Can Cinema Be ThoughT (original) (raw)
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Can Cinema Be Thought?: Alain Badiou and the Artistic Condition
Alain Badiou's philosophy is generally understood to be a fundamentally mathematical enterprise, his principle categories of being, appearing, and truth being themselves thought only though specific scientific events. however the event itself is contrarily thought not through mathematics but through art. and yet despite the fundamental role art plays in his philosophy Badiou's 'inaesthetic' writings seem unduly proscriptive, allowing room principally for the expressly 'literal' arts while eschewing for the most part those manifold arts which have little recourse to the letter. Badiou's polemical writings on cinema are both symptomatic and serve as the most extreme example of this position, his cinema being one which wavers precariously on the border of art and non-art. This paper accordingly questions whether cinema can truly occupy a place in Badiou's inaesthetics. Through a consideration of Badiou's writings on cinema i argue the hegemony of the letter in his inaesthetics to be both one of convenience and symptomatic of his mathematical leanings. I further argue that if cinematic truths are to be registered Badiou's understanding of cinema as (what I interpret to be) an art of disappearance must be rejected. I conclude by contending the oppressive literality of Badiou's philosophy results in his regrettably neglecting by and large those manifold illiterate arts that might otherwise serve to augment his thought.
Thinking Cinema with Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou holds that philosophy is obliged to engage with cinema because it presents a unique ‘philosophical situation’. This chapter accordingly provides a broad overview of Badiou’s understanding of cinema itself – taken in the generic sense, as an art almost entirely defined by its relation to other arts (as well as non-art) – while at the same time drawing out some of the more interesting artistic and philosophical consequences of his position. Following a brief examination of Badiou’s ‘inaesthetic’ conception of art and its relation to truth and philosophy, the chapter goes on to unpack Badiou’s (implicit) conception of cinema as an ‘inessential’ art by isolating two central complications film presents to his inaesthetic program, specifically surrounding the crucial concepts of ‘singularity’ and ‘immanence’. The chapter then moves on to discuss cinema’s peculiar position among the arts, before finally addressing some of the paradoxes Badiou’s understanding of cinema gives rise to, as well as some of the challenges it presents his philosophical system as a whole.
Badiou and Cinema (introduction)
Edinburgh University Press, 2011
Alex Ling seizes upon the philosophy of Alain Badiou to clarify a central question in film scholarship: ‘can cinema be thought?’ Treating this question on three levels, the author first asks if we can really think what cinema is, at an ontological level. Second, he investigates whether cinema can actually think for itself; that is, whether or not it is truly ‘artistic’. Finally he explores in what ways we can rethink the consequences of the fact that cinema thinks. In answering these questions, the author uses well-known films ranging from Hiroshima mon amour to Vertigo to The Matrix to illustrate Badiou’s philosophy as well as to consider the ways in which his work can be extended, critiqued and reframed with respect to the medium of cinema.
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.
To Be or Not To Be Perceived: On Film as an Onto-Logical Art
This paper turns to the work of Alain Badiou to rethink the nature of cinema and its relation to philosophy, arguing that while the cinematic image cannot claim any ontological fidelity to its referent, it nonetheless remains logically faithful. Reconsidered in light of Badiou’s recently elaborated ‘logical phenomenology’, cinema is shown to constitute not an ontological but rather an onto-logical art, being in the final analysis an art of appearances (and not of essences). To this end a complete ‘onto-logy’ of cinema is proposed which considers film at once ‘ontologically’ (as a multiple of multiples) and ‘logically’ (as a world of pure appearance). This onto-logical conceptualization of cinema leads to a reconsideration of the seemingly ‘essential’ relation of perception to film. This ostensible correlation is explored through a close reading of Samuel Beckett’s Film (Alan Schneider, 1965), a text which positions itself as a meditation on film qua film, and is generally supposed to equate ‘being’ with ‘being-perceived’. Taking umbrage with this standard Berkeleian interpretation, an argument is presented that Beckett’s work in fact details a concerted subtraction from perception itself, contending that Film – and by extension, film – is less concerned with ‘appearing-for-an-other’ than with ‘appearing-for-itself’. The paper thus attempts to undo the film-perception correlation and demonstrate how it is pure appearance – appearance (in) itself, devoid of essence as much as perception – that constitutes the basis of all cinema.
Abstracts Cinema: The "Counter-Realization" of Philosophical Problems
The article offers a survey of Deleuze's interest in images throughout his career. It suggests that his enduring fascination with time is the driving force behind his relatively late preoccupation with images, which started with an essay on Lucretius, followed by his book on Bacon's paintings, his two famous books on the cinema and a brief piece on Beckett's TV-plays. During the ten years of not discussing time at all, time has changed the medium of reflection: Deleuze stops conceiving time-as most structuralists do-as infinite, one-directional successiveness, similar to how utterances work. After the gap years, time gets involved in an "evental logic" that is designed after the role-model of images. From now on, time incorporates divergent flight lines (to a past, that never existed, to a future, that will never come true etc.). Far from being only chronological, time becomes a code name for a "reservoir" of simultaneity that undermines and overrides...
In the final pages of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, published in 1985, Gilles Deleuze concludes by saying, "The [philosophical] theory of cinema does not bear on the cinema, but on the concepts of the cinema, which are no less practical, effective or existent than cinema itself. [...] Cinema's concepts are not given in cinema. And yet they are cinema's concepts, not [philosophical] theories about cinema. So that there is always a time, midday-midnight, when we must no longer ask ourselves, 'What is cinema?' but 'What is philosophy?' (1) After 700 pages of sui generis analysis on the history and nature of cinema, and what cinema says about bodies and world, Deleuze unexpectedly alights at precisely the point at which his final work What is Philosophy? (written with Félix Guattari in 1991) picks up. How is it that questioning the nature of cinema necessarily leads to questioning the nature of philosophy?
Badiou Studies, 3: 1 (2014), 289-95, 2014
Whatever else it might be, Antoine de Baecque's selection of Alain Badiou's thinking on cinema is testament to the philosopher's lifelong engagement with the medium. The excellent translation is by Susan Spitzer and the book contains thirty-one texts: occasional pieces, conversations, theoretical discussions and appreciations of individual films, the earliest dating from 1957 (the next from twenty years later), and the most recent-apart from the new interview that opens the volume-from 2010. Some of the pieces have not been published before, while several have previously appeared in L'art du cinema, the journal founded by Badiou together with Denis Lévy in 1993, or other dedicated film venues. Many of the earlier texts, on the other hand, appeared in militant reviews. In his foreword, de Baecque suggests that the collection 'can be read as a veritable manifesto of cinema as conceived by Alain Badiou' (x), and he describes Badiou's ideas on cinema as 'amazingly consistent over time' (7). Badiou himself however, in the opening interview, is careful to contextualize his cinema interests in relation to his political activities and discussions, and indeed the pronouncements in polemical texts like 'Revisionist Cinema' (34-39) or the programmatic 'Art and its Criticism' (40-47) seem quaint removed from their original setting of Maoist publications like La Feuille foudre. Many of the more recent texts are commissioned pieces (intended Badiou Studies Volume Three, Number One (2014) Page | 323