Art, Politics and Philosophy: Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière

Theory,http://tcs.sagepub.com/ Culture & Society Art, Politics and Philosophy: Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière John W.P. Phillips Theory Culture Society 2010 27: 146 DOI: 10.1177/0263276409349284 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/27/4/146 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: Theory, Culture and Society Additional services and information for Theory, Culture & Society can be found at: Email Alerts: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://tcs.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/27/4/146.refs.html >> Version of Record - Aug 2, 2010 What is This? Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 Art, Politics and Philosophy Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière John W.P. Phillips Handbook of Inaesthetics by Alain Badiou, trans. Alberto Toscano Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005 The Politics of Aesthetics by Jacques Rancière, trans. Gabriel Rockhill with an Afterword by Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 2004. Abstract Taking the publication in English of several works by Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière as its point of departure, this review article attempts to outline what may be at stake in reading these two authors together. Looking especially at the works on politics and on aesthetics (particularly Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics and Rancière’s Politics of Aesthetics), the article also draws on other major texts by these authors as a way of clarifying their basic philosophical principles. Under the rubrics of ‘the axiom of equality’ (Rancière) and ‘the empty set’ (Badiou), these two thinkers establish links with their tradition in ways that are mobilized towards invention or transfiguration in spheres of both politics and art. Key words aesthetics ■ Alain Badiou Rancière ■ event ■ mathematics ■ politics ■ Jacques I N WHAT follows I single out two provocatively original French thinkers, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, who in different yet connected ways have brought the problem of aesthetics to the forefront of current debates about art and politics. ■ Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 27(4): 146–160 DOI: 10.1177/0263276409349284 Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 Phillips – Art, Politics and Philosophy 147 Badiou has occupied himself since the 1970s with conditions on which truths can be invented. These ‘truths’ of Badiou operate in some ways exactly as the truths of metaphysics do, in that they are universal and intuitively known, but in other ways they do not, for the labour of invention opens the world to procedures that cannot be predicted from the perspective of a given state of knowledge. ‘A truth’, writes Badiou, ‘bores a hole in knowledge’ (2005a: 525). Such truths proceed from the ostensibly mundane conditions of love, politics, art and science, such that in each case a truth emerges as simultaneously singular and immanent to the sphere from which it proceeds. ‘Art itself is a truth procedure,’ writes Badiou again. Its truths are immanent: ‘art is rigorously coextensive with the truths it generates.’ And they are singular: ‘these truths are given nowhere else than in art’ (Badiou, 2005b: 9). Such statements give philosophy a demonstrative and procedural rather than regulative and prescriptive role in relation to art and politics. Rancière, unlike Badiou, still speaks in terms of debate (for the philosopher an adherence to truth renders debate superfluous); but he operates in a sphere transformed largely by what he calls the ‘aesthetic regime’, which limits the possibilities of debate considerably. The notion of a regime operates simultaneously in historical, procedural and theoretical ways, and functions primarily as a ground for outlining schematic conflicts: we belong to a historicity in relation to which we can utilize resources to produce theoretical foundations for addressing political conflicts. In fact, the operational differences between these two thinkers are grounded to an extent on the ways in which they develop their schemas, a situation I propose to follow. Can they be read, together or separately, in terms of an event to which they may be said to belong? Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics and Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics, published in English-language editions within a year of each other (2004 and 2005 respectively), came out alongside several others in a rather sudden and somewhat haphazard translation programme undertaken in the last decade that includes both recent works and texts written 20 or 30 years ago.1 These thinkers, writing in rather different idioms and styles, seem nevertheless, in the (for them) fresh context of Anglo-American academic life, to occupy the same kind of intellectual space, having been granted the enthusiastic approval of several vintage commentators and partisans of materialism in critical theory (including Terry Eagleton and Christopher Norris). Slavoj Žižek no doubt has quite a lot to do with this; much of the Anglo-American interest follows in the wake of his widely read The Ticklish Subject (1999), crucial sections of which gather together these two (along with Ernesto Laclau and Etienne Balibar) as ‘post-Althusserian’. The Althusserian background is historically true, of course, and both consistently acknowledge the formative importance of political as well as intellectual events