Alain Badiou and Cinema

Alain Badiou

Stephen Zepke

For the French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937) cinema constitutes itself in an act of purification, it emerges by throwing off its non-artistic elements, and develops by using the other arts in an impure way. This, according to Badiou, produces a cinematic ‘visitation’ of a universal Idea. This ‘event’ marks a new mixture of the other arts, and reveals what had previously been impossible for cinema to express, being an irruption of something unprecedented and new. For Badiou then, cinema is a poetics of movement that exposes the passage of an Idea, an Idea that is an immobile singularity and universality, but which cinema’s ‘false movement’ has nevertheless brought into the world. This process of creation reveals what will-have-been, a retrospective void that defines a new present and gives cinema a political dimension as important as its aesthetic and ontological aspects. Here, cinema assaults the status quo by producing ‘illegal’ images that escape their non-artistic conditions within the popular imaginary and the market for clichés. As a result, cinema operates within the artistic and political registers, both of which are also ontological in their processes. In this Badiou’s cinematic philosophy delivers what seems a dominating desire of contemporary thought; the immanence of aesthetic and political practice within an ontological process. Alain Badiou has taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) since 1999, and also teaches at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris.

Books cited in the text, and further references:

AP – ‘Art and Philosophy’, in Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. A.

Toscano. California: Stanford University Press, 2005.

BE – Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005

C – The Century, trans A. Toscano. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.

E – Ethics, An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. P.

Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.

FM – ‘The False Movements of Cinema’, in Handbook of Inaesthetics.

FT – ‘Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art’, Lacanian Ink 23,

http://www.lacan.com/frameXXIII7.htm

M – Metapolitics, trans. J. Barker. London: Verso, 2006.

MP – Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. by N. Madarasz. Albany: SUNY

Press, 1999.

PA – ‘Philosophy and Art’, in Infinite Thought, Truth and the

Return to Philosophy, trans. O. Feltham and J. Clemens. London:

Continuum, 2004.

PC – ‘Philosophy and Cinema’, in Infinite Thought.

SA – ‘The Subject of Art’, in The Symptom 6.

http://www.lacan.com//symptom6_articles/badiou.html. unpaginated.

TA – Think Again, Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy.

Edited by Peter Hallward. London: Continuum, 2004.

TS – ‘Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’ in

Polemics.

“We must begin,” Badiou tells us in a lecture on art, “from the

beginning.” (SA, n.p.) The beginning, for cinema as much as for

philosophers, is marked by the oldest question: “What is being?”

Being, Badiou argues, is pure multiplicity untroubled by any

distinction between whole and part, a multiple of multiples

“without any foundational stopping point.” (BE, 33) Thus, this

beginning of philosophy already catches it in an impasse according

to Badiou, inasmuch as the ontology of multiplicity implies that

what we take to be ‘a thing’, a ‘one’, is not, and only exists as

an operation: what Badiou calls the “count-as-one”. (BE, 24) This

operation is what presents the multiplicity of being in a

situation, and what causes the multiple to “split apart” (BE, 25)

into the inconsistent multiplicity, or non-one, of being, and its

presentation or count-as-one as a consistent multiplicity. The

ontology of multiplicity is therefore the re-beginning of

philosophy based on the assumption that the one is not, and that

being qua being is neither present in a thing, nor in this things

presentation (the operation of the count). As a result, if what

exists in the world are consistent multiplicities, then being as

inconsistent multiplicity does not exist in the world, and is,

strictly speaking, nothing, it is ‘void’. As Badiou puts it: “it

is only in completely thinking through the non-being of the one

that the name of the void emerges as the unique conceivable

presentation of what supports, as unpresentable and as pure

multiplicity, any plural presentation, that is, any one-effect.”

(BE, 36) As void then, being is always already ‘subtracted’ from

any ‘count-as-one’, a subtraction that is achieved in the very

operation of presentation as such, inasmuch as being qua

inconsistent multiple cannot be counted-as-one. Badiou claims that

it was the mathematician Georg Cantor that both recognized this

paradox, and offered a way out of it by “creating the mathematical

theory of the pure multiple” known as ‘set-theory’. (BE, 38)

