, but it is also the object of consciousness—for it is in 
the nature of the spirit to have itself as its object. The spirit, then, is capable of 
thought, and its thought is that of a being which itself exists, and which thinks 
that it exists and how it exists”.
70
Does this heteronomy between ‘Entfremdung’ and ‘Entaüsserung’ imply synon-
ymy? Spirit’s self-externalization—that is, collective self-consciousness’ self-ex-
ternalization—is undoubtedly constitutive, but there is a marked difference be-
tween how Spirit realizes its freedom and those ways by which it becomes bound 
or subjected to a foreign agency or power, which is only, itself, an alienated or 
estranged form. That is, Hegel’s, all estrangement is externalization but not all 
externalization is estrangement. This account evidences the dialectical inter-
play between Spirit’s independence and dependence, wherefor Spirit frees itself 
form its subjection to nature, achieving spiritual independence/autonomy, and 
in doing so moves towards culture as a kind of “second nature” to which it then 
becomes subjected. It becomes dependent on societal institutions, customs, 
68
 Georg W. F. Hegel, Lectures of the Philosophy of History: The Lectures of 1825-1826, Vol III., 
trans. R.F. Brown, University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles 1990, p. 21.
69
 Hegel, Lectures of the Philosophy of History, p. 79. 
70
 Ibid., p. 45. 

244
ekin erkan
and norms in a manner by which Spirit’s freedom is significantly diminished. 
At once, naturalness or instinct is replicated within Spirit, manifesting within it 
in an estranged form while, institutions, customs, and norms begin to function 
as if they were nature. The anthropologist Arnold Gehlen would later similar-
ly refer to reified second nature but by way of mankind’s deficiency, using the 
term “ersatz organs” when describing technologies and institutions alike, with 
both of them compensating for the unfinished or lacking human; nonetheless, 
in both accounts in furnishing institutions qua norms culture becomes man’s 
“second nature”.
71
 
Accordingly, for Hegel every self-consciousness denaturalization engenders an 
unconscious re-naturalization, repressing Spirit. First there is subjection to ne-
cessity and then emancipation by way of generating another form of subjection. 
As Ludwig Feuerbach, a key disciple of Hegel, remarks: “Man—this is the mys-
tery of religion—projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes him-
self an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject; he 
thinks of himself is an object to himself, but as the object of an object, of another 
being than himself”.
72
 
Objectification thus yields the object to which the object-ifier is objecti-fied in-
ternally. This is the processual movement of alienation as double-objectification 
in Feuerbach and the young Marx.
73
 A naturalized scenography divulges itself 
where humans are necessarily self-externalizing, i.e., producers by nature. The 
termination of subjection is not the reinstatement of interiority—externalization 
is not the externalization of a pre-existing originary substance or the index of 
a vital source but, rather, a constant process of amendment, with this process 
generated because of the constituent non-identity of humans as self-transforming 
producers. Given this picture of Spirit, we are encouraged to see self-externali-
zation as resulting in either a state that is alienated or un-alienated depending 
on the circumstances in question. Mechanical compulsion and globalization, 
71
 Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl 
Pillemer (orig. 1940), Columbia University Press, New York 1988.
72
 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, Dover Philosophical 
Classics, New York 2008, p. 181.
73
 Marx roots this in human social relations, which become objectified via commodities. 
Feuerbach sees this as within the ambit of human self-consciousness and Marx sees this 
as human practice (i.e., social production).

245
for a rationalist politics of the event
as Badiou shows, collapses all norms and exercises of freedom into alienation 
such that we cannot measure the discrepancy between realized and unrealized 
collective human freedom, for our metaphysical collective Spirit is always being 
outpouched by way of a processual unfolding. 
Recall how, in the Science of Logic, the universal and singular form totality, the 
concept passing into concrete existence which is, itself, free and is none other 
than the ‘I’ or pure self-consciousness. The ‘I’ is the pure concept itself, the con-
cept that has come into determinate existence and finds itself instantiated into 
all manmade hardware.
74
 In Philosophy of Nature,
75
 Hegel constructs concepts 
that define Being by way of a tripartite model—the mechanical, the chemical, 
and the organic—demonstrating that these are instantiated into our productive 
experience of the world in equal part, with the living body sustaining this “con-
tradiction”.
76
 
Following Hegel, Badiou opposes the Kantian representational account of 
thought, along with the emphasis of finitude. Yet, Badiou also departs from and 
radicalizes the Hegelian productive experience via mathematical formalization, 
overcoming Hegel’s idealist solution of absolutizing the concept and the resid-
ual metaphysical conservatism in the Hegelian account of determinate being as 
“essence.” While retaining being (contra Deleuzean becoming), Badiou’s phi-
losophy begins by delivering thinking to its scientific condition, giving way to a 
materialist ontology subtracted from the categories of experience; accordingly, 
Badiou’s conceptual ideation also departs from the vagaries of the partition and 
distribution of the sensible.
77
 Badiou is perhaps one of the few living philoso-
phers who engages with both Plato’s philosophical pursuit of dialectical think-
ing and Quine’s challenge to intentional theories of meaning. Distinguishing 
form from content, mathematics for Badiou becomes apposite for the materi-
74
 For Hegel, “[t]he concept is free because the identity that exists in and for itself and consti-
tutes the necessity of substance exists at the same time as sublated or as positedness, and 
this positedness, as self-referring, is that very identity”. Georg W. F. Hegel, The Science of 
Logic [1816], trans. G.D. Giovanni, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2015, p. 513.
75
 Georg W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans. M.J. Petry (orig. 1842), Allen & Unwin, Syd -
ney 1970.
76
 Ibid., 10. 
77
 This is how Badiou distinguishes his non-dogmatic and non-essentialist materialism from 
those such as Ranciére.

