Metaphysics

The Immanence of Truths: Being and Event III

♡+

Alain Badiou

2018

The Immanence of Truths (L'Immanence des vérités) completes Badiou's Being and Event trilogy and crowns a philosophical project more than thirty years in the making. Its central innovation is the concept of the Absolute — reconceived not as a theological entity or a transcendent limit but as what mathematics, through the theory of infinite cardinal numbers (the infinite hierarchy of alephs), reveals about the structure of being. Badiou argues that truths are not merely finite interruptions of situations — as they appeared in Being and Event — but finitely produced representatives of infinite, absolute multiplicities. The immanence of truths means that the absolute is not beyond or outside the world but is present within it wherever a truth procedure operates: in the infinite excess that genuine mathematics, politics, art, and love introduce into their situations. The three preceding categories — the Finite, the World, and the Absolute — organise the work, which also includes a sweeping survey of the history of philosophy as a series of responses to the question of the absolute, from Plato and Spinoza through Hegel and Cantor to the present. With this volume, Badiou completes the most systematic philosophy produced in France since Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, and arguably the most sustained encounter between continental philosophy and formal mathematics in the history of Western thought.