Ontological Excess and the Being of Language (original) (raw)

This paper engages in a close reading of Badiou's Being and Event as an occasion to investigate the ways in which being and language may be related and does so by focusing upon his idea that mathematical language, in the form of set theory, is capable of managing the 'ontological excess' which he associates particularly with poetic language. Because, he argues, poetic language involves a sort of willful engagement with the 'one-effect', the presencing of multiplicity, and thereby the only possibility for being's emergence, is made unfeasible. The paper locates some of the affects of excess in the experience of modernism, and specifically in the poetic language of Mallarmé and Baudelaire. By considering what might be involved in 'the saying-showing power of language', as this idea is developed by both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the paper seeks to show how excess is the very source of beings' appearance in language, given that this appearance is silent and hence unsayable.

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