Cantor’s set-theory allows us to count-as-one everything that

exhibits a certain property. But what is counted here is not a

thing (a ‘one’) but a set (a multiple), making set-theory the

condition of Badiou’s rather startling claim that “the thinking of

a pure multiplicity is finally mathematics.” (SA, n.p.)1 Set theory

then, is the means to formalise presentation and its operative

counts-as-one, but in doing so it also performs a crucial

ontological operation, it “fixes the point of non-being from

whence it can be established that there is a presentation of

being.” (BE, 42) Ontology, as mathematics, is therefore the

presentation of presentation, which set-theory will go on to

axiomatize in the work of Zermelo and Fraenkel. These axioms will

determine the possible relations of belonging and inclusion

defining a set (a consistent multiplicity), and hence the possible

conditions of the presentation of being. Being does not precede

1 “Ontology,” Badiou writes, “axiom system of the particular inconsistency of multiplicities, seizes the in-itself of the multiple by forming into consistency all inconsistency and forming into inconsistency all consistency.It thereby deconstructs any one-effect; it is faithful to the non-being of the one, so as to unfold, without explicit nomination, the regulated game of the multiple such that it is none other than the absolute form of presentation, thus the mode in which being proposes itself to any access.” (BE, 30)

its presentation however, but instead emerges in a situation as

the result of the count-as-one operations, as what is always

already foreclosed by these operations, but as what they must

nevertheless assume; what “must-be-counted”. “It is this latter,”

Badiou argues, “which causes the structured presentation to waver

towards the phantom of inconsistency.” (BE, 52) This means, within

the situation relations of belonging and inclusion (given in the

axioms of set-theory) define when a multiplicity can be ‘counted

as one’ as a consistent multiple, while what evades the count –

the void of the not-one, or inconsistent multiple – is subtracted

from it. Subtraction makes the void a conditional subset of any

set, a “universal inclusion,” (BE, 87) but it includes the void

only as lack, as what avoids any count of positive terms and so

cannot belong to a set.2 To be counted as one is therefore the law

of presentation, (BE, 25) but like all laws this one can be

broken. Indeed, there is always the “danger” of an inconsistent

multiplicity “haunting” the situation as such, as the presentation

of subtraction itself. (BE, 94) This is the possibility inherent

in the fact that subtraction is the ‘suture’ of being (qua

inconsistent multiple) and its presentation (qua consistent

multiple), an ambiguous double movement of rejection and embrace.

2 This will imply, as Badiou writes, “the unpresentable is presented, as a subtractive term of the presentation of presentation.” (BE, 67) This is the axiom of the void set, and is written as: “(” (BE, 68)

The danger is that it is in the uncounted nature of the count

itself that the void adheres. To innoculate the structure against

such a possibility there must be a “count of the count” as Badiou

calls it, a “metastructure” within which all the axioms of

presentation can be counted as one in order to “secure” the

structure against the void. This metastructure establishes a

“state of the situation” (BE, 95) and inaugurates “the reign,

since completeness is numbered, of the universal security of the

one.” (BE, 98) To be counted as one means a multiple is presented

as belonging within a situation, but when this count is itself

counted, and so included within the situation, the multiple is

represented. Representation is therefore the “fiction” by which

the one attains being, by which what is included in the situation

are only the one-multiples that belong to it, meaning the void is

“banished.” (BE, 98) To both belong (presentation) and be included

(representation) in a situation is to be ‘normal’, to be

represented but not be presented is to be an ‘excrescence’, and to

be present in a situation, but not be represented by the state

marks a ‘singularity’. These last two excessive terms name the

suture of the void and its presentation, and appear, as we shall

see, as what cannot be counted as one by the state. Excrescence

and singularity will be the names of both ontological emergence

and aesthetic creation (which, as we will see, are essentially the

same thing), as well as being the conditions of any genuine

political resistance.

The appearance of a singularity is fleeting and rare, and is

what Badiou calls an ‘event’. Within the world of structured

presentation and representation an event – by definition

cataclysmic – presents an ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ as an

‘ultra-one’, and includes the ‘void’ of the situation – what had,

in psychoanalytical and political terms, been repressed – as

“retroactively discernible”. (BE, 56) This militant event is the

genetic moment of Badiou's ontology, erupting within science,

politics, art and love. (BE, 341) These are the four faculties of

the noumenal void that create themselves in creating new truths,

new retroactive namings of what was not. The event therefore

illuminates and incinerates in its explosion the axioms acting as

the contemporary conditions of appearance, the current “logical

grammar” (BE, 287) of belonging. These conditions are ‘natural’

inasmuch as everything they include can be counted as one.3 The

State polices, or, the same thing, produces ‘nature’ by numbering

and ordering all situations into subsets representable in

language. There is no room here for a ‘singularity’ that cannot be

represented (included) within an existing social subset. The 3 “‘nature’ and ‘number’ are substitutable.” (BE, 140) See also BE, 189.

State, Badiou provocatively argues, is not founded on a social

bond, but upon the prohibition and prevention of “un-binding”

maintained through its “administrative and management functions.”

