Alain Badiou on Existential Relevance of Death

This essay is an attempt to understand the relationship between existence and death in Alain Badiou's philosophical system. Badiou is a pro-system philosopher and is among the rare group of philosophers who speak of the necessity of the revival of the discourse on ontology as the building block of philosophy. He seeks to accomplish this through establishing a multiple-based ontological system upon Cantor's set theory. This multiple-centered ontology helps him neither be entrapped by the radical relativism of the postmodern and poststructuralist philosophers, nor to overcome the limitations and weaknesses of classic ideology-plagued ontology. It is through the prism of this multiple-based ontology which Badiou tries to conceptualize the relationship between existence and death. Thus he defines existence as the degree according to which, in a situation, the multiple appears as identical to itself. Taken this way, he believes existence is not an ontological concept but it is a matter of logic of being. According to Badiou, a being's existence has nothing to do with its multiple identity. In other words, existence is not a matter of essence; rather, it is more related to the appearance of being. Thus he defines death as the minimality or inexistence of a being in its referential situation. Mathematically speaking, the death of a being is an indication of the fall of its function of appearance. Thus he depicts death as a logical and not ontological notion. Badiou believes that such analysis of relationship of existence and death has two outcomes:a)death is a change in exteriority of the function of appearance of a given multiple, and
b) the meditation on death is vain. For death is but a consequence, and what thought must turn towards is the event upon which depends the local alteration of the functions of appearance.