Badiou and Cinema 9780748644483

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Badiou and Cinema

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The camera has been praised for extending the senses; it may, as the world goes, deserve more praise for confining them, leaving room for thought. Stanley Cavell The cinematograph never meant to create an event, but a vision. Jean-Luc Godard If people see one good film in ten bad, they are coming nearer to possession of the world. Charlie Chaplin I have faith in the cinema. Alain Badiou

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Badiou and Cinema Alex Ling

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Alex Ling, 2011 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in11/13pt Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4113 0 (hardback) The right of Alex Ling to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This publication is supported by a grant from the Research and Research Training Committee, Faculty ofArts, the University of Melbourne

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Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts

vii ix

Introduction: Gorky’s Maxim 1 Presenting Alain Badiou 2 Can Cinema be Thought? 3 In the Kingdom of Shadows 4 An Aesthetic of Truth 5 An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 6 Alain Resnais and the Mise en Scène of Two 7 The Castle of Impurity Conclusion: The Future of an Illusion

1 14 32 55 85 107 134 160 190

Bibliography Filmography Index

193 206 209

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Acknowledgements

A number of people have made this publication possible. First and foremost I need to acknowledge the enormous debt owed to Justin Clemens and Barbara Creed, without whom I would still be ‘immobile in the dark’. Eternal thanks also go out to my friends, family and colleagues, in particular A. J. Bartlett, Aurélien Mondon and Anna-Sophie Maass, who provided invaluable help and support throughout the project. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the staff at EUP, not least my excellent editor, Carol Macdonald. Finally, extra special thanks to the collection of ‘misfits, flâneurs, détournés, pedants and miscreants’ that is the Melbourne Badiou Reading Group.

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Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts

B BE C1 C2 C CD D DF E FF HI IT LW M MP MS NN OB P PA SM SP S20 TC TO TW WC1 WC2

Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Peter Hallward) Being and Event (Alain Badiou) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Gilles Deleuze) Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Gilles Deleuze) Conditions (Alain Badiou) ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’ (Alain Badiou) Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Alain Badiou) ‘Dialectiques de la fable’ (Alain Badiou) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Alain Badiou) Film Fables (Jacques Rancière) Handbook of Inaesthetics (Alain Badiou) Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy (Alain Badiou) Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2 (Alain Badiou) Metapolitics (Alain Badiou) Manifesto for Philosophy (Alain Badiou) The Meaning of Sarkozy (Alain Badiou) Number and Numbers (Alain Badiou) On Beckett (Alain Badiou) Polemics (Alain Badiou) The Politics of Aesthetics (Jacques Rancière) Second manifeste pour la philosophie (Alain Badiou) Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Alain Badiou) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (Jacques Lacan) The Century (Alain Badiou) Briefings on Existence (Alain Badiou) Theoretical Writings (Alain Badiou) What is Cinema?: Volume 1 (André Bazin) What is Cinema?: Volume 2 (André Bazin)

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Introduction: Gorky’s Maxim

Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If only you knew how strange it was to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre. Maxim Gorky1

Almost two-and-a-half millennia have passed since the mythical prisoner of Plato’s Republic first stumbled bleary-eyed from the ancient screening room of the cave to gaze upon the brilliance of the sun. Yet it is today, in our so-called ‘postmodern’ world – a world in which Plato has supposedly been ‘overturned’, in which truth finds itself on equal footing with opinion – that we need more than ever to turn to those principles underlying Platonism: to the foundational role of mathematics, to the ‘supreme genera’ of Ideas, to the possibility of real thought (outside of the calculable machinations of constituted knowledges); in a word, to the possibility of novel and disruptive truths. While it was for Plato imperative that the prisoner become a philosopher only after he had escaped the shadow-world of the cave and gazed upon the sun, contemporary doxa effectively holds that the philosopher is born as such in the cave, for if he knows anything it is that there is no sun to speak of, only an endless expanse of darkness. Such is the situation in which we find ourselves today, where all that would have spelt imprisonment for Plato has been resignified ‘freedom’ (the freedom of the markets, the freedom to consume mindlessly . . .), where truth is at best considered a palliative measure – a fantasy structure, a shield against an absurd existence – and at worst a cancer, a malignant growth affecting the breakdown of law and order. Clearly Plato’s sun cannot shine in an ‘enlightened’ world whose maxim is that truth is relative and relativism absolute. In this

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precise sense we can say that, inasmuch as the idealised society of the Republic constitutes itself around the figure of the ‘philosopher king’ – a figure who governs wisely because his eyes are trained toward the sun – our contemporary postmodern rulers are content to preside over a kingdom of shadows. Consequently, as Alain Badiou argues, to step outside of this shadow world – at least so far as philosophy is concerned – demands something of a ‘return to Plato’. Naturally, Badiou’s ‘return’ should not be taken lightly, constituting as it does as much an overturning of the ‘overturning of Plato’ as it does an overturning of Plato’s contemporary adherents. Indeed, whilst it is for Badiou imperative that Plato be restored, this restoration must be achieved ‘first of all by the deconstruction of Platonism’ (D, p. 101). That is to say, a ‘return to Plato’ must be understood as, on the one hand, an unravelling of what generally passes as Platonism – what Badiou holds to be ‘the great fallacious construction of modernity and postmodernity alike’ (D, p. 102) – and, on the other, a return to the ‘rifts and opacities of the platonic text’.2 A ‘return to Plato’ must therefore not be understood as nostalgic, still less reactionary, but, to the contrary, fundamentally affirmative. Indeed, if the world as it stands holds fast to the Ecclesiastical belief that there is nothing new under the sun, and is moreover morbidly obsessed with its own finitude – as is evidenced in its many declared endings (of ideology, of class, of politics, of art, of metaphysics, of history . . .)3 – it is for Badiou only through a return to Plato that we can finally say ‘enough!’, and ‘proclaim at a stroke an end to all ends, and the possible beginning of all that is, of all that was, and will be’ (P, p. 134). In brief, Badiou’s return to Plato marks a rupture with all those ideologies of finitude, in the form of a definitive beginning, a (re)commencement of philosophy proper. Of course, all this has been stated and restated countless times over, in Badiou’s own writings as much as in the various scholarship his work inspires. Moreover, this book is less concerned with Plato and his relation to Badiou than with the latter’s vexed relation to cinema. So why all this talk of Plato in a work which casts cinema and Badiou in its key roles? First, because I believe cinema plays an important (if for the most part unacknowledged) role in Badiou’s proclaimed recommencement of philosophy under the aegis of a return to Plato. As Badiou himself coyly suggests, ‘having said of theatre all the evil that he thought, Plato nonetheless gave his philosophy from the first a theatrical

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form. Today, however, philosophy begins anew, this much is certain. Cinema to start over what theatre began? Why not?’4 Similarly, in a recent paper on ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’, Badiou declares not only that today ‘there is a clear requisitioning of philosophy by cinema – or of cinema by philosophy’, but also that ‘after the philosophy of cinema must come – is already coming – philosophy as cinema, which consequently has the opportunity of being a mass philosophy’ (CD, p. 5). However, while Badiou has written extensively on and around cinema, at no point does he identify precisely how it is that cinema might inflect or ‘condition’ his philosophy. Nor is this omission rectified in any of the secondary scholarship on his work, the vast majority of which simply ignores the question.5 Nonetheless, Badiou’s words entwine the question of philosophy’s recommencement with the art of cinema, and this book accordingly tasks itself in part with unravelling this complex relationship. Second, as Jean-Louis Baudry (among countless others) has observed – and our epigraph provides testament to – ‘the allegory of the cave . . . haunts the invention of cinema and the history of its invention’.6 Given Badiou’s reluctance to clarify cinema’s precise role in his philosophy – and putting to one side the minor detail of the cinematograph’s bearing something of a family resemblance to Plato’s famous cave – our question is whether cinema is wholly confined to the illusory world inside the cave (presenting, as Gorky avers, ‘not life but its shadow’), or might it contrarily offer us a glimpse of the sun? This question, fundamental to our investigation, can be put in various ways. Must cinema be condemned to imitation, or can it attain to the Idea? Is cinema art or artifice? My preferred formulation, equally the most succinct, runs as follows: can cinema be thought? Which is of course to ask, on the one hand, if we can really think cinema – what cinema really is – and, on the other, whether or not cinema itself really thinks. Simply, only a thinking cinema can help facilitate the rebirth of philosophy. For Badiou holds that philosophy’s sole quarry is truth, and truth is finally the (Platonic) name for the process by which real thought, in violently breaking with opinion, establishes the Idea.7 The overarching concern of Badiou and Cinema is thus the properly Platonic need to reconfigure the place of truth in cinema.8 The difficulty of this task should be immediately apparent, inasmuch as our suspicion of all things ‘true’ is arguably most in evidence when we consider those media which, like cinema, function to blur the already problematic distinction between culture (or, more derisorily,

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‘entertainment’) and art.9 Thus we see time and again in writings on film how various critical approaches – the principal offenders being those to which we find the prefix ‘post’ attached (post-structuralist, post-modernist, post-Marxist . . .) – are engaged so as to demonstrate how the works under consideration are simply symptomatic of those fluxional (linguistic, ideological, socio-economic, etc.) and therefore truthless conditions outlined by the critical approach being employed. Indeed, it is precisely such a ‘symptomatic’ understanding of cinema that forms the very backbone of what David Bordwell and Noël Carroll have polemically designated, in an ironic nod to Louis Althusser, Film Theory (or alternatively The Theory, or Grand Theory), against which they have proposed their own post-Theory.10 And inasmuch as Film Theory and post-Theory can be seen to constitute the two dominant approaches to thinking cinema – approaches which I believe, despite a few notable efforts, are today effectively saturated11 – we would do well to briefly consider each approach. What Bordwell and Carroll group together under the general heading Film Theory effectively designates a curious melange of otherwise distinct theoretical approaches – the principal contenders being feminist, post/structuralist and post/Marxist – that dominated academic writings on film throughout the 1970s and 1980s. That said, we cannot help but observe this assemblage as constituting a decidedly incoherent set. So why their subsumption under a single heading? We find the answer in the introduction to the post-Theoretician’s manifesto, namely, the collection Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, wherein the editors immediately acknowledge ‘the unifying principle in this book is that all the research included exemplifies the possibility of scholarship that is not reliant upon the psychoanalytic framework that dominates film academia’.12 Simply, Film Theory’s binding agent – at least, according to post-Theory – is psychoanalytic theory, specifically, but not exclusively, the kind put forward by Jacques Lacan (so much so that for Bordwell and Carroll ‘Lacanian theory’ and ‘Theory’ effectively serve as synonyms).13 More than this, Film Theory’s canonical texts – to name but a handful, Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Stephen Heath’s ‘Narrative Space’, Christian Metz’s Psychoanalysis and Cinema, and Jean-Louis Baudry’s ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus’ – are distinguished not only by what we might loosely designate their shared ‘Lacanianism’, but also by their (implicit or explicit) ‘Althusserianism’. For Film Theory approaches cinema as

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an apparatus whose function is almost exclusively ideological, and, by extension, truthless.14 Simply, Film Theory has no truck with truth inasmuch as it regards the latter as an ideological construction, a fiction whose function it is to (re)produce otherwise contingent power relations, relations which, in Althusser’s famous formula, serve to represent ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.15 To this effect we can argue that the real binding agent of Film Theory lies in the wholesale denial of the category of truth. Moreover, it is precisely this foreclosure of truth which leads the Film Theorist to hold (again, implicitly or explicitly) every text to carry with it political implications. For, as Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni argue in their brief but highly influential paper ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’, ‘every film is political, inasmuch as it is determined by the ideology which produces it (or within which it is produced, which stems from the same thing)’.16 Consequently, Film Theory attempts – in diverse ways, and with varying degrees of success – to render explicit the obscure link between the supposedly mutually exclusive spheres of politics and art, with the express purpose of deposing established ‘truths’ and thereby provoking a ‘raised consciousness’. Post-Theory, on the other hand, sets itself apart from Film Theory in its encompassing all those ‘middle-range’ – and, for the most part, cognitivist – inquiries which, given their primarily empirical and formal concerns (witness for example the pre-eminence of historical and economic analyses), make no pretence toward offering any totalising structure.17 Now while the rejection of the notion of ‘truth’ by the Theorist is immediately apparent – insofar as the principal (political) thrust of Film Theory lies in exposing and deposing as unnatural everything in the text that presents itself as a natural and self-evident truth – the same cannot be said of post-Theory. Indeed, in one of many papers attacking the perceived hegemony enjoyed by the Film Theorist, Carroll laments the fact that ‘it is open season on truth throughout the humanities’18 and mobilises this very concept as one of the principal points of division between Theoretical and post-Theoretical approaches. Carroll even goes so far as to suggest that the future of film theory rests on its adopting a coherent theory of truth, maintaining that ‘as long as standards of truth and falsity are thought to be altogether eminently dispensable, Neanderthal throwbacks, film theory will flounder’.19 In short, in deposing an avowedly truthless – if politically active – Film Theory, the effectively ‘post-political’ post-Theorist claims truth as his own.

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But what exactly is this ‘truth’ to which the post-Theorist lays claim? Consider the case of Noël Carroll, who we can safely assume to be the principal philosophical voice of post-Theory. Carroll maintains that the Theoretical bias against truth stems from a spurious argument involving an illegitimate move from a common or garden variety ‘truth’ to a far grander conception of Absolute Truth. The argument basically runs as follows: any ‘true’ interpretation of a text must be exhaustive (an interpretation’s being ‘absolutely true’ implying that there is nothing left unsaid); however, even the most banal film allows for multiple interpretations; therefore there can be no true qua definitive interpretation of any text, for the simple reason that the text in question will always allow for something more to be said.20 This argument is of course fallacious, involving as it does a very explicit and illegitimate conflation of (banal, lowercase) ‘truth’ with an (Absolute, Capitalised) ‘Truth’. The rejection of such Truth is then hardly surprising.21 Indeed, we might go so far as to reconsider this argument in politico-ideological terms, whereby truth is rendered distasteful inasmuch as it finds itself displaced from a fundamentally ‘democratic’ conception to a sinister and stifling ‘totalitarian’ Truth. Needless to say, post-Theory, in its more modest or ‘democratic’ espousal of banal truths, can neatly sidestep this attack on Absolute Truth by simply pointing out that it in no way holds there to be any single true assertion (or theory, or story, or interpretation, etc.), but rather summons forth a vast democracy of ‘true’ assertions qua theories. In the final analysis, however, truth, as the post-Theorist conceives it, remains hopelessly relative, capable of little more than passively reflecting the world in all of its radical plurality. This is merely an ‘adequate’ truth, a truth as vapid as it is impotent. Which is precisely why the post-Theoretical conception of truth is of little or no use to us. In fact, what the post-Theorist designates as truth might be more accurately termed veridicality. Put simply, what is ‘true’ for Carroll is ultimately what is ‘maximally accurate’, or that which (ostensibly) ‘corresponds’ to reality. This is of course to say that post-Theoretical ‘truth’ entirely fails to distinguish itself from ‘knowledge’, which, at the end of the day, means that it remains on the same level as opinion (albeit well-considered or ‘veridical’ opinion). Whereas we know from Plato that truth is precisely something that violently breaks with doxa.22 On this point we hold firm to Badiou’s contention (apropos Plato) that ‘truth is neither the result of a “self-revelation”, nor the product of an “adequation” between the thing and its

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representation’.23 In terms of Plato’s cave allegory, truth conceived in this manner remains altogether undifferentiated from shadow-play, and serves as little more than a reinforcement of – as opposed to a radical break with – the status quo (hence its ‘democratic’ nature). Needless to say, the relativity (and consequent instability) of such an ‘adequate’ or passive conception of truth renders it a far cry from an eternal Idea. Far from being ‘adequate’, the conception of truth we adopt here is first and foremost exceptional, which is to say evental (for an event, as we will see, is precisely an exception to all adequation). In this sense truth, at least in its origination, is more akin to an opening of the real.24 Indeed, as Badiou demonstrates, if the concept of truth is to be of any real significance it is only inasmuch it can be shown to radically affect knowledge and (it amounts to the same thing) power structures: far from being a qualification of knowledge or an intuition of the intelligible, a truth is precisely that which bores a hole in knowledge.25 Meaning that a truth is both radically singular (it is epistemologically as much as phenomenologically unprecedented), and must, in the final instance, be capable of completely rewriting the logic of a world. To return to our earlier medical metaphor, the kind of truth we are interested in must be – at least from the point of view of the State – fundamentally cancerous. Of course, this is not to say that Badiou upholds any naïve conception of Absolute Truth (as either exhaustive or originary). To the contrary, as we will see, the infinite nature of a truth means it is inexhaustible (at least in principle), while the fact that universal truths are both constructed and immanent to the world in which they arise means they are neither pre-given nor transcendent. Thus we locate the necessary conditions for an active theory of truth: truths must be radically singular (they are wholly un-known), epistemologically affective (they disrupt economies of knowledge), constructed (they emerge ex post facto and require militant support), infinite (they are structurally incompletable), immanent (they are material constructions taking place in a world), and – fundamentally – universal (they are divorced from all particularity). Clearly neither Film Theory nor post-Theory come anywhere close to fulfilling these conditions: if truth is elided in the former, it remains fundamentally conservative (or even reactive) in the latter. Conversely, Badiou holds on the one hand (contra Theory) that truths exist, or can come to exist, and on the other (contra postTheory) that they are intrinsically revolutionary: wholly incapable of

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being placed under any theme of ‘accuracy’ or ‘adequation’, truths serve to rewrite everything that has been written.26 In simpler words, truths do not passively reflect what is, but rather actively set about creating all that will be.27 Gilles Deleuze, who devoted two great works of philosophy to cinema, famously held that ‘every reaction against Platonism is a restoration of immanence in its full extension and in its purity, which forbids the return of any transcendence’.28 Against Deleuze, Badiou holds that it is only through a ‘return to Plato’ that a simultaneously radical and entirely immanent conception of truth – of truth as novel universality pure and simple, distinguished from both a priori transcendentality and conservative veridicality – might be reached. This finally brings us back to Plato’s allegory of the cave and its spectral association with cinema. For it would appear that the consistent elision in film scholarship of the scene outside of the cave – of the sun qua Idea – is symptomatic of the elision of truth per se. Our task in this book is accordingly that of working through this symptom, with Badiou as our guide as much as our adversary, in the hope of locating the true power of cinema. Or again, it is the wager of this book that cinema is a real art – both a true art and a producer of truths in its own right – and not merely ‘the movement of shadows, only shadows’.29 Only once we have established a thinking cinema can we reapply its thought to Badiou’s own project and ascertain the true role of cinema – or how its thought is (or will be) rethought – in his selfproclaimed recommencement of philosophy. Which means that our ‘return to Plato’ is foremost a return to the point at which cinema finds its allegorisation in the cave, that is, to the famous question, generally indexed to André Bazin, of what cinema really is. As such, the question that guides this book – namely, that of ‘thinking cinema’ – reveals itself to be threefold in nature, being: what is cinema? (the ontological question); what does cinema think? (the artistic question); and how is cinema to be rethought? (the philosophical question). It should by now be clear that my project is in no way to subordinate Badiou’s thought to that of cinema, nor, worse still, to that of film theory (in its broader, de-capitalised sense). Rather, in premising my investigations on the simple yet powerful idea of ‘thinking cinema’, I attempt to draw out the radical consequences of Badiou’s theses on cinema (as much as the impact of cinema on Badiou’s thought). At the same time I try to elucidate Badiou’s thought in a

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manner wholly befitting the art of cinema, making more approachable his at times extremely difficult philosophy. For just as cinema has from the first been charged with a certain ‘democratising’ function – namely, that of ‘[bringing] the great treasures of art and literature within the reach of the general public’30 – so too this book seeks in part to democratise Badiou’s philosophy so as to, in true Platonic fashion, better ‘corrupt the youth’. It is for all these reasons that this book can be said to hold firm to Badiou’s imperative that ‘it is necessary today to be a Platonist’.31 With regard to structure, I have opted to take as direct a path as possible. Chapter 1 offers a brief introduction to Badiou’s philosophy and the crucial role of ‘conditioning’, paying special attention to his concept of ‘inaesthetics’ – namely, his approach to art which treats it as a condition of (and not an object for) philosophy. Chapter 2 moves on to present a detailed critique of his philosophical writings on cinema, focusing in particular on his central texts ‘The False Movements of Cinema’, ‘Philosophy and Cinema’, and ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’. This is followed by a consideration of some of the more immediate problems these writings raise, together with a number of questions he leaves unanswered. Chapter 3 considers cinema as an onto-logical art, an art which figures the relations of being and its appearing. Here I tackle the intricacies of Badiou’s settheoretical ontology and his more recent ‘logical phenomenology’ (or his ‘onto-logy’) and at the same time sketch a new ontology of cinema (of what cinema is). All this is realised, appropriately enough, through reference to Samuel Beckett’s Film (1965), which I argue – against Beckett as much as Badiou – is a work concerned less with subjectivity than with objectivity. Chapter 4 takes up the radical side of Badiou’s philosophy, namely, his concepts of event, subject and truth. Here I use one of Badiou’s favourite films, Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999), as my guide, examining it as a text that ‘updates’ (or ‘re-news’) Plato’s allegory of the cave to present a mass audience with what I call an ‘aesthetic of truth’. Chapter 5 investigates the relation of Badiou’s philosophy of cinema to that of Deleuze. The immediate consequence of this analysis is a reconsideration of how space and time operate in cinema, whereby cinema figures as an art whose foremost concerns lie with dis-appearance and re-temporalisation. Chapter 6 grounds the previous chapter’s more theoretical considerations in the truly artistic cinema of Alain Resnais, specifically his Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year in Marienbad (1961). Here I show how Resnais’ cinema is at one and

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the same time an ethical cinema, a cinema that presents the Ideas of love and of time, and a cinema that effectively rethinks the concept of the event. Finally, Chapter 7 condenses the findings of the preceding chapters into fifteen theses on impurification – and equally on cinema itself – and examines the disparate cinemas of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard in terms of the peculiarly cinematic knot they tie between art and politics, arguing that both Hitchcock and Godard, each in his own way, epitomise the idea of cinema being a ‘mass art’. Clearly the films I have chosen as my focus vary widely in their philosophical interest. While some serve a primarily illustrative or allegorical function (The Matrix), others are more immediately philosophically (as much as cinematically) investigatory (Film). Of direct philosophical consequence, however, are the artistic works (Last Year in Marienbad, Hiroshima mon amour) and what we might call the ‘non-artistically’ educative works (the otherwise disparate works of Hitchcock and Godard). The sum of these filmic considerations provides us with, I believe, a picture of cinema that takes into account its true philosophical importance. The point being that I am using these and other films not only to illustrate or exemplify Badiou’s existing philosophy, but also to consider in what ways his work can be extended, critiqued and reframed with respect to the medium of cinema, as much as to consider what problems film poses to philosophy itself. On a final note, it is important to point out that, in keeping with Gorky’s maxim that film presents a ‘Kingdom of Shadows’ – and equally with Badiou’s contention that ‘cinema is an art of the perpetual past’ (HI, p. 78) – the films examined herein are ones I have witnessed at the cinema (although, for the purpose of ‘fine tuning’, I have of course reviewed a number of them on DVD or video). For what concerns us here is after all not television but cinema, in all its luminous and ephemeral glory. As Samuel Beckett lamented, after having witnessed Donald McWhinnie’s 1961 television production of his Waiting for Godot, ‘my play . . . wasn’t written for this box. My play was written for small men locked in a big space. Here you’re all too big for the place’.32 So, too, we might say that our concerns lie not with the little but with the big picture. Notes 1. Gorky, ‘Review of the Lumière Programme’, p. 407. 2. Clemens, ‘Had we but Worlds Enough’, p. 108.

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3. As Badiou sees it, this ‘obsession with “finitude” is a remnant of the tyranny of the sacred’, inasmuch as ‘the “death of God” does not deliver us to finitude, but to the omnipresent infinitude of situations, and, correlatively, to the infinity of the thinkable’ (NN, p. 86). 4. Badiou and During, ‘Le 21e siècle n’a pas commencé’. 5. To take a single example, Peter Hallward – in whom Badiou recognises his ‘most well-versed and ardent interpreter and critic’ (LW, p. 543) – contends in his seminal work on Badiou that, unlike the other arts, ‘Badiou is not entirely convinced of the artistic potential of film’ (B, p. 206), and accordingly grants cinema only a single page entry in his otherwise exhaustive tome. 6. Baudry, ‘The Apparatus’, p. 307. 7. A final, less ‘philosophical’ reason for invoking Plato in a book on Badiou and cinema is the fact that Badiou has recently begun work on a feature film called The Life of Plato. Badiou envisages the film as part of a larger ‘Plato project’ involving two other components, namely, his seminar given at the Collège de France from 2007 to 2010 entitled ‘Pour aujourd’hui : Platon!’, together with a new ‘hyper-translation’ of Plato’s Republic. See Badiou, ‘For Today: Plato!’, pp. 54–5. 8. This is of course not to say that Plato himself would find any truth in cinema. Rather, cinema would doubtless suffer the same fate as poetry and theatre and find itself promptly expelled from the Republic. For cinema’s supposedly mimetic nature means that, like poetry, it would put ‘a bad constitution in the soul of each individual by making images that are far removed from the truth and by gratifying the irrational part’, Plato, ‘Republic’, pp. 1209–10/605b–c. 9. Badiou holds that today ‘the word “culture” seems to gradually prohibit all clear use of the word art’ (SM, pp. 134–5). It is accordingly of critical importance for Badiou that ‘art’ be radically distinguished from ‘culture’ (just as real politics must oppose itself to mere administration, science cannot be reduced to technology, and love must distinguish itself from sexuality). As we will see, the key to these oppositions ultimately lies with Badiou’s fundamental separation of truth from knowledge. See also SP, p. 12. 10. Needless to say, this anti-theoretical backlash is hardly singular to cinema studies, its branches having extended throughout all the humanities. 11. I intend the term ‘saturated’ to be understood here in the sense that Badiou gives it, namely, to suggest that the myriad enquiries constituting a particular mode of thinking are no longer ‘interesting’ in that they no longer produce anything really new. 12. Bordwell and Carroll, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi. 13. Post-Theory’s equation of Theory with Lacanian psychoanalysis is of course highly contentious: as Slavoj Žižek has noted, ‘except for Joan

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14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

Copjec, myself, and some of my Slovene colleagues, I know of no cinema theorist who effectively accepts Lacan as his or her ultimate background’, The Fright of Real Tears, p. 2. In practice, Film Theorists for the most part appropriate key Lacanian concepts (often problematically), such as the gaze and the mirror stage, while rejecting or criticising others (for example Lacan’s perceived phallogocentrism). If there is a central thesis underlying Film Theory it is that ‘the cinematic institution is complicit with ideology’, Creed, Pandora’s Box, p. 85. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 153. As flagged above, the nomination ‘Film Theory’ itself implicates the figure of Althusser, who designated (capitalised) Theory the Marxist praxis of dialectical materialism. See also Althusser, For Marx, p. 168. Comolli and Narboni, ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’, p. 814. Presenting such a totalising structure is of course the principal offence with which post-Theorists charge Film Theory, hence its capitalisation. That said, we should keep in mind that, if ‘Theory’ is principally understood as Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, post-Theory is no less psychologically inflected, the post-Theorist invariably attempting to cloak himself in a cognitivist garb. Carroll, ‘Prospects for Film Theory’, p. 53. Ibid. p. 56. See also ibid. p. 54. As Terry Eagleton for one observes, ‘no idea is more unpopular with contemporary cultural theory than that of absolute truth’, After Theory, p. 103. ‘Every truth . . . deposes constituted knowledges, and as such opposes opinions. For what we call opinions are representations without truth, the anarchic debris of circulating knowledge’ (E, p. 50). As such, ‘opinion is beneath the true and the false’ (E, p. 51). Badiou, ‘Pour aujourd’hui: Platon!’. Badiou holds that every truth originates in a chance occurrence qua event, which, as Oliver Feltham explains, ‘is not so much the emergence of a new entity as a tear opening up in the texture of the situation’, Live Theory, p. 101. To this effect an active conception of truth paradoxically has its roots (if not its branches) in the avowedly ‘truthless’ Theoretical camp, inasmuch as it is Jacques Lacan who first tells us that truth is that which punches a hole through knowledge and thereby ‘hollows out its way into the real’, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, p. 228. It is thus hardly surprising to find that Badiou, when discussing cinema, completely disregards both the Theoretical and the post-Theoretical camps. Rather, his canonical references – although I use the term ‘reference’ loosely, for Badiou rarely acknowledges his cinematic sources – are those whose principal question (like ours) is whether or not

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27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

13

cinema can be thought, figures like André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze, JeanLuc Godard and Jacques Rancière, together with those early theorists of the moving image such as Ricciotto Canudo, Abel Gance and Jean Cocteau. In fact, as we will see, a truth is precisely that which is – initially, at least – subtracted from knowledge. To this effect, far from proving ‘knowledgeable’, a truth is something which is radically un-known, it ‘has no external guarantee, it is its own criterion’, Gillespie, ‘Beyond Being’, pp. 7–8. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 137. Gorky, ‘Review’, p. 408. Bush, ‘Homer’s Odyssey’, p. 941. Badiou, ‘Plato, Our Dear Plato!’, p. 40. Beckett cited in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, pp. 435–6.