of the 1960s and early 1970s. But the ‘post’ becomes more complicated if we compare Rancière’s ferocious criticism of the Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 148 Theory, Culture & Society 27(4) Althusser circle (from 1975) with Badiou’s rather differently modulated readings, especially the patient, respectful (but ultimately devastating) reading of Althusser outlined clearly in his 1998 book, Metapolitics (2005). And Badiou’s teaching of the 1970s, bringing Lacan and Mallarmé to the intellectual and revolutionary Marxism of the time, emerges under the cultural shadow of Mao, a fecund three-point intersection. The Althusserian reference is rendered less determinate still by the extent to which they both mobilize (and alter) that notion of historicity, already emergent by the end of the 19th century, which Heidegger most enduringly formulates after Being and Time as Ereignis (or ‘event’).2 Rancière’s Aesthetics and Badiou’s Inaesthetics appear as deceptively brief statements, yet both perform exemplary operations. And they demand to be read according to the operations they perform rather than in terms merely of the statements they make. This crucial fact does not license anyone to ignore the rest of their still growing bodies of work, but it does allow us to treat these otherwise marginal engagements as representative.3 Read alongside each other, these two texts have the additional virtue of posing the problem of a negotiation between the founding yet contrary terms aesthetics and inaesthetics. I use this contingent fact as a way in, but refer throughout to their other works when necessary. The Axiom of Equality In a chapter in Metapolitics on Rancière’s Disagreement, Badiou permits himself a brief yet technically precise (which is not necessarily to say correct) definition of Rancière’s ‘overall doctrine’. It can be regarded, he says, as ‘a democratic anti-philosophy that identifies the axiom of equality, and is founded on a negative ontology of the collective that sublates the contingent historicity of nominations’ (Badiou, 2005c: 115). From Badiou’s point of view what this means is that Rancière’s doctrine represents something more than merely ‘democratic materialism’ (or postmodernism as we’ve now come to understand that term) owing to his identification of the ‘axiom of equality’, which isolates its role as an un-hypothetical principle (as compelling in its own way as, say, Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction). The so-called axiom of equality implies an ‘equality of intelligence’, regarded, in Rancière’s words, as the ‘absolute condition of any communication and all social order’ (Rancière, 1999: 34). In The Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou makes the same claim in privileging the domains of mathematics and poetry: The poem is, in an exemplary way, destined to everyone. No more and no less than mathematics. This is precisely because neither the poem nor the matheme take persons into account, representing instead, at the two extremes of language, the purest universality. (Badiou, 2005b: 31) The axiom of equality therefore appeals to an illimitable future of address. It illustrates, furthermore, a major difference between philosophy and social science, which demands an address that can be recognized (and an Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 Phillips – Art, Politics and Philosophy 149 addressee defined by the particularity of a knowledge community, which limits its range). The point about a poetic line or a mathematical sentence would be that no discursive community is capable of limiting the future universality of its address. On this basis every social organization can be regarded as a kind of a priori ‘policing’ implying corresponding ‘wrongs’. Every social organization (called by Rancière the ‘police order’) divides ‘those who have a part’ from ‘those who have none’ and thus falls foul of the axiom of equality, on which can be based the superimposition over the police order of ‘another community’, based entirely on the terms of a struggle for equality. This inexistent ‘other community’ (the police can conjure up in a paranoid manner all kinds of submerged insurgent communities), which might appear to have arisen contingently – as a political struggle over a perceived wrong – can thus be shown to be grounded on a universal principle that takes logical precedence over historical (quasi) a priori forms. In the short pamphlet Le Partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (translated as part of The Politics of Aesthetics, 2004), Rancière returns several times to the exemplary principle of ‘writing’, which paradoxically represents, throughout the historicity of Western thought, a threat and yet a powerful resource. In reference to Plato (and The Phaedrus), Rancière writes: . . . by stealing away to wander aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to speak to, writing destroys every legitimate foundation for the circulation of words, for the relationship between the effects of language and the position of bodies in shared space. (Rancière, 2004: 13) Readers of Jacques Derrida (1974) will be familiar with this notion of writing (or archi-écriture) as the paradoxical organizing principle of Western metaphysics. The most general element involves that property of the written mark, its ‘ideal iterability’, that allows it to be repeated, in principle ad infinitum, and which thus grounds what can be said or done on incalculable and illimitable future operations. Returning briefly to Badiou’s definition of Rancière’s doctrine, a