[H]ere's where another support for the Andy Kaufman style joke enters, Badiou also says this:

Truth is first of all something new. What transmits, what repeats, we shall call knowledge. Distinguishing truth from knowledge is essential. It is a distinction already made in the work of Kant, between reason and understanding, and it is as you know a capital distinction for Heidegger, who distinguishes truth as aletheia, and understanding as cognition, science, techne.

Now Badiou, who cites and references Heidegger, who is here explicitly using Heidegger to support his distinction between novelty and repetition as the basis for a distinction between truth and knowledge, and who we collectively agree is a smart fellow, is clearly wrong. Heidegger puts techne on both sides of the ledger, as both a process of poiesis (for the Greeks) and the means of enframing (for modernity). The difference is the historical and metaphysical overdetermination of techne, which hides the term's more original meaning and gives techne to us as something that we believe we master or control, but that actually controls us through this belief (a process called, appropriately enough, subjectification). Heidegger is saying (and he says it repeatedly, in Origin of the Work of Art, Age of the World Picture, the Question Concerning Technology, and so on) that different technological modalities produce different possibilities for techne, and with it different relations to Being. His diatribes against the typewriter in his seminar on Parmenides make this abundantly clear. Surely Badiou knows this. So either his disagreement must be more nuanced than I currently perceive, or this is one of those hints, a wink to his audience, a test to see if we figure out he's having us on, piling up layers of set theory in an authoritative tone, making odd declarations about the future of philosophy and the failures of philosophers, and then laughing as eager grad students trip over themselves writing articles extolling his virtues. Incidentally, if this is a joke, I suspect Zizek is in on it. I would have significantly more respect for him if it turns out he set the whole thing up.

¶ 6:11 AM