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CHAPTER 1

Presenting Alain Badiou

The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Ralph Waldo Emerson1

1.1

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. William Butler Yeats2

French philosophy has often found itself playing the role of romantic object to Anglophone academia’s desiring subject. The frequent attempts of the latter to devour the concepts put forward by the former are evidenced as much by the ongoing influence exerted by those grand spectres of twentieth-century French thought – the Derridas, the Foucaults, the Lyotards, the Deleuzes – as by the omnipresence of what is, after a fashion, their most abiding legacy, namely, poststructural and postmodern theory. Given the weight we grant French thought it is remarkable how long it has taken for the work of Alain Badiou – who without doubt is numbered among the most important philosophers of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – to receive serious attention. Although Badiou has published steadily since 1969’s Le Concept de modèle,3 the inaugural English translation of one of his works – Norman Madarasz’s rendering of Manifesto for Philosophy – only appeared comparatively recently in 1999. Meaning that, as far as English-speaking audiences go, Badiou barely scraped his way into the twentieth century (a fact not without a hint of irony, given that one of his most impressive and accessible works is consecrated to the same century).4 Since Manifesto’s English publication, however, the uptake of Badiou’s thought in Anglophone academia has been swift indeed, and today a very respectable (and

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ever increasing) number of Badiou’s works are available in English, together with numerous collections of his writings, critical responses to his works, introductions to his philosophy and so on.5 That said, it is instructive to briefly consider one or two possible reasons as to why it took so long for Badiou to be ‘welcomed’ into Anglophone academia. One might, for example, suggest this to be due to the banal fact that traversing his work demands a notinconsiderable amount of effort on the reader’s part. This is, of course, in no way due to any stylistic impenetrability on Badiou’s part, but rather to the twin facts that his is at once a mind-numbingly large project – ranging as it does from the ontological void through the plenitude of appearance to the paradox of events (together with the subjects and truths they can give rise to) – and that his core philosophy – principally laid out in his 1988 magnum opus L’Etre et l’événement and ostensibly ‘completed’ in his 2006 ‘sequel’ Logiques des mondes (respectively translated into English as Being and Event and Logics of Worlds) – would seem to require, among other things, as healthy a grasp on contemporary mathematics and logic as on the history of philosophy.6 And while we are at it, let us not forget that cinema – which is, after all, this book’s principal port of call – is hardly a discipline known for its fondness of mathematical formalisation (in spite of its clear links with the applied sciences). While this argument holds a certain amount of water, its sophistic roots are quickly exposed when we take into account both the extraordinary elucidatory power of Badiou’s writings and the concurrent need to explain the enduring ‘popularity’ of someone like Deleuze (not least in the area of cinema), against whom Badiou realised his own philosophy was (and arguably still is) principally staked, and for whom mathematics also plays a ‘vital’ role.7 I shall accordingly offer two somewhat more cogent (and intentionally didactic) hypotheses as to why Badiou escaped Anglophone attention for so long. Dipping liberally into Badiou’s terminological grab bag, I shall call these the ‘reactive’ and the ‘obscure’ explanations. Briefly put, the reactive position constitutes at base an inability to acknowledge and/or move beyond those impasses of poststructural and postmodern theory (the deadlock of the former being essentially linguistic, the latter relativistic), while its obscure counterpart concerns a general refusal to submit to the dictates of a complete materialism. Inasmuch as Badiou cedes ground to neither the absolutism of language, nor what he calls the ‘antiphilosophical’ practice of attributing a transcendence to the real, Badiou proves himself wholly

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unpalatable to the two dominant camps of Anglophone thought: the postmodern reactionary continues to hold firm to a paralysing relativism, while the antiphilosophical obscurantist remains mired in an immaterial mysticism (suffice to recall our earlier consideration of truth as either a cancer or a palliative measure). Or again, Badiou’s unpalatability would appear to be the inevitable upshot of his philosophical project being directed, in his own words, ‘first against . . . the culturalists, relativists, people preoccupied with immediate bodies and available languages, for whom the historicity of all things excludes eternal truths’ and ‘second, against those for whom the universality of the truth takes the form of a transcendent Law, before which we must bend our knee, to which we must conform our bodies and our words’ (LW, p. 513). We can better understand this opposition by considering how both the reactive and obscure positions relate to what Badiou has recently diagnosed as our contemporary malaise, namely, the hegemonic ideology which, at base, constitutes an outright denial of the possibility of possibility itself, and which Badiou designates ‘democratic materialism’. The democratic materialist is accordingly that dominant figure of late twentieth-/early twenty-first-century ‘culture’ identified above who – prescribed as he is by the master signifiers ‘capital’, ‘democracy’, ‘terror’, and the like – recognises nothing beyond the horizon of an exhaustively corporeo-linguistic world. To again invoke Plato’s allegory of the cave, the democratic materialist is the figure content to eke out his existence in shadows. The axiom of democratic materialism thus writes itself as follows: ‘there are only bodies and languages’ (LW, p. 1). Or again, this time in the formula of Ecclesiastes: ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. In contrast to this ‘democratic’ slant on an otherwise redoubtable materialism, Badiou espouses what he calls a ‘materialist dialectic’, which proclaims ‘there are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths’ (LW, p. 4). Or again: there are but worlds in which beings appear and communicate, except there are truths which can come to supplement these worlds (and which are universalisable). Such is Badiou’s fundamental philosophical declaration, within which we find the three principal strata comprising his thought, namely: the ontological (the thinking of being qua being, which is for Badiou the thought of the pure multiple, devoid of the One); the logical or the ‘objective’ (the thinking of appearing, of being-there-in-a-world); and what we might call the ‘subjective’ (the thinking of truths, or thought itself), categories I will examine in detail presently. Needless

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to say, this simultaneously accounts for Badiou’s avowed Platonism, inasmuch as it is, according to Badiou, none other than Plato who first tells us ‘there is something other than bodies and languages’, namely, that ‘there are truths, and a truth is neither a singular body (since it is generic) nor a phrase (since it punches a hole in the encyclopaedia of the situation)’.8 For Badiou contends – we will explore this contention soon – that universal truths can come to exist, that they are neither transcendent nor given but rather material (albeit infinite) constructions, made in (and making) a new ‘eternal present’ in a given world. And as we have seen, both the postmodern relativist (qua democratic materialist) and the obscurantist (qua transcendentalist) are absolutely incapable of accepting this position: Badiou’s truth is as irreducible to the tenets of the former as is its immanence to those of the latter. 1.2

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? This isn’t, it seems, a matter of tossing a coin, but of turning a soul from a day that is a kind of night to the true day – the ascent to what is, which we say is true philosophy. Plato9

Of his own philosophy Badiou declares that his ‘unique philosophical question . . . is the following: can we think that there is something new in the situation?’ 10 Indeed, Badiou’s project is at base an astoundingly rigorous attempt to think novelty, at one end a thinking of how something new – and, crucially, universal – arrives in a world, and at the other of how real global change can come about. Which is equally to say that Badiou’s principal concerns lie with the possibility of thought per se: of thought as divorced from the perambulations of knowledge, of thought as that which ‘interrupts repetition’, of thought as intricately connected to real novelty. Peter Hallward thus glosses Badiou’s work as an attempt ‘to link, on the one hand, a formal, axiomatic and egalitarian conception of thought . . . with, on the other hand, a theory of militant and discontinuous innovation’.11 These seemingly disparate conceptions intersect in what Badiou calls a ‘truth procedure’, namely, an active sequence, born in an unpredictable event, by which, and through local means, an infinite universal truth is painstakingly constructed. The precise mechanics underlying Badiou’s formulation of truth are complex and will be dealt with in detail in Chapter 4. Suffice for the moment

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to say that truths can only result from the chance occurrence of an event – which is at base a transitory ‘kink’ in the onto-logical order, albeit one which involves the sudden ‘transformation of the relations between the possible and the impossible’ (SP, p. 45) – together with a subjective affirmation of this event’s having taken place, and an ongoing fidelity to precisely what it is that this event implies for the situation in question. However, insofar as an event is (as we will see) as much an aleatory as an illegal occurrence through which certain hitherto ‘inexistent’ elements of a world suddenly assume a position of maximal existence – and also taking into account how the very nature of an event (specifically, its ontological illegality) means that its happening is as unpredictable as its having-happened is unknowable – we cannot help but appreciate the fundamentally exceptional character of truth: for a truth to come to be, an extraordinary and arduous sequence must first take place. The exceptionality of a truth procedure throws into greater relief Badiou’s separation of knowledge from truth (and thus of truth as ‘adequate’ from truth as ‘exceptional’). Whereas truth is inherently radical, the realm of knowledge is decidedly conservative, being ‘essentially static, “objective”, and structured according to the interests of those who dominate and govern the situation’.12 This dominating interest is what Badiou calls the state of the situation.13 Ordinarily the domination of the state over the situation is – for reasons I will examine in Chapter 3 – both absolute and beyond determination. Indeed, it is precisely this indetermination of the state’s domination over the situation that ensures the continued obedience of the individual members of a situation to its state. A truth procedure, however, assigns a precise measure to this otherwise indeterminate excess, whilst remaining itself ‘subtracted’ from all particularity – that is, from everything ‘known’ by the state, or from everything which falls into the realm of knowledge (what Badiou terms the ‘encyclopaedia’ of the situation) – and thereby evades or ‘distances’ itself from statist domination. Or, as Badiou puts it, ‘every genuine instance of thinking is subtracted from the knowledge in which it is constituted’ (HI, p. 66). Keeping this in mind, the necessary and sufficient conditions of a truth procedure might be briefly outlined as follows. First, an event – which for the present we can define as a localised and entirely unpredictable rupture in the order of things14 – adds to and is then subtracted from the situation. That is to say, an event – aleatory, illegal, excessive – literally flashes in and out of existence. However, insofar as the ‘place’ in which the event

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takes place – what Badiou calls the site – is precisely the ‘voided’ part of the situation, the place of radical ‘inappearance’ – that is, a point which for complex reasons remains altogether unrecognised by the state – there can be absolutely no knowledge of its occurrence (inasmuch as it falls outside of the statist order and is thereby subtracted from all predication). Now, the event’s being radically un-known means that its happening must itself be undecidable: a pure decision regarding its having taken place must be made (the ‘purity’ of this decision residing in the fact that there can be no criteria upon which to base a decision concerning the occurrence of something which is radically un-known).15 Moreover, the event itself having vanished, its trace – which is to say its immediate consequence (which is precisely the sudden and absolute appearance of what previously ‘inexisted’) – is only sustained thereafter by means of an affirmative subject which, having decided in favour of the event’s belonging to the situation, only comes into being by exerting a militant fidelity to the event’s having happened. Following which, by way of an arduous process of investigations into the event’s possible relation to the situation, this post-evental subject works to revolutionise the situation in the gradual accretion of what mathematicians refer to as a ‘generic set’, which, as we will see, is for Badiou the precise schema of a truth. Matters are further complicated by the fact that Badiou, following Plato, holds there to be but four generic fields in which truth procedures (or ‘thought’ per se) might take place, namely: art, politics, science and love. It is by virtue of this fact that these four fields also constitute the sole ‘conditions’ of philosophy, insofar as philosophy, as Badiou (again, after Plato) defines it, operates only inasmuch as it ‘seizes truths’ (MP, p. 141). In point of fact, philosophy is itself truthless. Rather, the task of philosophy is that of thinking the compossibility of the various (artistic, political, amorous, scientific) truths.16 Or again, philosophy’s sole objective is ‘the thinking of thought’ (D, p. 21). What philosophy does in effect is fabricate an empty category, which could be called ‘Truth’ (though its status remains wholly secondary to that of truths), under which a plurality of (lower-case) truths drawn from the disparate fields of art, science, politics and love might be tied together.17 The conditioning of philosophy thus involves something of an inversion of the common conception of philosophical thought (wherein philosophy is brought to bear on its conditions) to contrarily contend that philosophy can only be thought – in fact, constructed from scratch – by way of its conditions. Or again, real philosophy necessarily comes après coup: philosophy,

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Badiou tells us, is ‘the procuress of truth’ (HI, p. 10), and in no way its architect. It is for this precise reason that Badiou holds that we must do away with disciplines like ‘political philosophy’, for the simple reason that philosophy itself cannot ‘think’ politics (which is precisely what political philosophy proposes to do), but rather can only rethink the thought that real politics thinks.18 In its stead Badiou proposes his ‘metapolitics’, which refers only to the ‘consequences a philosophy is capable of drawing, both in and for itself, from real instances of politics as thought’ (M, p. xxxix). For the same reasons Badiou adamantly opposes traditional aesthetics and puts forward his own ‘inaesthetics’, namely, an approach to art which restricts its considerations to ‘the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the existence of some works of art’ (HI, p. xiv). Likewise, as we will see in Chapter 3, Badiou separates the properly philosophical discourse of ‘metaontology’ from ontology itself (which is for him – crucially – nothing other than mathematics, pure and simple). In each case the primacy of conditioning is clear: philosophy is the thinking of the real thought that truth procedures think.19 1.3

RETHINKING ART: ON BADIOU’S INAESTHETICS Every transformation is to some extent a swan song, to some extent the overture to a great new poem, which strives to gain shape in tints still blurred but brilliant. Karl Marx20

Let us now turn directly to the question of art and philosophy. We know already that art is one of the four conditions of Badiou’s philosophy. But what exactly does ‘art’ designate here? And what precisely does it mean for art to condition philosophy? Moreover, how to answer these questions before we have thoroughly investigated Badiou’s philosophy? Perhaps the best place to begin is with Badiou’s curious neologism ‘inaesthetics’. At the beginning of his Handbook of Inaesthetics Badiou offers a succinct explication of this strange term: 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. (HI, p. i)

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What can we glean from this definition? Let us start with what we know already. For one thing, it tells us that it is art itself that produces truths. Which also means that, while philosophy has a definite need for art, art can happily make do without philosophy. In a word, art is its own master. It is to this effect that Badiou rejects traditional ‘aesthetics’ – which he holds has little to add outside of establishing various rules of ‘liking’ – in favour of an approach to art which limits its interest to the manner by which art really thinks and thus might affect philosophy (hence art’s ‘intraphilosophical effects’). Furthermore, the limitation of inaesthetics to ‘some works of art’ brings into relief the fact that art – real art – is fundamentally rare, that of the myriad art works bequeathed to us, only a handful really think (or for that matter are really thought). Thus the relationship between art and philosophy is for Badiou, once again, a thoughtful one, inasmuch as philosophy tasks itself with (re)thinking the thought that art thinks.21 As the history of the relationship between art and philosophy revolves around the relation of the former to truth we would do well to examine this peculiar connection. Since its Platonic birth philosophy has seen a sharp division between the ways by which it approaches art, having forever looked upon it with a simultaneously scornful and idolatrous eye. As Badiou sees it, this schism lies between, on the one hand, a didactic schemata and, on the other, its romantic inverse. Issuing from Plato (who banned all art save military music and patriotic song from his Republic), the didactic schema sees truth as fundamentally external to art. According to this schema art is incapable of truth; rather, art imitates truth, it exhibits only ‘the pure charm of truth’ (HI, p. 2). Art – and art alone – is finally nothing more than ‘the charm of a semblance of truth’ (HI, p. 2). Contrarily, the romantic schema supposes art alone to be capable of truth.22 For Badiou, romanticism at base testifies to ‘the descent of the infinity of the Ideal into the finitude of the work’ (TC, p. 153). Such a sublime descent, Badiou notes, is ‘Christly’ in nature and effectively amounts to a consecration of the artwork, whereby the work is figured as sacred and the artist sublime, inasmuch as ‘the artist lifts subjectivity to the heights of the sublime by testifying that it possesses the power to mediate between reality and the Ideal’ (TC, p. 154). If the didactic approach is Platonic in nature, then the romantic schema is today most clearly associated with Heideggerian hermeneutics.23 The relation of philosophy to art thus appears to be split between one of romantic idolatry and one of didactic censure.

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A third schemata, however, equally presents itself, a classical schema, Aristotelian in nature, which proposes a completely different relation between art and philosophy to that of didacticism and romanticism, by effectively subtracting truth from the equation. The classical schema tells us that ‘the purpose of art is not in the least truth’ (HI, p. 4). On the contrary, art’s role is fundamentally therapeutic, being that of ‘tempering the passions’ (P, p. 135). The criterion of art according to the classical schema is thus first and foremost that of liking, ‘because “liking” signals the effect of catharsis’ (HI, p. 4). On this point it is worth quoting Badiou at length: The name of what ‘liking’ relates to is not truth. ‘Liking’ is bound only to what extracts from a truth the arrangement of an identification. The ‘resemblance’ to the true is required only to the degree that it engages the spectator of art in ‘liking’, that is, in an identification that organizes a transference . . . This scrap of truth is therefore not truth per se, but rather what a truth constrains within the imaginary. This ‘imaginarization’ of truth, which is relieved of any instance of the Real, is what the classical thinkers called ‘verisimilitude’ or ‘likelihood’. (HI, p. 4)

What this effectively means is that art, according to the classical schema, must itself remain thoughtless. Didacticism, romanticism and classicism: these are the three inherited schemas by which philosophy is knotted to art. Badiou for his part contends that these three schemas are today saturated, and that one of the major failings of the twentieth century was that it proved incapable of introducing any new schemata. Instead, the century bore witness to ‘the desperate and unstable search for a mediating schema’ (HI, p. 8) in the application of a synthetic ‘didactico-romantic’ schemata, best realised in the (ultimately nihilistic) artistic programme of the avant-gardes. For if the avantgardes were didactic in their desire to destroy the prevailing regime (qua state) of art – in their ‘condemnation of its alienated and inauthentic character’ – they were at the same time hopelessly romantic in their demand that art be ‘reborn as absolute – as the undivided awareness of its own immediately legible truth’ (HI, p. 8). In this sense, as Badiou explains at length in The Century, the twentieth century was essentially the century of avant-gardes. In point of fact, Badiou holds that the twentieth century was foremost defined not by a mere abstract interest in the imaginary, but rather by a profound and unquenchable ‘passion for the real’: if the nineteenth century was the century of promise, of the ‘still-to-come’ (of the revolution,

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of the new man, etc.), the twentieth century contrarily conceived itself as the time of delivery, as the direct invocation of the real, in its horrific as much as its creative capacity.24 This passion for the real is at base a purificatory passion, inasmuch as it necessarily involves the peeling away of semblance in ‘a non-dialectical confrontation between destruction and foundation’ (TC, p. 39). Such a passion – which, as we will see, has two faces, the one destructive, the other subtractive25 – is precisely what underlies the destructive agenda of the avant-gardes. Like the century itself, the avant-gardes – under whose banner we find such diverse artistic groups as dadaism, constructivism, acmeism, structuralism, suprematism, futurism, sensationism, and situationism – never hesitated in sacrificing the image for the sake of the real. To this effect the art of the avant-gardes was ‘no longer essentially a production of eternity, the creation of a work to be judged by the future’ (TC, p. 134). On the contrary, the avantgardes set about creating a ‘pure present’ of art, a present which led them to attach all importance to the artistic act – ultimately to the detriment of the work itself – insofar as the act, for the avant-gardes, figured the paradigm of the thought of a pure present. Thus the avantgardes placed themselves under the ‘suicidal chimera’ of a ‘perpetual commencement’ (TC, p. 136). Such permanent revolution could lead only to the erasure of art as such, meaning that the sole new schema which the century applied, the synthetic didactico-romantic schema, effectively exhausted itself in its very gesture. Given this sorry state of affairs, Badiou takes it upon himself to propose a fourth modality of the relation between philosophy and art, or more specifically, of the relation of truth to art (truth being the common term circulating between philosophy and art). It is of course this relationship which lies at the heart of his inaesthetics. In proposing his new schema Badiou first identifies the principal categories of the relationship between truth and art as those of immanence (is art’s truth really internal to the work itself?) and singularity (does an artistic truth belong to art alone, or can it equally be found elsewhere?). If we consider the three existing schemas, we can observe that at no point are these two terms held simultaneously. While the relation is certainly immanent to the romantic schema (infinite truth is embodied in finite art), it is hardly singular (the truth that art exhibits is not its own). Of course, it is the opposite which is the case for didacticism, where the relation is assuredly singular (only art presents truth as semblance, as the ‘charm’ of truth) but in no way immanent (truth being fundamentally exterior to art). And in classicism the relation is

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void from the first, inasmuch as art can speak only in terms of verisimilitude (or of what a truth constrains in the imaginary). Contrary to didacticism, romanticism and classicism, Badiou’s fourth schema – which we might call, in deference to Badiou’s philosophy, ‘subjective’ – affirms the simultaneity of immanence and singularity of truth in art. But how? The problem as Badiou sees it lies first and foremost with the relation of the finite to the infinite. Because, on the one hand, a truth is (for Badiou) an infinite multiplicity whose origin lies in an unknowable event, while on the other, an artwork is of itself necessarily finite.26 Thus it would appear that the only possible thinking of ‘true art’ must be romantic in nature (which, as we have seen, assumes the sublime descent of the infinite Idea into the finite work). However, such a romantic conception effectively fuses truth and event – something explicitly denied in Badiou’s philosophy – and thereby ‘returns us to a “Christly” vision of truth, because a truth is then nothing but its own evental self-revelation’ (HI, p. 11). We seem to have arrived at an impasse: how to think the infinite as immanent to finitude without falling back into romanticism? In order to overcome this problem Badiou sets out a number of propositions regarding the (finite) work and its relation to (infinite) truth. First, we know that an event must be separated from truth. So, leaving the question of truth to one side, what constitutes an artistic event? Obviously, in order to isolate such an event we need first to locate, in a specific artistic situation, a site, which will necessarily lie ‘on the edge of what is perceived, in that situation, as void of form’ (B, p. 195). This is why, at base, an artistic truth procedure is precisely that which gives form to what was previously formless (or ‘inform’). Or again, real art is nothing other than novel formalisation at its purest level.27 With this in mind, we can say that an artistic event will generally – though not necessarily – be ‘a singular multiple of works’ (HI, p. 12) that displace the frontier between sensible form and insensible formlessness. That is to say, an artistic event is what crystallises or ‘formalises’ what was previously ‘inform’ (as, in more general terms, an event brings into existence something that previously ‘inexisted’). Naturally, this work or group of works cannot be adequately placed within the existing artistic regime qua ‘state’ of art (hence its singularity). However, while a work can be an event, it can of course never be a truth.28 On the contrary, an artistic truth is nothing other than an ongoing artistic procedure. More precisely, an artistic truth is

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embodied in an identifiable artistic configuration, the origin of which lies in a vanished event (the initial appearance of the ‘singular multiple of works’ which formalise what was previously formless), and whose body is composed solely of the artworks belonging to this configuration (each individual artwork serving as the fabric from which its truth is gradually woven). An artistic body is thus the set of works constituted in the wake of an event ‘which treat, point by point, the consequences of the new capacity to inform the sensible’ (LW, p. 73). Hence the infinity of a truth is in no way confined to a single finite work, but rather comprises a virtually infinite – or, for all intents and purposes, eternal – sequence of works: as Badiou explains, ‘truth composes, it compounds itself to infinity. It is thus never presented integrally’.29 Following this logic we must concede that an artistic subject can in no way be the artist, nor an individual work, but rather must be the ever-expanding body of works unfolding in an artistic truth procedure.30 The entire ‘being’ of an artistic truth is then located in its works, works which, being outside of artistic knowledge (or the ‘state of art’), proceed solely by chance. Each individual work therefore figures as an investigation or an ‘enquiry’ into the truth that it actualises, piece by piece. In sum, an artistic truth is a material configuration (that, for complex reasons, constitutes an infinite generic set) which, issuing from an event and unfolding by chance alone, comprises an infinite complex of works. Or again, to think art as both singular and immanent to truth is one and the same as to think an artistic configuration. Outside of rethinking artistic thought, the role of philosophy is accordingly that of demonstrating how particular configurations fall under the category of truth. Countless such configurations are scattered throughout the history of art: in Greek tragedy, whose event is named ‘Aeschylus’, and whose saturation is found with Euripides; in the European novel from Cervantes to Joyce, etc. Yet, a configuration’s saturation – that is, the point at which the resources of the situation have dried up to the point that its novel explorations cease to be properly inventive (or are no longer ‘interesting’) – in no way spells a truth’s finitude. On the contrary, a truth is that which ‘ignores every internal maximum, every apex, and every peroration’ (HI, p. 14). Take, for example, the artistic truth procedure known as serialism, a procedure initiated by the Schönberg-event which ‘breaks the history of music in two by affirming the possibility of a sonic world no longer ruled by the tonal system’ (LW, p. 80). Having vanished, this event is constrained only by its trace, which is basically