striking factor lies in the inclusion of commonly translatable philosophical terms: democracy, identification, axiomatic, foundation, ontology, sublation, historicity and nomination. By defining Rancière’s doctrine as antiphilosophical in this crisp philosophical manner, Badiou establishes the grounds of both his agreement and his disagreement in a single amicable blow. No doubt partly in homage to Rancière, for a precise formulation of disagreement underpins Rancière’s political thought as its key operator, this chapter proceeds to spell out the terms of Badiou’s disagreement with him, as follows: there are operations that are immune even from the doctrine of disagreement. It’s worth dwelling on this for a moment. Disagreement translates mésentente (not désaccord, which I think would be the likely choice in most contexts when translating disagreement from English to French). The kinds Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 150 Theory, Culture & Society 27(4) of dissent or disharmony suggested imply disruption at the level of conditions of understanding rather than the kind of disagreement one has with someone if one understands but disagrees with the sense or sentiment of what is said. This is not disagreement at the level of the statement but at the level of its enunciation: ‘Disagreement occurs wherever contention over what speaking means constitutes the very rationality of the speech situation’ (Rancière, 1999: xi). Such forms of disagreement occur with the breakdown of conditions according to which different parties speaking different languages might share a common object. One no longer recognizes in the other’s language any shared object that one can present in one’s own. The disturbance represented by this form of disagreement is thus capable of redrawing the lines that constitute the conditions of speaking at all. Because disagreement – in its extreme situation – concerns politics, Rancière insists that politics is what philosophy attempts to expunge: ‘Philosophy tries to rid itself of politics, to suppress a scandal in thinking proper to the exercise of politics’ (Rancière, 1999: xii). This conception of philosophy thus puts it on one side of the distinction between the sphere of statements (governed ideally by universal conditions of truth and falsity) and enunciative modalities of speaking (governed by existing yet alterable conditions of possibility). Disagreement bears on the question of what can be said and done, while philosophy concerns itself with eradicating the sphere of the question itself. It’s thus possible that a certain kind of object is shared, and indeed recognized differently, by the contending vocabularies of these two exemplary philosophers. And what operates as philosophy for Badiou may turn out to be the field for Rancière of aesthetics (which Badiou rejects). One must keep an eye on the differences. The artwork in each case plays a peculiar role. If we reconstitute Rancière’s ‘doctrine’ in his own terms the dimension missing in Badiou’s definition reappears as aesthetics. In Le Partage du sensible, Rancière evokes a ‘long-term project that aims at re-establishing a debate’s conditions of intelligibility’ (Rancière, 2004: 10). What is at stake is the question of what one designates by aesthetics. This is a twofold question, a question about the object of a term and a reflexive question about its use. And it moves, in the vintage Heideggerian manner, in a circular orbit. Each side of the question has immeasurable implications for the other side. On the question of designation Rancière moves swiftly to an answer: Aesthetics refers to a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships (which presupposes a certain idea of thought’s effectivity). (2004: 10) The notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’ (one translation of le partage du sensible), which was developed in Disagreement, designates the ‘system of a priori forms that presents itself to experience’ (2004: 13). Rancière is clear in grounding this idea historically. It serves a purpose as a theoretical Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 Phillips – Art, Politics and Philosophy 151 operator yet functions also as an idea associated with the aesthetic regime itself. As ‘a specific regime’ it is distinguished first from a so-called ‘ethical regime of images’, exemplified by Plato (for whom artworks were to be distrusted as irrational and fickle representations in comparison with rational operations of thought and technique), and a ‘poetic regime’, dominated by standards associated with representation and beauty, and which ‘defines proper ways of doing and making as well as means of assessing imitations’ (Rancière, 2004: 22). Reminiscent of Aristotle but exemplified by classical approaches to art in general, the poetic regime, therefore, fosters an independent sphere for art and criticism. It separates art, as a sphere of doing and making, from other social spheres (political, scientific). The aesthetic regime departs from the poetic ‘by destroying the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making, a barrier that separated its rules from the order of social occupations’ (Rancière, 2004: 23). So the artwork not only breaks free from norms and rules of making that constrained the production of classical art, but also it implicates operations previously regarded as separate from art (social activities and operations of thought) with the same conditions. Henceforth aesthetics would be required to engage with the historicity of politics, society and thought in general, rather than merely