The Social Ontology of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event

Abstract

The innovation of Alain Badiou’s theory of change, which has attracted a great amount of attention from scholars working in disciplines across humanities, social sciences, and art over the past two decades, cannot be appreciated independently of the account of situations prior to an event’s irruption, namely, the order of being that is conceived using modern set theory in his treatise on general ontology. Retracing the meticulous systematicity with which pre-evental situations are conceived in Being and Event, this paper offers a reconstruction of Badiou’s general ontology that points toward the potential therein for articulating an account of structures and situations that may be qualified as social.