Not to be mean about the maths teachers I actually did have, but not one of them ever succeeded in making me giggle the way portions of Being and Event have been making me giggle over the past couple of days. I’ve been reading it on the train up to London, and attempting to read it on the tube. Probably get punched for that some time soon. Still, at least it’s not Dan fucking Brown. (That’s his real name, y’know…).

There’s something conspiratorial about the way Badiou works through his demonstrations, as if he’s letting you in on a tremendously good in-joke (an infinite jest, even). I admit, I actually threw back my head and cackled out loud when I got to the section on “Natural Multiples: Ordinals”, which kicks off with the sentence “There is better to come”. That’s one way of putting it: we’ve just been introduced to the concept of transitivity, via the transitive set {?, {?}} (which Badiou calls “the Two”), and if you’re acquainted the concept of recursion (via G?del, Escher, Bach, say), it’s hard not to have some intimations about what might be on its way. Everything races ahead joyously, for a while, from that point.

I’ve found Badiou’s treatment of axiomatic set theory so far extremely demystifying, and I guess it’s the process of demystification that’s so pleasurable; that and the recurring sense that Badiou must have read Derrida’s comments on the “structurality of structure” in “Structure, Sign and Play…” and quite determinedly set off from that point in a completely different direction. I wonder, with an almost prurient curiosity, whether Derrida ever read Being and Event, and what he made of it if he did. It seems to me that Badiou has Derrida’s number (or does a number on Derrida), in such a way that it is difficult to imagine an adequate Derridean retort.

Not a few readers of Badiou have complained about, or apologised for, being unable to follow the maths. I think this is a learned helpnessness, which one should labour to unlearn: the maths really isn’t that hard, and I say this as a non-mathematician who finds real maths quite prohibitively difficult to get into. I’m helped along by what I’ve been able to absorb from my readings on computer science-y topics, and it may be that what math-blind readers of Badiou need is a similar crutch or guide-rail (obviously adapted to the particular contours of their own impairment), but I promise that it’s worth trying to find a way in.

(Alternative means of persuasion: try these slogans. Math-blindness is a disease of capitalism! Mathematical literacy is the only weapon against neo-liberal mystagogy!)

In fact, I’m not at all sure that reading something like Being and Event is really worth it without the maths: it must be a hard and bewildering slog, just for the sake of a few (admittedly rather appealing) political catchphrases. On the other hand, the treatments of Beckett and Mallarm? (again, a fairly pointed encroachment on Derridean turf) are still ahead of me; perhaps “the resources of the poem” provide a viable alternative route - if not a royal road.