(BE, 108) These representative functions do not deal with

individuals but with “sub-multiples” or “classes”, and in

maintaining the ‘natural’ order “the State is the State of the

ruling class.” (BE, 105) This means that today the State

reproduces the situation as it has been structured by capitalism,

and protects the interests of the capitalist class. Under these

conditions “politics can be defined as an assault against the

State, whatever the mode of that assault might be, peaceful or

violent.” (BE, 110)4 This assault on the State in the name of the

event – the irruption of the void – will be a necessary criteria

for Badiou's cinema, as it will for science, the other arts, and

4 Badiou is unapologetic about the violence of radical politics. In defence ofMaoism he writes: “But the acts of violence, often so extreme? The hundreds of thousands dead? The persecutions, especially against intellectuals? One will say the same thing about them as about all the acts of violence that have marked the history, to this very day, of any expansive attempts to practice a free politics. The radical subversion of the eternal order that subjects society to wealth and to the wealthy, to power and to the powerful, to science and to scientists, to capital and to its servants, cannot be sweet, progressive and peaceful. There is already a great and rigorous violence of thought when you cease to tolerate that one counts what the people think for nothing, for nothing the collective intelligence of workers,for nothing, to say the truth, any thought that is not homogenous to the order in which the hideous reign of profit is perpetuated. The theme of totalemancipation, practiced in the present, in the enthusiasm of the absolute present, is always situated beyond Good and Evil, because, in the circumstances of action, the only known Good is what the status quo establishes as the precious name of its own subsistence. Extreme violence is therefore reciprocal to extreme enthusiasm, because it is in effect, to speaklike Nietzsche, a matter of the transvaluation of all values.’ (C, 62-3)

lovers everywhere. This ‘assault’ is the only option for politics

given that it is impossible for the State to produce an event,

making not only the politically committed, but artists, scientists

and lovers too all ‘activists’, “patient watchmen of the void” who

are able to illuminate “if only for an instant, the site of the

unpresentable, and the means to be thenceforth faithful to the

proper name that, afterwards, he or she will have been able to

give to – or hear, one cannot decide – this non-place of place,

the void.” (BE, 111, italics added) This makes creation, the

invention of a new truth, a fundamentally criminal act. The naming

of the event “is essentially illegal in that it cannot conform to

any law of representation.” (BE, 205)

This name – the appearance of politics as such – is a singular

inconsistent multiple whose elements don’t belong to the

situation, appearing instead at an “evental site … on the edge of

the void.” (BE, 175) The site belongs to the situation, but what

belongs to it does not. This event can only be counted “as the

arrival in being of non-being, the arrival amidst the visible of

the invisible.” (BE, 189) This is a glorious arrival, a naming of

the event that forces the situation to “confess its own void, and

to thereby let forth, from inconsistent being and the interrupted

count, the incandescent non-being of an existence.” (BE, 183) This

existence is first of all a “generic truth”, a part of the

situation that marks its “fundamental inconsistency”. “A truth is

this minimal consistency (a part, a conceptless immanence), which

certifies in the situation the inconsistency from which its being

is made.” (MP, 107) This ‘truth’ is generic because once it

appears it exists in every situation, it is universal, eternal and

belongs to everyone. “The generic is eglitarian.” (BE, 409)

Politics for Badiou, is in this sense “a communism of

singularities,” (MP, 108) inasmuch as truth is “indifferent to

differences [... and] the same for all.” (E, 27) Indeed, difference

– multiculturalism and postmodernism are Badiou’s examples (E, 22)

– is “precisely what truths depose, or render insignificant.” (E,

27) The power of political truth, or as we shall see of political

cinema, is not in representing differences, which “hold no

interest for thought”, (E, 26) but in recognizing what is the

same, what is eternally true for all, in its assault on the State.

It is this event the State attempts to repress – “the void

avoided” (E, 74) – because it signals a new egalitarianism, a new

“justice” founded in truth. There is something both liberating and

disturbing in this political imperative to create truth.

Championed by the likes of Slavoj Zizek, Badiou’s concept of truth

“aims at the very heart of politically correct radical

intellectuals, undermining their mode of life.”5 This is a major

break with a postmodern politics privileging difference, and, of

course, a major break with much recent film criticism that is

based upon it.