the history of artworks. From this perspective a further possibility arises. The ethical regime of images and the poetic regime of art both imply specific regimes of social and political life as well, so the Platonic Republic, for instance, now appears revised as a formal account of the police order against which the aesthetic sphere can be superimposed as the ground of emancipatory struggle. Aesthetics, then, refers to a certain way of reflecting on art that is connected with a way of thinking about the operations of thought. By following Rancière closely it is possible to trace a systematic logic here. The distinction within aesthetics, between (1) a certain way of thinking about art and (2) a presupposition of thought, retraces rather exactly the distinction in linguistics between statements made (reflections, judgements) and enunciative modalities (conditions of doing and saying). The difficulty here is that the distinction itself (between enunciation and statement), which privileges the domain of possibility rather than the act of speaking or doing as such, could only have come about in the wake, specifically, of an aesthetic regime. It is the aesthetic regime itself that enables a reflection on aesthetics as an aesthetic regime. The privilege for aesthetics thus becomes clearer, for with this designation Rancière aims to redraw the grounds for an otherwise confused assemblage of discourses around the notion of modernity (conceived variously as modernity, modernism, modernatism and postmodernism), which figures as: . . . the source of all the jumbled miscellany that sweeps together such figures as Hölderlin, Cézanne, Mallarmé, Malevich, or Duchamp into a vast Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 152 Theory, Culture & Society 27(4) whirlwind where Cartesian science gets mixed up with the revolutionary parricide, the age of the masses with Romantic irrationalism, the ban on representation with the techniques of mechanized reproduction, the Kantian sublime with the Freudian primal scene, the flight of the gods with the extermination of the Jews in Europe. (Rancière, 2004: 11) The authors most immediately conjured in this miscellaneous metalanguage (Bachelard, Foucault, Adorno, Horkheimer, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Lyotard, Lacan, Heidegger, and so on) form only part of the familiar and contested canon of modern critical theory to which it refers. The schemata of regimes plays a powerful role not merely in contesting these various alternative arguments about modernity but in resituating and re-contextualizing them, consolidating while redistributing the terms of their engagement. Things can be misleading. The Politics of Aesthetics (2004) serves as a kind of introduction to Rancière’s thought, although it aims for more than this. The initiative here belongs to Gabriel Rockhill, who translates Rancière’s short pamphlet, Le Partage du sensible, and surrounds it with supporting materials of several kinds: a translator’s preface; a translator’s introduction; a new interview with Rancière for the English edition; a critical afterword by Slavoj Žižek; and two appendices providing, first, a glossary of technical terms and, second, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. In his preface Rockhill argues that his objective might ‘best be described in terms of a relational reconfiguration of meaning that casts Rancière’s work in an alternate system of signification’ (in Rancière, 2004: x). The additional materials, then, should not be regarded as if they are merely supplements to or satellites around a central body. For the principle of the supplement infects anything that might otherwise have been regarded as original with a prior condition that renders it as supplementary as its translation, a mere node in a relational network of textual effects. Rockhill aims by way of this supplemented translation to ‘analyze the relational network within which Rancière’s work has emerged’ (in Rancière, 2004: x). This entails following rather literally the kind of procedure that one would elsewhere have evoked in a reductio ad absurdum: ‘it has required studying, in both French and English, Rancière’s entire corpus, his standard historical references (from Plato and the New Testament to Balzac and Rosellini) and the work of his contemporary interlocutors’ (Rancière, 2004: x). The notion of completion – not merely of the corpus but of the entire network that supposedly surrounds it – seems no less impossible than it did in the 1960s, as various idioms of structuralism attempted to establish the ideal conditions for textual analysis. The project unintentionally evokes Jorge Luis Borges and ‘The Library of Babel’, an apparently endless labyrinth of written volumes disruptive of anything that would limit a singular text to its signification.4 Nevertheless, the idea of a chain or network of signification, of signifiers divorced from their subjugation to any prior signification, remains in play. Rancière’s key theoretical formula in what Rockhill translates as ‘the Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 Phillips – Art, Politics and Philosophy 153 distribution of the sensible’ relies on such a formulation. Considered in terms of partition or division, the formula designates the ways in which the sensible or perceptible sphere is organized. Populations are divided not in terms of what individuals might say or think (not in terms of the meaningful content of their thoughts and dreams) but in terms of what can or cannot be said and done according to the division of the perceptual realm. This