Reading Badiou’s METAPHYSICS OF REAL HAPPINESS (3): non-deterministic dialectics

Badiou links the various anti-philosophical themes of chance, risk, freedom, and change to the notion of negation: « one can say that I am pursuing from one end of my philosophical enterprise to the other … a meditation on negation. I am simply trying to explain the possibility of change, the possibility of passing from a certain regime of laws of that which is to another regime, by the mediation of a protocol of a truth and of its subject. I am thus in dialectical thought, and in a dialectical theory of happiness, which is the paraconsistent negation of finitude by a complete infinite » (82).

So Badiou can say that his thought embodies a dialectics without determinism: « as my dialectical thought includes a figure of hasard, it is non determinist » (82).

Hegel’s Absolute is deterministic. Badiou argues that as he incorporates an element of chance in his system, his Absolute is non-deterministic. He tells us that in the futue book THE IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS he will discuss Hegel’s concept of the Absolute, as he agrees with Hegel and Plato that « all real happiness is a sort of provisional access to the Absolute » (82).

Describing the forthcoming book: « with the presence of an aleatory element, I introduce the principle of a cut which is not exactly homogeneous to the classical principles of negation. That is why, finally, I will be using three different and interwoven logics: classical logic, intuitionist logic, and paraconsistent logic » (83).

« At the same time, I will raise to the absolute the ontological system of reference – the thought of the pure multiple – by means of the truly sensational theory of « very big infinities » Threefold logic and infinity of infinities will be the key of a general theory of happiness » (83).