While reading Hans Jürg Rheinberger’s already seminal Toward a History of Epistemic Things - he is becoming something of a hero to me these days – I couldn’t prevent myself from constantly highlighting the Badiouian touch of his arguments. That is, I was struck by the fact that so many of Badiou’s themes (at least those which could be consider his most important; everything between and inside the mathematics of being and the laws of appearing) come to the fore when Rheinberger discusses what he calls an ‘epistemology of time’ that is to answer the question how – in the context of scientific experimentation – we can speak of history without invoking origins and grounds. As he formulates it: ‘Are they looking at a past that is the transformation of another, foregoing past? Or are they looking at a past that is the product of a past deferred, that is, of a future present?‘ (p. 176).
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Archive for the ‘Toward a History of Epistemic Things’ Category
Minor note on the newness of the new beyond/below Badiou
September 8, 2011An Epistemology of the Concrete // New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics
May 26, 2011Just recently discovered two great new books published by Duke University Press; Hans-Jurg Rheinberger’s An Epistemology of the Concrete and New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. (more…)
