Logic(s) of the Value Form - Marx with Badiou

Abstract

Alain Badiou has grounded the axiom of materialist dialectic on the following proposition: the Three supplements the reality of the Two. Consequently, if we are to call Badiou's ouvre a truly dialectical body of philosophy, it should be capable of congruence with its forerunning counterparts: Hegel's and Marx's dialectics. The paper aims to provide a proof by analogy between Badiou's materialist or affirmative dialectic and Marx's dialectics of the value form using rudimentary category theory. In order to sustain the converging pathway, the paper presupposes a synthesis of specific conceptions in the two strands of contemporary Marxian thought. Namely, structuralism of Louis Althusser, with a particular reference to Jacques Rancière's contribution in Reading Capital, and secondly, German »Neue Marx Lektüre«, new reading of Marx, initiated by Adorno's students Hans Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt and Alfred Schmidt. The paper implicitly reintroduces the concepts of »structural causality« and »absent cause« as a specific algebraic property in the structure of social exchange, intertwined with the topological adherence of object-moments of money commodity - an analogous category-theory approach to the one developed by Alain Badiou in his work Logics of Worlds.