Becky Vartabedian

MULTIPLICITY
AND
ONTOLOGY
IN
DELEUZE
AND
BADIOU
Multiplicity and Ontology in Deleuze and Badiou
 Becky Vartabedian

Multiplicity and
Ontology in Deleuze
and Badiou
Becky Vartabedian
Regis University
Denver, CO, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-76836-6 ISBN 978-3-319-76837-3  (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76837-3

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For AV
 Acknowledgements

This book develops themes from my doctoral dissertation, “Rethinking

Multiplicity After Deleuze and Badiou,” which I defended at Duquesne
University in 2015. There, Dan Selcer, Jay Lampert, and Fred Evans
were the first stewards of these ideas. Their attention to my work sub-
stantially improved it; I hope their influence comes through in the better
parts of this text, though I am responsible for any errors and all bone-
headed notions contained herein. Jim Swindal was instrumental in my
arrival at Duquesne, and Joan Thompson’s friendship went a long way
to keep me there. I was also fortunate to have encountered a community
that remains an ongoing source of support and encouragement as we’ve
each forged ahead, philosophically and otherwise; thanks to Stephanie
Adair, Taine Duncan, John Fritz, Justin Habash, Chelsea Harry, Matt
Lovett, H.A. Nethery, and Kelsey Ward. “Duquesne West” was estab-
lished when Boram Jeong recently arrived in Denver; much of this text
was revised and improved while sharing coffee and her good company.
At Palgrave Macmillan, Phil Getz shepherded this work through
the proposal and contract, and Amy Invernizzi promptly and helpfully
replied to my manifold questions; I appreciate their efforts to give these
ideas a home. I am also grateful to the two anonymous readers who
green-lit the proposal and assessed early chapter drafts; I thank them for
their attention and thoughtful comments, which have improved this text.
Nathan Eckstrand offered me a chance to discuss commitments at the
heart of this book on the Blog of the American Philosophical Association in
November 2017, an opportunity I deeply appreciate.

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

Kent Talmage-Bowers was the first to introduce me to philosophy

and its possibilities in classes at Northglenn High School almost 25 years
ago, which at the time I vehemently (and somewhat legendarily) resisted.
Now, my scholarly work aspires to advance Kent’s insistence on under-
standing ideas in their context, and his practices of teaching are the bed-
rock of my own work with students. I also express my gratitude for the
late Don McKenzie, who remains among my greatest teachers and is the
inspiration for the incredulous looks I offer in response to the ambitious
ideas of my own students. Karen Adkins has weathered most of my phil-
osophical ideas, including some genuinely terrible ones about Descartes
in 1999, and has always improved them; I wouldn’t be where I am with-
out her. Maria Talero thought I was fit for this style of life and I thank
her for her faith. It is a pleasure to read and to think with Sarah Pessin,
who brings good humor and uncommon brilliance to philosophical pur-
suit, and with Dan Selcer, who remains a keen interlocutor, generous
collaborator, and incisive mentor.
My colleagues in the Philosophy department at Regis University,
including the aforementioned Karen Adkins, Aaron Conley, Ron DiSanto,
Steve Doty, Tom Duggan, Abigail Gosselin, Gregory Grobmeier, Jason
Taylor, and Ted Zenzinger, each make Regis a unique place to teach
and to think. Jim Seibert kindly allowed me to sit in on his 2013 “Logic
and Proof ” seminar and responded to left-field questions about set the-
ory, even in the summer. Megan Patnott checked some of my work, for
which I am grateful. Gabriela Carrión, Eric Fretz, Debbie Gaensbauer,
Cath Kleier, Dave Law, Nate Matlock, Sally O’Laughlin, Susan Sci, Tim
Trenary, Quinn and Brent Waller, and Trudi Wright are excellent col-
leagues and better friends.
Emily Roby skillfully clears roadblocks that would threaten my work’s
progress, clearing I’m unable to do on my own. The York Street crew
kept the brain connected to the body and the body firmly rooted in a
community for three and a half years; their good humor and camrade-
rie supported my work. Thanks especially to Crawford Miller, Sharon
Moskowitz, Andrew Sapoznik, and Erich Slouf. My life and work
are rich and engaging because Kirsten Ahrendt and Alyssa Caballero
Ahrendt, Pilar Allen, Justin, Tracy, and Olive Berg, Paul and Julie
Cunningham, Dave DeNovellis, Molly Garrison, Matt Hrutkay and Tom
Eubanks, Sarah Marvez and Donell Humphrey, and Marilyn Talmage-
Bowers are each a part.
 Acknowledgements    ix

I benefit from regular care and feeding from the Case, Ketelsen,
Vartabedian, and González families. Thanks to Chipper and Meggy,
Patric, Kerry, Eric, Avery, Maya, and Simone; Betty and Mike, Matt,
Jen, Emmett, and Maeve; and Gina, Oscar, and Pilar. I regularly care for
and feed the greatest of canine companions, Lilly and Luke Vartabedian,
whose requests for pets or a run outside are always well-timed. I miss
my grandparents, Dariel and Nancy Case and Ed and Sue Simokat, terri-
bly, and remain deeply grateful for the intellectual and interpersonal gifts
they gave so freely.
It is a photograph of Andrew Vartabedian’s that appears on this
book’s cover, and I’m delighted that this occasions some of our work to
be presented together. He is the original reader of Deleuze and Guattari
in our house, having introduced me to the notion of a rhizome on an
evening walk many years ago. Andrew’s curiosity propels our partnership
in unexpected directions, and the intensity of his friendship is a unique
pleasure. It is the greatest honor of my life to share it with him. Thank
you, my dear; you’re the best.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Lower Layers 1

Orientations 2
Badiou’s Multiplicities 4
Deleuze’s Multiplicities 7
Multiplicity and Mannigfaltigkeit 9
Method 12
Plan of the Text 15
References 21

2 Engagements, 1976–1997: History of a Misunderstanding 25

1976–1977: Root, Rhizome, Potato 26
1976: Rhizome 26
1977: Potatoes, Cuts 30
1991: Logic and Multiplicity 37
Philosophy, Concept, Science, Function, and Event 38
Logic and Badiou 39
1997 (and Beyond): The Clamor over Clamor 42
Conclusion 48
References 51

xi
xii    Contents

3 Structure: Multiplicity and Multiple in Deleuze and

Badiou 55
Multiplicities: Riemann, Deleuze, Deleuze–Guattari 56
Riemannian Ideas 57
Reading Riemann in the Virtual Idea 64
Finding Riemann in Smooth and Striated Space 67
Summary 69
Multiplicities: Cantor, Badiou 70
Cantor’s Inconsistent and Consistent Multiples 70
Badiou’s Inconsistent Multiple 74
Breaking with Cantor: Separation and Comprehension 79
Breaking with Cantor: Absolute or Nothing 82
Summary 86
Conclusion 87
References 90

4 Procedures: One, Multiple, Subtraction 93

Badiou’s One-ness: Void, Scission 94
From Multiple to One: Void 95
From Multiple to One: Scission 104
Scission, Void, One-ness 108
One and Multiplicity in Deleuze and Guattari: Consolidation,
Subtraction 109
Consolidation and the Virtual Idea 111
Subtraction and ‘Making the Multiple’ 119
Consolidation and Subtraction in “Example 1” 125
Summary 129
Conclusion 129
References 133

5 Re-engagements 137
Subtractive Analysis: n − 1 and a ‘General Subtraction’
in Badiou 139
Special and General: Ontology, Subtraction 140
Limitations and Liabilities in Badiou’s Meta-ontological
Subtraction 147
Summary 155
 Contents    xiii

Conversation and Critique 156

A Mismatched Multiplicity 156
Structures, Rigidity, and Stasis 160
Monotonous Productions, Multiplicity, and Model Horizons 163
Conclusion 169
References 171

6 Conclusion: Multiplicity, Ontology, Deleuze, Badiou 175

Other Lineages 178
New Frontiers 180
References 183

Index 185
 Abbreviations

Major Texts by Badiou

BE Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum,

2005.
CT Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology. Translated,
edited, and with an introduction by Norman Madarasz. Intersections:
Philosophy and Critical Theory, edited by Rodophe Gasché. Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 2006.
DCB Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Translated by Louise Burchill. Theory out
of Bounds Series. Minneapolis, MN: Universit of Minnesota Press, 2000.
FP “The Fascism of the Potato.” In The Adventure of French Philosophy,
edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels, 191–201. London: Verso,
2012.
TS Theory of the Subject. Translated and with an Introduction by Bruno
Bosteels. London: Continuum, 2009.
TW Theoretical Writings. Edited and Translated by Ray Brassier and Alberto
Toscano. London: Continuum, 2004.

Major Text by Deleuze

DR Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York:

Columbia University Press, 1994.

xv
xvi    Abbreviations

Major Texts by Deleuze and Guattari

R “Rhizome: Introduction.” Translated by Paul Patton. I & C 8
(Spring 1981): 49–71.
TP A Thousand Plateaus, Volume 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987.
WP What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Ordinary comparison of interval (1/4, 3/4) with interval

(1/4, 1/2) 62
Fig. 3.2 Reading intervals (1/4, 3/4) and (1/4, 1/2) for shared
subspaces 62
Fig. 4.1 The cogito 126

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Lower Layers

This book investigates multiplicity in work by Gilles Deleuze (1925–

1995), writing by Deleuze with his collaborator Félix Guattari (1930–
1992), and in work by Alain Badiou (1937–). This investigation
concerns multiplicity as an alternative to a fundamental assertion con-
cerning the nature of being; for Deleuze writing with Guattari and for
Badiou, being is neither One nor many, but multiplicity. In situating
their respective work according to this shared commitment to multiplic-
ity, a second commitment-in-common to multiplicity articulated with
mathematical concepts and tools comes into view. Deleuze and Guattari
deploy Bernhard Riemann’s innovations in non-Euclidean geometry, and
a particular interpretation of differential calculus. In Badiou’s case, it is
his well-documented use of principles at the foundation of set theory
and its revisions in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, particularly
Cantor’s inconsistent and consistent multiples, the Zermelo–Fraenkel
axiom system, and insights from Bourbaki.
This book is also a work of imagination. In the pages that follow, I
invite the reader to consider a conversation that unfolded in the pages
of pamphlets and texts. I reconstruct a series of exchanges between
1976 (with the publication of Deleuze and Guattari’s pamphlet titled,
“Rhizome—Introduction”) and 1997, with Badiou’s publication of
Deleuze: la clameur de l’être, a text published in English as Deleuze: The
Clamor of Being (2000; hereafter Clamor). The conversation, when it
turns to questions of multiplicity and ontology, reveals objections and
demands concerning the structure of multiplicity, the way certain of the

© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. Vartabedian, Multiplicity and Ontology in Deleuze and Badiou,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76837-3_1
2  B. Vartabedian

mathematical and conceptual tools are deployed to organize being qua

being, and the procedures these chosen structures prescribe for handling
any one in relation to this multiplicity. The prospects for approaching
this as a conversation are aided considerably by my temporal distance
from the original set of exchanges. I am, as it will become clear below,
one in a lineage of thinkers that have taken up the Deleuze–Badiou
knot; my contribution emphasizes the unique strategies each thinker
takes when approaching the so-called “being question,” and identifies
the places where these differences give way to continuous commitments,
namely the demand to arrive at and maintain the multiple using some
form of subtractive procedure.
In approaching Deleuze with Guattari and Badiou at the site of mul-
tiplicity, I do so with Melville in mind; I have long been fascinated with
that exchange on the deck of the Pequod, in which Ahab enjoins young
Starbuck to “come closer … thou requirest a little lower layer.” Ahab’s
comment is something of an existential injunction and, for the purposes
of this project, a useful procedural reminder. As a reader of the Deleuze–
Badiou corpus and one attentive to their exchanges, it is significant to
consider how, precisely, Deleuze and Badiou each bring their reader to
the site of multiplicity in their ontological projects, how they identify
multiplicity with a fundamental aspect of being; and how, in Melvillian
parlance, they, respectively, admonish their readers to seek this lower
layer underwriting that which appears, a lower layer linked to and funda-
mental to its operation.

Orientations
The initiating provocation for this text is found in a different conversation,
begun by the father–son team of Ricardo L. and David Nirenberg. Their
2011 article, “Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology,”
objects to the so-called “radical thesis” Badiou proposes in Being
and Event, which appears in shorthand as “mathematics = ontology”
(BE xiii). The Nirenbergs challenge the contention that mathemati-
cal ontology, in general, and especially that proposed by Badiou, pro-
duces the sorts of things it claims to; for example, they insist that
Badiou’s particular—and by their lights, peculiar—use of set theory is
selective in its deployment and its consequences. The Nirenbergs claim
that set theory cannot be used to justify the philosophical or political
 1  INTRODUCTION: LOWER LAYERS  3

conjectures Badiou draws in Being and Event, and further that the iden-
tity of ontology and mathematics Badiou proposes precludes the possibility
for “pathic” elements, namely human thought, to emerge from the mathe-
matical system (Nirenberg and Nirenberg 2011, 606–612). This approach,
they insist, “will entail such a drastic loss of life and experience that the
result can never amount to an ontology in any humanly meaningful sense”
(Nirenberg and Nirenberg 2011, 586). The Nirenbergs operate according
to the view that ontology is an inquiry into being and questions related to
existence as these pertain to humans; they laud the resources of phenome-
nology, for example, insofar as this method derives conclusions of what it is
“to be” from lived experience. By emptying ontology of these ­resources—
a traditionally human center and the lived experience that accrues to it—
the Nirenbergs see Badiou’s use of set theory to be so reckless as to endan-
ger an entire tradition of thought.
The Nirenbergs’ claims occasion replies from A.J. Bartlett, Justin
Clemens, and Badiou himself. In a subsequent volume of Critical
Inquiry, the discussion unfolds with accusations that one camp has fun-
damentally misunderstood the other. Bartlett and Clemens insist that the
Nirenbergs have not read Badiou’s oeuvre carefully; the Nirenbergs fail
to understand that ontology as mathematics, for Badiou, really functions
as a “figure of philosophical fiction” (Bartlett and Clemens 2012, 368).
Badiou, explaining that Bartlett and Clemens respond to the Nirenbergs
with “polite irony,” calls the criticism raised by the Nirenbergs “stupid”
(2012, 363–364). While significant points both in defense and critique
of Badiou’s program are raised in these pages, the interlocutors seem
largely to talk past one another; the insights are, unfortunately, lost in
the polemical nature of the interchange.
As I was reading this exchange, however, I felt like the conversation
was missing something crucial, both as an opportunity for inquiry and a
chance for defense. A closer look at the “radical thesis” Badiou proposes
in Being and Event situates “mathematics is ontology” as the consequent
of a preliminary claim: “Insofar as being, qua being, is nothing other
than pure multiplicity, it is legitimate to say that ontology, the science
of being qua being, is nothing other than mathematics itself ” (BE xiii).
Badiou spends the first five meditations of Being and Event arguing for
the antecedent claim that being qua being is multiplicity. This claim is
not mentioned in the Nirenberg–Bartlett–Clemens–Badiou contretemps;
it is neither a matter of common sense nor established fact, and it led me
4  B. Vartabedian

to ask a further question following this debate: What does Badiou mean
when he claims being qua being is pure multiplicity?

Badiou’s Multiplicities
Badiou’s claim that being is pure multiplicity situates his project in the
debate persisting since Parmenides as to whether being is One or many.
Badiou’s opening salvo in Meditation One of Being and Event is to show
this debate as having stagnated:

For if being is one, then one must posit that what is not one, the multiple,
is not. But this is unacceptable for thought, because what is presented is
multiple and one cannot see how there could be an access to being out-
side all presentation … On the other hand, if presentation is, then the
multiple necessarily is. It follows that being is no longer reciprocal with
one and thus it is no longer necessary to consider as one what presents
itself, inasmuch as it is. This conclusion is equally unacceptable to thought
because presentation is only this multiple inasmuch as what it presents can
be counted as one; and so on. (BE 23)

Badiou identifies here two positions that are “unacceptable to thought.”

The first is the claim that being is not multiple; this is unacceptable
because we experience a kind of multiplicity and diversity of things in the
world. In other words, the presence of different kinds of things suggests
to us that there are different ways in which a thing can be. However, and
this is the second “unacceptable” claim, each of these different sorts of
things presents itself to us as unified, as one thing. These positions are so
entrenched, Badiou claims, that he must enact a decision that breaks the
impasse and can restart ontological questioning anew. This decision con-
sists in the claim that “the one is not” (BE 23), which means by implica-
tion that the multiple is Badiou’s preferred solution to the question of
being, at least as he has presented the available options.
Badiou observes a kind of dispositional affinity with the atomist pro-
grams associated with Democritus and Leucippus or the Epicureans and
Lucretius, for whom ‘the many’ are bodies arranged in void. However,
and in spite of these alignments, Badiou’s pure multiple is not material
and does not consist in the ‘bodies’ associated with these older posi-
tions. Rather, Badiou’s multiple is articulated in three ways, each accord-
ing to mathematical innovations: The first and second—inconsistent and
 1  INTRODUCTION: LOWER LAYERS  5

consistent multiplicities—are derived from work by Georg Cantor. The

third—generic multiplicity—comes from Paul Cohen’s more contempo-
rary work.
Georg Cantor distinguishes two types of multiplicity as a means of
avoiding a common “no set of all sets” paradox in the early development
of set theory, particularly with respect to the ordinal numbers (e.g., first,
second, third). To avoid the contradiction that arises from the presence of
an ordinal not counted in the set of all ordinals, Cantor posits a consist-
ent multiple that is closed and organized according to the typical rules
of the set; the inconsistent multiple, by contrast, is neither closed nor
organized. It functions as an “infinity of infinities,” and secures the pos-
sibility for the ordinal numbers to proceed unencumbered by closure.
Badiou uses the distinction between consistent and inconsistent mul-
tiplicity to establish being qua being as an inconsistent multiple of pre-
cisely the type Cantor prescribes. Badiou breaks with Cantor, however,
over the claim that an inconsistent multiplicity can be ‘counted’ by some
Absolute, divine being. Instead, Badiou argues that inconsistent multi-
plicity is a multiplicity of no-thing, an open infinity that cannot be total-
ized. In these terms, inconsistent multiplicity constitutes “the excess
presented to thought,” but technically speaking inconsistent multiplicity
does not make itself available to thought except through its expression in
the void set, whose mark is Ø.
Consistent multiplicity for Badiou, is the mathematic template for
the second aspect of the decision; if the One is not, it is still possible
to claim, as Badiou does, “that there is Oneness” (BE 23). If being qua
being is pure multiplicity, it is possible to derive from that pure multi-
ple—using operations of set theory—one as a result. Badiou uses the
axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel (ZF) set theory to form the void set into
one, which accomplishes the work of making (at least) one thing from an
infinite, open no-thing, without jeopardizing the nature of inconsistent
multiplicity. Badiou depends on this move to underwrite the presence of
the count-as-one as the primary mechanism of his ontology.
Generic multiplicity, while outside the scope of this project, reflects
a significant interpretation of multiplicity on which Badiou’s notion of
truth and the truth-procedure depend. In Meditation 33 of Being and
Event, Badiou assigns the generic multiple as a ‘being of the truth.’ In
other words, the generic multiple is the ontological framework that
accounts for the presence of a truth, but it is not identical to the truth
itself (BE 355). He explains that for ontology to produce a framework
6  B. Vartabedian

for generic multiplicity, it must absorb “the revolution introduced by

(Paul J.) Cohen in 1963” (BE 355). There are several conditions that
frame Badiou’s work with the generic, conditions he outlines in the
opening paragraphs of Meditation 33. Badiou begins by claiming, “It is
impossible for mathematical ontology to dispose of a concept of truth,
because any truth is post-evental, and the paradoxical multiple that is the
event is prohibited from being by that ontology. The process of truth
entirely escapes ontology” (BE 355). This claim must be read from a
position where the ZF axioms apply; that is, because the matheme of the
event essentially violates the rules of well-formed sets on which ZF set
theory depends, a concept of truth—dependent as it is on a ‘paradoxical’
multiple—cannot be managed by an ontology limited to ZF set theory.
This is intended to justify the extension to Cohen’s work on the generic.
The radical thesis that animates Badiou’s work—if being qua being
is pure multiplicity, then ontology is mathematics—mobilizes a gen-
eral notion of multiplicity in the three senses I’ve described previously.
‘Pure multiplicity’ is a label reserved for inconsistency, while consistent
and generic multiplicities describe the mechanisms of ontology and the
identification of truths, respectively. However, and as readers of Badiou’s
work know, this assignment is not an altogether tidy one. Although pure
multiplicity is only inconsistent, its specter haunts ontological construc-
tions. Consistent multiples are a means of “containing” a portion of
inconsistency, expressed by its proper name Ø. However, these proce-
dures are not always successful. An event results insofar as inconsistent
multiplicity as Ø is insufficiently “contained” by procedures of consist-
ency. Furthermore (albeit more remotely), a generic multiplicity depends
on inconsistency-having-erupted for Truth and truths to proceed.
My discussion of Badiou’s multiplicity focuses on inconsistent multi-
plicity as both foundational conceit and disruptive possibility. It is the
commitment that being qua being is pure multiplicity—that antecedent
of Badiou’s own radical thesis—that must be tended to for the claim
that mathematics is ontology to remain legible. In cases where Badiou
departs from this strict presentation, he opens his ontological position
to criticism; this criticism is, as I will show, potentially more destructive
than claims about mathematics, since it is leveled at the most basic com-
mitment underwriting the system. This weakness is exposed by several
commentators, and even by Badiou himself when situating his position as
an alternative to that of Heidegger, for example.1 I offer elaboration of
these criticisms and the liabilities these raise in Chapter 5.
 1  INTRODUCTION: LOWER LAYERS  7

Deleuze’s Multiplicities
For Gilles Deleuze, as Manuel DeLanda (2002, 9) explains, ­multiplicity
“is one (concept) that stands out for its longevity … (multiplicity) makes
its appearance in his early books and remains one of central impor-
tance, with almost unchanged meaning and function, until his final
work.” Deleuze deploys multiplicity in Bergsonism to describe Bergson’s
­identification of the traditional ontological problem of one and many as
a ‘false problem’ in the history of philosophy (Deleuze 1991, 39) and
devotes several pages to unpacking multiplicity as a more adequate foun-
dation for the nature of being. In Difference and Repetition, multiplic-
ity appears in the presentation of his positive position as an equivalence
with the virtual idea. Deleuze claims, “Ideas are multiplicities; every
idea is a multiplicity or a variety” (DR 182). The virtual idea, one half
of the ontological system Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition
(1968/1994), is an alternative to the Kantian idea. The latter, proposed
in the Schematism and appealing to the inner sense of time, fails to
bridge the gap between a priori categories and the empirical intuitions
the categories are said to govern. Deleuze finds this inadequate, since
this process proposes the idea is a result of external conditioning—the
idea only emerges after time has organized categories and intuitions.
The former, Deleuze’s contribution, provides a framework for the
distribution of difference and their relation; it is the work with the dif-
ferential dy/dx that produces differences, and it is the framework of mul-
tiplicity that accounts for their distribution and relation. Contrary to the
external conditioning of the Kantian idea, Deleuze proposes a procedure
of internal genesis—that is, the idea is expressed by its own conditions in
communication with one another; the idea is the expression, the event,
of that which constitutes it. This is, conceivably, a theory of the idea
‘without any gaps,’ without any potential breakdowns emerging from a
lapse in the inner sense of time. This is one layer of the virtual idea, or
one of its philosophical valences. That the virtual idea is a multiplicity is
perhaps trickier, since the referents include Bergson, Husserl, Riemann
(multiplicity’s persona), and Aristotle more remotely; that it appears
late in Difference and Repetition is also a complicating factor, since the
degree of philosophical complexity through which Deleuze’s presenta-
tion has passed is staggering.
Whatever this virtual idea consists in, and, however, the inter-
nal genesis is to come about in relation to it, Deleuze insists that it is
8  B. Vartabedian

a multiplicity and the multiplicity must be interpreted according to

a “Reimannian usage” (DR 182).2 This reference points Deleuze’s
reader to Bernhard Riemann’s analysis in the “Hypotheses” and his
innovative analysis of continuous magnitudes in relation to manifolds
(Mannigfaltigkeit). Though their presentation originates in Aristotle’s
Categories, Riemann elaborates two key features of continuous mag-
nitudes in the 1854 text, “On the Hypotheses Which Lie at the Bases
of Geometry” (hereafter “Hypotheses”): the first is the development of
multiply-extended or n-dimensional manifolds; the second is the asser-
tion that these are measured or compared per their own dimensional-
ity—they are not measured according to a static or background space.
Ontologically, Deleuze follows Bergson in positing multiplicity as
an alternative to one or many when it comes to assessing the nature of
being. The implications of Deleuze’s choice of multiplicity as an onto-
logical framework and the nature of this multiplicity as continuous are
indicated when Deleuze claims multiplicity organizes “the many as
such,” and that this scheme of organization “has no need whatsoever of
unity in order to form a system” (DR 182). Continuous manifolds con-
stitute transitions or pathways between points or subspaces in those man-
ifolds; significantly, and as Riemann claims, the relationships constituting
an extended manifold are immanently derived. By implication, these are
not subject to ambient space for their determination. Furthermore, the
relationships holding among points can become more complex insofar as
more points or neighborhoods become available for connection.
Attention to the presence of multiplicity in A Thousand Plateaus
(1980/1987) reveals an explicit discussion of Riemannian geometry as
one among several models in “1440: The Smooth and the Striated.” In
this case, concerns of multiplicity and structure are re-articulated along-
side several other examples, designed to illustrate the dynamic relation-
ship between “nomad space and sedentary space” (TP 474), roughly
spaces that allow for free circulation (smooth or nomad space) and spaces
that are more rigidly organized or controlled (striated or sedentary
space). In What is Philosophy? (1991/1994), Deleuze and Guattari weave
language of multiplicity, neighborhood, and dimension into their analysis
of Descartes’ cogito. It is the first example of this late text; that it appears
here as vocabulary key to illustrating the construction and analysis of the
concept confirms its significance over the long arc of Deleuze’s oeuvre.
Indeed, and as I show in Chapter 4, the language of this presentation
is Riemannian language, building a foundational concept in the history
 1  INTRODUCTION: LOWER LAYERS  9

of philosophy from these convenient and long-established mathematical

tools.
Riemann’s work yields one additional kernel, significant for under-
standing Deleuze and Guattari’s work with multiplicity; late in the dis-
cussion of extension, Riemann counters the n + 1 formula for creating
dimension with a formula—marked n − 1—for analyzing the multi-
plicity. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly develop this subtractive figure in
“Rhizome—Introduction” (1976/1981) and as such inaugurate a pro-
cedure of subtraction fundamental to ontological analysis in Deleuze and
Guattari’s work; I argue this procedure is present in Badiou’s work as
well.

Multiplicity and Mannigfaltigkeit
There is one additional ‘sense’ of multiplicity I depend on in this project,
and that is its conceptual heritage as Mannigfaltige or Mannigfaltigkeit.
This term is translated in Immanuel Kant’s work as ‘manifold,’ and is
identified as the predecessor of Riemann’s concept of manifoldness, and
subsequently informs the use of the term by Husserl and Bergson, as well
as Deleuze.3 Two versions of Mannigfaltige in Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason require attention: first, Mannigfaltige der Erscheinung, the man-
ifold of appearance discussed in the Transcendental Aesthetic; second,
Mannigfaltige der Vorstellungen, the manifold of representation, discussed
in the Transcendental Deduction (both A and B versions). In these cases,
the manifold is associated with something external to the subject: in the
Transcendental Aesthetic, the manifold of apperance is tethered to the
empirical object of intuition (or the immediate object of sense-experience);
in the Transcendental Deduction(s) the manifold is tethered to the tran-
scendental object of representation, or the object = X.
The manifold of appearance characterizes the object of sense-experience.
This object is undetermined, indicating that whatever it is is informa-
tion unavailable to the subject; put another way, the “being of the man-
ifold” is nothing other to the mind than undetermined (Kant 1998,
A22/B37). As an undetermined field of data, the manifold of appear-
ance is structured from without. The mind, in its positing the struc-
ture of space, determines objects according to other objects, using tools
of “form, magnitude, and relation” (Kant 1998, A22/B37). Perhaps
peculiarly, Kant (1998, A28/B44) argues that space has both “empiri-
cal reality” insofar as it structures “all possible outer experience” and
10  B. Vartabedian

“transcendental ideality,” insofar as it “is nothing as soon as we leave out

the condition of the possibility of all experience.” As an intuited con-
dition of the mind, space organizes the manifold of outer appearances
according to their simultaneity, or appearing together; the a priori intui-
tion of time, as it is presented in the Transcendental Aesthetic, organizes
appearances according to succession. These structures shape experience
(its empirical reality), but are not attributable to objects themselves—
only to minds that engage the manifold (its transcendental ideality). The
manifold thus has no power to organize itself; some structuring intel-
lect is required to bring organization and determination to the unde-
termined. The work of the Transcendental Aesthetic reveals that objects
aren’t actually experienced per se, but rather the manifold as an undeter-
mined field of data is structured (using outer and inner senses of space
and time, respectively) by the mind according to determinate relations of
succession and simultaneity.
The second version of the manifold deals with the re-presentation of
the manifold in the understanding. In the A Deduction, the object is rel-
egated to ‘placeholder,’ or object = X, while the understanding applies
the categories to the object = X.4 The categories give the conditions
by which objects can be organized in addition to the resources of space
and time, and lend a semblance of objectivity to experience, thus pro-
viding the conditions by which judgments about objects are possible.
In other words, the faculty of sensibility—that initial, sensory encounter
with an object—simply identifies that “something” is out there; the cat-
egories describe that “something out there” according to more specific
parameters.
Before arriving at the object = X, Kant (1998, A104) begins by
describing the “objects of representations,” which “must not be
regarded in themselves,” but rather regarded only according to the way
they are represented. While objects cannot be known or their essence
understood by cognition, the object, in general, functions as the req-
uisite source of corresponding representations. On account of this dual
edge—both the necessity of the object and the limitation of cognition
to apprehend it in itself—Kant (1998, A104) says, “It is easy to see that
this object must be thought of only as something in general = X, since
outside of our cognition we have nothing that we could set over against
this cognition as corresponding to it.” The object = X, then, functions
as a placeholder such that my representation of any object’s appearance
might be continuous. Exterior to the work of cognition, there are no
 1  INTRODUCTION: LOWER LAYERS  11

determinations of objects whatever. This limitation appears as early as the

discussion of appearance in the Transcendental Aesthetic, but Kant insists
that the object = X is necessary for underwriting the continuity of rep-
resentation (1998, A105).
This object = X, Kant (1998, A105) explains, is only a correspond-
ent to our representations and, “because it should be something dis-
tinct from all our representations, is nothing for us.” Like the content
of the manifold of appearance, the object is necessary for the continuity
of representation, but remains inaccessible to the faculty of understand-
ing. However, the object as that which is known necessitates a unity, and
this unity “can be nothing other than the formal unity of the conscious-
ness in the synthesis of the manifold of the representations” (Kant 1998,
A105). A theme recurs here—the object is present as a necessary con-
dition for the unity of representation, but the object gains no further
definition qua object in this analysis. The object of intuition persists as a
condition for continuous cognition, but beyond that, it remains undeter-
mined. Additionally, Kant (1998, A109) explains that the work of cogni-
tion can bring the understanding to an objective reality in which “all of
our empirical concepts can provide relation to an object.” However, this
relation marks the boundary of cognition, since the object is the object
qua transcendental object = X (Kant 1998, A110). The aim of the A
Deduction is, in part, to explain the conditions by which cognition is
possible at all.
The B Deduction opens with an investigation into the “possibility of
a combination in general” (B129), accomplished by the ‘interior’ func-
tions organizing the manifold rather than positing the transcenden-
tal object = X as an exterior source and limit of cognition. However,
Kant’s claims in the B Deduction are consonant with those made in the
A Deduction insofar as the object and its qualities mark the boundary
of cognitive analysis. The understanding organizes and determines that
which is represented to it; it cannot go beyond this data toward any con-
clusion about the re-presented manifold in itself. The presentation of
manifold in the A and B Deductions above reinforces the claim that the
object of cognition is unknown in itself, and in spite of its elevation to
transcendental object or an object, in general, its status remains undeter-
mined except in connection with the actions of a cognizing subject.
Though I’ve focused here on the object = X, this is embedded in the
broader project of explaining the scaffolding of cognition down to its
‘root’ in the transcendental unity of apperception, the general mode of
12  B. Vartabedian

reflective subjectivity required to cognize at all. This unity allows Kant to

posit a ‘transcendental subject,’ or the unity of consciousness that makes
all cognition possible. In his monograph on Kant, Deleuze (1984, 16)
presents this in a kind of formula, saying “I think myself and in think-
ing myself, I think the object in general to which I relate a represented
diversity.” Just as the Transcendental Aesthetic explained the encounter
of sensibility with an object, the A Deduction explains the necessity of a
transcendental object (the object = X ) to hold the attention of the cog-
nizing subject.5
The manifold has a clear epistemological function in Kant’s first
Critique; it is that which the mind can determine according to inner and
outer senses (time and space, respectively) and the categories (which, by
the argument in the B Deduction, are shown as judgments of the under-
standing), as well as hold as the condition for the possibility of any rep-
resentation whatsoever (i.e., the transcendental object = X argument in
the A Deduction). The ontological sense of the manifold, however, is
not only undetermined but also indeterminate. The object itself forms
a boundary that cognition simply cannot cross, and whatever is on the
other side of this boundary is off limits for ontological determination.
Though Deleuze explicitly engages Kant’s notion of manifold and his
deployment of the transcendental object = X, I am especially interested
in considering Kant’s framework of boundary and structure as these per-
tain to the structure and specific commitments presented in Badiou’s
ontology. I address this relationship in Chapter 5.

Method
In reading work by Badiou and Deleuze over shared conceptual com-
mitments like event, subject, or multiplicity, there seem to be four lines
of approach. A first approach is to focus or specialize in the work of one
thinker, to master the long arc of relation holding between key con-
cepts. The tradition of scholarship of this sort on Deleuze is deep; reflec-
tion on Badiou’s work continues to grow. For example, Peter Hallward
(2003) offers a comprehensive accounting of Badiou’s position, and as
one of the first studies of Badiou’s work of length in English, continues
to serve as a key introduction to Badiou’s work. Readers find, for exam-
ple, Oliver Feltham (2008) and Ed Pluth (2010) each offering sustained
engagement with key concepts over the long arc of Badiou’s productive
career.
 1  INTRODUCTION: LOWER LAYERS  13

A second requires recognizing charges of inadequacy levied by one

thinker against the other, an approach that has mainly consisted in
thoughtful defenses of Deleuze’s oeuvre against Badiou’s apparent
misreading and misunderstanding of key commitments in Deleuze’s
work. English-language readers see, for example, Daniel W. Smith’s
“Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Badiou and Deleuze
Revisited” ([2003] 2012) as an entry defending and clarifying Deleuzian
commitments in light of their critique in Badiou’s monograph on
Deleuze, published in English in 2000 as Deleuze: The Clamor of Being
(hereafter Clamor). More recently, Jon Roffe (2012) and Clayton
Crockett (2013) each offer book-length treatments that take Badiou’s
interpretation in Clamor to task. A third approach situates these thinkers
generationally or as “backstops” for reflection; as John Mullarkey (2003)
and Ian James (2012) recognize, Deleuze’s work is of a generation older
than Badiou and his contemporaries. In this framework, Deleuze’s work
is presented as a kind of heritage position with which thinkers in the suc-
ceeding generation must contend. Sam Gillespie (2008) begins with a
reflection on Badiou’s and Deleuze’s commitments-in-common to mul-
tiplicity and uses this common ground to discuss Badiou’s unique onto-
logical direction.
In this text, I follow a fourth approach: I stage a conversation
between Badiou and Deleuze. The topic of this conversation is multi-
plicity, and particularly its presence in and object of ontological inquiry.
In this trajectory, my work follows the model presented by Simon
Duffy (2013, 137), who affirms an approach that “(reads) their respec-
tive interpretations of mathematics, and the role that they each assign
to mathematics in the development of their respective philosophical
projects, together, alongside of one another.” Duffy insists that this
approach identifies “points of convergence,” in addition to sharpening
the sites of divergence that obtain between the two programs.
The evidence for this conversation, which I develop with some care in
the next chapter, is found in a series of exchanges in the period between
1976 and 1997, the period inaugurated with Deleuze and Guattari’s
“Rhizome—Introduction,” and ended with the French publication
of Badiou’s monograph on Deleuze. In this period, I identify several
exchanges that take concerns of multiplicity and its relationship to any
emerging or static ‘one’ as their center; these exchanges are largely indi-
rect, appearing ‘after the fact’ or in response to the work of the other.
To see this as a conversation, however, it is insufficient to attend to the
14  B. Vartabedian

content of the exchanges alone; rather, the deep commitments with

which the interlocutors arrive to the exchange must be set out. In this
case, an appreciation of Badiou’s and Deleuze’s respective accounts of
multiplicity and the mathematical paradigms on which these accounts
depend serve to deepen the conversation in the period I’ve identified
above, and particularly as these pertain to the development of Badiou’s
ontology, the structure of static genesis or points associated with the
place of the ‘virtual’ in Deleuze’s solo work, and the structure of the rhi-
zome and concept in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration. To this end,
I engage work by Riemann, Cantor, Zermelo, and Bourbaki in a way
that appreciates their technical specificity, and so I discuss the original
sources and key concepts at stake, but I have endeavored to make their
presentation clear and straightforward for the non-specialist reader.6
The conversational strategy resists a tendency, apparent in Badiou’s
work with other philosophers, described by Bruno Bosteels (2012, ix) as
“constitutive polemical knots.” These are argumentative strategies that,
per Bosteels (2012, ix–x),

… give Badiou’s philosophy its distinctive orientation, tonality, and feel.

Indeed, one of this thinker’s greatest virtues – which to others might seem
a defect, especially in his writings on other philosophers – lies in giving
thought a decisive orientation by leading readers to the point where they
must take a stand in one way or another.

Badiou’s relationship to Deleuze represents one of the major polemical

knots organizing his work. This relationship is confrontational along the
lines Bosteels describes. In the Introduction to Clamor, Badiou contin-
uously casts his program against Deleuze’s, identifying “an immanent
conception of the multiple” (DCB 4) as the central pole around which
their respective work orbits. Though my work proceeds by taking this
opposition seriously, I reject the requirement that the opposition must
be resolved in favor of one thinker over the other. The nature and fea-
tures of the multiple are precisely the elements under scrutiny, and the
demand Badiou makes of the reader requires it be comprehensively
established that the nature of being qua being is as Badiou characterizes
it, thus pre-empting the possibility for conversation altogether.
Given the rich resources emerging in the wake of Clamor, the stu-
dent of the Badiou–Deleuze disjunction may take up a slower, focused
strategy that reads multiplicity and its link to being qua being deeply and
 1  INTRODUCTION: LOWER LAYERS  15

according to the unique commitments attending each program. This

allows, I propose, not only a better understanding of one program vis-
à-vis the other, but also a broader frame of understanding. This broader
frame appreciates political, conceptual, and procedural commitments,
and thus imagines a focused conversation in which both interlocutors
are able to “speak their piece,” an approach that students now (at least)
two generations of scholarship removed from the original interchanges
are able to take up; indeed, it is only because of the breadth of work
developed in the three approaches I describe above that the tack I take is
possible.
Though readers of Badiou and Deleuze together are right to see their
approaches as largely incommensurate, owing to the diverging interpreta-
tions of multiplicity developed in their respective accounts and the differing
mathematical paradigms in action, my contribution identifies places where
these approaches give way to continuous procedural commitments—that
is, not only do Badiou and Deleuze share a commitment-in-common to a
form of multiplicity in their ontological accounts, but they both prescribe
a requirement to maintain the presence of this multiple using some form
of subtractive procedure. Additionally, seeing these thinkers in conver-
sation clarifies the objections—which remain remarkably similar from the
beginning of the conversation to its end—one thinker maintains against
the other. As I point out in this work’s Conclusion, the consistency found
in these critiques is a way of marking the hazards attending an ontology
developed without a subject at its center.

Plan of the Text

There are three claims that structure my work in this text. First, I insist
that an analysis of multiplicity in work by Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze,
and in Deleuze’s collaboration with Félix Guattari, clarifies key moves
or signposts of their respective theories. Second, articulating each of the
programs on their own terms allows readers to untangle the polemic that
often accompanies (and sometimes obscures) the analysis of multiplicity.
Third and finally, and as this work’s Conclusion demonstrates, attention
to multiplicity gives way to fundamental questions about the function of
decision and dissolution in ontological discourse. That is, accompanying
the presentation of multiplicity is a schema for determining what ‘counts’
for being qua being in the first place. This is the ‘lowest layer’ this inves-
tigation proposes to uncover.
16  B. Vartabedian

In service of this threefold strategy, I begin with “Engagements.”

Chapter 2 tracks Badiou’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s presentations
of multiplicity in the period 1976–1997. It is Deleuze and Guattari’s
“Rhizome,” the pamphlet published in 1976 and destined to become
the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, that I identify as inaugurat-
ing this conversation. I focus on two accomplishments in this pamphlet:
first, the critique Deleuze and Guattari raise against ‘traditional’ forms
of materialism (in general) and Maoism (in particular); second, their
­peculiar articulation of multiplicity as the third principle and structure of
the alternative they propose. In these two accomplishments, readers find
the terms on which Badiou will object to Deleuze and Guattari (and vice
versa): procedure and structure. Procedure concerns the relationship of
unity to multiplicity, in terms of production and priority; in other words,
critiques of procedure are directed at the way any one emerges from or
is cut from a multiple, and the status that one has with respect to the
multiple from which it is drawn. Structure describes the nature of the
multiplicity; it is in articulation of structure that the mathematical con-
cepts each thinker depends on become clear, and while I mention these
in Chapter 2, I reserve full investigation of these mathematical underpin-
nings for Chapter 3.
The two prongs of procedure and structure are again at issue in
Badiou’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizome. Writing pseu-
donymously as “Georges Peyrol,” Badiou’s 1977 “The Fascism of the
Potato” responds to the critiques Deleuze and Guattari direct at Maoist
dialectical procedure and the structure of the multiple. Badiou/Peyrol
returns fire, condemning the rhizomatic structure Deleuze and Guattari
propound for its unsatisfactory political consequences. Reflection on the
failure of May ’68 leads Badiou/Peyrol to argue that the absence of any
unifying force cut from the masses (e.g., class) will result in “the flat-
test of conservatisms” (FP 196), the opposite of any vigorous materialist
revolt.
I then fast-forward to 1991, in which Deleuze and Guattari make
direct address of Badiou’s ontological proposal in “Example 12” of their
What is Philosophy? Here, Deleuze and Guattari assess Badiou’s work in
their appraisal of logic, or a system of thought that appears to be philo-
sophical but is instead tethered to science, its fixed frames of reference,
and propositional claims. Logic and its prospects—those elements from
which a logical system is built—fail to appreciate the creative and tran-
sient nature of the concepts on which philosophy relies. Once again, the
 1  INTRODUCTION: LOWER LAYERS  17

critique Deleuze and Guattari raise is couched in terms of structure (in

this case the ‘place’ of logic’s origination as unspecified multiplicity) and
procedure (or the construction of sets from this unspecified multiplicity).
I conclude by assessing Badiou’s critique of Deleuze in Clamor. This text
argues that for all of his conceptual innovation and dedication, Deleuze
is ultimately a philosopher of the One. I survey the critique in Badiou’s
text, the critique Badiou’s text occasions, and note the ways these high-
light the structure-procedure elements that characterize the conversation
up to Clamor.
The work in Chapter 2 sets the limits for texts under investigation in
this study. Clamor may be identified as the ‘last word’ in the sustained
conversation between the Badiouian and Deleuzian camps, a conversa-
tion closed by Deleuze’s death in 1995. However, the parameters for
my inquiry are effectively limited by Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks on
Badiou’s work in What is Philosophy? Though Badiou’s commitments to
axiomatic procedures are evident in work as early as 1968–1969, it is rea-
sonable to conclude that Deleuze and Guattari respond in “Example 12”
to the mature presentation of Badiou’s system in Being and Event, pub-
lished as L’être et l’événement in 1988.
To be sure, in the 20 years following the initial publication of Deleuze:
la clameur de l’être, Deleuze continues to offer Badiou a touchstone
for reflection; readers of Badiou’s Logics of Worlds (2009a) find reflec-
tions on Deleuze’s conception of the event, and in a paean to Deleuze
in Pocket Pantheon (2009b), a meditation on their respective rejections
of finitude. Badiou’s elaboration of his system in Logics of Worlds and
the forthcoming Immanence of Truths must necessarily engage con-
ceptions of multiplicity built from the earlier text. However, I do not
address these more contemporary reflections but with two exceptions:
first, “The Question of Being Today,” an essay opening Badiou’s 1998
Court Traité d’ontologie transitoire, where he elaborates the nature of
inconsistent multiplicity; and second, the address titled “One, Multiple,
Multiplicities,” appearing originally in Multitudes (2000) as a response
to critics of Clamor. Badiou directly engages the Riemannian underpin-
nings of Deleuze’s system of multiplicity and in some ways, is a fulfill-
ment of the promise of Clamor. I discuss this text, effectively an epilogue
to the main engagements of 1977–1997, in Chapter 5.
As the first of two chapters devoted to an explication of multi-
plicity and its subsequent clarification of key elements of Deleuze’s
and Badiou’s oeuvres Chapter 3, titled “Structures,” attends to
18  B. Vartabedian

multiplicity-as-structure by focusing on the respective mathemati-

cal commitments on which these thinkers depend. I begin by describ-
ing Bernhard Riemann’s “Hypotheses” and two innovations therein:
his analysis of continuous and discrete manifoldness (itself an extension
of the original Aristotelian distinction), and the notion of multiply-­
extended manifoldness. I discuss a third result of Riemann’s investiga-
tion, an alternative comprehension of or disposition toward physical
space. I then read these back into Deleuze’s theory of the virtual idea as
it is explicitly defined in Difference and Repetition’s chapter 4 and in the
analysis of space in Deleuze and Guattari’s Plateau “1440: The Smooth
and the Striated.” Attention to Riemann and his contributions assists
Deleuze’s reader in confirming the consistency of his commitment to
multiplicity as an ontological structure.
I then turn to Badiou’s theory of multiplicity, with a special focus
on the distinction of inconsistent and consistent multiplicities. Badiou
establishes this early in Being and Event and it remains the founda-
tional distinction on which subsequent invocations of transfinite num-
bers (cf. Meditations 12–14 of BE), situation, and generic multiplicity
depend. I explain the Cantorian origination of this distinction, focusing
on his solution to the Burali-Forti Paradox. I then explain how this ini-
tial distinction is decisive for understanding the structure of Badiou’s
multiplicity and foregrounds his continuing commitments to a form of
materialism.
With a thorough accounting of multiplicity-as-structure accomplished,
Chapter 4, “Procedures,” assesses the techniques by which relation-
ships of one and multiple are determined in these systems. I begin by
discussing the presentation in Being and Event of the void set and its
status as existential axiom, key in building any situation from the multi-
ple, or in making the link of consistency to inconsistency. I then attend
to the analysis of scission in Badiou’s 1975 lectures, collected in Theory
of the Subject; this offers a preliminary sketch of procedures for deter-
mining an existent from a world. I address the differences between the
project relating one to multiple in Being and Event and the earlier one
proposed in Theory of the Subject with the aim of discussing themes
in-common between Badiou’s explicitly ontological and political works.
I then turn to the subtractive procedure Deleuze and Guattari propose
in “Rhizome,” explaining the content of this procedure and its prescrip-
tions for understanding the way any unity is positioned in Deleuze and
Guattari’s system. Subtraction is put to effective use in understanding the
 1  INTRODUCTION: LOWER LAYERS  19

way a concept is constructed, and so I discuss “Example 1” to apply the

insights of subtractive procedure to the discussion of Descartes’ cogito in
What is Philosophy?
Attention to their respective theories of multiplicity and mathemati-
cal underpinnings clears the way for a precise return to the objections
concerning structure and procedure, a reconstruction that is the subject
of this work’s Chapter 5. In “Re-engagements,” I begin by discussing
two forms of subtraction in Badiou’s work: first, the ‘special’ presenta-
tion in the Gamma Diagram; second, its ‘general’ form in a retrospec-
tive procedure revealing the presence of inconsistency in any situation.
I then demonstrate certain challenges that attend Badiou’s later onto-
logical articulations, particularly in “Kant’s Subtractive Ontology” and in
Briefings on Existence connected to his analysis of the fundamental onto-
logical choice. The presence of a general subtractive analysis, especially
when considered in combination with scission, allows me to identify
two, perhaps unexpected, continuities emerging from the analysis of sub-
traction in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. In both programs, subtraction
establishes a means of access to the structure of multiplicity; subtraction
also delivers a mode of maintenance designed to ‘keep’ multiplicity as the
ground or foundation of ontological investigation. I will show that both
Deleuze (with Guattari) and Badiou depend on subtraction as a mecha-
nism for managing the relationship of singular instances (in the former)
and count-structures (in the latter) to the multiplicity from which they
are derived.
I then turn to the explicit critiques raised in Chapter 2’s history, and
I demonstrate that the resources a thoroughgoing analysis of multiplic-
ity as both structure and procedure offer for understanding and evaluat-
ing these critiques. I reorient the ‘direction’ of multiplicity in a counter
to Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of arborescence, and subsequently
discuss the claims to rigidity that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to
Badiou’s project. I then assess the critique of ‘cases’ Badiou raises against
Deleuze in Clamor, in which Badiou claims that all unique instances are
fodder for Deleuze’s theory and are thus emptied of their significance.
Aided by insights from Simon Duffy’s analysis of Deleuze’s modes of
using mathematics, I respond to this critique and demonstrate the diver-
gence required by Badiou’s adherence to the “radical thesis.”
After a review of the conversation I staged in the main body of the
text, I conclude by considering an engagement that does not appear in
the preceding: Badiou’s 1988 review of Deleuze’s The Fold. The brief
20  B. Vartabedian

and vigorous critique of multiplicity Badiou offers in this text opens on

to the most fundamental of all commitments for an ontology without
subjectivity: a decision, in which the program must re-form elements of
what is already available, or a dissolution, in which the program reinvents
the field and relations of elements entirely.

