As It is Complex

as it is complex. Inasmuch as the situation and the count are one andthe same thing, it is clear that the "inconsistent underside" of a situationis itself fundamentally ungraspable. However, the count itself, beingan operation, clearly indicates its status as result, thereby necessitatinga corollary "must-be-counted" - an uncounted remainder - and it isprecisely this before-of-the-count that, in Badiou's words, causes thesituation to "waver towards the phantom of inconsistency" (BE 53).Given the seemingly self-contradictory fact that, while everything iscounted, the count itself necessitates a "phantom remainder" (namely,the initial "pure" multiple), we must conclude that the pure multipleis simultaneously excluded (or subtracted) from the situation - frompresentation itself - and at the same time included in "the name of what'would be' the presentation itself, the presentation 'in-itself'" (BE 53).Excluded from presentation itself, included in presentation in-itself, thepure multiple must really be nothing in the situation.However, as Badiou at once points out, being-nothing is not at allthe same thing as non-being. Indeed, this nothing subsists within thesituation in two immediate guises: in the very operation of the count(which, in its "pure transparency", itself goes uncounted); and in thepure multiple upon which the count operates (which, as we have seen,differs in-itself from its situational result). Thus the nothing, or, to giveit a more constructive name, the void, ultimately designates the gapbetween the situation (consistency, presentation itself) and its underlyingbeing (inconsistency, presentation in-itself). To this effect Badioudefines the void as the precise point at which the situation is sutured toits being and asserts that "every structured presentation unpresents 'its'void, in the mode of this non-one which is merely the subtractive face ofthe count" (BE 55). The pure multiple {qua being) thus "in-consists" asthe situational void, as the void in situ. This in-consistency is, however,absolutely fundamental, in so far as the law of structured presentationis that of the errancy of the void, just as much as its normal regime is"an absolute 'unconscious' of the void" (BE 56). Two immediate andimportant theses follow from this proposition: first, that, according tothe situation, the void is the proper name of being; and, second, thateverything that is is woven from the void.Mathematics is ontologyBadiou's position on the multiple leads him to conclude that mathematicsis ontology. After all, his two major ontological doctrines - that