A Discussion of Alain Badiou's Thesis on Aesthetics

MARTIN PLOT

Valencia

Seminario; Alain Badiou at CalArts; 2003

School of Music, CalArts

Today I will focus on the following points of Alan Badiou;s philosophy: 1) The claim that we don’t need to wait for an event, since “many events, even very distant ones, still require us to be faithful to them…[and,] besides, waiting is pointless, for it is of the essence of the event not to be preceded by any sign, and to catch us unaware with its grace, regardless of our vigilance.” (Paul, 111) However, your philosophy, regarding both politics and art, still seems to be expectant, crouched and waiting for the Messiah, the subject both created by and the one who names the event and inaugurates a new fidelity. 2) Following this, it seems to me that this expectation for a new fidelity necessarily leads to a rejection, not fully thematized I think, of what I regard as still operating events, in particular that of the advent of the French Revolution. Does not the rejection of the plurality of gods and demons—that is, the acceptance of a picture of competing events and truth procedures by modern democracy—force you to embrace the next or better so, the most recent event, as having inaugurated a truth procedure to which we must be faithful? Isn’t the most recent event the one we could call ‘the Bush event,’ the preemptive event, the event that might have inaugurated an era—it doesn’t matter how short it might be, and it might be short indeed—in which the American Republican Party becomes the “prose of the world”? Hasn’t that event enough apostles to be considered as such? Still, shouldn’t that event be opposed rather than proclaimed?