A Mathematised Archaeology Of Ontology: Agamben’s Modal Ontology Mapped Onto Badiou’s Mathematised Ontology

Abstract

This paper looks at the central portion of The Use of Bodies called An Archaeology of Ontology. Specifically, it concerns itself with Agamben’s historiographic approach to ontology as regards the construction of ontology via the concepts of presupposition, relation and mode. Placing these comments within the frame of the whole book, the study of use of bodies in part I and form-of-life in part III, the paper suggests that, contrary to Agamben’s own assertions, it is possible for an ontology to escape the historical destiny mapped out for it by First philosophy and foreclosed by Kant. This possibility makes itself known if one accepts that Agamben’s definition of the ontology to come as a modality of the use of bodies as a habitual form-of-life, is indeed another way of stating that said ontology is directly mappable onto Badiou’s work on existence as categorical functional relations between objects in Logics of Worlds. For use of bodies read functions be-tween objects, and Agamben’s modal and Badiou’s mathematised ontologies suddenly fall into a powerful if restless alignment.