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Brassier and Toscano - Postface - Aleatory Rationalism (from Alain Badiou - Theoretical Writings)

"Brassier and Toscano - Postface - Aleatory Rationalism (from Alain Badiou - Theoretical Writings)" belongs to Brassier's realism line, where abstraction, truth, and rational critique are used to pressure-test the archive's more charismatic inheritances.

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These pages matter because they show one major route by which the archive is forced into clearer argumentative language. Brassier's realism turns the afterlife of Land and the CCRU into a problem of truth, abstraction, and rational critique rather than scene myth or stylistic intensity alone.

The mechanism is pressure through philosophy. Sellars, Laruelle, Badiou, nihilism, and realism all become ways of testing whether concepts survive once they are detached from their original scene charisma and forced into stricter conceptual articulation.

That matters because this section is about philosophical afterlives, not only loyalty or rejection. Brassier keeps the archive alive precisely by refusing to leave its concepts in their original rhetorical atmosphere.

How to read this text

Read for how realism, truth, or abstraction are being defined before following the page into its local debate or target.

Track where the page tests Land or post-CCRU concepts against a stricter account of philosophy. That pressure is usually the real hinge of the text.

Representative extracts

Definition · paragraph 19

Aleatory rationalism is based precisely on the fact that there is no ‘reason’, in the sense of ratio or Grund, for events and the truths they give rise to. So while the type of philosophical subjectivity espoused by Badiou does seem to rest on the postulate which we could call that of ‘the justice of the new’ – on a kind of a priori and thus void fidelity to what happens insofar as it happens – the critical philosopher (or any of his Postface

Definition · paragraph 18

Needless to say, this means that Badiou’s philosophy abandons one of the main concerns common to critique, dialectics and sophistry, not to mention numerous manifestations of philoso- phical materialism: the account of the genesis of doxa or the sources of repre- sentation. Separation, rather than constitution, is the core of aleatory rationalism. Theoretical Writings

Definition · paragraph 6

Rather than postulating the inexor- able primacy of some figure of the One and the Whole, Badiou’s post- Cantorian rationalism asserts an untotalizable ontological dissemination and the aleatory emergence of a plurality of truths. For it is the decision to iden- tify mathematics with ontology that functions as the precondition for the evental theory of truth, splitting the subject of philosophy from within by forcibly expropriating it of its (imaginary) grip on its own constitutive condi- tions.

Definition · paragraph 6

Rather than postulating the inexor- able primacy of some figure of the One and the Whole, Badiou’s post- Cantorian rationalism asserts an untotalizable ontological dissemination and the aleatory emergence of a plurality of truths.

Definition · paragraph 1

POSTFACE Aleatory Rationalism Rimbaud employs a strange expression: ‘les re´ voltes logiques’, ‘logical revolts’. Philosophy is something like a ‘logical revolt’. Philosophy pits thought against injustice, against the defective state of the world and of life.

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