does not equate to any straightforward empiricism (the realm of the sensible is not simply that of the senses) but it does rely on a certain kind of primacy of the signifier. La sensible functions in French much as the sensible does in English (in the way the sensible or palpable is opposed to the intelligible), so one can speak of the signifier in terms of the repeatable mark, as an image of a sensible, that is, as a recognizable image (which can always be active in the imagination, independently of whether it is presently seen or heard). The idea of a distribution of the sensible thus performs the necessary function of limiting the otherwise endlessly relational quality of signified meaning without falling back on a theory of representation. In this sense, the theory of the distribution of the sensible conforms, in its doubtless peculiar manner, to a widespread shift from notions of signification as representation and communication to notions of speaking and doing as performance or enactment, from statements and regimes of truth to enunciative modalities. Rancière’s questions are thus formed in the opposition between a broadly classical regime and a modern aesthetic regime that, in some clear senses, one can say has superseded the classical one. The Empty Set Badiou, to all appearances, presents something quite different, at least to the extent that an aesthetic regime (or ‘condition’) does not imply a rejection of classical philosophical values. The Handbook of Inaesthetics, in gathering together some pieces on the arts (written between 1993 and 1994 and extended for publication as Petit manuel d’inesthétique in 1998), presents a single relatively coherent account of one of the four ‘conditions’ of philosophy: science, love, art and politics. Badiou claims that philosophy ‘operates’ on the basis of multiple truth procedures arising variously from these four conditions, but that philosophy does not itself produce truths. This apparent disarming of philosophy at the same time returns to some of the most central elements of classical philosophy. He defends Plato’s establishment of the independence of the rational capacity (as the movement towards the matheme) for which was required a denigration of art in its imitative capacity; but he raises art (and the poeme), in the sense we moderns are supposed to have learned from Mallarmé, as a heterogeneous truth condition. One hears the echo, in these four conditions, of Aristotle’s corpus divided into books in the three categories episteme (science), poiesis (production) and praxis (politics and ethics), and giving rise to the question of coupling: philosophy and science; philosophy and art; philosophy and politics. Philosophy, formed with the word philía, names itself in friendship and love. But the amatory condition licenses a fourth sphere: philosophy Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 154 Theory, Culture & Society 27(4) and psychoanalysis. And the Lacanian background never recedes too far in Badiou even today. Throughout Badiou’s first major book, The Theory of the Subject (2009a), Lacan represents in disguise the current state of philosophy in its classical sense, with a line running from Aristotle through Hegel and Heidegger via Lacan to Badiou himself: ‘Lacan’, he writes, in the seminar dated 21 February 1977, ‘is our Hegel, that is, he presents the (idealist) dialectic of our time. With our time comes the requirement that one pretends to oppose this dialectic to Hegel’s machines, and Lacan does not shirk this duty’ (Badiou, 2009a: 132). As readers of Hegel’s Greater Logic know, nothing emerges in its opposition to being, their difference mediated by the force of becoming. In the pages of Badiou’s book, certain ways of thinking nothing allow a gathering, under the non-sign of lack (Lacan’s ‘lack in the signifier’), of procedures that produce themselves in the mark or trace of subtraction, including Mallarmé’s ‘symbol’ and ‘the void’ of Epicurus. The signifier, the symbol and the void provide only three variants of the condition that, in Badiou’s next major book, Being and Event, grounds this nothing as ‘ontology’, via set theory and the mark of the empty set: {} or ∅, the set lacking all members: ∅ = {x: x ≠ x} Let’s be clear about what this means. It is one of the great virtues of Badiou’s mode of presentation that one cannot distinguish within it serious from joke philosophy. To this extent he belongs to an illustrious set of ‘joke thinkers’ who otherwise might not seem to have much in common (Søren Kierkegaard, Marcel Duchamp, Theodor Adorno, Harold Bloom, and perhaps also Lacan, belong to this set).5 The often-arid comedy cannot be extricated from either the intelligent labour of the operations or the passionate polemics of the expression. And notions of truth cannot be rejected as non-serious even if the specific truths seem funny. The introduction of set theory allows Badiou to put in axiomatic terms what for Lacan had been decisive in breaking from the ancient dialectic of the many and the one. A multiplicity can be ‘counted as one’ on the basis of the terms by which its elements are gathered. Through the axioms of set theory, we may say, ‘the one is not’, which provides a rigorous model for the operation of proper names, as follows: the empty set is the only unique set, because, as the only set lacking members, it is the only one that cannot be duplicated. The proof of this can be found in the so-called principle of extensionality, according to which sets may be compared in terms of elements they share. The empty set is the only set that cannot be compared with any other, for it has no elements. Badiou’s application of this set theoretical curiosity implies that if the empty set is unique then its mark ∅ operates as a proper name and as the negative inscription of existence. Existence accordingly can be affirmed only on the basis of the negative inscription, the mark of the empty set. That something is can only be affirmed on the basis of the one that is not. