Event and Decision: Ontology and Politics in Badiou, Deleuze, and Whitehead

This book addresses the philosophies of Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, and Alfred North Whitehead in relation to the concepts of event, ontology and politics. For Whitehead, the event is the realization of becoming, the actualization of the groundless ontological ground of creativity, the process of self-decision on possibilities yet undecided, the aesthetic and ethical impulse of existence. For Deleuze it is the expression of life without possession, bodies without organs, the virtual or actual reality of singularity and novelty. For Badiou, the event breaks from the situation, in which we always count (reality) as one and multiplicity as united. For all three thinkers, the event necessitates a radical politics that critiques traditional ontologies of social bodies, cultures, and art. The perspective that emerges from the book is of humanity constituted by, but also constituting a multiplicious event cycle: each person and thing bringing their own personal event into their experience of an event outside of themselves. The convergence of this multiplicity creates our complex world-a complexity not defined as aporia or impossibility, but rather infinity-that is always already still creating. Event and Decision offers the reader a live experience of this evental theory, an experience that mirrors the event of three philosophers themselves. And if the mirror you peer into shows you something foreign, something different than what you know as yourself, then this difference makes reading the book easy. The only impossibility is to lose your way.