Discalimer: I have not read Badiou, only a very tangential knowledge. And it is late night here in California, and I just finished teaching film class, and I've had a couple of glasses of wine.
2nd disclaimer: I'm working through this as a post-structualist indentifying common areas among philosophers and tarot. It probably needs correction by a specialist.
3rd discalimer: this is fun, too. I'm curious to see where this gets me in terms of a new/different understanding of tarot and the problem of spirituality. Please see this as a hppy contribution to
jmd's fascinating insight. I hope you can give me the patience and benefit of the doubt to read through it.
That said, Badious looks very intriguing, and I am very interested to read in Wikipedia that he has a strong tie to Lacan and Althusser, both fairly important to my way of thinking. Lacan is one of my main men, so to speak. So, I'm going to wade into this a bit because I know post-structuralism well enough to be a danger. I may need more than one post for this.
OK.
Post- structuralist philosophy generally (and there are variations) questions the notion of truth (it does many other things besides). Truth is bracketed, i.e. understood as a term that must be used as a noun, but its value as a concept is doubted. Therefore, truth will be written as [truth] from here on out to indicate its brackected or doubtful nature. The big difference is that while most post-structuralist philosophers (of which Badiou is one) deeply question [truth] as a knowable quantity, Badiou engages it head on. To make a huge reduction, since what we perecieve is the perception of others (which we can call culture, religion, society) the idea of an identifiable [truth] falls away and becomes unidentifiable or in badiou's terms, "undecidable." Badious attacks the notion of the "undecidable" and says that we must "decide upon the undecidable." This is a major break in post-structuralism. Jacques Derrida must be rolling in his undecidable grave. However, Badiou does not acknowledge the existence of [truth] qua truth (no brackets in this case) because he sees it as a proximal position. That is, it is constructed through multiplicity. This is where he gets into set theory, and I'm sorry, I can't get it completely (language, not number theory, being my area of [truth]). But from what I can gather, the set is composed of a multiplicity, and of the one which can elminate the multiplicity, and also composed of the "not one." This brings us back to the post-strcutralist notion of "absence" as an important determining quality. Briefly, what is present is determined in large part by an unindentifiable absence. So he believes in the one--i.e. the individual, an important corrective to Foucault for whom the individual does not exist--and brings in the "return of the repressed" of Jacques Lacan via the idea of absence. That is, what is absent continues to affect us through repression.
According to Wikipedia, the status of the singularity means that Badiou does not accept an overarching strcuture, which makes him "atheistic." Definitely a problem for the Tarot in the sense of a larger meaning or the "multiplicity" (which many of us call energy) that forms a basis for our readings.
But we're not done, and I think tarot has an interesting link at the end of this ramble.
In Badiou's set theory, if I'm understanding correctly, a set is determined by a "domination"--the characterisitic of the set-- and by what is absent or "indiscernible" or "undecidable." In essence, a set is determined by the domination and the categories or naming it engenders, and by what is another part of the language funtion, which is undecidable, a touch of the "absent" or the "repressed" which also makes its way into langauge. Insert "long philosophical explanation here," which blissfully we will not.
OK, we're getting close to tarot.
Our approach to the area of absence--the undeidable--can be accomplsished within our reality, our world of society and culture through regular everyday discourse. But, apparently, it becomes the occupation of the subject--a term for the psychologically and socially matured individual--to actually name, make real, the undecidable event.
The subject is in turn determined at least in part by the idea of what is absent (the subject and the not-subject). It is in this absence where our interest in Tarot lies, and thus with us an individuals and a larger culture constructed by the present and the absent.
The subject must take a stand (one big problem with post-structuralism is the hesitation to take a stand, which requires a sense of [truth]), and the subject must approach a notion of [truth]. I'm thinking the subject does this through the notion of absence--in a sense almost something like what the subject understands but does not know (very Lacanian, could be neurosis).
Or in Tarot language, what the subject intuits but does not know.
Tarot has a direct tie in because absence relates to reality through the
unconscious; that is, what is absent (but in fact present and repressed) and appears to us through certain cultural structures and personal neuroses. Badiou seems also to be suggesting a personal approach to [truth] through his four [truth] categories of love, science, politics, and art.
wikipedia said:
Badiou's ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of: 'decide upon the undecidable'. It is to name the indiscernible, the generic set, and thus name the event that re-casts ontology in a new light. He identifies four domains by which a subject (who, it is important to note, becomes a subject through this process) nominates and maintains fidelity to an event: love, science, politics and art. By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a 'generic procedure', which in its undecideability is necessarily experimental, and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place.
What this means is that a subject creates fidelity to a provisional [truth] through which she/he makes sense of the world and which act for the subject as a categories of [truth] even though these categories may not in fact be true. (One important implication is that identity is a construct, it can change, but one we can regard as provisionally true.)
If we relate, as
jmd brilliantly suggests, the four suits to these categories of truth, we develop a method of discerning the indiscernible, of understanding the unspoken world through the truth categories of the four suits. We are able to give a name to what is indiscernable and undecidable. We take a stand in the world.
Badious and a tarot reader may depart on this point--or maybe not: Badiou would see these categories, I think, as metaphors, provisional and experimental, which we understand as true but are not; a tarot reader might see the [truth] as truth. For some, the implication that the spiritual is also a provisional truth will be disturbing. For others, they read this way already. But both might agree that in having fidelity to these categories we create "being." And that is the important activity.
Well, that was fun. I enjoyed it. Hope somebody else did as well. And it gives me an answer. I've been having a running argument with a friend about how I can read tarot but claim to be an agnostic, because isn't "energy" really God. But Badiou supplies an answer, I think.
Yours in [truth],
Nuncle
Damn, the wine is wearing off....
), then 'Justice is something like the truth of politics, or truth in the political field'... and the connection or link between Justice and the Sword has at various times been made.