The event is first of all an “intervention” that “consists in

identifying that there has been some undecidability, and in

deciding it belongs in the situation.” (BE, 202) This decision

takes the form of a nomination, a name, but how can such a naming

be possible when it is precisely as void that the event appears?6

Badiou argues that this requires a subject prepared to contest the

law, and to agitate on behalf of an “illegal” name that is not

allowed within representation. Rather than counting as one within

the situation, the intervention names the event according to a

different logic, that of the two, by which the event is both

absent and present in a “supernumerary name”, (BE, 205) a name

that is both an “anomaly” within the State, and an enigma. The

militant announces this enigmatic name of the event through a set

of procedures Badiou calls “fidelity.” Fidelity is a militant

naming by which the event appears within the situation, thus

creating a revolutionary “counter-state.” (BE, 233) “A fidelity is

5 Rear cover statement appearing on Infinite Thought and Metapolitics.6 “The striking paradox of our undertaking is that we are going to try to name

the very thing which is impossible to discern. We are searching for a language for the unnameable.” (BE, 376)

definitively distinct from the state if, in some manner, it is

unassignable to a defined function of the state, its result a

particularly nonsensical part.” (BE, 237) The fidelity of a

subject to an event traces its trajectory from unassignable enigma

to a new truth defining existent multiples.7 This “procedure”

transforms the situation by “forcing” it to encompass a new truth.

At this point the two outsides of the situation, the event as

“singularity” and the “excrescent” generic procedures that force a

new truth into the situation, come together, and the new emerges

in all its revolutionary brilliance.8 “As such, art, science and

politics do change the world, not by what they discern, but by

what they indiscern therein. And the all-powerfulness of a truth

is merely that of changing what is, such that this unnameable

being may be, which is the very being of what-is.” (BE, 343)

Let's narrow our focus from the infinite expanse of the event

horizon and take a look at the appearance of ‘art’. “Art,” Badiou

tells us, “presents the sensible in the finitude of a work, and 7 “a truth groups together all the terms of the situation which are positively

connected to the event.” (BE, 335) This procedure is that of “subjectivization” as “the rule of the infra-situational effects of the supernumerary name’s entrance into circulation.” The subject in this sense, is “an occurrence of the void,” (BE, 393) and “measures the newness of the situation-to-come.” (BE, 406)

8 The generic procedure is included in the situation (as a representational operation) but does not belong to it (it has no object, or its object is the void), making it an “excrescence”, while the event itself belongs to the situation but is not included (represented) in it, making it a “singularity”.Through the action of the Subject the truth announced in the event (the void of the situation) enters the situation: “A faithful generic procedure rendersthe indiscernible immanent.” (BE, 342)

destines the infinite to the finite.” (M, 143) The artist’s

decision to remain faithful to an event results in an infinite

‘Idea’, or ‘truth’ appearing within the situation in a finite and

sensible being. Art understood in this sense is an “aristocratic

truth procedure,” inasmuch as “the artist ultimately needs no

one.” (M, 142) Indeed, art takes nothing but truth into account,

and this produces its “proletarian aristocratism”; (TS, 147) it

exists for all without consideration for any special interests.

The art work then, is not an event, it is a “local instance” of

truth – a “subject of art” (see, SA) – an ongoing “artistic

procedure” acting in fidelity to the event, and forcing a new

“artistic configuration” or “art-truth” into the situation. (AP,

12) This configuration is not an art form, a genre, a period in

art history, or – significantly for cinema – a technical

dispositif. (AP, 13) It is an “identifiable sequence” extending

from the event in “faithful procedures” dedicated to introducing

“great aesthetic transformations.” (BE, 340) Some of Badiou’s

examples are Greek tragedy, the “Classical style” of music, (AP,

13) Cubism and Cezanne, (BE, 329) or Malevich. (C, 56)9

A configuration thinks in the works that compose it and art

“is in each and every one of its points the thinking of the

9 For a long list of proper names designating artistic ‘events’, see TS, 141-2.

thought that it itself is.” (AP, 14) Art, for Badiou, exists as

thought's immanence with being qua being, inasmuch as it marks the

appearance of a new art-Idea qua void. In this way, art thinks

itself by creating itself anew, by forever discovering its truth

as what (it) is not. This distinguishes Badiou’s account of art

from both its Classical and Romantic relations to truth. It is no

longer ostracised from truth for being an imitation of the

(Platonic) idea, nor worshiped as the body of truth in its post-

Kantian incarnation.10 Nor is its exteriority to truth ‘cathartic,’

making art an Aristotlean therapeutic. Instead, Heidegger’s ‘anti-

aesthetic’ subtraction of the work of art from the realm of

knowledge and its emergence – in-itself – as a procedure producing

truth marks, for Badiou, the onset of modernity.11 Modernity, in

10 In Romanticism: “Art is the absolute as subject – it is incarnation.” (AP, 3) Inasmuch as Romanticism affirms the descent of the idea into the finite artwork, Badiou must detach it from his account of contemporary artistic practice. Doing so involves “deconstructing” the artwork, removing it from its romantic tendencies (especially those vitalist experiments generated fromthe Deleuzean refrain of ‘We don’t know what a body can do’ (TS, 137)) and replacing these with works exploring the Duchampian readymade, and other “temporary installations”. (C, 154) By bringing the art object into the everyday, the Ideal and infinite realm of its truth achieves a “disincarnation” in which: “The infinte is not captured in form, it transits through form. If it is an event – if it is what happens – finite form can be equivalent to an infinite opening.” (C, 155) The modern art work rejects Romantic incarnation by opening onto the infinite and ideal through the “active finitude” (C, 159) of the art work itself, which becomes oriented in the twentieth century towards “a sort of generalized theatricality.” (C, 156)