Notes
1. See, in addition to the aforementioned work by the Nirenbergs, Adrian
Johnston (2008) and Geoffrey Pfeifer (2015).
2. Riemann’s name is misspelled when it appears in Patton’s translation on p.
182. It is subsequently corrected in Patton’s text.
3. Daniel W. Smith (2012, 123) reads the lineage of this concept backward
from Deleuze’s usage of multiplicity, noting it “was first formulated math-
ematically by Bernard (sic) Riemann, in his non-Euclidean Geometry,
who in turn linked it to Kant’s concept of the manifold. Both Husserl and
Bergson adopted Riemann’s concept for their own philosophical purposes,
and Deleuze first wrote about the concept with regard to Bergson’s dis-
tinction between two types of multiplicity (continuous and discrete), which
Deleuze developed in his own manner and considered it one of the funda-
mental problems of contemporary thought.” The relations Smith identifies
here accounts for Deleuze’s assertion in Difference and Repetition that his
own concept of multiplicity is continuous with that of Bergson, Husserl,
and Riemann. M.D. Maia (2011, 9) offers an account of the relation of
Riemann’s work to Kant’s noting that Riemann’s use of Mannigfaltige has
“a slightly different meaning to define his metric geometry.”
4. At A111 Kant argues, “the categories that have just been adduced are
nothing other than the conditions of thinking in a possible experience,
just as space and time contain the conditions of intuition for the very same
thing They are therefore also fundamental concepts for thinking objects
in general for the appearances, and they therefore have a priori objective
validity, which was just what we really wanted to know.” The analysis of
the transcendental object = X is a vehicle by which Kant can arrive at the
demonstration of the categories, the second task of the deduction after the
argument for the transcendental unity of apperception.
5. In Kant’s Critical Philosophy Deleuze explains that synthesis necessitates
the presence of an object ‘in general’ in order to accomplish its task. He
says, “the manifold would never be referred to an object if we did not
have at our disposal objectivity as a form in general (‘object in general’,
‘object = x’). Where does this form come from? The object in general is
the correlate of the ‘I think’ or the unity of consciousness; it is the expres-
sion of the cogito, its formal objectivation” (15).
 1  INTRODUCTION: LOWER LAYERS  21

6. Baki (2015) offers a comprehensive and technical accounting of the math-

ematics at stake in Badiou’s Being and Event. Duffy (2013), as I have
explained above, elaborates a series of mathematical and philosophical
engagements in Deleuze’s work.

References
Badiou, Alain. 2000. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Translated by Louise
Burchill. Theory Out of Bounds Series. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press. Originally Deleuze: la clameur de l’être. Paris: Hachette,
1997. (Cited in text as DCB)
———. [2000] 2004. “One, Multiple, Multiplicities.” In Theoretical Writings,
edited and translated by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, 67–80. London:
Continuum. Originally “Un, multiple, multiplicite(s).” In Multitudes 1
(2000): 195–211.
———. 2005. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London:
Continuum. Originally L’être et l’événement. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988.
(Cited in text as BE)
———. 2009a. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Translated by Alberto
Toscano. London: Bloomsbury. Originally Logiques des mondes. Paris: Éditions
du Seuil, 2006.
———. 2009b. Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy. Translated by
David Macey. London: Verso. Originally Petit Panthéon Portatif. Paris:
Éditions la Fabrique, 2008.
———. 2009c. Theory of the Subject. Translated and with an Introduction by
Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum. Originally Théorie du sujet. Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1982. (Cited in text as TS)
———. 2012. “The Fascism of the Potato.” In The Adventure of French
Philosophy, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels, 191–201. London: Verso.
Originally Georges Peyrol. “Le fascisme de la pomme de terre.” In La sit-
uation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie, 42–52. Paris: François Maspero,
1977. (Cited in text as FP)
Badiou, Alain, A.J. Bartlett, and Justin Clemens. 2012. “I: To Preface the
Response to the ‘Criticisms’ of Ricardo Nirenberg and David Nirenberg.”
Critical Inquiry 38 (2): 362–364. https://doi.org/10.1086/662746.
Accessed 2 August 2012.
Baki, Burhanuddin. 2015. Badiou’s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set
Theory. London: Continuum.
Bartlett, A.J., and Justin Clemens. 2012. “Critical Response II: Neither/Nor.”
Critical Inquiry 38 (2): 365–380. https://doi.org/10.1086/662747.
Accessed 1 September 2013.
22  B. Vartabedian

Bosteels, Bruno. 2012. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Alain Badiou, The

Adventure of French Philosophy, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels, vii–
lxiii. London: Verso.
Crockett, Clayton. 2013. Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and
Event. New York: Columbia University Press.
Delanda, Manuel. 2002. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London:
Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1984. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties.
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press. Originally La Philosophie Critique de Kant.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963.
———. 1991. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. Originally Le Bergsonisme. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1966.
———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York:
Columbia University Press. Originally Différence et repetition. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1968. (Cited in text as DR)
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1981. Rhizome: An Introduction. Translated
by Paul Patton. I & C 8 (Spring): 49–71. Originally Rhizome: Introduction.
Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1976. (Cited in text as R)
———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press. Originally Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les
Éditions de Minuit, 1980. (Cited in text as TP)
———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Originally Qu’est-ce que la
philosophie? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991. (Cited in text as WP)
Duffy, Simon. 2013. Deleuze and the History of Mathematics: In Defense of the
“New”. Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Series. London:
Bloomsbury.
Feltham, Oliver. 2008. Alain Badiou: Live Theory. London: Continuum.
Gillespie, Sam. 2008. The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist
Metaphysics. Anamnesis. Melbourne: re.press.
Hallward, Peter. 2003. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
James, Ian. 2012. The New French Philosophy. London: Polity.
Johnston, Adrian. 2008. “Phantom of Consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian
Transcendental Idealism.” Continental Philosophy Review 41: 345–366.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-008-9086-5. Accessed 10 March 2015.
Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and
Allen W. Wood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. German refer-
ences are to Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. Leipzig, 1919.
 1  INTRODUCTION: LOWER LAYERS  23

Maia, M.D. 2011. “The Physical Manifold.” In Geometry of the Fundamental

Interactions, 9–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8273-5_2.
Accessed 6 January 2014.
Mullarkey, John. 2003. Post-continental Philosophy: An Outline. London:
Continuum.
Nirenberg, Ricardo L., and David Nirenberg. 2011. “Badiou’s Number: A
Critique of Mathematics as Ontology.” Critical Inquiry 37 (4): 583–614.
https://doi.org/10.1086/660983. Accessed 31 August 2011.
Pfeifer, Geoffrey. 2015. The New Materialism: Althusser, Badiou and Žižek.
London: Routledge.
Pluth, Ed. 2010. Badiou: A Philosophy of the New. Key Contemporary Thinkers
series. London: Polity.
Roffe, Jon. 2012. Badiou’s Deleuze. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Smith, Daniel W. [2003] 2012. “Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities:
Badiou and Deleuze Revisited.” In Essays on Deleuze, 287–311. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
———. 2012. “Analytics: On the Becoming of Concepts.” In Essays on Deleuze,
122–145. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
 CHAPTER 2

Engagements, 1976–1997: History of a

Misunderstanding

This chapter develops a conversation concerning the nature of multiplic-

ity and its relationship to one, drawing from material written by Deleuze
with Guattari and situates Badiou. This conversation begins in the after-
math of the May ’68 uprising, in which thinkers on the left are working
to recover and restate forms of materialism and leftism. It is in this intel-
lectual context that Deleuze and Guattari pen “Rhizome-Introduction”
([1976] 1981), which offers an alternative vision of materialism, one
emphasizing self-organizing and self-regulating systems. Their text occa-
sions a reply, titled “The Fascism of the Potato,” written by Georges
Peyrol (a pseudonymous Alain Badiou) in 1977. Badiou/Peyrol’s text
critiques Deleuze and Guattari’s work with attention to structure (the
way a multiplicity is composed) and procedure (the relation of one to
multiple prescribed by this structure). I begin by discussing Deleuze and
Guattari’s presentation and Peyrol’s subsequent critique. I use the terms
structure and procedure discerned in Peyrol’s work to organize the subse-
quent stages of this conversation and my larger investigation.
I suggest that using structure and procedure as an analytical framework
illuminates readings of Badiou’s work by Deleuze and Guattari in What
is Philosophy? ([1991] 1994) where the authors address the prospects of
Badiou’s ontology in Being and Event and in terms of the multiple he
proposes. This framework also offers another way into Badiou’s Deleuze:
the Clamor of Being ([1997] 2000), a text rich in readings—and mis-
readings—of Deleuze’s philosophical project. In this late entry, which
effectively ‘seals’ the conversation between Badiou and Deleuze, I show

© The Author(s) 2018 25

B. Vartabedian, Multiplicity and Ontology in Deleuze and Badiou,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76837-3_2
26  B. Vartabedian

that Badiou’s primary critique is structural and thus rehearses the early
challenges Peyrol raised against Deleuze and Guattari in “Rhizome.” This
insight prefaces the assessment of structure in Deleuze’s and Badiou’s
respective work in Chapter 3. The reader will note that this chapter is not
concerned with whether one thinker “got it right” when engaging the
work of the other. Rather, in the set of engagements I unfold here, I am
interested to identify the main criticisms one thinker brings against the
other(s), and the standard modes of reply when critically engaged.

1976–1977: Root, Rhizome, Potato

The conversation concerning multiplicity emerges in an already combative
climate. Since leftism (broadly), Communism and Maoism (more specif-
ically) each failed to mobilize the revolutionary spirit of May ’68 toward
transformation, proponents of these positions were required to rethink
their commitments. Some, like the so-called “New Philosophers,” turned
vehemently against their past efforts, disavowing their participation in
revolutionary activities, and claiming that the theoretical commitments
underpinning the movement were Stalinist in their trajectory.1 For their
part, Badiou and Deleuze (writing primarily in this period with Guattari)
each maintain a fidelity to materialism, albeit in different expressions.
In this section, I discuss Badiou’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s après-Mai
revisions of their materialist commitments, beginning with Deleuze and
Guattari’s “Rhizome—Introduction” ([1976/1981], hereafter “Rhizome”).
In this text, their commitments to materialism are bound up with an account
of multiplicity. I then discuss two of Badiou’s 1977 replies: first, and briefly,
“Flux and the Party,” a critique of the program Deleuze and Guattari pro-
pose in Anti-Oedipus; second, and more substantively, “The Fascism of
the Potato,” which Badiou penned as ‘Georges Peyrol.’ In this latter text,
Badiou/Peyrol takes aim at Deleuze and Guattari’s presentation of struc-
ture, the composition of multiplicity itself, and procedure, or the relationship
between one and multiple they propose.

1976: Rhizome
Deleuze and Guattari’s “Rhizome” is the first salvo in what will become
a two-decades-long exchange with Badiou. Deleuze and Guattari cri-
tique a relation of matter to thought at the heart of traditional mate-
rialism expressed in the slogan “the One that becomes two.” Before
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  27

presenting multiplicity as an alternative means of characterizing the rela-

tion of thought and matter, Deleuze and Guattari begin with the image
of thought as a book and offer two accounts of its relation to its source
material, or nature: first, as a unified form of imitation; second, as a sys-
tematic work of creation.
Deleuze and Guattari explain that the classical book “imitates the
world, as art does nature: by procedures which are peculiar to it, and
which carry out what nature cannot or can no longer do” (R 51). As
an imitation, or instrument of reflection, the book represents material
conditions in thought. However, and as Deleuze and Guattari point out,
claims to imitation are complicated by the fact that nature fails to repro-
duce itself with the regularity and precision prescribed by the image of
the book-as-imitation. The book also articulates a materialist law, the One
which becomes two. The “One” to which this law refers is the fundamen-
tal claim of materialism that what is is matter; the “two” is the reflec-
tion of matter in thought. At stake, however, and at the heart of Deleuze
and Guattari’s criticism, is that this theory is dependent on some arbiter
of accuracy; put another way, traditional materialism is beholden to an
external measure—a ‘third man’ of sorts—adequate to evaluate the preci-
sion of the reproduction.
This commitment to accuracy in reflection depends on the pro-
duction of a dichotomy between thought and nature (i.e., “thought
is not matter”). Deleuze and Guattari thus claim this position “ …
needs the presupposition of a strong principal unity to arrive at two
by following an ideal method” (R 51). The principal unity Deleuze
and Guattari assign to this position is the fundamental assumption
that whatever is is matter. The dichotomous claim, thought is not mat-
ter thus requires correlate support in the claims thought is adequate
because it is sufficiently like matter and matter exists before thought.
The priority of matter is the claim required for initiating a sequence of
thought-production.
In this context, the story Deleuze and Guattari tell about the book
situates it as a second-order reflection; the One of matter and the two
of the thought-matter reflection together give way to the ‘three’ of
the book as the record of this thought-matter reflection. Readers of
Deleuze and Guattari may identify a procedure for counting here, a
scheme of reproducing the original and initial One. Take, for example,
Jacques Lacan’s 1966 Baltimore Lecture, “On Structure as an Inmixing
of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever.” Here, Lacan
28  B. Vartabedian

posits subjectivity as the outcome of a process modeled after “the real

numerical genesis of the two” (2007, 191), and as an alternative to the
unified, intentional consciousness of phenomenology. Lacan depends
on principles of addition and repetition to construct the two, beginning
with the empty set: “you have at one the place of zero and afterward it
is easy to understand how the place of one becomes the second place
which makes for two, three, and so on” (Lacan 2007, 191). Lacan’s
reference is to Frege’s principles of construction from zero.2 The pro-
cess of generating natural numbers continues simply by repeating the
operation of addition. However, Lacan (2007, 191) attributes to “the
mark,” or the empty set, “the effect of rubbing out the difference,”
and in doing so “makes it possible to add things with no considera-
tion as to their differences.” In the Lacanian accounting, the procession
toward the two occurs with no regard to the unique status of the ele-
ments being combined, a demand prescribed by the “emptiness” of the
sequence’s point of initiation.
Deleuze and Guattari propose a reversal to the pattern suggested by
traditional materialism by shifting their attention to a multiplicity con-
stituting the unity from which the two emerges. Traditional materialism,
they claim, “has never understood multiplicity” (R 51), since multiplicty
exceeds an ideal and orderly production (and re-production) of reflec-
tion. Deleuze and Guattari are occupied, not with assessing the perio-
dization of materialist thought but rather with its reimagining. They
counter the book-as-imitation with a vision of the book as “radicle-system
or fasciculated root” (R 51), a system articulated according to its own
logic and thus jettisoning attachment to reflection, reproduction, and
adequacy. Deleuze and Guattari’s system resists unification though uni-
fication may be a consequence or accident; multiplicity describes a struc-
ture or system of organization and one that develops in spite of the
absence of a principal root.
The system “of elaborate secondary roots” Deleuze and Guattari align
with multiplicity depends on connection. Deleuze and Guattari thus
name the rhizome as their preferred system, a system evident in animal
life (“warrens, in all their functions as habitat, provision, passage, evasion
and disappearance” [R 52]), and in botanical life, as an “underground
stem-system from those roots or radicles” (R 52). This system develops
apart from any logical procession, and as such is not beholden to evalua-
tion of its adequacy. It is instead assessed according to six “approximate
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  29

characteristics”: connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rup-

ture, cartography, and tracing-mania. As the third of the “approximate
characteristics” of a rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari posit their ver-
sion of multiplicity as a way of breaking the image on which materialist
ontology depends. They are clear that multiplicity must be “treated as a
substantive” (R 53). To treat multiplicity as a substantive is an acknowl-
edgement of the being of the system; it means acknowledging that
whatever is is fundamentally organized as a self-constructing and self-
regulating system.
Deleuze and Guattari posit their rhizomatic multiplicity against the
book as imitative unity, growing from a single point of origin and elab-
orating “in one direction, a linear one for example, while all the more
affirming a totalizing unity in another dimension, that of a circle or of
a cycle” (R 52). The circle or cycle restricts connections, training their
proliferation in one direction. In the example I offered from Lacan
above, development of subjectivity proceeds according to addition, a
cycle repeated without attention to the differences or unique features
of the subject being constituted. To avoid this simultaneous constraint
and capitulation to unity, Deleuze and Guattari offer a procedural
suggestion:

In reality, it is not sufficient to say “Long live the multiple”, even though
this cry is difficult enough to utter. No typographical, lexical, or even syn-
tactic trick will suffice to make it audible. The multiple must be made; not
by always adding a further dimension but, on the contrary, in the simplest
way possible, by force of moderation, at the level of the dimensions at
our disposal, always n minus one (it is only in this manner that the one
forms part of the multiple, through being always subtracted). Subtract the
unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write to the power of n-1.
(R 52)

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the multiple is discovered by sub-

traction; the differences disguised by Lacan’s method of addition are
actively sought out in the subtractive process. Indeed, the preceding
comparison of the book-as-imitation to the book-as-system should sug-
gest why a claim like ‘long live the multiple’ poses a challenge to the
traditional materialist. Since materialism requires a unifying factor
immanent to the material conditions that will secure transformation—
an element or group with a unified motivation emerging from the
30  B. Vartabedian

mass—a commitment to multiplicity that effectively demotes unity

to an accidental feature of that multiple will be an unsatisfactory pro-
posal. However, the claims concerning subtraction yield a result even
more dissatisfying; the tendency toward unity is something that must
be actively resisted in the work of thought. While a system will never
be complete, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that any move in this direc-
tion returns to the problematic system of reflection that has in fact
stagnated.
In “Rhizome,” Deleuze and Guattari are occupied, not with assess-
ing repetition and periodization of materialist thought, but rather with
reimagining it entirely; their assertion of multiplicity is instrumental in
their revision. Deleuze and Guattari explain that substantive multiplic-
ity “loses all relationship to the One as subject or object, as natural or
spiritual reality, as image and world” (R 53). Multiplicity jettisons the
One and any requirements of adequacy that may attend its representa-
tion. Deleuze and Guattari explain that their multiplicity “has neither
subject nor object, but only determinations, magnitudes, dimensions
which cannot increase in number without changing in its nature”
(R 53–54). The multiplicity, in other words, is only its structure, a
structure that is also explicitly mathematical, here drawing on language
of quantity from Aristotle and—most significantly—from Bernhard
Riemann, whose innovations in non-Euclidean geometry provide
Deleuze with the vocabulary and principles to construct his account.
I discuss the mathematical underpinnings of this commitment in
Chapter  3 and return to Deleuze and Guattari’s claims concerning the
principle of multiplicity in more detail.

1977: Potatoes, Cuts

So far, I have explained the critical position in Deleuze and Guattari’s
“Rhizome” as disposed against traditional materialist logic; Deleuze
and Guattari reject the articulation of matter and structure captured in
the phrase “the One that becomes two.” Their criticisms give way to a
positive expression of materialism as a multiplicity that resists unifica-
tion. However, “Rhizome” is not immune from criticism; it precipitates
several responses from Alain Badiou in 1977. The first, “The Flux and
the Party,” offers a thoroughgoing critique of the version of materialism
Deleuze and Guattari offer; the second, “The Fascism of the Potato,”
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  31

follows the materialist critique of the first text. Here, Badiou—writing

pseudonymously as Georges Peyrol—emphasizes the problematic nature
of the structure Deleuze and Guattari propose, attended by an inade-
quate conception of multiplicity.
In 1977, the UCFML (Union des Communistes de France Marxiste-
Leniniste), a group of thinkers persisting in their commitments to
Maoism, published La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophe in
two installments. The first took Althusser as its target, and identified a
problematic quietism concerning the pivotal events of May ’68 and their
effects in the theoretical and political landscape.3 The second install-
ment, written as a polemic against Deleuze and Guattari, contained
two essays by Badiou. One, “The Flux and the Party: in the Margins
of Anti-Oedipus,” is primarily directed against Deleuze and Guattari’s
understanding of a mass as motivated by ‘desire.’ This motivation, as
Badiou ([1977b] 2012, 179) understands it, is extra-rational insofar as
it eludes rational or logical accounting and suffuses the mass. This leads
not to rupture and revolution, but rather to a quiet petering-out of state
organization and is thus emptied of transformative possibility. Badiou
([1977b] 2012, 181) explains, “the ‘leftist’ political daydream is a mass
movement that proceeds straight on until it is joyfully proclaimed that
the State has quietly faded away.” In other words, not only are Deleuze
and Guattari surprised by the events of May ’68, since these cannot be
rationally or logically accounted for, these events can only go out with a
whimper; they can neither predict a revolutionary rupture, nor can their
system harness it for revolutionary change. Notions of ‘desire’ and ‘free-
dom’ are thus too vague to move the mass toward transformation.
Accompanying “The Flux and the Party” in the second installment
of La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophe is “The Fascism of
the Potato,” an explicitly Maoist polemic written by “Georges Peyrol,”
a pseudonym of Alain Badiou’s.4 Peyrol’s account begins with a retro-
spective rehearsal of the events of May ’68 from the point of view of
“its intellectual protagonists,” for whom the events of May were sim-
ply a “mass uprising,” an “insurrection of the multiple” (FP 191).
Continuing a theme from “Flux and the Party,” these “protagonists”
minimize any possibility of unification—however temporary—of this
mass under a common class element. Peyrol claims that destabiliz-
ing instruments of class consciousness (e.g., unions and the Parti
Communiste Française [PCF]) created the illusion of an “horizontal
32  B. Vartabedian

storm,” consisting in the mobilization of “immigrants, women, ecol-

ogists, soldiers, prisoners, students, homosexuals, etc.” (FP 192). To
obscure the class condition necessary for the novel political and proce-
dural position to emerge, Peyrol explains that they inflamed the mul-
tiple “against the pretensions of the One” (FP 192). This resulted in
ideological and practical dispersions, since the multiple as a mass could
not effectively unite; Peyrol claims, the interests of the intelligentsia pre-
vented it from doing so:

Under the anti-organizational pretexts, it is not too difficult to see the

rejection of the point of view of class. (The petty-bourgeois intelligentsia’s)
theme was to add up the revolts (immigrants, women, ecologists, soldiers,
prisoners, students, homosexuals, etc.), to enumerate the punctual social
forces to infinity, but obstinately to combat anything resembling the polit-
ical unification of the people’s camp, seized in its antagonistic inflection, in
its living class being. (FP 192)

The intelligentsia thus worked effectively to add up the various fronts of

insurrection, but avoided the site of unification, the insurrection’s “liv-
ing class being,” that might bring the desired novel order and procedure
into being. The political situation is clear, insofar as the intelligentsia
mobilized the multiple, but prevented it from mobilizing itself using the
condition of class, a condition Peyrol identifies as immanent to the mass
uprising.
Peyrol explains, however, that this mobilization on its own was insuf-
ficient, saying “this revolt against the pseudo-centres was far from giving
way on the spot to the new Maoist thought, which is that of a centre of
a new type (of the party of a new type), new not only in its being but
also in its process” (FP 191). The productive conclusion of the upris-
ing requires both novel organization and novel practice, as opposed to
simple enumeration and recognition; Peyrol proposes here Maoism, on
account of its ability to “concentrate” this class point of view and focus
it toward revolution and transformation (FP 192). This immanent class
condition, “the One of the multiple,” functions also as “the politics of
the people,” and the content, but not the form, of the revolt. To capi-
talize on “the One of the multiple” seems to emphasize the integrity of
the class movement emerging in the context of the mass revolt. As Peyrol
has explained, these “politics of the people” were not realized, and the
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  33

result comes in the appearance of “the politics of their enemies: political

history abhors the void” (FP 193). The upshot seems to be the mobi-
lization of the multiple without a direction, a problem or vacuum that
would have been filled except for the intelligentsia working to avoid mili-
tancy and class struggle (FP 193).
The “Fascism of the Potato” is not only a broad and retrospective
analysis of conditions leading to the failure of May ’68, however. It turns
toward a specific critique of Deleuze and Guattari, and their proposals in
“Rhizome” as thought emblematic of this failure. Peyrol’s engagement
with Deleuze and Guattari proceeds along two paths. One is an analysis
of the structure of the multiple or multiplicity, while the other concerns
the procedure by which a relation of One to this multiple/multiplicity
is produced. He begins with procedure—attempting to resolve what
he takes to be an erroneous analysis of the dialectic, and then turns to
a rejection of the structure posed by Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of
multiplicity.
Peyrol begins with Deleuze and Guattari’s apparent misunderstanding
of the dialectic: “Only a moron (seul un crétin),” Peyrol explains, “can
confuse the Marxist dialectical principle ‘One divides into two’ with the
genealogy for family ties concealed in ‘One becomes two’” (FP 194).
Peyrol takes issue with their description of the dialectic as becoming, as if
the two emerges or is generated from the One. He insists, instead, that
“the One has no existence as entity,” since for the Maoist “there is only
unity from movement, all is process” (FP 194). The One is, in this con-
text, the result of dialectical, not genetic, process. Peyrol re-describes the
dialectic as scission, or cutting from the multiple a temporary unity (FP
194). In the principal case of May ’68, it is the cutting of ‘class’ from the
‘mass,’ which is a tactic of dividing from the multiple resulting in a tem-
porary unity; this unity is alone capable of transformation, of unifying
the groups identified in the so-called “horizontal storm” toward trans-
formation. The image of taproot and ‘principal unity’ that Deleuze and
Guattari ascribe to Maoism is inverted, and the implication is that the
Maoism to which Peyrol is committed sees the mass as that from which a
unity is identified. Without the work of scission, he insists that an ontol-
ogy premised on multiplicity alone results in “the flattest of conserva-
tisms, the surest ratification of everything that exists” (FP 196). Absent
a mobilizing antagonism, Peyrol argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s rhi-
zome may unfold, but it will never change in any meaningful way.
34  B. Vartabedian

With scission-as-procedure the preferred understanding of the

dialectic, Peyrol turns to the structure of multiplicity. He begins by
taking up two of the principles Deleuze and Guattari deploy to artic-
ulate the rhizome’s structure: the first principle of connection and the
third principle of multiplicity. Peyrol rehearses Deleuze and Guattari’s
first claim concerning the rhizome: “Any point of a rhizome can be
connected to anything other, and must be” (R 52–53, quoted in FP
197). Peyrol targets the ‘must be’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s claim
and articulates three senses of this imperative to connection. The first
is connection without motivation; individuals connect for the sake
of connecting, for “the enjoyment of unlimited contacts” (FP 197).
Second, a politics of the pure multiple can result only in failure. He
explains that “since at least the Commune these ‘convergences’ of
dismembered struggles are the prequel to the failure, the massacre,
and the restoration of the One in its most repugnant military forms”
(FP 197). History seems to suggest that the presence of a “horizon-
tal storm” is neither necessary, nor sufficient a condition to accom-
plish political transformation; in fact, it seems to make way for fascistic
control—Peyrol urges the “Sectarians of the rhizome” to “remem-
ber Chile!” (FP 197). Peyrol’s worry is that a flattening cannot resist
authoritarian tendencies; the 1973 coup and ascendance of Augusto
Pinochet in Chile are, per Peyrol, outcomes following from the adop-
tion of a “flat” multiplicity.
A third critique is registered against the principle of connection,
which Peyrol uses to reinforce the value of scission and dialectical pro-
cedure. Because the principle of connection prevents antagonism—
everything has a place by its being connected to other elements of the
rhizome—there are no unanticipated elements that would precipitate
a revolution. He insists that the work of scission is to generate a One
that “(concentrates), through the practice of antagonism, the means to
radically separate the people’s revolutionary politics from all forms of
bourgeois politics” (FP 197). Peyrol insists, at regular intervals in this
critique, that the One generated through scission is both precarious and
temporary. It is precarious because it is a contingent result of scission
and temporary insofar as it will eventually be re-absorbed into the mass
from which it is drawn. This reabsorption is necessary to accomplish the
work of periodization necessary to the movement of materialism. This
is opposed, to be clear, to the persistence of a One realized as military
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  35

junta, in which control of the mass is accomplished by one group, with

more permanence and destructive potential than a temporary condition
uniting the mass.
Peyrol’s final turn in “The Fascism of the Potato” is toward Deleuze
and Guattari’s third principle of multiplicity. In “Rhizome,” Deleuze
and Guattari define a multiplicity as having “neither subject nor object,
only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in
number without the multiplicity changing in nature” (R 53–54, quoted
in FP 198). Peyrol finds this definition unsatisfactory, first on account
of its ‘occult’ nature (he calls it an “incantation” [FP 198]), and second
because the claim of dimension and its transformation “lives as a parasite
on the dialectic” (FP 198). Peyrol is committed to an account of change
that proceeds from the procedure of scission; the change to any multi-
plicity is evidence of there having been a unity sufficient to transform
it. However, Deleuze and Guattari seem to suggest that a multiplicity
changes only when the number of connections increases. Peyrol insists
that these changes require the multiple to be “a thinkable category only
in its contradictory relation to the One. All thinking of the pure multiple
carries like its shadow a thinking of the pure one” (FP 198). Deleuze
and Guattari cannot, despite their attempts to the contrary, offer an
account of pure multiplicity that succeeds in rejecting the One, since the
One of the rabbit warren is also and already the One of matter. As far
as Peyrol can tell, Deleuze and Guattari have not escaped the problem-
atic oscillation between One and multiple that a concept of multiplicity is
designed to supplant.
Indeed, it is in this context—Deleuze and Guattari “ensnared in the
Greek traps of the One and the Multiple” (FP 199)—that Peyrol argues
against the procedure by which “the multiple must be made” (cf. R 52):
subtraction. Peyrol argues that this subtractive move is “a complete fail-
ure! The subtraction of the One merely metaphorizes the need for both
the One and Multiple, both ‘n’ and ‘1’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s con-
struction of multiplicities” (FP 199). Peyrol’s rejection continues the
line of critique he raised against Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of pro-
cedure. This subtractive move emphasizes “the ideas of the revolt” and
“the forces of revolution” minus the very things that transform these
from mere description to productive revolution. Subtraction, Peyrol
claims, accomplishes a problematic division that makes the whole vulner-
able to fascist control, and Deleuze and Guattari are named as “prefascist
36  B. Vartabedian

ideologues” (FP 201).5 This charge, which Peyrol unhesitatingly levies at

Deleuze and Guattari, is avoided in the procedures he and other Maoists
affirm; the One resulting from scission is precarious enough that it will
not become tyrannical, but instead will be replaced by a new (equally
precarious, equally temporary) One. Put another way, the practice of
scission and its status as a temporary one cut from a pre-existing mass
avoids the threat of tyranny.
Each of these critiques, whether aimed at Deleuze and Guattari
or at Deleuze alone, emphasizes the same set of issues: namely, that
Deleuze and Guattari’s version of materialism is too enamored with the
‘mass’ in ‘mass uprising,’ and as such will resist or prevent a mobiliz-
ing factor—namely class—from unifying the mass. As Badiou puts it
in the December 1977 lecture “Answering—to the Sphinx—demands
from the subject not to have to answer—for the Sphinx,” Deleuze’s
emphasis on the mass is such that “every unified configuration is an
illusion, or even a ‘totalitarian’ threat” (TS 206). Badiou describes
Deleuze as committed to a heretical materialism, the “dynamicist her-
esy,” which insists “that all is flux, tendency, approximation” (TS 206).
In the examination of “Rhizome” above, I emphasized Deleuze and
Guattari’s rejection of relying on a unity to describe multiplicity; their
multiplicity is always moving, connecting, generating, and so resists
slowing in a way that would support a rupture or accommodate an
antagonism. Put another way, the dynamicist heresy is all remainder
and no number, all matter and no reflection, all articulation and no
revolution.
Deleuze and Guattari prefer a multiplicity defined by the number of
connections holding between ‘nodes’ or poles. The examples they use to
illustrate this version of multiplicity suggest the multiplicity is localized
or focused; rabbit warrens, stem-systems, and dandelions, each develop
connections from somewhere and in relation to one another. Their mul-
tiplicity is ‘made’ by a subtractive procedure, one that removes or sus-
pends an organizing unity that would mute the distinctive and unique
connections comprising the manifold. Writing as Georges Peyrol, Badiou
argues for a relation of One and multiple in which the One is “of the
multiple” (cf. FP 192). Peyrol insists that this One, cut from the mul-
tiple, is precarious because its existence is temporary and contingent.
More specifically, Peyrol’s polemic insists that the Maoists alone (among
the après-Mai rabble) could correctly identify the condition of class
that would have transformed the mass revolts. However, these positive
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  37

positions are embedded in critique. Deleuze and Guattari reject the

Maoist dialectic and its structural apparatus, while Peyrol points to the
practical failure of rhizomatic organization in a highly-charged political
atmosphere.
Returning to Badiou’s work in the late 1970s raises two critical sig-
nals. First, Badiou’s critique of Deleuze (with or without Guattari) is
as old as the publication of Anti-Oedipus; it is right to see in this early
phase figures of what becomes repeated in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being.
I have briefly discussed the polemics appearing in La Situation Actuelle
sur le front de la philosophie, as well as Badiou’s lectures of 1977–1978,
collected in Part IV of Theory of the Subject where Deleuze is mentioned.
This set of critiques identifies a second signal: While Badiou is, indeed,
engaged in vociferous critique of Deleuze and Guattari, he accomplishes
this alongside the positive articulation of a materialist ontology and epis-
temology. In the translator’s introduction to Theory of the Subject, Bruno
Bosteels (2012, xvii–xviii) explains that the lectures late in 1977 are pri-
marily concerned with Badiou’s commitment to understand the move-
ment of materialism—its “periodization”—and the conditions required
for its renewal. It is not that the critiques of Deleuze and Guattari are a
sideline; the polemical force of the writing, particularly in La Situation
Actuelle belies that concern. Rather, they are part of a much larger the-
oretical enterprise, at least from Badiou’s point of view. The issue turns
on the structures that both support thought and keep it moving; in the
1970s this issue exercised in against an explicitly political background. In
the 1990s, the question shifts to the quality or constitution of the mul-
tiplicity from which thought is formed. It is this concern that occupies
Deleuze and Guattari, in their 1991 evaluation of the ontological pro-
posal Badiou offers in Being and Event.

1991: Logic and Multiplicity

In the preceding, I examined an early debate concerning multiplicity
couched in terms of structure and procedure. By structure, each camp
describes the nature of multiplicity or mass; by procedure, they describe
methods by which the relation of One to multiplicity is accomplished.
In “Example 12” of Deleuze and Guattari’s 1991 What is Philosophy?
they take up Badiou’s ontological proposal according to both the nature
of the multiple and the way Badiou’s work with it proceeds. They are
38  B. Vartabedian

particularly concerned with his use of set-theoretic strategies that align

with logic; in the context of their analysis, Deleuze and Guattari see this
as a problematic position that transforms philosophy’s concepts into sci-
entific functions and burdens these with evaluation according to logical
principles. I begin by describing Deleuze and Guattari’s preferred frame-
work, which aligns philosophy and the concept (on the one hand) and
science with the function (on the other).

Philosophy, Concept, Science, Function, and Event

Deleuze and Guattari answer the titular question of What is Philosophy?
by claiming, “philosophy is the discipline that involves creating con-
cepts … they must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and would
be nothing without their creator’s signature” (WP 5). In addition to
its task (the creation of concepts) and its persona (the philosopher),
Deleuze and Guattari explain that the place of philosophy is the plane
of immanence, the site that “secures conceptual linkages with ever-
increasing connections” (WP 37). In other words, the plane of imma-
nence is the proper place of linking and multiplying; concepts take
advantage of this by “populating the plane” (WP 37). Deleuze and
Guattari can therefore assign the what, the whom, and the where of con-
cept production. Their first engagement with these elements, found
in “Example 1,” is with “one of the best-known, signed philosophi-
cal concepts, that of the Cartesian cogito” (WP 24). Though I discuss
this example in greater depth in Chapter 4, the analysis of the cogito
offers helpful background for the approach Deleuze and Guattari take
to Badiou’s work.
As a concept, Descartes’ cogito—expressed as an event in the phrase,
“I think, therefore I am”—is constituted by elements of doubt, thought,
and existence, and the relationships holding among these, in their par-
ticular Cartesian context. The concept is thus a map of the movement of
thought between these elements, and these passages are themselves con-
tent-rich, as I demonstrate in my analysis of the diagram in Chapter 4. A
philosophical analysis of the concept, by Deleuze and Guattari’s lights,
requires recognition and understanding of these elements and their
­connections in their particular fullness, and also in their locality, since the
components any concept collects are forged in a complete and localized
whole. Put another way, the cogito is a local unity of doubting, thinking,
and being.
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  39

Just as philosophy’s output is the concept, science’s output and

means of communication is the function. These, according to Deleuze
and Guattari, “are presented as propositions in discursive systems,” and
provide a vocabulary that “enables the sciences to communicate” (WP
117). Unlike philosophical knowledge, scientific bodies of knowledge
are communicated propositionally and as such depend on fixed frames
of reference in which these propositions can be interpreted. In Deleuze
and Guattari’s analysis, functions rely on “a relation of dependence or
correspondence (necessary reason) … so that ‘being human’ is not itself
the function, but the value of f (a) for a variable x” (WP 135). In other
words, the function reports relationships of input and outputs that are
interpreted for a given function on account of its corresponding to (or
not) the states of affairs it purports to describe. Fixed frames of refer-
ence—and a rigid correspondence relation—allow for the develop-
ment of scientific disciplines and their discursive peculiarities, but their
dependence on propositions allows for these discourses to be sensible
in other scientific frames. Deleuze and Guattari explain that as long as
science facilitates communication and common vocabulary among its
discursive bodies, it takes as its site the plane of reference, populated by
“states of affairs, objects or bodies, and lived states” (WP 150–151) all of
which express functions using propositions.
Philosophy’s site, the plane of immanence, is populated by events,
which express concepts. For example, the designations cogito (the subject
of “Example 1”) and “the ox head wired for sound” (the Kantian con-
cept at the heart of “Example 4”) each express concepts that are complex
linkages and maps of relations between elements—multiplicities. They
are events insofar as they each mark a novel irruption of thought consol-
idated in a transformed way; the ox head—as a mapping of thought—is
re-forged from components of thought, doubt, and being that constitute
the cogito. It is this notion of the event that is especially at issue, since
Deleuze and Guattari claim in “Example 12” that Badiou’s version of
the event, as presented in Being and Event depends on logical operations
(with their origins in science) and not from philosophical ones.

Logic and Badiou
Logic capitalizes on the work of science, especially its propositional char-
acter, and applies a second, more rigid, system of reference for judging
the truth or falsity of the proposition. In this transformation, Deleuze
40  B. Vartabedian

and Guattari explain that logic “is reductionist not accidentally but
essentially and necessarily: following the route marked out by Frege and
Russell, it wants to turn the concept into a function” (WP 135). This is a
mistaken pathway, since logic treats concepts as instances of mere predi-
cation. Per Deleuze and Guattari:

The set of a function’s truth values that determine true affirmative prop-
ositions constitutes a concept’s extension: the concept’s objects occupy
the place of variables or arguments of the propositional function for which
the proposition is true, or its reference satisfied. Thus, the concept itself
is the function for the set of objects that constitute its extension. In this
sense, every complete concept is a set and has a determinate number; the
concept’s objects are the elements of the set. (WP 136)

In this context, a concept is a predicate. For example, the concept

human being requires objects to instantiate it; the elements B, N, and
T are among the set constituting this concept, and the concept thus
‘extends’ to include it. Propositions concerning B, N, and T and their
status as human beings are thus true affirmative propositions. Under
this analytical framework, concepts also have an intension, or “the
conditions of reference that provide the limits or intervals into which
a variable enters in a true proposition” (WP 136). Intension describes
the attending features or differences of an instance as a mechanism for
evaluating the instance’s correspondence to a concept. If B, N, and
T are instances of the concept or set human being, they can also be
assigned as part of the set “Becky’s nieces and nephews.” This second,
more particular assignation, assigns to these instances a further speci-
ficity. Deleuze and Guattari call the intensive features of a proposition
its prospects. However, and problematically for Deleuze and Guattari,
from the vantage of logic concepts are neither created, nor are these
forged; rather, concepts are predicative placeholders that either apply
or do not, containers waiting to be populated and intensified using
subsidiary forms of predication.
Deleuze and Guattari say, “By confusing concepts with functions,
logic acts as though science were already dealing with concepts or form-
ing concepts of the first zone” (WP 140). Logic doubles and reinforces
the scientific function, mistaking its results for “philosophical” content
and subjecting the creative pathways of thought evinced in philosophy
and its concepts to the rigorous demands of propositional reference. Put
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  41

another way, in its attempts to bridge science and philosophy, logic sub-
mits concepts like cogito or “the ox head wired for sound” to a deter-
mination and evaluation by correspondence, a relation itself determined
by a single frame of reference; this frame of reference assigns values of
true and false to each instance. However, this yields some difficulty when
approaching Descartes’ concept: To evaluate the cogito on these terms,
one would evaluate the claim “I think, therefore I am” according to
its correspondence to the existing frame of reference, and then subject
each of the interior elements—expressed propositionally as “I doubt,” “I
think,” and “I exist”—to a similar type of evaluation. Though it is the
case that key ‘moments’ of a concept can be expressed propositionally,
not all of the concept’s components are expressed in this way, and the
interior elements are reduced to mere predication. What appears is an
analysis of any concept such that only the propositions remain, while the
passages that trace thought’s movement among the elemental stops drop
away. In other words, a logical analysis of a concept only attends to a
small portion of its components, identifying the unique features of an
instance under broad (and indistinct) parameters.
In “Example 12,” Deleuze and Guattari criticize Badiou for build-
ing a philosophical system from scientific foundations. They say Badiou
“proposes to distribute at intervals on an ascending line a series of fac-
tors passing from functions to concepts” (WP 151). It is the “passing
from functions to concepts” part of the claim that identifies the prob-
lem: Badiou gets the order of things wrong, since his theory of the
event is developed from the function rather than from a conceptual sys-
tem. In short, the system in Badiou’s work that would give rise to an
event is built on a category mistake. This limitation is especially evident
in Deleuze and Guattari’s exposition of the philosophy-concept versus
science-function relationship, which amounts to a comparison of types
of multiplicities and an articulation of their appropriate results. Per
Deleuze and Guattari, it is the “neutralized base, the set, which indi-
cates any multiplicity whatever” (WP 152), which forms the point of
departure for Badiou’s procedure. By beginning from “any multiplicity
whatever,” Badiou’s system depends on a kind of arbitrariness about the
starting point, one in which “any old set” might do. This is problem-
atic because sets and the events linked to these are not localized; they
are insufficiently particular and effectively come out of nowhere. Deleuze
and Guattari counter this with the insistence that a multiplicity requires
not a single set or element, but “at least two multiplicities,” because
42  B. Vartabedian

“the multiplicity is precisely what happens between the two” (WP 152).
Defining multiplicity as a dynamic relation accomplishes the requisite
work of localizing the multiplicity, at least as far as Deleuze and Guattari
are concerned.
Their critique also emphasizes the set’s subjection to “a regime of the
‘counting-as-one’ (bodies or objects, units of the situation)” (WP 151).
As I pointed out above in the analysis of extension and intension, the
concept “Becky’s Nieces and Nephews” has at least three elements: B, N,
and T. Affirmative propositions follow concerning B, N, and T and their
relation to the predicate-concept, and thus their belonging to the set.
There is no dynamism in this form of counting, no creation or sense of
irruption that Deleuze and Guattari assign to the properly-sited (philo-
sophical) concept; Badiou ascribes philosophical productivity to a func-
tion, a logical mechanism depending on extension and intension, rather
than to the creative trace of the concept.
Though the theory of the event is nominally at issue, Deleuze and
Guattari’s criticisms are here directed at the structural commitments that
underwrite Badiou’s account. They take issue with reframing creative and
dynamic movements of thought in propositions, and then developing
these propositions in an evaluative and rigid frame of reference. There
is no apparent attention to locality or specificity, only re-presentation
of thought’s movement in static terms. This critique recalls Deleuze and
Guattari’s rhizomatic rejection of the dialectic, which draws from an
established unity and re-presents this unity. In the discussion of logic and
its relationship to science, logic takes the basic commitment of scientific
procedure—functions resulting in propositions—and freezes these results
in a way that re-casts philosophy and local philosophical interventions.
Absent a localizing anchor, Badiou’s theory of the event becomes unsat-
isfactorily abstract and, perhaps, as much a surprise to Badiou as May ’68
appeared to Deleuze and Guattari.

