Bergson, Badiou, and "The Problem of Language": Fragment 12934ff.

“The Bergsonian denigration of language, as the synchronistic counterpart of pure, dynamic, diachronicity, inaugurated the postmodern stance on language as a medium at odds with phenomenal experience. Language’s quantificational (mathematical) structure seems to oppose it to what is originary or purely qualitative; however, given a brief consideration of the structure of language, this proves to be an untenable position. Language is a network of expressions which consist of free variables that become constant only when set in relation to a verificational double. This means, then, that expressions, in the form of n+x, a constant n, infintely predicable by x, a free variable, are not closed, cold, and lifeless symbols, as Bergson state in Freewill and Time, but, rather, are dynamic embodiments of qualitative multiplicity, situationally closed and temporally open.

Foundational to Bergson’s critique of language is a misunderstanding of numbers as static synthetic bodies, a notion that Badiou’s Being and Event is at pains to correct. Badiou’s correction consists in disproving the existence of the One, replacing the One with a function of consciousness he calls “the count-as-One structure,” which upon appropriation of a pure multiplicity creates the virtual “one.” However updated it may be, Badiou’s concept of the “count-as-One” structure of consciousness is merely a nuanced, slightly revised version of Bergson’s theory of consciousness. Consciousness is set in opposition to noumenality, insisting upon Postcantorian Set Theory’s implicity superiority in forming an ontology that breaks free from traditional identity theories, what Badiou bases his ontology upon, also fails to account to explain how the “one” comes into being; instead, it merely reduplicates Bergson’s mistaken ideas about number by insisting upon the ex nihilo origination of the “one” by means of an inexplicable function of consciousness. And what is at stake is nothing trivial; the affirmation or negation of the existence of the one is perhaps the only remnant of philosophical antiquity that still bears significant consequences for identity theory, irrespective of the theologico-platonic overtones of the primary “one.”"

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