You gotta think too about the importance for Badiou not only of mathematical and propositional logic, but also of poetry and the novel. Because for him everything comes down to writing as Event. Hence his fascination with the perfect specificity of creative utterance (Mallarme), as well as the duration, or Spinozist endeavor, of the labor of production (Beckett). For him there is an ontology not just of books but also the sentence. Woolf, working out of Russell, incorporates this into her novels, which read as adventures in narrativity. Whereas in Beckett the sweetness and light of Woolf's "house of being," derived from Russell's logical atomism, yields to a new dynamic of narration, more Wittgensteinian and even less compromising. Here, narrative functions as a differential machine, struggling to continue as it slowly grinds itself to a halt.

"I Can't Go On, I'll Go On."



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