1997 (and Beyond): The Clamor over Clamor

The preceding two sections demonstrate that multiplicity is a live issue
for reflection and interlocution in work by Badiou and Deleuze and
Guattari, beginning in the late 1970s and continuing through the 1990s.
The final entry in this conversation comes in 1997, with the publica-
tion of Badiou’s book-length treatment of Deleuze’s work, Deleuze: la
clameur de l’être (Deleuze: The Clamor of Being). This text interprets
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  43

Deleuze’s work thematically and with a particular objection in mind:

Deleuze’s work is “organized around a metaphysics of the One” (DCB
17). In Badiou’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s “Rhizome,” which
I discussed above, Badiou suggests that their refusal to reproduce or
re-present matter in thought—in short, an outright resistance against
one-ness—ends with Deleuze and Guattari accepting the monism of
matter. If everything is generated from matter, then all there is is mat-
ter; no meaningful place is made for the creative activity or separation
thought can accomplish. In the terms I’ve been using so far, this critique
is aimed at procedure.
Badiou also lodges an explicit critique of structure in Deleuze’s work.
As Badiou recounts the historical shifts in their “nonrelationship” (DCB
1), he claims that his work came into direct alignment with Deleuze’s
after the publication of L’Être et l’événement in 1988. “In developing
an ontology of the multiple,” Badiou says, “it was vis-à-vis Deleuze and
no one else that I was positioning my endeavor” (DCB 3). This direct
philosophical alignment emerged after decades of indirect personal and
political opposition, which Badiou chronicles in the text’s early pages.
Put another way, the account in Clamor is developed from a site of con-
tinuity (a shared commitment to multiplicity, such as this concept is
expressed in their respective works), rather than from a site of antago-
nistic difference, apparent in Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Maoism,
and in Badiou’s/Peyrol’s critiques of the intellectual left and Deleuze
and Guattari’s affinity with this position.
Of this direct alignment, Badiou identifies “two paradigms that
govern the manner in which the multiple is thought,” assigning to
Deleuze’s “the ‘vital’ (or ‘animal’) paradigm of open multiplicities (in
the Bergsonian filiation,” and to his own “the mathematical paradigm of
sets, which can also be qualified as ‘stellar’ in Mallarmé’s sense of the
word” (DCB 3–4). Badiou’s characterization, then, situates his multiplic-
ity alone as mathematical, and although Badiou acknowledges Deleuze’s
mathematical interests (noting that in the earliest stages of Badiou’s
knowledge of Deleuze it is because of the latter’s work with math and
Spinoza), he does not see these as relevant to Deleuze’s conception of
multiplicity.
This analysis, outlined in the first chapter of Deleuze: The Clamor
of Being, begins with the assertion, “we can therefore first state that
one must carefully identify a metaphysics of the One in the work of
Deleuze” (DCB 11). It would appear, for example, that in Difference
44  B. Vartabedian

and Repetition when Deleuze argues against the traditional opposi-

tion of One and many to multiplicity (cf. DR 182), he is working
to escape the demands of this couple. Badiou claims, however, that
“going beyond a static (quantitative) opposition always turns out to
involve the qualitative raising up of one of its terms” (DCB 10; empha-
sis mine). By avoiding the demand of the pairing One or many, the
implication is that both are: one and multiple—as the totality rep-
resented by all available options—is one. Badiou identifies these as
weak claims concerning multiplicity in Deleuze’s oeuvre. He cites
claims of the univocity of Being in Difference and Repetition as onto-
logically more significant than “the whole thousand-voiced mul-
tiple” for which Being speaks (DR 304, quoted in DCB 11). From
The Logic of Sense, Badiou cites the ‘all’ of communication between
events, the claim that Sense “is ‘the position in the void of all events
in one’” (Deleuze 1990, 180, quoted in DCB 11). In these (early)
cases, multiplicity gives way to One in Deleuze’s work; Badiou reads
these texts as expressing a telos of the One-All, in which multiplicity
serves as a kind of smokescreen to disguise this tendency.6
Another angle of criticism Badiou raises against Deleuze’s work
concerns the place of the subject. Badiou approaches this from the
machine-automaton pairing, explaining that for Deleuze, the subject
has emerged from the machinic production of desire, and sees its own
disintegration in its return to the machine. There is a form of ascetic
purification to this subject. Badiou claims, “Thinking,” the activity
associated with the subject, “is not the spontaneous effusion of a per-
sonal capacity. It is the power, won only with the greatest difficulty
against oneself, of being constrained to the world’s play” (DCB 12).
As an alternative to the distinctive work of subjectivity in terms of
thought and choice, Deleuze’s subject takes up its task while tethered
to the machine that produces it. This position, clearly unpalatable to
the theorist of the militant subject, apparently limits the transform-
ing power a subject ought to have. There is no room for the revi-
sion of an accepted order. In fact, Badiou sees the Deleuzian proposal
as fundamentally backwards; the machine order forms a limit deter-
mining the subject’s thought. This constraint—and the occasional
or rare possibility for a subject to escape it—suggests to Badiou that
“Deleuze’s conception of thought is profoundly aristocratic” (DCB
12), since only a few can pass from “only meager local configurations”
of the machine, through “the transfixion and disintegration of their
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  45

actuality by infinite virtuality” (DCB 13), or the limit of this config-

uration’s power. The counterintuitive result, Badiou claims, is that a
philosophy whose currency is a vitalist multiplicity is also a philoso-
phy of death, when considered from the position of the subject. This
cycle, rare as it is, does not accommodate transformation except of the
subject by way of asceticism, in which “ … thinking consists precisely
in ascetically attaining that point where the individual is transfixed by
the impersonal exteriority that is equally his or her authentic being”
(DCB 13). By this analysis, thought is an individual in contemplation,
a position Badiou assigns to “ontologies of presence” in Being and
Event, and one utterly devoid of the disruptive possibilities Badiou
builds into his own theory of the multiple.
Badiou’s third criticism of Deleuze consists in the claim that the
latter “arrives at conceptual productions that I would unhesitatingly
call monotonous, composing a very particular regime of emphasis or
almost infinite repetition of a limited repertoire of concepts, as well as
a virtuosic variation of names, under which what is thought remains
essentially identical” (DCB 15). By this, Badiou suggests that the
apparent diversity of cases from which Deleuze draws is employed
in service of the same conceptual structure across his oeuvre. Where
some readers see consistency, Badiou sees a problematic conservatism,
presenting itself in a commitment to a system abstracted from the
cases the system purports to explain. Badiou takes as his chief exam-
ple here Deleuze’s analysis of cinema, in which “(Deleuze’s) entire
enterprise is proposing a creative repetition of concepts and not an
apprehension of the cinematic art as such” (DCB 16). In the Cinema
volumes, hundreds of films stand as cases illustrating Deleuze’s
notions of movement and time; this analysis is not ‘film theory’ as
such, but rather a theory of time, and a theory of movement. Badiou’s
issue here is with the displacement occurring between case and con-
cept. He says, again in the instance of the Cinema texts, “ … it is once
again, and always, (Deleuze’s) philosophy that begins anew and that
causes cinema to be there where it cannot, of itself, be” (DCB 16). The
cases are drafted to reiterate conceptual commitments. Put another
way, cinema (and any other set of cases put forward) is emptied of its
cinematic significance and stands only as an expression of Deleuze’s
conceptual apparatus. Badiou’s critique poses keen questions concern-
ing the issue of method; I return to this in my discussion of Clamor in
Chapter 5.
46  B. Vartabedian

Badiou closes his opening chapter of Clamor by crystallizing the cri-

tique he’s raised, lauding the Deleuzian commitments to “an ethics of
thought that requires dispossession and asceticism,” and to “a systematic
and abstract” philosophy as virtues (DCB 17). The first commitment,
that Deleuze’s philosophical project “is organized around a metaphys-
ics of the One,” is the source of dispute and its assessment. Readers of
this final entry in the conversation concerning multiplicity are aware
that Badiou offers an incomplete characterization of Deleuze’s ver-
sion of multiplicity, and from this characterization goes on to argue
that Deleuze’s commitments to univocity are liabilities for any pur-
ported claims to immanence. The objections present in Badiou’s 1997
monograph rehearse once again the issues of structure and procedure
present in the early work, and they also overlook the mathematic ideas
that underwrite Deleuze’s notion of multiplicity. This mode of reading
Deleuze’s work is not new; as I discussed above, in 1977 Georges Peyrol
dismisses the third principle of multiplicity in “Rhizome” as an occult
presentation or an “incantation”. Badiou’s work does not, however, go
unremarked upon.
In addition to the immediate responses—and defenses–of Deleuze’s
overall program by Arnauld Villani and José Gil in Futur Anterieur,
Daniel W. Smith ([2003] 2012) takes care to unpack each of the math-
ematical traditions on which Deleuze draws, thus responding to the
unfulfilled promise of Clamor: An examination of the mathematical
underpinnings of Deleuze’s theory of multiplicities. In doing so, Smith
rejects the circumscription of Deleuze’s work to the so-called vital-
ist paradigm. Smith devotes an entire section to the broad and varied
mathematical roots on which Deleuze’s engagement draws, situating it
primarily in a framework of problematics. This approach to mathematics
involves, for example, the dynamic work of constructing a figure from
a few rules for drawing and principles for deploying the tools, where a
theorematic system demonstrates characteristics of an already-drawn
and available figure (Smith [2003] 2012, 290–291); the difference in
these sorts of systems turns on whether one creates (as in a problem-
atic approach) or consults (in a theorematic or axiomatic approach).
Deleuze favors the former, though not to the exclusion of the latter.
Smith ([2003] 2012) marks the presence of axiomatics, particularly in
A Thousand Plateaus, as a way of affirming the ecumenism of Deleuze’s
overall approach.7
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  47

Inattention to Deleuze’s emphasis on the problem, as Smith ([2003]

2012, 307) explains, “results in numerous infelicities in (Badiou’s)
reading of Deleuze.” In particular, he cites Badiou’s assertion that one
must begin from “a concrete case” when discerning Deleuze’s onto-
logical work (DCB 14), and argues that this demand begins from the
end and not the beginning; the concrete case expresses a solution to a
problem or the answer to a question. When armed with a solution, as
Deleuze explains in Difference and Repetition, it is easy to forget the
problem that occasioned and thus assume—incorrectly—that the solu-
tion is the problem (DR 162–163). In this way, Smith responds to
Badiou’s claim in Clamor that Deleuze relies on ‘monotonous produc-
tions,’ or simply the re-production of his general structural concerns in
diverse fields. However, as Smith—following Deleuze—suggests, it is
not merely structural reproduction. Rather, each solution is unique to
the problem occasioning it; put another way—and in terms, I develop
in subsequent chapters—the system or the ‘concrete case’ actually
describes a particular and peculiar relationship between multiplicity and
the one expressing it.
In addition to reflection on the nature of the system Deleuze devel-
ops—the relation of structure and procedure—Smith’s critique estab-
lishes a directional or dispositional element necessary for distinguishing
Deleuze’s program from Badiou’s. Smith ([2003] 2012, 309) claims,
“Deleuze’s is a ‘bottom up’ ontology (from problematics to discretiza-
tion-axiomatization), whereas Badiou’s is a ‘top-down’ ontology (elabo-
rated exclusively from the viewpoint of axiomatics, denying the existence
of problematics).” This is the difference between an ontology under-
stood genetically or dynamically, tasked with the work of creation and
construction, and an ontology understood descriptively or statically, in
which questions of being and its appropriate science—though compre-
hensive in their development—are stripped of their constructive ability
and instead demonstrate or describe. In Chapter 5, I explicitly return
to this insight and point out ways in which the specific critiques raised
in the set of engagements I have described reinforce this directional
difference.
Smith argues that an appreciation of Deleuze’s use of mathemat-
ics counters Badiou’s claims that Deleuze’s multiplicity is only vital-
ist. This is accomplished by recognizing Deleuze’s use of various other
models, alongside the mathematic, as illustrative of the core concerns
48  B. Vartabedian

of differentiation, individuation, and transformation in Deleuze’s work

([2003] 2012, 305). There are complex mathematical structures at play
throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre, though Badiou—in his narrow demands
for what counts, not only as ontology, but as mathematically appropriate
for ontology—fails to appreciate both their presence and the nature of
their deployment.
To be sure, the conversation does not stop with Daniel W. Smith’s
assessment. As I pointed out in the preceding chapter, Clamor initiates
an entire strain of scholarship intended, in some cases to defend a more
developed account of Deleuze’s broad commitments against Badiouian
critique (Roffe 2012; Crockett 2013). Simon Duffy (2013) has carefully
accounted for the mathematics at work across Deleuze’s oeuvre, defend-
ing Deleuze against Badiou’s critiques after a comprehensive airing of
Deleuze’s engagement with mathematical tools. These are the major
English-language respondents to the challenges raised by Badiou in his
monograph on Deleuze. My work in the next chapter takes a deep dive
into the nature and structure of mathematical multiplicity as Deleuze
and Badiou respectively develop it.

Conclusion
My aim in this chapter has been to situate Alain Badiou and Gilles
Deleuze with Félix Guattari in conversation over the nature and func-
tion of multiplicity. This conversation, which I claim begins with the
publication of Deleuze and Guattari’s “Rhizome” in 1976 and ends with
Badiou’s 1997 monograph Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, indicates that
their positive presentations of a theory of multiplicity are often staged
as a critique of the other’s position. I began with an early and explicitly
political point of discussion, initiated by Rhizome and followed immedi-
ately by several responses from Badiou. I focused my attention on “The
Fascism of the Potato,” in which Badiou (writing as Georges Peyrol)
objects generally to forms of materialism that refuse to ratify a temporary
point of consolidation, and specifically to the the principles of multiplic-
ity proffered by Deleuze and Guattari as promoting a kind of political
conservatism and thus undermining any moves toward transformation
from the political left.
While the discussion of multiplicity in the 1976–1977 exchanges pro-
ceeds under political auspices, the analysis Deleuze and Guattari take
up in 1991’s What is Philosophy? is conceptual. Deleuze and Guattari
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  49

approach Badiou’s theory of the event—which they discuss briefly

in “Example 12”—in their analysis of logic. Logic is problematic for
Deleuze and Guattari because it reduces concepts, the currency of phil-
osophical creation, to a scientific language that is evaluated according to
a fixed plane of reference. Deleuze and Guattari locate Badiou’s theory
in this logical context, noting that the multiplicity to which any event is
connected is insufficiently localized and overly abstract. Badiou’s theory
depends on mechanisms of logic that effectively freeze the movement of
elements, rather than allowing for their free circulation and connection,
like those discussed in “Example 1” and “Example 4” earlier in What is
Philosophy?
I indicated that Badiou’s chief criticism appearing in Deleuze: The
Clamor of Being is the claim that in spite of commitments to the contrary,
Deleuze proffers a “metaphysics of the One,” rather than a comprehen-
sive theory of multiplicity. This position has problematic implications for
the nature of connection in Deleuze’s ontology: first, what appears to be
a philosophy of life ends up being a philosophy of death, since any unique
instance is re-appropriated by the multiplicity from which it emerged; sec-
ond, robust and unique productions (e.g., cinema) are appropriated as
mere cases of the structure on which Deleuze’s theory depends. Though
Deleuze maintains a consistent theoretical commitment across his work,
Badiou points out—as he did in “The Fascism of the Potato”—that this is
really a commitment to a kind of conservatism of the “same,” underwrit-
ten by the nature of multiplicity itself.
These three engagements allow me to identify two valences of cri-
tique: the first, structure, attends to the way the multiplicity itself is con-
structed; the second, procedure, attends to the way any one emerges or
is cut from the multiple. In the next chapter, I demonstrate the separa-
tion of their theories along the lines of their explicit mathematical com-
mitments. Attention to mathematical paradigms of multiplicity and their
use by Deleuze and Badiou clarifies the structure of multiplicity; it is an
investigation, then, of structure that forms the scope of the next chapter.

Notes
1. 
François Dosse discusses the relationship of the New Philosophers to
Deleuze and Guattari; see Dosse (2010, 362–381). For an account of their
relationship to Badiou, see e.g., Bosteels (2009, xvii–xviii) and Badiou
(2016, 1–19).
50  B. Vartabedian

2. Sam Gillespie (2008) explains that Frege’s deduction of zero depends on a

failed definition of number as “everything equal to itself,” where “equal to
itself” is the defining property. Gillespie (2008, 50) says, “Unfortunately
for Frege, ‘everything’ was not a number. But if the logic is reversed, and
we come up with the property ‘not equal to itself,’ we have the first logical
concept that subsumes a number. No object falls under the concept ‘not
equal to itself,’ and to that lack of object, we can assign a number, zero.”
Badiou (2008, 22) addressees Frege’s deduction of zero.
3. See Badiou ([1977a] 2012, 11): “Althusser and company are more radi-
cally nihilist in that, for them, quite plainly nothing happened in May ’68.”
4. Badiou’s continued Maoist affiliation through the 1970s required the use
of pseudonyms in political, academic, and cultural criticism. In an inter-
view with Antoine de Baecque, Badiou explains that his use of pseudonyms
was an attempt to secure personal and intellectual protection. As a known
member of UCMFL, Badiou explains that he and others “were arrested,
frisked, interrogated. We had to take certain precautions, and the pseudo-
nyms helped us cover our tracks so that the guy sitting across from us at
the police station wouldn’t have a ready-made file on us with texts we’d
written and be able to say ‘You wrote this, this, and this … ’” (Badiou
2013, 13). Bruno Bosteels (2011, 110–156) devotes an entire chapter of
Badiou and Politics (Chapter 3, “One Divides into Two”) to Badiou’s rela-
tion to Maoism and his participation with the UCFML.
5. Peyrol claims that this appellation follows from their commitments to the
“negation of morality, repudiation of antagonism, aestheticism of the mul-
tiple, which outside of itself, as its subtractive political condition and its
indelible fascination, leaves in abeyance the One of the tyrant: one prepares
for the kowtow, one is already bowing down” (FP 201).
6. Badiou offers a litany later in Clamor that reinforces these problematic
commitments: “We can say that, for Deleuze, Being is formulated univo-
cally as: One, virtual, inorganic life, immanence, the nonsensical dona­­
t­­ion of sense, pure duration, relation, eternal return, and the affirmation
of chance. As for thinking, this is, for him, disjunctive synthesis and intu-
ition, the casting of dice, the ascetic constraint of a case, and the force of
memory” (DCB 78). In “Deleuze’s Vitalist Ontology,” published in 1998
shortly after Clamor, Badiou considers the reasons that “made Deleuze
choose against ontological mathematicity in the end, and what made
him choose the word ‘Life’ as Being’s main name” (CT 62); these rea-
sons mirror those unpacked in the early sections of Clamor. Deleuze’s
fundamental commitment to univocal being, particularly as it is expressed
in pp. 35–42 of Difference and Repetition and subsequent focus on the
‘between’ as this univocal being’s primary indicator are liabilities Badiou
identifies in the structure of being as Deleuze proposes it. Badiou also
 2  ENGAGEMENTS, 1976–1997: HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTANDING  51

argues that Deleuze’s commitment to univocity prevents any partition of

being in favor of emphasizing the links that gave rise to the partition in
the first place (CT 63–64), a criticism directed at procedural separation of
any one from the multiplicity. With respect to the ‘between,’ Badiou reads
this as a commitment to the “neutral movement of the Whole,” found by
examining the link between conditions for determination and the deter-
mined being, rather than the resulting poles (CT 65). Together, these lead
Badiou to claim that in Deleuze’s project, “there is no being of Being”
(CT 66), no aspect of being qua being that is not captured by the move-
ment organizing it. This movement is life, “which is thinkable as an in-
between of the movements of actualization and virtualization” (CT 66).
The structure Badiou reads in Deleuze’s work is the strands holding each
of the poles together, but this structure is—by Badiou’s estimation—only
vital, never mathematical.
7. 
Jon Roffe (2016) has recently criticized, with characteristic care and
attention, the understanding of axiomatics by Deleuze and Guattari in A
Thousand Plateaus, and gestures to the way this misguided understand-
ing of axiomatics forms the background of analysis in “Example 10” and
“Example 12” of What is Philosophy?

References
Badiou, Alain. 2000. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Translated by Louise
Burchill. Theory Out of Bounds Series. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press. Originally Deleuze: la clameur de l’être. Paris: Hachette,
1997. (Cited in text as DCB)
———. 2005. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum.
Originally L’être et l’événement. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988. (Cited in text as BE)
———. 2006. Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology.
Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Norman Madarasz.
Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory Series, edited by Rodolphe
Gasché. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Originally Court Traité
d’ontologie transitoire. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. (Cited in text as CT )
———. 2008. Number and Numbers. Translated by Robin Mackay. London:
Polity. Originally Le Nombre et lest nombres. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990.
———. 2009. Theory of the Subject. Translated and with an Introduction by
Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum. Originally Théorie du sujet. Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1982. (Cited in text as TS)
———. [1977a] 2012. “The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front.” In
The Adventure of French Philosophy, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels,
1–18. Originally La Situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie, 5–19. Paris:
François Maspero, 1977.
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———. [1977b] 2012. “The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-
Oedipus.” In The Adventure of French Philosophy, edited and translated by
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les marges de l’ Anti-Œdipe).” In La situation actuelle sur le front de la philos-
ophie, 24–41. Paris: François Maspero, 1977.
———. 2012. “The Fascism of the Potato.” In The Adventure of French
Philosophy, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels, 191–201. Originally
Georges Peyrol. “Le Fascisme de la pomme de terre.” In La Situation actuelle
sur le front de la philosophie, 42–52. Paris: François Maspero, 1977. (Cited in
text as FP)
———. 2013. “‘Cinema has Given Me so Much’: An Interview with Alain
Badiou by Antoine de Baecque.” Cinema, 1–20. London: Polity.
——— with Gilles Haéri. 2016. In Praise of Mathematics. Translated by
Susan Spitzer. London: Polity. Originally Éloge des mathematiques. Paris:
Flammarion, 2015.
Bosteels, Bruno. 2009. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Theory of the Subject, vii–
xxxvii. London: Verso.
———. 2011. Badiou and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———. 2012. “Translator’s Introduction.” In The Adventure of French
Philosophy, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels, vii–lxiii. London: Verso.
Crockett, Clayton. 2013. Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and
Event. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Constantin Boundas.
New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York:
Columbia University Press. Originally Différence et repetition. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1968. (Cited in text as DR)
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1981. Rhizome: An Introduction. Translated
by Paul Patton. I & C 8 (Spring): 49–71. Originally Rhizome: Introduction.
Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1976. (Cited in text as R)
———. 1994. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Originally Qu’est-ce que la
philosophie? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991. (Cited in text as WP)
Dosse, François. 2010. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives.
Translated by Deborah Glassman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Originally Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Biographie croisée. Paris: Éditions
La Decouverte, 2007.
Duffy, Simon. 2013. Deleuze and the History of Mathematics: In Defense of the
“New”. Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Series. London:
Bloomsbury.
Gillespie, Sam. 2008. The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist
Metaphysics. Anamnesis. Melbourne: re.press.
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Lacan, Jacques. 2007. “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite

to Any Subject Whatever.” In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of
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Roffe, Jon. 2012. Badiou’s Deleuze. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
———. 2016. “Axiomatic Set Theory in the Work of Deleuze and Guattari.”
Parrhesia 23: 129–154. Available online: https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/
parrhesia25/parrhesia25_roffe.pdf. Accessed 8 September 2017.
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Edinburgh University Press.
 CHAPTER 3

Structure: Multiplicity and Multiple

in Deleuze and Badiou

In the preceding chapter, I situated Badiou in conversation with Deleuze

and Guattari in the period 1976–1997. The content of this conver-
sation is their respective theories of multiplicity and the problems or
liabilities one thinker sees in the work of the other. I used an early pseu-
donymous work of Badiou’s—“The Fascism of the Potato,” written as
Georges Peyrol—to establish two valences of understanding multiplicity:
one, procedure, concerns the relationship between any one and the mul-
tiple from which it is drawn; a second, structure, describes the nature of
the multiplicity itself.
My focus in the present chapter is with structure, or the nature of
multiplicity. In what follows, I reconstruct Deleuze’s and Badiou’s
theories of multiplicity on the terms of their original presentations
and with the mathematical influences on which they depend intact.
The approach I take here and in the next chapter—effectively keep-
ing their accounts apart from one another—allows for something of a
full airing of the program without interruption by critiques from the
other. I return to these critiques in this work’s Chapter 5.
Since the preceding chapter closed with Badiou’s effective ‘last
word’ in the conversation, and in particular with the claim that
Deleuze is a metaphysician of the One, I begin with Deleuze’s theory
of multiplicity. I focus on concepts Deleuze develops from Bernhard
Riemann’s 1854 “On the Hypotheses which Lie at the Bases of
Geometry” (hereafter “Hypotheses”). Riemann’s transformation of

© The Author(s) 2018 55

B. Vartabedian, Multiplicity and Ontology in Deleuze and Badiou,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76837-3_3
56  B. Vartabedian

continuous quantity from its Aristotelian presentation, the expression

of continuous quantity in multiply-extended manifolds, and a resulting
alteration in the comprehension of physical space each clarify Deleuze’s
theory of multiplicity. I demonstrate this by making the Riemannian
contributions explicit Deleuze’s definition of the virtual idea in
Difference and Repetition’s chapter 4, and the analysis of smooth and
striated space in Plateau “1440: The Smooth and the Striated” in A
Thousand Plateaus.
I then turn to Badiou’s multiple, beginning with a ‘short course’ in
key terminology at work in his ontology, namely operation, presenta-
tion, situation, and structure. This offers a valuable preface for Badiou’s
multiple and its conceptual heritage in Georg Cantor’s distinction of
inconsistent and consistent multiplicities. Cantor develops this distinc-
tion as a solution to the Burali-Forti paradox, a set-of-all-sets paradox
concerning ordinal numbers. I also discuss a significant tool in the form
of Ernst Zermelo’s axiom of separation, a mechanism for maintain-
ing the separation between inconsistent and consistent multiples that
emerges after Russell’s paradox, perhaps the best-known of the set-
of-all-sets paradoxes. As with my work on Deleuze and Deleuze with
Guattari, I read Cantor’s influence back through key texts in Badiou’s
ontological turn, namely portions of Being and Event and Briefings on
Existence. I discuss the continuity this assertion of in/consistency pro-
vides for Badiou’s program, from the concerns expressed in the theo-
retical and political critique of the 1970s to the ontological concerns
from the late 1980s to the present. I then conclude with a brief word
about the axiom of separation and its significance in bridging structure
and procedure in Badiou’s work, a prefatory gesture for my work in
Chapter 4.

Multiplicities: Riemann, Deleuze, Deleuze–Guattari

In Chapter 1, I offered a brief explanation of the nature of multiplic-
ity in Deleuze’s work and its significance for shaping his ontology.
Multiplicity replaces notions of being as One or many; multiplicity is the
“true substantive, substance itself ” (DR 182), indicating that even these
consolidated notions of One and many are themselves multiplicities. In
Chapter 2, I attended to multiplicity in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of
the rhizome, which “has neither subject nor object, but only determina-
tions, magnitudes, dimensions, which cannot increase in number without
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  57

changing in its nature” (R 54). The rhizome-multiplicity resists place-

ment in a proposition and the application of predicates from without to
specify it; instead, it depends on interior transformations to the linkages
comprising the rhizome. These are registered as changes to determina-
tion, magnitude, and dimension, and these index the Riemannian con-
cepts on which Deleuze’s account of multiplicity depends.
I engage the content of Riemann’s “Hypotheses” to clarify the
notions from this text that Deleuze deploys in his theory of multiplicity
and show that an appreciation of Riemann’s work clarifies Deleuze’s use
of multiplicity in relation to the virtual idea, to rhizome, and (later) to
the concept. I begin by describing key features Riemann’s “Hypotheses”:
his innovation with respect to continuous manifoldness, including the
articulation of multiply-extended magnitudes, and the transformation
this occasions for comprehending physical space. I then re-read two
versions of Deleuze’s multiplicity with these insights in tow: the virtual
idea in Difference and Repetition; and multiplicity in Plateau “1440: The
Smooth and the Striated.”

Riemannian Ideas
Before launching into an assessment of Riemann’s work, consider an
example. The neighborhood in which I live is defined and ‘contained’ by
cross streets, its boundaries inscribed on the Denver city map. It is also
divided into several hundred parcels, measured according to their square
footage and legal description. Each of these individual parcels is mapped,
and survey measurements describe where one parcel begins and another
ends; indeed, as mapping technology becomes more sophisticated, any-
one searching for real estate listings can observe the shape and size of
individual parcels on a given city street. My neighborhood, then, can
be determined and defined using these discrete modes of measurement.
However, this is only one way of defining a neighborhood. I understand
the neighborhood by pathways between my house to Liz’s next door,
to Melissa’s house two blocks over, and to Damien’s house. There are
routes to and from local watering holes, our gym, and the nearest gro-
cery store; linkages between libraries, transit, and other neighborhood
services are ready to be made. Surveys of neighborhoods include ‘walk-
ability indexes,’ or measures of the degrees to which gentrification has
taken hold, measures equally significant to understanding the nature of
a neighborhood. My neighborhood, then, can be mapped with more
58  B. Vartabedian

depth and complexity than city grid’s coordinates allow. In fact, and
in this context, the grid is just a single case of mapping—a ‘sheet’ of
­information—that lay over a series of other maps or sheets.
It is the difference between narrow, numeric, or coordinate definitions
of the neighborhood and its parcels on the one hand, and the complex
relationships that give a neighborhood its sense on the other—that illus-
trates the transition and innovation Bernhard Riemann’s “Hypotheses”
offers to spatial thinking. This work begins with the claim that “geom­
etry assumes, as things given, both the notion [Begriff ] of space and the
first principles of constructions in space” (Riemann 1873, 14). While
geometry depends on both a concept of space and axiomatic principles
to shape that space, Riemann is troubled by the absence of an adequate
explanation linking these two givens, since geometers, mathematicians,
and philosophers have each failed to sort it out. Riemann asserts that
the gap between these two assumptions is closed by the development
of “the general notion of multiply-extended magnitudes,” one “entirely
unworked” so far in the history of mathematics (1873, 14). He thus
invents the bridge he sees necessary by working from concepts already
available, namely those of magnitude, continuity and discontinuity,
points and elements, measure and counting. The plan at the outset of
the “Hypotheses,” then, is to rebuild the foundations of geometry with
concepts and basic logical relations.
This work of rebuilding consists in three tasks. First is Riemann’s
innovation of the “multiply-extended magnitude,” a concept he builds
out of “general notions of magnitude” (1873, 14). Second, he intends
to show that the multiply-extended magnitude is “capable of different
measure-relations, and consequently that space is only a particular case
of a triply-extended magnitude” (Riemann 1873, 14). Finally, the work
accomplished in the second part puts the manifold ‘to work’ in order, as
Erhard Scholz (1992, 29) explains, “to improve the comprehension of
physical space.” I now turn to Part I of the “Hypotheses,” and especially
its Sections 1 and 2 to explain Riemann’s reconstruction.
Riemann’s emphasis on a conceptual mathematics is inaugurated
in a procedural statement: “Magnitude-notions [Grössenbegriffe]
are only possible where there is an antecedent general notion [alleg-
meiner Begriff ] that admits of different specialisations [verschiedene
Bestimmungsweisen]” (Riemann 1873, 15). Riemann acknowledges the
dependence of his concepts of magnitude (Grössenbegriffe) on an already
well-defined general concept. Aristotle’s distinctions of continuous and
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  59

discrete quantity, as these are presented in Part Six of the Categories, are
the well-defined concepts in play here.1 Lines, surfaces, and bodies are
examples of continuous quantities, while numbers and syllable constitute
discrete ones.
The distinguishing characteristic of discrete quantity is that its parts
remain separate from one another. Aristotle illustrates this, in the case
of number, with the examples of “two fives making ten,” or of seven
and three making ten. In these cases, the parts “do not join together
at any common boundary but are separate” (Aristotle 1984, 4b28).
Likewise, syllables bi- and -shop retain their distinct sounds independently
of their combination in the word bishop. Further, it is possible to describe
relationships between these parts. In the case of discrete quantities,
a principle of “relative order” may apply; there is a discernible order
of succession in counting, and a word dictates the order of its syllables.
However, such an order is not always required—the parts 7 and 3 can be
combined in any order to accomplish the result of 10.
By contrast, the continuous quantities can be broken into parts, and
despite this break maintain “a common boundary at which its parts join
together” (Aristotle 1984, 5a1-2). Aristotle assigns, for example, the
point as a limit of a line. These quantities are related using a principle
of relative position, determined by the relations of joined parts. In other
words, continuous quantities can be ‘located’ by the positions of other
parts. Aristotle (1984, 5a16-20) says, “The parts of a line have position
in relation to one another: each of them is situated somewhere, and you
could distinguish them and say where each is situated in the plane and
which one of the other parts it joins on to.” For example, given a line
AB bisected at a point C, I describe segments AC and CB (thus distin-
guishing the parts), mark C as the point or common boundary at which
these segments are joined, and locate segment AC based on the position
of CB. Aristotle’s distinction, when applied to the example of my own
neighborhood, illustrates the difference between considering a neighbor-
hood as surveyed coordinates (i.e., my lot takes up x number of square
feet on defined parcel y) that carve the space into defined and incom-
mensurate parts and considering it as a series of linked spaces—there is,
for example, a ramshackle fence that describes my backyard and Liz’s
backyard next door. The fence serves as a ‘common boundary’ joining
continuous quantities.
Riemann (1873, 15) explains that the sense of a magnitude is only
available against the background of an “antecedent general notion which
60  B. Vartabedian

admits of different specialisations.” Riemann describes these as either

continuous or discrete types of manifoldness, using Mannigfaltigkeit to
distinguish these from magnitudes. Riemann’s work depends, first, on a
distinction of magnitude from manifoldness, and a concept of manifold-
ness as Mannigfaltigkeit. In Chapter 1, I discussed the Kantian use of
this term, noting that it refers to an indeterminate field of sense data (in
the manifold of appearance) or as an indeterminate placeholder for an
object of cognition, the object = X. Mannigfaltigkeit comes to Riemann
by way of Gauss and Herbart; in Gauss’s case, a manifold describes a
“system of objects linked by some relations, the dimensionality of the
manifold depending on properties and interconnectedness of the rela-
tions” (Ferreirós 2007, 44). Gauss’s insight describes the ‘interior struc-
ture’ of a manifold, which (as I explain below) Riemann deploys in the
“Hypotheses.”
In tracing the passage of Mannigfaltigkeit from Kant to Riemann,
Erhard Scholz (1992, 22) explains Riemann’s dependence on a pro-
cedure from J.F. Herbart called “graded fusion,” which consists in an
activity of mind “which does not destroy the individual presentations
but glues them together, with the result that the continuous transi-
tion from one to another becomes possible.” Per Scholz (1992, 23),
Herbart’s graded fusion is crucial for Riemann’s development of the
manifold, since Riemann “presupposed the existence of concepts,
mathematical or not, which may arise as the result of a ‘graded fusion’
into serial forms. He took up the result and opened it to mathematical
consideration, thus forming his concept of multiply-extended magni-
tude.” As Scholz explains here, and Ferreirós (2007, 46) and Biagioli
(2016) confirm, a serial form is an abstract framework that, at least in
Herbart’s analysis, can be applied to and organize the content of the
empirical world. For Riemann, Herbart’s serial form offers some flexi-
bility concerning the way any region of space behaves and thus estab-
lishes the way particular marks and relations in this space will operate
and be measured. Put another way, where Gauss offers the interior
structure of any manifoldness as comprised of relations, Herbart’s
insights describe the initial conceptual condition for the possibility of a
manifold.
Riemann (1873, 15) says that continuous manifolds are developed
from points and allow for a “continuous transition from one to another
of these specializations,” while discrete manifolds take elements as their
units. Riemann (1873, 15) insists that for continuous magnitudes,
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  61

“measure consists in the superposition of the magnitudes to be com-

pared; it therefore requires a means of using one magnitude as the stand-
ard for another.” The line AB bisected at C allows for the comparison of
the individual segments AC, CB in relation to one another and in rela-
tion to the whole AB. If no “standard magnitude” is available, Riemann
(1873, 15) says, “two magnitudes can only be compared when one is
part of the other,” and the comparison consists only in determining “the
more or the less and not the how much.” In other words, comparison of
continuous magnitudes is a matter of relative position that may—in some
cases—admit of basic quantitative evaluation (i.e., more or less).
Discrete manifolds are “so common that at least in the cultivated lan-
guages any things being given it is always possible to find a notion in
which they are included” (Riemann 1873, 15). However, continuous
manifolds are far less common; the most direct examples of multiply-­
extended manifolds are “the positions of perceived objects and colors”
(Riemann 1873, 15). In the case of color, it is a set of relations hold-
ing between three values: grayscale (the deviation, either more or less,
of temperature), gamut (the range of values that express the color), and
luminance (that color’s brightness). When, for example, Pantone releases
a color portfolio, a hue—blue—is specialized as Aquamarine, Scuba
Blue, and Classic Blue. These specializations are distinguished from one
another depending on the values of grayscale, gamut, and luminance
each one expresses.
Following the initial distinction of discrete and continuous manifolds,
Riemann applies further specifications to these manifolds. He explains
the difference between simply-extended continuous manifolds and multi-
ply-extended continuous manifolds. Two continuous manifolds are sim-
ply-extended when it is possible to transition from one point to another
(Riemann 1873, 15). This transition is essentially one path with two
directions, backward and forward. Extension, then, describes the num-
ber of pathways available between points. In his articulation of the virtual
idea as multiplicity, Deleuze uses terminology of dimension in place of
extension; a simply-extended manifold is one-dimensional, while a dis-
crete manifold has dimension zero (Plotnitsky 2009, 123). However,
as Riemann (1873, 15) explains, a simply-extended manifold “…passes
over into another entirely different, and again in a definite way, namely
so that each point passes into a definite point of the other, then all the
modes of determination so obtained form a doubly-extended manifold-
ness.” It is therefore possible to add pathways by increasing the available
62  B. Vartabedian

Fig. 3.1  Ordinary comparison of interval (1/4, 3/4) with interval (1/4, 1/2)

Fig. 3.2  Reading intervals (1/4, 3/4) and (1/4, 1/2) for shared subspaces

paths to travel. As Riemann describes it here, the simply-extended mani-

fold is doubled by adding additional points and thereby creating further
pathways for travel. This process continues to triply-extended, quadruply-
extended, and to n-extended manifolds, or in Riemann’s (1873, 15)
terms, “as a composition of a variability of n + 1 dimensions.”
Arkady Plotnitsky explains the process of extending manifolds using
open intervals and the neighborhoods they constitute. He suggests that
some continuous object (e.g., a line) may be described, “not by the set
of its points, but by a class of its open subspaces covering it” (Plotnitsky
2009, 120). Take, for example, the two open intervals Plotnitsky pro-
poses, (1/4, 3/4) and (1/4, 1/2). On visual inspection of Fig. 3.1,
the magnitude described in (1/4, 1/2) is shorter than the magnitude
described in (1/4, 3/4); the magnitudes are separate entities.
However, and as Plotnitsky suggests, re-reading this figure for neigh-
borhoods requires a recognition that both the open intervals pass over
the point 1/3 (Fig. 3.2). The open subspaces ‘covering’ the point 1/3
include both intervals, which form the neighborhood of subspaces for
point 1/3 (Plotnitsky 2009, 120). The basic graphs of these intervals
are therefore not compared or described by their length, but rather on
account of their relationship at the point 1/3, a re-appraisal of space
according to sites of overlap between two intervals instead of compar-
ing these according to their (discrete) units of length; this is akin to
comparing my neighbor’s yard to my own using the boundary created
by our shared fence, rather than calculating lot sizes using Denver city
planning data.
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  63

The insights of dimensionality are also illustrated in the differences

between the two diagrams. Figure 3.1 indicates two, one-dimensional
intervals; there is only one available pathway to travel (i.e., from 1/4
to 3/4 and back). When the intervals are interpreted as overlapping at
1/3, the number of available pathways increases to four. These path-
ways include each of the one-dimensional pathways between the orig-
inal intervals (so two pathways); a third pathway between 1/4 on the
lower line through the point 1/3–3/4 on the upper line; and a fourth
route from 1/4 on the upper line, through the point 1/3–1/2 on the
lower line.
In Plotnitsky’s example, the identification of neighborhoods and sub-
spaces depends on a way of ‘interpreting’ manifolds. The differences
between these very basic Figs. 3.1 and 3.2 reflect this shift. If the former
Fig. 3.1 demonstrates discrete manifoldness, the latter Fig. 3.2 changes
the interpretation of these intervals, expanding the kinds of determina-
tions available by relationships holding between points, between inter-
vals, or between other spaces. According to Plotnitsky (2009, 121n21),
this expansion to open subspaces and neighborhoods “enabled Riemann
to define manifolds of any dimensions, even infinite-dimensional ones,
as collections of covering maps,” and secured these manifolds to be
determined independently of “ambient Euclidean space.” However,
Riemannian space and Euclidean space are not mutually exclusive.
Plotnitsky (2009, 119) explains that Riemannian space is a more “capa-
cious” concept; while a space or surface may be a complex, non-Euclidean
space there are local neighborhoods that can be described in Euclidean
terms.
Merzbach and Boyer (2011, 472) compare Riemann’s differential
geometry to “ordinary geometry,” which “is interested in the totality of
a given diagram or figure, whereas differential geometry concentrates on
the properties of a curve or a surface in the immediate neighborhood
of a point on the curve or surface.” The comparison of Figs. 3.1 and
3.2 illustrates the differences between so-called “ordinary geometry,”
expressed by Fig. 3.1, and differential geometry, expressed in the shift
to shared subspaces in Fig. 3.2. Returning to the example with which I
opened this section, the various ways I understand the neighborhood in
which I live do not eliminate its description as parcels and survey coor-
dinates, but rather recognizes it as a method of definition when a certain
vocabulary or disposition toward the space applies.
64  B. Vartabedian

Reading Riemann in the Virtual Idea

In the preceding, I discussed three key ideas appearing in Riemann’s
“Hypotheses”: his reiteration and expansion of continuous quan-
tity as manifoldness, the procedure by which these manifolds become
­multiply-extended, and the consequences of these innovations for the
comprehension of physical space. Principles of continuity, extension
(or dimensionality), neighborhoods, and overlapping subspaces each
offer mechanisms for emphasizing the relationships between spaces;
this emphasis is significant for Deleuze’s theory of multiplicity, which
I return to below.
In Chapter 1, I gestured to Deleuze’s assertion of the virtual idea as
a multiplicity. I stated Deleuze’s preference for an account of the idea
using internal genesis rather an external conditioning; in the latter, time
functions as a third term facilitating communication between categories
and intuitions. By contrast, internal genesis indicates an idea emerges
directly from, and can be traced to, the conditions that produce it. The
virtual idea, discussed in chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition, is an
instrument of internal genesis and depends on a structure afforded by
a continuous multiplicity; this ground allows for the three pieces of the
differential—the element dx, its reciprocal relation dy/dx, and its sub-
sequent determination resulting in a pre-individual singularity—to take
hold.
Deleuze is clear: “Ideas are multiplicities: every idea is a multiplicity
or a variety” (DR 182). He indicates that any idea is issued from a multi-
plicity; put another way, the idea is structured according to the principles
attending any multiplicity. However, Deleuze turns in on the very problem
of being itself, noting that “Everything is a multiplicity in so far as it incar-
nates an Idea. Even the many is a multiplicity; even the one is a multiplicity”
(DR 182). In his hands, the foundational dilemma of ontology finds its
solution in a third option, and the calcified positions of One and many
are re-animated as dynamic multiplicities. Instead of raising the stakes
by confirming the many qua multiplicity as the solution, Deleuze takes a
deflationary step; as solutions, one and many are themselves expressions
of differentiated multiplicities.
These (apparently) colossally opposed positions are really separated
by differences characteristic of the multiplicities to which they are teth-
ered. “Everywhere,” Deleuze says, “the differences between multiplici-
ties and the differences within multiplicities replace schematic and crude
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  65

oppositions … there is only the variety of multiplicity—in other words,

difference” (DR 182). The method of evaluation Deleuze proposes here
is in line with the turn, discussed in the previous section, of Riemannian
manifolds inward and their determinations as fundamentally local; this is
opposed to the measure of any manifold according to a fixed background
space. To understand the way the multiplicity develops these differ-
ences, an appreciation of the explicitly Riemannian terminology Deleuze
deploys is valuable. Deleuze specifies the nature of the idea, describing it
as “an n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity” (DR 182). This
definition demonstrates that whatever expression is under investigation,
the multiplicity it expresses is structured according to basic Riemannian
commitments: dimension, continuity, locality.
When describing dimensionality of a multiplicity, Deleuze explains,
“by dimensions, we mean the variables or coordinates upon which a
phenomenon depends” (DR 182). Riemann asserts that the continuous
manifold can be either simply- or multiply-extended, based on the num-
ber of available transitions or pathways passing through a point. In
the case of my own neighborhood, the dimensions can indicate the num-
ber of pathways etched between my house and various landmarks in the
neighborhood. Deleuze uses the language of n-dimensionality to indi-
cate the openness of the virtual idea according to multiple extensions and
dimensions; in other words, it is not confined or restricted to a particular
number of dimensions. Dimensionality equips the virtual idea to manage
the complexity apparent in the multiplicity it expresses. Beyond the path-
ways holding between my house and landmarks, the dimensionality of
my neighborhood increases to layers that include quality of life measures,
transit routes, and other opportunities of connection that increase the
complexity surrounding my house.
In terms of continuity, Deleuze claims this consists in “the set of rela-
tions between changes” holding among dimensions (DR 182). This is,
more or less, the definition of a continuous manifold and also the con-
ditions for its determination. That is, in the exposition of Riemann’s
account above I demonstrated that continuous manifolds are measured
using relations developed in and by the manifold itself. This is a pre-
scription of measure, which ensures continuous manifolds are not sub-
jected to an evaluative framework outside the manifold itself. To submit
the manifold to an exterior measure is to dilute or cover over the differ-
ences and specificity that makes the continuous multiple what it is. In
the case of Riemannian manifolds, this exterior measure is ambient and
66  B. Vartabedian

static space; with respect to Deleuze’s virtual idea, the exterior measure
consists in demands of representation and identity.
Finally, Deleuze insists that the multiplicity is definite. He says, “by
definition, we mean the elements reciprocally determined by these rela-
tions, elements which cannot change unless the multiplicity changes its
order and its metric” (DR 182–183). This characteristic depends on
the points linked by the multiplicity and emphasizes its locality. A defi-
nite multiplicity captures certain portions of “the intense world of dif-
ferences” with which Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism operates. It
occupies part of this ‘intense world’ and reads for the relationships in
that part.
Riemann’s conceptual-mathematical approach identifies the princi-
pal framework of the virtual idea. That is, continuous multiplicity and
its features provide an inchoate solution to the problem of external con-
ditioning that occasions Deleuze’s inquiry in the first place. By its very
nature, continuous multiplicity is keen to an account of internal genesis
because the linkages proper to that multiplicity are managed within it;
there is no ‘without’ to the multiplicity, and thus no threat of exterior
conditioning. The analysis of dimensionality in a Riemannian multiplicity
identifies a complex and contained site from which an idea might arise,
and its emphasis on locality or its status as definite focuses on a portion
of space, rather than the space against a larger background or in a global
configuration.
The broader transformation in ways of thinking about space, a hall-
mark of non-Euclidean geometries (in general) and Riemann’s work
(in particular), emphasizes not only immanent measure but a kind of
ecumenism about measure in general. Merzbach and Boyer (2011, 497)
explain that in investigating “distances between two points that are
infinitesimally close together,” Riemann insisted that there were more
options available than traditional Euclidean methods, though there are
cases in which traditional forms of measure may be activated. Deleuze’s
comments at the opening of this section in Difference and Repetition,
in which he asserts the priority of multiplicity to one and many, offer a
similar commitment; just as static background space might be invoked
to describe the nature of a multiplicity, Deleuze insists that the complex
series of connections underwriting a virtual idea are anchors from which
the idea and its empirical expression may emerge. Where Riemann’s
work emphasized a shift in the comprehension of physical space,
Deleuze’s assertions with respect to multiplicity suggest a shift in the
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  67

comprehension of ontological space. Immediately following the expo-

sition of the virtual idea in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze offers a
three ‘cases’ in which the virtual idea is operative: first, “atomism as a
physical idea” (DR 184); second the notion of the organism as a “bio-
logical idea” (DR 184–185); and third, an analysis of Marxism as a social
idea (DR 186).2
The third of these examples, the social Idea “in a Marxist sense” (DR
186), requires a radical localization for its prosecution. In this example,
Deleuze explains that Althusser and his collaborators were right to reject
an historicist interpretation of Marxism,

since this structure never acts transitively, following the order of succession
in time; rather, it acts by incarnating its varieties in diverse societies and by
accounting for the simultaneity of all the relations and terms which, each
time and in each case, constitute the present. (DR 186)

Deleuze here suggests that if there is a social Idea in a Marxist sense, it

is not an idea that is rehearsed historically and in fact, does not repeat
itself ‘successively.’ That is, any social Idea is borne in the present and is
limited to that particular present. For example, the social Idea organizing
relationships in my Denver neighborhood in the mid-1990s is not the
same social Idea working out in Denver in the late 2010s. If, for exam-
ple, the social Idea is something like ‘gentrification,’ the structure installs
relationships between notions of ‘opportunity,’ ‘affordability,’ ‘displace-
ment,’ ‘property tax,’ and ‘growth,’ as each of these are interpreted at
present. I discuss this example again in the next chapter, but for the
present purposes it transforms an idea of Denver away from the physi-
cal boundaries associated with it on a map and toward a series of related
elements describing it in late 2017.