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an affirmative statement regarding the possibilities it implied, of the kind: ‘an organization of sounds may exist which is capable of defining a musical universe on a basis which is entirely subtracted from classical tonality’ (LW, p. 80). The subject of the subsequent musical truth is accordingly the concrete ‘becoming’ of dodecaphonic music, whose body is located not in the composers and musicians themselves, but rather in the ‘works that are written and performed and which attempt to construct a universe conforming to the imperative harboured by the trace’ (LW, p. 80). If this sequence (which, along with Schönberg, was principally carried by the proper names Berg and Webern) eventually found itself saturated by the close of the 1970s, this simply reflects the fact that ‘every subject, albeit internally infinite, constitutes a sequence whose temporal limits can be fixed after the fact’ (LW, p. 81). Or again, whilst its possibilities remain infinite, its ‘corporeal’ capacities – that is, its subjective body, together with all those resources presented in the situation which might still inscribe themselves in the dimension of the work – finally became too restricted. So even though a truth procedure is in essence infinite, once its corporeal capacities have dried up, ‘an infinite subject reaches its finition’ (LW, p. 81). Thus we see that every truth is at once eternal and provisional, immortal and mortal, transcendent and mundane. As I have already stated, the role of art is, at base, that of giving form to what is formless. Or again, art’s imperative is that of ‘inscribing the inexistent’, of making ‘sensible’ or bringing into sense (where ‘sense’ is understood in terms of both appearance and knowledge) that which fails to make sense in the world to which the art in question belongs.31 Considered in this manner we can see that art possesses a peculiarly political function, inasmuch as it declares the possibility of something new happening in a world, the very possibility of radical change. For all true art ‘aims at forcing a thinking to declare, in its area of concern, the state of exception’ (TC, p. 160). Every authentic artistic configuration therefore says something which is equally local (entirely particular to the world in question by dint of its former inexistent qua trace) and universal (pertaining to the transworldly truth issuing from this trace). Moreover, it is clear that for Badiou each art is differentiated from the other arts, having its own form, its own (apparent, incipient or wholly unknown) possibilities, its particular content, modes of expression, and so on.32 This differentiation equally holds at both the local and the global levels. Simply, each art has according to Badiou its own unique possibilities, and to

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this effect can be seen to do something specific with respect to thought (something that its sister arts cannot do). For example, if mathematics (as we will see in Chapter 3) is that which ‘makes truth out of the pure multiple’, the latter being understood as ‘the primordial inconsistency of being qua being’, then poetry is that which ‘makes truth out of the multiple, conceived as a presence that has come to the limits of language’ (HI, p. 22). In short, poetry displays the generic truth of presentation as such, of presentation pushed to the limits of unpresentation. We might go so far as to say that, while mathematics reveals or inscribes the purity of being, poetry delivers presentation in its absolute austerity, subtracted of all specificity.33 The poem thus ‘interrupts’ language, it is ‘the liberation of what a language can do, once freed of the existing regime of re-presentation’ (or again, a true poem ‘subtracts language from the manipulation of knowledge’ (B, p. 197)). Theatre, on the other hand, speaks to a ‘generic humanity’, that is, to ‘humanity subtracted from its differences’ (CD, p. 2). Theatre, Badiou insists, refers to what is essentially indifferent (and therefore universal) in us, to what is common to everyone, irrespective of our differences (namely, to the absolute commonality or ‘indifference to difference’ which, as we will see, ultimately resides in our very being). A real play therefore reveals generic humanity in those ‘indiscernible differences that take place on the stage for the first time’, and as such summons the spectator to ‘expose himself to [the] void’.34 So too is theatre, in the intense and ephemeral nature of the performance, clearly the most immediately evental of the arts. Theatre is thus, to invoke one of Noel Coward’s cinematic excursions, a ‘brief encounter’35: as Badiou puts it, people do not go to the theatre to be cultivated; rather, they go to be ‘struck by theatre-ideas’ (HI, p. 77). Indeed, Badiou holds that ‘in the theatre, it is explicitly – almost physically – a question of the encounter of the idea’ (HI, p. 77). Outside of theatre the closest contender for the title of ‘most evental art’ is assuredly dance, which, as Badiou acknowledges, is the very ‘paradigm of a vanishing art’ (TC, p. 159). However, dance, at least for Badiou, ultimately falls short of true artistic status, serving instead as its metaphor. ‘Dance is not an art’, Badiou tells us, being rather ‘the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body’ (HI, p. 69). Simply, dance designates a possibility, it is metaphorical in its essence: dance ‘[provides] the metaphor for the fact that every genuine thought depends on an event’ (HI, p. 61).36 Clearly we see that philosophy rethinks the thought that each art thinks. But what of our principal port of call: what of cinema? Is

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there a thought proper to cinema? According to Badiou, when we are dealing with cinema it is neither a question of a realisation nor an encounter, nor even a metaphor. Rather, the question of cinema, entirely caught up with that of movement, is that of a passage, that is, of ‘the passage of the idea, perhaps even of its phantom’ (HI, p. 77).37 And, so as to explicate this strange formula, it is to Badiou’s writings on cinema that we now turn. Notes 1. Emerson, Nature, pp. 68–9. 2. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, p. 881. 3. Le Concept de modèle (translated into English in 2007 as The Concept of Model) only marks his first philosophical book, Badiou having by this stage already published two literary works, Almagestes (1964) and Portulans (1967). 4. See Badiou, The Century. 5. The following books by Alain Badiou are currently available in English (presented in order of their publication): Manifesto for Philosophy; Deleuze: The Clamor of Being; Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil; Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism; Handbook of Inaesthetics; Being and Event; Metapolitics; Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology; The Century; The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics; Number and Numbers; The Meaning of Sarkozy; Conditions; Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2; Theory of the Subject; and Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy. Further to this the following collections of Badiou’s essays are currently available in English: Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy; On Beckett; Theoretical Writings; and Polemics. Excluding special journal issues, three major books critically appraising Badiou’s work have also appeared: Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy; Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions; and The Praxis of Alain Badiou. In addition to all this, three books outlining and criticising Badiou’s work are also available: Jason Barker’s Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction; Peter Hallward’s Badiou: A Subject to Truth; and Oliver Feltham’s Alain Badiou: Live Theory. 6. Needless to say, Badiou strives to render the mathematics he employs as simply and intelligibly as possible. In the words of one of his commentators, ‘Badiou’s own exegesis of mathematical concepts are the best – bar none – I have ever read’, Clemens, The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory, p. 209.

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7. Badiou notes in his Deleuze that with ‘the publication of L’Etre et l’événement . . . I gradually became aware that, in developing an ontology of the multiple, it was vis-à-vis Deleuze and no one else that I was positioning my endeavor’ (D, p. 3). 8. Badiou and Hallward, ‘Beyond Formalisation’, p. 128. 9. Plato, ‘Republic’, p. 1138/521c. 10. Badiou and Bosteels, ‘Can Change be Thought’, p. 252. 11. Hallward, ‘Consequences of Abstraction’, pp. 1–2. 12. Hallward, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. ix. 13. The state of the situation should not be confused with the state apparatus itself. While the state is named as such due to what Badiou sees as ‘a metaphorical affinity with politics’ (BE, p. 95), more important are its implications of ‘stasis’ and ‘the status quo’, this being precisely what the state maintains. In this sense Badiou’s state operates much like Rancière’s ‘police’, being at base ‘not so much the “disciplining” of bodies as a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed’, Rancière, Disagreement, p. 29. 14. ‘The event is a cut, the interruption of pure repetition’, Badiou and Hounie, ‘The Question of Democracy’, p. 59. 15. In Badiou’s words, ‘the undecidable is . . . that which subtracts itself from a supposedly exhaustive classification of statements’ – namely, the ‘encyclopaedia’ of the situation – ‘realized according to the values ascribed to them by a norm’ (TW, p. 104), that is, the state. 16. ‘Philosophy does not pronounce truth but its conjuncture, that is, the thinkable conjunction of truths’ (MP, p. 38). 17. ‘What is proper to philosophy is not the production of universal truths, but rather the organization of their synthetic reception by forging and reformulating the category of Truth’ (SP, p. 108). 18. As Badiou declares, ‘I am opposed to every academic division of philosophy into would-be objective domains: there is nothing legitimate, or interesting, in what is termed “epistemology” (philosophy of sciences), “aesthetics” (philosophy of art), “psychology” (philosophy of affects) or “political philosophy” (philosophy of the practices of power)’ (M, p. xxxi). 19. The very structure of a truth procedure, as outlined above, amply evidences the manner in which Badiou’s own philosophy has been conditioned by disparate truth procedures. For example, the mapping of the situation (which concurrently reveals the state’s domination over the situation to be immeasurable) is drawn from various scientific truth procedures, while the determination of this indeterminate excess hails from instances of real politics. So, too, the thought of the event itself is drawn from artistic thought, whilst the fidelity to this unknowable event finds its origin in the amorous truth procedure.

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20. Marx, ‘Letter to his Father’, p. 41. 21. In Badiou’s words, ‘we must above all not conclude that it is philosophy’s task to think art. Instead, a configuration thinks itself in the works that compose it’ (HI, p. 14). 22. To take a single well-known romantic example, Walter Benjamin famously holds that ‘truths . . . can be expressed neither systematically nor conceptually – much less with acts of knowledge in judgements – but only in art. Works of art are the proper site of truths. There are as many ultimate truths as there are authentic works of art’, ‘Truth and Truths’, p. 278. 23. Heidegger famously holds that ‘unconcealedness sets itself into work, a setting which is accomplished by art’, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 77. Or again, ‘it is through the work of art as essent being that everything that appears and is to be found is first confirmed and made accessible, explicable, and understandable as being or not being’, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 159. 24. In this sense the revolutionary programme of the twentieth century finds its maxim in the nineteenth, in Marx’s famous thesis that ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it’, ‘On Feuerbach’, p. 118. 25. Briefly, the ‘destructive’ tendency treats the real as identity and thereby involves purification tout court, hammering out semblance to arrive at the ‘pure thing’. The ‘subtractive’ approach contrarily treats the real from the first as a gap and attempts to measure this ‘minimal difference’. See also C, pp. 54–7. 26. Badiou even goes so far as to argue that ‘art creates finitude’, being ‘the creation of an intrinsically finite multiple, a multiple that exposes its own organization in and by the finite framing of its presentation and that turns this border into the stakes of its existence’ (HI, p. 11). 27. In his ‘Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’ (contained in the collection Polemics), Badiou notes that ‘the real of art comprises an ideal impurity as the immanent process of its purification’, which is equally to say that ‘art has as its prime material the incidental contingency of form’ (P, p. 146). An artistic event is thus the coming into form (or becoming-form) of what was radically formless – that is, the initial formalisation of the real (or the void) of the artistic situation – in the guise of a new imperative regarding the sensible. 28. This is of course not to wholly reduce the event to the work itself. Indeed, the illegal nature of the event means it appears only to disappear. Rather, we might suppose that the ‘eventness’ of a work lies in its sudden emergence in the situation. Thus, in Badiou’s language, the singular ‘evental’ work can also be seen to constitute in part the trace of the event (the work subsists, together with the radical possibilities it implies) and part of the ‘body’ (or materiality) of the artistic subject.

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29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

31

In this sense the work is complicated with – but is irreducible to – the event itself (which is contrarily confined to its initial appearance). Badiou, ‘What is Love?’, p. 49. Jumping ahead somewhat, we can immediately see how Badiou’s conception of subjectivity effectively does away with questions of auteurism, and even turns one of the standard critiques of Film Theory into a rule, namely, its ‘suggesting that texts constituted subjects’, Lapsley, ‘Cinema, the Impossible’, p. 14. On this point we should note that Badiou’s Platonism leads him to hold all true art to be essentially poetic (hence the seemingly synonymic nature of poetry and art in Badiou’s writings). As Diotima says in Plato’s ‘Symposium’, ‘everything that is responsible for creating something out of nothing is a kind of poetry’, ‘Symposium’, p. 488/205c. Accordingly, statements such as ‘every poem seeks to uncover and carry to the formal limits of language the latent void of sensible referents’ (NN, p. 161) should be taken to apply as much to poetry as to art in general. An artistic truth is always ‘in a rigorous immanence to the art in question – a truth of this art’ (HI, p. 13). ‘The thought of the poem only begins after the complete disobjectification of presence’ (TW, p. 238). The poem is for Badiou a radically subtractive operation that seizes the purity of being and yields the Idea: ‘extirpated from the rule of the relation, subtracted as much from nature as from the pathos of consciousness, placed on a background of nothingness, facing the latent void of the pure multiple, being shines – distant, but measurable in truth’ (C, p. 60). Badiou, ‘Rhapsody for the Theatre’, p. 220. See David Lean’s excellent 1945 filmic adaption of Noel Coward’s ‘Still Life’ as Brief Encounter. On this point it is interesting to note that Badiou’s consideration of dance appears to be conditioned less by dance itself than by the writings of Stéphane Mallarmé, who enthused ‘ballet symbolizes caprice taking rhythmical flight . . . and how the human form in its more excessive mobility or the peak of its development, cannot disobey these laws, in so far, I know this to be the case, as it is a visual embodiment of thought’, ‘Ballets’, p. 112. Needless to say, every truth is in essence a passage, for their infinite nature means that they are always ‘becoming’ and as such are ‘never presented integrally’, Badiou, ‘What is Love?’, p. 49.

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CHAPTER 2

Can Cinema be Thought?

Formalization is our goal, our ideal. Jacques Lacan1

2.1

PARASITIC CINEMA Now, it is necessary to ask of the cinematograph, is it to be accepted within the confines of art? Ricciotto Canudo2

If we focus solely on the smattering of Badiou’s ‘inaesthetic’ papers on cinema that have thus far made their way into English, then we would be forgiven for concluding that, at least at first glance, far from serving to condition his philosophy, cinema is of little consequence to Badiou. Indeed, on a superficial reading his best known musings on film – namely, the chapter in his Handbook of Inaesthetics on ‘The False Movements of Cinema’ (comprising two earlier papers first published in L’art du cinéma)3 and his essay on ‘Philosophy and Cinema’ found in the collection Infinite Thought (also originally published in L’art du cinéma)4 – do not appear all that encouraging, especially when placed alongside his decidedly more exuberant writings on poetry, theatre, music and the like.5 For one thing, Badiou’s liberal use of the words ‘contaminated’, ‘parasitic’ and ‘inconsistent’ in his description of cinema seem rather less than inspiring. Nonetheless, as this book will argue (in a manner perfectly befitting the art of cinema), appearances can be deceiving. In point of fact, Badiou’s interest in cinema stretches back quite a way. One need only note that in 1993 Badiou, together with Denis Lévy, founded (and remains a regular contributor to) the review L’art du cinéma. Moreover, when we look closely, we can discern a noticeable ‘evolution’ in Badiou’s thoughts on cinema. Whereas Badiou was previously content to define cinema alternatively as a ‘bastard art’ or a ‘Saturday night art’6 – formulations that should not

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necessarily be understood in a derogatory sense – we now find him saying that ‘cinema is today the only art which is cut to the measure of the world’, and that, ‘in publishing the final synthesis of my philosophy [Logics of Worlds] . . . I will try to turn philosophy toward filmic expression’.7 Indeed, the gradual unravelling of a theory of appearing in Logics of Worlds arguably follows a decidedly cinematic logic, which is why it comes as little surprise that in his latest work Badiou designates cinema ‘the greatest artistic invention of the past century’ and notes that ‘the advent of images without referents, or virtual images, doubtless opens a new stage of questions concerning representation’ (SM, p. 136). In addition to this, Badiou has recently begun work on his own ‘big feature film’ entitled The Life of Plato. That said, his properly philosophical or ‘inaesthetic’ writings on the question of cinema are indeed slim pickings, being effectively limited to a handful of brief yet incisive interventions, the most significant of these being the aforementioned essays from Handbook of Inaesthetics and Infinite Thought, together with another paper entitled ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’.8 In themselves, these three papers provide a fascinating archaeology of Badiou’s thoughts on cinema, stretching from 1994 to 2005 and tracing the gradual evolution of his thoughts on this difficult subject. Which is to say that, unlike his writings on the other arts, Badiou’s conception of cinema remains to this day in a state of flux, still very much in nascent form. Exactly why this is the case is an interesting question. We might immediately cite the fact that cinema is truly an art – arguably the art – of the twentieth century.9 What this means is that, unlike poetry, painting, sculpture, music, theatre and dance – each of which thrived in Plato’s time – there is no cinematic precedent to be found in Ancient Greece. Certainly cinema’s contemporaneity is one of the reasons as to why film is for Badiou that ‘most impure of arts’. However, on another level, cinema’s unprecedented nature goes some way towards explaining why the immediate philosophical problem cinema presents for Badiou is not so much that of wresting it away from the hegemonic grasp of Deleuze than of reconciling it with his own ‘return to Plato’ (a Plato, as we have seen, simultaneously radically removed from yet strangely intimate to cinema, by dint of the myth of the cave). Thus we would be forgiven if we saw in his explicitly philosophical cinematic writings – not least in his chapter on ‘The False Movements of Cinema’ – less a novel intervention into the cinematic art than a concerted ‘Platonisation’ of Deleuze. We will return to this idea in Chapter 5.

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For the present, let us consider Badiou’s three principal ‘cinematic’ texts one by one, beginning with the earliest, namely, the chapter consecrated to cinema in his Handbook of Inaesthetics. ‘The False Movements of Cinema’ – or rather, the two papers from which the chapter is originally composed – represents Badiou’s first real intervention into the question of cinema and its relation to philosophy.10 Badiou begins this considerably dense chapter by observing that cinema is, at base, a subtractive art, its principal operation being that of the cut. The initial cinematic act, for example, is that of cutting or subtracting the image from the visible.11 So too the simple act of framing serves as an exclusionary device, selecting sections of the visible while rejecting others, thereby effecting a ‘constrained visibility’ (HI, p. 82).12 Yet at the same time, as Badiou points out, it is precisely in the way that things are cut from the visible and captured in the cinematographic image that ‘brings forth, indivisibly, both their singularity and their ideality’ (HI, p. 78).13 Jumping forward somewhat, we will note that it is with this subtractive practice in mind that Badiou is able to hold that the operation proper to cinema is ultimately that of ‘[organising] within the visible the caress proffered by the passage of the idea’ (HI, p. 78). Needless to say, just how cinema does this proves to be somewhat of a tricky business. In elaborating this peculiar operation Badiou isolates three fundamental – albeit false – movements inherent to cinema, movements which will prove fundamental to our own investigation: a global movement, which he tells us relates the Idea to ‘the paradoxical eternity of a passage’ (HI, p. 78); a local movement, whereby the image is continually subtracted from itself; and an impure movement, by which cinema ‘installs the idea within a contrasting allusion . . . to arts that are wrested from their proper destination’ (HI, p. 79). Together these movements constitute what Badiou here designates the ‘poetics of cinema’, the entire effect of which is to ‘allow the Idea to visit the sensible’ (HI, p. 80), or again, to ensure a sensible ‘encounter with a real’ (IT, p. 115). Notions such as ‘visitation’, ‘encounter’ and ‘passage’ are of course crucial to this formulation – we are speaking here of cinema after all, where rewind and pause are not factoryinstalled options – inasmuch as Badiou insists that the Idea in no way finds itself incarnated in the sensible. On the contrary, cinema is for Badiou the art which most immediately: belies the classical thesis according to which art is the sensible form of the Idea. The visitation of the sensible does not endow the latter

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with a body. The Idea is not separable – it exists only for cinema in its passage. The Idea itself is visitation. (HI, p. 80)

We can immediately observe the first two (global and local) movements to be primarily formal in nature, relating for the most part to the mechanics, or rather, the ontological consistency, of film. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that the global movement is the film itself, its ultimate composition (the ‘final cut’, or montage).14 To be sure, on a formal level the global movement refers chiefly to the technical infrastructure of a film, that is, to the ordered set of edits, shots, sequences and so forth by which each work is constituted as a ‘whole’. It is the manner by which these elements are brought together (or composed into a ‘global’ whole) that (perhaps) grants the Idea its passage. However, this global movement is in truth a ‘false movement’ inasmuch as it is essentially immeasurable: strictly speaking, the global movement is immobile, for the simple reason that it designates a complex system of relations, the real thought of which is properly topological (and hence atemporal).15 The local movement, on the other hand, refers to that most basic cinematographic mechanism, namely, the repetitive passage from frame to frame (in general, at the rate of twenty-four frames per second). In designating the interminable passing of one immobile image to another, this movement ultimately functions to ‘[subtract] the image from itself’ (HI, p. 78). Meaning, like the global movement, the local movement is equally false, for it too is clearly an immobile ‘movement’, being nothing but the illusion resultant of the uniform substitution of one immobile segment for another.16 Thought in their formal nature, both the global and the local movement constitute an understanding of cinema that is at once (falsely) ontological – for, in contrast to the protestations of André Bazin, the image has no essential identity to its referent (qua thingin-itself)17 – and (falsely) temporal – as such movement constitutes at best (as Deleuze famously argued in his Cinema 1) nothing more than an ‘indirect’ image of time. I will return to these ontological and temporal questions presently.18 Of more immediate concern to us is the third, ‘impure’ movement of cinema. In fact, it is arguably for this movement, and this movement alone, that Badiou wavers in allowing cinema a properly artistic status. At its most basic, the impure movement refers to the fact that cinema amalgamates the other arts without, for all that, actually presenting them. Or again, how cinema ‘takes’ those elements which

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belong to the other arts without actually giving anything back. For when an Idea visits us cinematically, it is necessarily brought forth by way of an intrafilmic ‘complication’ of the other arts (for example, an ostensibly cinematic Idea might be indebted to a certain musical evocation, an actor’s peculiar theatricality, and so forth). Simply, as Badiou sees it, cinema, as the ‘seventh art’, ‘does not add itself to the other six while remaining on the same level’ (HI, p. 79).19 On this point it is interesting to compare Badiou’s considerations to those of Ricciotto Canudo, the pioneering theorist of cinema as ‘the seventh art’ (alongside poetry, painting, sculpture, music, theatre and dance), who, writing in 1923 (perhaps with a certain forgivable idealistic naïveté), believed that the cinema would come to constitute a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, whereby cinema would ‘increasingly serve as Art’s powerful coadjutor’. As Canudo argues: when the painter and the musician truly wed the poet’s dream, and when their triple expression of a single subject is achieved in living light by the écraniste . . . films will reach us with a supreme clarity of ideas and visual emotions. We will recognize cinema as the synthesis of all the arts and of the profound impulse underlying them.20

Badiou, for his part, writing seventy-one years after the fact, holds the ‘seventh art’ to be little more than ‘the “plus-one” of the arts’, and, as such, an art ‘both parasitic and inconsistent’ (HI, p. 83). Far from providing a glorious synthesis, Badiou’s third movement effectively tells us that cinema is little more than art’s shadow. The Platonic reference here is key: cinema is literally a shadow art, an impure amalgamation (and re-presentation) of greater – and essentially Other – artistic Ideas, Ideas which exist fundamentally outside of cinema, outside of the cave. Or again, cinema offers only the phantom of the Idea, a shadow of its true form. Thus the impure movement is for Badiou the falsest of the three, insofar as he is adamant about there being no mediation between the arts: ‘the arts are closed’, Badiou tells us, ‘no painting will ever become music, no dance will ever turn into poem’ (HI, p. 82). What remains once these arts have been wrested away from themselves is nothing but a ‘breached frontier’, a gap ‘where an idea will have passed, an idea whose visitation the cinema, and it alone, allows’ (HI, p. 82). Herein lies the quandary of cinema. While both the global and local movements serve to ‘carry’ the Idea (formally as much as diegetically), it is the impure movement, and it alone, which is responsible for ‘producing’ the Idea in the first place. However, this means that

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any cinematic Idea must first be taken – stolen – from other arts, for ‘when a film really does organise the visitation of an Idea . . . it is always in a subtractive (or defective) relation to one or several among the other arts’ (HI, p. 86). Thus Badiou takes every opportunity to remind us that ‘in cinema, nothing is pure’ (HI, p. 86). Indeed, Badiou tells us that cinema is at base ‘nothing but takes and montage’ (HI, p. 86, translation modified),21 and as such, in its artistic pretensions, is ‘internally and integrally contaminated by its situation as the “plusone” of arts’ (HI, p. 86). However, this seemingly disreputable impurity finally proves itself to be the very power of cinema. For cinema’s role is ultimately that of idealising the Idea, of ‘impurifying’ Ideas which have already been given in the other arts, so as to create from their impurity altogether new Ideas, or ‘bring to light’ new facets of old Ideas. As Badiou puts it, cinema’s ‘force as a contemporary art lies precisely in turning – for the duration of a passage – the impurity of every idea into an idea in its own right’ (HI, p. 83). Cinema – in a manner strictly analogous to philosophy itself22 – is thus for Badiou the ‘great “impurifier”’ (HI, p. 88), procuring and amplifying Ideas which do not in truth belong to it. To this effect, ‘to speak of a film is . . . to indicate what there could be, beyond what there is. Or again: How the “impurification” of the true clears the path for other purities’ (HI, p. 88). Of all the movements of cinema it is the impure movement which holds at one and the same time the least and the greatest promise, and it is accordingly this movement which Badiou seeks to develop in his essay on ‘Philosophy and Cinema’. Before we broach Badiou’s second major cinematographic excursus, however, let us take a moment to consider Badiou’s rather unconventional deployment of the Platonic ‘Idea’. In reading ‘The False Movements of Cinema’ one is immediately struck by the inconsistent treatment of this fundamental concept, as it shifts seemingly indiscriminately between its upper- and lower-case variants.23 Rather than see this as a simple oversight on Badiou’s part we should instead conclude that the apparently arbitrary demotion of ‘the Idea’ to ‘the idea’ (coupled with its subsequent reinstatement to the rank of Idea) is in actual fact illustrative of the impure movement itself. For if, as we have seen, cinema ‘impurifies’ Ideas belonging to the other arts, and proceeds to turn such impurifications into Ideas in their own right, then is it not the case that the (pure) Idea must first pass through the (impure) idea in order to become the new (impurified) Idea? Thus the play between Idea and idea can be seen as fundamental to the operation of cinema itself.