11 Although Badiou acknowledges that Heidegger’s radical critique of aestheticsbegins modernity, he nevertheless rejects Heidegger’s own “poetico-natural orientation, which lets-be presentation as non-veiling, as the authentic origin.” (BE, 125) Here, Heidegger remains a Romantic, (AP, 6) and by giving the rights to truth to art he “hands philosophy over to poetry.” (MP, 74) Art is not and cannot be the usurpation (or worse, the ‘truth’) of philosophy, but equally the opposite holds too, maintaining each in their area of

Badiou’s sense, is defined by art’s anti-mimetic foundation in the

event-void and the fact these ideas, proper to art alone, emerge

from art’s self-critique as something absolutely new.12

Nevertheless, Badiou, categorically condemns Modernism’s most

critical mechanism, the avant-garde. The avant-garde he argues,

attempts to mediate Platonic and Romantic conceptions of art,

overcoming the former’s ostracism of art from truth by destroying

its autonomy and then confirming the latter in demanding art be

reborn as the living expression of the absolute. This is

“desperate and unstable” (AP, 8) Badiou claims, and avant-garde

artists remain “partisans of the absoluteness of creative

destruction.” (AP, 8)13 The artist, for Badiou, is instead the

expertise. Not an ‘aesthetics’ then, Badiou offers an ‘inaesthetics’: “a relation of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producerof truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object of philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophicaleffects produced by the independent existence of some art works.” (As Badiou’s self-penned epitaph to Handbook of Inaesthetics puts it) In fact, philosophy does not produce any truth. “It seizes truths, shows them, exposesthem, announces that they exist. In so doing, it turns time towards eternity – since every truth, as a generic infinity, is eternal.” (AP, 14) As a result, “Philosophy is the go-between in our encounters with truths, the procuress of truth.” (AP, 10)

12 In a fascinating critique of Badiou’s inaesthetics Jacques Rancière calls ita “twisted modernism” (TA, 221) because its attempt to combine modernism withPlatonic ideas requires a condemnation of Romanticism that is both “summary” and somewhat hypocritical. Rancière argues that Badiou constantly “circles” the empty sepulchre, Hegel’s “core-image of Romantic art,” (TA, 223) marking the re-ascension of the idea and the disappearance of the body. In Badiou artis “forever caught between the muteness of material and the return to itself of thought.” (TA, 223) This, for Rancière, is finally the paradoxical result of an art that produces ideas as subtractions that are simultaneously inscribed in a name. For Badiou’s comments on Rancière’s work see M, chaps. 7and 8.

13 Badiou’s position on the avant-garde seems to vary with the context. In BE, “intervention is always the affair of the avant-garde.” (BE, 219) But this ‘avant-garde’ is not artistic per se, and at other points, such as in AP

adherent of the creative event.

As much as Badiou rejects the avant-garde attack on art

(interpreting, as we’ve seen, its ambitions towards the everyday

as an anti-romantic disincarnation), he also rejects any defense

of art’s purity, or of its essential being. Art’s truth is in this

respect entirely immanent, a work materialises an infinite truth

when it is able to stage the “minimal difference” between itself

and the event of its founding subtraction. As a result, Badiou’s

‘modernist’ sensibilities tend towards the aesthetics of emptiness

(Malevich, Webern) where minimal difference is materialized as the

real of lack. Similarly cinema, he argues, is essentially impure,

being both saturated by the market forces determining its

production (Hollywood), and in a constant relation with the other

arts. Indeed, a “‘pure cinema’ does not exist, except in the dead-

end of avant-garde formalism.” (PC, 111) Badiou’s strange

Modernism therefore rejects formalism, while still searching for

cinema’s own defining ideas: “Artistic activity can only be

discerned in a film as a process of purification of its own

immanent non-artistic character.” (PC, 111) Unlike the formalism

Badiou strongly attacks avant-garde artistic movements as failed attempts to merge didactic and Romantic positions on art. More recently in C, however, Badiou claims the avant-gardes as an important symptom of the century’s desire for the real. As a result: “We’ve re-thought the fate of the avant-gardes, and hailed, for all time, their splendid and violent ambition.” (C, 152) Here the avant-garde is celebrated as the modern response to Romanticism, while in TS Badiou returns to the criticisms he made in AP both quoting and confirming them. (TS, 135)

