ABSTRACT
This chapter follows the evolution through Althusser’s and Badiou’s respective projects of the problem of conceptualizing the relation between disjunctive events across different domains of social activity, with a principal focus on the (non)relationship between aesthetic and political events. Beginning with readings of key passages in Reading Capital and Being and Event, it shows how the means by which Althusser accounts for the apparent asynchronicity of events across aesthetic, scientific, political, etc., times—namely, by reference to an economic time itself internally fragmented under capital—continues to pose problems for Badiou in his own project. Specifically, it argues that the so-called mathematical turn in Badiou’s thought enables him to affirm Althusser’s theory of the asynchronicity of events, while also rejecting Althusser’s attempt to hold these temporal regimes in relation to one another under some kind of social totality, by reviving the key concept of compossibility from Leibniz’s metaphysics. After laying out the contours of Badiou’s divergence from Althusser on this point, the chapter closes with a consideration of what it might look like to read the literary event from the perspective of its compossibility with respect to other types of events.
