School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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End date: 2015 × Start date: 2011 × Type: Masters Research thesis × Subject: cultural studies ×

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    After language: Alain Badiou and the linguistic turn
    Eade, Peter ( 2011)
    This thesis aims to explore whether and how theorists in the humanities today can talk about truth and universality after the critical and linguistic turns in philosophy. To approach this problem it examines the work of Alain Badiou, who explicitly seeks a theory of truth which is contemporary with these developments. Whether we are talking about analytic or continental philosophy, language came to dominate philosophical enquiry in the past century. In making the heretofore overlooked or obfuscated link between language and thought apparent, this put into question the nature and limits of reason, the autonomy of the knowing subject, and the representational or realist conception of truth. Moreover, it left in doubt the viability of philosophy itself (outside the perennial or self-effacing investigation of language) insofar as it seemed to rest on the solidity of these very tenets. For Badiou, the outcome of this trajectory is a pervasive sense of the finitude and limits of reason, and of the end or completion of philosophy. He seeks to reverse this by interrupting the linguistic turn with his own turn to mathematics. In particular, Badiou is able to discern in mathematics a mode of thought subtracted from its linguistic or finite determination, and able to grasp the real in a way unaccounted for by critical or linguistic philosophy. On this basis (the separation of thought from language or finitude as evidenced in mathematics) Badiou develops a theory of truth as infinite and eternal, whilst nonetheless realised in and through language. In this way, Badiou’s thought aims to account for the linguistic turn, and for critical philosophy more generally, whilst nonetheless subverting them internally. This leaves us with a compelling and original notion of truth, and of the role of truths in historical change, and in addition resituates philosophy as not so much the discoverer of truths, but their standard-bearer and compiler.