of ‘high’ Modernism however, and echoing his comments on the

readymade’s effect in art, this process begins within the common

imagery constituting cinema as a mass-art, and guaranteeing its

universal address. Cinema’s modernist ‘immanent-critique’

therefore begins with the purification of the visible and audible

of representation, identification and realism, and continues with

the purification of the clichés that make it an object of

capitalist Spectacle. In cinema there are five “privileged

operators” of the Spectacle: “pornographic nudity, the cataclysmic

special effect, the intimacy of the couple, social melodrama,

pathological cruelty.” By purifying the film of these operators

cinema will produce a new “cinema-idea.” (PC, 114)14 In fact,

cinema is an art of “visitations” that “organize within the

visible the caress proffered by the passage of the idea.” (FM, 78)

Modern cinema in its sensible materiality, that is, in its

thought, is a fidelity to such visitations that reject the

aesthetic and political state of the ‘contemporary’ situation,

forcing its change. “A film operates,” Badiou tells us, “through

what it withdraws from the visible.” (FM, 78) This “cut” is

carried out as much by framing as it is by editing, and as Badiou

puts it, cinema’s “flowers” (ideas), in their “captivity to the

14 Elsewhere Badiou calls this a new Academicism or “Pompierism” (TS, 136) constituted by violent technological affects and a grandiose decorative style.

cut”, are both singular and ideal. (FM, 78) This ‘idealism’ of the

cinema nevertheless remains entirely immanent to cinema, while

rejecting any account that would see cinema’s operations as

essentially material or affectual. Such ‘cinematic idealism’

clearly runs counter to much contemporary cinema theory.

Badiou claims that cinema’s modernity is in fact a “post-

classicism.” (PC, 123) Cinema has come to the end of its modernist

subtractions, but as yet no new configuration (event) is

perceptible, leaving us drowning in a proliferation of “pre-

existent schemas.” Post-classicism responds to this situation with

the moving camera, which seeks to join together “visible

configurations which are disparate, or classically non-unifiable.”

This “contemporary formalism” cannot encounter the real and has

already given rise to a kind of academicism. Cinema is neo-

classical inasmuch as it seeks to purify this dead-end of academic

reaction, but it does so on the basis of a saturated modernism,

from within the realm of the popular itself. Badiou’s examples are

“the best sequences of The Titanic, or even Brassed Off.” (PC, 124)

Art, for Badiou, involves “the destitution of the category of

objectivity,” (PA, 97) meaning there is neither a film “object”,

nor a subject as its (productive or receptive) condition of

possibility. (See also SA) As a result, Badiou rejects the

possibility of a contemporary auteur, leaving us with “an inquiry

into the details.” (PC, 115) “The basic unit of investigation is

not so much the film in its totality as some moments of film,

moments within which an operation is legible.” (PC, 114) The

operations of an event appear in cinema through their negation of

the non-art of the market, they “discredit ordinary industrial

materials” (PC, 115) and avoid the “dominant motifs, more or less

coded within genres.” (PC, 116) This puts cinema into a permanent

rebellion against its contemporary commercial conditions as well

as against its current theoreticizations, and defines cinema’s

creative operations as those producing an eternal truth.

Nevertheless, despite modern cinema being the permanent negation

of its contemporary situation, it must not be forgotten, Badiou

tells us, “that it is the films of Oliveira, of Kiarostami, of

Straub, of the early Wenders, of a certain Pollet, of some

Godards, etc.” – a short and tantilising list – that allow us to

identify “everything” new in the situation. (PC, 110) These

directors are the measure of the new because they were the new,

providing a brief genealogy of its emergence. Despite the very

elitist feel of this list, an aspect it shares with most of

Badiou’s pronounced preferences in art, what its members share is

the way they disrupt the smooth consumption of cinema’s ‘genres.’

These genres involve some narrative elements, but are mainly

defined as political conflicts over the State’s power of

representation.