Finding Riemann in Smooth and Striated Space

A similar approach attends Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of
Riemannian multiplicity in A Thousand Plateaus. There, Riemann’s work
is offered as one among several models for thinking about the relation
of smooth space, a space of virtuality or ideality, and striated space, a
space of actuality and spatio-temporal inscription. The models in ques-
tion include a technological model, by which practices of weaving fab-
ric are expressed; a musical model, explained using Boulez’s distinctions
68  B. Vartabedian

of “smooth space-time,” which “one occupies without counting” and

“striated space-time” where “one counts to occupy” (TP 477); the mari­
time model, which illustrates smooth space with “intensities, wind and
noise, forces and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe,
or ice” (TP 479) and the striated space with maps and bearings; a physi­
cal model demonstrating the passage of striated back to smooth space;
and an artistic model (TP 493–494). Deleuze and Guattari identify two
modes of relationship between smooth and striated space, the relation
underwriting each of these models. The first is a distinction of magni-
tude from distance, and a second is the relation of distances to one
another; the Riemannian principles I’ve outlined above assist in under-
standing these elements.
A magnitude describes a comparison determined against ambi-
ent space and is identified as a metric space; on the other hand, dis-
tance describes comparisons determined using those things being
compared, and is nonmetric. Of distance, Deleuze and Guattari say
that it is “a set of ordered differences, in other words, differences
that are enveloped in one another in such a way that it is possible to
judge which is larger or smaller, but not their exact magnitude” (TP
483). The judgment of ‘larger’ or ‘smaller’ is only available accord-
ing to the distances being compared, and not according to fixed meas-
ure. This description is consonant with Riemann’s descriptions of
continuous multiplicities; I expressed this difference in my explanation
of the Figs. 3.1 and 3.2. Deleuze and Guattari attribute to distances
(and, by implication, continuous multiplicity) “a process of continuous
variation” (TP 483), a recognition of the links developed and develop-
ing among points in the multiplicity. By contrast, “multiplicities of ‘mag-
nitude’ distribute constants and variables” (TP 483); the measurements
of magnitude accord more neatly with Euclidean spaces, rather than
Riemannian ones.
While the first aspect concerns the relationship of metric to nonmet-
ric space, a second aspect concerns the relationship of nonmetric spaces
to one another. For this assessment, Deleuze and Guattari quote Albert
Lautman’s Les schémas de structure, in which Lautman raises first the fact
that “Riemann spaces are devoid of any kind of homogeneity” (quoted
in TP 485).3 In other words, Riemann spaces are defined in such a way
that they do not lose their individual determinations when connected
to a larger space. Rather, they require principles of assembly—terms like
gluing, stitching, or patching describe the connections of manifolds to
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  69

one another. Lautman says, “Riemann space at its most general thus pre-
sents itself as an amorphous collection of pieces that are juxtaposed but
not attached to each other” (quoted in TP 485). Consider, for exam-
ple, the various ways in which I make qualitative descriptions about my
neighborhood. The walkability indexes and trends concerning gentrifica­
tion are metrics separate from the paths my husband and I take to our
neighborhood restaurants, but these different metrics still describe the
same portion of space; as such, they form layers or strata, and suggest
a complex network of connections available for assessing the neighbor-
hood in which we live.

Summary
In the preceding, I have identified and explained two examples in
which attention to Riemannian concepts clarifies both the presence of
multiplicity and its organization in Deleuze’s and Deleuze-Guattari’s
work. These emphasize the nature of connection or relation as defin-
itive of the Idea, and smooth space. Further, the disposition toward
understanding space proffered in Riemann’s work encourages Deleuze
or Deleuze-Guattari’s reader to see particularity against a series of
other connections, other nodes for linking up, other expressions of
intensity.
In Chapter 1, I mentioned Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the
rhizome-multiplicity as “only determinations, magnitudes, dimensions
which cannot increase in number without changing its nature” (R
53–54). Having rehearsed key Riemannian concepts, the nature of this
rhizome-multiplicity is considerably clearer; the rhizome is its path-
ways, its connections, which are described dynamically and variably
according to n + 1 dimensions. Like the rabbit hole on the surface, or
the description of a neighborhood by parcel and survey coordinates,
these determinations give way to a complex series of connections that
underwrite and inform these points of entry. What remains is the task,
as Deleuze and Guattari explain in Rhizome, of ‘making’ the multiple,
that work of subtraction that identifies layers and analyzes the strata.
This work, also aided by a Riemannian procedure, is the subject of
Chapter 4. I turn my immediate attention to the structure of multi-
plicity in Badiou’s work, which depends on an entirely different math-
ematical paradigm.
70  B. Vartabedian

Multiplicities: Cantor, Badiou

In the preceding section, I discussed Riemann’s contributions to geom-
etry and comprehension of physical space and explained the ways these
contributions illuminate the structure of multiplicity in Deleuze’s indi-
vidual work and in his collaboration with Guattari. The focus of the pre­
sent section is to assess the mathematic sense of multiplicity in Badiou’s
work, drawing on his deployment of a distinction from Georg Cantor:
that of inconsistent and consistent multiplicities, the distinction that
founds Badiou’s ontological project in Being and Event.
I begin, as I did in the preceding, by setting out the primary math­
ematical presentation; in this case, it is a set-of-all-sets problem posed by the
Burali-Forti Paradox and Cantor’s subsequent response. I then return to
Badiou’s work, focusing on Badiou’s reading of Cantor and the distinction
of inconsistent and consistent multiplicities in Being and Event. I discuss
the way it shapes the framework for both an understanding of being qua
being and the ontology Badiou develops in the text. After discussing the
initial presentation of inconsistent multiplicity in Being and Event, I turn
to a more detailed meditation on the concept in Briefings on Existence; in
its opening essay, “The Question of Being Today,” Badiou elaborates five
features of inconsistent multiplicity that support a turn to mathematized
ontology. This offers a framework for appreciating the deployment of the
axiom of separation in Badiou’s ontology, a principle regulating the rela-
tionship between inconsistent multiplicity and any consistent multiplic-
ity constructed from it. I discuss the axiom of separation in its original
context, following the presentation of Russell’s paradox, and explain its
function in Badiou’s work. It is against this background that I discuss
Badiou’s break with Cantor over the notion of inconsistent multiplicity
as an Absolute, a totality that only God can count. Badiou, by contrast,
insists that inconsistent multiplicity is no-thing, though it is named by the
void.

Cantor’s Inconsistent and Consistent Multiples

In the Introduction to Being and Event, Badiou explains that the pos-
sibility of a mathematized ontology rests on the emergence of set the-
ory as “a singular science,” which itself depends on Georg Cantor’s
innovations with respect to understanding infinity (BE 6). In Cantor’s
1899 letter to Richard Dedekind, he offers the conceptual separation
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  71

of inconsistent from consistent multiples. The letter is precipitated by

a problem raised by Cesare Burali-Forti two years earlier regarding the
construction of a set of all ordinal numbers.
Burali-Forti’s paradox and Cantor’s solution each turn on the con-
cept of well-orderedness, or well-defined multiplicity, and whether
such a concept is only expressed in sets. The immediate upshot is, by
Cantor’s deduction, that the concept of well-orderedness may apply to
any multiplicity but it is not necessarily the case that every multiplic-
ity is a set. In other words, and as Jean van Heijenoort (1977, 113)
explains, Cantor’s solution to the paradox is “to abandon, not the
well-ordering of the multiplicity, but its sethood.” The Burali-Forti
paradox concerns ordinal numbers, which (most basically) describes
the position of an object or number in a sequence, (e.g., first, sec-
ond, third). Burali-Forti (1977, 111) identifies a well-ordered set as
having a first element, and every element “that has successors has an
immediate successor.” Take, for example, two collections or sets of
ordinals, viz. (first, second, third) and (fourth, fifth, sixth); these sets
satisfy the criteria for being well-ordered. In these example sets, each
one has a first element [(first) and (fourth), respectively], and there
are no gaps between the successor elements in each set. Arranging two
sets sequentially indexes to each set its own ordinal: the set of ordinals
(first, second, third) comes first in the sequence, while the set of ordi-
nals (fourth, fifth, sixth) comes second.
The problem giving rise to the paradox, per van Heijenoort (1977,
113), is a contradiction “engendered by the ordinal of the multiplicity­­­
of all ordinals.” This contradiction does not arise from the satisfaction of­
criteria for well-orderedness per se, but rather from attempting to
describe the sets themselves as First and Second. The problem emerges
because the descriptor ordinal First is greater than the ordinals in
the segment (first, second, third); but (first) is also in First, such that
(first) < First, which is a contradiction.4 Van Heijenoort (1977, 104)
puts it succinctly, saying “the ordinal is at once an element of the set
of ordinals and greater than any ordinal in the set.” The formulation of
the Burali-Forti paradox shows that assigning sethood to ordinality con-
strains it in such a way that it results in a contradiction. Though my dis-
cussion concerns simple ordinals, the stakes of both the Burali-Forti
paradox and Cantor’s reply concern the logical possibilities of transfi-
nite numbers. That is, if it is not possible to consistently describe simple
ordinal numbers, then the prospects for transfinite numbers—numbers
72  B. Vartabedian

designating quantities larger than the natural whole (counting) n ­ umbers—

are compromised.
In his letter to Richard Dedekind, Cantor takes up the contradic-
tion posed by the sethood of ordinality. He agrees to the condition of
well-orderedness, saying that “A multiplicity is said to be well-ordered
if it satisfies the condition that every submultiplicity of it has a first ele-
ment; I call such a multiplicity a ‘sequence’ for short” (Cantor 1977,
114). Cantor’s definition condenses the requirements for succession in
the terms of ‘sequentiality,’ and does so in the language of multiplicity;
simply by recasting the problem in these terms, Cantor accomplishes an
important conceptual addition.
Cantor (1977, 114) identifies a consistent multiplicity as a multi-
plicity whose elements “can be thought of without contradiction as
‘being together,’ so that they can be gathered together into one thing.”
Consistent multiplicity is equivalent to a set, and Cantor requires con-
sistent multiplicity to hold without contradiction, its elements unified
and complete. On these terms, the consistent multiplicity reads parallel
to any set-language invoked by Burali-Forti. However, consistent multi-
plicity allows for the inference of inconsistent multiplicity, a label Cantor
applies to a multiple for which “the assumption that all of its elements
‘are together’ leads to a contradiction” (1977, 114).5 An inconsistent
multiple is never closed, and by its nature will never constitute a com-
plete unity. Cantor’s division reveals a careful thinking through multi-
plicity in terms of contradiction; that is, while Burali-Forti identifies the
relationship for which a contradiction holds, Cantor imagines a construc-
tion for which a contradiction may be avoided.
The distinction between consistent and inconsistent multiplicities
allows Cantor to solve the Burali-Forti paradox. Cantor accomplishes
this by explaining that the system of all numbers (Ω) is a simply-ordered
system. A simply-ordered system designates a “rank order” holding
between elements in a set, “such that, for any two of its elements, one is
the earlier and the other the later” (Cantor 1977, 114).6 Furthermore,
as the system of all numbers, Ω contains “a least number. Hence the
system Ω, when naturally ordered according to magnitude, forms a
sequence” (Cantor 1977, 115). That there is a least number in the
sequence is an insight Badiou will capitalize on in his discussion of
the void in Meditations four and five of Being and Event, but for the
immediate analysis this conclusion indicates that Ω (and the sequence
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  73

beginning with zero, which Cantor describes as Ω′) are well-ordered

multiples, but they cannot be consistent.
If Ω′ (the sequence of ordinals that begins with zero as its least
number) was a consistent multiple, that is, if it could be completed as
a set, Cantor (1977, 115) says, “there would correspond to it a num-
ber ∂ greater than all numbers of the system Ω.” The set Ω would thus
be assigned a corresponding number. The trouble with this is, however,
that since ∂ is itself a number (the number corresponding to the sup-
posed set of all ordinal numbers qua consistent multiple), ∂ “occurs in
the system Ω, because this system contains all numbers; ∂ would thus be
greater than ∂, which is a contradiction” (Cantor 1899/1977, 115). On
this analysis, Cantor has walked right up to the edge of the Burali-Forti
paradox. Without the distinction between inconsistent and consistent
multiples, Cantor would be forced into retreat, but his subsequent claim
is, “The system Ω of all numbers is an inconsistent, absolutely infinite
multiplicity” (1899/1977, 115). There is, in other words, no set of all
ordinal numbers, even though ordinal numbers may be conceived as
belonging to a system—the ordinal number system.
Cantor is not yet finished, however. The claim that the system of all
ordinal numbers is an inconsistent multiplicity (and thus incomplete and
inconceivable as a unity) applies to transfinite cardinal numbers as well.
To put it another way, the question of ordinality must somehow extend
to Cantor’s system of Alephs (‫א‬0, ‫א‬1 … ‫א‬n). Cantor (1977, 114) explains
that similarity between two systems consists of a “one-to-one relation
such that the rank order of corresponding elements is the same in both.”
Where Cantor designated the system of ordinal numbers by omega (Ω),
he identifies the system of all transfinite cardinal numbers by tau (‫)ת‬. He
insists that there is a “one-to-one” relationship between Ω and ‫ת‬, such
that these systems can be read (imprecisely) using simpler finite ordinal-
ity and cardinality; first, second, third corresponds one-for-one with 1,
2, 3. Thus, Cantor (1977, 116) claims that ‫ ת‬is “similar to the system
Ω, and therefore likewise inconsistent; or absolutely infinite.” In other
words, one-to-one correspondence allows the transfer of a mapping
strategy used for simple ordinality onto more complex systems.
Cantor’s solution to the Burali-Forti paradox begins from a shared
definition of well-ordered sets that relies on requirements of a first
element and sequentiality. Cantor’s solution departs, however, in its
recasting the problem in terms of multiplicity, rather than sets. This
74  B. Vartabedian

allows Cantor to distinguish two types of multiplicity: consistent (a

multiple for which the consequences of sethood does not yield a con-
tradiction) and inconsistent (a multiple for which the closure of its
elements into a set results into a contradiction). In addition to think-
ing types of multiplicity more broadly, Cantor’s solution takes the
step of assigning logical possibilities to these multiplicities, imagining
‘both sides’ using the framework of contradiction. From this termino-
logical and inferential basis, Cantor argues:

1. The system of all numbers Ω is a simply-ordered system, which has

a least number and is ordered sequentially;
2. And Ω cannot be a consistent multiple, since any ordinal ∂ used
to designate it would be simultaneously in the system and greater
than the system.
3. Therefore, Ω must be an inconsistent multiple; because of this
inconsistency it must also be absolutely infinite.

In Cantor’s solution, two clear innovations emerge. First is his dis-

tinction of types of multiplicity, which allows for a more capacious
understanding of the nature of ordinals. Second is the insistence on
developing this distinction with the simple requirements of contradic-
tion. Inconsistent multiplicity can never be closed or counted as a total-
ity, and Cantor’s deduction of the inconsistent multiple secures against
the contradiction that devastates ‘mere’ sets. Inconsistent multiplicity
remains open and, from Cantor’s position, absolutely infinite. These
basic insights inform a reading of Badiou’s version of in/consistent mul-
tiples, a reading that expands our understanding of Badiou’s notions of
presentation and operation. It is to this analysis that I now turn.

Badiou’s Inconsistent Multiple

Cantor’s distinction of multiplicity into inconsistent and consistent
types clarifies Badiou’s uses of these concepts. In the present section,
I am interested in Badiou’s descriptions of inconsistent multiplicity:
first, as these appear in the early stages of Being and Event; and sec-
ond, the expansion of this concept in Briefings on Existence. Though
these two textual encounters show Badiou’s account to be continu-
ous with Cantor’s, I conclude this discussion by explaining the break
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  75

Badiou makes with Cantor over the status of inconsistent multiplicity

as an absolute; this break ushers in a brief engagement with the void
and void set, the element that allows for the construction of consist-
ent multiples. Attention to inconsistent multiplicity here foregrounds
my work with consistent multiples in the next chapter, since it is con-
sistent multiplicity that offers the material for understanding proce-
dure in Badiou’s work.
However, the initial appearance of inconsistent and consistent mul-
tiples in Badiou’s work is not technical, but rather conceptual insofar as
it appears in Badiou’s offering of a shorthand that he deploys in math-
ematical, meta-ontological, and textual meditations in Being and Event
(BE 19). This shorthand consists in the notions of operation, presenta-
tion, situation, and structure. Presentation and operation describe the
landscape of being and its science respectively, while situation and
structure describe the after-effects of an operation. For the purposes
of the present examination, I focus on operation and presentation,
which re-situate the problem of One and many as one and multiple
in Badiou’s work. This is a meta-ontological positioning; that is the
operation-presentation couple allows Badiou the conceptual bridge
between a traditional philosophical problem (the status of being qua
being as one, many, or multiple) and the technical valence of presenta-
tion qua multiple that allows Badiou to initiate his peculiar ontological
proposal.
In keeping with Badiou’s decision against the One as being qua being,
he situates the operation as the work of counting, that procedure for
closing any multiple as a consistent set. Operation takes multiple as its
material, but this connection is only determinable retrospectively, or as
an “after-effect of the count” (BE 24). This retrospective identification
of multiple secures the link of one and multiple necessary for any count
whatever, at least conceptually. Identifying operation as the mechanism
for one-formation in Badiou’s ontology allows him to offer the concep-
tual pairing of situation and structure. Situation, Badiou explains, is “any
presented multiplicity” (BE 24), a site at which multiplicity is exposed to
the operation; it is the “place of taking place” for ontology. Structure, by
contrast, indicates the presence of an operation; it is the evidence of the
count-as-one having operated in any situation (BE 24). Without delving
too deeply into this pairing (at least not yet, anyway), the articulation of
terms like situation and structure allows Badiou to introduce the most
76  B. Vartabedian

basic relation of his ontology: belonging. He says, “when anything is

counted in a situation, all this means is that it belongs to the situation in
the mode particular to the effects of the situation’s structure” (BE 24).
Here belonging is belonging simpliciter, without the technical support of
the axiom of separation that Badiou introduces in Meditation 3.
The triplet of operation-situation-structure offers a meta-ontological
mapping for what Cantor identifies as a consistent multiple. Its men-
tion here clarifies the nature of consistent multiplicity in the presence of
a count-operation (situation) and belonging-relation (structure). The
operation-situation-structure triplet also offers a means for attending to
presentation, by describing the relation of a situation to the multiplic-
ity it presents, insofar as that “exposed” multiplicity belongs to a situa-
tion. Though Badiou says, “the count-as-one (the structure) installs the
universal pertinence of the one/multiple couple for any situation” (BE
24), this linking does not specify the nature of the multiple-presentation.
Operation and presentation, though not interchangeable, are insepara-
ble. Put another way, if there is an operation (closure by a count), there
is also presentation (a multiple having been counted).
If the operation is the work of one-ing, presentation is aligned with
the multiple. However, the nature of this multiple is not yet clear.
Following the ‘founding activity’ of operation, Badiou explains the way
multiple functions in both operational and “presentational” contexts:

The multiple evidently splits apart here: ‘multiple’ is indeed said of pres-
entation, in that it is retroactively apprehended as non-one as soon as
being-one is a result. Yet ‘multiple’ is also said of the composition of the
count, that is, the multiple as ‘several-ones’ counted by the action of struc-
ture. There is the multiplicity of inertia, that of presentation, and there is
also the multiplicity of composition which is that of number and the effect
of structure. Let’s agree to term the first inconsistent multiplicity and the
second consistent multiplicity. (BE 25)

Badiou assigns the Cantorian distinction on a fault line emerging in his

account after operation. That is, there are two senses of multiple: the
count is described as a multiple—a consistent multiple and is a multiple
accompanying one insofar as any one is a composition of multiple ele-
ments; there is also a multiple preceding the count, the inconsistent multi-
ple. Perhaps one of the more important identifications Badiou makes here
concerns inconsistent multiplicity as a multiple of inertia; presentation
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  77

does not mark a site at which being qua being shows itself or makes itself
available to the operation; there is no active principle or movement asso-
ciated with being qua being. Inconsistent multiplicity is a static, infinite
reservoir situated at the foundation of ontological operation.
Badiou insists that in its preliminary stages, presentation’s “only predi-
cate” is “that of the multiple” and the sense of multiple here can be split
according to consistent and inconsistent types (BE 28). Consistent multi-
ples isolate specific instances of presentation: “the multiple of presentation
is this multiple whose terms let themselves be numbered on the basis of the
law that is structure (the count-as-one)” (BE 28). By contrast, inconsistent
multiplicity is always and irreducibly multiple—it will never be constrained,
closed, or counted. Badiou describes presentation in inconsistent multiplic-
ity as “more latent … a kind of inert irreducibility of the presented-multiple
to appear” (BE 28). Badiou’s assertion of the irreducibility of the presented
multiple reinforces ‘the multiplicity of the multiple’ at the level of inconsist-
ency; it is general, as an alternative to the apparent specificity of consistent
multiples, and resists closure because of its inconsistency “all the way down.”
Here Badiou’s use of Cantor’s distinction describes the landscape and
limitations of ontology. This is to say that the project of Being and Event
builds from this initial positing of both inconsistent and consistent mul-
tiplicity (on the one hand), and inscribing inconsistent multiplicity of
ontological activity (on the other). In the next chapter, I discuss in detail
the ‘limitation’ posed to consistent multiplicity by inconsistency. Now,
however, I turn to a more detailed analysis of inconsistent multiplicity in
Badiou’s Briefings on Existence.
Briefings on Existence is a collection of essays in what Badiou identifies
as “transitory ontology,” or a phase in which the movement from being
to appearing is still unfolding. In the first of these essays, “The Question
of Being Today,” Badiou offers a meditation on the nature of inconsist-
ent multiplicity, identifying “five conditions for any ontology of the mul-
tiple” required to keep the One at bay (CT 40). These conditions align
with certain of Cantor’s observations of inconsistent multiplicity and are
thus extended and interpreted in a Badiouian context.
First, Badiou explains, “Ontology is the thought of the inconsistent
manifold, that is, of what is reduced without an immanent unification to
the sole predicate of its multiplicity” (CT 40). This claim functions first
as a statement of what ontology is (as the thought of inconsistent mul-
tiplicity); and second, as a description of inconsistent multiplicity itself.
78  B. Vartabedian

Here, he claims that the inconsistent manifold resists unification except

in the case of describing it as a multiplicity or manifold (i.e., the incon-
sistent multiple is multiple). This description is in accord with Cantor’s
insistence that the inconsistent multiple remain open, an insistence he
offers as a remedy to the contradiction attending sethood. Of course,
with respect to the first interpretation (an identification of what ontology
is), this insistence is entirely Badiou’s.
Second, Badiou identifies this ontology of the multiple as depending
on the view that “the multiple is radically without-One in that it itself
consists only of multiples. What there is, or the exposure to the thinkable
of what there is under the sole requirement of the ‘there is,’ are multi-
ple of multiples” (CT 40). To avoid the trap of transcendence, Badiou’s
claim that the “multiple is radically without-One” leaves the multiple as
the frontier of ontological inquiry; there is nothing beyond the multiple
of multiples, no possibility for unification in some other deeper ‘sector’
of multiplicity.
These first two assertions demonstrate Badiou’s interpretation of his
inconsistent multiplicity as aligned with Cantor’s version. In the third
assertion, Badiou expands the ways in which is view is aligned with that
of Cantor; this expansion is in the terms of the philosophical problem of
One and many, with which Badiou’s ontology is (most generally) con-
cerned. He says:

Granted that no immanent limit related to the One determines multiplicity

as such, there is no first principle of finitude. The multiple can thus be con-
sidered infinite. Or even, infinity is another name of multiplicity as such. As
no first principle binds infinity to the One, it ought to be tenable for there
to be an infinite amount of infinities, an infinite dissemination of infinite
multiplicities. (CT 40)

Ontology does not, as Badiou says here, begin from a ‘first principle of
finitude.’ This would circumscribe the multiple using some expression
of one-ness; Badiou rejects phenomenology (and particularly that of
Heidegger), on account of phenomenology’s beginning from and limit
according to Dasein’s finitude. Absent this determining limit, Badiou can
claim that the multiple is infinite and that the two concepts are identi-
cal. Cantor (1977, 114) affirms this in his letter to Dedekind, describ-
ing inconsistent multiplicity as “absolutely infinite.” Badiou’s subsequent
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  79

claims regarding the ‘infinity of infinities’ are posited without reference

to Cantor’s absolute. As such, Badiou is required to maintain the incon-
sistent multiple as absolutely open, without a horizon of closure afforded
by a transcendent presence (CT 55). Paul Livingston (2012, 53–54)
explains that this transcendent presence underwrites a “transcendent
orientation” of thought, which “sets up the totality of beings by refer-
ence to a privileged being, a ‘super-existence’ that assures the place of
everything else, while at the same time obscuring its own moment of
institution or the grounds of its own authority.” This super-existence
fixes the totality of beings, and in doing so forecloses against the possibil-
ity for change.
This third condition, along with the fourth (“Instead, let us consider
a multiple to be a multiple of nothing” [CT 40]), identifies significant
claims regarding not only the nature of inconsistent multiplicity, but also
claims to existence. Recall that the notion of the ‘there is’ is restricted
to the operation or count-procedure, and does not operate in being qua
being. This requirement underwrites the fifth condition Badiou raises in
Briefings on Existence, that “actual ontological presentation is necessar-
ily axiomatic” (CT 40). That is, once a link can be established between
being qua being and a first ‘existence,’ the rules governing this existence
are axioms of set theory. In the next chapter, I explain the empty set,
its status as first existent, and its relation to inert, inconsistent multiplic-
ity. However, these claims depend on an articulation, first, of Zermelo’s
axiom of separation, and second an address of Badiou’s break with
Cantor over the nature of inconsistent multiplicity as absolute.

Breaking with Cantor: Separation and Comprehension

The discussion of inconsistent multiplicity from Briefings on Existence
offers a second statement of its nature, particularly vis-à-vis the work
of ontology. It ‘re-sets’ the founding notion of Badiou’s ontology in
explicit Cantorian terms and disposes it toward the ontological practice
of count-construction. In Cantor’s case, inconsistent multiplicity is pos-
ited to keep ordinality open. Sam Gillespie explains, using Badiou’s work
in Number and Numbers, why Cantor requires a distinction of ordinals
from natural numbers. As Gillespie (2008) points out, while natural num-
bers are ordinal numbers, not all ordinal numbers are natural numbers
(for example, ω [the first transfinite ordinal], or ‫א‬0). Gillespie (2008, 55)
80  B. Vartabedian

calls on Badiou here to point out that “an ordinal is the number of the
figure of well-ordering,” or that an ordinal is an index of well-ordering.
As such, the ‘options’ for these sorts of indices must remain open, rather
than restricted to the natural numbers.
The axiom of separation, proposed by Ernst Zermelo in 1908, reg-
ulates the relation between sets and the multiple from which these are
drawn and, by implication, reinforces the persisting openness of incon-
sistency in Badiou’s project. The axiom of separation reads, “Whenever
the propositional function G(x) is definite for all members of a set M,
M possesses a subset MG containing precisely those elements x of M for
which G(x) is true” (Zermelo 1977, 202). There are three operative
components here: first, a function G(x), an instrument or tool ‘doing’
the separating, which is also definite, meaning that when it is applied a
result will obtain; second, an already-available set of elements M; and
third, a subset MG resulting from the application of the function to M.
The subset “Becky’s Nieces and Nephews” (a set I call on frequently
in this text) results from applying a definite function—x is a child of my
sibling—to the set “Becky’s Family” or, more to the scale prescribed by
inconsistent multiplicity, “human beings.” The operation prescribed by
the axiom seems a pretty straightforward mechanism for separating sub-
sets from sets; it also telegraphs a relationship between inconsistent and
consistent multiples, insofar as one can conceive of consistent multiples
being cut from a larger—infinite—multiplicity.
It serves another important purpose, however: Zermelo’s axiom of
separation is a limited comprehension principle; any function operative on
a set draws out a subset of the original, and does not define the entire set
M. Significantly, Zermelo’s axiom preserves the possibility for excess in
the original multiple. As a limited comprehension principle, the axiom of
separation is the mathematical procedure that protects against totaliza-
tion or a destructive contradiction. Zermelo’s axiom proceeds from his
insights that “sets may never be independently defined by means of this
axiom but it must always be separated as subsets from sets already given:
thus contradictory notions such as the ‘set-of-all-sets’ or the ‘set of all
ordinal numbers’ … are excluded” (Zermelo 1977, 202). Zermelo’s
axiom is a procedure that secures set-theoretic operation against para-
doxes that would undermine the possibility for set construction.
The paradox in question, at least in the development of axiomatic set
theory, is Russell’s Paradox, another set-of-all-sets paradox that emerges
in response to Gottlob Frege’s efforts to remove guesswork from certain
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  81

of the presentations of naïve set theory. As Badiou points out, and as

the discussion of Cantor’s work above reinforces, the articulation of
key notions in naïve set theory is conceptual and not properly mathe-
matical; Badiou cites Cantor’s initial definition of set as “the grouping
into a totality of quite distinct objects of our intuition into thought”
(quoted in BE 38) as one such example. Frege’s work, particularly in the
Begriffschrift presents a formal logical language in which these ideas can
be expressed.
However, at issue is Frege’s “Basic Law V,” introduced in
Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, which describes equality between two sets,
each organized according to concepts, based on a one-to-one corre-
spondence between the contents of the two sets. Paul Livingston (2012,
23) offers an example in which sets organized according to the predi-
cates red and heavier than 20 kg may each “ensure the existence of a set
containing all and only things” determined by these predicates; the set of
red kettlebells in my gym and the set of kettlebells heavier than 20 kg in
said gym each have the same number of objects and the very same objects
populating these sets. As such, and according to Basic Law V, these sets
are equal.
The problem with Frege’s Basic Law V is that it is intended as a uni-
versal comprehension principle, describing rules to which all sets conform.
As Bertrand Russell pointed out, not all sets are the same. In articulating
his famous paradox, Russell initiates thinking about a limit on compre-
hension (put one way) or a rejection of totality (put another way). In his
1902 letter to Frege, Russell (1977, 125) states the inconsistency as fol-
lows: “Let w be the predicate: to be a predicate that cannot be predicated
of itself. Can w be predicated of itself? From each answer, the opposite fol-
lows.” Russell is essentially asking whether a particular predicate can both
describe a set w and be included in the set w. The formal ­presentation—in
keeping with the Fregean impulse toward clarity of expression—sets this
out a bit more precisely:

1. R: {x | x ∉ x}
First, define the Russell set R as a set such that it does not belong

2. R ∈ R ↔ R ∉ R
to itself. The negated belonging symbol indicates this limitation.

Second, infer from the definition of the Russell set R that if R

belongs to itself, then it is the case that R does not belong to itself
(reading the implication from left to right); but the double arrow
82  B. Vartabedian

requires the implication be also read from right to left. As such, if R

does not belong to itself, then R belongs to itself.

Russell introduces a contradiction that undermines the coherence and

power of naïve formal language; per Badiou, it shows the “equivalence of
a statement and its negation,” which “annihilates the logical consistency
of the language” (BE 41). To preserve consistency, then, a limit on com-
prehension must be established. Zermelo’s axiom of separation allows
for set construction without positing a required one-to-one mapping
between the set and the multiple from which it is drawn.
As a limited comprehension principle, one that separates sets from an
already-given multiple and thus avoids problematic set-of-all-sets con-
sequences, the axiom of separation authorizes the work of separating
subsets from any presented multiple. In the context of Badiou’s project,
the application of the axiom of separation must always be read accord-
ing to the controlling problematic of his ontology: the multiple is, the
one is not, and the excess of inconsistent multiplicity must be preserved
by any ontological apparatus. Badiou’s closing remarks in Meditation
Three reinforce this requirement: “the axiom of separation takes a stand
within ontology,” since it reinforces the demand that a multiple must
“be already-there; some pure multiple, as multiple of multiples, must be
presented in order for the rule to then separate some consistent multi-
plicity” (BE 47–48). The axiom of separation suggests that if there is a
multiple, it is possible to draw from it elements to form a set. This sug-
gestion, however, is hypothetical until some parameter for existence can
be established; the axiom of separation waits for the emergence of ‘some-
thing’ to count.
The axiom of separation functions on the side of structure in Badiou’s
ontological project, since Zermelo’s axiom authorizes the limited compre-
hension of any set in relation to the multiple from which it is drawn. It
maintains of excess on the side of inconsistency such that it will not be sub-
ject to closure once any count-procedure is inaugurated. This authorizes
Badiou’s rejection of Cantor’s characterization of inconsistent multiplicity
as absolute, and his own assertions that the inconsistent multiple is nothing.

Breaking with Cantor: Absolute or Nothing

Cantor’s commitment to—or obsession with—infinity as a pathway to
divinity is well known. Paul Livingston notes that the questions leading
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  83

to Cantor’s exposition of sets are motivated by “the thought of a divine,

infinite transcendence.” Livingston (2012, 22) explains this disposition
toward divinity

… led Cantor to believe both that the well-defined infinite sets of the nat-
urals, or the reals can exist as wholes (in that God can indeed group them
all together as unified sets, even if finite agents cannot) and, on the other
hand, that the whole infinite hierarchy of infinite sets forms an “unincreas-
able” ultimate totality that cannot be treated mathematically at all, what
Cantor (following tradition) called the Absolute.

Livingston’s comments make clear that as far as humans can count, infin-
ity is infinite and cannot be totalized by the operations of organization
or counting; this openness makes space for the transfinite, again as far as
human counting goes. Beyond the transfinite, Cantor posits the presence
of an “unincreasable totality” that constitutes the Absolute.7
Cantor’s disposition toward an Absolute or transcendent conception
of infinity marks the place from which Badiou’s alignment with Cantor
breaks. In Meditation Three of Being and Event, Badiou explains that
inconsistent multiplicity describes a set that “is ‘too large’ to be counted
as a set in the same way as the others. “Too large” is the metaphor of an
excess of being-multiple over the very language from which it was to be
inferred” (BE 41). Badiou surmises that the concept of the “too large” is
Cantor’s way of marking his work with an “ontological thesis,” in which
inconsistency “orientates thought toward the Infinite as supreme-being,
or absolute” (BE 42). Cantor’s solution, in the face of a restrictive and
restricting paradox of construction, is to turn to the nature of multiplic-
ity itself; the distinction of inconsistent and consistent multiples makes
way for a pronouncement of being qua being as Absolute.
This ontological thesis, Badiou points out, can be interpreted along
two lines. First, it may be the case that Cantor is viewed as “theolo-
gian,” if his work “ties the absoluteness of being not to the (consistent)
presentation of the multiple, but to the transcendence through which
a divine infinity in-consists, as one, gathering together and numbering
any multiple whatsoever” (BE 42). In this description, Badiou suggests
that the proper place of the absolute is with consistency, the means by
which the “there is” is guaranteed. However, the view of Cantor as the-
ologian transforms the inconsistent multiple into an object of adoration;
this position—the onto-theological position—is one Badiou is wholly
opposed to.
84  B. Vartabedian

A second interpretation of the ontological thesis assigns to Cantor a

“brilliant anticipation” in which Cantor “saw that the absolute point of
being of the multiple is not its consistency—thus its dependence upon a
procedure of the count-as-one—but its inconsistency, a multiple-deploy-
ment that no unity gathers together” (BE 42). This reading of Cantor’s
work aligns being with inconsistent multiplicity and its science with con-
sistency. In other words, the alternative to an onto-theology is a math-
ematical ontology, the commitments of which include the retrospective
revelation of inconsistency through consistency, multiple by way of the
count-as-one. Contrary to the absolute presence Cantor posits at the
‘end’ of his theorizing over the infinite, Badiou claims that the inconsist-
ent multiple is marked by no-thing. This thesis, which is adjacent to that
of the void set, is articulated in Meditations 4 and 5 of Being and Event.
Badiou’s assessment of nothing and the void begins with a claim
regarding “any situation in particular” (BE 52). Situations, as structured
presentations, are such that inconsistency is obscured by the count-pro-
cedure. Beginning from the situation yields a false conclusion regarding
being qua being: “Any situation, seized in its immanence, thus reverses
the inaugural axiom of our entire procedure. It states that the one is and
that the pure multiple—inconsistency—is not” (BE 52). In other words,
if the ontological question is posed at the level of a situation, Badiou
says, there would be no evidence of inconsistency at any point—the sit-
uation is such that is secured against the disruption inconsistency may
generate.
To take these claims of the “immanence of the situation” further
Badiou says, “inside what a situation establishes as a form of knowl-
edge, being is being in the possibility of the one” (BE 53). This claim
reinforces the strict closure the situation provides: what the situation
“knows” (the content of the situation, the world “inside” the situation
itself ) is only its own terms, accounted for according to the reinforc-
ing relations of belonging. A crude way of putting it is that what is not
counted (that is, what does not appear in the situation) does not exist. This
presents a significant difficulty, however, because if there are no means of
exposing inconsistency, the count merely reinforces itself. That is, there
is no evidence of the multiple from which the count-procedure emerges.
Without some glimpse of the multiple, situations are mere tautologies
and, perhaps worse (for Badiou), the One is reinforced. This is precisely
the end Badiou’s account aims to avoid. However, he probes the diffi-
culty further, saying:
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  85

To be sure, there is no antecedence of the multiple which would give rise to

presentation because the latter is always already-structured such that there is
only oneness or consistent multiples. But this ‘there is’ leaves a remainder:
the law in which it is deployed is discernable as operation. And although
there is never anything other – in a situation – than the result (everything,
in the situation, is counted), what thereby results marks out, before the
operation, a must-be-counted. It is the latter which causes the structured
presentation to waver toward the phantom of inconsistency. (BE 53)

For Badiou, there is no “power” or “movement” (for lack of better

terms) that would create a presentation. This reinforces the above point
regarding the immanence of the situation and its nature as consistent and
‘oned.’ This second sentence indicates, however, a relation (again, for
lack of a better term) between the situation and the multiple from which
it is extracted—the situation is the result of an operation on this mul-
tiple. Badiou again reaffirms the nature of the situation as secured, but
here he points out that the operation reveals something prior to the situ-
ation, which he describes here as “a must-be-counted.” Put another way,
the operation must have had something on which to operate to arrive at
a structured result. Badiou’s fantôme here, the specter that haunts the
situation, is the inconsistent multiple, its spectral status confirmed by its
‘disappearance’ following the operation. As such, he explains that the
inconsistent multiple must “be nothing” (BE 53), a site where existence
is prohibited.
Badiou uses the status of inconsistent multiple as nothing to affirm
the true thesis that “there is one-ness,” and to discredit the “(false) the-
sis of the ontologies of presence, ‘the one is’” (BE 53). In this way, the
further distinction of the inconsistent multiple as ‘nothing’ confirms
the trajectory of Badiou’s ontological project against those positions
he brackets, those positions seating the One as being qua being. There
is also a finer distinction at play, however: “between the (true) thesis
‘inconsistency is nothing,’ and the (false) structuralist or legalist thesis
‘inconsistency is not’” (BE 54). The false claim relegates inconsistency
to the status of non-being (and the affirmation, following ontologies of
presence, that the One alone is), while the true thesis simply asserts that
the inconsistent multiple is “not a being” (BE 23).
The nothing, it turns out, is no place. Badiou explains, “it would be
pointless to set off in search of the nothing” (BE 54). It will not emerge
as a term in the situation, since that would require its having been
86  B. Vartabedian

subject to the count; the nothing is itself invisible in the situation. When
Badiou claims that “the only thing we can affirm” regarding the relation
of the situation and nothing is that “every situation implies the noth-
ing of its all” (BE 54). The nothing trails the situation in the form of
necessity, as a ‘that-from-which’ the situation is constructed; while the
nothing cannot be discovered in the situation, nothing is necessary for a
situation to be at all.
It is this relationship, between the inconsistent multiple and the sit-
uation, that allows Badiou to introduce the concept of the void, which
he defines accordingly: “I term void of a situation this suture to its
being. Moreover, I state that every structured presentation unpresents
‘its’ void, in the mode of this non-one which is merely the subtractive
face of the count” (BE 55). In other words, the void of a situation is
the reminder of the situation’s relation to the nothing. Taking the void
as a reminder has not only a reminiscent effect, but an orienting one
as well—it is the side or facet of this presentation that indicates its dis-
position toward the inconsistent multiple.8 As such, it is the “name of
being—of inconsistency—according to a situation” (BE 56). By iden-
tifying the void, it is possible to now speak about inconsistency in the
language appropriate to a mathematical ontology; this, in part, is the
work of this text’s Chapter 4.

Summary
In the preceding, I’ve discussed the value of inconsistent multiplicity for
both Cantor and Badiou. These thinkers share an affirmation that ordi-
nality must remain open and thus inconsistent; if it will be possible to
generate large cardinals (the series of alephs) or transfinite ordinals (the
series beginning with ω), a founding separation of closed, consistent
multiplicity from open, inconsistent multiplicity is necessary. However,
and as I explained above, Cantor’s insistence on an Absolute or presence
capable of closing inconsistency marks the condition at which Badiou’s
reading breaks away. The implication of open ordinality for Badiou is,
straightforwardly, that the inconsistent multiple cannot be closed—no
trap door exists in the articulation of inconsistency for transcendence to
emerge. As an alternative, Badiou proposes nothing as the character of
inconsistent multiplicity. As nothing, it resists closure or the ‘internal’
inscription of closed sets. Instead, the procedure of making-consistent,
or counting, is facilitated by the presence of a void, or the “suture” to
inconsistency present in any situation or structured presentation. There
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  87

are two positive consequences that follow from Badiou’s assertion of

inconsistency as nothing; one consequence is prospective, the other
retrospective.
The prospective consequence concerns assertions Badiou makes in
Meditations 12–14 of Being and Event regarding the relationship of
infinity to normal multiples, or a ‘maximum’ expression of consistency.
The analysis of limit ordinals (ω0, or the first transfinite ordinal) requires
a persisting openness secured by an equally open inconsistency. The limit
ordinal organizes an infinite series of successor ordinals, but it does not
invoke a principle of closure. Rather, the limit ordinal indexes a border
that allows the enumeration of ordinals to proceed. The presence of a
limit ordinal, the assertion that infinite succession is possible from the
border it creates, and its articulation in the context of the normal multi-
ple, each pave the way for the subsequent meditations concerning singu-
lar multiplicity. In other words, the discussion of the limit ordinal is the
fullest expression of a certain kind of consistent multiplicity, and forms
a background against which the singular multiple and its issue of an
evental site can be understood.
The retrospective consequence is a conformity of this contemporary
ontological structure with an earlier political and theoretical structure
Badiou/Peyrol asserts in “The Fascism of the Potato.” In Chapter 1, I
explained Peyrol’s insistence that for a mass revolt to be successful, there
must be a motivating element ‘cut’ from it. This framework transfers to
the ontological division of in/consistency Badiou develops in Being and
Event and beyond, and as such marks a ‘periodization’ in Badiou’s own
theorizing; mass is reconceived as inconsistent multiplicity, and class—
that element creating a temporary and contingent unity from the mass—
is reconceived as consistent multiplicity. The division of consistent from
inconsistent multiplicity, the ascription of inconsistency to being qua
being, and the assertion of consistency as an indication of presence (i.e.,
“there is one-ness”) demonstrate a fidelity to the structure characteriz-
ing the explicitly materialist commitments of Badiou’s earlier work. I say
more about this connection in Chapter 4.

Conclusion
This chapter is the first of two ‘explicative’ chapters, in which I attend
to matters of multiplicity in their mathematical and philosophical con-
texts. My focus here has been to demonstrate the way multiplicity serves
to structure Deleuze’s, Deleuze-Guattari’s, and Badiou’s respective
88  B. Vartabedian

accounts of being. In my analysis of multiplicity across Deleuze’s

oeuvre, I showed that whatever is is, at least in part, a multiplicity. By
using Riemann’s concepts of continuous, multiply-extended man-
ifolds, I explained that these principles form the underlying shape and
space of that which emerges. The virtual idea is built from connections
that, when linked, form the conditions by which any empirical or con-
ceptual instance is generated. An analysis of smooth space—whether
in explicitly Riemannian terms or in terms of models expressing these
commitments—shows that an understanding of space requires both its
coordinates and the pathways connecting those coordinates. The trick in
each of these cases, it seems, is to be able to search ‘below’ the empiri-
cal instance or discrete expression to see the network of connections that
produce it. This shift is made possible in part by the transformation in
spatial thinking Riemann’s work occasions.
A similar commitment holds on Badiou’s part, insofar as whatever
is is also a multiplicity, but a consistent multiplicity, subject to the rules
governing contradiction. It is posited alongside an inconsistent mul-
tiplicity, a multiplicity that remains open and—on Badiou’s analysis—
resists closure into an ultimate totality. This “innumerable immensity”
is drawn from innovative thinking by Georg Cantor, who responds to a
set-of-all-set paradox with a rewriting of the relationship of a set to that
from which is created. The articulation of inconsistent and consistent
multiplicities is necessary for an account of singular multiplicity and the
evental site, the place of transformation and novelty in Badiou’s system.
In the preceding, I have offered positive presentations of each pro-
gram of multiplicity, designed to show the way multiplicity serves to
structure accounts of being and a subsequent ontology. This presenta-
tion is warranted, given that the critiques I discussed in Chapter 2 often
proceeded from incomplete or polemically-convenient presentations of
an opponent’s concept of multiplicity by their interlocutor. My focus in
the next chapter takes up a similarly neutral presentation of procedure in
their respective ontologies, beginning with Badiou’s articulation of the
void set and the axiomatic system that counts it.

