APS takes up the theme of worlds (and the collapse of worlds) and ecology in a very Merleau-Pontyish post on The Co-Implication of World and Earth. There’s a kind of grace to his writing at the moment that I appreciate; I mean grace as serendipity, things just coming off unexpectedly right, rather than poise and elegance. For example:

Of course, moving outside this position as onlooker, taking a step out of the everyday and into the guise of the dead, we can write it in formal mathematical language, and this has its own story to tell but is ultimately unconcerned with the life present prior to it.

This gets right to where the differend between Badiou and Deleuze occurs. If according to Badiou Deleuzian “vitalism” permits one to speak of the “life present prior” to this or that schema of the virtual, and falls back ceaselessly on this prior present as the inexhaustible resource of philosophical-practical or political-conceptual creativity, for Deleuze the infinite swarming of Badiou’s set-theoretic multiple is ultimately a power of death, an affair of number or of “formal mathematical language”, that perhaps comprehends the vital in simulation, through a kind of accumulation and articulation of evidence, but is “ultimately unconcerned” with what we experience “intuitionally” of body and world.

In Anthony’s account, the phenomenological reduction is the locus of this “concern” that mathematical language allegedly lacks: it is “under the reduction” that world and earth, body and perception, emerge as “co-implicated”. Of course Badiou does not simply lack an account of phenomena, or a logos to go with it: Logics of Worlds is intended as just such an account. What does it mean for two things to be co-implicated, what is the schema of such relations and invaginations? Badiou’s answer is different to that given by phenomenology, because it asserts that any particular logic of appearance is always the logic of some particular world, and this proliferation of logics (of worlds) is thus not regulated by any singular reduction, but by the “great logic” of appearing and objectivity given in topos theory. Is this a valid answer, or an evasion?