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This point also gives us pause to reconsider Badiou’s ‘return to Plato’ by way of his deconstruction. For when we really confront the Idea as it is presented in Badiou’s philosophy, we quickly realise it bears scant resemblance to the dominant contemporary acceptation of the Platonic Idea. For one thing, as Jacques Rancière points out, ‘for Badiou, to be a genuine Platonist . . . is to make the Platonic eternity of the Idea come forth in the radicalization of anti-mimesis’.24 For Ideas, as Badiou conceives them, are inextricably entwined with truths, and every truth flows from an event qua singularity (which, for reasons we will soon explore, is immediately universal) whose radically un-known status means that it can in no way be mimetic, lest it forego its event-ness. There is therefore no originary transcendence to Badiou’s Ideas: Ideas are here not timeless perfect forms awaiting their imperfect actualisation in material content. Rather, Ideas are for Badiou both a posteriori (with regard to an event) and axiomatic, inasmuch as they are generated (or thought) in the course of a subjective truth procedure. In a word, subjects really do think Ideas. Finally, since the Idea – that ‘intractable element of a truth’25 – is, like the subject, suspended from (constructed, generic) truths, truths are not, strictly speaking, Ideas (their realisation being infinitely suspended, or suspended from infinity).26 Rather, truths transcend the Ideas they give rise to. The implications of this conception of the Idea for cinema (qua art) are immediate. As we know the subject of art is not the artist but rather the sequence of works (each individual work forming part of the subject-body of a truth). The Ideas – which should of course be understood here in their material index as Forms, that is, as radically new forms (novel formalisation being after all the imperative of all true art) – thus ‘generated’ in cinema are but so many subsidiary truth-propositions encompassed in an artistic configuration. The questions left hanging (or suspended) are then the following: if, as I noted above, cinema’s role is that of procuring and amplifying Ideas (qua Forms) which do not in truth belong to it, does this mean that truth itself is necessarily external to cinema? What then becomes of the all-important theses of immanence and singularity? Can cinema really produce its own truths if its true-Ideas are not, properly speaking, its own? Or does it merely pervert, in its impurificatory capacity, other truths whose real thought lies elsewhere? In sum, is cinema really formalisable? Such are the difficult questions guiding this book. In contrast to ‘The False Movements of Cinema’, which effectively limits itself to the question of film qua film (or of its ontological

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specificity), ‘Philosophy and Cinema’ presents itself as an examination or diagnosis of the contemporary cinematic situation, coupled with a number of suggested prescriptions designed as a kind of curative (or purificatory) measure. The paper begins by pointing out the rather disconcerting fact that ‘there is no “objective” situation of cinema’ (IT, p. 109). This is to say that, when considered as a ‘whole’, the films that are currently being produced do not allow for any real intelligibility. Simply put, the cinematic situation is a mess. This situational incoherency is worrying for the simple fact that truth, by virtue of its generic nature, must affect the entirety of the situation: if there is no coherent situation there can be no truth of the situation. Thus Badiou appears to deny from the first the very possibility of there being any truth to (contemporary) cinema, which would of course mean in turn that the cinema of our times falls considerably short of its artistic aspirations. However, he goes on to establish a ‘subjective’ cinematic situation on the basis of two axioms, namely: 1. Cinema is capable of being an art, in the precise sense in which one can identify, among the undividedness of forms and subjects, cinema-ideas. 2. This art has been traversed by a major rupture, between its identificatory, representative and humanist (‘Hollywoodian’) vocation and a modernity which is distanced, involving the spectator in an entirely different manner. (IT, p. 110)

With these axioms we can easily produce a restricted (or ‘framed’) cinematic situation within which to operate. Of the first axiom, we can clearly observe the operations outlined in the previous paper, and how cinema-ideas are principally entwined with an ‘impure movement’, for we know that ‘the passage of an idea in a film presupposes a complex summoning forth and displacement of the other arts’ (IT, p. 111). Of the second we can easily recognise the split between socalled ‘Hollywoodian’ cinema and a modern or ‘purificatory’ cinema, a cinema which seeks to purge itself of its base content. Badiou’s principal aim in this paper, however, is to expand upon his ‘impurity’ thesis. We know that cinema is for Badiou an art ‘both parasitic and inconsistent’, defined first and foremost by its own essential impurity. This impurity, however, hinges as much on cinema’s inherent artistic bastardry (film being the product of an unsanctioned union between theatre, photography, music, literature, painting, vaudeville, etc.) and compromised nature (cinema being a collaborative medium governed for the most part by capitalistic

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concerns), as on its artistically ‘porous’ nature, that is, its peculiar status as a ‘place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art’ (IT, p. 111). Indeed, Badiou is acutely aware of the fact that ‘no film strictly speaking is controlled by artistic thinking from beginning to end. It always bears absolutely impure elements within it, drawn from ambient imagery, from the detritus of other arts, and from conventions with a limited shelf life’ (IT, p. 111). Which is simply to say that – at least in the case of cinema – non-art is immanent to art as a rule. Now, insofar as cinema figures as something of a grey area between art and non-art, Badiou contends that artistic activity in cinema – the effective passage of a true cinema-Idea – can only be discerned as a ‘process of purification of its own immanent nonartistic character’ (IT, p. 111). For a film to be truly artistic, an effectively interminable process of purging must first take place. But, as Badiou concedes, such an absolutely purificatory process can never be truly achieved. At best, such a ‘pure’ cinematic ideal might only be approached asymptotically.27 To this effect Badiou provisionally concludes that ‘cinema’s artistic operations are incompletable purification operations, bearing on current non-artistic forms, or indistinct imagery’ (IT, p. 111). We might then suppose Badiou’s overall position regarding the artistic status of cinema to be the following: the impurity proper to cinema forecloses from the start any possibility of its attaining true (or ‘pure’) artistic status. Needless to say, this is not our position. On the contrary, it is precisely in its maintaining a certain degree of non-artistic content that cinema is guaranteed a certain artistic capacity. In point of fact, an absolute purification of its non-artistic content would paradoxically suppress cinema’s artistic capacity, inasmuch as it is precisely through its inherent non-artistry that cinema finds its universal (and hence ‘artistic’) address. Indeed, in expanding his conception of the impure movement into the realm of non-art, Badiou holds a film to be truly contemporary – and thus, at least potentially, ‘universal’ – if and only if ‘the material whose purification it guarantees is identifiable as belonging to the non-art of its times’ (IT, p. 113). This is also the principal reason as to why cinema is, for Badiou, intrinsically (if not empirically) a mass art: a film is truly contemporary only inasmuch as its principal internal referent is a ‘common imagery’, and not the ‘artistic past of forms’. Thus Badiou effectively posits a second impure movement at play in film, inasmuch as cinema ‘gathers around identifiably non-artistic materials, which are ideological indicators of the epoch . . . [and] transmits, potentially, their

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artistic purification, within the medium of an apparent indiscernibility between art and non-art’ (IT, pp. 113–14). So how do we finally discern art in cinema? Basically, when looking at a film, we must be able to grasp, together at the same time, the ‘subjacent material’ (its non-artistic content which ensures its contemporaneity), a protocol of purification (its ‘artistic index’, operating through the various false movements), and of course the passage of an Idea (the happy outcome of its purificatory protocol, or the success of said movements).28 For all his talk of ‘artistic cinema’, Badiou nevertheless holds that even in the ‘subjective’ situation of cinema ‘the weight of non-art is crushing’ (IT, p. 115). The current moment of cinema, Badiou explains, is one of ‘neoclassicism’ (as opposed to ‘postmodernism’), for contemporary cinema consistently fails to create anything new, opting rather to rework or (in keeping with cinema’s impure logic) re-new past cycles.29 Thus both sides of the split between ‘Hollywoodism’ and ‘modern cinema’ find themselves grouped under the neo-classical banner, the former obviously recycling tired formulas, while the latter remains embedded in an altogether saturated subtractive sequence (wherein each and every ostensibly ‘necessary’ filmic element – actors, action, narrative, continuity, etc. – is systematically excised from the text in the hope of attaining to something ‘pure’).30 Thus, for all its promise, ‘Philosophy and Cinema’ concludes on a sour note, Badiou maintaining that ‘no new configuration is perceptible qua event’ (IT, p. 123) and providing little hope that cinema will rise from its sub-artistic position. On this account, contemporary cinema remains equally the shadow of art and nonart, Badiou closing his paper by cynically asking of the neo-classical attempts to purify cinema, ‘what are the few clues of such an effort worth today? What do they promise?’ (IT, p. 124) 2.2

PARADOXICAL RELATIONS I have faith in the cinema. Alain Badiou31

With respect to ‘Philosophy and Cinema’, ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’ paints a far more positive picture. This brief essay is far and away Badiou’s most optimistic piece of cinematographic writing to date, considering as it does the paradoxical relations constitutive of cinema while at the same time consolidating the two pieces considered above. Above all, this paper tells us precisely why philosophy

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has immediate recourse to cinema, or again, why cinema – contemporary or otherwise – presents a philosophical situation. But what exactly is a philosophical situation? Or rather, what in a specific situation ensures its warranting philosophical investigation? In Badiou’s words, a situation is genuinely philosophical ‘when it forces the existence of a relation between terms that, in general, or in common opinion, can have no relation to each other’ (P, p. 3). Moreover, Badiou is adamant that ‘philosophy only exists insofar as there are paradoxical relations, relations which fail to connect, or should not connect’ (CD, p. 1). Why? Because impossible relations present us with a space wherein we must first decide between two mutually exclusive positions, where we must measure the distance separating these two positions, and where we must come to terms with the significance of a radical exception qua event. Or as Badiou puts it, when confronted with paradoxical situations the philosopher must: 1. Clarify the fundamental choices of thought. And such choice is . . . always a choice between that which is interested and that which is disinterested. 2. Clarify the distance between thought and power, that is, the distance between the state and truths. Measure this distance. Know if it can or cannot be crossed. 3. Clarify the value of the exception, of the event, of rupture. Moreover, do so against the continuity of life and against social conservatism. (P, p. 8)

Simply, philosophical situations are those that involve radical decisions, measured distances, and exceptional events. Moreover, the task of philosophy is to discern the elusive link between these three terms, for ‘a philosophical concept . . . [is] always that which knots together a problem of choice (or of decision), a problem of distance (or of gap), and a problem of exception (or of event)’ (P, p. 9). Outside of such paradoxical situations philosophy is pointless, for, as we have seen, there can be no such thing as a ‘quotidian philosophy’. Without the decisions, distances and events entailed in impossible situations, philosophy cannot exist. ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’ begins by happily observing that such paradoxical relations are precisely what are on offer in cinema. Not only in its representations, but in its very constitution. So what exactly are cinema’s paradoxical relations? Philosophy of course has a ready-made response to this question, namely, that cinema presents an altogether impossible relation between artifice and reality. That is, cinema offers at one and the same time ‘the

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possibility of a copy of reality and the entirely artificial dimension of this copy’ (CD, p. 1). Which is finally to say that cinema is an ontological art. Simply, this reading acknowledges the fact that ‘cinema has become the immediate form (or ‘technique’) of an ancient paradox, that of the relations between being and appearing’ (CD, p. 1). Or as Jacques Rancière puts it: cinema in a sense spends its time doing philosophy, because cinema is an art of appearance par excellence, an art which puts into question the reality it reflects [renvoie]. Every film can equally be considered a practical exercise in the relationship between reality and appearance.32

And as Badiou reminds us, this is precisely what André Bazin had so eloquently argued all along.33 Badiou, on the other hand, enters into the question from an altogether different angle, opting to begin instead from the fact of cinema’s being a ‘mass art’. We have already seen that Badiou holds cinema to be intrinsically a mass art inasmuch as its principal internal referent is non-artistic ‘common imagery’, that is, insofar as it is suffused with all those ‘ideological markers of the epoch’. Now Badiou tells us that cinema is empirically a mass art for the simple reason that, unlike any of the other arts, its masterpieces ‘are seen and liked by millions of people from all social groups at the very moment of their creation’ (CD, p. 1).34 This is not only due to cinema’s physical availability, but because its masterpieces speak generically, which is to say, like theatre, they speak of and to a generic humanity. On this point Badiou finds support in the immortal works of Charlie Chaplin, whose famous character of the Tramp ‘is no less a representative of generic “popular” humanity for an African than for a Japanese or for an Eskimo’ (CD, p. 2), and whose work arguably encapsulates the very idea of cinema as a ‘democratic emblem’.35 The problem, however, is that while cinema doubtless figures as the greatest mass art that has ever existed, ‘mass’ and ‘art’ are themselves intrinsically opposed terms. Simply, ‘mass art’ establishes a paradoxical relation. Because ‘mass’ is an essential political category – or more precisely today a category of ‘activist democracy’ (being intrinsically ‘for-all’) – while ‘art’ is to the contrary a fundamentally aristocratic category, for, as Badiou puts it: ‘art’ comprises the idea of formal creation, of visible novelty in the history of forms, and therefore requires the means of comprehending creation as such, necessitating a differential education, a

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Badiou and Cinema minimal proximity to the history of the art concerned and to the vicissitudes of its grammar. (CD, p. 2)

Put even more simply, if ‘mass’ is immediately for-all, then ‘art’ is eventually for-the-few. Recognising this discrepancy between politics and aristocracy, we can clearly see how ‘mass art’ is a contradiction in itself.36 Philosophy’s interest in cinema therefore lies primarily in the fact that cinema is a mass art, and as such fixes a paradoxical relation, an altogether improbable conjunction between ‘a pure democratic element (on the side of irruption and evental energy) and an aristocratic element (on the side of individual education, of differential locations of taste)’ (CD, p. 2). Moreover, as Badiou is wont to point out, while the twentieth century was certainly the century of avantgardes – in fact, for Badiou, ‘all the arts of the twentieth century have been avant-garde’ (CD, p. 2) – it was at the same time ‘the century of cinema’ (IT, p. 121), the century of the greatest mass art that has ever existed. Cinema thus imposes a complex web of impossible relations (between aristocracy and democracy, refinement and vulgarity, invention and familiarity, the real and semblance, etc.). Inasmuch as philosophy concerns itself exclusively with such relations, Badiou holds that ‘“to think” cinema comes down to forcing the relation, to arranging the concepts which, under the constraint of real films, shift the established rules of the connection’ (CD, p. 2). And incidentally, this is precisely what ‘The False Movements of Cinema’ and ‘Philosophy and Cinema’, and now ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’, attempt to do. To this effect Badiou outlines five major ways by which philosophy ‘shifts the established rules’ and really thinks cinema. First, following the path set by André Bazin, we can enter into the question of cinema from the paradox of the image itself. We have already seen something of this approach above, in our consideration of ‘The False Movements of Cinema’. Here cinema figures as an ontological art simply because it is ‘the height of the visual offered as semblance’ (CD, p. 3). On this account cinema is paradoxically at one and the same time completely real and absolutely false. Given Badiou’s recent elaboration of a logic of appearing, this is perhaps the most immediate way to think his own relation to cinema. Second, we can enter from the paradox of time (or time-in-image). In this case film figures as a temporal art, as the art which ‘transforms time into perception’ (CD, p. 3). However, as with the image itself,

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this temporality would appear to be false (presenting at best only an ‘indirect’ image of time). This temporal approach of course finds its most famous philosophical exponent in the figure of Gilles Deleuze. A third approach – again derived foremost from the work of Bazin37 – is through the paradox of artistic impurity, or impurity with regard to the other arts. This is of course the principal movement considered in both ‘The False Movements of Cinema’ and ‘Philosophy and Cinema’, by which cinema figures as the ‘plus-one’ of the arts, an art which thrives parasitically off its artistic others. As Badiou puts it, ‘cinema takes from the other arts all that is popular, all that could, once isolated, filtered, separated from their aristocratic requirements, destine them to the masses’ (CD, p. 3). As such, cinema figures as ‘painting without painting, music without music, novel without subjects, theatre reduced to the charm of actors’ (CD, p. 4), and so forth. Yet at the same time, cinema thereby ensures the ‘popularity’ of the other arts, because it ‘opens’ them up, it ‘weakens their aristocratic, complex and composite quality’ (CD, p. 4). Cinema thus presents the ‘active democratisation’ of the arts. It is the seventh art which democratises the other six, bringing them into the mass sphere.38 The fourth point of entry into the question of cinema is from the paradox of non-artistic impurity, whereby cinema, due to its integral relation to non-art, figures as an art which is itself ‘beneath’ art. This approach is the one principally expounded in ‘Philosophy and Cinema’. ‘In cinema’, Badiou explains, ‘we travel to the pure from the impure’ (CD, p. 4), which is to say that we move, artistically speaking, in an altogether inconsistent manner between aristocracy and democracy (as art in general demands that we enter by way of the pure and not the impure).39 For unlike painting or poetry (or, for that matter, any of the other arts), cinema is for the most part an unexpected art, an art which catches you by surprise, by virtue of the fact that we do not in general suspect it of being an art (or, at the very least, of being artistic).40 Moreover, according to Badiou, cinema ‘democratises the movement by which art drags itself from non-art by drawing from this movement a border, by making from impurity the thing itself’ (CD, p. 5). Or again, cinema can be immediately seen to serve a kind of ‘filtering’ function, ‘purifying’ non-art, bringing it into art (in a kind of symmetry with cinema’s ‘impurifying’ the other arts). Finally, we can enter into the question by way of its ‘ethical paradox’, whereby cinema is seen to present itself as the ‘popular

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phenomenology of every situation wherein we must choose’ (CD, p. 5). Cinema is here a ‘pointed’ art, an art of points.41 In its incessant portrayal of Good versus Evil, of heroes and villains, cinema certainly presents tales of the most ridiculous variety. Yet at the same time we cannot help but recognise something estimable in these hypocritical tales, in their goal ‘to present an immense audience with the typical and excessive figures of the great conflicts of human life’ (CD, p. 5): ‘to speak of war, of passion, of justice and injustice, of truth, with, for ordinary material, all the cock-and-bull stories of old crooks, of female poisoners and mad kings’ (CD, p. 5), such is the ‘ethical’ aim of cinema. Image, time, artistic impurity, non-artistic impurity, ethics: these are the five philosophical ways by which cinema is (re)thought, the five great filmic paradoxes. Accordingly, the investigations undertaken in the remaining chapters of this book equally seek to answer – or at the very least further elucidate – these questions. 2.3

AFTER-THOUGHTS

Now would be a good point to review some of what we have seen thus far. We know that, according to Badiou, philosophy’s principal concern rests with the question of real novelty, which lies between a vanished event and its material consequences. The active (‘subjective’) perseverance in this novelty is what Badiou names a truth procedure, or ‘thought’ proper. Such thought is, however, restricted to the fields of art, science, politics and love. Philosophy’s role is thus that of re-thinking thoughts which are fundamentally external to it. Badiou coins the term ‘inaesthetics’ to describe this peculiar modality between philosophy and art. Inaesthetics thus designates the philosophical recapitulation of a relation between art and truth that is at once singular (every artistic truth is peculiar to the art in question) and immanent (artistic works are wholly present to the truth they fabricate). Cinema, however, introduces a number of problems into Badiou’s understanding of the inaesthetic knot tying together art, philosophy and truth, not least regarding the all-important question of singularity. For one thing, cinema’s impurity with regard to the other arts would seem to render the truths it elicits far from singular. Further, it is questionable whether Badiou is able to surmount this problem through recourse to a kind of re-singularisation, that is, by holding that cinema ‘impurifies’ Ideas belonging to the other arts

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and turns these impure ideas into new cinema-Ideas in their own right. Arguably, if cinema is to attain true artistic status, it must itself present something radically singular, something ‘pure’ to cinema, something that no other art can offer. So too is it questionable whether we can discern any singular ‘power’ to cinema (in the sense that poetry arrests language and provides the thought of presentation qua presentation, or dance serves as the metaphor for thought). For cinema’s ‘democratic’ power is necessarily entangled with the other arts, lying as it does in its ability to ‘popularise’ these arts and their Ideas by ‘[weakening] their aristocratic, complex and composite quality’ (CD, p. 4). On this point we can easily glean cinema’s affinity with philosophy itself, inasmuch as cinema’s role is finally that of re-thinking thoughts which do not in truth belong to it. To this effect, cinema would appear to be, at least on Badiou’s account, like philosophy, intrinsically truthless: cinema is simply the ‘common’ ground on which other artistic truths are re-presented and re-arranged. Indeed, this is at least one of the ways we can read Badiou’s assertion that ‘after the philosophy of cinema must come – is already coming – philosophy as cinema’ (CD, p. 5).42 Or again, philosophy as cinema would mean not only the ‘active democratisation’ (or ‘compossibilisation’) of (artistic, scientific, amorous and political) truths, but also their subsequent popularisation. Hence Badiou’s promising allusion to the spectre of a ‘mass philosophy’ (CD, p. 5). But must cinema be relegated to such a truthless position? Is cinema unable to produce truths in its own right? Is there such a thing as singular cinema? There is still one last problem we must raise before we can move on to consider the ontological nature of cinema. When Badiou discusses artistic truth procedures, he invariably speaks of the ‘becoming form’ of what was previously formless. However, this is not the case in his cinematographic writings. Rather, the Idea at best passes through the filmic text (it is, as Badiou repeats time and again, nothing other than a passage). Moreover, this transient Idea is, as we have just recounted, one which is gleaned from other arts, which is to say that any formal novelty cinema presents has already been presented elsewhere. Cinema thinks, Badiou tells us, but what exactly does it think at the level of its own form? What precisely constitutes real cinematic novelty? The conspicuous gap in Badiou’s writings on cinema – the cut, if I may put it that way – is clearly that of the event (or, more precisely, the trace of the event), for while Badiou frequently speaks of a ‘thinking cinema’, at no stage does he point to any cinematic

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event.43 Or again, while Badiou certainly understands that cinema ‘thinks’, he neither gives us access to whence this thought arises nor to what it really is (outside of a conception of ‘generic humanity’, the true artistic thought of which remains the province of theatre and the novel).44 Rather, filmic thought is simply assumed. We might even go so far as to argue that Badiou’s writings on cinema bear witness to a somewhat fragmented thought which falls variously under the didactic, romantic and classical schemas, and which consistently falls short of its inaesthetic aspirations. Badiou’s cinema remains essentially romantic in that he holds that the duty of cinema is simply ‘to organize within the visible the caress proffered by the passage of the idea’ (HI, p. 78) which is itself drawn from another place. So too his cinema remains classical inasmuch as its power lies precisely in its being a mass art, meaning that its ‘masterpieces’ ‘are seen and liked by millions of people from all social groups at the very moment of their creation’ (CD, p. 1).45 Further, we know that, according to the classical schema, art’s ‘resemblance’ to the true is required ‘only to the degree that it engages the spectator . . . in an identification that organizes a transference’ (HI, p. 4). So when Badiou notes that cinema is both the height of the real given as semblance and ‘the final mastery of the metaphysical cycle of identification’ (CD, p. 3), we can clearly discern a certain classicism at work. Finally, Badiou’s cinema would appear to remain fundamentally didactic (and in this sense classically Platonic), inasmuch as his cinema is, as we have seen, ultimately non-evental, and thereby fails to register truth as such: cinema is rather, according to Badiou, the medium par excellence which exhibits the pure ‘charm of a semblance of truth’ (HI, p. 2).46 Certainly we have various ‘thinking cinemas’, but can we really identify artistic sequences issuing forth from a formal rupture qua event, which are singular to cinema itself? And how might such a sequence condition philosophy? With these questions firmly in tow, we can now begin our investigation proper by considering cinema as an ontological art. Notes 1. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, p. 119. 2. Canudo, ‘The Birth of a Sixth Art’, p. 61. 3. The chapter from Handbook of Inaesthetics brings together Badiou’s ‘Le cinéma comme faux mouvement’ and ‘Peut-on parler d’un film?’.

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4. This paper originally appeared in 1999 as ‘Considérations sur l’état actuel du cinéma, et sur les moyens de penser cet état sans avoir à conclure que le cinéma est mort ou mourant’. 5. I have argued as much in the past. See Ling, ‘Can Cinema Be Thought?’. 6. Badiou, ‘Le Plus-de-Voir’, p. 90. 7. Badiou and During, ‘Le 21e siècle n’a pas commencé’. 8. The significance of these three texts lies in their concerning themselves foremost with the question of cinema qua cinema, whereas the bulk of Badiou’s other published articles on cinema focus more on individual works. Notable amongst these other essays are his considerations of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998) in ‘Le Plus-de-Voir’, his paper on science fiction cinema entitled ‘Dialectiques de la fable’, his discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) in ‘Oui à l’amour, sinon la solitude’, and his commentary on Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Tout va bien (1972) in ‘La fin d’un commencement’. The remainder of Badiou’s texts directly consecrated to cinema figure examinations of various films, including F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) (‘Notes sur Le dernier des hommes’), Manoel de Oliveira’s The Divine Comedy (1991) and The Convent (1995) (‘La divine comédie et Le couvent’), as well as two of Udi Aloni’s films, 2002’s Local Angel (‘Local Angel’, contained in the collection Polemics) and 2006’s Forgiveness (‘The Dimensions of Art’). 9. Of course, as Jacques Rancière reminds us, ‘cinema as an artistic idea predated the cinema as a technical means and distinctive art’ (FF, p. 6). On this point perhaps we would do better to cite André Bazin – on the proviso that we distance ourselves from his monotheistic rhetoric – in his astute observation that ‘these precursors were indeed more like prophets’ (WC1, p. 19). 10. Recall this chapter brings together two separate papers first published in 1994 in L’art du cinéma. 11. As Jacques Rancière similarly observes, ‘even [photographic] resemblance is a cut. An image of something that is not there, it is already a cut. There is therefore dissemblance even at the heart of resemblance’, Rancière and During, ‘L’affect indécis’, p. 148. 12. As Stanley Cavell notes, ‘when a photograph is cropped, the rest of the world is cut out’, The World Viewed, p. 24. Similarly Gilles Deleuze notes that ‘the frame ensures a deterritorialization of the image’ (C1, p. 22). Of course the frame is further delimited by ‘the frame of frames’ (C1, p. 22), that is, the screen on which the film is projected. 13. As in all of Badiou’s cinematographic papers, one can detect the strong influence of those pioneering theorists of the moving image (Ricciotto Canudo, Abel Gance, Jean Cocteau, etc.). For example, here we can hear echoes of Ricciotto Canudo’s proposition that ‘the artist’s skill

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

[lies] in immobilizing the essence of things and their universal meanings in a particular and clear configuration’, ‘The Birth of a Sixth Art’, p. 62. Throughout this book the term ‘montage’ will be used to designate the whole of the film, or the film as a whole. I reserve the term ‘sequence’ to designate the various montage-effects (or ‘micro-montages’) internal to the film. As Badiou points out, ‘the technical infrastructure [of a film] governs a discrete and uniform unwinding, the entire art of which lies in never keeping count’ (HI, p. 81). ‘The local movement is false because it is nothing but the effect that follows upon the subtraction of the image (or equally of speech) from itself’ (HI, p. 82). We need only think here of Jean-Luc Godard’s famous quip about cinema being ‘death twenty-four times per second’. André Bazin famously held that ‘there is ontological identity between the object and its photographic image’ (WC2, p. 98). In ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’ Badiou recognises Bazin’s argument as belonging to the ‘preformed philosophical response’ to the question posed by cinema regarding its paradoxical relation between total artifice and total reality, by which cinema can be considered an ontological art. I will explore Bazin’s important relation to Badiou in more detail in Chapter 3. We can at this point identify Badiou’s privileged philosophico-cinematic interlocutor as Gilles Deleuze, being that, as I flagged above, Badiou’s ‘false movements’ are (if only implicitly) drawn from Deleuze’s own cinematographic writings. The terms ‘local’ and ‘global movement’ (not to mention ‘false movement’), for example, are clearly appropriated from Deleuze’s Cinema 1. Indeed, Badiou begins his original 1994 paper by asking ‘Is it possible to initiate a thought of cinema from the notion of image? From image in movement? From what Gilles Deleuze precisely named the movement-image?’, ‘Le cinéma comme faux mouvement’, p. 1. In point of fact, the term ‘global movement’ comes from François Regnault, who first identified a formal system at work in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, one which operates in accordance with two axioms, namely that ‘a film tends to organise itself according to a principal geometric or dynamic form’ and that this principal form ‘tends to become reflexive [autonyme] of film itself, from the point of view of its form’, ‘Système formel d’Hitchcock’, p. 22. Further, Regnault notes that this ‘principal form’ – or, to give it its ‘Deleuzian’ name, ‘global movement’ (C1, p. 22) – which represents the form of the film itself is frequently found in its pure state in (to use Regnault’s example) the opening credits of Hitchcock films, such as ‘the spirals of Vertigo, the broken lines and the contrasting black and white structure of Psycho, the arrowing Cartesian coordinates of North by Northwest’, ‘Système formel d’Hitchcock’, p. 22. Deleuze, for his part, notes that it is no less

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20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

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interesting to observe the decomposition of the global movement into ‘relative movements, local forms turned towards the respective parts of a set, the attributions to persons or objects, the distributions between elements’ (C1, p. 23). Thus Deleuze, if only in passing (on the way to his more problematic conception of the Whole), first explicates the global and the local movements. Moreover, in a move that cannot help but interest Badiou and Deleuze scholars alike, he does so explicitly in terms of sets. Badiou tempers this notion somewhat in ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’, allowing that in taking from the other arts ‘all that is popular, all that could, once isolated, filtered, separated from their aristocratic requirements, destine them to the masses’ (CD, p. 3), cinema thereby assures their ‘popularisation’. Or again, cinema’s role lies in the ‘democratisation’ of the other arts. Canudo, ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, p. 293. Here Badiou employs the French prise and montage, respectively rendered as ‘takes’ and ‘editing’ by Alberto Toscano in his translation of Handbook of Inaesthetics. While I am aware of the dangers inherent in the use of the French montage (cf. MP, p. 161n; Gray, ‘Sources and Translator’s Notes’, p. 181n), I have nonetheless opted for its literal translation as ‘montage’, insofar as Badiou is drawing here on Deleuze’s writings on the movement-image, which involves a fundamental distinction between editing (or cutting) – which is after all more faithfully rendered by the French découpage – and montage. For while the former designates the determination of the shot (or ‘take’), the latter designates their final rearrangement into a coherent ‘whole’. Moreover, Deleuze himself is drawing on the work of Sergei Eisenstein, who repeatedly asserted that ‘shot and montage are the basic elements of cinema’, Film Form, p. 49. Recall that philosophy (as Badiou conceives it) only exists inasmuch as it procures Ideas which remain fundamentally external to it. It is interesting to note that, aside from the excision of the ‘Deleuzian’ introduction, the only change between the original L’art du cinéma papers and their resurfacing as a single chapter in Handbook of Inaesthetics involves the capitalisation (or decapitalisation) of ‘Idea’. Indeed, between the two original texts and their ‘counting-as-one’ in Handbook of Inaesthetics, the apparently indiscriminate shift from ‘Idea’ to ‘idea’ (or from ‘idea’ to ‘Idea’) occurs no fewer than twentytwo times. Rancière, ‘Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics’, p. 222. Badiou and Hallward, ‘Beyond Formalisation’, p. 129. On this point we should of course understand ‘suspended’ in its temporal sense (the Idea itself is suspended from the infinity of a truth) as much as its spatial sense (the Idea ‘hangs from’ a truth procedure).

