Alain Badiou

Abstract

For the French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937), cinema constitutes itself in an act of purification, it emerges by throwing offits 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. From 1968 to 1999 Badiou served on the faculty in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris, VIII. He has taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) since 1999, and also teaches at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. He has published many papers and books concerning the ontology of mathematics and the “truths” of philosophical discourses. Some of his works include The Concept of Model (1969; English trans. 2007), Being and Event (1988; English trans. 2005), Metapolitics (2006) and The Century (2007).