The first critical work to attempt the mammoth undertaking of reading Badiou's Being and Event as part of a sequence has often surprising, occasionally controversial results. Looking back on its publication Badiou declared: "I had inscribed my name in the history of philosophy". Later he was brave enough to admit that this inscription needed correction. The central elements of Badiou's philosophy only make sense when Being and Event is read through the corrective prism of its sequel, Logics of Worlds, published nearly twenty years later. At the same time as presenting the only complete overview of Badiou's philosophical project, this book is also the first to draw out the central component of Badiou's ontology: indifference. Concentrating on its use across the core elements Being and Event-the void, the multiple, the set and the event-Watkin demonstrates that no account of Badiou's ontology is complete unless it accepts that Badiou's philosophy is primarily a presentation of indifferent being. Badiou and Indifferent Being provides a detailed and lively section by section reading of Badiou's foundational work. It is a seminal source text for all Badiou readers.

prefaceacknowledgementsIntroduction:Subtractive Being; Nonrelationality; Indifference; Set Theory; Retroactive Axiomatic Reasoning; Transmissibility, Intelligibility and Communicability; Theory of the SubjectChapter One: Being: The One and the MultipleHow to Prove that the One Is-Not (Meditation One); The One as Operational Counts-as-One; The Ancient Problem of Classes; Situations and Structures; The Multiple; Presentation of Presentation; Reasoning on Being by Means of Axioms; How to Accept that Being Is-NotChapter Two: Being: Separation, Void, MarkMeditation Two; Set Theory and Aggregation as Collection (Meditation Three); Axiom of Separation; Notation and Self-Predication; The Pure Multiple is Real; The Void: Proper Name of Being (Meditation Four); The Void and Nothing; Void as Nomination; ZF+C: The Nine Axioms of Contemporary Set Theory (Meditation 5); Axiom of Extensionality; Axiom of Replacement or Substitution; The Void Set and In-Difference; Meditation Six: Aristotle; Conclusion: Pure Multiple and the VoidChapter Three: Being and ExcessPowerset Axiom (Meditation Seven); Point of Excess; Void as Name; Four Kinds of One-ness: One, Count-as-one, Unicity, forming-into-one; The State (Meditation Eight); Threat of the Void; Belonging, Inclusion and Parts; Typologies of Being; States and Indifference (Meditation Nine)Chapter Four: Nature and InfinityNature is Normal (Meditation Eleven); Transitive Sets: Cardinal and Ordinal (Meditation Twelve); Nature and Minimality; Nature and Intrication; The Inexistence of Nature; Potential and Actual Infinity; Proving the Actual Infinite; Doubling and Dedekind Infinites; Frege and EquinumerosityChapter Five: Infinity, Limit and SuccessionThe Limit; Succession and Limit; The Upper or Maximal Limit; Succession; Infinite Thought: Problems of Procedure (Meditation Thirteen); In-Different Other: The Second Existential Seal; There is some infinity in natural multiples (Meditation Fourteen); Conclusion on BeingChapter Six: The Event: History and Ultra-OneHistorical Singularities (Meditation Sixteen); Historical Singularities, and Evental Sites: Examples; Primal Ones and the Edge of the Void; Singularity vs. Normality; Self-Predication: The Matheme of the Event (Meditation Seventeen); The Problem of Naming; Axiom of Foundation (Meditation Eighteen); Implications of Foundation; Coda: Un-RelationChapter Seven: The Event, Intervention and FidelityThe Wager: yes or no (Meditation Twenty); Intervention; Seven Consequences of the Event; Axiom of Choice (Meditation Twenty Two); Choice is Indifferent; Due to Choice, Singularities Exist and they are Indifferent; Fidelity, Connection (Meditation Twenty Three)Chapter Eight: The GenericContinuum Hypothesis: (Meditation Twenty-Seven); The Thought of the Generic (Meditation Thirty-One); Truth and Knowledge: The Indifference of Avoidance; Generic Procedure; The Matheme of the Indiscernible (Meditation Thirty-Three); Easton's Theorem (Meditation Twenty-Six); Conditioning the Indiscernible; Indiscernible or Generic Subsets; The Existence of the Indiscernible (Meditation Thirty-Four); Extension; Is there a name for the discernible such that it can be said to exist?Chapter Nine: Forcing: Truth and SubjectTheory of the Subject (Meditation Thirty-Five); Subjectivization; Chance; Faith; Names; Forcing (Mediation Thirty-Six); Leibniz's Identity of Indiscernibles (Meditation Thirty); The Proof of Forcing (Meditation Thirty-Six); From the Indiscernible to the Undecidable; Conclusion (Meditation Thirty-Seven);bibliographyindex