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Science

"Science" belongs to Brassier's realism line, where abstraction, truth, and rational critique are used to pressure-test the archive's more charismatic inheritances.

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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 12

At the same time, Badiou's account is one in which there is nothing that science cannot know because, dispensing with every vestige of substance, Badiou's formalist ontology leaves no room for the inconceivable or unconceptualizable. Truth is the sole exception to the order of being, but science is one of the harbingers of truth.

Definition · paragraph 4

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 4

What distinguishes Badiou's stance towards science is its simultaneous acknowledgement of the inextricability of science and ideology together with the novel suggestion that it is science itself, rather than philosophy, that proves to be the most acute diagnostician of those ideological prejudices that hinder its development.

Definition · paragraph 4

Badiou's most sustained account of the relation between philosophy, science and ideology occurs at the beginning of his philosophical career in four texts published between 1967 and 1969. These are "The (Re) commencement of Dialectical Materialism" (1967), "Mark and Lack: On Zero" ([1967] 1969b), "Infinitesimal Subversion" (1968), and The Concept of Model (1969a).3 Badiou's account

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