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Brassier - Science (Chap. 6 from Alain Badiou - Key Concepts)
"Science (Chap. 6 from Alain Badiou - Key Concepts)" belongs to Brassier's realism line, where abstraction, truth, and rational critique are used to pressure-test the archive's more charismatic inheritances.
Archive condition
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Core idea
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 1
SIX Science Ray Brassier Rationalism and scientism Badiou is a rationalist: he holds that mathematics captures whatever is sayable about being qua being and names science (alongside art, politics and love) as one of the generators of the truths that condi- tion philosophy.
Definition · paragraph 4
ALAIN BADIOU: KEY CONCEPTS belittle the power of scientific reason while exalting the a-rational as philosophy's proper concern. Philosophy, science, ideology Badiou accepts the Marxist claim that science is never ideologically neutral (witness for example the recurring attempts to enlist Darwinism and complexity theory in order to legitimate competition, inequality and the free market as ineradicable natural phenomena).
Definition · paragraph 2
ALAIN BADIOU: KEY CONCEPTS criticizing "scientism" rather than science itself (for which, they assure us, they harbour nothing but respect). The facility with which this dis- tinction is routinely brandished invites suspicion. What exactly is meant by "scientism"?
Definition · paragraph 6
ALAIN BADIOU: KEY CONCEPTS means of production: "[Ultimately, in physics, fundamental biology, etc., mathematics is not subordinated and expressive, but primary and productive" (Badiou 1967: 464). Thus mathematics is not an a priori formal science grounding the empirical sciences' access to reality, but rather the paradigmatic instance of a productive experimental praxis.
Definition · paragraph 2
ALAIN BADIOU: KEY CONCEPTS criticizing "scientism" rather than science itself (for which, they assure us, they harbour nothing but respect).
Appears in sections
Brassier, Grant, and Speculative Realism Primary section
Analytic and speculative receptions of Land and the CCRU through Brassier, Grant, and adjacent philosophical lines.