246
ekin erkan
alist dialectic and, by extension, the politics of event. Badiou does not merely 
overcome the residual “essentialism” in empiricist and naturalist theories of 
meaning, but also goes beyond idealist attempts to identify the determinations 
of being in analogy with alethic modal conceptual relations of material incom-
patibility and consequence. Instead of extoling the negative as the engine of 
trans-historical and ontic individuation, from which all determinations can be 
subsumed into a deductive order and in which infinity proceeds from the point 
of Being, alone, Badiou’s materialist dialectic here involves a more primitive act 
of affirmation. Such affirmation underwrites action, preceding the differential 
oppositions that organize ontological and phenomenological determinations. 
Make no mistake, even with his politics Badiou reiterates the Platonic priority 
accorded to the pure ideality of mathematics in their extensional dimension, 
which escape the registers of meaning and the qualitative determinations of ex-
perience as we move towards apprehending the universal and eternal forms of 
being. Thus, Badiou provides us with a rationalist concept of radical politics, 
with every dialectical truth unspooling a cut upon the real, imparting the pos-
sibility of a fundamental Truth beyond the empiricist canvas. If the logic of the 
dialectic necessitates that we be resolutely materialist, in the spirit of Marx’s 
response to Hegel, then Badiou both avoids dualist solutions—which would 
necessitate separating the subject from material reality—while simultaneously 
avoiding the idealist solution of identifying logic and metaphysics, the forms of 
thought and the forms of being. Rejecting the reification of observational vocab-
ulary (i.e., empiricism) and theoretical vocabulary (i.e., naturalism), Badiou er-
uditely elides the immanent productivity and historicity of science. Instead, Ba-
diou’s political philosophy continues his rationalist-materialist epistemology of 
mathematics, which involves defusing the dichotomy between the representing 
form and represented fact. For Badiou, theorization and experimentation—that 
is, philosophy and action—are dialectically woven in a vector of formalization 
in which conceptual interpretation is periodically disturbed. Migrants and Mil-
itants, as well as Badiou’s political work writ large, could very well be seen as a 
program to exact such a disturbance. 
References
Badiou, Alain, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill, University of Minne-
sota Press, Minneapolis 2000

247
for a rationalist politics of the event
—  Being and Event, trans. by Oliver Feltham, Continuum, New York, 2006
—  Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Albert Toscano, Continuum, New York 
2008
—  Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels, Verso, New York, 2008
—  “ Affirmative Dialectics: from Logic to Anthropology”, The International Journal of Ba-
diou Studies 2 (2016), No. 1 
—  The Pornographic Age, trans. A. J. Bartlett & Justin Clemens, Bloomsbury Press, Lon-
don and New York 2019
—  Migrants and Militants, trans. Joseph Litvak, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK 2020
Balibar, Étienne, On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Commmunity, trans. 
Joshua David Jordan, Fordham University Press, New York, 2020
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1972], 
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, University of Minnesota Press, 
Minneapolis, 1983
—  A Thousand Plateaus [1980], trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 
Minneapolis 2005
Deleuze, Gilles, Proust and Signs [1964], trans. Richard Howard, University of Minnesota 
Press, Minneapolis 2000
—  Difference and Repetition [1968], trans. Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, New 
York 1994
—  The Logic of Sense [1969], trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, Columbia University 
Press, New York 1990
—  Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Zone Books, New York 
1991
—  Two Regimes of Madness—Texts and Interviews 1975 – 1995, trans. Ames Hodges and 
Mike Taormina, Semiotext(e), New York 2006 
—  Foucault [1986], trans. Seán Hand, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1988
—  Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature [1997], 
trans. Constantin V . Boundas, Columbia University Press, New York 1991.
—  Letters and Other Texts, trans. Anna Hodges, Semiotext(e), South Pasadena 2020
Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites 
Jacques Derrida to Respond, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2000
Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, Dover Philosophical 
Classics, New York 2008 
Gehlen, Arnold, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl 
Pillemer (orig. 1940), Columbia University Press, New York 1988
Hallward, Peter, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 
2003
Hegel, Georg W . F., Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Science [1817], ed. Klaus Brinkmann 
and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2010 

248
ekin erkan
—  Philosophy of Nature, trans. M.J. Petry (orig. 1842), Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1970
—  Lectures of the Philosophy of History: Introduction—Reason in History, trans. H.B. Nis-
bet, University of Cambridge Press, Cambridge, UK 1975
—  Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], trans. A.W. Miller, Oxford University Press, Oxford 
1977
—  Lectures of the Philosophy of History: The Lectures of 1825-1826, Vol III., trans. R.F. 
Brown, University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles 1990
—  The Science of Logic [1816], trans. G.D. Giovanni, Cambridge University Press, Cam -
bridge, UK 2015
Kleinherenbrink, Arjen, Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism, Edin-
burgh University Press, Edinburgh 2019
Koopman, Colin, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person, 
University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2019
Leibniz, Gottfried W ., “The Principles of Philosophy, or, The Monadology” [1714] in Philo-
sophical Essays, trans. and ed. Rorger Ariew and Daniel Garber, Hackett, Cambridge, 
MA 1989
McCumber, John, Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought, Acumen Pub-
lishing, Durham, UK 2011
Sacilotto, Daniel, Saving the Noumenon, (Under Review) 2020 
Žižek, Slavoj, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Verso, 
New York 2012