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27. As Badiou puts it, ‘“pure cinema” does not exist, except in the deadend vision of avant-garde formalism’ (IT, p. 111). 28. Recall that Badiou holds that ‘a film is what exposes the passage of the idea in accordance with the take and montage’ (HI, p. 86, translation modified), namely, the local and global movements (which in turn only operate by way of cinema’s impure movement). 29. While ‘neoclassism’ involves the re-newing of past cycles, we should not confuse it with ‘postmodernism’, which contrarily designates everything that comes ‘under the banner of abolishing the universal, that is, the total exhibition of particularisms and the historical equality of formal means’ (P, p. 134), and is as such the principal enemy of all true or ‘affirmationist’ art. Moreover, Badiou does not hold neoclassical cinema to be incapable of putting forward something admirable. For example, Badiou speaks highly of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), which is clearly both neoclassical (most obviously in its reworking of the American melodrama) and serves to carry a particular cinema-Idea, which is finally that ‘humanity is love. When there is no love, there is no humanity’, ‘Oui à l’amour, sinon la solitude’, p. 65. 30. Interestingly, the theorisation of this (saturated) subtractive movement was perhaps pushed furthest by one of Badiou’s heroes of the twentieth century, the Suprematist Kazimir Malevich, who held that ‘cinema . . . must realize that art can exist without the image, without everyday life, and without the idea’s visage’, ‘And Visages Are Victorious on the Screen’, p. 33. 31. Badiou and During, ‘Le 21e siècle n’a pas commencé’. 32. Rancière and During, ‘L’affect indécis’, p. 145. 33. André Bazin – who, alongside Deleuze, is undoubtedly Badiou’s principal cinematic interlocutor – argues that cinema’s ‘guiding myth’ is that of ‘an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist of the irreversibility of time’ (WC1, p. 21). The concrete realisation of this myth would give us what Bazin famously calls ‘total cinema’. However, as Bazin is quick to point out, ‘realism in art can only be achieved in art in one way – through artifice’ (WC2, p. 26). Moreover, every cinematic work involves a choice between what to include and what to exclude. This choice ‘sets up a fundamental contradiction which is at once unacceptable and necessary: necessary because art can only exist when such a choice is made. Without it, supposing total cinema was here and now technically possible, we would go back purely to reality. Unacceptable because it would be done definitively at the expense of that reality which the cinema proposes to restore integrally’ (WC2, p. 26). According to Bazin, ‘the “art” of cinema lives off this contradiction’ (WC2, p. 26).

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34. As Erwin Panofsky put it more than 70 years ago, ‘if all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of the general public would become aware of the fact and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to happen with the movies the social consequences would be catastrophic’, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’, p. 290. 35. Is there a more powerful image of cinema’s democratic address (as much as its status as a ‘mass art’) than that of Charlie innocently waving a red flag and unwittingly leading a march of striking workers in Modern Times (1936)? Moreover, in appealing to the work of Chaplin, whose films ‘have been seen throughout the world, even in the homes of Eskimos, or projected on tents in the desert’, Badiou is clearly echoing – at times almost word for word – the sentiments of those early, ‘optimistic’ French film theorists and practitioners (Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, Ricciotto Canudo, etc.). Jean Cocteau, for example, writes in 1919 that Chaplin’s power lies in the fact that ‘he addresses all of us, everywhere’, ‘Carte Blanche’, p. 173. Abel Gance, for his part, in a 1912 piece responding to Ricciotto Canudo’s original 1911 essay ‘The Birth of a Sixth Art’, proclaims that the ‘sixth art, with one and the same sadness, will bring tears to the eyes of the Arab and the Eskimo, and which, at the same time, will offer them the same lesson in courage and strength’, ‘A Sixth Art’, p. 67. Bazin too notes that ‘there are certainly more people on earth who have never heard of Napoleon or Hitler or Churchill or Stalin, than of Charlie’ (WC2, p. 125). 36. One cannot help but think here of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s condemnation of a conformist society in which ‘connoisseurship and expertise are proscribed as the arrogance of those who think themselves superior, whereas culture distributes its privileges democratically to all’, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 106. Incidentally, it is precisely the fear of cinema’s being a mass art which justified both the institution and eventual enforcement (in 1934) of the Motion Picture Production Code, Will Hays recognising all too well that unlike the other arts, cinema ‘appeals at once to every class’, meaning that ‘the motion picture has special moral obligations’ over and above the other arts, Doherty, ‘The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930’, p. 349. 37. Bazin spent much time extolling the virtues of cinema’s impurity with regard to the other arts, proclaiming that cinema provides ‘an open sesame for the masses to the treasures of the world of art’ (WC1, p. 167). 38. In this precise sense, and in contrast to Badiou’s implorations in ‘The False Movements of Cinema’, we can say that Canudo was absolutely right in his claim that cinema would ‘increasingly serve as Art’s powerful coadjutor’, ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, p. 293.

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39. Badiou is characteristically blunt on the matter: ‘could you deliberately go and see bad painting? Bad painting is bad painting; there is little hope it will change into something good’ (CD, p. 4). 40. On this point Badiou is perhaps more subtle: ‘Aristotle said that if we do good, pleasure will come “as a gift”. When we see a film it is often the other way around: we feel an immediate pleasure, often suspect (thanks to the omnipresent non-art), and the Good (of art) comes as an unexpected bonus’ (CD, p. 4). 41. In Badiou’s philosophy, ‘points’, which dot the path of a subject, designate decisive spaces in a subjective truth procedure, spaces wherein everything boils down to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision, where only an affirmative answer facilitates the continuation of the process. I will consider points in more detail in Chapter 4. 42. Deleuze famously concludes his Cinema 2 on a similar note, declaring ‘there is always a time . . . when we must no longer ask ourselves “What is cinema?”, but “What is philosophy?”’ (C2, p. 269). 43. The closest Badiou comes to nominating a cinematic event is in Logics of Worlds where he identifies ‘lyrical montage in cinema, from Griffith to Welles, passing through Murnau, Eisenstein and Stroheim’ (LW, p. 73) as an artistic configuration qua truth procedure. 44. Badiou’s concept of generic humanity first gains prominence in his writings on Beckett’s prose, where Badiou contends that ‘Beckett reduces his characters to their minimal, ontologically irreducible functions’ (OB, p. 200) so as to communicate at a properly universal level. 45. As we know, ‘liking’ has no real relation to truth, but is rather ‘bound only to what extracts from a truth the arrangement of an identification’ (HI, p. 4). 46. Or again, this time in ‘classical’ terms, cinema is that medium which most perfectly presents an ‘“imaginarization” of truth, which is relieved of any instance of the Real’ (HI, p. 4).

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CHAPTER 3

In the Kingdom of Shadows

Let no one who is not a geometer enter here. Plato1

3.1

FALSE REAL COPIES OF A FALSE REAL It is not in turning away from appearance or in praising the virtual that we have a chance of attaining to the Idea. It is rather in thinking appearance as appearance, and therefore as that which, of being, comes to appear, and gives itself to thought as deception of vision. Alain Badiou2

Our first declaration must be that any understanding of cinema as an ontological art on the basis of some ‘essential’ relation it exhibits between its own intrinsic semblance and an objective reality which remains fundamentally exterior to it is a dead end. No matter how seductive André Bazin’s sentiments may be, we cannot today uphold any argument that maintains ‘there is ontological identity between the object and its photographic image’ (WC2, p. 98). This is not, however, to say that Bazin’s protestations regarding the inherent realism of cinema need be abandoned altogether. The terms of the relationship simply need to be altered: cinema is not in fact an ontological art, rather, cinema is a logical art. What exactly does this mean? For one thing – in a variation on the impure theses – it tells us that cinema is not an essential art, an art of essences. Rather – and this is our fundamental point – cinema is an art of appearances. Because, as we will see, appearance is for Badiou one and the same as logic. For the present let it suffice us to say of this identification that what appears is nothing other than a logical determination of what is. Meaning what is peculiar to cinema is its ability to stage the complex interplay between being and being-there, between the purity of the real and the relative impurity of semblance, between what is

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and what appears, by way of the fiction of appearance. Cinema is then finally an onto-logical art – or to be absolutely precise, a logically onto-logical art3 – the art which best dramatises the relations between being and appearing. Before we press on, however, we would do well to consider Bazin’s ontological argument in a little more depth. As is well known, in maintaining the ontological identity of the cinematographic image and the object itself Bazin effectively holds court against much that we might consider ‘essentially’ cinematic.4 For the objectivity of the filmic image demands in Bazin’s eyes that cinema be ‘committed to communicate only by way of what is real’ (WC1, p. 110), and the immediate victim of such ‘realism’ – which Bazin explicitly opposes to the ‘expressionist heresy’ (WC2, p. 26)5 – would appear to be that most essential cinematic technique, namely, the cut. Indeed, Bazin goes to great lengths to demonstrate the superfluity of the cut, returning time and again to Orson Welles’s invention of depth-of-field photography in Citizen Kane (1941), the results of which he considers to be ‘far superior to anything that could be achieved by the classical “cut”’ (WC1, p. 34). More precisely, what falls foul of Bazin’s ‘realist’ polemic is the artistic process that, by means of the cut, ‘can actually multiply the static interpretations of photography by those that derive from the juxtaposition of shots’ (WC1, p. 44), namely, montage. Simply, montage is for Bazin something fundamentally unreal (and therefore ontologically suspect): Montage which we are constantly being told is the essence of cinema is . . . the literary and anticinematic process par excellence. Essential cinema . . . on the contrary, is to be found in straightforward photographic respect for the unity of space. (WC1, p. 46)

Ultimately, montage in Bazin’s eyes amounts to little more than a parlour trick, which, in transforming ‘something real into something imaginary’ (WC1, p. 50) and thereby challenging the ‘authenticity’ of true cinema, can ‘run the risk of threatening the very ontology of the cinematographic tale’ (WC1, p. 48). Thus, for the true Bazinian, the ontological power of the photographic image – which lies in its ‘scrupulously honest’ re-presentation of an objective space – lies in direct contrast with what we might understand as the ontological composition of film itself.6 Bazin, of course, premises the ontological efficacy peculiar to cinema on the basis of the relative autonomy of the photographic process, observing that while ‘all the arts are based on the presence

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of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence’ (WC1, p. 13). As Noël Carroll notes, the general supposition underlying this human absence is that ‘the difference between machinemade and handmade pictures . . . is situated on an ontological fissure that goes deep into the very structure of the world’.7 Simply, human interference, according to Bazin, necessitates an ontological inconsistency, a definite shift from an ‘essential’ re-presentation (where the object and its reproduced image are ontologically identical) to a merely ‘apparent’ representation (where the image only serves to approximate the object, where the image and the object, while ontologically ‘similar’, fail to coincide). While it is Bazin who first claims that ‘the photograph itself and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint’ (WC1, p. 15), it is Stanley Cavell who effectively supplies the argumentation. Put very simply, Cavell (following Bazin as much as Panofsky) holds that film is a fundamentally presentative – or more precisely, re-presentative – medium, meaning that what it reproduces are either the objects which appear in the world, or the appearance of these objects. But Cavell goes one step further in coyly suggesting that an object’s appearance (what he calls its ‘sight’) is too entwined with the object itself, for ‘objects are too close to their sights to give them up for reproducing’.8 Ipso facto, it must be the objects themselves which are photographically re-presented. Of course the problem with this line of argumentation lies in its assumption that the photographic image must re-present either objects or their appearances: as Noël Carroll wonders, ‘why must we believe that something or anything is in fact re-presented via photographic representation?’9 Indeed, it is for this reason that Carroll adopts the absolute contrary of the Bazinian position, holding that the photographic image does not in fact re-present anything at all, for the simple reason that ‘what photography does is to produce a stand in for its model’.10 Carroll (and by extension post-Theory) thus effectively sidesteps the problem of cinematic realism by the simple demotion of cinematic re-presentation to mere representation. For our part, siding with neither the Bazinian nor the postTheoretician, we can say that what is lacking in the above ‘ontological’ considerations is precisely a coherent ontology. Not only that, but so too is a phenomenology called for, that is, a consistent theory of appearance, of the logical relations constitutive of being-there-ina-world. In fact, following Badiou – who, as we will see, is eminently capable of furnishing us with both of these crucial tools – we are

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perfectly capable of holding that cinema re-presents both objects and appearances (or their ‘sights’), inasmuch as they are in the final instance one and the same thing. Thus, when Cavell argues that ‘objects are too close to their sights to give them up for reproducing’, we reply that it is not that objects are too entwined with their appearance, rather, objects are nothing but their appearance.11 Indeed, if, as I stated above, we can no longer suppose with Bazin any ‘ontological identity between the object and its photographic image’, this is not to say that the image fails to demonstrate any logical coherency. Such purely logical identity remains on the plain of appearance and thereby eschews questions of essence. For as we saw above, cinema in no way re-presents essences, inasmuch as it is not an ontological art: to repeat, cinema is an onto-logical art (with the emphasis falling on ‘logical’). As Badiou observes, ‘the entire principle of the art of cinema is that of subtly showing that it is only cinema, that its images only bear witness to the real inasmuch as they are manifestly images’ (DF, pp. 128–9). Which is equally to say that the cinematic image can have no ‘ontological identity’ to its referent precisely because it is image (however, as we have just seen, this does not rule out its having a logical identity). In a word, cinema does not present the real of the image, it presents images of the real. Or as Godard famously put it: ‘not a just image, just an image’.12 In subtracting the image from the visible, cinema does not cut from what is, but from what appears (or is there). The fundamental point is then that the real of cinema is paradoxically internal to semblance. Meaning that cinema is at once absolutely real (in its manifest falsity) and absolutely false (in its manifest reality). Or as Badiou puts it: cinema simultaneously offers the possibility of a copy of reality and the entirely artificial dimension of this copy. With contemporary technologies, cinema is capable of producing the real artifice of the copy of a false copy of the real, or again, the false real copy of a false real. And other variations. (CD, p. 1)

Yet this is precisely where cinema’s virtue as an onto-logical art lies: in the very real of semblance, which is to say, in the reality of artifice, in its ‘thinking appearance as appearance’ (DF, p. 129). Put simply, that there can be no transitivity between the thing itself and its filmic (re)appearance means that cinema truly is a superficial art. There is nothing pejorative in this assertion. Rather, my point is that cinema is an art of surfaces, not essences. Moreover, as we will see, being

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only reveals itself – in the abruptness of the event – as a complication of appearance. Indeed, this is the very core of the paradoxical relation by which cinema figures as an onto-logical art: the art which so effectively displays the infinite wealth of being is precisely the art whose real is nothing but the desert of semblance. 3.2

BEING AND APPEARING Mathematization alone reaches a real. Jacques Lacan13

We have already outlined the major stakes of Badiou’s philosophical system. While we need now to turn – so as to explicate the above – to Badiou’s onto-logy proper, to enter here into a detailed analysis of the complexities of both his set theoretical ontology and his logic of appearance would be at once impracticable and unnecessary. I will therefore restrict myself to presenting only the briefest of overviews of Badiou’s onto-logy, reserving close examination only for those aspects of his thought which are either key to his overall project or which can be seen to bear directly on the art of cinema. The opening gesture of Being and Event literally turns the history of ontology – which, from Parmenides on, holds that what is is one and what is there (or is presented) is multiple – on its head. Considering the famous theses on the one and the multiple in the Parmenides, Badiou argues that the true Platonic assertion is not ‘if the one is not, nothing is’, but rather ‘if the one is not, (the) nothing is’ (BE, p. 36).14 At base this means that, if there is no ultimate consistency or unity to being (‘if the one is not’) – this being for Badiou the necessary precondition for any truly non-theological ontology15 – then being must be that which ‘in-consists’ (‘the nothing is’). In fact, this is the very kernel of Badiou’s ‘subtractive’ ontology: that which is one (or is ‘consistent’) is not, strictly speaking, what is. Rather, what is per se is multiple (devoid of any instance of the one, radically withdrawn from all possible unification). Which is finally to say that being, thought in its very being (the ‘being-ness’ of being, or being qua being), is nothing other than inconsistent multiplicity. It is to this effect that Badiou holds that ontology is the science of the pure multiple.16 While the one is not, there is nevertheless an ‘effect’ of one-ness, which is necessarily posterior to the pure multiple. The fundamentality of this point cannot be overlooked: pure multiplicity is for Badiou

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anterior to the one, or, inconsistency precedes consistency.17 Now, insofar as that which is consistent is clearly one and the same as that which is presented of being, we must conclude that the retroactive ‘one-ification’ of pure multiplicity (or the rendering consistent of inconsistency) is nothing other than the presentation of multiplicity as such. This fact would appear self-evident given that in everyday life what is presented or brought to experience is in one way or another unified: simply, our experiences are of the one, and in no way of the ‘multiple-without-one’. Such unified presentation constitutes what Badiou calls a situation. A situation is thus any presented multiplicity whatsoever. Or again, a situation is the constitution of inconsistent multiplicity: it is literally ‘the place of taking-place’ (BE, p. 24). If the latter is then to have any relation to the place of presentation it can only be as the ‘taking-place’ anterior to the place itself, that is, the presentation of presentation itself (or presentation ‘in-itself’): pure presentation prior to the structured presentation that is the situation. As structured presentation a situation can be anything whatsoever: a July business meeting, a film, ontology, Eastern Europe, several platypi, a political demonstration, an atom. Which of course concurrently implies that the one and the multiple can quite happily be at the same time both different and the same. Simply, any situation (any presented multiple) admits sub-situations, as much as any situation is itself a sub-situation of another situation (ad infinitum). Badiou terms the operation by which pure multiplicity is ‘oneified’ (or ‘situated’) the count (or ‘count-as-one’). The count constitutes the structure of the situation and operates by determining certain elements (multiples) as belonging to the situation. To this effect the situation itself is indistinguishable from the count. The crucial ontological distinction is then found at the level of the situation’s being: the pure being of the situation – the ‘before of the count’ – remains beyond the situation itself, inasmuch as its being is uncounted multiplicity. Or to put it another way, the being of consistency is inconsistency. The paradox here is fundamental: the inconsistent being underlying all consistency is itself radically unknowable (inasmuch as all knowledge is necessarily ‘situated’) and to this effect any consideration of what precedes the situation is itself hopelessly compromised by its very situatedness. Inconsistency is therefore the real of presentation, the precise point at which thought butts against its own limit.18 Which is why Badiou’s initial embrace of the multiple (and concurrent assertion that ‘the one is not’) is a pure decision: the actual status of inconsistent multiplicity is itself

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properly undecidable. Moreover, this is precisely why Badiou’s is a subtractive ontology: in the face of a classical metaphysics defined as an ‘enframing of being by the one’ (BE, p. 34), Badiou decides that ontology can be nothing other than the theory of indifferent, inconsistent multiplicity, radically subtracted from the power of the one. In formulating his ontology Badiou must still account for the seemingly irreducible and apparently illogical gap between the (known) consistent multiple and its (radically unknown) inconsistent being. Thus we return to his Platonic reformulation of the Parmenidean thesis ‘if the one is not, (the) nothing is’. We must take his words literally here: Badiou really is asserting that the nothing is. This ‘nothing’ is as crucial as it is complex. To explain, inasmuch as the situation and the count are one and the same thing, it is clear that the ‘inconsistent underside’ of a situation is itself fundamentally ungraspable. However, the count itself being an operation clearly indicates its status as result, thereby necessitating a corollary ‘must-be-counted’ – an uncounted remainder – and it is precisely this before-of-thecount that, in Badiou’s words, causes the situation to ‘waver towards the phantom of inconsistency’ (BE, p. 53). Given the seemingly self-contradictory fact that, whilst everything is counted, the count itself necessitates a ‘phantom remainder’ (namely, the initial ‘pure’ multiple) we must conclude that the pure multiple is simultaneously excluded (or subtracted) from the situation – from presentation itself – and at the same time included in ‘the name of what “would be” the presentation itself, the presentation “in-itself”’ (BE, p. 53). Excluded from presentation itself, included in presentation in-itself, the pure multiple must really be nothing in the situation. However, as Badiou is fast to point out, being-nothing is not at all the same thing as non-being. Indeed, this nothing subsists within the situation in two immediate guises: in the very operation of the count (which, in its ‘pure transparency’, remains itself uncounted) and in the pure multiple upon which the count operates (which, as we have seen, differs in-itself from its situational result). Thus the nothing – or, to give it a more constructive name, the void – ultimately designates the gap between the situation (consistency, presentation itself) and its underlying being (inconsistency, presentation in-itself). To this effect Badiou defines the void as the precise point at which the situation is sutured to its being and asserts that ‘every structured presentation unpresents “its” void, in the mode of this non-one which is merely the subtractive face of the count’ (BE, p. 55). The pure multiple (qua being) thus ‘in-consists’ as the situational void, as the void in situ.

