Power Failure: Appearance and Change in Badiou’s Logics of Worlds

ABSTRACT Where Being and Event was a book of meta-ontology, demonstrating how things be, Alain Badiou tells us that Logics of Worlds is an objective phenomenology demonstrating how (and what) things do. As such, it should also be considered a book about power: how objects function in their worlds, how change is possible, and what the event does to worlds and the objects in them. Attending to this, this article shows two conflicting forms of power emerge in Logics of Worlds, the power of appearance and the power of change. In this article, the author argues their incommensurability suggests an overall failure of a consistent account of power from Badiou.