Abstract

This paper engages in a close reading of Badiou’s Being and Event as an occasion to investigate the waysin which being and language may be related and does so by focusing upon his idea that mathematicallanguage, in the form of set theory, is capable of managing the ‘ontological excess’ which he associatesparticularly with poetic language. Because, he argues, poetic language involves a sort of willfulengagement with the ‘one-effect’, the presencing of multiplicity, and thereby the only possibility forbeing’s emergence, is made unfeasible. The paper locates some of the affects of excess in the experience ofmodernism, and specifically in the poetic language of Mallarmé and Baudelaire. By considering what mightbe involved in ‘the saying-showing power of language’, as this idea is developed by both Wittgenstein andHeidegger, the paper seeks to show how excess is the very source of beings’ appearance in language, giventhat this appearance is silent and hence unsayable