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 Phillips – Art, Politics and Philosophy 155 This truth, like all truths, operates as the inexistent reference to an existent that cannot be presented as such (the unnameable), and it functions (echoing the rallying cry of German Romanticism) as an ‘in-difference’. Badiou (substituting ‘multiple’ for ‘set’) puts it like this: . . . the difference between two multiples, as regulated by the axiom of extensionality, can only be marked by those multiples that actually belong to the two multiples to be differentiated. A multiple-of-nothing thus has no conceivable differentiating mark. The unpresentable is inextensible and therefore indifferent. (Badiou, 2005a: 67) And now here’s the point. The reference to the unpresentable – the extreme negative existential mark – serves to unify the otherwise heterogeneous conditions of art and mathematics. So the truths of mathematics and those of art belong each time singularly to heterogeneous truth conditions (such truths are given nowhere else than in mathematics and art respectively). Yet at the limit of each an unpresentable (negative) truth operates as their indifference: the axiom of the empty set or the void, respectively. The unpresentable is clarified in this way as a matter of operational significance – as a structural condition rather than as a merely evanescent truth whose proper realm would lie elsewhere. The Inaesthetics book owes as much to The Theory of the Subject (2009a) as it does to Being and Event (2005a). Entire arguments from the earlier book are adapted for these several engagements with the arts and, to a surprising extent, Mallarmé figures repeatedly as philosophy’s main teacher. Inaesthetics is defined briefly at the beginning of the book: By inaesthetics I understand a relation of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art. (Badiou, 2005b: xiv)6 By ‘intraphilosophical effects’ we are to understand what happens when philosophy arrives at singular truths by following procedures that art (and more often poetry) provides. A striking and famous precedent for this kind of operation would be the moment in Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Artwork’ when Heidegger brings us to a kind of impasse, with a question about the truth of equipment. After several dense pages of commentary on metaphysical interpretations of ‘the thing’, which ‘assault’ the thing in various ways, and which fail to distinguish between ‘thing’, ‘work’ and ‘equipment’, he asks: ‘but what is the path to the equipmentality of equipment? How are we to learn what equipment in truth is?’ The answer that Heidegger chooses allows him to ‘describe a piece of equipment quite apart from any philosophical theory’ (Heidegger, 2002: 13). It operates as a kind of inaesthetics avant la lettre, in that it gives up on philosophical explanation by letting the work guide Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 156 Theory, Culture & Society 27(4) the philosopher in the quest for the truth of equipment (the controversial example of Van Gogh’s Shoes from 1888). The article begins philosophically by raising questions concerning the artwork, but develops by allowing specific artworks to guide philosophy through some of its greatest difficulties. Badiou’s project contests Heidegger’s clearly premature declaration (if one takes this literally) of the ‘end of philosophy’, and involves reasserting the philosophical priority of truth in terms of events. In a tightly argued essay, ‘Philosophy and Art’ (from Conditions and translated in Infinite Thought), Badiou acknowledges the importance of Heidegger’s devaluation of aesthetics but also contests the sense of the ‘end of philosophy’, which he believes Heidegger ‘sutures to the poem’s authority’ (Badiou, 2002: 98). Again, this has to do with a general misunderstanding of Plato characteristic of our era: ‘The Heideggerian misunderstanding of the true nature of the Platonic gesture [is] at its core the misunderstanding of the mathematical sense of the Idea’ (Badiou, 2002: 97). So The Handbook of Inaesthetics establishes Mallarmé alongside Plato (‘What is a Poem?’, 2005b: 16–27). Art has become a condition in relation to which its events are situated as close as possible to the ‘point of the unnamable’ (2005b: 24). The unnameable poetic condition, borrowing a phrase from Mallarmé (and thus following the inaesthetic principle), is ‘the power of language’ (2005b: 25). To put it in the simplest way possible, poetry presents the impossible narrative of how poetry comes to be, and it thus circles itself in recording the evanescence of its event. Its truth is therefore the truth of the event as such insofar as it fails to name the event of the poem itself. The consistency of this meta-logical procedure informs The Handbook of Inaesthetics throughout, not just in several essays providing exemplary procedural readings of poems, but also in readings of cinema (Wenders predictably), theatre and dance. In the latter sexual difference in Mallarmé’s reading is, according to Badiou, ‘made to serve as a metaphor for the event as such, a metaphor for something whose entire being lies in disappearance’ (Badiou, 2005b: 65). Following Mallarmé in word and deed, Badiou rejects two alternatives for interpreting art: the referential or mimetic alternative (according to which art would operate as description or representation) and the expressive (according to which art operates as the expression of the artist’s vision or genius). Here Badiou begins by paraphrasing Mallarmé, before outlining his own schematic account: ‘The poem is neither a description nor an expression. Nor is it an affected painting of the world’s extension. The poem is an operation’ (Badiou, 2005b: 29). As we have seen it’s an operation involving withdrawal or subtraction a priori, which involves not the objectification that a philosophical aesthetics allegedly demands, but a ‘disobjectification’. The world to which the poem gives access is strange; what presents itself does so at the cost of the disappearance of what is presented. It’s a world entirely made up of traces of a world. Badiou (in another argument reproduced from The Theory of the Subject) finds a poetic counterpart to the meta-mathematical formula, exemplified by the mark of the empty set, in the non-word ‘ptyx’ that Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 Phillips – Art, Politics and Philosophy 157 Mallarmé notoriously used in the ‘sonnet en –yx’. According to the formal rule that Mallarmé had set himself, each line of this sonnet was to end in the letter -yx (or -yxe for the feminine endings). Running out of such words in French (the dictionaries of the time listed only 13), Mallarmé used the invention ptyx in the line: ‘Sur les Crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx [On the credenzas in the empty room: no ptyx]’ (Mallarmé, 1982: 48). Badiou claims that this ‘name that does not name’ would be ‘the name of what the poem is capable of: to bring forth from language a coming to presence that was previously impossible’ (2005b: 25). But because it operates as a fake name, the reader is led to conclude that ‘the poem, which has no other role but that of manifesting the power of language, is powerless to name this power veridically’ (Badiou, 2005b: 25). The ptyx therefore functions to represent the poem to the extent that it presents this self-representation as failing a priori. Meta-poetry intersects with meta-mathematics at the point of their respective failures: the failure each time to name that which, for structural reasons, made evident in the operation of the failure, cannot be named. Badiou and Rancière: Names for What Event? The two principles, ‘the empty set’ and ‘the axiom of equality’, operate in complementary ways to the extent that each designates a condition of nonbeing (in Hegelian terms ‘already no longer’ and ‘not yet’) that requires consistent and ingenious modes of affirmation. In the 21st century these two modes are perhaps the most formally coherent alternatives that the present condition of thought offers, rejecting democratic materialism (postmodernism), scientific positivism and any kind of truth claim that would appeal to a hidden or transcendental matrix (any appeal to a notion of God or of Man), but promising some kind of ontological condition. There are two compelling reasons for reading these two thinkers alongside each other today. First, their relatively recent emergence in Englishspeaking intellectual history carries with it the rhetoric of a break with tradition, as if these voices, which have not been heard alongside those of better-known (and dead) French writers like Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida and Lyotard, now stand for something refreshingly different, that is, they now stand apart and against the better-known aspects of their tradition.7 This rhetoric requires careful consideration, for there is much at stake in this dividing up of an intellectual tradition, and it operates entirely differently in the texts of the writers in question and those of some of their English language commentators. The second reason, which is in this way related to the first, involves the deeper, at once more urgent and more enduring, question of what relationships can yet be invented between thought, art and politics?8 The singularity of a writer’s engagement with the world event implies a distinct vocabulary and an idiosyncratic mode of operation. But the writer remains indebted to the fields within which this engagement is to be wrought, to the idiomatic possibilities of an intellectual tradition. So if in the last decade Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 158 Theory, Culture & Society 27(4) we have been encouraged to read these authors as somehow exceptions to or as separate from traditions that we’re supposedly more familiar with, once we turn to their own texts we find something rather different. We find alongside the multiple modes of distancing a strong affirmation of that tradition, a continuous register of acknowledgement and indebtedness, and, most insistently, a motivated return to a privileged range of (partly overlapping) key texts to be read with increasing care and patience. Notes 1. In the ‘Author’s Preface’ to the 2005 English translation of Being and Event (L’Être et l’événement from 1988), Badiou regards his late reception outside France as ‘a proof of consistency and resistance; far more so than if I had been subject to immediate translation – which can always be a mere effect of fashion’ (2005: xi). Badiou’s personal faith in the enduring importance of his own work should not need such a fickle proof, of course, and it is surprising to find him seizing a justification so readily in the attentions of the immediate Anglo-American intellectual sphere. 