Notes
1. Ferreirós (2007, 51) says Riemann’s manner of presentation follows a
“formal trend” in nineteenth century logic, insofar as Riemann’s work
depends on the position that “there is no reference to classes of objects
 3  STRUCTURE: MULTIPLICITY AND MULTIPLE …  89

(individuals), only to classes of further concepts.” The “formal trend” was

intended as a restrictive application of logic to the procedural or formal
use we are presently familiar with; it had, according to certain logicians
of the day, been diluted by its use in Psychology and Epistemology. Per
Ferreirós (2007, 48), this move constituted a “return to the Aristotelian
conception and doctrines of logic.” Ferreirós (2007, 52) points out that
this mode of relationship “was absolutely common” in nineteenth cen-
tury Germany in particular, and leads to its precise expression in Frege’s
comprehension principle. Arkady Plotnitsky (2009, 118) also identifies this
reading of Riemann’s initial definition according to the class-concept pair-
ing, although he does not provide a history of this relationship. Ferreirós
(2007, 41) identifies Categories 4b20 and Metaphysics 1077b18-20 as the
Aristotelian sources of the distinction of continuous and discrete quanti-
ties; in the former, Aristotle discusses poson (quantity); in the latter, magni-
tude (megethos) and numbers (arithmos) are the concerns of mathematical
propositions.
2. In addition to Deleuze’s discussion of these ideas (DR 184–186), see also
Daniela Voss (2013, 196–198).
3. Albert Lautman, Les schémas de structure (Paris: Hermann, 1938), 23,
34–35. The first quotation I discuss is from page 23, the second is found
on pages 34–35 of Lautman’s text. The full reference is found in TP 573.
4. My description is aided by Eric Weisstein’s insights concerning the paradox
in its attendant entry at Wolfram Mathworld.
5. Readers of Cantor’s letter to Dedekind note that the order of presenta-
tion goes (1) inconsistent multiplicity, (2) consistent multiplicity, and (3)
well-orderedness, with some intervening discussion about simply-ordered
multiplicities and conditions for similarity.
6. Cantor later addresses the condition of simple order for three distinct
numbers, saying, “of two distinct numbers α and β, one is always the
smaller, the other greater, and that, if for three numbers we have α < β and
β < γ, we also have α < γ” (115).
7. Livingston points his reader to Michael Hallett’s Cantorian Set Theory
and Limitation of Size (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Hallett’s discussion of Cantor’s absolute includes Cantor’s letter of
1887–1888 in which he claims a distinction between “increasable actu-
al-infinite or transfinite” and “unincreasable actual-infinite or Absolute”
(quoted in Hallett, 41). The latter magnitude cannot be apprehended,
or is not ‘rationally subjugable’ (Hallett, 41) by human cognition or
operation.
8. Badiou’s readers know that it is possible for the void to appear—or
“become localizable at the level of presentation”—in a situation. This pos-
sibility makes way for the event, an “ultra-one of a hazard” (BE 56).
90  B. Vartabedian

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Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. I, edited by Jonathan Barnes,
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(Cited in text as BE)
———. 2006. Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology.
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———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis,
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Livingston, Paul. 2012. The Politics of Logic. London: Routledge.
Merzbach, Uta, and Carl Boyer. 2011. A History of Mathematics, 3rd ed.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
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Deleuze.” In Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, edited by Simon
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———. 2009. “Bernhard Riemann’s Conceptual Mathematics.” Configurations
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June 2013.
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Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
 CHAPTER 4

Procedures: One, Multiple, Subtraction

In Chapter 3, I explained Deleuze’s and Badiou’s respective theories of

multiplicity. Though it is widely recognized that they differ over what
constitutes multiplicity, my interest was to link their preferred versions
of multiplicity to ontological structure. The present chapter is focused
on the procedure prescribed by structure, or the mechanism(s) Badiou
and Deleuze use to account for one in relationship to the multiplicity
forming the structure of ontology. I begin where I left off in the pre-
vious chapter by examining the tradition of one-multiple relations in
Badiou’s oeuvre. Badiou’s affirmation of a one that results from count-
ing the multiple, or one-ness, is a necessary step toward transformation.
An event requires an evental site, which requires at base a situation, or an
organized and counted multiple. I focus on the system Badiou develops
in Being and Event, where the work of defining consistent multiplicity
with the count-procedure requires a point at which inconsistent multi-
plicity is exposed to operation; this is the void set and its mark Ø, nec-
essary for ontological structure. This process is aided by the axioms of
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. Though it is prohibited from being qua
being, Badiou affirms one-ness as a function in mapping any event and
describing the pathway from being to transformation.
By contrast, Deleuze and Deleuze’s writing with Guattari accom-
modate any one insofar as it is held in suspension with the multiplic-
ity occasioning it. Deleuze and Guattari maintain this commitment,
for example, in their analysis of the war machine in “Rhizome,” or
the series of examples—including mathematical ones—in Plateau

© The Author(s) 2018 93

B. Vartabedian, Multiplicity and Ontology in Deleuze and Badiou,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76837-3_4
94  B. Vartabedian

“1440: The Smooth and the Striated” in A Thousand Plateaus. In

his earlier work, Deleuze’s commitments to division and overturned
Platonism in Difference and Repetition develop the concerns on which
the later texts build. In these cases, whether early or late, Deleuze and
Guattari insist that any one is an expression of the multiplicity to which
it is tethered. To identify the multiplicity generating an expressed one,
they prescribe a procedure of subtraction, or n − 1, to “make the multi-
ple.” This injunction is familiar from the reading of “Rhizome” I offered
in Chapter 2. However, Deleuze and Guattari affirm consolidations of
multiplicity insofar as these tethers remain intact; I illustrate the relation-
ship of consolidation and subtraction in the cogito diagram illustrating
“Example 1” in What is Philosophy?

Badiou’s One-ness: Void, Scission

In the preceding chapter, I discussed the Cantorian distinction of the
inconsistent multiple from consistent multiples and explained their func-
tion in Badiou’s ontological project. Badiou assigns inconsistent multi-
plicity to being qua being, while consistent multiplicity is the ontological
position at which existence is established. I identified the origin of this
distinction in Georg Cantor’s novel solution to the Burali-Forti paradox;
consistent multiples are those that can be closed or made into sets with-
out resulting in a contradiction, while an inconsistent multiple cannot be
closed without contradiction and thus remains open and infinite. I dis-
cussed Zermelo’s axiom of separation, which dictates the relationship
between inconsistent and consistent multiples such that consistent mul-
tiples are separated from an already-available multiple. For Badiou’s pur-
poses, Zermelo’s work authorizes a condition under which set-theoretic
ontology—the work of constructing situations—can proceed. Finally, I
explained the significance of no-thing in relation to inconsistent multi-
plicity and with respect to Badiou’s overall project; it is in the no-thing
that Badiou breaks with Cantor (on the one hand) and introduces the
void as a foundational piece of his ontological program (on the other).
However, and though the resources for understanding the structure
of ontology in Badiou’s work are rich, it is insufficient to claim that
the identification of two types of multiplicity describes a procedure for
relating one and multiple in Badiou’s work. Indeed, this distinction
only identifies the ground over which determination of any one is pos-
sible. Badiou’s demonstration of the void and its mark Ø identifies the
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  95

procedural component in Badiou’s ontology. As the “first existent” in

Badiou’s system, it functions as the object of an initial count-procedure
and persists irrespective of the complexity that may append to that struc-
ture. With the more contemporary accounting for the count in Badiou’s
work established, I return to his earlier preoccupation with the work
of scission, or his analysis of the dialectic by division to show the ways
Badiou’s thinking on the relation of one and multiple marks an evolution
in the operation of dialectical thinking across his oeuvre.

From Multiple to One: Void

Badiou’s work maintains a consistent commitment to a theoretical con-
figuration affirming multiple or mass and some temporary one emerg-
ing from this multiple. In the early work, from the 1965s “The (Re)
Commencement of Dialectical Materialism” through the lectures col-
lected in Theory of the Subject, this affirmation is primarily political and
motivated by Badiou’s explicitly Marxist and Maoist commitments. By
1985, however, Badiou seems to have abandoned these explicit com-
mitments. Indeed, and as Oliver Feltham (2008, 85) points out, the
appearance of the short text Peut-on penser la politique? “seals the almost
complete disappearance of Marxist vocabulary—party, dialectic, revolu-
tion, proletariat—from Badiou’s work.” Badiou affirms a necessary trans-
formation of dialectical thinking, given the turn in the Soviet Union and
associated Bloc countries toward parliamentary politics. This new ver-
sion of the dialectic, Badiou (1985, 86) explains, “will be recognized
first of all by its conflict with representation. Such thinking tracks down
the unrepresentable point in its field, from which it turns out that one
touches on the real” (translation mine). Instead of seeking an internal
condition to promote transformation (e.g., the class condition discussed
in “The Fascism of the Potato”), Badiou’s interest shifts toward finding
an unaccounted-for point as this source.
This short description in Peut-on penser la politique? bears a purposive
similarity to the relation Badiou prescribes for science and ideology in his
earlier work. For example, in “The (Re)Commencement of Dialectical
Materialism,” (1965), Badiou situates science and ideology in an oscil-
lating relationship, one in which the transformations science brings to
ideology are eventually absorbed and thus require new scientific trans-
formations to re-arrange the order. Badiou explains, “If science is a pro-
cess of transformation, ideology—insofar as the unconscious comes to
96  B. Vartabedian

constitute itself therein—is a process of repetition” ([1965] 2012, 147).

This play of transformation and repetition requires positive interven-
tion. Twenty years later, however, Badiou’s revision to dialectical think-
ing reveals a process committed to seeking the point of transformation
something like ideology or social-political discourse has covered over. By
the time of Peut-on penser la politique?, Badiou insists that thought must
search for a point responsible for disruption and transformation; the
presentation in 1985 is expressed in language consistent with Badiou’s
repositioning theory toward the “pure multiple,” work that is first and
foremost ontological and inaugurated in Being and Event.
In Part IV of Being and Event’s Introduction, Badiou accounts for
the way this search for the unpresentable point proceeds. The “logi-
cist” commitments that occupied his earlier work, Badiou explains, were
inconsistent “with the clear Lacanian doctrine according to which the
real is the impasse of formalization. I had mistaken the route” (BE 5).
Badiou’s concern, at least from this vantage, is to discover the limits of
thought, the point at which formal structures no longer apply. No such
limit is identified in Badiou’s earlier work; there, dialectical thinking
is concerned with formal scientific structures that directly act on static
ideology in order to transform it (Brassier 2005). However, in Peut-on
penser la politique?, thought’s task is to pass through structures of rep-
resentation to identify the point of access to the real.
Badiou’s transformation also registers a shift in his assessment of mass
or multiple. Already convinced of the efficacy of axiomatic thinking—a
commitment as early as The Concept of Model (1968)—Badiou identi-
fies multiple as the background of his approach. He elaborates on this in
Being and Event, saying,

I came to the conclusion that the sole manner in which intelligible figures
could be found within was if one first accepted that the Multiple, for math-
ematics, was not a (formal) concept, transparent and constructed, but a
real whose internal gap, and impasse, were deployed by the theory. (BE 5)

The multiple, as Badiou describes it here, must itself remain impervious

to structure except for its “internal gap and impasse,” or the point at
which the multiple is exposed as such. This is the gap, and its impasse
is this same point understood as a limit of thought. Though these are
features of the multiple, Badiou closes this claim by insisting that the gap
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  97

and impasse are legible in the theory of the multiple. This leads Badiou
to the void set and its proper name Ø. The void is ‘that from which’
consistent multiples are constructed, and it also serves as the boundary
for formal thinking. As such, the void serves to bridge inconsistent and
consistent multiples; however, and before turning to Badiou’s explicit
account of the void, it is perhaps helpful to see what it is not.1
Traditionally, and when it is aligned with ancient atomists and
Lucretius, void is an empty field through which bodies circulate.
According to Aristotle, atomists like Democritus and Leucippus main-
tained “the full and the empty are the elements, calling the one being
and the other non-being” (1984, 985b5-6). The element associated
with being is full and solid and consists in a body; the void, the element
associated with non-being, is an empty field in which atoms are organ-
ized. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius explains that the universe “as it
is in itself, is made up of two things; for there are bodies, and there is
void in which bodies are and through which they move this way and
that” (1975, 418–421). For these early thinkers, the void is an absence
or emptiness, though an emptiness is necessary as the bodies that move
in it. Of Democritus and Leucippus Aristotle explains, “they say that
what is is no more than what is not, because body no more is than
the void” (1984, 985b8-9). Though the principle of existence is attrib-
uted to bodies, the emptiness of void is required to trace movement,
integration (or disintegration), and change. Lucretius and the atom-
ists depart from Parmenidean strictures concerning being, since they
each maintain the reality of both being and non-being and thus affirm
the possibilities for these to be objects of thought; in the Parmenidean
account the goddess has barred human thought from even considering
non-being.
Like the atomists and Lucretius before him, Badiou affirms the void
as both an object of thought and a necessary component of any ontol-
ogy. Unlike these precedent thinkers, however, when void is deployed in
an ontological context it bears no traces of a material connection, and
though Badiou refers to it as a “multiple of nothing,” and marks it Ø, it
is not an instance of non-being. Though Badiou maintains what I have
called above a “dispositional affinity” with these earlier positions, the
specific content of the void differs from these precedent presentations.
I now turn to Badiou’s demonstration of this idea and discuss its signif-
icance as the procedure on which Badiou’s ontological turn is founded.
98  B. Vartabedian

On the Mark Ø
In the previous chapter, I explained the conceptual difference between
inconsistent and consistent multiples and discussed the axiom of separa-
tion as a principle for understanding the status of a consistent multiple
vis-à-vis an already-available multiple. The axiom of separation distin-
guishes “that ‘on the basis of which’ there is presentation,” that is the
inconsistent multiple, from “the result of presentation,” or consistent
multiple(s). However, these concepts are static; in the matter of actu-
ally constructing a consistent multiple, a fourth component is required.
Badiou introduces this as “an unpresentable yet necessary figure which
designates the gap between the result-one of presentation and that ‘on
the basis of which’ there is presentation” (BE 55). In other words, the
fourth component is the mark of separation between inconsistent and
consistent multiples. Badiou then names this gap “the nothing particular
to the situation, the unlocalizable void point” that clarifies “the situa-
tion is sutured to being” (BE 55). In other words, the void—this fourth
component required for the construction of consistent multiplicity—­
maintains a “present absence” that identifies the situation as multiple and
as such as separated from inconsistent multiplicity.
Badiou posits the void, first, as a “pure proper name” (BE 59). As a
proper name, this designation is such that it refers only to itself; the con-
tent of this reference, however, is the no-thing of the inconsistent mul-
tiple. The void as pure proper name will thus mark each situation with
no-thing, accomplishing the “suture” of any situation to being as pre-
scribed in Badiou’s description. However, and in spite of this appellation,
it’s necessary to note two things: first, identification of a pure proper
name serves only as a link to inconsistent multiplicity, and is insufficient
to establish existence—more work is required on this score; second, the
void will not serve as a pathway to being qua being, but rather a proce-
dural stop, marked Ø.
The mark Ø is a symbolic intervention attributed to the Bourbaki
group, which originated at the École normale supériéure in the late
1930s. Bourbaki member André Weil claimed responsibility for the selec-
tion of Ø to designate the empty set, a move part of Bourbaki’s larger
efforts to transform set-theoretic language toward more precision.2 Such
a move is in-line with the broader moves of formalism, particularly those
developed by and following Frege in the wake of Cantor’s problematic
inexactness. Badiou has long admired the work of the Bourbaki group,
noting that their intervention at the junction of arithmetic and geometry
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  99

inspires the broader commitments of his ontological project. He explains

that their work

… makes a distinction from the outset between algebraic structures, which

are the possible structures (addition, subtraction, division, root extraction,
etc.) that enable calculations, and topological structures, which make it
possible to think spatial arrangements (neighborhoods, inside and outside,
connections, the open and the closed, etc. (2016, 48)

Readers of Badiou’s oeuvre see the links of this recent paean to Bourbaki
as valuable for mapping Badiou’s own project; like this intrepid group of
mathematicians, Badiou’s own projects depend on the respective trajec-
tories engaging algebra and the “possible structures” of calculation (in
Being and Event) and those of topologies (in Logics of Worlds). However,
Badiou’s deployment of Bourbaki is not only honorific—it also has pro-
cedural significance for the ontological project.
The empty set Ø is the complement of any set E (Bourbaki 1968,
349); intuitively, and given that a set is an ensemble of elements and as
such is ‘full,’ it is reasonable to see the empty set in a negative relation
to this set E. Procedurally, the complement is identified in Bourbaki by
subtraction and defined with subsets (1968, 72). Take, for example,
the set “Becky’s nieces and nephews,” containing the elements (B, N,
T, F, W ). Identifying the subset “Becky’s nieces” draws from the orig-
inal set elements (N, T, W). The complement is thus the subset of ele-
ments to which the identified property does not apply; the subset (B, F),
or “Becky’s nephews” is the remainder, and the complement of “Becky’s
nieces.” At the level of set Bourbaki (1968, 349) explains, “some prop-
erties, for example x = x, are true for all elements of E.” Here, Bourbaki
identifies a property that holds for the entirety of elements in the set E.
Since the work of determining a complement required subtraction from
the given set all elements and subsets with the identified property, the
complement of set E (the set for which the property x = x is true for all
elements) is the set for which the property x ≠ x is true. The complement
is, therefore, a set with no elements.
For Badiou’s work, two aspects of this operation are of value. First,
the operation by which a complement is determined is subtraction; it is
the result of subtracting a subset from the larger set. In the case of deter-
mining the complement at the level of the set, the set E, when subtracted
from itself, yields the set with no elements, Ø. Second, it is worth noting
100  B. Vartabedian

(especially in relation to Badiou’s claims concerning the presence of Ø

in any situation) that complements determined subtractively must be
already available to serve as complement. Bourbaki’s analysis shows the
empty set Ø present as complement, a claim consonant with the require-
ments Badiou prescribes concerning the void and its mark Ø as a founda-
tional component in any consistent multiple.
In an interview with Tzuchien Tho, Badiou (2007, 99) explains,
“the void is the point on which we found the constructible sets which
allow us to unfold the characteristics of pure being.” In terms I’ve been
using above, the void is a site from which consistent multiplicity is built.
However, the void’s presence in a consistent multiple is an element anti-
thetical to the situation in which it appears; in other words, the void
maintains the link to inconsistent multiplicity. The mark Ø is the point
of no-thing that must be carried through any situation; it is that tether
Badiou sought in order to relate presentation to operation. Badiou can-
not simply assert, however, that Ø exists. Rather, it must be found via
the “principal Ideas of the multiple,” or in axioms (BE 60).

A Multiple of Nothing and Its Axiomatic Expression

The conceptual commitments to inconsistent and consistent multiples
are constraints on the way Badiou defines the void. Though he asserts
its status as a “pure proper name” and deploys the mark Ø, the void can-
not be issued by inconsistent multiplicity as a one without having been
counted; this contradicts the fundamental commitment to one as a result
of ontological operation and jeopardizes the nature of inconsistent mul-
tiplicity itself. Instead, Badiou specifies that the void “auto-declares itself
in the form of the multiple, despite there being nothing numbered by
it” (BE 59). The discussion of the mark Ø in connection with the empty
set above clarifies the last part of this claim; Ø is the empty complement
of any set whatever, and it is precisely this emptiness, this no-thing-ness
that inscribes the boundary for inconsistent multiplicity on the one hand.
On the other, the void’s “auto-declaration” occurs in a mark legible to
mathematical structuring. It is in this valence, that of the language of the
multiple, that the void is apparent as a “‘multiple’ of nothing” (BE 67).
The empty set has no differentiating element; nothing belongs to
it and nothing can belong to it. As Badiou points out, “the structure
of the statement that inscribes the ‘first’ existence is thus, in truth, the
negation of any existence according to belonging” (BE 67). Put another
way, the relations that maintain ordinary sets must be negated to find
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  101

the existent on which these sets are founded. In light of this, it is rea-
sonable to wonder how existence follows from negation. The statement
Badiou presents is an axiom, which follows the tradition of Zermelo’s
axiom of the null set and Bourbaki’s axiom of the empty set. The axiom,
in natural language, reads, “there exists that to which no existence can
be said to belong” (BE 68); presented formally, the statement is (∃β) [~(∃α)
(α ∈ β)], there exists a set β for which no element α that would belong
to β exists.3 This formal presentation explicitly connects the procedure
to an axiom system since, as Badiou notes, the void set “will begin with
an existential quantifier (thereby declaring that being invests the Ideas)”
(BE 68). On account of the formal presentation and its axiomatic status,
the void set is effectively ‘separated’ from the inconsistent multiple to
count, though it retains is peculiar place as link or trace of any ontologi-
cal construction to being qua being, or the inconsistent multiple.
Badiou’s axiomatic presentation of the existence of the void set is
the first and foundational step in linking one and multiple; it is now
inscribed in the language of ontology, both in terms of content (the
appearance of a mathematically legible symbol, Ø) and form (i.e., the use
of an axiom). The procedural transformation toward consistency—that
is, the work of moving this from a structuring concept to a content-filled
object of ontological inquiry—is a movement “from being-without-one”
to the one of a structured situation, governed by the relations of belong-
ing and inclusion.

From Nothing to Number

My present concern is to discuss the movement to consistent multiples
and subsequently to number, the results of the process linking multiple
to one in Badiou’s ontology; in other words, I will show how Badiou
moves from a “‘multiple’ of nothing” (BE 67) to one. This requires
attention to the supplementary relation of inclusion, the axiom of exten-
sionality, and the axiom of the power set, as these appear in Being and
Event.
Before introducing or discussing these tools, Badiou reminds his
reader that belonging is “the originary relation” (BE 81). Belonging is
a strong relation, insofar as it defines the whole of a set. The elements B,
N, T, F, and W each belong to and so define the set “Becky’s Nieces and
Nephews.” Inclusion, according to Badiou, “indicates that a multiple is
a submultiple of another multiple” (BE 81). If belonging describes the
whole, inclusion describes the parts; the elements B, N, T, F, and W are
102  B. Vartabedian

each parts of the set “Becky’s Nieces and Nephews.” Though it builds
from a multiple, the inclusion relation results in “a multiple essentially
distinct” from the set it is a part of (BE 83). There are two axioms that
support this claim. First is the axiom of extensionality (in Bourbaki, the
axiom of extent [1968, 67]), which asserts that two sets are equal if and
only if these contain identical elements (BE 60–61). Second is the axiom
of the power set, which indicates that the subsets of any given set can
themselves be counted as a set: {B, N, T, F, W} counted as individuals
{B}, {N}, {T}, {F}, {W}; counted by parentage {B, N, T} and {F, W};
by gender {B, F} and {N, T, W}; by age {B, N} and {T, F, W}, and any
other relevant parameters that apply to these elements. The combination
of each of these and the original set constitutes the power set; as such,
the eleven subsets I’ve drawn from the original are each included in the
original set. The axiom of the powerset shows that the subsets organized
from the original set are always more numerous than the multiple from
which they are drawn. However, because they do not contain identical
elements are distinct from one another (per the axiom of extensionality);
put straightforwardly (and for example), the elements in the set {B, N}
do not correspond exactly to the elements in the set {B, N, T, F, W}, and
so the sets are not equal.
Badiou explains that the void set Ø is included in—and is thus a part
of—any set (BE 86). My previous discussion of the empty set iden-
tified it as a complement of any set; Bourbaki shows that the empty set
remains when any set is subtracted from itself. This finding is consist-
ent with Zermelo’s claim that “the null set is a subset of every set M”
(1977, 202). To the eleven subsets associated with “Becky’s Nieces and
Nephews” I add a twelfth in Ø, a placeholder for the complement (in
Bourbaki’s analysis) and a register of the void (in Badiou’s).
Badiou explains that inclusion reveals a second feature of the void set;
Ø “possesses a subset, which is the void itself” (BE 86). Returning to the
illustration of “Becky’s Nieces and Nephews” above, I identified the sub-
sets {B}, {N}, {T}, {F}, {W}; Badiou asserts that the same move is avail-
able for the void set. It has a subset, which Badiou writes p(Ø), and this
subset indicates the presence of a part of Ø. This is perhaps a peculiar
claim, augmented by Badiou’s assertion that p(Ø) “solely announces that
everything which is presented, including the proper name of the unpre-
sentable, forms a subset of itself, the ‘maximal’ subset” (BE 88). These
single subsets are maximal insofar as these express only the included ele-
ment; in other words, the element both belongs and is included in the
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  103

count. The subset {T}, for example, is only and totally {T}, not {T} in a
larger group organized by property (e.g., gender, parentage, or age).
In the case of the subset p(Ø), the relationships are a bit trickier to
track. The subset {T} is not empty, and its status as both element and
part of the larger set is relatively uncontroversial. However, Ø has no
content, nothing belongs to it, and it is identical to itself. The subset
p(Ø) , though, is not empty. Its element is the proper name of the void,
something it re-presents in its inscription; Badiou shifts to writing it {Ø},
and the axiom of extensionality demonstrates that Ø and {Ø} are dis-
tinct multiples. This describes the procedure of “forming-into-one of Ø”
(BE 91). If the void set presents nothing, then the subset of the void set
presents one ‘thing,’ which is the proper name of the void. This impli-
cation is repeated: if Ø, then {Ø}; if {Ø}, then {{Ø}}, and numbers are
expressed by axiomatic operation on the void set. The move to consist-
ency requires the void and axioms of separation, extensionality, void set,
and power set. However, and before moving on from Badiou’s ontolog-
ical accounting, it is necessary to note that the counts {Ø} and {{Ø}} are
each subject to a second count. “All situations,” Badiou explains, “are
structured twice. This also means: there is always both presentation and
representation” (BE 94). By this requirement, {Ø} is represented as 1,
{{Ø}} is represented as 2, and so on. The move from nothing to number
is complete.
Up to this point my interest has been to show how one and multi-
ple are related in Badiou’s contemporary ontology. I have been especially
interested in showing this relation in light of the shift Badiou prescribes
for dialectical thinking in the 1985s Peut-on penser la politique? This
prescription indicates that dialectical thinking is tasked with pursuing
an ‘unrepresentable point,’ or the presence of the Real in any situation;
in Badiou’s ontology, this point is the void set, which acts as a mediat-
ing boundary between the infinite inconsistent multiplicity and consist-
ent multiples, the closed sets at the foundation of Badiou’s ontological
project. When demonstrated alongside Zermelo’s axioms of separation,
extensionality, and powerset, the void set authorizes the construction of
consistent multiples; the void set presents the no-thing of inconsistency
to the axioms of set theory, thus bridging the gap between being qua
being and its science. The void set also identifies the limit of ontology’s
reach—to the void set, but not beyond it—and as such identifies the
impasse of thought when it comes to being qua being. To be sure, the
search for this void is prescribed insofar as its irruption in a situation is
104  B. Vartabedian

the index of an event; but for the purposes of this study, I am interested
in showing the void as a key element in Badiou’s procedures for relating
multiple and one.
This set of mathematical procedures, developed in concert with a
reorientation of dialectical thinking, is not the only procedure for relat-
ing one and multiple in Badiou’s oeuvre. In Chapter 2, I discussed
Badiou’s doctrine of scission in the critique Badiou—writing as Georges
Peyrol—levies against Deleuze and Guattari. In what follows, I offer an
account of scission as Badiou develops it in the 1975 lecture that opens
Theory of the Subject. Though scission is primarily developed as the
framework underwriting the emergence of a subject, I attend to its pres-
entation of one from a multiple (in this case, a two). This account has
two benefits for my present examination: first, scission prefigures a tra-
jectory Badiou acknowledges and transforms in the more contemporary
ontology; second, it clarifies the position from which Peyrol critiques
Deleuze and Guattari’s account of multiplicity.

From Multiple to One: Scission

The set of lectures that open Theory of the Subject are broadly concerned
with the “Place of the Subjective,” an identification of the procedures
and components that contribute to the determination or existence of
something. Badiou’s inquiry depends on distinguishing two dialectical
matrices “at the heart of the Hegelian dialectic” (TS 3). One, alienation,
moves thought forward; the other, scission, moves thought down. As
Badiou explains, in scission, “…there is no unity that is not split. There
is not the least bit of return into itself, nor any connection between the
final and the inaugural” (TS 4). Scission essentially freezes the movement
of thought at a moment of temporary unification to attend to the com-
ponents constituting that moment; in other words, scission requires a
stoppage and analysis of the increasingly complex content of any unity
at any stage of the dialectic. Badiou selects the interpretive matrix of
scission to investigate “the notion of the ‘something’, which is the first
form of being-there in Hegel’s Logic” (TS 4).4 The analysis of dialectical
thinking requires, per Badiou, a presentation of existence.
In Hegel’s Science of Logic, existence is the second move in unfolding
the doctrine of being; the first is the movement from being to nothing
to becoming. Hegel (2010, 59/21.69) asserts that because pure being
is without determination, it “is pure indeterminateness and emptiness,”
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  105

and as such is nothing; nothing, though also empty and indeterminate,

requires a thought to fix its status. The procedures of thinking about
being and thinking about nothing are indicative of their sameness:
“Nothing,” Hegel says, “is therefore the same determination or rather
absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as what pure
being is” (2010, 59/21.69). Their sameness thus allows Hegel to iden-
tify the “immediate vanishing of one into the other” as becoming (2010,
60/21-69-70). By identifying this transformation of being into noth-
ing (and vice versa), becoming discloses a new unity and the “truth” of
being and nothing; the dialectical procession redefines being as coming-
to-be and nothing as ceasing-to-be.
The dialectic of existence begins from becoming, coming-to-be
and ceasing-to-be, represented as a unity labeled “determinate being.”
Hegel (2010, 83/21.97) notes that existence is “the simple oneness of
being and nothing.” Instead of analyzing becoming from the simple
plurality of coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be, these are carried forward
as an immediate unity. Hegel (2010, 83/21.97) identifies this unity as
“Dasein; according to its [German] etymology, it is being (Sein) in a
certain place (da).” As I will discuss below, the claim that existence is a
matter of determination in place is significant for Badiou’s 1975 analysis.
For Hegel, however, the assertion of this determinate unity as Dasein is
insufficient on its own for inaugurating existence; Dasein must be pos-
ited or expressed “in negation, in something and other” (Hegel 2010,
84/21.97). Put another way and in order to exist, Dasein must be both
the place it is in and the place in which it is not. This qualitative dis-
tinction is significant for the account of existence in the Logic, insofar as
the negation in here is determinate non-being. Hegel (2010, 85/21.99)
defines this negation, saying it is “still a quality but one that counts as
a lack and is further determined as limit, restriction.” The simple asser-
tion of Dasein is qualitatively transformed by that which it is not, deter-
minate non-being; it is inscribed by an identification of its boundaries.
The temporary unity of determinate being (Dasein) and determinate
non-being is something, the inaugural moment of existence (Hegel 2010,
88/21.102).
My description of Hegel’s work in the preceding two paragraphs
depends on the interpretive matrix of alienation, in which thought is
ushered forward by the identification of a contradiction (e.g., being is
revealed, on analysis to be nothing). The matrix of scission pauses at the
unity of something to interrogate the two moments constituting it. The
106  B. Vartabedian

inscription of existence as a unity of being-there and being-other-than-

there allows Badiou to claim, “Everything that exists is thus at the same
time itself and itself according to its place” (TS 8). I can re-interpret the
moments of the dialectic identified above as follows: the conditions for
the existence of anything are (a) the thing itself, the unified presence of
coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be, which is qualitatively indistinct; and
(b) the thing in place, “returned to itself” from its limit in non-being,
a recognition of that which it lacks. This latter move qualitatively distin-
guishes the thing precisely on account of its placement. Badiou’s reading
of scission isolates these dialectical components to develop a formula, A
and Ap, where A identifies a thing A-as-such, and Ap as A-in-another-
place. The components A and Ap allow Badiou to register “the mini-
mum primary differential” required for existence, which Badiou explains
by saying, “this only differs from that by the statement of difference, by
the literal placement” (TS 6). Badiou signifies this as AAp, which should
be read as A, a thing as such, times Ap, a thing in another place.
Badiou devotes some attention to the notation Ap that he introduces
to mark A-as-other. The place p can be expanded to infinity, though a
quantitative reduplication (e.g., Ap1, Ap2, Ap3, …Apn) does not trans-
form Ap beyond its status as other. This initial signification is not itself
scission, but rather the marker of minimal difference so that determina-
tion might be accomplished. Per Badiou, “a constitutive scission,” or the
formula establishing existence, is A = AAp (TS 6), follows from the iden-
tification of these components and their repetition. The relation of con-
tradiction is present in scission between A and “the space of placement
P” (TS 7), pointing to the world in which A is placed; the qualitative
limitation in Hegel’s account of something, where something and some-
thing-other are the terms in play, is realized for Badiou in this determin-
ing background.
Badiou’s analysis of scission sees the place or world operating as a
third term that defines something-other (Ap) in particular. He supports
this with a political example, describing place as “the bourgeois world,
imperialist society,” and situating this background as “the true contrary
of the proletariat” (TS 7). In the bourgeois world, the proletariat (A) is
reduplicated as the bourgeois (Ap); considered in reverse, the proletar-
iat is “the principal productive force” and “antagonistic political pole”
in the bourgeois world (TS 7). Scission articulates the relationship of
something A, something-other Ap, and the world in which these interact
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  107

P as constitutive of an existence. It depends on an identification of dif-

ference holding between A and Ap, and the formula A = AAp expresses
“the only form of existence of something in general” (TS 10). The for-
mula A = AAp replaces the Aristotelian identity A = A. Something, for
Badiou, is not identical to itself, but exists when it is seen alongside its
limitation.
From this assertion, Badiou articulates a series of iterations for scis-
sion that describes a series of “great dialectical concepts” that form the
foundation on which subjectivity emerges. These include determination,
which is scission “thinkable only from the indexed term … Ap(AAp)”;
a “determination of the new, Ap(A),” or force; and a relapse or reas-
sertion of place: “Ap(Ap) = P ” (TS 10). Badiou’s interest here is to
describe the set available relations between something, its limitation (as
placed elsewhere), and the world in which this is placed. There is a nor-
malizing or neutralizing function in determination’s application of Ap,
where the “something other” is doubled over something A; there is also
an overriding function in the relapse—what Badiou will call the splace
of determination—in which something A is prevented from appearing
altogether. Badiou’s focus is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an opportunity in
which something A is neither neutralized nor overridden; if transfor-
mation is at stake, then the determination of the new—force—must go
unrecognized or unassimilated by the world.
Badiou’s alignment with Hegel on this score is suggestive of access
to a ‘retrospectively present’ multiple. Nina Power (2006, 197) explains
that scission is used “as the basis of an attempt to found a distinction
between ‘something’ and ‘another thing’ … the dialectic is first and fore-
most a process, not of negation and the negation of negation, but of
internal division.” Though Badiou’s alignment here is with the Maoist
dictum that “One divides into two,” the reading of the dialectic as scis-
sion and not alienation at least gestures to the possibility that scission
can be applied at any point of the dialectic. Put another way, readers of
Hegel know that each moment of the dialectic carries forward the pre-
vious and precedent moments, and so the unity accomplished at the
end of the analysis of something is a unity that follows from the previ-
ous of moments the dialectic has passed through to arrive at that unity.
Badiou’s analysis of scission suggests that a unity of this sort—even if it is
temporary—could be analyzed to identify the component parts.
108  B. Vartabedian

Scission, Void, One-ness

My attention in the preceding section has turned on procedures for one-
ing multiples, evident in Badiou’s ontological project in Being and Event
and gestured to his earlier political inquiry. Badiou’s doctrine of scission,
a hallmark of his political theorizing, prescribes a slowing or freezing of
the movement of negation to identify a temporary unity and the multi-
ple constituting it. Scission proposes that this relationship between one
and multiple is more-or-less direct; the conditions for transformation and
the condition for suppression are already present in the constitutive for-
mula. Further, the various combinations for determination, force, and
relapse are of the defined and available elements. The only additional
requirement is proceeding from a matrix of scission rather than a matrix
of alienation; alienation, which emphasizes movement by negation will
never slow sufficiently to identify a unity from the multiple. Scission
accomplishes this identification by slowing movement long enough to
identify a unity.
When applied to the position Georges Peyrol advocates in “The
Fascism of the Potato,” scission requires each of the groups enumerated
in the May ’68 “horizontal storm” to see their interests against the larger
background of a bourgeois world. It is this work of seeing oneself placed
and subsequently redefined in the terms of that place that Peyrol con-
strues positively; if the “immigrants, women, ecologists, soldiers, pris-
oners, students, homosexuals, etc.” (FP 192) each observed themselves
against the bourgeois background, the unifying dimension of class would
have emerged as key in capitalizing on the promise of May. Such is the
faith of Georges Peyrol, a faith that peters out in the transformations of
radical leftism toward parliamentary politics in the mid-1980s.
It is in this context that Badiou rethinks the structures for organiza-
tion and transformation. As I traced in Badiou’s Peut-on penser la poli-
tique? and the reflexive introduction of Being and Event, Badiou’s search
moves from a one cut directly from the multiple to a point of trans-
formation in the form of the void. In this move, expressed in the work
Badiou undertakes to establish the void set as the “first existent” and
the possibility for any one-result whatever in Being and Event, Badiou
assigns the work of transformation to a “gap or impasse,” a point at
which thought finds its limitation and restriction. In this way, the work
of one-ing is indirect insofar as it consists in a series of operations on
the void point, including the application of axioms and installation of
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  109

relations of belonging and inclusion, and not directly on the inconsistent

multiple or mass the void serves to name.
Though, and as A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens (2012, 368) have
indicated, mathematized ontology serves Badiou’s work as a “figure of
philosophical fiction,” a series of moves necessary to liberate philosophy
from the work of thinking being, ontology’s positive value is its tools
for mapping types of situations—normal, singular, and excrescent—for
identifying and prescribing sites of rupture. Just as the elements of con-
stitutive scission can be reduplicated and arranged to describe condi-
tions of suppression or transformation, Badiou’s ontological framework
in Being and Event identifies a maximum of three types of situation: a
normal situation, in which everything belongs and is included and thus
has no asymmetry; an excrescent situation, in which everything that is
included does not belong, the asymmetry of which favors suppres-
sion; and a singular situation, in which everything that belongs is not
included, an asymmetry which favors transformation. In the ontological
Badiou, and on account of the displacement of ontology from philoso-
phy, this mapping is static and formal. An excrescent situation does not
generate suppression, but rather only describes the structure of suppres-
sion in the language of the multiple; similarly, a singular situation does
not burst forth with transformative qualities, but simply describes the
structure of transformation according to minimal mathematical and log-
ical relationships of belonging and inclusion. This stasis, prescribed by
the conceptual distinction of inconsistent and consistent multiples and
the limitation imposed by the axiom of separation, marks the procedures
for generating any one from a multiple in Badiou’s explicit theory of the
multiple, developed in Being and Event.

One and Multiplicity in Deleuze and Guattari:

Consolidation, Subtraction
In the preceding section I discussed the procedures for one-production
apparent in Badiou’s oeuvre, including the technical count-procedure
appearing in Being and Event and the account of scission that marks
determination and the identification of existents in his earlier work, and
particularly in Theory of the Subject. My aim in the present section is to
discuss the procedures for connecting one to multiplicity in Deleuze’s
oeuvre, accounting for the way the continuous multiplicity is shaped in
the direction of a conceptual or empirical consolidation.
110  B. Vartabedian

In the previous chapter, I explained the structure of multiplicity in

Deleuze’s work, discussing several examples illustrating a consistent com-
mitment to multiplicity defined between points, as a system of connec-
tion. I discussed the structuring function of multiplicity in the virtual
idea and in “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” where a sense of rela-
tion between spaces constructed using principles of multiplicity is clar-
ified. The Riemannian principles in play in these examples are, broadly,
three. First is the basic distinction of continuous manifolds from discrete
ones, where the former are defined by transitions between points. From
this assertion, found originally in Aristotle’s Categories—Riemann devel-
ops a second innovation, an account for extending manifolds in multi-
ple dimensions that links points “as a composition of a variability of n + 1
dimensions” (Riemann 1873, 15). This transformation allows for the
density of connection between local points to obtain. The third contribu-
tion of Riemann’s work is to revise a sense of space such that it need not
be evaluated primarily according to a static coordinate space. As Arkady
Plotnitsky (2009, 119) explains,

The key conceptual component of (Riemann’s) approach is to define a

topologically and geometrically complex space, particularly a curved space
such as a sphere, not as a constitution of points, but as a space that could
be covered by maps where by it can be treated as locally Euclidean, even
though globally the space itself may not be Euclidean.

Per Plotnitsky, Riemann’s work contributes to a re-thinking of space to

emphasize its “global” behavior according to principles of continuity and
multiple-dimensionality, toward the development of so-called “covering
maps” that account for links between points in the space. However, this
does not exclude the possibility that portions of these maps might be
accounted for in coordinate terms. I used the example of my own neigh-
borhood to illustrate this, indicating that though there is an “Euclidean
layer” that defines the neighborhood in terms of discrete parcels and
measures relationships between these parcels using coordinate informa-
tion, there are a number of other layers—perhaps more descriptive than
the coordinate layer—that are each invented, forged dynamically by an
understanding of the neighborhood according to relationships of neigh-
bors to one another, to and from local landmarks, etc. A Riemannian
grasp of my neighborhood sees each of these layers and all together as
constituting my neighborhood.
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  111

It is against this background, that I am now interested to discuss

the procedures for one-production in Deleuze’s work and in his col-
laboration with Guattari, though this enterprise is a bit tricky. That
is, and unlike the one resulting from the count or the cut in Badiou’s
work, the one holds no privileged place in Deleuze’s and Deleuze and
Guattari’s work. It is rather understood in conjunction with and as an
expression of a local multiplicity. In what follows, I attend to the dif-
ferential procedures for issuing a pre-individual singularity and a result-
ing example of a virtual idea—Deleuze’s analysis of Marxism as a ‘social
idea,’ in Difference and Repetition. I then turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s
injunction to ‘make the multiple’ with the figure n − 1; I discuss the
way this is mobilized by Riemann in the “Hypotheses” and expressed in
the example of the war machine in “Rhizome”. I supplement this with
the imperatives to division and overturned Platonism in Difference and
Repetition; though they are not properly subtractive, these prefigure
this procedure and its later expression. I then address “Example 1” in
What is Philosophy? to demonstrate both consolidation and subtraction
‘in action.’

Consolidation and the Virtual Idea

Attention to the multiplicity structuring the virtual idea, the task of
my analysis in Chapter 3, reveals the dynamic connections, structured
according to principles of continuity and multiple-dimensionality, consti-
tuting that idea. Deleuze’s use of the differential element dx and its three
moments as undetermined, determinable, and determined, mobilizes the
multiplicity to consolidate in a virtual idea; it offers, in other words, the
conditions by which the internal genesis of an idea is possible.
In the Introduction, I explained that Deleuze’s accounts of the vir-
tual idea and the internal genesis it expresses are each offered as a solu-
tion to Kant’s theory of external conditioning. Kant’s solution, offered
in the Schematism, depends on time “as the formal condition of the
manifold of inner sense” (Kant 1998, A138/B177) to facilitate the con-
nection between categories and intuitions necessary to produce an idea.
Time is adequate to this task since, as Kant (1998, A138/B177) claims,
because it is “a third thing, which must stand in homogeneity with the
category on the one and the appearance on the other, and makes pos-
sible the application of the former to the latter.” Although Kant’s argu-
ment is exceedingly tidy—time functions as the third term in a syllogism
112  B. Vartabedian

connecting categories and intuitions—it is insufficient because it is

imposed from without to complete the linkage. As Daniela Voss (2011, 67)
explains, Deleuze’s disposition toward internal genesis follows the frame-
work established by Solomon Maimon. Rather than depend on a third
term to bring categories and intuitions together, Maimon argues that the
conditions for the idea are found in the way categories and intuitions are
structured. For Deleuze, the principles of internal genesis mobilize the
connections evident in a local multiplicity toward a pre-individual singu-
larity. This depends on a (peculiar) interpretation of differential calculus.
However, before arriving at this peculiar interpretation, consider a
conventional understanding of differential calculus; the practice deter-
mines, over “continuous mathematical magnitude the smallest possi-
ble intervals or differentials” (Boyer 1949, 12). These small increments
make it possible to identify a value on the continuous magnitude at a
particular instant. For example, on a curvilinear function f(x) = x2, it is
possible to calculate the average rate of change, or a line secant to the
curve between two identified points, and to derive from the average rate
the instantaneous rate of change at a given point on the curve, marked
by a line tangent to the curve as the rate of change approaches zero.
For a value x = 2, the function yields a y-intercept: f(2) = 4 and an
ordered pair designates a point on the curve at (2, 4). To identify the
average rate of change, a second pair of coordinates are required. Taking
another point on the x-axis an arbitrary distance from 2 described as
2 + h (where h marks the change from 2 to the point h), the value of
the function at 2 + h is evaluated as f(2 + h) = (2 + h)2. Using point-
slope formula, generically m = yx22 −y −x1 , the coordinates (2, 4) and
1

2
([2 + h], [2 + h] ) determine the slope of the secant line. Expanding
(2 + h) 2 to 4 + 4 h + h2 and converting it to point-slope formula yields:
4+4h+h2 −4
 
2
 
m = (2+h)−2 , which simplifies to m = 4h+h h . The equation is sim-
plified further to m = 4 + h after factoring h from each of the terms. The
slope of the line connecting (2, 4) and ([2 + h], [2 + h]2) is thus 4 + h
and describes the average rate of change over the function.
To determine the instant rate of change at the point (2, 4), the
limit must be identified. As the value of h, that change from 4 to 4 + h
approaches a value of zero, the slope of the line tangent to the curve
at (2, 4) is calculated taking the limit of the secant line as h approaches
zero. The formula f ′ (x) = lim 4 + h describes the derivative of f(x); as
h→0
h becomes smaller (or vanishes), the value 4 remains. The slope of the
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  113

line tangent to the curve at (2, 4) is 4, and describes the instant rate of
change at that point.5
In this conventional assessment, identifying slopes of secant and tan-
gent lines is operational and determines average and instantaneous rates
of change over a function. Deleuze’s peculiar interpretation of the dif-
ferential depends, as he explains, on a “so-called barbaric or prescientific
(interpretation) of the differential calculus” (DR 170), an interpretation
that trades the actual existence of infinitesimals—and their operational
function—for their ideal existence.6 Very basically, this is the claim that
dx can be put to work without assigning to it any particular mathemati-
cal or numeric value.7
In his presentation of differentiation in chapter 4 of Difference and
Repetition, Deleuze explains that the “principle of a general differential
philosophy” depends on an interpretation of the differential element dx
to “(appear) as simultaneously undetermined, determinable, and deter-
mination” (DR 171). As undetermined, dx does not carry a particular
numeric value, but rather is the “symbol of difference” in Deleuze’s sys-
tem. It is determinable inasmuch as dx may be brought into “reciprocal
determination” (DR 171) with other differential elements; it is expressed
dy/dx and does not yet bear a value. Finally, the “principle of complete
determination corresponds to the effectively determined,” or the point at
which a singularity emerges (DR 171). This singularity effectively com-
pletes the virtual idea initiated in the account of multiplicity and readies
it for its expression in space and time.
Deleuze explains that the symbols dx and dy, which he proffers in
order to counter the ~A of contradiction, “are completely undifferenci-
ated in the particular and general, but completely differentiated in and
by the universal” (DR 172). As “undifferenciated,” Deleuze insists that
these symbols are not attached to empirical or conceptual instances; to
be differenciated is to express a multiplicity in a here-and-now instance,
to be actualized in space and time. By distinguishing differentiation
from contradiction, Deleuze expands the virtual idea according to quan-
tity (a multitude of elements may be in circulation, rather than simply
two terms) and quality (a corresponding multitude of relationships may
obtain, rather than the narrow relations prescribed in contradiction).
Operationally, because differential elements cannot be actualized, they
lack “any assignable function” (DR 183). In Deleuze’s scheme, dy and dx
are abstracted even further from a recognizable mathematical or conti­
nuous point; the differential elements of the multiplicity do not carry a
114  B. Vartabedian

particular or specific value. However, these elements are necessary for the
definition of an idea-multiplicity.
When Deleuze claims that the differential elements are “completely
differentiated in and by the universal” (DR 172), this is a gesture to
the differential elements in their relation, dy/dx. The assertion of “the
universal” directs Deleuze’s reader to Jean Bordas-Demoulin’s claims
regarding the differential relation dy/dx, and to one of the key contri-
butions of the “pre-scientific” version of the calculus on which Deleuze
relies. According to Simon Duffy (2013, 77), Bordas-Demoulin’s work
sets asides questions of whether the differentials exist, and “instead con-
siders dy/dx or 0/0 to be the symptom of a qualitative difference or
change of function, insofar as it excludes that which individualizes the
function in favor of the universal.” Bordas-Demoulin’s expression of the
universal as 0/0 is peculiar, particularly since any conventional differen-
tial relation divided by zero yields an undefined result. What might it
mean, then, to “set aside questions of whether the differentials exist”?
Henry Somers-Hall offers some orienting comments regarding the com-
mitments by which Deleuze selects Bordas-Demoulin’s 0/0. Somers-
Hall (2010, 567) explains that in connection to the calculus,

Deleuze’s aim will be to use the calculus to foster an understanding of the

transcendental free from all resemblance to the empirical, as it is only once
this resemblance has been removed that the transcendental can be seen as
the grounds of the generation of the empirical, rather than simply as a con-
ditioning factor.8

On Somers-Hall’s interpretation, these structures of the differential and

its relation are to be interpreted as a set of markers to which empirical
results might be mapped in the virtual. Put another way, their inter-
pretation is philosophical, rather than mathematical. If the elements of
the differential are relieved of the requirement to communicate precise
mathematical values, then the 0/0 is a means of accounting for the trans-
formation of an idea in the virtual; it cannot be undefined, since there
are no empirical values associated with it.
When Deleuze says that differential elements are “differentiated” by
the universal, he means that differential elements are installed in relation
and that it is possible this relation could constitute a qualitative change.
Deleuze explains that these differential elements begin as undetermined,
but they “must in effect be determined, but reciprocally, by reciprocal
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  115

relations which allow no independence whatsoever to subsist” (DR 183).