To begin Badiou asks about the possibility of purified sexual

images “proving an exception to the contemporary subsumption of

love by the functional organization of enjoyment?” (PC, 116) With

the unfortunate ubiquity of pornography Badiou concludes that “as

yet no conclusive work has been done on this point.” (PC, 117) In

the genre of “extreme violence, cruelty, [… and] variations of

putting to death” (PC, 117) there has, however, been considerable

research. The point, Badiou argues, is whether “embryonic

operations exist which announce that all this material – which

acts like an urban mythology for today – will be integrated into

attempts at a baroque tragedy?” (PC, 118) Despite this evocative

description, no examples are given. The next genre is the figure

of the worker, and the problem for cinema is to create a

“subjective generalization” of the worker’s “autonomy.” “What is

at stake is the very possibility of a real encounter of cinema and

politics.” (PC, 118) A long history of such encounters already

exists, and today cinema must strip itself of any nostalgia in

order for the worker to appear as the film’s “unfigurable real

point.” (PC, 118) The example is Denis Levy’s L’Ecole de Mai. Next

comes the millenarian motif. Here the problem is to purify the

special effect of the “planetary catastrophe” signifying our

helplessness in the face of globalization, by transmitting “the

idea that the world is prey to Capital in an unbridled form, and

by this very fact rendered, globally, foreign to the very truths

that it detains in its midst.” (PC, 119) This would require a

“hero” whose “truth procedures confidence in themselves” were able

to force this rather remarkable new truth upon us. Once more,

there are no examples.15 The final genre Badiou mentions is the

“petite-bourgeois comedy” representing love through the various

states of marriage. Here it is a question of a “subjective ex-

centring” of the “dominant conceptions,” (PC, 120) with Rohmer

being “superior to his descendents.” (PC, 120) As well as working

within/against these ‘genres’ cinema also mounts other assaults,

such as Godard’s transformation of the “permanent rhythmic

background” of youth into an “adulterated murmer,” or Kiarostami

or Oliveira’s use of the car chase to change “a sign of speed into

a sign of slowness, constraining what is an exteriority of

movement to become a form of reflexive or dialogic interiority.”

(PC, 112) In all these cases cinema defines itself anew through

its subtractive appearance, avoiding the cliché and commercialism

15 Badiou does mention John Woo as attempting to purify the special effect through “a type of slowed calligraphy of general explosions.” (PC, 113)

of the mass-art, while nevertheless achieving a universal address

proper to truth.

Cinema is also impure in relation to the other arts, being the

seventh art only in the sense of being every art’s ‘plus-one.’

Cinema is “parasitic and inconsistent” (FM, 83) and “operates on

the other arts, using them as its starting point, in a movement

that subtracts them from themselves.” (FM, 79) The relation to

music for example, circles the use of rhythm that gives cinema

“the tonality of the movement” within the “general pulsation of

filmic transitions.” (PC, 121) Cinematic rhythm may therefore

begin from its music, but also includes editing, colors and

acting. In the twentieth century (“the century of cinema”) music

has three lines of development, two of which cinema has

appropriated. First, a post-romantic music still operating under

“the artifices of the finishing tonality” (PC, 121) has had an

important place in cinema music. Badiou’s example is Visconti’s

Death in Venice. Here the idea linking “amorous melancholy, the

genius of the place, and death” (FM, 80) becomes visible in a

space opened by Mahler’s melodies, a space where music and

cinema’s “pictorial stability” annul and dissolve each other.

“These transferences and dissolutions are the very thing that will

have ultimately constituted the Real of the idea’s passage.” (FM,

80) Second, Badiou traces a line from jazz to “youth music”, “from

rock to techno,” a line also often utilized in cinema and

identified with the ‘post-classical’ frenetic camera. And finally,

the site of “veritable musical creation,” Schönberg’s rupture with

the tonal system introducing a “universe of musical singularities.

(PC, 121) It remains however, for a cinematic rhythm comparable to

serial and post-serial music to emerge, and cinema must, Badiou

claims, take some blame for this failure. Oliveira and Straub are

exceptions proving the rule. Another example of cinema’s status as

the ‘plus-one’ of the other arts is its relation to theatre, a

relation embodied by the actor, whose Hollywood form must be

purified. The actor must refuse being animated by capitalist

neuroses, must escape normalized subjectivity, in order to “divert

the evidence of the image” by poeticizing it. (PC, 123) Finally,

and in relation to literature, cinema separates “the novelistic

from itself by something that we could call a theatrical sampling,

and opens up a space between theatre and the novel as a passage

between them.” (FM 79) Here, as with all the other examples, the

‘impurity’ of cinema appears in the way it “extracts” something

from the other arts, diverting both itself and them in a mutual

“subtraction”, which is also a “passage.” Cinema therefore appears

only in its relation to the other arts, as their plus-one, but

this addition is a subtraction, the paradoxical movement of

cinema’s impurity and self-purification establishing its ‘truth.’