2. Althusser had not begun any engagement with Heidegger – or indeed with Nietzsche – until the 1980s, a situation that might help clarify his oblique angle to an intellectual environment otherwise steeped in a rapidly growing engagement with German philosophy after Nietzsche. 3. Badiou’s three major works, The Theory of the Subject (2009a), Being and Event (2005a) and Logic of Worlds (2009b), require long and patient analysis, and no engagement can be attempted without this. In addition to Rancière’s Disagreement (1999), The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) and The Philosopher and His Poor (2003) are also required reading. 4. The risk is that the event of Rancière’s engagement will be cobbled rather than showcased by these several supplements, presenting, in the original sense, a curate’s egg. 5. On the importance of the joke as part of the antithetical force of critique, see Sellars (2007). 6. The political complement to inaesthetics is metapolitics: . . . by ‘metapolitics’ I mean whatever consequences a philosophy is capable of drawing, both in and for itself, from real instances of politics as thought. Metapolitics is opposed to political philosophy, which claims that since no such politics exists, it falls to philosophers to think ‘the’ political. (Badiou, 2005b: xxxix) 7. For proof of this widespread effort of distancing, see, for instance, the following typical moments. In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek evokes, under the monstrous coinage ‘standard postmodern deconstructionist political theorists’, an at best vague and very often erroneously identified sphere of intellectual procedures to which he conveniently opposes his so called ‘post-Althusserian’ theorists (Žižek, 1999: 153). Gabriel Rockhill in a footnote on Rancière’s difference from Badiou states: Despite his profound disagreement with Alain Badiou over the question of aesthetics, it is clear that their kindred approach to politics and their shared refusal of post-structuralism acts as a common front against the most wellknown tradition in contemporary French thought. (Rockhill, 2004: 76) Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 Phillips – Art, Politics and Philosophy 159 More considered yet still fussily concerned with establishing the distance are Peter Hallward in his ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Badiou’s Ethics (Badiou, 2001: xxi–xxx) and Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens in their ‘Introduction’ to Badiou’s Infinite Thought (Badiou, 2002: 3–9). In nearly every case, to my mind, a more or less gross misconception or false generalization of what is understood by poststructuralism or deconstruction applies. 8. These readings are dedicated to Paul Rae, Tania Roy and others, ‘il y a là cendre’, who may recognize what they have contributed to them. References Badiou, Alain (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso. (First published in French in 1993.) Badiou, Alain (2002) Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London: Continuum. Badiou, Alain (2005a) Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum. (First published in French in 1988.) Badiou, Alain (2005b) Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (First published in French in 1998.) Badiou, Alain (2005c) Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker. London: Verso. (First published in French in 1998.) Badiou, Alain (2009a) The Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum. (First published in French in 1982.) Badiou, Alain (2009b) Logic of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum. (First published in French in 2006.) Derrida, Jacques (1974) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (First published in French in 1967.) Heidegger, Martin (2002) Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mallarmé, Stéphane (1982) Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Mary Anne Caws. New York: New Directions. Rancière, Jacques (1975) La Leçon d’Althusser. Paris: Gallimard. Rancière, Jacques (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lesssons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rancière, Jacques (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose. London: Verso. (First published in French in 1995.) Rancière, Jacques (2003) The Philosopher and his Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster and Andrew Parker. London: Verso. (First published in French in 1983.) Rancière, Jacques (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill with an Afterword by Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso. (First published in French in 2000.) Rockhill, Gabriel (2004) ‘The Silent Revolution’, SubStance 33(1): 54–76. Sellars, Roy (2007) ‘Harold Bloom (Comic) Critique’, pp. 255–89 in Graham Allen and Roy Sellars The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom. Cambridge: Salt. Žižek, Slavoj (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014 160 Theory, Culture & Society 27(4) John W.P. Phillips is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He writes on philosophy, literature, critical theory, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, urbanism and military technology. He is co-author with Ryan Bishop of the forthcoming Modernist Avant-garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). And he is currently researching a project on autoimmunity in biotechnology and political philosophy. [email: [email protected]] Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on August 17, 2014