The multiplicity requires at some level the opportunity for differences to
circulate freely. However, these elements carry with them the possibilities
for determinability (their installation in relation) and determination (the
preparation of this relation to be realized in space and time); they bear
the capacity to circulate and be put to work in service of the relation,
that second structuring element of a multiplicity.
To realize the possibility of determinability, situating these elements in
a strict reciprocal relation is required; this strict reciprocity more-or-less
locks the differential elements into a relation, and generates a mode of
determination, or a pathway between the elements so related. As such,
the second structural feature of the idea articulates the dimensionality
of that particular idea. This is expressed symbolically as the relation of
dy/dx, or “the principle of reciprocal determination” of these elements.
In this relation, Deleuze explains, “each term exists absolutely only in
its relation to the other: it is no longer necessary, or even possible, to
indicate an independent variable” (DR 172). This reinforces Deleuze’s
insistence that the organization of a multiplicity is intrinsic, based on the
relations and networks developed between the points of that multiplic-
ity. The dual significance of this second structural feature of multiplicity
consists in the determination of points in relation, and confirmation of
the idea’s continuity. Deleuze says, “In all cases the multiplicity is intrin-
sically defined, without external reference or recourse to a uniform space
in which it would be submerged” (DR 183). Multiplicity resists the
imposition of structure that is not grown from the reciprocally related
elements and the status of this reciprocal relationship vis-à-vis other
“neighboring regions” (DR 183). The differential relation reinforces
the dimensionality and interiority of the idea-multiplicity that marks it as
continuous.
A third condition, the “principle of complete determination,”
accounts for “the effectively determined (values of dy/dx)” (DR 171).
The immediate difference between the second and third conditions of
the idea can be expressed as follows: the reciprocal relation of dy/dx
identifies a place where a change in the function could obtain; the “effec-
tive determination” of the value of this relation marks a place where a
change in the function has occurred. In other words, the third condi-
tion of the idea is the site of an idea’s transformation in the direction
of its spatio-temporal expression. While the preceding two conditions of
the idea are described according to “quantitability” and “qualitability,”
116  B. Vartabedian

respectively, Deleuze assigns “potentiality” to the third condition of the

idea, suggesting its break in the direction of actualization (DR 176).
This break is indexed by the presence of a “‘preindividual’” singularity
(DR 176). Simon Duffy (2013, 16) defines the singularity in the context
of Leibnizian calculus as “points of articulation where the shape of the
curve changes or alters its behavior.” As such, the presence of a singular-
ity is crucial for defining the curve; in the conventional example above, a
pre-individual singularity would be associated with the infinitesimal point
at which the graph of the function breaks from the x-axis; this break
toward curvature makes it possible to evaluate the rates of change on the
function with identifiable (i.e., non-infinitesimal) points. The singular-
ity functions analogously for Deleuze, insofar as it identifies the place at
which the idea is prepared to be transformed, to become actual.
Deleuze offers three examples of this virtual Idea, each one affirm-
ing the presence of infinitesimal elements, their relationships, and their
“potentiality” or their bearing the requisite elements of concrete expres-
sion. In the previous chapter, I discussed the relation of the social Idea
to Deleuze’s framework defining a multiplicity. In this context, I discuss
the social Idea’s interpretation with respect to the differential. The social
Idea develops the elements, relations, and potential in a localized frame-
work, underwritten by the “element of quantitability,” or the differential
element, the relations determining “qualitability,” and the “potentiality
of societies” (DR 186). Each of these elements, as Deleuze explains, are
“established not between concrete individuals but between atomic bear-
ers of labor-power or representatives of property” (DR 186). Though
the claims concerning localization are perhaps straightforward to grasp
(the social Idea is the idea of this particular social arrangement and its
entailments), this dive to the “atomic” level is not quite as straightfor-
ward; large-scale social movements like Marxism are not defined as
clashes between the bourgeois and proletariat, but rather express traces
or micro-tendencies present in any social arrangement. These traces link
up, and in doing so lay the ground and limits in which concrete rela-
tions and engagements will unfold. Daniela Voss (2013, 198) explains,
“Instead of being an abstract transcendent principle, the Idea is not
larger than what it determines, that is it is itself determined by the con-
tingent empirical circumstances.” Put yet another way, the social Idea
poses a question along the lines of what is meant by “the economic” in
this place and at this time? The answer to this question—the solution—
emerges in the concrete expression of economic relationships; however,
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  117

the solution itself covers over the conditions of its emergence. This
requires a bit of imagination to see at work.
Take, for example, my own neighborhood; though I’ve described this
neighborhood previously in terms of covering maps that mark pathways
to and from various landmarks, these covering maps describe layers of
the neighborhood. To approach the neighborhood from the angle of the
social Idea, the answer to the question What is meant by “the economic”
in my Denver neighborhood in 2017? is gentrifying. I can point to a series
of concrete indices supporting this answer: rising home prices, long-time
residents displaced to more affordable suburbs north and east of the city
limits, and economic growth in certain sectors, all offer palpable evi-
dence for this solution, and are each tangled in complex and determining
relations with one another. However, the social Idea requires a recogni-
tion that even these concrete indices express abstract possibilities some-
how ‘embedded’ in Denver’s social arrangement in the early twenty-first
century. Put directly, gentrification expresses these embedded traces of
opportunity, affordability, displacement, and growth, each mobilized
in ways peculiar to this place and time; these traces link up with one
another (growth/displacement, opportunity/affordability, displacement/
opportunity, affordability/growth, displacement/affordability, growth/
opportunity) and their nexus identifies their potentiality or the direction
of their expression.
The differential and its three moments combine with the framework
offered by Riemannian multiplicity to form the structure of the virtual
idea. Deleuze describes this structure, saying,

Just as structure is independent of any principle of identity, so genesis is

independent of a rule of resemblance. However, an Idea with all its adven-
tures emerges in so far as it already satisfies certain structural and genetic
conditions, and not others. (DR 184)

Deleuze reasserts here the nature of the virtual idea according to the cri-
tique of the dogmatic image of thought, the project of Difference and
Repetition, but also in terms consonant with the selection of Riemannian
multiplicity and its consequences. The virtual idea resists evaluation by
a concept of identity on account of its immanent or intrinsic measure;
it “forms a system” by linking certain elements and building pathways
between these without appealing to a static unity or its requirements.
Similarly, the genetic procedure Deleuze attributes to the differential
118  B. Vartabedian

relation is not governed by pre-existing rules of determination; the

results of the differential procedure need not conform to externally
imposed norms.
In his introduction to the differential in chapter 4 of Difference and
Repetition, Deleuze claims, “a great deal of heart and a great deal of
truly philosophical naivety is needed in order to take the symbol dx seri-
ously” (DR 170). To interpret dx, Deleuze depends on the tools of a
minor tradition of differential calculus for the continued construction
of his virtual idea. The resources this minor tradition offers, both in
terms of principles of a transcendental (rather than empirical) analysis of
dx and its success in offering an account of internal genesis are evident.
However, we may wonder whether this dependence on such a minor
tradition is not also a liability for Deleuze. Consider the claims above
that one reason Riemannian differential geometry works in the context
of Deleuze’s project is on account of its capaciousness. I offered a brief
comparison of Riemannian geometry with other geometric approaches
which demonstrated that Euclidean and other non-Euclidean geometry
can actually be treated as special or highly specific cases of Riemannian
space.9 Deleuze’s preferred interpretation of the differential, by contrast,
seems to balance on a knife edge. Put another way, one needs far less
“philosophical naivety” to accept the principles of continuous multiplic-
ity and immanent measure than one needs to follow a transcendental
interpretation of the differential relation. While at present I am not con-
cerned to evaluate the adequacy of the mathematical systems proposed
by Badiou and Deleuze for the tasks to which they are assigned, this
sharply inverted relation of multiplicity and the differential in Deleuze’s
virtual idea are deserving of further investigation.
In this section, I have discussed Deleuze’s deployment of the differ-
ential dx, its relation, and transformation toward a pre-individual singu-
larity. This prescribes the work of consolidation in the virtual toward a
concrete empirical or conceptual expression. This notion is not particu-
larly straightforward, and though I’ve worked through an example of the
social Idea, additional discussion is required. I return to the work of con-
solidation below in my analysis of “Example 1” in What is Philosophy?, as
this draws together both the productive or genetic work of consolidation
and the regulative work of subtraction, both key and appearing across
Deleuze’s work. Before arriving at this example, however, I address
Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s use of subtraction, marked with
the figure n − 1 in regulating the function of any consolidated instance.
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  119

Subtraction and ‘Making the Multiple’

In Chapter 2, I discussed Deleuze and Guattari’s injunction to ‘make
the multiple’ using a tool of subtraction, marked in their work with the
figure n − 1. I explained this figure as a counter to Lacan’s claim that
any unity is constructed by addition, and this addition accomplishes the
erasure of difference. The subtractive procedure Deleuze and Guattari
deploy is designed to affirm difference, to see the variety grounding
any particular expression. Here, I explore the procedure of subtraction
according to a more remote referent found in Riemann’s “Hypotheses”;
there, and in addition to the n + 1 mechanism for expanding manifolds
he discusses, Riemann explains that any region of manifoldness may
resolve to fewer dimensions and, where possible, to the identification of
quanta or points of position in that manifold.
The n + 1 is a formula for expansion, for increasing the dimensionality
of any manifold. Riemann (1873, 15) follows this presentation with a
prescription “to resolve a variability whose region is given into a varia-
bility of one dimension and a variability of fewer dimensions.” Resolving
describes the task of isolating a position in any manifold. This procedure
is marked n − 1; it begins by identifying a given manifoldness and ana-
lyzing it using the following parameter:

Take a continuous function of position within the given manifoldness,

which is not constant through any part of that manifoldness. Every sys-
tem of points where the function has a constant value, forms a continuous
manifoldness of fewer dimensions than the given one. (Riemann 1873, 15)

The key notions to take away from this quotation are two: first, that a
region of manifoldness is associated with a function that determines the
place of points and relations among these points; second, the work of
resolving the manifold—in other words, enacting subtraction—requires
an identification of points where the function is essentially static, where
no change in the function is apparent. This is the case for constant func-
tions, for which the output or result is the same for every input value, or
(put another way) where the function registers no change in relation to
its input and output values.
It is from these two notions of analysis—the identification of a
region of manifoldness and determination of a point of stasis in that
manifoldness—that a kind of limitation is enacted. From this point of
120  B. Vartabedian

stasis, Riemann (1873, 15) explains that it is possible to see variabil-

ity or dimensionality in relation to this point, a position that is of fewer
dimensions than the original manifoldness. Put another way, though the
identification of the point is possible, it is still a point embedded in the
series of connections or dimensions that hold for that given region of
manifoldness. There may be fewer connections passing through the point
than in the fully expanded manifold. Riemann (1873, 15) explains that
by this process “the determination of position in the given manifoldness
is reduced to a determination of quantity and to a determination of posi-
tion in a manifoldness of less dimensions.” He points out that it may be
possible to assign a quantity to the position, but even without that finite
identification the work of resolution identifies location and relationships
in relation to the resulting dimensionality.
In what follows, I address two examples from Deleuze’s work that
illustrate these procedures of limitation and subtraction. First, the
war machine, discussed in “Rhizome,” is an example of subtraction
and distribution in a kind of abstract system. The war machine, when
understood according to subtraction, affirms Deleuze and Guattari’s
preference for “a-centred systems,” self-organizing and self-regulat-
ing systems that resist coordination from above or from without; the
static point from which the war machine is revealed is the General. The
account of Deleuze’s overturned Platonism, a component of Difference
and Repetition’s argument elevating difference over “the same,” offers
an early blueprint for subtractive procedure in Deleuze’s work, taking
the concept sophist as its point of constancy or stasis.

A-Centered Systems, War Machine(s)

Subtraction creates sites of connection aligned with rhizomatic thinking,
such that “any point on a rhizome can be connected to any other point
and must be. This is quite different from trees or roots which fix a point,
an order” (R 52–53). Subtraction allows for the identification of con-
ditions giving rise to any conceptual or individuated consolidation of a
multiplicity. A rhizome is an example of an “a-centred system,” which
Deleuze and Guattari describe as,

finite networks of automata in which communication occurs between any

two neighbors, where the links or channels are not preexistent, where
individuals are all interchangeable, defined only by their state at any given
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  121

moment in such a way that local operations are co-ordinated and the final
overall result synchronized independently of any central instance. (R 61)

The a-centered system offers a framework for understanding Deleuze

and Guattari’s preference for a dynamic, self-determining system liber-
ated from centralized control. When the subtractive figure n − 1 appears
in “Rhizome,” it designates a system resisting the imposition of a cen-
tralized authority. The war machine, which Deleuze and Guattari identify
as a self-organizing, a-centered system, is an example of “a machine mul-
tiplicity” that “rejects any centralizing, unifying automaton as ‘an asocial
intrusion’ (15)” (R 62).10 They describe this machine multiplicity as a
problem or perplexity:

The problem of the war machine or firing squad: is a General necessary

in order for n individuals to fire at the same time; the solution without a
General can be found for a acentred multiplicity with a finite number of
states and signals of corresponding speed, from the point of view of a war
rhizome or a guerilla logic. (R 61)

The war machine illustrates the way a multiplicity ought to behave, func-
tioning according to terms it sets itself and resisting terms imposed on
it from without. This is accomplished by its ability to fire according to
its states and signals, without requiring the command from a general.
Deleuze and Guattari explain that the n individuals constituting the war
machine are “truly always n – 1” (R 61). In maintaining its self-organi-
zation, the war machine also maintains the subtractive position, submit-
ting itself to the logic of the multiple and not the logic of a centralized
authority. The work of subtraction and location identified in Riemann’s
work above, when laid over the example of the war machine, suggests
that it is possible to account for the occasion and conditions for a single
member of the firing squad’s action. However, this is necessarily embed-
ded in and alongside the other members of the grouping and the dynam-
ics (read: occasion and conditions) for their actions.
The a-centered system is consistent with the overriding paradigm of
multiplicity Deleuze and Guattari promote. However, the discussion of
the a-centered system also reveals subtraction’s normative force. That
is, a system is not properly rhizomatic, nor does it express a multiplicity
when its principle of organization is ceded to a unifying figure or con-
cept; the war machine is no longer a rhizome when it takes its orders
122  B. Vartabedian

from a general. If subtraction is maintained, though, the war machine

operates according to its self-coordinating status. The n − 1 figure acts
as the procedure for distribution and fracture, and ensures multiplicity is
not absorbed by a single, unifying instance.

Division and Overturned Platonism

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes the procedure for
analyzing any empirical or conceptual instance as interrogation.
Interrogation finds its model in an interpretation of the activity of divi-
sion in Plato’s Sophist, the means and method by which the Eleatic
Stranger hunts the sophist. For Deleuze, division offers the means
by which it is possible to “(deny) the primacy of original over copy, of
model over image” (DR 66). In this context, division serves the elab-
oration of difference “in itself,” which is the task of Difference and
Repetition’s first chapter; for the purposes of this study, it offers a pro-
cedure that prefigures the technical work of subtraction prescribed by
Deleuze and Guattari in “Rhizome.”
In the Sophist, Socrates and his interlocutors Theodorus, Theaetetus,
and the Eleatic Stranger attempt to identify the true nature of the philo­
sopher. The visitor replies that while sophist, statesman, and philosopher are
each distinct, the work of untangling them is a challenge. He proposes
to Theaetetus the proper method of hunting the sophist, “by searching
for him and giving a clear account of what he is” (Plato 1997, 218c).
They begin with the angler as their model, attempting to understand the
angler by dividing its tasks and activities according to a series of posed
differences. For example, they divide angler to the point of identifying
him as possessing an art (technē), rather than a knack; the angler is a
hunter that strikes by hooking, not spearing (Plato 1997, 221b-c). When
they arrive at the sophist, they first determine whether the sophist is a
layman or an expert (Plato 1997, 221c), and they further determine that
the sophist is an expert at hunting. The search for the sophist—the hunt
for the hunter—affirms some possibilities and rejects others: the sophist
takes as their technē the “opininative art,” which is either committed to
truth or to opinion (Plato 1997, 232c). In all cases, however, the rejected
possibilities remain in plain view in order to show the trail Theaetetus and
the stranger have each taken.
The sophist is determined, not by instances measured against a con-
cept, but (in at least one of the seven divisions) rather by fragment-
ing the concept ‘angler’ and holding each of those fragments apart
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  123

to properly determine the concept. Each division can trace its line-
age back to the first division, and the links in the long chain hold fast;
the procedure does not collapse or disappear once the desired result is
accomplished. Furthermore, these fragments could be held in a strong
analogical relation to assess “sophist” and (by degrees) “philosopher.”
Division (whether applied to angler or sophist) develops an array of dis-
tributed components. The Eleatic Stranger and Theaetetus together
weave an elaborate net to nab the sophist.
Daniel W. Smith has assessed the function of dialectic by division,
and especially division in the Sophist as a model for a Deleuzian search
for difference “in itself.” Smith (2012, 10) explains that while the other
aporetic dialogues, namely the Phaedrus and Statesman, “move upward
toward the ‘true lover’ or the ‘true statesman,’” the movement in the
Sophist is rather a dive toward the depths. Seeking the sophist uncovers
an array of alternatives: sophist, philosopher, angler, forger, and whole-
saler, among other distinctions, appear in the work of dividing. This
move is also costly, since as Smith (2012, 10) points out, “the method
of division can make no appeal to a foundational myth or model, for it is
no longer a matter of discerning the true sophist from the false claimant,
since the true sophist is himself the false claimant.” The work of division in
the Sophist rejects the ascent to the true altogether, since in each of the
seven attempts to discover the sophist it comes eerily close to the philos-
opher in several respects; the true and the false, as Smith has pointed out,
are compromised categories.
The platonism of the Sophist thus resists a singular analysis of Platonic
dialogues according to a theory of Forms; that is, one does not read
the Sophist to find a form of the titular character. Further, the work of
division enacted by the Eleatic Stranger does not follow the neat line of
“What is …?” questioning offered by Socrates in the broader Platonic
corpus. Instead of using a controlling concept to evaluate the relation-
ships uncovered in division, the dive to the depths initiated in this pro-
cess fractures a particular idea according to immediate inference and
association. In this gesture of fracture, division offers a model for sub-
traction of the sort I’ve identified as apparent in Deleuze and Guattari’s
collaborative analyses. Deleuze’s analysis of division in the Sophist offers
further confirmation of this affinity.
In addition to resisting the internal tendency of dialectic by the
“What is…?” question characteristic of the Platonic approach, dialectic
by division also resists an external tendency imposed according to the
124  B. Vartabedian

Aristotelian method of dividing according to genus and species, which

requires a middle term to mediate between species and genus (e.g.,
human as a rational animal, where rational determines the type of ani-
mal the human is). Deleuze claims that the Aristotelian method cannot
cope, for example, with the Eleatic Stranger’s division of “art into arts of
production and arts of acquisition,” and raises the subsequent question,
“but then why is fishing among the arts of acquisition?” (DR 59). There
is no middle term to determine fishing as a species of the acquisitive arts;
furthermore, to strive for the generality pervading definition by genus
and species misses the purpose of division.
Deleuze explains, “Platonic division in no way proposes to determine
the species of a genus—or if, rather, it proposes to do so, but superfi-
cially and even ironically, the better to hide under this mask its true
secret” (DR 59).11 This true secret is the work, as Deleuze repeats, of
authenticating and selecting, rather than identifying; the difference is
strict, insofar as identification draws an instance under a predetermined
concept, while authenticating and selecting are means of testing, “of
selecting a pure line from material which is not” (DR 60). In other
words, selection can only operate when a series of alternatives—some via-
ble, some not—are available to select from.
Deleuze essentially uses a concept or empirical instance as an index
that solicits a pursuit of its origins. It is here that division’s affinity with
subtraction becomes clear. Platonic division’s point of departure, he says,

can therefore be either a genus or a species, but this genus or this large
species is understood as an undifferenciated logical matter, an indifferent
material, a mixture, an indefinite representing multiplicity which must be
eliminated in order to bring to light the Idea which constitutes a pure line
of descent. (DR 60)

Division can begin its work from either the genus (i.e., animal) or the
species (i.e., human); however, division demands a different avenue of
analysis, proceeding by the same manner of unfolding modeled in the
Sophist. The aim is to identify the array of terms in their immediacy and
then to see the lineage giving rise to the genus, species, angler, or soph-
ist. Deleuze insists that by the method of division, “there are no longer
contraries within a single genus, but pure and impure, good and bad,
authentic and inauthentic, in a mixture which gives rise to a large spe-
cies” (DR 60). As I discussed above, an imperative accompanies division
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  125

that requires all the options—the entire array of possible claimants—to

be left on the table to select from or to authenticate. Against the Platonic
model, Deleuze mobilizes division as follows: “it is a question of mak-
ing the difference, thus of operating in the depths of the immediate, a
dialectic of the immediate” (DR 60). Deleuze puts division to work in
service of determining difference, which is necessary to understanding
multiplicity in his system. In other words, the activity of division and the
fragmentation it develops serves to illustrate the superior “mesh” woven
in a multiplicity, and to emphasize the complexity of his preferred model
for understanding multiplicity (DR 182).
The examples of division (in Deleuze’s early work) and subtraction
(apparent in Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari) each insist on a kind
of regulation. That is, to accomplish “the task of modern philosophy
…to overturn Platonism” (DR 59), the concept must be interrogated
and fractured to discover the series and variety of ideas underwriting its
expression. Similarly, subtraction functions as a way of resisting central-
ized control and affirming, in the case of the war machine, the possibili-
ties of production interior to any localized multiplicity. Both procedures
operate from an identification of a more-or-less static point: division and
the work of overturned Platonism require the stable concept of the soph-
ist to proceed, while the war machine describes a self-regulating system
subtracted from the figure of the General. My attention now turns to
Deleuze and Guattari’s work in establishing the diagram of the cogito,
appearing in “Example 1” of What is Philosophy?, as a site at which both
consolidation and subtraction operate.

Consolidation and Subtraction in “Example 1”

In the preceding section, I discussed examples of subtraction at work
in examples of the war machine and overturned Platonism. I now turn
to Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the Cartesian cogito in “Example
1” of What is Philosophy? Their work with this concept illustrates both
consolidation and subtraction together, and functions as an expression of
both structure and prescriptive procedure. I am especially keen to show
that the deployment of Riemannian notions persists into Deleuze’s late
collaboration with Guattari, and that these notions continue to function
as principles of organization.
Readers of Descartes’ Meditations are familiar with the procedure by
which the meditator arrives at the conclusion, “I think, therefore I am.”
126  B. Vartabedian

Through a practice of hyperbolic doubt, the meditator has effectively

cleared away any and all claims about which a doubt might be raised;
the purpose of this exercise is the discovery of certainty (Descartes 1984,
AT 7.21-22). The first anchor at which the meditator arrives is “I am, I
exist” (Descartes 1984, AT 7.25). In an investigation of just what kind
of “I” the meditator is, they proceed to realize, first, that they doubt;
second, that they think (since doubting is a form of thinking); and third,
that thinking is evidence of existence (Descartes 1984, AT 7.26-27).
The purpose of this procedure, at least in the immediate context of the
Meditations, is to identify the foundation on which subsequent claims
of certainty are built, and to eventually accommodate less-than-certain
claims in a way that returns the meditator to the world they categorically
doubted at the beginning of the project.
Deleuze and Guattari are interested in the cogito in because of their
reader’s (likely) familiarity with the concept, and because it facilitates an
exposition of their conceptual analysis. Deleuze and Guattari argue that
this concept bears the conditions of its emergence, since it links doubt,
thought, and existence under a single sign. They present the concept
in the following diagram in Fig. 4.1, appearing on page 25 of What is
Philosophy?
The I at the apex stands for the condensed concept, the cogito, while
the arcs D, T, and B each mark successive stages of Descartes’ process in
Meditation Two: doubting, thinking, and being. The subsidiary Is mark
points at which some self-reflective awareness occurs and causes the pro-
cess to change direction (as in, for example, the turn from doubting into
thinking, marked by I′).
Deleuze and Guattari to describe their arrangement “in zones of
neighborhood or indiscernibility that produce passages from one or to

Fig. 4.1  The cogito

 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  127

the other and constitute their inseparability” (WP 25). Deleuze and
Guattari say, “the first zone is between doubting and thinking (myself
who doubts, I cannot doubt that I think)” (WP 25). The transforma-
tion in this first zone is indexed I′. The second zone, “is between think-
ing and being (in order to think it is necessary to be)” (WP 25). This
describes the second “hill” of the diagram and connects each of the three
components; these components are consolidated or condensed by the
apex I.
The diagram supporting Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the cog-
ito also offers clues for how a reader “makes the multiple” by “subtract-
ing” or bracketing “the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted”
(R 52). The unique—that is, the mark of consolidation—in the diagram
is the point I at the diagram’s apex. The work of subtraction requires
tracing the underlying links between points in the diagram. Deleuze
and Guattari conduct a first subtraction when they claim the apex
point “passes through all the components and in which I′ (doubting),
I″ (thinking), and I‴ (being) coincide” (WP 25). This first subtraction
isolates a layer of the diagram expressed by the dotted lines linking these
three composite elements and the respective connection of these to the
apex I. Deleuze and Guattari describe these components as “intensive
ordinates,” or positions in the concept at which a qualitative transfor-
mation occurs.12 Doubting, thinking, and being are transformations
of kinds of activities, and the ordinates mark where this transformation
takes place.
A second subtraction traces the path between these ordinates, allow-
ing Deleuze and Guattari to describe their arrangement “in zones of
neighborhood or indiscernibility that produce passages from one or to
the other and constitute their inseparability” (WP 25). Deleuze and
Guattari say, “the first zone is between doubting and thinking (myself
who doubts, I cannot doubt that I think)” (WP 25). This first zone
takes its ordinate as I′. The second zone, they explain, “is between think-
ing and being (in order to think it is necessary to be)” (WP 25). This
describes the second “hill” of the diagram, connecting each of the three
stages D, T, and B and their respective components I′, I″, and I‴. This
description relies on reading for passages or transitions, linkages between
points, and an understanding that dimensionality increases by adding
available paths to travel between points. Further, the mention of “zones
of neighborhood” reinforces the concept’s construction as a continuous
128  B. Vartabedian

multiplicity, since neighborhoods describe adjacent subspaces and the

passages among these.
This analysis reaches its maximum in Deleuze and Guattari’s expo-
sition of the subspaces doubting, thinking, and being. This exposition
indicates the divisibility of these explicit spaces into specific, implicit
phases. They say,

… doubt includes moments that are not the species of a genus but the
phases of a variation: perceptual, scientific, obsessional doubt … the same
goes for modes of thought – feeling, imagining, having ideas – and also for
types of being, thing, or substance – infinite being, finite thinking being,
extended being. (WP 25)

This identification of phases allows Deleuze and Guattari to suggest

the way ordinates attract processes. On the basis of this “attraction,”
it is possible to identify a fourth, speculative subtraction based on the
relations of these phases to the ordinate they are assigned. One might
imagine a version of the diagram in which the ordinate I′ is itself an
expression of relations between perceptual doubt, scientific doubt, and
obsessional doubt, where ordinate I″ expresses relations of feeling, imag-
ining, ideating, and where ordinate I‴ accounts for the relations holding
among being, thing, or substance. Each of these so-called “implicit phases
of a variation” may be traced to smaller or partial instances particular to
the locality in which these occur (e.g., each of the times I have—in part
or in full—doubted the veracity of my senses constitutes for me a version
of perceptual doubt).
It is not clear that Deleuze and Guattari are proposing a mechanism
for reading the second Meditation as much as they are capitalizing on its
most visible contribution to philosophical thought; the cogito is valuable
to Deleuze and Guattari insofar as it can be “mechanized” using princi-
ples of Riemannian multiplicity and successfully diagrammed. Questions
regarding the relation of Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis to the cogito in
its broader context in the Meditations are not settled, nor do Deleuze
and Guattari assess the success or failure of the cogito in the long view
(WP 27).
Reading Deleuze and Guattari’s work with “Example 1” and its atten-
dant diagram makes way for an understanding of the complex relations
between a multiplicity and its singular expression; it also allows for an
appreciation of the procedure of subtraction. This imperative indicates
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  129

the necessity of understanding any consolidated instance as expressing a

multiplicity, and subtraction offers the procedure for accomplishing this
task. While the deep regions of the virtual idea are not explicit in the dia-
gram, I have attempted—in the speculative fourth subtraction proposed
above—to characterize what these might consist in.

Summary
The analysis of the diagram in “Example 1,” even down to the specula-
tive presence of “phase-variations,” expresses a structure consistent with
division in Deleuze’s early work, with subtraction in the earlier instances
of his collaboration with Guattari, and this late work. In Deleuze and
Guattari, subtraction takes any unique conceptual or empirical consoli-
dation as a point to examine the continuous multiplicity to which that
consolidation is linked. In the preceding discussion of subtraction in the
war machine (broadly) and the cogito (specifically), I emphasized that
subtraction is essentially local, focusing on the concept or empirical con-
solidation to be interrogated. These figures and their schemes of organ-
ization also reinforce structural principles of continuous multiplicity:
immanent measure, expansion according to n-dimensions, definition and
relation according to connected elements. Subtraction is also consonant
with earlier figures in Deleuze’s work, namely that of division and its ser-
vice to overturned Platonism. A traditional interpretation of Platonism
maintains it as a philosophy minimizing difference in service of con-
formity to a unifying concept or form. However, Deleuze’s suggests that
there is a procedure interior to Platonism by which it “has not given up
hope of finding a pure concept of difference in itself” (DR 59). It is in
division and its functioning in Plato’s Sophist that both elaborate a proce-
dure for determining difference and expressing a subtractive disposition
in Difference and Repetition.

Conclusion
The work of this chapter has been to discuss procedures apparent in
work by Badiou and Deleuze for determining any one from a multiple
or multiplicity. As the second of two explicative chapters, I built on the
analysis of structure developed in Chapter 3 to emphasize a variety of
expressions for “one-ing” a multiple. In some cases, these are prescribed
with technical specificity; Badiou’s set-theoretic ontology, consisting
130  B. Vartabedian

in the application of axioms to the void set marked Ø, is the means by

which counting-as-one is possible. I brought Badiou’s engagement
with Bourbaki to bear, as well as the functioning of axioms of Zermelo–
Fraenkel set theory to establish the void as first existent and develop
from this first existent sets constructed using relations of belonging and
inclusion.
I explained the turn Badiou makes toward mathematized ontol-
ogy after having abandoned his purely political—and largely epistemo-
logical—efforts of formalization, attending to the account in Peut-on
penser la politique? And Part IV of the introduction to Being and Event
in which Badiou registers his exhaustion with traditional forms of mate-
rialism. In the ontological turn, readers find a persisting commitment
to discover the condition of transformation, though its form is as an
“unrepresentable point” that subverts organization applied to it. I com-
pared this ontological approach with a more direct political analysis,
appearing in the account of scission Badiou develops in the January 1975
lecture that opens Theory of the Subject. There, and working with a par-
ticular interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic—that of scission, or division,
rather than alienation—I suggested that Badiou’s approach requires a
temporary freezing of dialectical movement, examining any unity accord-
ing to its component parts.
I then turned to procedures for one-production in Deleuze’s work,
which I called consolidation, beginning with an account of the differ-
ential relation. In contrast with a more conventional interpretation
of the differential, I described the components of Deleuze’s version,
which draws on a “pre-scientific” interpretation of the calculus, one
largely unconcerned with confirming whether these differentials exist. I
described the three key pieces of this program: the element dx, or the
quantitability of the differential; the relation dy/dx, or the qualitability
of the differential; and the assignation of values to the relation dy/dx, or
its potentiality. Together, these three pieces develop the blueprint of a
pre-individual singularity, or the ideal conditions required for the con-
crete or actual inscription of a concept or instance. I discussed the exam-
ple, which Deleuze offers, of the social Idea to illustrate these elements
in action.
Though consolidation is significant in Deleuze’s work, it is accompa-
nied by an imperative to subtraction, or a procedure by which the con-
solidated instance is analyzed to discover the multiple underneath. I
discussed the technical precedent in Riemann’s presentation of the n − 1
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  131

figure, which Deleuze and Guattari invoke in Rhizome as shorthand for

‘making the multiple’ (cf. R 52). I discussed this procedure in a series of
expressions—including interrogation in service of overturned Platonism,
its support of an a-centered system like the war machine, and its function
in revealing pathways of thought in a diagram of Descartes’ cogito—
across Deleuze’s work and in his collaboration with Guattari. I claimed
that subtractive procedure is significant insofar as it marks a consistent
commitment in Deleuze’s work to maintaining the link between any
expression and the multiple from which it is drawn.
The next chapter returns to the series of engagements I outlined in
Chapter 2. I insist that a more comprehensive understanding of both
Badiou’s and Deleuze’s respective commitments to multiple, one, and
the link between these clarifies the critiques one thinker raises against the
other. However, I begin by affirming the presence of subtractive proce-
dure in Badiou’s work, thus identifying a second commitment-in-common
(in addition to multiplicity) between these opposing programs.

Notes
1. Though Badiou is expressly concerned with the void and its mark Ø here,
he has long considered the status of this ‘border’ between thought and
its object. In “Mark and Lack,” for example, Badiou is interested “the
meta-theoretic function of the zero” ([1969] 2012, 165) and its ser-
vice in the work of suturing. The early work in “Mark and Lack” situ-
ates Badiou in direct conversation with J.A. Miller, whose text “Suture”
deploys zero as a means of identifying “the relation of the subject to the
chain of discourse” (Miller [1965] 2012, 93). As Paul Livingston (2014)
pointed out, in these early inquiries there is no gap in Badiou’s work,
a position consistent with the texts from the 1970s I am concerned to
investigate here.
2. The reference to Weil’s comments is available via Jeff Miller’s “Earliest
Uses of Symbols of Set Theory” website here: http://jeff560.tripod.
com/set.html. Miller cites the quotation from Weil’s The Apprenticeship
of a Mathematician, trans. Jennifer Gage (Basel: Birkhauser Verlag,
1992), 114.
3. Bourbaki’s presentation of the empty set relies on the universal quantifier
∀ (for all or every object), not on the existential quantifier ∃. In Theory

tional relation (∀x) (x ∉ X), which indicates that for every element x, it
of Sets (1968, 72), Bourbaki defines Ø as the value equivalent to a func-

does not belong to set X; as such, X is empty, since there is no additional

132  B. Vartabedian

information regarding the contents of set X. It is useful to note, perhaps,

that Badiou’s presentation gets a kind of rhetorical force from the use of
the existential quantifier, since the crucial step he is working to establish
is the existence of Ø.
4. Badiou’s approach to the dialectic and his preference for scission is pecu-
liar. Gabriel Riera (2015), Frank Ruda (2015), and Nina Power (2006),
as well as Bosteels (2001) each identify this tendency in Badiou’s
approach.
5. This example is adapted from the Khan (2015), “Calculating Slope of
Tangent Line Using Derivative Definition,” available online at: https://
www.khanacademy.org/math/differential-calculus/taking-derivatives/
derivative_intro/v/calculus-derivatives-2-new-hd-version.
6. In a (brief) description of the transformation differential calculus under-
goes in the nineteenth century, Manuel DeLanda (2012, 223) explains
this transformation as a consequence of the belief that “all of mathematics
had been reduced to logic in the late nineteenth century: first the differen-
tial calculus was reduced to arithmetic—the concept of infinitesimals was
replaced by the notion of limit and the latter reduced to that of num-
ber—and later on arithmetic was reduced to set theory.” The transfor-
mation of mathematics along these lines is noted, not only by DeLanda,
but also by Daniel W. Smith ([2003] 2012). It is of key significance for
Deleuze’s work inasmuch as it facilitates a distinction between the royal
or major science reflected by axiomatics, in contrast to the nomad-mi-
nor science of problematics that Deleuze depends on across his oeuvre.
In DR, Deleuze addresses this transformation briefly on pp. 176–177.
7. Deleuze uses Leibniz’s notation for the differential relation in his work.
Morris Kline (1967, 375–376) explains that Leibniz’s notation, “though
suggestive of what takes place, can be misleading, for the instantaneous
rate of change of y with respect to x is not a quotient but rather the limit
approached by the quotient k/h).” In subsequent discussion, Klein sub-
stitutes the Newtonian notation ẏ for the dy/dx relation.
8. See also Henry Somers-Hall (2010, 566–570) and Simon Duffy (2013,
47–88). Somers-Hall’s comments on the calculus offer helpful orienta-
tion toward the broad ideas. Duffy’s work situates these “prebarbaric”
commitments of the calculus in a broader conversation about the Kantian
precedent to which Maïmon (chiefly) reacts, and which avails Deleuze of
the resources of Maïmon, Bordas-Demoulin (contra. Leibniz in particu-
lar), and Wronski.
9. See Uta Merzbach and Carl Boyer (2011), A History of Mathematics, 3rd
ed. This insight also appears in Penrose (2004, 138).
10. The parenthetical reference (15) is to Rosenstiehl and Petitot (1974),
“Automate asocial et systems acentrés,” Communications 22: 45–62.
 4  PROCEDURES: ONE, MULTIPLE, SUBTRACTION  133

11. In a footnote appended to this claim in DR, Deleuze refers his reader
to Aristotle’s critique of division in the Prior and Posterior Analytics; he
returns this critique with a direction to Statesman 266 b-d, in which “the
determination of species is merely an ironic appearance and not the aim
of Platonic division” (DR 312n20).
12. Manuel DeLanda (2002, 25) describes an intensive property as “not so
much one [that] is indivisible but one which cannot be divided without
involving a change in kind.” He illustrates this with an example of a vol-
ume of water, the temperature of which is transformed when that volume
is heated from below: “while prior to heating,” DeLanda explains, “the
system is at equilibrium, once the temperature difference is created the
system will be away from equilibrium, that is, we can divide its temper-
ature but in so doing we change the system qualitatively” (2002, 25).
This example is designed to demonstrate the transformation of an inten-
sive property—temperature, in this case—results in a change to the system
(i.e., from equilibrium to disequilibrium), not just to the volume of water
being heated.

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 CHAPTER 5

Re-engagements

My work in the previous two chapters elaborates the ideas of multiple

appearing in Badiou’s work, the commitments to and nature of multi-
plicity across Deleuze’s oeuvre, and the procedures governing the rela-
tionship of multiple and multiplicity to one in their respective programs.
The path I’ve cut through this landscape has emphasized very basic con-
tinuities holding between the two systems: their shared affirmation of
multiple as the ground or foundation of being and the use of mathe-
matic structures to organize multiplicity are hallmarks of this “moment”
in ontological inquiry. This chapter begins by recognizing one additional
continuity, evident in the presence of a subtractive procedure in Badiou’s
work and one on the order of the n − 1 that “makes the multiple” for
Deleuze and Guattari.
This procedure, which I label general subtraction, functions as a
“divestment procedure” that reveals the presence of inconsistency in any
situation (Bartlett and Ling 2014, 3). For the sake of clarity, I distin-
guish this general subtraction from the procedure Badiou outlines con-
cerning the identification and assertion of any truth described in the
Gamma Diagram; I label this move of subtraction special subtraction
and draw out the differences between the special and general accounts
in Badiou’s work. This alignment indicates the overlapping recognition
of a fundamental procedural necessity in these often-opposed programs;
I insist on the presence of a continuous procedure, in spite of Georges
Peyrol’s claims in “The Fascism of the Potato” that subtraction fails to
serve multiplicity (as Deleuze and Guattari prescribe) and only reinforces

© The Author(s) 2018 137

B. Vartabedian, Multiplicity and Ontology in Deleuze and Badiou,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76837-3_5
138  B. Vartabedian

the presence of the one and multiple (FP 199). As I discuss below, how-
ever, subtraction is only possible in the ontological register; there are
important ways in which subtraction differs from the technique of scis-
sion Peyrol proposes. These differences are another way of marking the
“periodization” internal to Badiou’s own thought, the move from politi-
cal epistemology to ontology.
I address two frameworks in which Badiou’s subtractive procedure—
when it is applied apart from the rich conceptual resources of the
­ontology developed in Being and Event—create liabilities for his overall
program. The first emerges in Badiou’s critique of Heidegger in Briefings
on Existence; when Badiou applies subtraction to make his ontology
conversant with a Heideggerian one, he empties his program of the dis-
tinctive features that establish it as a genuine alternative to Heidegger’s
program. Second, and along similar lines, I return to Kant’s notion of
the manifold and Badiou’s critique in “Kant’s Subtractive Ontology.” In
this brief text, and one in which—again—Badiou poses his ontological
project as an alternative to the Kantian program, Badiou ends up posit-
ing his ontology in a roundabout way as an “ontology of presence”, an
alternative he works in the early stages of Being and Event to strenuously
avoid. The solution to these problems is found in the tricky balance of
affirming the specific, mathematical and mathematically-derived concepts
that populate Badiou’s ontology (on the one hand) and affirming the
restriction of ontology to mathematics (on the other hand).
I opened this text by claiming a conversational approach occasions a
more comprehensive look at the programs under discussion and, in neu-
tralizing rhetoric associated with more combative or polemical critiques,
offers a finer-grained understanding of the relation of Deleuze’s theory
of multiplicity to Badiou’s. The work of the preceding two chapters
completed the comprehensive look, and the second task of this chap-
ter is to approach once again the relation of the two programs. I begin
with the discussion precipitated by “Rhizome” and its various replies, as
well as the assessment by Deleuze and Guattari of Badiou’s program in
What is Philosophy? Returning to this set of exchanges with an expanded
understanding of structure and procedure reinforces the sense in which
Deleuze and Guattari’s “Rhizome” applies a form of the multiple anath-
ema to the programs they critique. Further, attention to structure and
procedure show Badiou’s dependence on an ontologically-static frame of
reference in which procedure operates, a stasis that has consequences for
accounting for the new or novel in his work.
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  139

I then take up Badiou’s claim that Deleuze’s oeuvre is populated

with ‘monotonous productions,’ interpretations of singular or unique
instances that serve his overall theoretical trajectory, apparently at the
cost of this uniqueness or singularity. With analysis by Simon Duffy
(2013) on Deleuze’s use of mathematics, I demonstrate that this is only
a liability if one is committed to the consequent of the radical thesis, that
mathematics = ontology. This also serves as corrective to the discussion,
apparent in Badiou’s “One, Multiple, Multiplicities,” that his preferred
mathematical paradigm—and only his preferred paradigm—adequately
mobilizes Riemann’s insights.

Subtractive Analysis: n − 1 and a ‘General

Subtraction’ in Badiou
In the continuous multiplicities from which Deleuze and Guattari’s
key concepts are built, n − 1 acts as a procedure, distributing the
localized multiplicity to avoid its total absorption by a single, u
­ nified
interpretation or instance. In “Rhizome,” Deleuze and Guattari insist
that the work of subtraction, required for the unveiling of any multi-
plicity, cannot simply be declared; it must instead be an act of analysis
(R 52). In the preceding chapter, I discussed examples from Deleuze
and Guattari’s work that showed a commitment to the presence of
one understood only in relation to the multiplicity grounding it; per
Deleuze and Guattari, it is only on account of this subtracted status
that the one maintains any presence with respect to the multiple
(R 52).
Because it need only maintain a determined, continuous multiplicity
in relation to its unique expression, the procedure by which the multiple
is revealed and is maintained can be the same procedure. To illustrate
these ideas, I discussed several examples from Deleuze and Guattari’s
work, emphasizing the “a-centred system” any rhizomatic multiplic-
ity expresses. The diagrammatic analysis of the cogito in “Example 1”
shows, for example, that the cogito is not simply posited in the single
point, “I think, therefore I am.” Rather, it is accompanied by its con-
stitutive elements of doubt, thought, and existence; these elements form
‘zones of indiscernibility’ among which pathways are etched, and a map
tracing the concept’s construction appears. In this context, subtraction
reinforces the complexity attending any single expression, and urges the
analyst to seek the conditions and connections producing it.
140  B. Vartabedian

As I show in this section, Badiou’s subtractive system is the work of

disposing ontological thought to its seat in the void, to the discovery of
thought’s fundamental limit at the boundary of inconsistent multiplic-
ity. In this way, it serves a similar function to the n − 1 procedure in
Deleuze and Guattari’s work; it does not include a reinforcing or regu-
lative function, however, and is distinguished from Deleuze and Guattari
on this account. The presence of a “descriptive” subtraction, one that
identifies the multiple-character of any ontological construction, also
forms a continuity between Badiou’s program and that of Deleuze and
Guattari. However, I demonstrate ways in which the subtractive impulse,
when it is divorced from the rich conceptual vocabulary of Badiou’s
ontology, becomes a liability and reveals keen limitations of Badiou’s
account; this so-called ‘meta-ontological’ subtraction is a move Badiou
deploys when situating his program as an alternative to other ontologi-
cal proposals, namely those of Heidegger and the “subtractive ontology”
Badiou reads in work by Kant.

Special and General: Ontology, Subtraction

Some terminological precision around the notion of subtraction in
Badiou’s work is required. One finds subtraction to refer to the pro-
cess by which a truth is analyzed (a process described by the Gamma
Diagram); one also finds an insistence on subtraction as a requirement
for maintaining the status of being as multiple. In order to fix this ter-
minology a bit more, I propose a distinction of special subtraction from
general subtraction, a distinction Badiou applies to ontology in Briefings
on Existence. There, Badiou contends that against the background of the
Cantorian identification of in/consistent multiplicities, it is possible to
“move from ‘special ontology,’ which still links the multiple to the meta-
physical theme of representing objects, numbers and figures, to ‘general
ontology,’ which sets the free, thoughtful apprehending of multiplicity as
such as the basis and destination of mathematics” (CT 40–41). Special
ontology, then, requires multiplicity to re-present everything that is; it
imposes a requirement on multiplicity-qua-being to account for the
world as it appears in its specificity and complexity. As I showed in the
previous chapter, Badiou’s ontology is not capable of this. Indeed, it
resists this impulse by forming out of the void consistent multiples, or
structured situations, that describe the arrangement of terms by relations
of belonging and inclusion. As such, Badiou’s ontology is a candidate for
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  141

general ontology, the work of thinking or organizing pure multiplicity as

multiplicity; the requirements of general ontology are minimal, insofar as
the so-called “apprehension of multiplicity” is the only task it is assigned.
The distinction of special and general is thus founded on a kind of limita-
tion of scope; where special designates work devoted to a specific object
or process, general designates a disposition toward the foundation of
all thought in pure multiplicity. Special ontology, in other words, reads
multiplicity toward the world as it appears; general ontology, by contrast,
reads multiplicity in the direction of inconsistent multiplicity. This dis-
tinction can be applied to subtraction in Badiou’s work, an application
that clarifies—and perhaps fixes—its use in a more helpful way. Special
subtraction appears in Badiou’s work as the fourfold framework mobi-
lizing the philosophical investigation of truths, while general subtraction
describes the retroactive procedure of identifying the multiple in any
structured situation.
In the opening paragraphs of “On Subtraction,” an essay appear-
ing in the collection Conditions, Badiou (2008, 113) defines subtrac-
tion as “an act … the paragon of the act, the act of a truth, the one
through which I come to know the only thing one may ever know
in the element of the rea: the void of being as such.” Subtraction is
thus a means of access to the only accessible element of being qua
being—that of the void. The diagram traces its presence through a
post-evental process, that of discerning the emergence of a truth.
Subtraction is associated with the “Gamma Diagram,” a map of sorts,
layering “the logical figures of subtraction onto an ontological distri-
bution” (Badiou 2008, 122). Ontological categories including the
one-more, the finite, the infinite, and the one-less account for the status
of a truth relative to the situation in which it emerges; its trajectory is
accounted for in logical terms that map (respectively) any truth’s status
as undecidable, indiscernible, generic, and unnameable. It is this log-
ical apparatus that exposes what was ontological in philosophical—or
meta-ontological—terms.
Here subtraction is a method of separation acknowledging the singu-
lar status of a truth against familiar or established standards of evaluation:
the undecidable indicates any truth resists norms or laws; the indiscerni-
ble is any truth’s resistance to marking (Badiou 2008, 115); the generic
describes the character of any truth in its infinity, or in its capacity to take
on “an excess of determinations” which “engenders an effect of indeter-
minacy” (Badiou 2008, 118); the unnameable is that truth’s resistance
142  B. Vartabedian

to familiar or ready expressions. In the context of this special subtraction,

these resistances are facilitated by the void’s presence in the situation
that generated the truth: the event, itself a result of the void’s irruption
in any consistent multiple. This form of subtraction shares the impetus
toward localization apparent in a so-called special ontology. That is, it
takes a specific and narrow focus on which to operate (truth) and opens
this narrow focus to a broader investigation. Though Badiou would not
affirm a special ontology per se, distinguishing a special form of subtrac-
tion recognizes the passage of the void through a very narrow frame-
work. It also situates special subtraction as a liminal procedure, exposed
on an ontological side such that it can be grasped in language appro-
priate to a mathematized ontology, and on a logical side, with language
appropriate to the broader conditions—art, science, love, politics—in
which a truth might appear.
The subtraction documented by the Gamma Diagram is not the only
way of ‘siting’ the void. A.J. Bartlett and Alex Ling define a subtraction
that moves in a different direction. Bartlett and Ling (2014, 4) say,

Once an object is divested of (or ‘subtracted from’) everything that goes

into making it a ‘unique thing’ – once we isolate it from its context and
strip away each and every one of its qualitative determinations – what
remains is essentially a multiple of multiples. This pure multiple remain-
der is literally the being of the object, the elementary ‘there is’ underlying
everything that ‘is there.’