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This in-consistence is, however, absolutely fundamental, insofar as the law of structured presentation is that of the errancy of the void, just as much as its normal regime is ‘an absolute “unconscious” of the void’ (BE, p. 56). Two immediate and important theses follow from this proposition: first, that, according to the situation, the void is the proper name of being, and second, that everything that is is woven from the void. Returning momentarily to film, we can see how these remarks regarding the one, the multiple and the void furnish us with more than enough material to establish a preliminary ontology of cinema. Indeed, it is clear that a film is itself nothing other than a multiple of multiples. Moreover, the elements of a film are themselves just as much multiple multiplicities: a sequence, for example, is a consistent multiple whose elements (shots) are themselves multiples. So, too, a shot is a multiple made up of multiples (frames). Further, each individual frame – those immobile segments constituting the base elements of cinema – is nothing other than another multiple within which further multiplicities (the elements constituting the mise en scène) are carefully configured. Of course, all these multiple multiplicities are themselves constantly shifting, jostling for position, by virtue of a film’s inherent (if false) movement. In fact, it to this impossibly complex relational interplay between multiple multiplicities that Badiou (following Deleuze following Regnault) gives the name ‘global movement’ (thus, as we have seen, its ‘measurement’ is properly non-linear, or topological). Equally, ‘local movement’ names that elementary relationship of base filmic multiple to base filmic multiple – of one frame to the next – which serves to establish a film’s ‘passing’. There is therefore nothing at all derisory in Badiou’s observation that ‘cinema is nothing but takes and montage’ (HI, p. 86, translation modified): shots and montage are simply the delimitation and reconstitution of all the multiple multiplicities which make up a film. Or again, shots and montage exhaust the local and global movements of a film. Film in itself, film qua film, is thus, in essence, little more than a vast (re)counting mechanism. So what then can we say of the in-consisting multiple, or again, what is the status of the void in cinema? Here we find immediate support in the thought of Gilles Deleuze (who, incidentally, along with sketching the local and global movements, spends much time teasing out the fact that film constitutes a multiple of multiplicities in the opening chapters of his Cinema 1). The name of the void for Deleuze – at least in the first of his cinema books – is eminently the

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‘out-of-field’, or what exceeds the frame, being that which at once escapes the camera’s arresting gaze and equally ‘testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot be said even to exist, but rather to “insist”’ (C1, p. 18). Indeed, in line with our general theory of consistent multiplicity, ‘all framing determines an out-of-field’ (C1, p. 17), or again, every counted multiple determines a corollary uncounted multiplicity, the count being as much an exclusive as an inclusive gesture (we have seen as much already in cinema’s basic operation of ‘cutting’ from the visible). Yet at the same time the out-of-field testifies to another, arguably more immediate instance of the void – one which for Deleuze only really comes to the fore in his Cinema 2 – which is that of the cut ‘internal’ to the film, that is, the edit or interstice, a voiding rendered all the more invisible under the consensual rule of continuity editing. As we will see, it is precisely in constituting itself as a whole that a film ‘recounts the count’ and thereby secures itself against the inconsistency of the void (qua cut). We will return to these filmic meditations presently. Badiou’s position on the multiple leads him to conclude that mathematics is ontology. After all, his two major ontological doctrines – that the science of being qua being (ontology) can only be the theory of pure or inconsistent multiplicity, and that all that is is woven from the void – are precisely what mathematics – or more precisely, axiomatic or Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZFC) – thinks. Indeed, everything we have examined thus far on the side of both inconsistency (pure multiplicity, presentation in-itself, operation of the count) and consistency (‘impure’ multiplicity, presentation itself, counted situation), as well as that which bleeds between the two (the void), finds an immediate correlate in axiomatic set theory. For example, a situation (qua consistent multiple) is literally a set, inasmuch as a set is ultimately nothing other than ‘a plurality thought as a unit’.19 Moreover, ZFC admits of only one relation, belonging ([), which alone dictates what composes (or one-ifies) a set, meaning the set itself (qua multiple) possesses no ‘unary predicate’, no essence other than its being a multiple.20 So too set theory, through the axiom of the empty set, premises existence itself on the void, that is, on the empty or memberless set, on the set to which no elements belong (written Ø). Thus, rather than affirming a ‘first’ multiple from which all other multiples are derived (and thereby illegally smuggling the one back into being at the level of the multiple) or designating origination at the point of the multiple-counted-as-one (thus overlooking the count’s status as result), set theory contrarily substantialises the

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very ‘nothing’ affecting the purity of the multiple, that is, it literally makes this nothing be through the assumption of a proper name (the void, Ø). Of course, the upshot of Badiou’s equation of mathematics with ontology is that philosophy finds itself primitively split from what had formerly been considered its privileged discourse, insofar as philosophy can only speak ‘metaontologically’: whereas philosophy only offers second-order considerations on the nature of being, mathematics, in its pure intelligibility as much as its apodicticity, is the practice of directly inscribing pure multiplicity. Of ZFC’s nine axioms one is of especial concern here.21 This is the axiom of the power set, which tells us that if there exists a set c then there also exists a set of all the subsets of c. For example, if we call c the set {a, b, g}, then the power set of c – noted p(c) – establishes the patently larger set {a, b, g, {a, b}, {a, g}, {b, g}, {a, b, g}, Ø} (note the void is included in every set). The number of subsets of a given set can be easily measured by the formula 2n, where n is the number of elements in the initial set (for example, in the above case of an initial set with 3 elements we have 23 or 8). 2n thus measures the size (or cardinality) of the power set. This axiom further illustrates a fundamental ontological distinction between belonging ([) and inclusion (,). For example, each of the elements of our set c (that is, a, b and g) clearly belong to (or are presented in) c. However, as we have seen the elements of c also form subsets – namely a, b, g, {a, b}, {a, g}, {b, g}, {a, b, g}, Ø – subsets that include (or represent) the initial set c. The fundamentality of the power set axiom lies in its providing the schema for the protective mechanism or ‘riposte to the void’ that is the ‘count of the count’ (BE, p. 98). For while existence itself owes all that it is to the void, the latter’s errancy necessarily threatens the fabric of structured presentation. Thus the situation must ‘prohibit that catastrophe of presentation which would be its encounter with its own void’ (BE, p. 93). To avert this ‘ruin of the one’, every situation (with the notable exception of ontology itself) necessarily subjects itself to a structural ‘recount’, establishing a metastructure whose principle is essentially that of the power set. Indeed, as we saw above, the void insists within the situation by virtue of its own structuring principle, inasmuch as, in its ‘operational transparency’, the count itself fails to be counted, which means the recount literally involves ‘counting the count’, being the (successional) count by which the (voided) count is itself counted. The recount thus ‘secures’ the situation against the void’s emergence in the ‘vanishing point of consistent multiplicity’ (BE,

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p. 94) that is the very operation of the count, thereby nullifying the gap between inconsistent and consistent multiplicity. This double structuring – ensuring that there is both presentation and representation – by which the structure of a situation is itself counted as one is what Badiou calls, ‘due to a metaphorical affinity with politics’ (BE, p. 95), the state of the situation.22 Moreover, it is in this precise sense that Badiou can say that in our world ‘what counts – in the sense of what is valued – is that which is counted’ (NN, p. 2). Things get rather complicated, however, when the situation in question is infinite. And the fact of the matter is that virtually every situation is infinite.23 Certainly, when dealing with finite quantities the domination of the state over the situation is readily calculable (we simply have to follow the rule 2n). However, this is not the case when dealing with infinite quantifications. Suffice to say that the hitherto mentioned indeterminate nature of the quantitative excess of the state over the situation results from Easton’s theorem – the demonstration of which lies far and away beyond the scope of this book – which effectively tells us that in order to designate the value of p(c), where c is an infinite cardinal, it is entirely consistent to simply choose any superior successor cardinal of c. The ramifications of such infinite errancy on the relation of the situation to its state are immediate: in Badiou’s words, ‘however exact the quantitative knowledge of a situation may be, one cannot, other than by an arbitrary decision, estimate by “how much” its state exceeds it’ (BE, p. 278). Herein lies the impasse of ontology: given an infinite (albeit measurable) situation, we cannot know – we can but decide – the size of its state. Between structure and metastructure ‘a chasm opens, whose filling in depends solely upon a conceptless choice’ (BE, p. 280). Which means in turn that the state – whose very function is that of excising the void – ultimately serves to facilitate the void’s re-emergence at the juncture between itself and the situation over which it presides. Fundamental to Badiou’s philosophy is his contention that this ontological impasse ‘cannot be seized or thought in immanence to ontology itself, nor to speculative metaontology’ (BE, p. 284), but rather can only be overcome through recourse to an extra-mathematical anomaly qua event. Placing both the impasse of ontology and the event momentarily to one side, we need to note that, in its reduction to questions of essence, of being in its ‘integral transparency’ (LW, p. 358), Badiou’s subtractive ontology proves itself wholly incapable of accounting for how it is that multiples come to appear in a world, which is to say, how it is that a being is constrained to ‘a local or situated

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exposure of its multiple-being’ (TO, p. 162, translation modified). There can, for example, be no properly differential or relational thought to being, inasmuch as set theory’s axiom of extensionality allows only for absolute difference and absolute identity: either two multiples possess exactly the same elements (and are therefore the same) or they do not (and are accordingly absolutely different). Yet relationality is obviously a fundamental characteristic of appearing inasmuch as ‘every “there” is the product of a particular set of differential relations that flesh out a situation in a particular way’ (B, pp. 293–4), and so any thought of the latter must be properly divorced from nonrelational ontology. In answering this and other problems Badiou’s recent work has moved from an abstract metaontology which identifies situations solely ‘with their strict multiple-neutrality’ (LW, p. 99) to a metaonto-logical conception of being-there, which has both a mathematical and a logical side, and which accounts for the ‘contamination’ of being with its phenomenal appearance, or its differential localisation in a world. Hence the parallel thesis governing Logics of Worlds: just as mathematics thinks the purity of being, so too logic – or more precisely, category theory (in particular the difficult branches that deal with topoi and sheaves) – thinks appearing qua being-there-in-a-world. So what is a world? Put very simply, a world is a situation in which beings appear. Put not so simply, a world is a logically complete, ontologically closed set that is measured by an inaccessible infinite cardinal and which contains a transcendental together with the indexation of all the multiples which fall under its field (which constitute the objects of the world). While a world, like a situation, is essentially a multiple of multiples, worldly multiples ‘appear’ with varying degrees of intensity, or again, a world’s multiplicities possess ‘a coefficient of presence’.24 Put another way still, a world is a complex relational network (it adheres to a logic) in which multiples appear more or less intensely with regard to one another. These differentially appearing multiplicities constitute the objects of the world in question, which is to say that a multiple’s appearing is equivalent to its objectification: appearance is literally the becoming-object of the multiple. The relative intensity of a multiple’s (qua object’s) appearing in a world falls under the jurisdiction of the transcendental immanent to that world, this being precisely that central structure which organises ‘the rational disposition of the infinite shades of a concrete world’.25 We might thus (loosely) consider the transcendental as the logical or worldy equivalent of the ontological state of the

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situation, and the regime it establishes as the logical counterpart to the situation’s ‘encyclopaedia’. So what exactly is the transcendental? The ontological answer is straightforward enough: it is a partially-ordered set belonging to the situation. However, as the transcendental’s function clearly rests with appearance, it must be accounted for in logical terms. To do so, we need first to note that, just as a situation is a set, so too a world constitutes a topos (or more precisely, a Grothendieck topos). For our purposes we can define a topos as a category of topological space which behaves in a manner strikingly similar to that of sets (save the emphasis on functions or morphisms over belonging), whose terms are objects and their relations, and which contains finite limits and a subobject classifier.26 Now, accepting that a topos is the logical articulation of a world, just as a set is the ontological articulation of a situation, we can with relative ease equate its finite limits with the boundaries of the world and the subobject classifier with the world’s transcendental. Without going into too much detail, the finite limits of a topos involve both a terminal object – namely, an object, generally designated ‘One’, that ‘envelopes’ the entirety of the topos (or the transcendental regime of the world), meaning that every object of the topos ‘counts as one’ only inasmuch as it enters into a relationship with this One – and an initial object – that is, an object, designated ‘Zero’, which fails to enter into any relation with the terminal object (or, for that matter, any of the other objects), and as such is not ‘counted as one’. Needless to say, we can easily discern a certain homology between the initial object and the void set of ontology proper. Further, the point of convergence of the manifold relations between all of the subobjects of a topos – the objects of a topos being equally subobjects (a subobject being basically ‘the categorical version of subsets’)27 inasmuch as a topos is itself an object – is the topos’ subobject classifier, which acts rather as it sounds, serving to classify all the subobjects of the topos in question (of which it itself is equally a subobject). It is precisely this ‘central object’ which enjoys a relation with every object (save the initial object) of the topos-world that Badiou designates the transcendental of a world. Inasmuch as a world (qua topos) constitutes a site of appearing, and appearing is obviously meted out in varying degrees of intensity (certain objects appear more intensely than others), the key to a world’s logic clearly lies in its being ordered. This ‘intensive ordering’ is the function of the transcendental immanent to the world in question, and is thought differentially, in terms of identities and

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differences, on an asymmetrical scale of ‘more or less’. The basic idea is that, given a world in which T is the transcendental, for every two beings x and y which are there in this world there exists a value p which measures in T the degree to which x and y appear identical. This relation is called an ‘identity function’ and is written Id(x, y) = p. Ultimately, what the transcendental does is evaluate the identity of each and every object with regard to all the other objects of the world, thereby establishing a global order-relation.28 Now, given the precondition of a topos being closed – that is, its demand of both an initial and a terminal object – we will say of a world’s transcendental regime that there is both a minimum degree (absolute difference, or Id(x, y) = m) and a maximum degree (absolute identity, or Id(x, y) = M), together of course with the manifold degrees falling between these extremes. The transcendental regime of a world therefore necessitates such a thing as a ‘zero-degree of appearance’, which is to say, a minimal degree of identity between an object and every other object appearing in a world, or again, an object which fails to ‘identify’ (or enter into a relationship) with any other worldly object. In this case, ‘since it is identical to nothing that appears within a world . . . it can be said of this being that it does not appear within the given world. It is not there’ (LW, p. 123).29 The reverse of this is, of course, that there exists a maximal transcendental degree, which is ‘attributed to the being that is absolutely there’ (LW, p. 138), which accordingly envelops all the world’s objects. There remain two important terms which need to be clarified before we can return to our discussion of cinema, namely, object and existence. In defining the former we need first to note that a multiplebeing only comes to appear (or is ‘localised’) in a world insofar as it is itself ‘indexed’ onto the transcendental. Such indexing is an identity function that ‘links every difference immanent to the multiple to the intensity of appearing in the world’ (LW, p. 194).30 Thought outside of its multiple-being, indexation constitutes a multiple’s phenomenon. Badiou reserves the term ‘object’ for the couple formed by a multiple’s phenomenon and the multiple itself. Meaning that an object of a world is finally nothing other than ‘the transcendental indexing of a multiplicity’ (LW, p. 358), thought simultaneously in its being and appearing.31 This brings us finally to the question of existence. Given what we have seen thus far – that ontology is the science of the pure multiple, that being-there is the logical expression of being, that everything that appears is transcendentally determined in a differential network – it should come as little surprise that

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Badiou holds existence to be nothing other than a transcendental degree of self-identity: Given a world and a function of appearing whose values lie in the transcendental of this world, we will call ‘existence’ of a being x which appears in this world the transcendental degree assigned to the self-identity of x. (LW, p. 208)

Simply, the more a being affirms its identity to itself, the greater degree of existence it enjoys. Existence is thus not an ontological but a logical category: to be and to exist are not the same thing. Furthermore, given the concept of the minimum, we know that there must be such a thing as a zero-degree of self-identity, a place of inexistence. Or again, if, for a being x in a world A, we have Id(x, x) = m, then we can say that x inexists in A. Which is of course to say that death, considered as ‘inappearance’ (or, more precisely, the negative passage from appearing to inappearing), is for Badiou ultimately a logical category. 3.3

FILM AS AN ONTO-LOGICAL ART The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn into the core of the eddy. Samuel Beckett32

We now find ourselves in the position of being able to reapply Badiou’s phenomeno-logical apparatus onto cinema itself so as to establish a complete onto-logy of cinema (as well as clarify some of our earlier remarks concerning cinema as an onto-logical art). We recall that a film is, like everything, at base a multiple of multiples. More than this, we can see now that each film constitutes an ordered set (every film unravelling in a predetermined sequence in strict accord with its local movement). So, too, we know that what Badiou designates cinema’s global movement is precisely the topological structure demarcating the complex relational interplay between the multiple multiplicities constitutive of the film. Or again: that a film is a set (or topos) results from its constituting a global movement; that this set is ‘ordered’ stems from its exhibiting a local movement. At this point, however, the term ‘global’ takes a far more definite shape, for it is clear that a filmic text, as a site of appearing, constitutes a world.

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Thus our first problem: given that a film is a world (bounded appropriately enough by the global movement), we must be able to discern a transcendental proper to that world. First, we should note that, in keeping with Badiou’s contention that the global movement is a properly topological affair, every film has a single transcendental. But what is it, and where exactly is it located? On this point Badiou gives us two guiding examples drawn from the wider realm of art. The first lies in his consideration of the fable of Bluebeard (in which he draws equally from Charles Perrault’s original fairy tale and Paul Dukas’s operatic adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, Ariadne and Bluebeard). Here Badiou can simply locate the transcendental of each world within the language proper to the art in question: in the arrangement of words in Perrault’s tale; in the musical composition of the Maeterlinck–Dukas version. Later, in his detailed consideration of Hubert Robert’s painting The Bathing Pool, Badiou goes into greater detail, explaining that: the whole question of pictorial assemblage in effect amounts to distributing the identities and differences according to the degrees which prescribe the drawing of forms, the spectrum of colours, the overall lighting and so on. This invisible prescription is the work of the painter in the succession of his gestures (a certain brushstroke, then another . . .), but it only exists in the completed space of the canvas as the transcendental which organizes its appearing. It will be noted in passing that this point is indifferent to the figurative or abstract character of the artwork in question. In every case, the temporal construction as the amassing of artistic decisions is ultimately recapitulated as the transcendental of a closed visibility. (LW, p. 204)

Badiou goes on to add that ‘style’, whilst not entirely equivalent to the artist’s ‘invisible prescription’ (which would be the transcendental proper), nonetheless bears something of a ‘family resemblance’ to the transcendental, and to this effect we might speak of ‘the transcendental field of style’ (LW, p. 205). So in the final analysis we can say that the transcendental of an artwork-world rests with the paradoxical trace of the artist’s invisible prescription, that is, what Badiou calls its ‘style’, being the idiosyncratic deployment of the ‘language’ proper to the world in question by the creator of this artistic world (who is of course finally excluded from the world itself). To this effect we will, in what follows, take the abstract notion of ‘style’ to designate the transcendental of a filmic world.

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Which leads us to our second problem: given both a filmic world (qua global movement) and its transcendental (qua style), we need now to investigate the upper and lower limits of its transcendental regime, that is, we must be able to locate, amongst its manifold objects, a maximal and a minimal object for each determinate filmic world. We might suppose the most ‘sensible’ place to look for such limits is in that most fundamental cinematic medium, light.33 Indeed, the very process of film projection seems to provide a neat metaphor for the operation of the transcendental, inasmuch as the projector distributes the sensible in terms of light and shadow, and at the same time remains removed from (or invisible with regard to) the world itself. Moreover, can we not discern in Badiou’s assertion that a world’s transcendental organises ‘the rational disposition of the infinite shades of a concrete world’34 a certain touch of the cinematic? Surely Badiou’s words here cannot help but call to mind Maxim Gorky’s beautiful (if disapproving) description of cinema as a ‘Kingdom of Shadows’: is not a film’s transcendental precisely that which reigns over its ghostly subjects? After all, it is a commonplace truth that nothing ‘appears’ without light.35 Moreover, given such a transcendental regime, should we not then logically be able to discern a film’s maximally apparent object as that image which shines the brightest? Were this indeed the case the transcendental regime of a filmic world would literally range from the absolutely visible through to the in-visible. We might consider here the standard case of the ‘Hitchcockian object’, namely, the ‘fascinating, captivating, bewitching, spellbinding object’36 which assumes a position of such importance that it literally ‘overshadows’ the whole of the film. Take, for example, the jewelled pendant which shatters Scottie’s reverie in Vertigo (1958), or the lighter in Strangers on a Train (1951), or better still, the glass of milk Johnnie delivers to Lina in Suspicion (1941). Not only are these objects the ones which shine (literally as much as metaphorically) the brightest in his films – Hitchcock famously went so far as to place a light inside the glass to ensure its absolute luminosity – but they also effectively come to determine the film itself (Judy’s pendant unmasks her as Madeleine; the lighter ensures that Bruno and Guy’s murderous pact holds; if the ‘suspicious’ milk is poisoned then Johnnie is indeed trying to murder his wife). However, while a film’s maximal object is in general inscribed at the level of light qua image, we would be wrong to assume the equation of appearance with luminosity. Simply, the idea of directly

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equating phenomenal luminosity to objectual intensity relies altogether too heavily on the second-order act of perception, on the notion of an object’s existence being predicated on its being observed (or on the equation of appearing with appearing-for-something). On the contrary, in Badiou’s ‘objective phenomenology’, appearance designates first and foremost appearance-for-itself, meaning it demands no observation: simply, there is ‘neither reception nor [subjective] constitution’ (LW, p. 231) at work in Badiou’s theory of the object.37 Which is to say that Badiou’s doctrine of appearing is strictly speaking that of nonphenomenal phenomena, of ‘pure image’ wholly divorced from its being-perceived. Thus the idea of directly equating the intensity of appearance of the objects of a filmic world to their relative luminosity involves an all-too subjective conception of objectivity.38 That said, a film is clearly both perceptive (the image is first cut from the sensible) and something to be perceived (it demands an encounter with a viewer). Indeed, cinema would seem to conceive (of) itself foremost in terms of perception. Hence the abundance of theories regarding the gaze in cinema, from its early ‘voyeuristic’ invocation in Metz through its various gendered guises – most notably Mulvey’s scopophilic-male gaze, Silverman’s masochistic-female gaze, Doane’s transvestite gaze, and Creed’s castrating-female gaze – up to and including its recent Lacanian ‘rectification’ in Copjec, McGowan and Žižek (whereby the gaze is at once de-subjectivised and objectivated).39 But is perception strictly speaking essential to film? Here we hit upon a paradox at the very heart of cinema, whereby cinema constitutes on the one hand a ‘private spectacle’40 – cinema being of itself a ‘spectatorless’ enterprise, wholly separated from its public – and on the other a mass art – cinema’s value lying in the fact that its masterpieces are ‘seen and liked by millions of people from all social groups at the very moment of their creation’ (CD, p. 1). In answering this question we can do no better than consider the example of Samuel Beckett, whose Film (Alan Schneider, 1965) effectively presents an investigation of the very nature of film, of film qua film.41 Moreover, it would appear that this fundamentally visual study – Film being silent save a curt ‘shh’ in the opening scene – ultimately equates the ‘essence’ of film with perception. Beckett himself seems to indicate this fact by prefacing Film’s shooting notes with Bishop Berkeley’s famous proposition ‘esse est percipi’ (‘to be is to be perceived’).42 Needless to say, our reading of Film will differ markedly from this standard Berkeleian interpretation.

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Despite the grandness of its thesis, Film is in fact a rather straightforward work.43 Its ‘plot’ – how it ostensibly stages its thesis – can be summed up very easily. There are two characters, one ‘in flight’ (who is the object of the camera’s gaze), and the other ‘in pursuit’ (who effectively is – for the most part – the camera’s gaze). In Beckett’s script these ‘characters’ are accordingly designated ‘O’ (for ‘Object’) and ‘E’ (for ‘Eye’). O spends the duration of the film attempting to evade all perception, not only by E but also by the various agents of perception around him (people, animals, pictures . . .). At the film’s climax, O is finally forced to encounter E, who is revealed to be none other than himself. Viz., O perceives E, E perceives O, O = E. The point being that O and E present a single, albeit ‘sundered’, subject. So what Film appears to be saying is that, in attempting to withdraw from all perception, O (qua generic human subject) finally comes up against the hard kernel of self-perception, for, as Berkeley states, being is being-perceived (ipso facto, we can’t escape perception without ceasing to be). Thus the reciprocity of perceiving-being and being-perceived – the idea that each is ontologically maintained by the other – appears at first glance to be rendered by Beckett as wholly constitutive of being itself (à la Berkeley) and at the same time wholly exhaustive of the ‘essence’ of cinema. Before we consider the relative merits of this by-the-numbers reading, it is worth pointing out that Film occupies a decidedly singular place in both Beckett’s oeuvre and Badiou’s own detailed writings on Beckett. For one thing, it represents Beckett’s one and only foray into the art of cinema. Furthermore, it is one of his few silent works.44 This silence further singularises Film, inasmuch as of the four principal themes Badiou isolates as traversing the entirety of Beckett’s work – namely those of saying (or rather, of ‘ill saying’, of failing to say adequately), being, appearing and thinking – it is the first, the imperative to speak, that is perhaps most immediately apparent. Moreover, Film does not partake of the rupture which Badiou holds takes place in Beckett’s work in 1960 with How It Is.45 For Badiou, this text signals a decisive move beyond Beckett’s previous concerns with the solipsistic cogito (qua thought) to instead focus on ‘everything that supplements being with the instantaneous surprise of an Other’ (OB, p. 16), namely, the chance occurrence of the event. Film, however – which was written in 1963, shot in 1964 and premiered in 1965 – in no way considers this new theme. We might even go so far as to say that Film is adamantly antievental: in Film nothing happens. To this effect Beckett’s cinematic

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excursus has something of an anachronistic flavour to it, a certain out-of-timeness. In ignoring the newfound evental dimension to his work, Beckett can be seen to use Film to further explore some of his longer-standing obsessions, principal among these being the idea of thought – as it is embodied in the subject qua cogito – as fundamentally torturous. This point bears some explanation. Let us begin with the obvious and note that Beckett’s work – Film proving itself no exception – is ascetic (to say the least), being a fundamentally subtractive process which Badiou holds aims at revealing ‘generic humanity’, comparable to the method of enquiry adopted by Descartes or Husserl. Indeed, as far as Badiou is concerned: Beckett’s method is like Husserl’s épochè turned upside down. Husserl’s épochè consists in subtracting the thesis of the world, in subtracting the ‘there is’ in order to then turn toward the movement or the pure flux of that interiority which is directed at this ‘there is’. . . [while] Beckett’s method is precisely the opposite: it is a question of subtracting or suspending the subject so as to see what happens to being. (HI, pp. 116–17)

Thus Beckett’s insistence that Film not be ‘realistic’, but rather depict ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ spaces, spaces of almost total abstraction.46 Further, we can see that thought – which is, we recall, the fourth of Beckett’s principal themes (alongside saying, being and appearing) – is equally the conflation of the first theme (the minimal requirement of thought being its enunciation) with the third (all enunciation entails a level of appearing). Moreover, thought is equally the question of what can be said about the second. That is to say, thought, which is constituted in appearing-saying, in keeping with Beckett’s Cartesian programme, must aim at being itself. Badiou supposes this sought-after being as an ‘originary silence, whose being is constituted by its enunciation, and which is the subjective condition of all announcements’ (OB, p. 11). Such silent-being would thus mark a ‘pure point of enunciation’, ‘a silence which is indefinitely productive of the din of words’ (OB, p. 52). Or again, this time in more recognisably Badiouian (although equally Beckettian) terms, the whole of Beckett’s thought is directed toward the void. The torture of the thinking or enunciating subject then lies on the one hand in the fact that the very conditions of its search are strictly speaking ‘unbearable, charged as they are with anxiety and mortal exhaustion’ (OB, p. 11), and on the other in the very impossibility of its ever attaining its

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ascetic goal, that is, of its ever grasping ‘the silent being of all speech’ (OB, p. 11). In acknowledging the priority of the voice in Beckett’s Cartesian universe, we cannot help but be struck by the disturbing silence of Film. Indeed, given what we have just seen, one would be forgiven for supposing that the absence of the voice in Film takes torture off the table. Yet Film is clearly concerned first and foremost with the torture of self-reflection (qua cogito) inasmuch as its central premise is that, even after having successfully voided all extraneous perception, the ‘anguish of perceivedness’ nonetheless persists in the ‘inescapability of self-perception’.47 So even in the absence of the voice, of the writhing pain caused by the subject’s need to literally ‘twist itself toward its own enunciation’ (OB, p. 54), the torture of the cogito continues unabated. Moreover, in his own critical invocation of Film, Badiou simply notes that ‘the schema of Film – the eye and the object – is insufficient’ for ‘the cogito requires not two but three terms’ (OB, p. 12). Which is to say that the self-perceiving subject (qua cogito) of Film (at least so far as Badiou conceives it) is fundamentally undermined. But what exactly does this mean? Basically, according to Badiou, Beckett does not regard the subject as a doubling – as simple self-reflection or ‘the thought and the thought of thought’ (OB, p. 53) – but rather as a tripling. This subjective trinity, seemingly absent from Film, implies that there is at once a subject of enunciation – a subject who speaks and, more importantly, can ask ‘who speaks?’ – a subject of passivity – a subject who ‘constitutes the obscure matter of the one who speaks’, ‘the idiot body of all subjectivity’ (OB, p. 53) – and a subject of the question – a subject who asks what the subject of enunciation and the subject of passivity are, and in doing so ‘subjects himself to torture’ (OB, p. 53). But is it enough to maintain, as Badiou does, that the schema of Film – that of object and eye – is simply a failed instance of the cogito, less a subjective triplicity than an objective duplicity? Is it not rather that, in subtracting the enunciative dimension from the cogito so as to prioritise the object-eye relation, Beckett contrarily spotlights the very substance of the cogito, namely, the ‘subject of passivity’ qua ‘obscure matter of the one who speaks’, that ‘idiot body’ which provides the support for both the subject of enunciation and the subject of the question? Indeed, it is my contention that with Film Beckett delves to the very depths of subjectivity to reveal the brute appearance of the subject (prior to its making-itself-apparent in the enunciation). Properly speaking, this brute appearance constitutes,

