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Continuing from part one on “What Is Love?” (1992). We go through Badiou’s account of love as the resolution of the paradox that on the one hand, Truth is trans-positional, which means there’s no separate “man’s truth” and “woman’s truth” (or any other division like that), yet the positions of man and woman are “entirely disjunct.” Badiou puts this in terms of a “humanity function,” where people engaging in truth procedures like love thereby get counted as part of Humanity.
In the full episode, we consider the extent to which Badiou’s mathematical language is merely metaphor (it’s not) and look at Badiou’s comments about alleged gender differences, why he insists that the two perspectives are entirely distinct. One way that Badiou is not like someone espousing archetypical male and female spirits is that he doesn’t consider these to exist prior to love itself. Love creates sexual difference, and sexual difference creates love; we have no reason to prioritize (chronologically or ontologically) one of these over the other.
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