“These transferences and dissolutions are the very thing that will

have ultimately constituted the Real of the idea’s passage.” (FM,

80)

This movement marking the passage of an idea has three

aspects. First cinema is the global movement of the visitation,

the event-site of an idea. Second, cinema’s ‘generic’ self-

purification becomes visible in “acts of local movement.” (FM, 79)

Third, there is within cinema an “impure circulation” of the other

arts, giving rise to “transferences and dissolutions”. These three

“movements” constitute the “poetics of cinema,” a poetics of the

visitation of the idea in the sensible. This is not, Badiou the

resolute atheist insists, an incarnation. Cinema is not a sensible

form of the idea, and does not endow the latter with a body. “The

idea is not separable – it exists only for cinema in its passage.”

(FB, 80) In fact, cinema’s ideas become visible in these three

“movements”: in the event, in its ‘truth procedure’ within

language, and in its relations to the other arts. In this sense,

Badiou gives us, quite precisely, an idea of cinema that finds its

principle in (a distinctly Lacanian) topology rather than

movement. Indeed, cinema is a “knot” tying together its three

false movements. (FM, 82) Global movement is false because no

measure is adequate to the event. Local movement is false because

it is the effect following the subtraction of an image from

itself. And impure movement is “falsest of all” because there is

no way of completing the move from one art to another. “The arts

are closed.” (FM, 82) As a result, “formal considerations –

cutting, shot, global or local movement, color, corporeal agents,

sound and so on – must be referred to only inasmuch as they

contribute to the “touch” of the Idea and to the capture of its

native impurity.” (FM, 85)

Despite the eternal essence of any ‘idea’ we must always

remember that in cinema it refers only to its contemporary

conditions, only to everything in the current situation that is

not. Although this adds a powerful contemporaneity to cinemas

ontology, Badiou’s “axiomatic discussion of film” does raise the

problem, as he readily admits, “of speaking about it qua film.”

(FM, 86) The cinematic idea – the truth of cinema – appears

through a process of subtraction (from commercialized genre

effects, from the other arts, and from what already makes up

cinema ‘itself’) that is finally both a new and exciting

philosophy of cinema and a rather restricting approach. It is

restricting because despite the often acute readings he gives of

films, Badiou is only interested in cinema qua idea, rather than

qua film. This means that when they appear, discussions of formal,

material or historical aspects of cinema are entirely

subordinated, and usually replaced, by a description of an idea.

These descriptions vary in nature, sometimes proceeding according

to the strictly subtractive methodology of the axiom, as in

Badiou’s account of cinematic genre, but often adopting a poetic

methodology of the ‘impure,’ which tends towards the metaphoric.

In Visconti’s Death in Venice, for example, the film’s grand

accumulation of cultural references leads to a “decomposition by

excess,” (FM, 86) as a metaphor for the main character’s

melancholy “adventure,” presenting a “visitation of a subjective

immobility.” (FM, 87) It is no longer clear how cinema here

aspires to, or indeed creates, the new. On the other hand, when

Badiou places cinema as a mechanism of subtraction from its

contemporary capitalist capture, and sees these operations as

intervening at the level of popular culture, he offers an exciting

role to cinema as mass-art. Here cinema is less art than politics,

inasmuch as “an event is political if its material is collective.”

(M, 141) In this sense cinema’s ‘impurity’ seems to disengage it

from the other arts, for it is its impurity that places its

production within the economic realm of capital rather than the

creative (not to mention Romantic) subjectivity of the artist.16

These are the moments when Badiou’s analysis of cinema tends more

towards the question of what is to come – towards the cinematic

act – than to the analysis of what has already been achieved, and

when he considers the contemporary conditions of cinema in

political terms (the representation of sex and violence for

example) rather than in terms of its historical achievements. At

these moments Badiou’s examples tend towards the popular (John

Woo, Titanic, Brassed Off) rather than the canon (Visconti, Welles,

Murnau), and so move away from modernism’s formal and elitist

constraints to explore the political potential of cinema’s refusal

of capitalism’s miserable conflation of what is with what can be.17

This is finally the gift Badiou offers, a gift both exciting

and generous: cinema as a truth procedure, cinema as a poetic

politics acting against Capital’s saturation of everything,

against its capture of the future. “When the situation is

saturated by its own norms, when the calculation of itself is

inscribed there without respite, when there is no longer a void

between knowledge and prediction, then one must be poetically

ready for the outside-of-self.” (PA, 100) This is the role of

16 For the distinction between “individual” (love), “mixed” (science and art) and “collective” (politics) situations, see BE, 340.

17 This formulation comes from ‘Philosophy and Politics’, in Infinite Thought, p. 74.

cinema, to subtract itself from the representational logic of the

Capitalist ruling class in order to offer a new truth, a new image

of the collective.