In my discussion of Badiou’s count-procedure in the preceding chap-

ter, I explained that the void is the point at which thought grasps the
proper name of being; the void simultaneously maintains the nature of
being as inconsistent and founds ontology as the construction of con-
sistent multiples. Bartlett and Ling’s characterization of what I call
general subtraction begins from things, a passage possible from the
analysis in Logics of Worlds.1 Bartlett and Ling emphasize a “divest-
ment procedure” that drives inquiry toward the multiple; insofar as
ontology is a theory of pure multiplicity, this peeling away serves as a
reminder of the content of any situation or thing as originally multiple.
Their presentation is also consistent with an early claim of Badiou’s in
Being and Event, where he insists, “The multiple is retroactively legible
therein as anterior to the one, insofar as the count-as-one is always a
result” (BE 24). Following the decision that the One is not, Badiou’s
analysis of any consolidated or counted situation reveals the prior and
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  143

persisting presence of the multiple as the being of that consolidated or

counted situation.
General subtraction is a mechanism that maintains the disposition of
ontology toward multiples (not ones or multiples counted-as-one) and
toward maintaining the character of being qua being as the multiple of
multiples. In Briefings on Existence, Badiou explains that the subtractive
disposition must continually be pursued, at least until thought arrives
at the limit posed by inconsistency: “so long as a multiple (a being),”
Badiou says, “is not a manifold of multiples, subtraction has to be main-
tained until the very end” (CT 37). It suggests a shift from any con-
solidated situation to the elements that situation is composed of, and
then to a subsequent recognition of the source of this composition in
the void set. As such, subtractive analysis is motivated by an imperative
to seek inconsistency at the foundation of ontological operation. Though
my work in the preceding chapter demonstrated the construction of
counts from the void (and so moved prospectively), a requirement of gen-
eral subtraction or divestment maintains a link to the void founding any
ontological procedure—including one as complicated as the truth-pro-
cedure expressed in the Gamma Diagram. As such, general subtraction
is local insofar as it describes the pathway to the void and inconsistent
multiplicity from any particular, consolidated situation.
This radical localization supports a theory of ontological rank,
appearing in Logics of Worlds and accounting for the relationship of any
world—which Badiou describes as “the place in which objects appear”
and the contingent relations between elements in that “closed ontolog-
ical set” (2009, 598)—to multiplicity.2 Badiou (2009, 112) explains,
“Ultimately, it is clear that every thinkable being is drawn from opera-
tions first applied to the void alone. A multiple will be all the more com-
plex the longer the operational chain which, on the basis of the void,
leads to its determination. The degree of complexity is technically meas-
urable: this is the theory of ‘ontological rank’.” The theory of ontolog-
ical rank maintains the disposition of general subtraction I’ve elaborated
here as Badiou’s theory of appearances adds complexity to the ontology
of situation in Being and Event. While their qualitative determinations
are accounted for inside the world in which these appear, Badiou’s the-
ory of ontological rank keeps an appearance operationally linked to the
void and so to inconsistent multiplicity; their quantitative status is deter-
mined by the connection each world maintains to the void. Lindsey Hair
144  B. Vartabedian

(2006, 279n4) explains that the complexity of any world is determined

by the originary link to inconsistency, and reinforces its locality:

…since there is no whole of Being, there can be no single scale upon

which multiple being can be ordered – there are multiples whose con-
struction does not intersect with other multiples outside the single shared
foundational set of the void. This cancels the possibility of any global uni-
formity or categorization of beings: identifications and relations are always
local.

The extremity of closure Hair suggests (and a more detailed analysis of

Logics of Worlds would offer) supports a radically-localized subtractive
procedure. To be sure, understanding the transition from world to void,
from quality to quantity, depends in part on understanding the mathe-
matical links Badiou develops between set-theoretic ontology and cate-
gory-theoretic ontology. However, and for the present purposes, the
significance of this discussion is to indicate the possibilities for read-
ing general subtraction from complex appearances to the void. These
examples suggest that any general mode of subtraction is a disposition in
Badiou’s ontology, that is, a turning of inquiry toward inconsistent multi-
plicity at its foundation and an accompanying unbinding of any situation
in search of the multiple of multiples. This unbinding moves from the
situation, to the elements collected in the count-procedure, to the source
of composition in the void set; the count does not go to work directly on
inconsistent multiplicity, only that exposure of being in the void.
The assessment of structure in this work’s Chapter 3 demonstrated
the differences in kind between the multiplicities at work in Badiou’s and
Deleuze and Guattari’s respective work. This difference must be main-
tained to avoid any elision between the two programs; however, the
analysis of general subtraction in Badiou offers a perhaps unexpected
continuity between his program and that of Deleuze and Guattari’s.
General subtraction, like the n − 1 procedure, begins from a situation an
instance of consolidation, analogous in its location to the conceptual or
empirical expression in Deleuze and Guattari’s account. The assessment
of procedure in the preceding chapter makes it possible to see these in
analogous positioning, insofar as the one of situation (in Badiou’s work)
remains composed of and tethered to inconsistent multiple by way of the
void, and the one of concept or instance (in Deleuze and Deleuze and
Guattari’s work) is tethered to the continuous multiple it expresses.
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  145

In Deleuze and Guattari, subtraction takes a unique conceptual or

empirical expression and suspends it to discover the continuous multi-
plicity from which that expression emerges. Subtraction, when exer-
cised on the diagram associated with “Example 1”—a task I took up in
Chapter 4—indicates that there is no need to look beyond this identified
multiplicity for its source. There are a number of elements a continuous
multiplicity mobilizes: intensive ordinates mark the qualitative changes in
the process, linkages between neighboring points trace the path between
ordinates, and the ordinates themselves serve as “attractors” for related
phases or variation. This example reinforces principles associated with
Deleuze’s use of Riemann’s continuous manifolds, including immanent
measure, expansion according to n-dimensions, definition according to
elements and relations between elements. It also suggests that all sub-
traction for Deleuze and Guattari is local, limited to the concept or
empirical expression and the multiplicity to which it is tethered.
Badiou’s subtraction, though general in its disposition toward incon-
sistent multiple at the foundation of any situation, is also local inso-
far as it begins (at least) from an ontological situation, unbinding
layers of structure to reveal the void at the foundation of that situation.
Subtraction reduces the situation into a more primitive procedure of
forming-into-one, and further to its most minimal presentation in the
void set. Beyond the border presented in the void set, and inaccessible
to thought, is the inconsistent multiple; subtraction suggests the presence
of inconsistent multiple to thought in the void set, but the inconsistent
multiple is beyond the reach of mathematical structure. However, unlike
Deleuze and Guattari’s subtractive procedure, which both makes and
maintains a continuous multiplicity, the subtractive procedure Badiou
uses to uncover multiplicity finds its limit at the void set. There is no
access, at least with the tools of ontology, to inconsistent multiplicity
beyond the void set. However, general subtraction maintains a ‘dispo-
sitional link’ toward the void set and inconsistent multiplicity beyond it.
The procedure of general subtraction I’ve attributed to Badiou’s
ontological work is not continuous with his earlier, politically-moti-
vated work. In Chapter 4, I took up a discussion of scission from the
1975 lecture that opens Badiou’s Theory of the Subject. There, he reviews
the Maoist principle “One divides into two” using a dialectical matrix
emphasizing division and not alienation; in other words, Badiou’s cho-
sen interpretation of the dialectic is to read a single moment of the
dialectic according to its two preceding and constitutive moment,
146  B. Vartabedian

rather than the movement of alienation and sublation that moves the
dialectic forward. I explained that scission relies on a kind of freezing or
pausing to discover the “minimum primary differential” distinguishing
determinate being and its qualitative opposite, both of which contribute
to the determination of any existent. Though it is implied that each of
the moments under investigation carry the heritage of precedent dialecti-
cal moves to their particular moment of analysis, Badiou’s interest in scis-
sion is simply to identify the condition of difference and from that point
initiate the work of combination and recombination toward a struc-
tural analysis of transformative force and repressive splace. Put another
way, scission, for Badiou, reads for the moment of contradiction and no
further.
Badiou’s ontology is governed by a similar imperative insofar as
the point sought is that of the void. However, and as I explained in
Chapter 4, the void point is a complement of any ontological structure,
more-or-less successfully covered over by the actions of the count, and
ultimately discoverable by the divestment of general subtraction. The
language of minimum primary difference is abandoned in the ontolog-
ical work in favor of a deep point of rupture or fracture. The dictum
transforms with the ontological turn from “One divides into two” to
“One divides into multiple.” Though the impulse is the same, Badiou’s
ontological analysis—because it is loosed from the requirement of rep-
resenting anything (it is not, in other words, a form of ‘special ontol-
ogy’), can thus accomplish a subtractive inquiry that moves through
strata of structure to discover a link to inconsistent multiplicity in the
void point. There is also a way in which the procedure described in
scission differs from the analysis of division I attributed to Deleuze’s
account of overturned Platonism in Chapter 4. While Badiou’s assess-
ment of division reads until the place of contradiction is uncovered,
the work of division and overturned Platonism requires a “deforma-
tion” of a concept at all of its natural joints, until the concept can be
divided no further. There is no pursuit of contradiction in this process,
only differentiation (in a nonmathematical sense), pursued to identify
all that underwrites it.
In the context of Badiou’s ontological project—the project governed
by mathematical concepts and apparatus—general subtraction keeps the
void and inconsistent multiple in view. This is significant as the movement
from being to appearing gains considerable complexity. However, the
move Badiou makes in the “The Question of Being Today” and again in
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  147

“Kant’s Subtractive Ontology” situates subtraction in a meta-ontological

context, and I contend that this move creates problems for Badiou’s account.

Limitations and Liabilities in Badiou’s Meta-ontological

Subtraction
Meta-ontology is the discursive framework in Badiou’s project to handle
typically philosophical problems and concerns. For example, the first
meta-ontological move of his ontology—the decision—is occasioned by
the more common philosophical question concerning whether being is
One or many; I discussed this decision and its implications in Chapter 1.
As a result of the decision, Badiou develops a vocabulary for handling
this question according to the subsequent claims that ontology is a sit-
uation and being is multiple. These are the meta-ontological means of
cashing out the strictly mathematical ontology to come. A second
meta-ontological move is to prohibit approaches that would claim
ontology is not a situation. Following the decision in Being and Event,
Badiou enacts a restriction against so-called “philosophical ‘ontologies’”
that turn ontology toward an object of inquiry more-or-less alien to the
structures used to investigate it (on the one hand), or the nihilism of the
Heideggerian position (on the other), which replaces philosophy with
poetry and subsequently claims the enterprise of metaphysics is at its end.
For example, Heidegger (2000, 15–16) collapses the distinction
between Being and becoming, a division—or restriction—he argues is
invoked by Plato and Aristotle. These so-called “restrictions of being”
are understood as different terms that are set up against the concept of
being. Becoming is typically set against Being to explicate the problem of
change; seeming marks the problem of appearances; thinking is used to
illustrate the difference between the mind and the world. Heidegger sees
these distinctions as false ones and takes as his task the demonstration of
a “fixed continuity,” or the shared meaning of becoming, seeming, and
thinking with physis. In Heidegger’s case, the restriction is artificial since
it elevates nomos over physis; as such, the only way of dealing with physis is
in the fragments of Heraclitus or the poetry of Parmenides. Indeed, the
three reasons Badiou offers in Being and Event for rejecting “philosophi-
cal ontologies” may also apply to Heidegger’s position. The ‘experience’
of physis, while it may be somehow intelligible it is not expressible in pre-
cise terms; as such, the recourse to the poetic is a failure of degree, both
with respect to language and experience.
148  B. Vartabedian

However, Badiou explains that a poetic ontology “finds itself in an

impasse of an excess of presence, one in which being conceals itself ”
(BE 10). This is a failure of kind, and one occurring at the conceptual
level. Because the ontological difference is too radical and too com-
fortable with the prospect of the end of metaphysics, it goes beyond
the tolerances of an investigation—ontological or philosophical—into
being qua being. Badiou’s solution, then, is to remove the extremes
reflected in a Heideggerian approach. Restricting ontology against phi-
losophy and poetry depends requires an object that can be discovered by
inquiry, that is conceptually familiar, and linguistically expressible. This
object, the void, is discovered subtractively and conceptually familiar on
account of both its philosophical valence and mathematical significance;
it is linguistically expressible insofar as the language put to it is that of
mathematics. Badiou thus restricts philosophy to the specific opera-
tion and evaluation of truths in its conditions (art, science, politics, and
love). A third move is accomplished by subtraction as a disposition as an
imperative to continue the analysis of any situation toward the multi-
plicity that forms its foundation. Together with the restriction, subtrac-
tion forecloses against philosophical tools when it comes to investigating
multiple-being, and mathematized ontology is elevated as the tool best
suited to this task.
At first, Badiou’s work in the restriction seems standard; positioning
his work against Heidegger’s seems fairly obvious, since it is Heidegger
who revives the “being-question” with which Badiou’s ontological pro-
ject is primarily concerned. However, his opposition to Heidegger on
this score requires that Badiou be able to situate his commitments in a
philosophical (read: meta-ontological) register, both according to the
philosophical problem identified in the decision and in relation to com-
peting philosophical proposals on this score. The opposition to Deleuze
is quite different, since—and as I have endeavored to demonstrate in
the preceding chapters—their common commitments to multiplic-
ity offer them something of an equivalent language in which to speak.
In responding to broadly philosophical or meta-ontological demands,
ones where common language and disposition aren’t readily available
or can’t be constructed, Badiou abandons his ontological proposal and
the resources it offers to stand as a genuine alternative in this broader
conversation. In “The Question of Being Today,” the essay opening
Briefings on Existence, the decision against the One is the same; however,
instead of inconsistent multiplicity at the end of ontology, Badiou posits
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  149

an indeterminate, undefined nothing. In abandoning the precise sense of

inconsistent multiplicity as no-thing, both a limit and a liability emerge
in Badiou’s meta-ontological analysis.
Just as Being and Event opened with the decision and an assessment
of its implications and consequences, so Briefings on Existence opens with
a refreshed take on the most fundamental position of Badiou’s ontology.
He justifies the position that being qua being is “the radical manifold or
a multiple that is not under the power of the One” (CT 35). The first
of three subtractive commitments Badiou unfolds is consistent with this
claim. He says, “pure multiplicity, or the manifold unfolding of the unlim-
ited reserve of being as a subtraction from the power of the One, can-
not be consistent on its own” (CT 35). This is an assertion of Badiou’s
basic commitments—being qua being is multiple, not One; multiple
being is pure multiplicity—but it includes a new component: subtraction
is the active principle resisting the One. Because pure multiplicity is inert,
it cannot animate itself; the “manifold unfolding the unlimited reserve
of being” is subtraction’s work. On this description, it is not clear what
Badiou means by subtraction, except that “manifold unfolding is not con-
strained by the immanence of a limit” (CT 35–36). Subtraction is perhaps,
in this context, the mechanism for pursuing and securing pure multiplic-
ity past any limitation that might emerge. While ontology depends on the
boundary present in the void set to begin its operation, Badiou describes
here a procedure that exceeds limits to arrive at pure multiplicity.
Badiou takes this a step further by claiming that the subtractive dis­
position, when “complete,” will discover “a multiple of nothing. The sub-
tractive also amounts to the following: instead of conceding that for lack
of multiple there is the One, assert that for lack of multiple there is noth-
ing” (CT 37). Badiou’s assertion of the identity of multiple and noth-
ing is familiar insofar as it is introduced in Meditations 4 and 5 of Being
and Event. There, the ascription of nothing to inconsistent multiplicity is
to reinforce it as a site where existence is prohibited. In the ontological
context (as opposed to the meta-ontological context), there are a series
of positive indicators to keep nothing from slipping into a kind of nihil-
ism. The status of nothing as inconsistent multiple and as the precedent
of any consistent multiple all serve to keep a “productive nothing” in
view. Put another way, the specifications of multiple as inconsistent, and
then as nothing, are appropriate if they are specifications of an idea with
a ­conceptual anchor as many qua multiple is. However, at the meta-on­
tological level, these specifications are removed entirely.
150  B. Vartabedian

In the third subtractive commitment, Badiou restricts both defini-

tions of the multiple (CT 37) and its naming as multiplicity or multiple
(CT 38). To submit “multiplicity” to this naming, Badiou claims, is “to
already enter into what Heidegger calls the ‘process of limiting Being’ by
appealing to a delimiting norm. And the One would return” (CT 38).
To define the multiple, then, amounts to an assertion of the One over it;
this results in nominating or naming being with something other than
the void Ø, which in its precision reinforces the inconsistency of incon-
sistent multiplicity. Indeed, general subtraction applied after the speci-
fication of multiple as inconsistent multiplicity and the assertion of Ø as
its proper name is acceptable, since the limits of ontological operation
are established; thought can compensate for a lack of access beyond the
void set because it can form that void set into one. However, when sub-
traction finds being is nothing, there is a transformation of the problem
on which the decision is founded. In other words, in trying to outrun
Heidegger, Badiou insists on an indefinite nothing, which is neither
One, nor multiple bearing the robust resources of his mathematical
apparatus. In his desire to protect being qua being against the inappro-
priate control a definition would exert over being, Badiou’s walking back
from calling it multiplicity or inconsistent multiplicity draws his account
perilously close to a kind of ineffability, thus weakening the protection he
claimed to have installed against ontotheology. While Badiou does not
posit an absolute or a god, the reticence to name or mark the foundation
of being qua being opens the projects to objections of venerating “that
which cannot be named.”
In “The Question of Being Today,” Badiou’s goal is to carry the sub-
tractive impulse that serves his ontology well enough to a broader phil-
osophical position. To oppose his program Heidegger’s, Badiou chooses
the meta-ontological register, where subtraction brings thought to noth-
ing without the tools to build back or out of that nothing. Badiou offers
a general orienting remark when he says, “an axiomatic thought seizes
upon the disposition of undefined terms” (CT 38). By this, Badiou
seems to be claiming that set-theoretic ontology is suited to the pro-
gram he describes here, since it is a program that depends on undefined
terms for its functioning. However, the void set and its proper name
Ø, while empty is hardly undefined. Indeed, the specific mathemati-
cal and ontological function of the void set requires, as Badiou demon-
strates in Meditations 4 and 5 of Being and Event, a proper name in
order to serve as the site of ontological initiation. But Badiou vacates
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  151

this possibility when he claims that his solution to the problem of

One and many escapes definition and limitation. In his global, meta-­
ontological subtraction, Badiou removes the anchor by which thought—
axiomatic or otherwise—might be able to cope with multiplicity or
multiplicity-as-nothing.
Badiou’s entanglement with Heidegger in “The Question of Being
Today” reveals a kind of limitation to the application of what I’ve
called a general subtraction; when it is deployed in the meta-ontolog-
ical register, it is emptied of the features that tie it to key ontological
concepts, emptied of the things that give Badiou’s ontology its distinc-
tive character and the teeth of the restriction. A similar liability attends
Badiou’s engagement with Kant; in this case, Badiou’s interpreta-
tion of the transcendental object = X and the transcendental unity of
apperception as forms of void “withdrawn from being” (TW 143) cre-
ates problems for Badiou’s own account of the void, even in its onto-
logical richness.
In Chapter 1, I described two broad engagements with the mani-
fold in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason The first, in the Transcendental
Aesthetic, seeks to transform a merely passive engagement with mul-
tiplicity into an active empirical intuition, the material cognition
requires to begin its work. The analysis of empirical intuition is consti-
tuted in relation to an appearance, intuition’s “undetermined object”
(Kant 1998, A20/B34). As the source of these undetermined objects,
the manifold presents an array of data to which the faculty of sen-
sibility—that faculty responsible for the production of intuitions—
responds. Kant’s claims regarding the nature of an appearance in the
Transcendental Aesthetic allowed me to conclude that “the being of the
manifold” is nothing to the mind other than undetermined. As unde-
termined, the manifold does not demonstrate its own organization;
a “structuring intellect” arranges the appearance of the manifold from
without.
The second encounter with the manifold is found in the
Transcendental Deduction. I focused primarily on the A Deduction and
its introduction of the transcendental object = X. I explained that the
object = X functions as a placeholder necessary to secure the continu-
ity of experience, and like the manifold of the Transcendental Aesthetic,
the object = X is undetermined with respect to its content. It takes as
its correlate the transcendental unity of apperception, which func-
tions as the general condition by which cognition is possible. From the
152  B. Vartabedian

B Deduction, I emphasized the work of combination (Verbindung) in

connection with representation; representation provides the ‘material’ for
combination and indicates the limit of cognition’s reach. In other words,
cognition can only operate on representations of an object, never the
object itself.
Johnston (2008, 352–353) insists that Badiou’s work remains in the
grip of a Kantian structure in the form of the count-as-one, which he
posits as an active mediation between inconsistent and consistent mul-
tiples. Further, the discussion of the inconsistent multiple (particularly
as Badiou addresses it in Meditations 2–4 of Being and Event) installs
inconsistent multiplicity as a version of a “thinkable but unknowable”
noumenon (Johnston 2008, 353). Johnston, as well as Pfeifer (2015),
have each raised concerns about the traces of Kantian structures in
Badiou’s work, in spite of Badiou’s claims that, as Johnston (2008, 348)
points out, “Badiou balks at Kant’s invocation of the ostensible ‘limits
of possible experience,’ insofar as this boundary line partitioning nou-
mena from phenomena entails the prohibition of constructing a rational
ontology.”3 The main objection Badiou raises against Kant, then, is that
the distinction of phenomena and noumena maintains the impossibility
of a rational ontology, and may only posit something like an ontology of
presence, requiring access “beyond the noumenal veil” for an assessment
or exposure to being.4
Questions—like those Johnston and Pfeifer raise—concerning who
counts? and where from? are valuable, though are perhaps less devastat-
ing for Badiou’s account when it is clear that ontology is a mechanism
for mapping the relationship of structure to its suture to being at the
void point; ontology is not, as I have attempted to show in my account
of general subtraction, prospective but retrospective. This deflationary
strategy, while perhaps less satisfactory than an ontology that generates
objects using count-procedures (a special ontology) is in line with the
restriction of ontology from the dynamic work of philosophy in Badiou’s
work.
I maintain a concern about Badiou’s relation to Kant, however, over
the notion of the void itself. In “Kant’s Subtractive Ontology,” Badiou
reads the transcendental project through the lens of his own ontology. In
particular, Badiou seizes the transcendental object = X and the transcen-
dental unity of apperception as examples of Kant’s “subtractive radical-
ity.” Badiou says,
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  153

The feature common to both originary apperception as transcenden-

tal proto-subject and this x as transcendental proto-object is that, as the
primitive invariant forms required for the possibility of representation, this
subject and this object remain absolutely un-presented: they are referred
to, over and above all possible experience, only as the void withdrawn from
being, for which all we have are names. (TW 142–143)

Badiou equates the transcendental object and the transcendental unity of

apperception as the foundation for possible experience, both empty of
content and absolutely necessary for thought to proceed. Badiou’s insist-
ence that these structures are un-presented situates them analogously to
the void in his own work.
The procedure of general subtraction is charged with discovering the
limit of thought; in Badiou’s work, the general subtractive procedure
ends in the discovery of the void, which functions as the presentable fea-
ture of inconsistent multiplicity. Above, Badiou suggests the object = X
serves a similar function in Kant’s work; it names the boundary and
stands-in for what thought cannot grasp. Badiou equates the object = X
and the void further by describing the object = X as “an object that is
nothing,” a claim I discussed in connection with the presentation of
the void set in Chapter 3 (TW 142). Badiou finds the Kantian attempt
admirable but retreats to a critique of Kant over his requiring both the
transcendental object = X and the transcendental unity of apperception.
These ‘two voids,’ Badiou claims, require a relation, so Kant’s work can-
not constitute a fully subtractive ontology. In other words, subtraction
must resolve to a single void, and not two.
I propose that Badiou’s reading of Kant has problematic impli-
cations for Badiou’s own project, which become clear on inspection
of the transcendental object = X. The transcendental object = X is
required for thought in the same way that the void and its esoteric
mark are necessary for the determination of consistency; in fact,
Badiou suggests these two elements are the same. Additionally, the
content of both the object = X and the void are the same for Badiou,
insofar as they both consist of nothing (no-thing). This opens a ques-
tion, then, about how these respective void-markers, discovered by
subtractive procedure, maintain their status as no-thing. However, the
identification of transcendental unity of apperception as a void offers
some correlate support for keeping the transcendental object = X
154  B. Vartabedian

legible and purposive. Together, these commitments shed light on

the uncomfortable consequence of Badiou’s aligning the void with
the transcendental object = X; minimally, the coincidence of Badiou’s
project with Kant’s here requires the deployment of an analogous,
non-subtractive mechanism to keep the void a void—a kind of faith,
perhaps, that maintains the presence of the void as such at the bound-
ary of inconsistent multiplicity. This is another way of conceiving of
the noumenon in Badiou’s work, though from an inquiry into the void
and not, as Žižek (2004) has argued for Badiou’s dependence on a
gap between the noumenon of the Real and the phenomenon of any
world.
It may be that a deflationary account of ontology in Badiou’s work,
one that emphasizes its status as static and as a kind of mapping tech-
nology (as I proposed in the preceding chapter) each allay the wor-
ries about Badiou’s smuggling in an active principle in the form of the
count, or his failure to adequately bridge ontology and phenomenol-
ogy. For my part, the analysis of the void alongside its Kantian corre-
lates requires Badiou’s reader to maintain the presence of inconsistent
multiplicity beyond the void. This gesture—an honorific to Cantor’s
innovations—is procedurally overwritten in the presence of the void Ø.
Further, this charge deposits Badiou’s project among ontologies of pres-
ence; counterintuitively, perhaps, the presence in Badiou’s ontology is
an absence.
Badiou’s objections to Kant’s transcendental object register diver-
gences in the accounts of local subtraction with which I open this
chapter. Badiou could quite easily extend his criticism of Kant’s pro-
ject against Deleuze’s; in other words, a truly subtractive ontology dis-
solves all bonds in order to reach no-thing and ontology of relation still
depends on one thing. I am reminded of Peyrol’s objection to subtrac-
tion in “The Fascism of the Potato,” in which Peyrol objects that the
subtractive disposition Deleuze and Guattari offer requires both one and
multiple, the two (FP 199). Peyrol’s requirements are to seek the condi-
tion of transformation, the “one of the multiple” to rupture the existing
order. Badiou’s critique of Kant in “Kant’s Subtractive Ontology,” and in
the procedure of general subtraction I’ve identified above, offers a means
of identifying that rupturing condition, minimally an identification of
(and maximally a ‘return to’) the no-thing of the void point present in
any situation.
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  155

Summary
The claim Badiou stakes regarding any comparison between his program
and Deleuze’s is that the central problem with which philosophy today is
concerned is an “immanent conceptualization of multiplicity” (DCB 4)
to be discerned in their respective approaches. As perhaps the most sus-
tained of Badiou’s combative texts, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being makes a
number of attacks on Deleuze’s program; chief among these is the claim
that Deleuze is ultimately committed to a form of transcendence in dis-
guise, implying that only Badiou’s approach maintains a grip on multiple
without collapsing into transcendence. An analysis of subtraction sug-
gests otherwise, since in both Badiou’s and Deleuze’s programs some
anchor of multiplicity is accessible to thought, the commitments of what-
ever version of multiplicity that system depends on are expressive within
that system.
In Chapter 4, I discussed the way that Deleuze’s virtual idea is a rela-
tion between differential elements resulting in pre-individual singular-
ities. The connections holding among elements and their relations are
themselves a genetic process. Subtraction offers an “immediate” access
to multiplicity, insofar as the suspension of the unique instance brings
inquiry to multiplicity. I demonstrated this in the analysis of the dia-
gram and explication attending Deleuze and Guattari’s “Example 1”
in the previous chapter. There, the language of Riemannian multiplic-
ity and principles of construction appropriate to continuous multiplic-
ity are readily available. In Badiou’s program, the general subtraction I
described above shows that every consolidated unity bears the mark of
inconsistent multiplicity; as such, multiplicity is immanent and latent
in Badiou’s account. The void point is buried and can only be uncov-
ered with the requisite subtraction to observe situation as constructed
according to principles of the consistent multiple, and to subsequently
demonstrate the link of these consistent multiples to their foundation in
the void set. It is from this vantage of a commitment in common, that
of subtraction and its work in demonstrating the link to multiplicity—
whether it is the dynamic, genetic multiplicity Deleuze and Guattari
proffer, or the static void point forming a limit for thought in Badiou’s
work—that I now return to the engagements I outlined Chapter 2. The
resources developed through a thorough investigation of structure and
procedure afford a clarity around the consistent critiques each party
brings against the other.
156  B. Vartabedian

Conversation and Critique
In this section, I address the conversation I constructed in Chapter 2.
There, I proceeded chronologically, beginning with “Rhizome” in 1976
and continuing to the publication of Deleuze: The Clamor of Being in
1997. With the benefit of the resources I developed in Chapters 3 and 4,
I focus on and expand two points of discontinuity or divergence between
Deleuze with Guattari and Badiou. First, and using the apparent mis-
match in types of multiplicity prescribed in “Rhizome” and “The Fascism
of the Potato,” I return to critiques surrounding the structure of multi-
plicity raised across the 20-year period I’ve identified. Second, these cri-
tiques surrounding structure offer an occasion to reflect on the stasis and
rigidity with which Badiou’s ontological address of multiplicity is pre-
sented, a critique broadly aimed at procedure. Third and finally, I address
Badiou’s specific criticism of the presence of “monotonous productions”
in Deleuze’s work, a critique which offers an opportunity to consider the
way mathematics is supposed to function in their respective work.

A Mismatched Multiplicity
In “Rhizome,” Deleuze and Guattari take Maoism to task over the
dictum “one becomes two” (R 51). For his part, Peyrol takes this dif-
ference in phrasing to be significant enough to lob an ad hominem at
Deleuze and Guattari, insisting that “only a moron” would get this idea
wrong. The presentation Peyrol offers as a replacement—“one divides
into two” (FP 194)—is clarified by recognizing that scission expresses a
dialectical matrix of division and not of alienation. If the latter, tracing
the movement of the concept, then attending to the dictum as a scheme
of becoming is useful; but in the lectures opening Theory of the Subject,
Badiou is clear that scission follows the former. In the approach Badiou
prescribes there, following his work with Hegel, temporary unities are
divided according to their component parts and the relations between
these; the relation of contradiction is revealed through something essen-
tially “returned to itself ” from another place and signified in the formula
A = AAp. Badiou explains that the bourgeois world facilitates a contra-
dictory relation of bourgeois and proletariat, insofar as one only sees the
other against the background of this world. Scission is a kind of pause
and recollection, suspending—for the sake of analysis—alienation, the
movement ‘from’ a dialectical position initiated by contradiction.
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  157

In Peyrol’s “The Fascism of the Potato,” scission takes up this task,

emphasizing a temporary stasis, to fix the “one of the multiple” capa-
ble of revising the mass and its direction. Deleuze and Guattari seem to
invert the Maoist image by insisting on images of root and tree; Peyrol
suggests, by contrast, that the one is already and immediately two,
already divided, and will return to that position after a temporary one is
eclipsed. Peyrol insists the “one of the multiple” in May ’68 is class, but
he notes this only after acknowledging the diversity of the mass in his
enumeration of the groups comprising “horizontal storm” (cf. FP 192).
In Chapter 4, I explained that the function of scission is, for Peyrol,
essentially revealing to each of the groups the background against which
they are organized; in identifying this repressive background, it would
be possible for each of these groups to band together and successfully
re-write their present by revolution.
The tangible or visible nature of this particular mass is useful as a ful-
crum, both for understanding Peyrol’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari
and Badiou’s move away from materialism as the central paradigm around
which his work is organized. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, Peyrol’s
objection to Deleuze and Guattari’s “Rhizome” is a limit imposed by its
avowed ‘horizontality.’ In this flattening, Peyrol argues that it gives way
to a kind of fascism, invoking Pinochet in his warning call to “sectarians
of the Rhizome!” (FP 197). Deleuze and Guattari address fascism in their
discussion of multiplicity in “Rhizome”, describing it parenthetically as “a
horrible multiplicity—defined by its lines or dimensions precisely laid out
on a plane of consistence” (R 55). Its horror consists not in its outcome,
but in its mode of organization; its precision and order forecloses against
a creative tangle and particular results issuing from this tangle, “lines of
flight” from the mass of connection. The horror is in stasis, in superim-
posed organization, or—worse—supra-imposed organization designed to
straighten out a dynamic multiplicity otherwise operating according to an
internal logic.
In their discussion of a rhizome’s fourth principle, that of “asignifying
rupture,” Deleuze and Guattari explain that the movement interior to the
rhizome must “be relative, always intertwining, the one caught up in the
other (R 55). As such, and in the context of May ’68s “horizontal storm,”
it is not a mere enumeration or identification that Deleuze and Guattari
champion. Rather, it is the movements among these in their particular-
ity and in their present, relative to one another, that interest Deleuze and
Guattari. This commitment appears in Deleuze’s account of the social Idea
158  B. Vartabedian

in Difference and Repetition, again in the analysis of the war machine and
a-centered systems in “Rhizome”, and in the discussion of the cogito in
the first example in What is Philosophy? The transformation these transac-
tions occasion is not necessarily revolution, but re-formation. Even if May ’68
was successful on the terms Peyrol prescribes, it may be the case that
Deleuze and Guattari would have been surprised by it, but it is also possi-
ble that they would be indifferent to it qua expression and more interested
in the dynamic and particular connections giving rise to it.
From this vantage, it might be reasonable to dismiss Peyrol’s critique
of Deleuze and Guattari in this period as simply missing the point and
move on. In his commitment to transformation and a constant attention
to the signs permitting or prohibiting it, the Maoist Peyrol fails to see
a bigger picture and project with which Deleuze and Guattari are con-
cerned: thought in a much longer time frame (Deleuze and Guattari are
“geophilosophers,” after all) and an overturning of thought toward dif-
ference and disjunction, rather than conjunction and identity. However,
and for the purposes of this study, it offers a moment’s pause to con-
sider these structures of scission and rhizome in tandem. It also offers
a chance to consider again Badiou’s ontological turn in light of the cri-
tique he raises in “The Fascism of the Potato.” In Chapter 4, I explained
the exhaustion Badiou observed with respect to materialist politics and
the disposition of his theoretical work toward structures capable of dis-
covering the irruption of the Real in any situation. Though there is a
kind of displacement of Badiou’s attention, Power and Toscano (2009),
Bosteels (2012), and Dosse (2010) have each convincingly argued for
the intractability of Badiou’s ontology from its political roots. This link is
reinforced by attending to the glancing comment Deleuze and Guattari
make about fascism and its structure. Badiou’s ontological turn is of
course politically and transformationally oriented; however, it is in these
early encounters that the seeds of Badiou’s “ontology of the multiple,”
positioned against Deleuze’s are planted (DCB 3).
These early encounters also offer resonances of the critiques to
come. For example, the conceptual objections Deleuze and Guattari
raise against Badiou’s project in “Example 12” of What is Philosophy?
have roots in these early critiques. Though logic, that broader operative
context in which Deleuze and Guattari engaged Badiou’s work, is not
fascism, it is “motivated by a real hatred” and “rivalry with, or will to
supplant philosophy” (WP 140). This is accomplished by first fixing a
concept to a plane of reference and then reducing it to a rigid system of
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  159

predication; Deleuze and Guattari object to transformations of structure

that straightens the pathways of intensive ordinates to becoming lines in
a proof. When logic does admit a philosophical concept, it casts the con-
cept as “the subject’s pure and simple opinions, of subjective evaluations
or judgments of taste” (WP 141). The concept is admitted as empty
because it lacks the rigor of number or “the well-ordered set” (WP 141),
and blind since it cannot speak in the language of a doubly-fixed frame of
reference.
Unlike a Russell, Frege, or (a caricature of) an analytic philosopher,
Badiou has a peculiar response, stemming from a meta-ontological move
required by his work. The radical thesis is presented as a hypothetical,
and there are good reasons to take it seriously as such: if being qua being
is a pure multiplicity, only then is mathematics ontology. The inaugurat-
ing if takes a strong position insofar as it shifts the being-question out of
the domain of philosophy, where it is beset by so-called “ontologies of
presence” (think Levinas, or Plato of the forms), or Heidegerrian abdi-
cations to poetry. These options are in fact too devoted to correspond-
ence and are frustrated in the face of peculiarly human being. Instead,
Badiou assigns to ontology the being of the pure multiple and that
alone, the task, as Badiou (with Haéri 2016, 49) says, “of the thinking
of what there is, of what is.” As I have shown in the preceding, particu-
larly regarding Badiou’s commitment to the void, his concern is to effec-
tively map patterns of existence using the tools of mathematics. Put in
a more direct reply to the critique Deleuze and Guattari raise, Badiou
uses logical tools but in his ontology, in particular, these are loosed from
the requirements of logical correspondence insofar as they do not pro-
nounce “true” or “false,” and rather describe the structures of what is.
This is another way of tracing the transformation from Badiou’s earlier
work (e.g., in The Concept of Model), where tools of mathematical logic
are set to operation directly on political realities, to map out a transform-
ative science capable of withstanding incursion by bourgeois ideology
(Brassier 2005, Livingston 2011). Badiou’s work may also be unmoored
from a scientific frame of reference because of its founding commitment
to being qua being as pure multiplicity.
It is in this way that Badiou’s account is further distanced from a
philosophical sense of “the many,” since the content of inconsistent
multiplicity is an infinite multiple that may not be closed or completed;
it is not bodies and void in an atomist or Lucretian sense. In Briefings
on Existence, Badiou claims Democritus is committed to a subtractive
160  B. Vartabedian

disposition, expressed as “the dismissal of the One,” occurring in his

work “through a dissemination and appeal to the void” (CT 35). He
takes the subtractive disposition of Lucretius further, claiming that in De
Rerum Natura, “Lucretius is the one who directly confronts thought to
subtraction from the One, which is none other than inconsistent infinity,
that is, what nothing can collect” (CT 35). Whether these assignations
are correct is, of course, significant; it is possible to note, though, given
the trouble I’ve pointed to above concerning Badiou’s meta-­ontological
deployment of subtraction that the comparison is at best only one of
loose analogy. Here, the terms of inconsistency and nothing float free
of their rigorous mathematical mooring, which compromises the com-
parison to Lucretius or Badiou’s own commitments, neither of which
is desirable. The atomist position has, perhaps more in common with
Peyrol, who is committed to an empirical expression of mass, its specific
diversity, and its resistance to totalization.

Structures, Rigidity, and Stasis

In their response to Ricardo and David Nirenberg, A.J. Bartlett and
Justin Clemens (2012, 368) counter the former pair’s critique by
explaining that a mathematical ontology, for Badiou, is “a figure of phil-
osophical fiction.” As the preceding work has demonstrated, mathema-
tized ontology must essentially function as a “productive placeholder”
so that philosophy may be liberated from questions of being and the
traps attending these and instead investigate the truths stemming from
transformation.
A precise statement of generalized subtraction reveals an ontological
map of an event that, while neutral, is not an origin in the sense of a
generation or production. The work of mathematized ontology is simply
to map or describe the structure of that transformation; this is a con-
sequence of Badiou’s claims concerning scission and, when combined
with the account of general subtraction I’ve developed above, it demon-
strates that though ontology can build, it is also effective in reading sub-
tractively. Using the tools of axiomatic set theory and the relations of
belonging and inclusion, reveals a maximum of three types of ontolog-
ical situations: normal (what belongs is included), excrescent (what is
included does not belong), and singular (what belongs is not included).
The structural features of these three types of situation are revealed in
the general subtractive disposition, which divests procedure to discover
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  161

the void point at the foundation of any ontological structure; this also
has the effect of showing the limit of thought, insofar as thought consists
in the tools of axiomatic set theory. The positive apparatus of structure
and procedure present in Badiou’s ontology, though presented first in
the system, offers a retrospective mapping—instead of asking “what went
wrong in May ’68?,” Badiou’s ontology can offer a descriptive frame-
work of Pauline or Cantorian transformations that is also prescriptive
insofar as other concrete candidates for transformation—Tahrir Square,
for example—are structurally legible.
Rigidity also appears here in Deleuze and Guattari’s objection to
Badiou’s use of the count, identifying “the set’s subjection to a regime
of the ‘counting-as-one’ (bodies or objects, units of the situation)” (WP
151). Though a function expresses relations among components circulat-
ing in the frame of reference (the site of scientific thought), the method
of set construction using the count applies, by Deleuze and Guattari’s
lights, a functional relationship to freely-circulating elements in the plane
of immanence (the site of philosophical thought). As I pointed out in
Chapter 2, this yields an objection to Badiou’s work that claims it is too
rigid for philosophical operation. Any event, irrespective of the domain
in which it occurs (art, science, politics, love), has the same ontological
structure, apparent in the asymmetry of belonging and inclusion. This
implication—that an event bears universal markers wherever it erupts—
is problematic for Deleuze and Guattari, as a capitulation to identity or
“the same”. As the analysis of structure in Chapter 2 showed, the mul-
tiplicity they affirm as the condition for any empirical or conceptual
expression is radically particular, determined according to the pathways
developing among the nodes or elements themselves. The only “univer-
sal,” if it can be identified as such, is the basic definition of multiplicity as
between at least two elements. Deleuze and Guattari abandon any pre-
tensions to prediction or prescription when it comes to a multiplicity’s
expression. Put another way, predictability is the price of creativity.
I’ve used the preceding pages to demonstrate the ways a more thor-
ough account of multiplicity deepens the critique and conversation
persisting between Badiou and Deleuze. When Deleuze and Guattari
engage traditional materialism, Maoism, or Badiou’s ontology, the
tendency is to read its dependence on models of reproduction from a
single, genetic point; Deleuze and Guattari superimpose the require-
ments of multiplicity as they conceive it to reveal limitations in the old
way of thinking. Badiou’s account of scission, when read alongside an
162  B. Vartabedian

articulation of general subtraction, shows no such commitments. As my

analysis demonstrated, this genesis is no part of the ontology developed
in Being and Event, since the inconsistent multiple and void set are inert;
procedure in the form of Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms is shown to com-
pose something from the nothing of the void. For its part, the count and
its functioning are—just as the nature of any one is shown to be mul-
tiple—revealed or discovered retrospectively; the presence of a situation
indicates the count has been applied. This recognition requires Badiou’s
ontology to operate in a more-or-less hypothetical frame of reference.
Evidence for this is available in Badiou’s preface to Being and Event, and
particularly Part IV, which I discussed in Chapter 4. In this hypotheti-
cal frame, Badiou’s ontology offers tools of mapping in terms congen-
ial to the antecedent claim of the “radical thesis,” the assumption that
being qua being is multiple. Additionally, Deleuze and Guattari’s per-
sisting—and compelling—critique is that the schematic prescribed both
in traditional forms of materialism and the project of Badiou’s ontology
attempts to develop the new or novel from rigid, universal frameworks.
In response, Deleuze and Guattari reassert their emphasis on multiplicity
as between elements, pathways forged and re-forged in local bundles of
connection. This interior movement—striving for and maintaining hori-
zontality, subtracting the one to make the multiple—produces transfor-
mation or expression on a smaller, more frequent, and potentially more
legible scale.
It is in examining this commitment to one-ing, counting, or isolating
a class condition that Badiou, writing both as Peyrol and himself, raises
the critique of stasis against Deleuze and Guattari, identifying as prob-
lematic any multiplicity that in its practice of mere affirmation has no
transformative traction. An examination of Deleuze and Guattari’s own
response to claims of fascism or problematic inaction directs the read-
er’s attention to the structure of the multiple itself. Deleuze and Guattari
assign fascism to multiples that are essentially one-dimensional, with
a single trajectory and in which no deviation is possible; in these cases,
creative escape is foreclosed against. In light of this critique of rigidity,
whether Deleuze and Guattari bring it against fascism or the misguided
application of logical requirements to philosophical concepts, Badiou’s
project once again comes into view. I explained that though Badiou’s
work develops its ontology from a commitment to multiplicity, it is not a
creative, dynamic, or self-governing multiplicity; rather, it is a multiplic-
ity that trades in universal types, situations organized according to the
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  163

combinations of belonging and inclusion. These types hold irrespective

of the complexity that may develop in any world (the ontological appa-
ratus Badiou develops in Logics of Worlds). Though these universal types
are both descriptive and prescriptive, they do not support creativity per
se; one must move to the emergence of the faithful subject in Being and
Event to find the dynamic moment in Badiou’s ontological apparatus.