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in both Badiou’s and Beckett’s parlance, not a subject, but an object. Moreover, this subject-object is a pure object, that is, an object appearing-for-itself (recall that Badiou’s is a pre-perceptive or non-phenomenal phenomenology). Which is to say that Film is ultimately less concerned with questions of subjectivity than those of objectivity. More precisely, Film, whose very name marks it as a treatise on the ontological character of cinema, presents an investigation of what is objectively essential to cinema. To this effect I think that Film must be understood not as a failed instance of the cogito but rather as a (literally) exceptional work, insofar as its subtractive aim is not generic humanity (something that its ensuing unpopularity with audiences amply attests to), but rather generic cinema. Simply, in subtracting the realm of speech, all that remains of Film is image, pure and simple. This base appearance is its being. Indeed, this is precisely the destination of Film, whose concerns lie less with some (impossible) ‘silent being of all speech’ than with the (equally impossible) ‘invisible being of all appearance’. In failing to broach this fundamental invisibility Beckett maintains the essence of cinema – its ontological halting point – to be appearance (in) itself, which is equally to say that brute appearance constitutes the very being of film. So as to underscore my point it is worth considering two pivotal sequences from Film, namely, the opening shot of Keaton’s ‘creased and reptilian’48 eye, and the traumatic climax in which O is finally confronted with the truth of E. First, let us note that the celebrated close-up of the eye which both ‘opens’ and ‘closes’ Film is in fact more than reptilian; it is prehistoric. I intend ‘prehistoric’ to be taken literally: the eye in question is pre-historic, prior to subjective history, prior to (and equally subsisting beyond) the story of Film. The eye is thus in effect outside of – and simultaneously contains – the (hi)story of Film. Moreover, as Enoch Brater observes, ‘Keaton’s reptilian eye, though blinking, is, however, not dilating, not focusing’.49 Neither intensive nor furtive, searching nor sought after, the eye is rather passive, even vacant. It is, for all intents and purposes, the ‘passive (eye of the) subject’, the ‘obscure matter’ upon which subjectivity – history – narrates itself. This point has not passed by unnoticed, Sidney Feshbach for one pointing out how the eye-image ‘contains, without rhetorical inflation, its resemblance to a flower, a sun, a mandala, a cosmic map, that is, the instruments of a worldview’.50 We might simplify this further by stating that the eye presents a ‘world-image’. Both in the

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sense that what we see in the eye is the image of a world, and that the eye, as an object (in the sense we have come to understand it, that is, as pure image) literally is a world of images. It is the world of ‘pure’ appearing prior to appearing-for-an-other, the ‘subject of passivity’, the rock on which the cogito is founded and flounders. This pre-historic scene is effectively repeated in the traumatic climax of Film, namely, the point at which O, having by this point either removed or obscured every perceivable object – that is, every object capable of perception – and who has until now avoided directly facing E, is finally forced to perceive his tormentor – who is of course revealed as himself, as self-perception – at which point O slumps back into his chair, buries his face in his hands, and silently rocks to and fro. How does this scene repeat the ‘prehistory’ of the eye of Film’s opening? Is this point not simply the Berkeleian recognition of the hopelessness of escaping self-perception, of the ultimate coincidence of being with being-perceived (which is stricto sensu historical)? Yes and no. For this self-perception – the final equation whereby E = O – is strictly speaking void: O does not perceive anything outside of himself, nothing outside of O perceives him, it is a moment of pure apperception, or what we might call aperception, the absence of perception. What we see here is literally a staging of appearing-for-itself: E appearing for O; O appearing for E; E being O. Thus we re-encounter the ‘subject of passivity’, the pure objective appearance upon which the cogito is built. Moreover, we can see that, inasmuch as Film is ultimately an exploration of the generic nature of film, Beckett finds the essence of cinema not in perception but in pre-perception: simply, Film both is and is about pure appearance, appearance qua appearance (and not appearance-for-an-other). We might now ask ourselves what precisely is Beckett’s take on Berkeley’s formula. Does he really believe that self-perception constitutes the bedrock of being? Or, to invoke a term central to Film Theory, what is the status of the desire enacted in Film, a desire which doubtless circulates around escaping the ‘anguish of perceivedness’? Is Film, as Deleuze argues, ultimately a question of transcendence (though he would of course reject the term himself), of ‘becoming imperceptible’ – not only to others, but equally to ourselves – of how we become one with Life and thereby attain to ‘a cosmic and spiritual lapping’?51 Or is it rather a more tragic tale, where, as Simon Critchley recently put it, while ‘self-perception is what maintains us in being . . . what we desire, what we crave, what we yearn for, is non-being, that is to say, the escape from being’?52 Or to render it

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in more obviously oppositional terms, is Film’s desire finally that of ‘attaining once more the world before man, before our dawn’ (C1, p. 70), or is it rather that of ‘struggling with the irreducibility of the human world’?53 To put it bluntly, is Film a story of transcendence or of tragedy? My own answer is at once ‘both’ and ‘neither’. For in subtracting the voice and exploring the visual or apparent nature of cinema, Film, as we have seen, is finally a question of pre-subjectivity – of pure objectivity – which is at once ‘the world before man’ and the irreducible aspect of humanity. Because what we bear witness to in the ‘subject of passivity’ is the ‘obscure matter’ of the cogito, the ‘idiot body’ which is in effect both human and pre-human. The crucial difference lies in the relation of being to perception: whereas for Deleuze (as much as for Badiou) being precedes perception, Critchley treats the two as coextensive. We might then reformulate our question in the following manner: what is the status of possibility in Film’s avowed desire to escape apperception into what I have called aperception? Beckett’s ‘scripted’ answer is ambiguous at best, limited to three concise sentences: All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains being. Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of selfperception. No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience.54

While Critchley prioritises the first two points – and attempts to write off the last as an instance of typically Beckettian black humour – Deleuze contrariwise favours the third. Of course, having already worked though a pre-perceptive onto-logy – recall that being, as Badiou conceives it, is pure multiplicity, while appearance is first and foremost ‘nonphenomenal’ – we can immediately rally to the Deleuzian interpretation, on the proviso that we understand this withdrawal from perception to be subtractive in nature, that is, not as an ascension ‘towards the luminous plane of immanence’ (C1, p. 70) – which would, for Badiou, constitute an antiphilosophical solution – but rather as a descent towards the abstraction of being qua being, a descent which is necessarily thwarted, unable to pass beyond the point of its appearing. For Deleuze, Film’s accomplished ascension is attested to by the symbol of the rocking chair ‘which suspends us in the middle of nothingness (to-and-fro)’.55 My Badiouian (in spite of Badiou) reading, on

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the other hand, sees the rocking chair as less a symbol of the nothingness of the void than the minimal gesture which maintains the fundamental (and fundamentally objective) knot between being and appearing, rocking to-and-fro, teetering on the edge of pre-perceptive phenomenality (recall O’s eyes are now covered, effectively forever), yet unable to plunge into the icy water of absolute abstraction. Reapplying this logic to the thought of film qua film, specifically with regard to the question of light, we see that this almost-abstract space – this place ‘where light, always propagating itself, had no need to be revealed’ (C1, p. 70) – is finally neither the mystical place of ‘cosmic and spiritual lapping’ nor the quasi-ground of pure being divorced from its appearing. Rather, it is the space of appearing qua appearing, of appearance in-itself, which is finally the properly generic space of cinema.56 This is certainly one of the ways we might interpret Badiou’s assertion that the power of cinema is precisely that of ‘thinking appearance as appearance’ (DF, p. 129), that is, of being able to think appearance as brought to the brink of its appearing, of displaying the minimal difference between appearing and inappearing.57 This in mind, we can easily return to the idea of Film’s investigating the nature of cinema to observe that the ‘essence’ of film is not perceptive but rather pre-perceptive, namely, that of nonphenomenal appearing, or what we have (following Badiou) called ‘logic’ (further reinforcing cinema’s status as an onto-logical art). This is equally the lesson of Film and cinema itself: even if, in the end, O and E (who are the Same) no longer exist, but rather ex-sist, appearance nonetheless persists, and it is precisely this pure appearance that constitutes both the essence (which, paradoxically, lies precisely in its ‘inessential’ nature) and the power of film as such. Having worked through the basics of Badiou’s onto-logy and considered film as an onto-logical art, we can now turn to the central paradox of Badiou’s philosophy, namely, the event. In doing so we will use one of Badiou’s favoured films as our guide.

Notes 1. Inscription above the entrance to Plato’s Academy. 2. Badiou, ‘Dialectiques de la fable’, p. 129. 3. By ‘onto-logical’ – or alternatively, ‘ontologico-logical’ – Badiou effectively condenses the two major arguments of Being and Event and Logics of Worlds, namely, that mathematics is ontology and that logic is appearing. Moreover, the term simultaneously designates a

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

separation (of ontology from logic, of being from appearing) and an intrication, inasmuch as the ‘logic’ Badiou is concerned with is ontologically or mathematically prescribed (as opposed to the ordinary formal or linguistic logic so dear to analytic philosophy). Bazin famously holds that ‘the photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model’ (WC1, p. 14). Bazin thus effectively restages in cinema the famous polemic between Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács over expressionism and realism. Cf. Bloch, ‘Discussing Expressionism’, and Lukács, ‘Realism in the Balance’. Recall Badiou’s fundamental contention that ‘cinema is nothing but takes and montage. There is nothing else’ (HI, p. 86, translation modified). Carroll, ‘Defining the Moving Image’, p. 119. Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 20. Carroll, Philosophical Problems, p. 145. Ibid. p. 146. It is worth pointing out that the word ‘sight’ is here misleading, inasmuch as for Badiou the question of perception has no real bearing on an object’s appearing in a world. Rather, the world of appearance is the world of ‘pure image’, of image divorced from its subjective perception. Godard cited in Wright, ‘Elizabeth Taylor at Auschwitz’, p. 54. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, p. 131. See Plato, ‘Parmenides’, p. 397/166c. Briefly, Badiou’s argument rests on a variation in Plato’s terminology which shifts between two ‘kinds’ of multiplicity, namely, plhqoß (plethos) and polla (polla). Badiou holds the former as designating pure or ‘inconsistent’ multiplicity (or the ‘multiple-without-one’) while the latter figures consistent (or ‘oneified’) multiplicity. That Plato cannot substantialise these differences – instead resorting to the metaphor of a dream – is for Badiou simply indicative of his pre-Cantorian situation: simply, inconsistent multiplicity is properly unthinkable before set theory allowed us to truly grasp ‘a multiple disseminated without limits’ (BE, p. 36). Badiou holds that any ontology of the one must be theological. Consequently, if God is dead, the central task of philosophy must be that of grasping ‘an immanent conceptualization of the multiple’ (D, p. 4). As Badiou puts it elsewhere, ‘ontology, if it exists, must be the theory of inconsistent multiplicities as such. Meaning that what lends itself to ontological thought is the multiple without any predicate other than its

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17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

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own multiplicity. Without any concept other than itself, with nothing to guarantee its consistency’ (TO, p. 36, translation modified). We must keep in mind that for Badiou the multiple that ontology grasps is the multiple ‘reduced without any immanent unification to the sole predicate of its multiplicity’ (TO, p. 40). Such a multiple’s being radically without-one demands that it consist solely of multiples; it is a multiple of multiples. As this multiple of multiples cannot be subject to any principle of finitude its multiple multiplicities must themselves be infinitely disseminated. As unpredictable, in-finite multiple of multiples, it is clear that the one is radically foreclosed from being qua being. Recall that Lacan famously contends that the real ‘can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization’ (S20, p. 143). Hausdorff, Set Theory, p. 11. In set theory ‘what is counted as one is not the concept of the multiple; there is no inscribable thought of what one-multiple is. The one is assigned to [ alone; that is, to the operator of denotation for the relation between the “something” in general and the multiple’ (BE, p. 44). ZFC’s axioms are those of extensionality, power set, union, empty set (or void), replacement, infinity, foundation, separation and choice. For an excellent critical examination of Badiou’s deployment of set theory, see Clemens, ‘Doubles of Nothing’, pp. 21–35. To this effect Badiou demonstrates (contra Rousseau) that ‘the State is not founded upon the social bond, which it would express, but rather upon un-binding, which it prohibits’, and accordingly (contra Marx) ‘one must not lose sight of the fact that the State as such . . . cannot be so easily attacked or destroyed . . . because even if the route of political change . . . is always bordered by the State, it cannot in any way let itself be guided by the latter, for the State is precisely non-political, insofar as it cannot change, save hands’ (BE, pp. 109–10). In fact, by Badiou’s logic, ‘every situation is ontologically infinite’ (M, p. 143). This ontological in-finitude is a necessary consequence of his decision that the one is not, for, as Badiou demonstrates, ‘given that no immanent limit anchored in the one determines multiplicity as such, there is no originary principle of finitude. The multiple can therefore be thought of as in-finite. Or even, infinity is another name for multiplicity as such’ (TO, p. 45, translation modified). Badiou and Sedofsky, ‘Matters of Appearance’, p. 251. Badiou, ‘Towards a New Concept of Existence’, p. 68. It should be pointed out that what follows is an extremely simplified version of Badiou’s articulation of worlds in terms of topoi, the mathematics of which is far and away too complicated to be addressed here in any depth. Aside from Badiou’s own exposition in Logics of Worlds (wherein a world qua site of appearing is onto-logically articulated as a Grothendieck topos, whose transcendental structure conforms

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to a Heyting algebra), I am basing my own limited understanding of topos theory on a handful of canonical texts, namely: Goldblatt’s Topoi; Borceux’s Handbook of Categorical Algebra 3; Mac Lane and Moerdijk’s Sheaves in Geometry and Logic; and Lawvere and Rosebrugh’s Sets for Mathematics. 27. Goldblatt, Topoi, p. 75. 28. The order-relation is written ≤. Thus we say that, if Id(x, y) = p and Id(x, z) = q, then q ≤ p (or x is more identical to y than to z). 29. Ontologically, such a multiple lies on the edge of the void. 30. More formally: ‘if x and y are two elements of a being A, and T is the transcendental of the world in question, indexing is an identityfunction Id(x, y) which measures in T the degree of “apparent” identity between x and y. Otherwise put, if Id(x, y) = p, it means that x and y are “identical to p degree” with regard to their power of appearance in the world’ (LW, p. 194). 31. Anticipating a possible objection to my earlier assertion that cinema is an ‘objective’ art because it does not cut from what is, but rather from what is there, we can still affirm that what cinema (re)presents are objects, inasmuch as cinema supplements its own being with the appearance whence it cuts. We can thus still hold (against Cavell and Bazin) that cinema re-presents both objects and appearances, as an object figures the intra-worldly appearance of a multiple. 32. Beckett, Proust, p. 11. 33. Cinema’s transcendental regime cannot of course be entirely reduced to the question of the image, inasmuch as a film effectively speaks in two ‘languages’, namely, those of light and of sound. Needless to say, while I focus here on the former, my argument can equally be applied to the latter. 34. Badiou, ‘Towards a New Concept of Existence’, p. 68. 35. On this point we find strong cinematic support in Alfred Hitchcock, who stresses the fact that ‘fundamentally, there’s no such thing as colour; in fact, there’s no such thing as a face, because until the light hits it, it is nonexistent’, Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 18. 36. Dolar, ‘Hitchcock’s Objects’, p. 45. 37. On this point we would do well to recall how Bazin championed the seventh art over its precursors because it is only with cinema (or photography) that ‘an image of the world [can be] formed automatically, without the creative invention of man’ (WC1, p. 13). That is to say, for Bazin, cinema’s artistic power lay foremost in its absolute objectivity. 38. It is in fact generally the central protagonist who designates a filmworld’s maximum object, inasmuch as the vast majority of films revolve around (and reflect psychologically) this character. Which leads us to deduce a film’s minimal object as the ‘reverse’ of this central figure, being that which enters into no relation whatsoever with (or remains

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40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

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radically alien to) the protagonist. For example, if the maximal object of Zac Snyder’s 300 (2006) is King Leonidas, who encapsulates above all a certain idea of hypermasculine activity, then we can suppose 300’s minimal object to be masculine passivity. This can be easily verified: while various forms of masculine activity are flagrantly – fetishistically – displayed throughout the film, masculine passivity is wholly denied or displaced (as we see, for example, in Leonidas’ disparaging reference to Athens, which only serves to emphasise the radical non-relation of the film’s maximal/active and minimal/passive objects). Likewise the maximum object of Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003) is Frannie Averey (Meg Ryan), around whom the narrative revolves, while her reverse, being that which does not appear in the film, is precisely the standard (antiseptic, heteronormative) conception of ‘romance’ generally promoted by Hollywood cinema (specifically in the romantic comedy genre associated with Meg Ryan). On these conceptions of the cinematic gaze, see: Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema; Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’; Silverman, ‘Masochism and Subjectivity’; Doane, The Desire to Desire; Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine. Creed’s Pandora’s Box also offers a useful summation of these gazes. On the re-Lacanianisation if the gaze, see: Copjec, Read My Desire; Žižek, Looking Awry; McGowan, ‘Looking for the Gaze’. Badiou, ‘Rhapsody for the Theatre’, p. 188. Simon Critchley for one observes that Film is ‘firstly, obviously and stupidly . . . about Film. That is, it is concerned with the genre of Film itself, the nature of the cinematic medium. To this extent, there is not just a laconic economy or simplicity to Beckett’s title, but also an arrogance, even a hybris: his one experiment with Film is a definition of the nature of the cinematic medium itself’, ‘To Be or Not To Be’, p. 110. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, pp. 77–8. As Raymond Federman points out, early criticism of Film focused on the fact that it was ‘too simple, too obvious in its symbolism’, ‘Samuel Beckett’s Film’, p. 364. Beckett of course wrote two mimes, ‘Act Without Words I’ and ‘Act Without Words II’. Although published in 1964, How It Is was composed between 1959 and 1960. The original French title Comment c’est better pleads Badiou’s case, comment c’est (‘how it is’) being homonymic with commencer, the verb ‘to begin’. Beckett demanded that Film take place ‘on an absolute street . . . [in an] absolute exterior’, and that ‘the principle of the room is to seek the minimum . . . a formal minimum. Even the table that carries the . . . bowl . . . just a support . . . a kind of abstract support’, cited in Gontarski, ‘Film and Formal Integrity’, p. 131.

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 323. Schneider, ‘On Directing Film’, p. 88. Brater, ‘The Thinking Eye in Beckett’s Film’, p. 168. Feshbach, ‘Unswamping a Backwater’, p. 355. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 26. Critchley, ‘To Be or Not To Be’, p. 113. Ibid. p. 111. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 323. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 25. As Badiou contends, ‘what Beckett aims at [in his fiction] is to separate . . . appearance, which it both restores and obliterates, from the universal core of experience’ (OB, p. 44). 57. Thus the parallel between cinema and poetry, for poetry’s power lies in its ability to push presentation to the limits of unpresentation, to reveal presentation in its austerity: in Badiou’s words, ‘the thought of the poem only begins after the complete disobjectification of presence’ (TW, p. 238).

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CHAPTER 4

An Aesthetic of Truth

To have a regard for reality does not mean that what one does in fact is pile up appearances. On the contrary, it means that one strips the appearances of all that is not essential, in order to get at the totality in all its simplicity. André Bazin1

4.1

THE WORLD PULLED OVER OUR EYES Reject everything about the real that does not become true. Robert Bresson2

Badiou begins his paper on science fiction cinema, ‘Dialectiques de la fable’, by noting how it is imperative that we: always verify, against empiricism and with Platonism, that the visible, apparent face of what is certain (like Saint Thomas, we must see to believe), is in reality only a particular aleatory index of the real. And consequently, in the cinema: verify that this artifice – cinema – seriously tests philosophy by imposing a variation of the regime of the sensible. In sum, verify that cinema has at its disposal a certain aptitude for the concept, whence it has the power of making visibly uncertain the certainty of the visible. Or again: of showing that the image is only a semblance, or even a semblance of image. (DF, p. 120)

Accepting Badiou’s challenge clearly involves further investigation of cinema’s peculiar standing as an onto-logical art. While this is what I have by and large already attempted in my reading of Film, our study here will not focus on any such instance of ‘arthouse’ cinema. Nor will it entail any Bazin-esque recourse to documentary or classical ‘realist’ cinema.3 On the contrary – and entirely in keeping with cinema’s standing as a ‘mass art’, an art that popularises otherwise ‘aristocratic’ concepts – in what follows I will be drawing support from what may well be (save in its occasional monotheistic

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rhetoric) the least Bazinian film imaginable, namely, Larry and Andy Wachowski’s 1999 sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix. But how to consider The Matrix and at the same time retain so much as a whiff of originality? Everybody knows that The Matrix, notwithstanding its many explicit references to work of Jean Baudrillard, leaves itself wide open to philosophical interpretation. Slavoj Žižek for one has observed how, ‘like the proverbial picture of Jesus which seems always to stare directly at you, from wherever you look at it – practically every orientation seems to recognize itself in it’.4 Not only that but, in a film so hopelessly saturated with philosophical (as much as mystical, political, technological, etc.) signposts, it would seem that the very possibility of drawing a coherent (or at least non-contradictory) line of reasoning is itself suspect.5 Further still, our most obvious point of entry appears to be barred, for it would surely be the height of redundancy to observe today how The Matrix revisits Plato’s cave myth (a prisoner held under the thrall of an all-encompassing illusion escapes his cell to encounter the ‘real’ world, following which he dutifully returns to free his fellow captives . . .).6 Indeed, this is precisely the approach that Badiou himself adopts in ‘Dialectiques de la fable’ (and which, for Badiou, assures its superiority over Vincenzo Natali’s Cube and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, both from 1999). So what is left to say about The Matrix that has not already been said countless times over? Very simply, my approach will be to at once undo and extend Badiou’s Platonic argument by demonstrating how the film accords less with Plato’s philosophy than with Badiou’s. For if Plato found in his cave the perfect allegory for the process of philosophical education, The Matrix can be seen to provide Badiou with the ideal allegory of a truth procedure.7 What is more, it does so on a mass scale. In this sense we can say that the operations of The Matrix are less inaesthetic than aesthetic, provided that we understand by ‘aesthetics’ less a discourse on art than on appearing, considered as the transcendental arrangement of the objects of a world (much in the manner that Jacques Rancière uses the term with reference to the ‘distribution of the sensible’).8 This aesthetic dimension is key, for in holding The Matrix to be a subjective allegory it is clear that we must be able to demonstrate how it renders ‘visibly uncertain the certainty of the visible’ (or imposes ‘a variation of the regime of the sensible’). For if a truth is to come to be, a world’s aesthetic (qua transcendental) regime must be shaken to its very core so as to admit into its order something both new and absolute. Insofar as I contend

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it is precisely this evental rearrangement – or more precisely, the representation thereof – that is at work in The Matrix, I argue that the Wachowski’s blockbuster admirably presents a mass audience with what we might call ‘an aesthetic of truth’. How so? For one thing, outside of its obvious kung-fu sensibilities, The Matrix neatly stages the properly Parmenidean drama of the one and the multiple. Let us begin on a strictly nomenclative level. Aside from their demonstrably Christian connotations, the names ‘Neo’ and ‘Trinity’ clearly signify unicity and multiplicity, or more pointedly, the one and the multiple. This is made abundantly clear in Neo’s being reverently referred to as ‘the One’ (which is, of course, an anagram of ‘Neo’) throughout the film. And let us not forget that, in proper Badiouian fashion, it is Trinity who anticipates Neo (or again, multiplicity precedes unicity). Of course the third term of this ontological troika is none other than Cipher – the empty set, the void – whose perverse wish to be truly incorporated into the matrix and consequent attempts to destroy the consistency of both the one (Neo) and the multiple (Trinity) ultimately come to nothing. Trinity/multiple, Neo/one, Cipher/void: already we have almost all the nominal ingredients for a sufficient ontology. Evidently, in order to guarantee the matrix’s ontological consistency, we still require a fourth term in the form of a suturing principle (a principle which would allow precisely for the void’s seamless incorporation into the world of the matrix). Hence the Agents, those personifications of the State whose job it is to ensure the system’s continued smooth running by locating and stamping out anomalies wheresoever they arise. Needless to say, the Agents (qua state) are both omnipresent – in Morpheus’s words, ‘inside the matrix, they are everyone, and they are no one’ – and omnipotent, their being markedly stronger and faster than ordinary humans indicating the fact that their power lies in irremediable excess over the individual elements of the situation. In addition to this, the state is represented as a fundamentally inhuman organism (in this case, a computer programme) which affects a semblance of humanity by cloaking itself in human garb. Which of course leads us at length to the glaringly obvious, that is, that underlying all of the above is the fact that the illusory world of the matrix is itself nothing but a mathematical construction. Indeed, in one of the final sequences of the film, Neo, having triumphantly realised his infinite potential, literally ‘sees’ the matrix for what it truly is, as a world writ large in luminous mathematical script.

