THE LINGUISTIC SPACE OF TRUTH IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF ALAIN BADIOU AND JACQUES DERRIDA: THE LIMITS OF NAMING AND EXPRESSIBILITY

• Published in: Епістемологічні дослідження у філософії, соціальних і політичних науках
• Main Author: Юрій ГЛАДИШКО
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oles Honchar Dnipro National University 2026-05-01
• Subjects: linguistic space of truth; limits of naming; limits of expressibility; event; unnameable; genericity; différance; khōra; Alain Badiou; Jacques Derrida
• Online Access: https://visnukpfs.dp.ua/index.php/PFS/article/view/1316
• ISSN: 2618-1274; 2618-1282

This article examines the linguistic space of truth in the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida with particular attention to the limits of naming and expressibility. The study aims to provide a comparative reconstruction of the two philosophical models by clarifying how truth, language, event, writing, naming, and unnameability function within their respective conceptual systems. The research relies on a comparative, historical-philosophical, and hermeneutic approach combined with conceptual analysis and close reading of key texts by both thinkers and recent scholarship on their reception. The study demonstrates that Badiou and Derrida both move beyond the classical propositional model of truth, yet do so in fundamentally different ways. In Badiou’s philosophy, truth emerges as an event-conditioned procedure of fidelity rather than as a completed judgment. The article reconstructs the ontological basis of this claim through the concepts of multiplicity-without-one, situation, count-as-one, event, subject, genericity, and the unnameable. It establishes that the linguistic dimension of truth in Badiou does not coincide with the language of knowledge: truth arises within a situation as that which cannot be deduced from the existing order of representation. Naming therefore performs a necessary but limited function, since it fixes the event and sustains the procedure of truth without exhausting its content. The study further shows that the unnameable marks the internal limit of the truth procedure and prevents truth from becoming a totalizing discourse. In Derrida’s philosophy, the limit of expressibility does not appear as a boundary internal to a single truth procedure. Instead, it operates at the level of the very structure of meaning through différance, writing, trace, context, temporality, translation, and the problematic status of the name. The article shows that Derrida’s critique of logocentrism undermines any final coincidence between name and meaning. Meaning is constituted through deferral, difference, and contextual displacement and therefore never achieves complete self-presence. In this context, khōra and Derrida’s reflections in On the Name offer a particularly clear articulation of the instability of naming: naming does not secure semantic closure but exposes the constitutive incompleteness of meaning. The article formulates the main comparative result as follows: in Badiou, the limit of naming functions as an internal limit of the truth procedure, whereas in Derrida it functions as a structural condition of meaning-making itself. The theoretical significance of the study lies in clarifying how truth, language, event, writing, and naming relate to one another in contemporary continental philosophy. Its practical significance lies in the possibility of applying the results in courses on modern and contemporary philosophy, philosophy of language, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and comparative history of philosophy. The originality of the article lies in its systematic comparative interpretation of Badiou’s concepts of event, truth, genericity, and the unnameable alongside Derrida’s concepts of différance, writing, khōra, and the limits of expressibility as two distinct models of the linguistic space of truth. The article is theoretical in type. Its main limitation is its conceptual focus, which leaves aside empirical discursive practices and detailed reception history. Further research may specify how the linguistic space of truth operates within particular conditions of Badiou’s system and may deepen the comparison between Badiou’s unnameable and Derrida’s reflections on naming, translation, and khōra.