Monotonous Productions, Multiplicity, and Model Horizons

In Chapter 2, I explained that Badiou charges Deleuze with “monot-
onous productions,” claiming that Deleuze’s work is concerned with
“composing a very particular regime of emphasis or almost infinite
repetition of a limited repertoire of concepts, as well as a virtuosic var-
iation of names, under which what is thought remain essentially identi-
cal” (DCB 15). Evidence for Badiou’s claim is available in the work I’ve
done, for example, to develop Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s
commitments; overturned Platonism, the work in “Example 1,” the anal-
ysis of the social Idea as a virtual Idea, the war machine, and the rhizome
itself are all different means for presenting the structure and procedure
associated with Deleuze’s account of multiplicity. Though he claims this
consistency is a virtue of Deleuze’s account, Badiou sees the prolifera-
tion of examples as a matter of reproducing the conditions of thought
at the cost of displacing the specificity and uniqueness of the example
itself. The issue underwriting Badiou’s criticism thus concerns whether
Deleuze’s framework admits of too much flexibility, such that its only
trace or reliable characteristic is its having-been-enacted, the evidence of
which is a series of productions that serve the form of thought, rather
than its specific content.
I discussed in some detail the reply Daniel W. Smith ([2003] 2012)
offers to Badiou’s characterization of Deleuze’s multiplicity as vitalist
and nonmathematical. In short, Smith establishes that because Badiou is
committed to only one pole of mathematical inquiry—the axiomatic—
he fails to appreciate Deleuze’s alignment with the problematic pole.
On Smith’s analysis, Badiou’s selection of axiomatics and the asser-
tion that mathematics = ontology each make it impossible to entertain
any other possibility. The equivalence of mathematics = ontology only
means a particular kind of mathematics, and as Smith ([2003] 2012,
288) explains, “the more precise equation however, would, be that
‘ontology = axiomatic set theory,’ since for Badiou it is only axiomatic
164  B. Vartabedian

set theory that mathematics adequately ‘thinks’ itself and constitutes a

condition of philosophy.” Indeed, it is clear that Badiou’s commitment
to axiomatic set theory structures his ontology according to rigid princi-
ples associated with demonstration, rather than the creative or construc-
tive principles associated with problematics, at least as far as the ontology
is concerned; it is also the case that the ontological principles associ-
ated with situations are explicitly set-theoretic, derived either from the
Zermelo–Fraenkel system or the innovations by Cohen in support of the
generic multiple.
In Logics of Worlds, by contrast, Badiou invokes complexity and den-
sity in the discussion of a topological space, “A mathematical concept
that aims to rigorously think what is the ‘place’ of a being, its environs
(or neighborhoods), its boundary, and so on” (Badiou 2009, 596). Here,
principles of density, connection, and relation all offer a topological space
its unique character; this, however, is the business of appearing, not
being. Put another way, Badiou’s broad mathematical paradigm does not
exclude constructive or dynamic configurations, but these configurations
are ontologically prohibited. Badiou’s ontology, on subtractive analysis,
yields just three types of situation, only one of which underpins transfor-
mation. The critique concerning monotonous production could be just
as easily turned on Badiou’s ontology, since it is governed by a restric-
tive vision of what can count for an ontological structure, and an equally
restrictive vision of the conditions under which transformation occurs.
In “One, Multiple, Multiplicity,” a text written in response to critiques
of Clamor indicating Badiou’s paltry attention to the Riemannian founda-
tions of Deleuze’s work, Badiou returns to mathematical resources (gen-
erally) and Riemann (specifically) to attend to their status in Deleuze’s
work. This short text begins with a series of affirmations of Deleuze’s
work, both in its practical resistance to the New Philosophers (TW 68)
and its conceptual commitments to a metaphysics of multiplicity and sin-
gularity (TW 69). It includes a series of provocative engagements, some
of which (as in Section 1 of the text) rehearse again Deleuze’s apparent
commitment to a metaphysics of the One-All and a vitalist multiplicity;
the problematic commitment, discussed in Section 2, to the notion of
multiplicity as a play between one and multiplicity, or closed and open; and
in Section 4, an assessment of their respective readings of Spinoza and the
status of analogy in Deleuze’s work. Pertinent to the present discussion
are elements of Section 3, in which Badiou discusses the deployment of
mathematics and the explicit resources of the Riemannian paradigm.
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  165

Badiou affirms that mathematics has abstract and theoretical resources

that far exceed empirical presentation. Mathematics, Badiou explains,
“shows itself perfectly capable both of providing schemas adequate
to experience, and of frustrating this experience by way of conceptual
inventions that no intuition could ever accept” (TW 75). The instance
Badiou begins with is the graze, a physical experience that can be con-
ceptually accounted for in the tangent of any continuous curve; Badiou
cites this on account of its similarity to a “superficial touch” or a caress
in the empirical world, and its affinity to certain Deleuzian concepts (i.e.,
lines of flight). However, Badiou then points to a nineteenth-century
discovery “that there exist continuous functions that cannot be derived
at any point,” to say that there are continuous functions for which a tan-
gent cannot be identified. Badiou claims, “This is just a particular case
of a general law: everywhere where mathematics is close to experience
but follows its own movement, it discovers a ‘pathological’ case that
absolutely challenges the initial intuition. Mathematics then establishes
that this pathology is the rule, and that what can be intuited is only an
exception” (TW 75). This is a revealing critique on Badiou’s part. Of
course, there are pathological instances in mathematics, and in this dis-
cussion Badiou raises a warning of sorts that one ought to not get overly
invested in the commitments to differential calculus and the behav-
ior of curves, and particularly as these prescribe anything about being.
However, rather than analytical, this critique seems grossly prescriptive;
choose the right mathematics, the one that doesn’t give itself to patho-
logical interpretations that might undermine the entire apparatus.
The resources of multiplicity (at least as these are associated with the
differential so far) are less diverse, per Badiou, than “the variegated config-
urations proper to set-theory,” which “provide an incomparably richer and
more complex resource” (TW 76). On this point, Badiou cites the possible
intervention of a generic subset in a partially-ordered set, claiming it “not
only surpasses in violence, as a case for thought, any empirical rhizomatic
schema whatsoever, but, by establishing the conditions for ‘neutrality’ in
a multiple that is both dispersive and co-ordinated, it actually subsumed
the ontology of these schemata” (TW 76). The subtext here is that the
ontological rupture offered by the event is more of a rupture than any-
thing the rhizome has on offer; the generic intervention into a situation
re-­orders the structure of the situation according to the violence of the void’s
irruption therein. Badiou then enumerates types of cardinality, including
inaccessible, compact, ineffable, measurable, enormous, Mahlo, Ramsey, and
166  B. Vartabedian

Rowbottom cardinals, that maintain specific principles for their respective

constructions, each relying on apparatuses in excess of what’s available
in the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiom system. This move is authorized, at least
in part, by the recognition late in Being and Event that the intervention
of the generic multiple requires an expansion of set-theoretic principles
beyond the initial constructions permitted under the Zermelo–Fraenkel
paradigm. Badiou raises this set of examples to affirm the density of the
concept of set construction, which functions in complex ways apart from
the mere issue of number. Further, the principles for constructing any set
and principles governing their content are diverse and are sufficient to
generate the countable infinities—and kind of density—Badiou is after.
In the critique that suffuses “One, Multiple, Multiplicities,” Badiou dou-
bles-down on the commitment to mathematics as ontology, insisting that
the commitment to set-theoretic ontology follows its expansion to include
robust and diverse forms of construction. These constructions exceed any
form of complexity imagined by a rabbit warren, dandelion grass or any
other form of rhizomatic development (though, somehow, they resist the
esoteric or occult nature with which Badiou-as-Peyrol saddled Deleuze and
Guattari’s account of multiplicity in 1977).
A more faithful reading of Riemann, as Badiou explains in Section 3,
sees Riemann’s work as paving the way for the set-theoretic interventions
of Cantor and Dedekind (TW 77). Badiou also insists that Riemann’s
considerations are mathematically Platonist through and through, requir-
ing “a speculative framework entirely subtracted from the constraints
of empirical intuition” (TW 77). On Badiou’s assessment, Riemann is
a poor fit for Deleuze’s theory of multiplicity because Riemann’s work,
understood in an exact trajectory, expresses principles Deleuze himself
would not accept. In my own discussion of Riemann’s work in Chapter 3,
I explained that he decamps to the conceptual in order to develop the
multiply-extended manifold; Riemann is, in other words, invoking an
abstract framework to invent the concepts necessary for his geomet-
ric intervention. Indeed, the letter of Riemann’s work (per Badiou) is
not only a kind of Platonism, but also neutralizes difference and local-
ity insofar as the multiplicity Riemann prescribes “in effect can indiffer-
ently welcome numbers, points, functions, figures, or places, since it does
not prescribe that of which it is composed” (TW 77). In failing to grasp
the metaphysical commitments of Riemann’s work, Badiou suggests
that Deleuze in effect dooms the metaphysical paradigm of multiplicity
invoked across his oeuvre.
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  167

This perplexity, borne from Badiou’s commitment to an exactitude

in the deployment of application of mathematical paradigms, may be
relieved in part by attending to the function of mathematics in Deleuze’s
work. In his thoroughgoing investigation of Deleuze’s use of mathe-
matics, Simon Duffy proposes three general “components” to explain
Deleuze’s mathematic engagement. “The first component,” Duffy
(2013, 1) explains “can be characterized as the history of mathematics
relevant to each of the programs or mathematical disciplines with which
Deleuze engages, and the mathematical problems or problematics that
are extracted from them.” Readers of Deleuze are familiar with the more
general identification of royal science and nomadic science, and Deleuze’s
typical selection of nomadic, or minor, paradigms according to which he
articulates his system. This proclivity of Deleuze’s underwrites the task
of Duffy’s text, which offers a historical accounting of the minor mathe-
matical tradition on which Deleuze depends, in service of a third compo-
nent, the “creation of new concepts by bringing together mathematical
and philosophical problematics” (Duffy 2013, 3). However, it is in con-
nection with a second component of Deleuze’s use of mathematics, an
effective transfer of the selected “interventions in the history of math-
ematics” to philosophical problems (Duffy 2013, 2) that a counter to
Badiou’s critique becomes available.
Duffy (2013, 2) says, “It is important to note that Deleuze eschews
characterizing his redeployment of mathematical problems and problem-
atics as simply analogical or metaphorical.” Put another way, Deleuze
does not play fast and loose with mathematical models, and similarly
does not attempt to force “quantitative and exact” models into philo-
sophical discourse, since these are the province of science and set the
philosophical analysis on the tenuous ground. For example, one would
not expect to find the results of a specific experiment in biology or chem-
istry, or a well-known problem from physics deployed as a model in
Deleuze’s work or in his collaborations with Guattari. Citing Deleuze’s
discussion in Cinema II, Duffy (2013, 3) explains, “Deleuze recognizes
that citing mathematical notions of the exact kind outside of their par-
ticular sphere would rightly expose one to the criticism of ‘arbitrary met-
aphor or of forced application’.” This recognition at once reveals the
limitation on mathematical application in Deleuze’s work and the liabil-
ity attending Badiou’s own commitments; forced application is certainly
the charge levied at Badiou by Deleuze and Guattari in “Example 12,”
and again in 2011 at Badiou by the Nirenbergs. The way out—a full
168  B. Vartabedian

restriction of ontology to mathematical outworking, to which Badiou is

committed—will only limit the nature of the discourse altogether.
Duffy (2013, 2) points out that the mathematical models Deleuze
deploys are models and “problems that are ‘essentially inexact yet com-
pletely rigorous’.” Quoting Deleuze (1995, 29) Duffy explains that
a model’s designation as inexact consists in its “conceptualizable char-
acter.” For example, my presentation of the various instances in which
Riemannian principles are expressed in Deleuze’s work supports the
recognition that Riemann’s work is tapped precisely because it can be
mobilized in diverse frameworks. Deleuze’s multiplicity depends on the
principles expressed in Riemann’s descriptions of determinations and
dimensionality; it could (and does) describe the basis for a differential
geometry, but the principles of n-dimensionality and immanent measure
are, for example, sufficiently inexact to be mobilized toward prescrib-
ing relationships and possibilities at the genetic foundation of a concrete
case. I have endeavored to demonstrate this in several examples drawn
from Deleuze’s oeuvre.
Duffy’s work offers greater insight into why Deleuze selects
Riemann’s model of multiplicity, rather than the exact model Badiou
adopts, and it is, therefore, a better explanation for Deleuze’s selection
than only capitulating or falling back into Deleuze’s preferences for the
minor or nomadic sciences. Deleuze seeks a model with principles that
can be exhausted in areas beyond their immediate or local disciplinary
expression. Though Badiou insists that expanding the number of pre-
cise mathematical resources (in different forms of cardinality and their
associated principles of construction) will ensure coverage of ontologi-
cal diversity, Deleuze invokes a structure and procedure with ‘maxi-
mal’ expression. For example, in Plateau “1440: The Smooth and the
Striated,” Deleuze and Guattari investigate the structures and rela-
tion of smooth space to striated space in terms of mathematics, mari-
time parlance, textile creation and weaving, aesthetics (or “nomad art”
[TP, 492–499]), music, and physics. They conclude the plateau with an
injunction:

Do not multiply models. We are well aware that there are many others …
What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the
passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually
striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and
emits new smooth spaces. (TP 499–500)
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  169

The value of the model, for Deleuze and Guattari, is found in the tools
it offers for reading and mapping the particularity of the concrete case,
the transaction between multiple and one constituting the substantive
sense of multiplicity on which Deleuze—writing on his own and with
Guattari—depend. In this way, an emphasis on locality or particular-
ity realizes this “inexact yet completely rigorous” deployment of mod-
els. Badiou’s identification of so-called “monotonous productions”
is a failure (or a refusal) to understand the specificity of the conditions
­producing the example, the localized arrangement of abstract elements in
a multiplicity linking up in a way that generates the expressions appropri-
ate to it. The analysis, for example, of the difference between the diagram
of Descartes’ cogito in “Example 1” and its resonances with the “ox head
wired for sound,” that diagram associated with “Example 4” (both in
What is Philosophy? ) express this local difference; in the Riemannian anal-
ysis of the cogito, which I took up in the previous chapter, the structural
features of the diagram are deployed not only in construction, but also
as tools for reading the diagram itself, with attention to the particularity
and specificity of its conditions.

Conclusion
I began this chapter by identifying a commitment in Badiou’s ontologi­
cal project to a general form of subtraction; this procedure serves as an
injunction of sorts to read any consolidated situation—indeed, from any
concrete instance—toward the identification of the void point and suture
to being evident in any situation. I distinguished general subtraction
from a so-called special form of subtraction, in which Badiou addresses
the logical and ontological movement of truths emerging from any
evental rupture. The presence of a general subtractive procedure identi-
fies, along with a commitment to multiplicity, a second commitment in
common with the Deleuzian program insofar as both deploy subtractive
procedure to “make the multiple” in their respective work. An impor-
tant difference obtains, of course, in that Deleuze and Guattari’s subtrac-
tive procedure is a kind of normative requirement (which I established in
Chapter 4), while Badiou’s general subtraction is necessary only insofar
as it serves that general commitment to seek the void point at the foun-
dation of thought structured ontologically.
I showed that while Badiou’s prescription for general subtraction
offers a mapping strategy for the ontological makeup or framework of
170  B. Vartabedian

any situation built according to the robust components of his math-

ematized ontology, liabilities emerge when he deploys subtraction at a
meta-ontological or philosophical level. In these cases, the tethers that
maintain being qua being as no-thing—precisely the character of the
inconsistent multiple, the proper name of being in the form of the void,
and the relations of belonging and inclusion used to count the void
set—are eliminated. This unmooring transforms Badiou’s work into
an ontology of presence, insofar as it installs an analogue that requires
a certain kind of faith, but lacks the requisite tools for approaching its
object. I demonstrated this by reading Badiou’s meta-ontological sub-
traction in his critique of Heidegger in “The Question of Being Today”
and his engagement with Kant in “Kant’s Subtractive Ontology.” These
meta-ontological engagements identify a liability apparent in Badiou’s
work following from the strict assignation of ontology to mathematics.
I then returned to the conversation I opened in Chapter 2, address-
ing the critiques I enumerated there with the resources of more ful-
ly-formed understanding of multiplicity as structure and procedures for
one-production in Deleuze’s and Badiou’s respective work. In the direct
exchanges in 1976, 1977, and again in 1991, I showed that there are
two major issues underpinning these critiques, issues which add dimen-
sion to the response of one program to the other. Deleuze and Guattari
fail to appreciate Badiou’s work from a procedural standpoint; that is,
Badiou’s ontology does not generate but rather functions retrospectively
to map the structure of a situation, and similarly, scission does not gener-
ate but rather engages a kind of stoppage so that a transformative con-
dition might be drawn from the background. A second issue is linked to
structure, since the transformative condition can only emerge in Badiou’s
work from a single kind of structure, the singular situation. I used this
insight to return to Badiou’s critique of Deleuze in Deleuze: The Clamor
of Being concerning what Badiou identifies as “monotonous produc-
tions” in Deleuze’s work. I used this as an opportunity to reflect on the
demands Badiou places on mathematics and, in reading “One, Multiple,
Multiplicities,” for example, the way these demands translate to his cri-
tique of Deleuze on exactly this point. I addressed Simon Duffy’s care-
ful account of the “inexact yet rigorous” functioning of the Riemannian
model in Deleuze’s work as a way of assessing Badiou’s critique.
My intention in this chapter has not been to close a conversation;
indeed, and if anything, the concluding remarks concerning models or
the gesture toward Platonism in Badiou’s arguments in “One, Multiple,
 5 RE-ENGAGEMENTS  171

Multiplicities” ensure sites at which an informed assessment of multiplic-

ity as structure and mathematics as procedure will deepen these portions
of the discussion. Though I have not discussed the specific doctrine of
the event, the specter of transformation haunts my own analysis, as it
forms the practical and practicable expression of any ontological struc-
ture, any prescriptive procedure; I have shown in these remarks that its
intuitive presence dictates the way structures and procedures are con-
strued, and explicit engagement with a doctrine of event, as commit-
ment-in-common and thus a center for conversation, forms the horizon
of any future inquiry.

Notes
1. Mathematics of the Transcendental accounts for the complicated mathemat-
ical apparatus Badiou deploys in Logics of Worlds, one that serves to bridge
the ontology and theory of being that occupies Being and Event with the
ontology and theory of appearing Logics of Worlds is tasked with.
2. Paul Livingston (2012, 255/ff.) identifies the theory of ontological rank as
a point of convergence between Badiou’s “generic orientation of thought”
and precedent, “criteriological” positions. Livingston’s discussion of this
aspect of Badiou’s work spurred my thinking on this point.
3. In fact, Johnston identifies “three fundamental reasons why Kant functions
as one of the main nemeses of Badiouian philosophy” (347); Badiou’s
rejection of the noumenal/phenomenal distinction is the second of these
three. The other two consist in Kant’s emphasis on subjective finitude,
which ties philosophy and its prospects to the problems of human subjec-
tivity (347), and finally Badiou’s commitment to materialism, on the basis
of which Badiou insists that his project is fundamentally incompatible with
Kantian idealism (348).
4. Michael Olson (2009, 154) has suggested that an ontological reading of
Kant’s critical project transforms its central task according to “the subjec-
tive constitution of the objectivity of objects.”

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———. 2005. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London:
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———. 2008. Conditions. Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum.
———. 2009. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Translated by Alberto
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———. 2012. “The Fascism of the Potato.” In The Adventure of French
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———. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New
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———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis,
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———. 1994. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
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Edinburgh University Press.
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In Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, edited by Peter
Hallward, 165–181. London: Continuum.
 CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Multiplicity, Ontology,

Deleuze, Badiou

This book has been concerned with the (re)construction of a conversa­

tion between Badiou and Deleuze with Guattari in the period 1976–
1997, identifying their major presentations of multiplicity and the critical
accounts they offer of the other’s conceptual presentation. I have insisted
that a focused accounting of multiplicity as a structure clarifies both the
affirmative positions and critical results developed in this conversation.
Likewise, attention to the procedure prescribed by their respective struc-
tural commitments offers a more comprehensive accounting of the rela-
tion of one and multiple in their work, which situates their programs as
alternatives to determining the nature of being; where it was formerly
One or many, Deleuze and Badiou offer a novel option in their respec-
tive versions of multiplicity.
In Deleuze’s work, the structure afforded by continuous mani-
folds makes way for the connection or expansion to n-dimensions in
any local region of manifoldness; in this case, the dimensions are con-
nections forged between elements of the virtual, and in this local region
the demands for assessment and evaluation are prescribed by the con-
nections themselves. In its affirmation of local evaluation, Deleuze’s
account of multiplicity develops apart from an ambient frame of refer-
ence. Approaching these commitments through their original articula­
tion in work by Bernhard Riemann clarifies Deleuze’s interpretation
and deployment in his system. I attended to this structure in the defini-
tion of the virtual Idea in Difference and Repetition, demonstrating the
Riemannian principles in its presentation, and in the relation of space

© The Author(s) 2018 175

B. Vartabedian, Multiplicity and Ontology in Deleuze and Badiou,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76837-3_6
176  B. Vartabedian

Deleuze and Guattari prescribe in “1440: The Smooth and the Striated”
in A Thousand Plateaus.
With respect to procedures, both on his own and in collaboration
with Guattari, I explained that the genetic structure of Deleuze’s work is
built using the differential elements dx, dy, their relation dy/dx, and the
determination of this relation. I explained Deleuze’s peculiar interpreta-
tion of these differential elements against the background of a more con-
ventional assessment of the differential, which is used to identify average
and instantaneous rates of change at any point on a curve. The so-called
transcendental interpretation of the differential calculus brackets the
existence of the differentials and in doing so, relieves the apparatus from
having to locate these in space and time. I offered an interpretation of
the social Idea in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, which seats the
conditions for any concrete transformation in trace elements of an idea
circulating in any social context. I also discussed the presence of subtrac-
tion and interrogation deployed to “make the multiple” at the ground
of any consolidated instance. The analysis, evident in the figures of the
war machine as a-centered system and in an earlier accounting of over-
turned Platonism, reinforces the status of any consolidated instance as a
kind of one-ness in suspension, always understood according to the mul-
tiplicity producing it. I concluded my analysis of structure and procedure
in Deleuze and Guattari’s work by evaluating “Example 1” in What is
Philosophy? and its attendant diagram as an articulation of these concerns
‘in action.’
In my discussion of Badiou’s work, I showed that structure con-
sists largely in the threefold relation of inconsistent multiple—void—
consistent multiple. In Chapter 3, I discussed the way these are devel-
oped from developments in the discussions concerning set theory in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discussions involving
Cantor, Frege, Russell, and Zermelo. I discussed the status of the incon-
sistent multiple as no-thing in Badiou’s work, and the way this registers
a break with Cantor’s onto-theological assertion of an Absolute presence
capable of closing inconsistency. I assessed Zermelo’s axiom of separa-
tion, which prevents the overlap of consistent with inconsistent multi-
plicity, an occasion that would undermine the apparatus over which set
theory operates. I identified under “procedure” those mechanisms that
produce one-ness from multiple, including the account of the void, its
mark Ø, and the axiom establishing it as first existent at the founda-
tion of any ontological structure. I discussed the axioms of set theory
 6  CONCLUSION: MULTIPLICITY, ONTOLOGY, DELEUZE, BADIOU  177

used to construct these structures, and used this analysis of one-ing in

Being and Event as a means to approach the presentation of scission
in earlier work by Badiou; scission cuts any one from the multiple and
follows from an understanding of the dialectic as division. I discussed
Hegel’s assessment of something appearing in The Science of Logic as a
background for Badiou’s interpretation, and I discussed the way this
informs a procedure scission as one-ing, which he develops in Theory of
the Subject.
In addition to their respective commitments to multiplicity and their
deployments of mathematics, I argued that the attention, particularly to
procedure, reveals a third continuity between Badiou’s and Deleuze and
Guattari’s work in the form of subtractive analysis; this is analysis to identify
the multiplicity, whether the set of precipitating connections (in Deleuze’s
case) or the founding void point (in Badiou’s). To accomplish this, I
developed some terminological precision around what I called a general
subtraction in Badiou’s work, distinguishing it with the work of follow-
ing a truth through the pathways of special subtraction developed in the
Gamma Diagram. From this common commitment, I put the resources
developed under the auspices of structural and procedural analysis to
the original terms of the conversation from 1976 to 1997; this revealed
consistent critiques around the direction of multiplicity, the r­igidity of a
set-theoretic structure, and the very status of ontology itself as p­ roductive
or descriptive. I concluded by initiating another, entirely indirect, con-
versation concerning the way mathematics functions in Badiou’s and
Deleuze’s work, identifying the valences of rigidity and flexibility that
attend their programs, respectively. The work of thinking through
model as a methodological commitment forms a frontier for continued
investigation.
To be sure, transformation is a front-line concern for both Badiou and
Deleuze. As I discussed in the initial moves Chapter 2, much of what
motivates Badiou’s work is a search for traceable transformation, inspired
by the failure of May ’68 or the abdication of revolutionary politics
toward more comfortable parliamentary procedures. When Deleuze and
Guattari write “Rhizome,” their concern is to overturn the commitments
and tendencies present in traditional materialism; Deleuze, in Difference
and Repetition, similarly assigns to philosophy the task of overturning
Platonism (DR 59). I have acknowledged the presence of this expec-
tation as a specter in my own work. However, instead of tracing their
work in the direction of the new, I’ve seated their presentations in the
178  B. Vartabedian

direction of the old—that is, in the terms of an ancient ontological ques-

tion concerning whether being is One or many.

Other Lineages
One of the benefits of reading the Badiou-Deleuze relation from the
point of a common conceptual commitment like multiplicity is that it
situates their apparent dispute in a longer lineage of philosophical inves-
tigation. The availability of multiplicity (precisely of the sort Badiou and
Deleuze invoke) as an ontological choice draws these programs into con-
versation with Lucretius and the atomists, and Badiou’s avowed math­
ematical Platonism offers a perennial disjunction against the overturned
Platonism distinguishing Deleuze’s account. Following the method I’ve
suggested in the preceding pages, attention to the conceptual underpin-
nings of their respective deployments of multiplicity offers an additional
dimension to these comparisons, which are themselves regular features
of this particular philosophical landscape.1 In all cases, the opportunity
to liberate the Badiou-Deleuze knot from an internecine dispute and
open it on to a broader landscape of philosophical inquiry adds depth to
our understanding of—and appreciation for—these carefully-developed
systems. Indeed, and as I have explained elsewhere, a recognition of the
explicitly philosophical or ontological content of terminology emerging
from the Badiou-Deleuze relation or in their respective programs adds
value to their deployment in other fields (Vartabedian 2017).
Taking multiplicity as an ontological foundation in Badiou’s work
yielded a return to Kant’s notion of the manifold (Mannigfaltigkeit). In
“Kant’s Subtractive Ontology,” Badiou assesses the ontological prospects
apparent in Kant’s work, particularly in the assertion of the transcen-
dental unity of apperception and the transcendental object = X. Badiou
reads these as analogous to his own deployment of the void, hold-
ing a place at the foundation of cognition (in Kant’s case) and ontol-
ogy proper (in Badiou’s). Though Badiou uses this occasion to argue his
ontology is genuinely subtractive, insofar as it resolves to a single void
and not the relation required by the “two voids” present in Kant’s sys-
tem, this complicates Badiou’s assertions elsewhere that his ontology
is an alternative to ontologies of presence. Because the void essentially
overwrites inconsistent multiplicity, an act of faith in this infinite and
uncountable no-thing must be invoked to maintain its presence beyond
the boundary to though posited in the void. By re-seating Badiou’s work
 6  CONCLUSION: MULTIPLICITY, ONTOLOGY, DELEUZE, BADIOU  179

in conversation with that of Kant, and by mobilizing the key signposts of

his ontology and the content with which these are invested, I suggested
that Badiou opens his theory to compromise according to principles he
is keen to avoid. Put another way, in the move to compare his ontol-
ogy with the programs of other philosophers (particularly those with
whom more concrete continuities, such as multiplicity or subtraction,
are absent), Badiou identifies a liability attending the severity with which
he’s restricted ontological inquiry from philosophical investigation.
This liability and limitation were not only developed in relation to
Kant’s work, however; as I showed in Chapter 5, it also shows itself in
Badiou’s relationship to Heidegger. The restriction Badiou enacts in
Being and Event situates the mathematized ontology and its object
in inconsistent multiplicity as an alternative to the abdication evident in
Heidegger’s “poetic overturning” (BE 27), which expresses the exhaus-
tion of the more general onto-theological position; if the language and
tools to express being qua being are at the start inadequate to their task,
then it ought not be surprising that these find a limit. Philosophy and
ontology are thus gutted, identified as (prematurely) at their end and
ready to be abandoned. Badiou restricts ontological discourse to math-
ematics in Being and Event; however, when he approaches Heidegger at
a meta-ontological level, without the rich resources of his mathematical
ontology, liabilities and limitations in Badiou’s project become apparent.
This indicates, not necessarily the failure of Badiou’s project, but the dif-
ficulty with which thinkers after Heidegger face when disentangling their
positions from his.
For example, Knox Peden (2014) has pointed out that Deleuze’s
break from Heidegger is not decisive, and the reinvigoration of
Spinozism as an alternative to phenomenology requires a Heideggerian
presence to build against. Peden (2014, 217) explains, “In order to pro-
duce a Spinozism that is truly ‘post-Heideggerian,’ Deleuze must recu-
perate a notion of the infinite as anterior to the finite temporality regnant
in Heidegger’s exquisite account of modal existence.” Put another way,
it is not merely a bracketing of the subjective center that occupies phe-
nomenology, but Deleuze’s work requires another inversion. In the
preceding chapter, I discussed the way in which a new accounting of
materialism on the order of the rhizome requires a reversal of origins—
the material from which any single instance emerges is connected, multi-
ple, and ruptures in unpredictable though creative ways. In Peden’s pithy
180  B. Vartabedian

description here, the reader finds an alignment of the ‘anterior infinite’

with the virtual, the depths to which interrogation, division, and subtrac-
tion dive to account for the conditions producing any finite instance.2
Indeed, Peden characterizes the terms I have been interpreting accord­
ing to a Riemannian framework (with a heritage in the Kantian notion of
the manifold) as originating in Deleuze’s disposition toward Spinozism.
He identifies conceptual affinities between Deleuze and Althusser con-
cerning a Spinozist interpretation of multiplicity (2014, 238), and
approaches the structure of the Deleuzian idea and its differential ele-
ments from this vantage. Peden’s approach to reading Deleuze, particu-
larly in relation to Heidegger, to Althusser, and ultimately to Spinoza,
opens yet another frontier for engaging the Deleuze-Badiou relation,
specifically concerning multiplicity. Peden’s insights identify a set of fis-
sures and fractures that have deeper origins than the boundary I’ve iden-
tified in Kant’s work.

New Frontiers
Readers attentive to the exchanges between Badiou and Deleuze in the
period to which I’ve limited my inquiry may notice a curious absence
in the preceding: Badiou’s review of Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and
the Baroque. In this review, Badiou’s entire first section is devoted to an
analysis of Deleuze’s sense of multiplicity, and it prefigures much of what
appears in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. I have left this for last because
in the brief opposition Badiou raises to Deleuze’s theory of the multiple
here is revealed the most fundamental determination to which each pro-
gram is committed and a further frontier for exploration.
Badiou (1994, 52) points out, first, that the notion of the fold pre-
sents an “antiextensional concept of the multiple, a representation of the
multiple as labyrinthine complexity, directly qualitative and irreducible to
any elementary composition whatever.” By this, Badiou seems to mean
that Deleuze’s multiplicity resists reduction to formal language and can-
not be trapped under a logical concept; it manages some form of quali­
tative expression from a complex tangle of relations. This description
also reveals (by implication) Badiou’s own demands for a concept of the
multiple: it is formalizable in logical language and has tools—an axiom
of extensionality, for example—that indicate its in/equality with other
multiples; it eschews connection and related complexity except for the
most basic forms of relation, belonging and inclusion. When reinvention
 6  CONCLUSION: MULTIPLICITY, ONTOLOGY, DELEUZE, BADIOU  181

comes, it will be legible in an elementary composition, and as such reveal

a fragment of being qua being that has been there all along. Perhaps
only in amorous love will this event be expressed in a radically local way,
though the steady state of Badiou’s ontology will insist that this love is
structured like all other great loves.
In my remarks concluding Chapter 5, I emphasized the ‘virtue’ of
locality in Deleuzian multiplicity, a virtue that is used as one in a series of
reasons for resisting the claim that Deleuze is a philosopher of the One-
All. In his review of The Fold, Badiou (1994, 54) discusses the liability
attending locality, saying:

Nuance will be used to dissolve the latent opposition, one of whose

terms the clear magnifies. Continuity can then be established locally as an
exchange of values at each real point, so that the couple clear/obscure can
no longer be separated, and even less brought under a hierarchical scheme,
except at the price of a global abstraction. This abstraction itself is foreign
to the life of the world.

Badiou’s objection here is with Deleuze’s apparent refusal to choose

among or select against; where “the clear,” those ideas following Plato
and Descartes, relieves obscurity and offers a path to decision, Deleuze’s
interpretation of Leibniz in The Fold—and indeed much of what I’ve
discussed in the preceding pages—rejects these in favor of any point’s
fragmentation into a multiplicity. Perhaps the abstraction Badiou is call-
ing on here is something like the “inexact yet rigorous” notions Deleuze
deploys in his work, but Badiou seems to suggest that even the most pal-
atable abstraction would fail to generate sensible results. Deleuze is the
philosopher of the fracture, of fragmentation, of the crack; these are con-
ditions any count, any clear and distinct idea, or any Form would fail to
collect to itself.
In a pithy statement of the stakes, at least as far as Badiou imagi-
nes these, he says, “Animal or number: this is the cross of metaphys-
ics” (1994, 55). Here again, Badiou repeats the assignment of vital and
mathematical multiplicities, an assignment that, as the review of Daniel
W. Smith’s argument in Chapter 2 proposed, Badiou uses to cover over
the diverse mathematical commitments on which Deleuze’s project
depends. In Chapter 5, my attention to Badiou’s work with Riemann in
“One, Multiple, Multiplicities” suggests that because Deleuze does not
follow Riemann to the letter—that is, to the crossroads of set theory and
182  B. Vartabedian

its ontological potential—Deleuze’s multiplicity will only ever be vitalist.

However, as an alternative to the cross of animal and number, I propose
that an examination of multiplicity reveals that the cross of metaphys-
ics—the lowest layer and fundamental determination—for Badiou and
Deleuze is either dissolution or decision. This amounts to a revision of
the terms of the debate in a novel framework, as Badiou’s decision that
“the One is not” accomplishes, or an inversion of the debate itself, as
Deleuze’s turn toward multiplicity as substantive requires. That is, we
find ourselves at the frontier of determining how any ontology that has
displaced subjectivity in the ways Deleuze and Badiou have gets under-
way in the first place.3
Readers of Badiou’s 1988 review must fast-forward to 2011, when
the Nirenbergs launch a similar-sounding critique at Badiou’s ontology,
claiming it empties ontology of being, of thought, or any other human
characteristics that would make it “make sense” in the life of the world
(after a phrase). But it seems fair to pose the same question to Badiou;
not, as the Nirenbergs demand, to make ontology an endeavor seated
with human subjectivity again, but rather to push its boundaries as far as
possible. Isn’t all of what Badiou and Deleuze have taken up an abstrac-
tion “foreign to the life of the world,” and isn’t that the point? The price
of ontology conducted absent any subject raises the question, in the per-
sisting attention to mathematical procedure, to structure, and to being
and thought ambitiously loosed from the controls of subjectivity, Badiou
and Deleuze each ask us to consider again what do we mean when we
talk about ‘being’? What abstraction, whether qua being or qua thought,
will allow for imagining the new, the novel, or the transformed? In the
preceding I have emphasized, not the event, but rather their respective
understanding of multiple and its relationship to one as necessary for rec-
ognizing this possibility.

Notes
1. Take, for example, A.J. Bartlett (2011), Ryan J. Johnson (2016),
John Bova and Paul Livingston (2017); Thomas Nail’s recent return to
Lucretius as “the first philosopher of immanence” (2017) brings Lucretius
into another register with Badiou and Deleuze, theorists of ‘immanent
multiplicity.’
2. In Pocket Pantheon, Badiou (2009, 117–118) cites this commit-
ment to infinity as precisely that which unites his work with Deleuze’s.
 6  CONCLUSION: MULTIPLICITY, ONTOLOGY, DELEUZE, BADIOU  183

In characteristic fashion, of course, Badiou insists it is a choice against fini-

tude and its apparatuses, rather than an affirmation of infinity or, as Peden
explains here, a matter of prioritizing infinity as Deleuze seems to do.
3. As Jay Lampert (2015, 272) has pointed out, even a decision for Deleuze
is an instance of fracture: “When Deleuze speaks of the ‘power of deci-
sion,’ he means something like commitment to a serial problem. A deci-
sion is not ‘decisive’ in the sense that an argument or a battle is. It is not a
state of mind, a set of reasons, or an outcome, but a divergence-point and
all its possible branches, both fulfilled and unfulfilled.”

References
Badiou, Alain. 1994. “Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.” In
Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas
and Dorothea Olkowski, 51–69. London: Routledge.
———. 2009. Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy. Translated by
David Macey. London: Verso. Originally Petit Panthéon Portatif. Paris:
Éditions la Fabrique, 2008.
Bartlett, A.J. 2011. Badiou and Plato: An Education By Truths. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Bova, John, and Paul Livingston. 2017. “Univocity, Duality, and Ideal Genesis:
Deleuze and Plato.” In Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics,
edited by Abraham Jacob Greenstine and Ryan J. Johnson. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Johnson, Ryan J. 2016. The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter. Plateaus—New
Directions in Deleuze Studies Series. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lampert, Jay. 2015. “Deleuze’s ‘Power of Decision’, Kant’s = X, and Husserl’s
Noema.” In At The Edges of Thought: Deleuze and Post-Kantian Philosophy,
edited by Craig Lundy and Daniela Voss, 272–292. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Nail, Thomas. 2017. “Lucretius and the Immanence of Motion.” The Immanent
Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere. Social Science Research
Council (SSRC). Available Online: https://tif.ssrc.org/2017/09/19/lucreti-
us-and-the-immanence-of-motion/. Accessed 5 January 2018.
Peden, Knox. 2014. Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from
Cavaillès to Deleuze. Cultural Memory in the Present Series, edited by Hent
de Vries. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Vartabedian, Becky with Nathan Eckstrand. 2017. “Early Career Research
Spotlight: Becky Vartabedian.” Blog of the American Philosophical Association.
https://blog.apaonline.org/2017/11/15/early-career-research-spotlight-re-
becca-vartebedian/. Accessed 15 November 2017.
 Index

A Bartlett, A.J., 3, 109, 137, 142, 160,

Aristotle, 8, 30, 58, 59, 89, 97, 110, 182
133, 147 and Justin Clemens, 3, 109, 160
Atomism, 67 “Basic Law V”. See Frege, Gottlob
Axiom, 1, 18, 56, 70, 76, 79, 80, 82, Belonging (relation), 42, 76, 84, 100,
84, 94, 98, 101–103, 109, 176, 101, 109, 130, 140, 160, 170,
180 180
axiom of extensionality. See ∈ (symbol), 81
Extensionality Bordas-Demoulin, Jean, 114, 132
axiom of powerset. See Powerset Bosteels, Bruno, 14, 37, 50
axiom of separation. See Separation Bourbaki, Nicolas, 1, 14, 98–102,
axiom of void. See Void 130, 131
empty set, 98, 99, 101, 102, 131
Burali-Forti, Cesare, 71
B Burali-Forti paradox, 18, 56, 70–74,
Badiou, Alain, 1–6, 9, 12–19, 21, 25, 94
26, 31, 36–39, 41–43, 45–51,
55, 56, 70, 74–83, 85–89, 95,
96, 99, 101, 104–109, 118, 131, C
132, 137–139, 145–148, 152, Calculus, 1, 112–114, 116, 118, 130,
156–158, 161–171, 175, 177, 132, 165, 176
178, 180–182 conventional interpretation of the
Peyrol, Georges (Alain Badiou), differential, 130
16, 25, 26, 31, 36, 43, 48, 87, transcendental interpretation of the
104, 162, 166 differential, 118, 176

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 185

B. Vartabedian, Multiplicity and Ontology in Deleuze and Badiou,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76837-3
186  Index

Cantor, Georg, 5, 56, 70, 88, 94 scission, 36, 95, 107, 130, 145,
Clemens, Justin, 3, 109, 160 146, 156, 177; constitutive
and A.J. Bartlett, 3, 109, 160 scission A = AAp, 106; force,
Cogito, 9, 19, 20, 38, 39, 41, 94, 146; splace, 146
125–129, 131, 139, 158, 169 in Sophist, 122–125, 129
in Descartes, 8, 19, 38, 41, 126, Duffy, Simon, 13, 19, 48, 114, 116,
131, 169 132, 139, 167, 170
inWhat is Philosophy?, 9, 19, 38, 94,
125, 126, 158, 169; “Example
1”, 19, 94, 125, 169 E
Cohen, Paul J., 5, 6, 164 Euclid, 1, 20, 30, 63, 66, 68, 110,
118
“Example 1”. See Cogito
D Extensionality (axiom), 102, 103, 180
DeLanda, Manuel, 7, 132, 133
Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 12–15,
20, 21, 44–48, 50, 61, 64–66, F
89, 110, 112–117, 124, 131, Feltham, Oliver, 12, 95
132, 146, 148, 164, 178–183 Frege, Gottlob, 28, 40, 50, 80, 81,
and Félix Guattari, 1, 2, 9, 13, 89, 98, 159, 176
15–19, 25–31, 33–43, 48, 49, “Basic Law V”, 81
51, 55–57, 67–70, 80, 88, 93,
94, 104, 109, 111, 118–123,
125–130, 137–140, 144, 145, G
154–159, 161–163, 166–170, Gauss, C.F., 60
175–177 Gillespie, Sam, 13, 50, 79
Descartes, René, 8, 19, 38, 41, 125,
126, 131, 169, 181
Dialectic, 33–35, 37, 42, 95, 104– H
107, 123, 125, 130, 132, 145, Hallward, Peter, 12
146, 177 Hegel, G.W.F., 104–107, 130, 156,
Differential, 1, 7, 63, 64, 106, 177
111–118, 130, 132, 146, 155, Heidegger, Martin, 6, 78, 138, 140,
165, 168, 176, 180 147, 148, 150, 151, 170, 179,
differential relationdy/dx, 114 180
dx, 7, 64, 111, 113–115, 118, 130, Herbart, J.F., 60
176
pre-individual singularity, 1, 64,
111, 112, 118, 130 I
Division, 35, 72, 87, 94, 95, 99, 107, Idea, 7, 18, 56, 57, 61, 64–67, 69,
111, 122–125, 129, 130, 133, 88, 97, 110–118, 123, 124, 129,
145–147, 156, 177, 180 130, 149, 155–157, 163, 175,
and overturned Platonism, 94, 111, 176, 180, 181
122, 125, 129, 146
 Index   187

Kantian idea, 7; Schematism. See infinities, 5, 73, 74, 77, 78, 83,
Kantian idea 103; no-thing, 5, 70, 94, 98,
virtual idea, 7, 18, 56, 57, 61, 100, 170
64–67, 88, 110, 111, 113, Mannigfaltigkeit, 8, 9, 178; in Kant,
116–118, 129, 155, 163, 175; 9, 178; in Riemann, 62
social idea, 111, 116, 163 pure multiplicity, 3, 5, 6, 35, 149,
Inclusion (relation), 101, 102, 109, 151
130, 140, 160, 170, 180 “stellar multiplicity”, 43
“vital multiplicity”, 43, 45, 181
Maoism, 16, 26, 31–33, 43, 50, 156,
K 161
Kant, Immanuel, 9 Union des Communistes de France
Marxiste-Leniniste (UCFML),
31
L Materialism, 16, 18, 25–27, 29, 30,
Lacan, Jacques, 27 34, 36, 37, 48, 95, 130, 157,
Lautman, Albert, 68, 89 161, 162, 171, 177, 179
Livingston, Paul, 79, 81, 82, 131, May ‘68, 157
171, 182 Meta-ontology, 147
Lucretius, 4, 97, 160, 178, 182

N
M “New Philosophers”, 26, 49, 164
Magnitude, 9, 57–62, 68, 72, 89, 112 Nirenberg, David L., 2, 3, 160
Maimon, Solomon, 112 Nirenberg, Ricardo, 2, 3, 20, 160,
Manifold or Multiplicity 167, 182
consistent multiplicity, 5, 18, 70, Non-Euclidean geometries, 1, 20, 30,
72, 75, 149; in Badiou, 1, 118
70, 75, 88, 109, 140, 149; in Numbers, 5, 18, 28, 59, 71–74, 79,
Cantor, 1, 70, 73, 74, 78, 176 80, 89, 103, 140, 166
continuous multiplicity, 8, 18, 57, Aleph ‫א‬, 73, 86
61, 65, 66, 68, 175; continu- cardinal numbers, 73, 86, 166, 168;
ous manifolds, 8, 62, 65, 110 large cardinals. See Cardinal
discrete multiplicity, 20, 61, 88 Numbers
generic multiplicity, 5, 6 first transfinite number ω0, 87
inconsistent multiplicity, 5, 6, 17, ordinal numbers (ordinality), 5, 71,
70, 72–80, 82–84, 86–89, 93, 73, 79, 80
94, 98, 100, 103, 140, 141,
143–146, 148–150, 152–155,
159, 176, 178, 179; in Badiou, O
74, 77–79, 83, 85, 94; in Object = X, 10–12, 60, 151–154, 178
Cantor, 70–74; as infinity of
188  Index

Ontology, 1–3, 5, 6, 12, 14, 15, 19, S

20, 25, 29, 33, 37, 43, 47–50, Schematism. See Kantian idea
56, 64, 70, 75–79, 82, 84, 88, Scission. See Division
93–95, 97, 101, 103, 104, 109, Separation (axiom), 56, 70, 76, 79,
129, 130, 138–154, 158–166, 80, 82, 94, 98, 103, 109, 176
168, 170, 171, 175, 177–179, in Badiou, 70, 76, 79, 103
181, 182 in Zermelo, 79, 80, 82, 94, 103,
general ontology (in Badiou), 140, 176
141 Smith, Daniel W., 13, 20, 46, 48, 123,
special ontology (in Badiou), 132, 163, 181
140–142, 146, 152 Space, 8–10, 12, 18, 20, 56–60,
Ordinality. See Ordinal Numbers 62–70, 83, 88, 106, 110, 113,
Overturned Platonism, 94, 111, 120, 115, 118, 164, 168, 175, 176
122, 125, 129, 131, 146, 163, in Kant, 9, 12, 60
176, 178 smooth space and striated space, 67
Spinoza, 43, 164, 180
Subtraction, 9, 18, 19, 29, 30, 35, 69,
P 93, 94, 99, 109, 111, 118–125,
Paradox, 5, 18, 56, 70–73, 80, 81, 83, 127–130, 137–155, 160, 162,
88, 89, 94 169, 170, 176, 177, 179, 180
Burali-Forti paradox. See Burali- n-1 in Deleuze and Guattari, 9
Forti, Cesare n-1 in Riemann, 9, 111, 118, 121,
Parti Communiste Française (PCF), 122, 130, 140, 144
31 general subtraction, 137, 139–146,
Peden, Knox, 179 150–155, 160, 162, 169, 177
Phenomenology, 3, 28, 78, 154, 179 special subtraction, 137, 140–142,
Plato, 122, 129, 147, 159, 181 177; Gamma Diagram, 137,
Plotnitsky, Arkady, 62, 89, 110 140, 177
Powerset (axiom), 102, 103
Pre-individual singularity. See
Differential U
UCFML. See Maoism

R
“Radical thesis”, 2, 3, 6, 19, 139, 159, V
162 Void, 4, 5, 18, 33, 44, 70, 72, 75, 84,
mathematics = ontology, 139 86, 88, 89, 94, 97, 98, 100–104,
“Rhizome–Introduction” 108, 109, 130, 131, 140–146,
(“Rhizome”), 1, 9, 13, 25, 26 149–155, 159, 160, 162, 165,
Riemann, Bernhard, 1, 8, 18, 30, 55, 169, 170, 176–178
58, 175 Ø (symbol), 5, 93, 94, 97, 102,
Russell, Bertrand, 81 103, 130, 150, 154, 176
Russell’s paradox, 56, 70, 80
 Index   189

axiom of empty set (Bourbaki), 98, W

100, 101 War machine, 93, 111, 120–122, 125,
axiom of null set (Zermelo-Fraenkel 129, 131, 158, 163, 176
set theory), 101
in Badiou, 4, 5, 18, 44, 45, 70, 72,
74, 75, 78, 82, 84, 86–88, Z
93–104, 108, 111, 129, 130, Zermelo, Ernst, 56, 80
138, 140–155, 159–162, 165, Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, 93, 130
166, 169, 170, 176–179
void (axiom), 5, 18, 44, 75, 84, 86,
93, 95, 97, 98, 100–103, 108,
130, 140–146, 148, 150–155,
159, 161, 162, 169, 170, 178
Voss, Daniela, 89, 112, 116