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More than this, we might note that the common failure of the numerous ‘Platonic’ interpretations of The Matrix is that they necessarily suppose an ontological fissure which separates the cave (the illusory world of the matrix, the world of appearances) from its ‘true’ exteriority (‘the desert of the real’). On the contrary, like cinema, the real of the matrix lies in its very semblance: as Badiou himself points out, The Matrix’s imperative – the task befalling the ‘chosen One’ – is not simply that of escaping to the ‘real’ world, but rather that of remaining inside to ‘sustain the test of the real against semblance’ (DF, p. 127), to seize the real in semblance. The chosen One is not he who breaks free of the cave, nor even he who, having realised the ‘truth’, returns to free his fellow prisoners. Rather, the chosen One is ‘he who knows how to recognise semblance from the interior of semblance – he who, in the Cave, comes to the realisation that the shadows are only shadows’ (DF, p. 127). Herein lies the meta-filmic nature of The Matrix: in its seizing of the real in semblance, in the simple fact that ‘the question of a calling into question of the image from the image itself, in the direction of its external cause, is the question of cinema itself’ (DF, p. 128). But how does this question arise? What is it that first leads one to question the unquestionable? Or, to put it in Platonic terms, how do we come to understand that the shadows are merely shadows? This problem leads us to the real anomaly of the matrix (as much as The Matrix), namely, the irrational question ‘what is the matrix?’ On one level, the irrationality of this question lies in the fact that it is fundamentally unanswerable, for precisely the same reasons that Lacan tells us there is no metalanguage: the simple fact is that we should never really be able to step outside the matrix, for, logically speaking, there is no ‘outside’ to speak of. We might even go so far as to say that ‘there is no meta-matrix’. Indeed, by dint of the fact that the world of semblance that is the matrix simultaneously underscores its own artificial reality (the matrix being after all the familiar – if false – mathematically structured world of appearances) and the real artificiality of the external world (the ‘desert of the real’ being itself ‘stranger than fiction’ and equally governed by logico-mathematical rules), The Matrix paradoxically proposes an ontological identity between these two logically distinct worlds. Put simply, what is, is the matrix, yet so too the matrix is what is there. This is to say that the matrix exhaustively stages the onto-logical ballet of being and appearance. Thus in the sequels to The Matrix (2003’s comparatively pallid Reloaded and Revolutions) the boundary between the matrix

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and ‘the real world’ becomes increasingly blurred (Agent Smith takes ‘real’ human form; Neo’s powers begin to operate outside of the matrix . . .). There is, however, another, more immediate reason for holding the question ‘what is the matrix?’ – when asked from a position of absolute interiority to the matrix – to be a logical absurdity: simply, the question has no objective basis in ‘reality’. It cannot be explained away, as Morpheus attempts, as an existential itch or ‘a splinter in your mind’. Rather, the question itself poses a radical singularity: the only consistent answer to the question of the question is the paradoxical thesis that it gave rise to itself. The point is that we are clearly dealing with something which exceeds the material (corporeolinguistic) world, something outside of the aesthetic order. Of course, the sequels to The Matrix attempt to ‘solve’ this problem by moving more and more into obscurantism. Yet this need not be the case: there is in fact a materialist answer to a question which asks itself. However, in order to broach this paradox, we first need to examine more of Badiou’s core philosophy. 4.2 EVENT, SUBJECT, TRUTH: SYNTHESISING THE MATERIALIST DIALECTIC

This is our fate, to live with doubts, to pursue a subject whose absoluteness we are not certain of, in short, to realize that the only ‘true’ science is itself of the same mortal, perhaps empirical, nature as all other human undertakings. Paul J. Cohen9

We recall from Chapter 3 that one of the central tenets of Badiou’s philosophy is his contention that the impasse of ontology – being the absolute (and absolutely indeterminate) domination of the state over its situation (or, in terms of The Matrix, of the Agents over the humans) – can only be thought through recourse to an extramathematical anomaly. Here we finally touch upon the core of Badiou’s materialist dialectic, namely, the event itself, that fundamental concept constituting ‘the bedrock of my entire edifice’ (BE, p. 181). Indeed, insofar as Badiou’s initial declaration that mathematics is ontology effectively strips philosophy of its ‘highest responsibility’, we can argue that philosophy per se only really kicks in at the point of the event, which fundamentally escapes mathematical thought.10 The event, however, is a very tricky business indeed. For one thing,

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it eludes mathematical thought, meaning it is ‘that-which-is-notbeing’: strictly speaking, the event is not. Further, the event cannot be thought outside of its site (which provides, if only briefly, its worldly support), which itself errs on the wrong side of the laws of being and accordingly appears only to disappear. To this effect the event-site multiple can only really be thought by virtue of its consequences. Or again, the only ‘evidence’ of an event lies in its subsequent trace. More than this, the event is necessarily a chance supplement: aleatory in its (non)being, an event is finally, as Mallarmé would have it, ‘a throw of the dice’. Lastly, between Being and Event and Logics of Worlds, Badiou has proposed two decidedly different conceptions of the event (as well as the site, the subject, etc.). It is important to point out that in what follows I will be privileging the presentation offered in Badiou’s more recent work.11 Before we can really grasp an event we must first come to terms with a site, which is basically a momentary aberration of the laws of onto-logy. Technically, a site is an object (that is, a multiple whose elements are indexed to a world’s transcendental) which, due to a momentary ‘kink’ in the onto-logical order, comes to count itself in the referential field of its own indexation. Or again, a site is that which ‘summons its being in the appearing of its own multiple composition’ (LW, p. 363), which is to say ‘it makes itself appear’ (LW, p. 452). A site therefore testifies to the intrusion of being in appearance. At the level of being, a site (x) proves itself paradoxical in its being a reflexive multiple, meaning it is an element of itself (that is, x [ x).12 In its counting of itself in itself the site constitutes a supernumerary term – it is, as Badiou puts it, an ‘ultra-one’ – and is as such, by dint of ZFC’s axiom of foundation (which tells us that every multiple harbours at least one element which presents nothing that the initial multiple presents, thereby prohibiting a set’s belonging to itself), ontologically illegal. In transgressing the laws of being, the site must accordingly vanish. As such, the site figures as ‘an ontological figure of the instant: it appears only to disappear’ (LW, p. 369). Or again, a site, ontologically speaking, literally is not (being ‘thatwhich-is-not-being-qua-being’): on the contrary, a site is something that happens. Lastly, in its giving its very being a value of existence, a site temporarily bridges the fissure separating being from being-there, which is to say it involves ‘the instantaneous revelation of the void that haunts multiplicities’ (LW, p. 369). The ontology of the site thus consists essentially of three points: it is a reflexive (therefore illegal) multiple; it involves the revelation

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of the void; it appears only to disappear. The logic of the site, on the other hand, obviously has decidedly ‘aesthetic’ (as we have been using the term) ramifications, involving the distribution of the intensities around this vanished site. Of this distribution two immediate possibilities present themselves: either the intensity of existence briefly attributed to the site is maximal, in which case we are dealing with a real singularity (in convoking its void, the site reveals something radically unknown), or it is not, in which case we are merely dealing with a fact (the site fails to convoke the void, everything that appears is already known). Clearly our interest lies with the former, which we can further divide into its strong and weak variants. Simply, while a weak singularity no doubt involves the brief (if absolute) existence of the site, only a strong singularity – that is, a singularity whose apparent consequences are maximal – constitutes an event proper. Of course, the consequences of an event can mean one thing and one thing only, namely, the sudden and absolute existence of what had formerly inexisted, or to be more precise, of what had formerly been the inexistent object proper to the site itself, that which constituted, ontologically speaking, the void of the situation.13 It is in this precise sense – in its issuing from the void – that the singular event addresses itself universally, insofar as the void constitutes the ‘absolute neutrality of being’ and as such ‘neither excludes nor constrains anyone’ (E, p. 73). Indeed, an event (or a strong singularity), considered as a site in extremis, essentially effects something of an existential inversion, inasmuch as the ‘maximally true consequence of an event’s (maximal) intensity of existence is the existence of the inexistent’ (LW, p. 377). Further, given that the event-site appears only to disappear, this absolutely existing former inexistent is the sole testimony to the event’s having happened, which is to say it is the trace of the event, its lingering consequence.14 Thus Badiou can succinctly describe the event as equally ‘a pure cut in becoming made by an object of the world, through that object’s auto-appearance . . . [and] the supplementing of appearing through the upsurge of a trace: the old inexistent which has become an intense existence’ (LW, p. 384). This trace is, however, not logically inconsequential: although an event’s happening certainly affects the transcendental order of the world, ‘the worldly order is not subverted to the point of being able to demand that a logical law of worlds be abolished’ (LW, p. 379). Existentially speaking, an event involves a real life and death struggle, for, as we know, a transcendentally ordered world demands both a maximum and a minimum, and the forfeiture of either of these

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positions necessitates another object taking its place. Or again – on a seemingly morbid note – we must accept the fact that ‘the opening of a space of creation requires destruction’ (LW, p. 396): that one object comes to live through an event necessarily spells the death of another. Mortality to one side, we know that all that remains of a vanished event is its trace, being precisely the sudden and absolute existence of the former inexistent. In general, the trace takes the form of a prescriptive statement concerning the new possibilities implied by the event (suffice to recall our earlier musical example of Serialism). In Being and Event Badiou reserves the name fidelity for the set of procedures which discern all those multiple-objects whose existence is found to depend in one way or another upon this evental trace. As we will see shortly, the infinite generic set of those event-dependent terms will be called a truth. To be faithful to an event is then to ‘separate out’ from within a world all those elements which depend in one way or another upon (the trace of) an event from those which do not, or, as Badiou puts it, ‘to gather together and distinguish the becoming legal of a chance’ (BE, p. 232). Of course, being itself an operation (as opposed to a term), a fidelity is evaluated purely in terms of its result (namely, the one-ified – or ‘objectified’ – consequents of the event), meaning that, ‘strictly speaking, fidelity is not’ (BE, p. 233). Rather, what is are those consistent multiples brought together post facto under the banner of being connected in one way or another to the evental trace. To this effect a fidelity operates in a certain sense on the same level as the state, inasmuch as in its grouping of multiples it serves to count the parts of the situation, meaning its ever-changing result is ultimately situationally included (even if it does not belong). In sum, a fidelity, grasped in its being, is nothing other than a chain of positive connections between situational terms and the trace of a vanished event. In Logics of Worlds Badiou reserves the term body for the wholly material (or ‘objective’) series of such connections or enquiries. Meaning that a body, as Badiou defines it, is a finite fragment of an otherwise infinite faithful procedure (insofar as an evental fidelity can be grasped at any point as a provisional result) which operates in ‘a kind of ontological allegiance with the new appearance of an inexistent’ (LW, p. 470). Or again, a body is the very ‘stuff’ – the ‘objective’ material – of a faithful procedure, it is ‘the bearer of the subjective appearance of a truth’ (LW, p. 451).15 There remains, however, a crucial link missing between the (vanished) event and the particular connective procedures faithful to that event. It is to this all-important liaison that Badiou gives the name

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subject. This subject, however, stands in marked opposition to orthodox conceptions of subjectivity, for Badiou holds the only acceptable theory of the subject to be neither physical nor metaphysical, but rather ‘meta-physical’. Simply, in strict accordance with the logic of appearance, ‘a theory of the subject cannot be the theory of an object’ (LW, p. 49). Thus, with regard to contemporary metaphysics of subjectivity, Badiou explains that his subject is not a substance (inasmuch as substance designates a situated or ‘one-ified’ multiple while – as we will see – the subject fundamentally escapes the law of the count) nor a void point (the void being properly speaking inhuman and a-subjective), nor an invariable of presentation (the post-evental subject being necessarily something of a rarity). Nor for that matter is Badiou’s subject a register of experience, nor category of morality, nor ideological fiction.16 What the subject is is rather a formalism: emerging only in the wake of an event, the subject exceeds the human animal as that integral structure tying together on the one hand an evental trace and on the other a new body. In knotting together a trace and a body, a subject effectively spans two impossible points – points with which it never actually coincides – namely, the vanished event (as opposed to its apparent trace) and the eternal to-come of an infinite truth (as distinct from its finite body). A subject is then finally a formal structure we can, given the opportunity, enter into: it is not something we are, but rather what we might become, something which offers us the possibility of really living. For, as Badiou sees it, ‘to live’ can only mean to be incorporated into a subjective truth procedure, and accordingly ‘“to live” and “to live for an Idea” are one and the same thing’ (LW, p. 510). To this effect, knowing that a truth procedure is effectively eternal (it ‘compounds itself to infinity’ and as such is ‘never presented integrally’), to become a subject – to be incorporated into a truth procedure – is ultimately to partake in immortality. However, insofar as in Logics of Worlds Badiou holds that the event itself leaves a mark (it has apparent consequences, in the form of its objective trace), it would at first glance appear to be incapable of offering a radically subjective opening, a space adequate to mark the real birth of the subject. Or again, insofar as there is an evental trace, the decision regarding the event’s having happened would not seem to be strictly speaking pure.17 In part to account for this apparent loss of radical subjectivity, Badiou deploys a theory of points (derived once more from topos theory), namely, spaces wherein the infinity of a world crystallises into a binary option, where everything

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boils down to a ‘pure choice’, to a crucial ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision, wherein only the former facilitates the truth procedure’s continuation while the latter contrarily brings about its downfall. As Badiou explains: a point concentrates the degrees of existence, the intensities measured by the transcendental, into only two possibilities. Of these two possibilities, only one is the ‘good one’ for a truth procedure that must pass through this point. Only one authorizes the continuation, and therefore the reinforcement of the actions of the subject-body in the world. (LW, p. 416)18

Thus, with Nietzsche, a point literally ‘splits the world in two’, between all those objects which affirm the possibilities implied by the trace and all those that do not. Or in the language of Being and Event, a point is that which, in advance of their subjective recollection, divides the situation into its constitutive positive and negative atoms. Points thus ‘test’ the subject, marking as much its point of entry (its subjective ‘birth’ in the intervention: was x an event or not?) as the conditions of its continuation, inasmuch as the course of a subject is dotted with points which must be ‘held’ if the subject is to stay ‘alive’. Moreover, holding each point requires not only a radical decision, but also an active or efficacious component, which Badiou, in keeping with the meta-physicality of the subject, designates the organs of the subject-body. The various points affirmatively held by the subject thus constitute the ‘fibrous’ tissue of the subject-in-theworld (qua objective body), designating an ‘organic’ path through the maze of objective worlds, worlds which – to pursue Badiou’s increasingly corporeal metaphor – range from ‘atonic’ or pointless (worlds devoid of points, and which are accordingly ‘lifeless’) through to ‘taut’ or pointed (worlds rich in points, ‘lively’ worlds). Were we to employ a literary metaphor, we might say that points constitute the decisive events – the peripeteia – in the narrative of the subject. There are, however, a few last aspects of Badiou’s philosophy that need to be clarified. Meta-physicality to one side, we know that a truth is in essence an infinite generic set. That a truth is infinite means not only that it is (in the language of Cantor) a transfinite set but moreover that its procedure entails an effectively endless sequence of affirmative connections to an evental trace. That it is ‘generic’ means that it is absolutely a-particular or ‘indiscernible’ with regard to the situation of which it is a subset, being composed entirely of enquiries which themselves ‘avoid’ every property formulable in the language

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of the situation.19 Or again, a truth’s genericity means that it remains fundamentally ‘indiscernible and unclassifiable for knowledge’ (BE, p. 338).20 Moreover, as we have seen, the evental origin of a truth precludes its being mathematically explicable (the event-site, as that-which-is-not-being-qua-being, ontologically ex-sists). That said, while strictly speaking mathematics has nothing to say about the production of a truth, it can nevertheless – through recourse to Paul Cohen’s generic set theory21 – delineate its ontological form. Indeed, it is Cohen’s concept of the generic set which tells us that the being of a truth is ultimately situated in that space opened up by the impasse of ontology, that is, in the immeasurably infinite excess of the state over the situation. Moreover, this impasse is precisely: the point through which a subject may pass, since only a subject is capable of the ‘indiscernment’ that being itself indicates as its real. Only a subject is capable of those decisions that force a path through the impasse of number, thanks precisely to their evental foundation in the supernumerary. (B, p. 130)

If a truth is, ontologically speaking, an infinite and ‘excrescent’ – that is, its terms are represented but not presented – collection or counting-as-one of all those affirmatively investigated terms in the situation, then this subset (qua subject-body) qualifies as ‘generic’ if and only if it evades all criteria of discernment available in the situation (and is to this effect strictly speaking ‘unknowable’). The question of course remains as to how exactly this is the case. Simply, being counted (included) by the state yet having no discernible property, the entire being of a truth resides in its being a subset, that is, in the fact that it is composed of presented multiples, for ‘an indiscernible inclusion . . . has no other “property” than that of referring to belonging’ (BE, pp. 338–9). As this property – which is nothing short of its being, pure and simple – is obviously shared by each and every term of the situation (inasmuch as they all are), the indiscernible subset solely possesses the properties of any set whatsoever: of the generic subset ‘all one can say is that its elements are’ (BE, p. 339). It is in this precise sense that such a set presents the properly universal truth of the situation, for the indiscernible grasps as one-multiple ‘the very being of what belongs insofar as it belongs’ (BE, p. 339).22 However, as an excrescent multiple, the ‘true’ subset does not itself belong to the situation, and at the same time, by virtue of its genericity, it remains ‘subtracted’ from knowledge. Thus, in order to be presented (or ‘normalised’), its belonging must be forced upon

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the situation, thereby establishing a new situation in which it will be discernible (which is to say ‘knowable’). Such forcing (the mathematics of which is, once again, provided by Cohen) constitutes ‘the fundamental law of the subject’ (BE, p. 401). In order to render the indiscernible subset ‘known’ (to force it, as it were, to be) it is clear that the language of the situation must itself undergo radical transformation.23 It is to this effect that the subject tasks itself with resignifying names already present in the language of the situation, the referents of which remain suspended from the infinite becoming of a truth. Such nominations constitute a new ‘subject-language’ which, whilst recognisable, nonetheless appears to the outside observer both arbitrary and contentless (by virtue of its suspension from the ‘to-come’ of a truth). The subject thus literally forces ‘the situation to dispose itself such that [its] truth – at the outset anonymously counted as one by the state alone – be finally recognized as a term, and as internal’ (BE, p. 342). In this manner subjects really do change the world, ‘not by what they discern, but by what they indiscern therein’ (BE, p. 343). Thus we finally arrive at a point where a nuanced definition of subjectivity can be given. First, we know that the subject is an absolutely anterior function, wholly dependent on the chance occurrence of an illegal event. Second, the subject has both a dynamic and an extensive dimension (the former lying as we have seen in the evental trace, the latter in its corporality, namely, its objective body and efficacious organs). Further, by way of its ‘fundamental law’ – the forcing of indiscernible terms – the subject, militating around the trace of the vanished event, locates itself ‘at the intersection, via its language, of knowledge and truth’ (BE, p. 406): forever separated from truth by ‘an infinite series of aleatory enquires’ (BE, p. 399), the subject ‘traces, in the situation, the becoming multiple of the true’ (BE, p. 394). The subject thus ‘synthesises’ the materialist dialectic: just as all that is is woven from the void, so too ‘the subject is woven out of a truth’24 (which draws its power from the void), through which what already is is subjectively rewritten. So, to recapitulate, the being of a truth constitutes a generic set inasmuch as its sole criterion of assemblage is the inconsistent being of its elements, and its absolute power is ‘that of changing what is, such that this unnameable being may be, which is the very being of what-is’ (BE, p. 343). Such forcing of knowledges by truths is the sole raison d’être of the subject. Further, as that which both ‘decides’ in the wake of a vanished event and ‘indiscerns’ the to-come of a truth,

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forcing it, as it were, to be, the subject is forever caught between the past of the vanished event and the future of an unfinishable truth. The time of the subject is therefore that of an eternal present: The time of truth is the time of a properly eternal present, indifferent to both the inheritance of the past and the promise of the future. The subject of fidelity lives exclusively in an unfolding present, the present of evental consequences. (B, p. 157)25

It is in this precise sense that Badiou can say that, in being incorporated into a subjective truth procedure, ‘“we”, of the human species, are committed to a trans-specific procedure, a procedure which opens us to the possibility of being Immortals’ (LW, p. 71). 4.3

‘SYSTEM FAILURE’ The answer is out there Neo. It’s looking for you. And it will find you. If you want it to. Trinity

Our obvious point of re-entry into The Matrix is through the paradox of the event. For one cannot help but be struck by the resemblance the structure of the event-site bears to the problem of creatio ex nihilo we encountered above, namely, how to think a question that asks itself? In actual fact, what we encounter in both cases is a variation on Russell’s famous paradox involving the set of all sets which do not belong to themselves (the paradox residing in the fact that, were the resultant set to belong to itself, then by definition it must not belong to itself, and vice versa). The point being that the paradox posed by the question, as an onto-logical impossibility – according as much to the general laws of being and appearing (specifically the axiom of foundation) as to those of the matrix (which are after all one and the same) – should exhaust its being in its very appearing. This is, of course, to say that the question must logically disappear into itself.26 But clearly this is not the case: inexplicably, the question remains. If anything, it is strangely ubiquitous, seeming to float through the shadier corners of the matrix (in teasing the question from Neo at the beginning of the film, Trinity reveals that she too was haunted by the same question . . .). Why? Because, when we really get down to it, we find that the question is only apparently paradoxical, which is to say it is not strictly speaking evental. The ostensible paradox of the question derives from the fact of its being not an event but rather the trace of a (past) event, the lingering consequence of a previous event

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to which Morpheus remains absolutely (if obscurely) faithful. Of this event, all we are told is what Morpheus recounts to Neo: when the matrix was first built there was a man born inside who had the ability to change whatever he wanted, to remake the matrix as he saw fit. It was he who freed the first of us, taught us the truth: as long as the matrix exists, the human race will never be free.

So we have an event (the brief, if absolute and maximally consequential, appearance of an entity capable of manipulating the laws of the matrix) and its trace (the question ‘what is the matrix?’, which is equally the statement ‘the matrix is’), both of which remain firmly entrenched (even if the former has long since vanished) in the simulated world of the matrix. Further, we recall that a new subjective body constitutes itself in the wake of an event by ‘separating-out’ from within the situation all those terms which are in one way or another affirmatively connected to the vanished event. To this effect we can observe how a new body effectively establishes a new world, a world whose very exceptionality necessitates its radical subtraction from the order of the old world, and whose point of commonality lies in the truth of the event (the universality of which lies exclusively in its convocation of the strict neutrality of being). Our contention is then the following: in The Matrix the Nebuchadnezzer is precisely such a subjective body. For the Nebuchadnezzer, nestled in the heart of the ‘desert of the real’ (which of course constitutes the being of the matrix, the invisible ‘ground’ upon which the world of appearances is constructed), is the very corporeality of the subject, a new body literally drawn from the matrix and cohering around a single truth (that the matrix is nothing other than a prison constructed so as to efficiently farm human energy). Two worlds: the insular world of the matrix in which the evental trace circulates, and the Nebuchadnezzer, extracted from the matrix, constituting a new body. The subject of The Matrix thus serves much the same purpose as phone lines in the film: true to its meta-physical nature, the subject is nothing other than the bridge spanning two worlds, between the trace of the vanished event and a new body, between the matrix and the Nebuchadnezzer, by way of the desert of the real. The question of subjectivity is, however, more complex still. In his recent work Badiou has come to distinguish four different possible subjective modalities, which he designates (in order of their emergence): faithful; reactionary; obscure; and resurrected. As we have seen, the faithful subject, in wholly subordinating itself to the

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prescriptive trace of the event, ‘grounds’ itself in a new body and produces a new eternal present (we recall that the faithful subject ‘lives exclusively in an unfolding present’ (B, p. 157), forever caught between the past of a vanished event and the future of an unfinishable truth). The reactive subject contrarily works to extinguish this present through the active negation – as opposed to the outright elimination – of the evental trace. The reactive subject thus equally produces a new present, albeit a present far removed from ‘the glorious and affirmative present of the faithful subject’: on the contrary, the reactive present is ‘a measured present, a negative present, a present “a little less worse” than the past’ (LW, p. 55). The obscure subject, on the other hand, seeks the outright annihilation of the evental present in the name of some transcendent ‘incorruptible and indivisible over-body, be it City, God or Race’ (LW, p. 60). It is the fervent desire of the obscure subject to obliterate the new in deference to the past. In sum, faithful, reactive and obscure subjects each constitute themselves with regard to a new present: ‘the faithful subject organises its production, the reactive subject its denial . . . and the obscure subject its occultation’ (LW, p. 62). Which leads us finally to the resurrected subject. Badiou calls resurrection the ‘reactivation of a subject in another logic of its appearing-in-truth’ (LW, p. 65). Such a resurrection necessarily supposes a new world, ‘which generates the context for a new event, a new trace, a new body – in short, a truth procedure under whose rule the occulted fragment [of truth] places itself after having been extracted from its occultation’ (LW, p. 65). Simply, while the reactive subject denies the trace (thereby extinguishing the present) and the obscure subject organises its occultation (thus eliding the present), the resurrected subject testifies to the present’s inexpugnability, to its ineradicable eternity (which is, after all, ‘nothing other than the presence of the present’ (C, p. 78)). Meta-physicality aside, we can equally discern the subjective orientations of The Matrix on a more ‘tangible’, if still allegorical, level. Indeed, the faithful, reactive, obscure and resurrected subjective positions clearly find their respective counterparts in Trinity, Cipher, Morpheus and Neo. Trinity, against all odds (including her own death), remains, of course, absolutely faithful to the event. Cipher, on the other hand, is content to renounce everything to do with the event in favour of a comfortable (if truthless) ‘life’ in the matrix. Morpheus for his part believes so blindly in the possibility of reviving the event (in his fanatical search for ‘the One’) that he is more than willing to sacrifice the present (for the sake of ‘fate’, the subjective body of the

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Nebuchadnezzer is virtually destroyed towards the end of the film).27 Which leads us at last to Neo, the (literally) resurrected subject. Before we broach the problem of Neo, however, let us note that the very idea of resurrection presupposes a certain doubling (inasmuch as there must first be something to be resurrected). I raise this so as to highlight the fact that Neo is a fundamentally split figure. As Agent Smith observes during their first meeting, Neo has ‘been living two lives’. In fact, the truth is closer to six. On the one hand Neo is ‘objectively’ divided, being split between his ‘respectable’ life as Thomas A. Anderson, software developer, and his ulterior life as a hacker, while on the other, Neo finds himself ‘subjectively’ split between the ‘new’ world of the Nebuchadnezzer and the virtual world of the matrix. Further still, we can say that Neo is also ‘eventally’ split: on the one hand Neo constitutes a resurrected subject, striving to revive the truth of the vanished event, while on the other he is the resurrection of the vanished event itself.28 An already triply-split figure, Neo is to this effect doubly paradoxical, being at one and the same time the event and its subjective affirmation. To revisit our earlier ‘proper name’ argument, outside of a simple case of letter-shuffling, is it not for this precise reason that he is referred to throughout the film as both ‘Neo’ and ‘the One’? To spell it out, if ‘Neo’ signifies real ‘novelty’ (that is, the ‘new’ world qua subjective body constructed in the wake of a vanished event), then ‘the One’ surely designates what Badiou himself calls the ‘ultra-one’, namely, the supernumerary event itself. Which is why Neo’s struggle throughout the film is ultimately antagonistic: on the one hand he strives to resurrect a past event (in the face of its obfuscation through Morpheus), while on the other he must come to terms with his being the event itself. Clearly Neo is the most aberrant of aberrations. Neo’s subjective constitution should by now be obvious enough: a finite term of an infinite situation (the world of the matrix), Neo suddenly finds himself connected to an evental trace (the question ‘what is the matrix?’, whose derived proposition is ‘the matrix is’) and is accordingly incorporated into a subjective body (the Nebuchadnezzer and its crew), whose arduous task it is to construct from the existing world a new world on the basis of a single truth (namely, that the human race has been enslaved by machines and effectively transformed into batteries . . .).29 Neo’s evental status on the other hand proves a little more difficult to discern. For one thing, Neo’s being an event evidently necessitates his equally being a site. Which of course means that, as an ‘ultra-one’, Neo must be seen to

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(illegally) convoke his very being in his objectual appearance. But how? As good Platonists, we find our answer in understanding the ‘desert of the real’ – or more precisely, everything in the ‘real’ world which is in one way or another wired into the matrix – as constituting the very being of the matrix. Simply, Neo convokes his being in his field of appearing – and thereby locates the real in semblance – in his accomplishing what no one else could do, namely, in his really understanding (as opposed to simply knowing), from a position strictly internal to the matrix, that this world is an all-encompassing computer programme, whose rules can be both bent and broken (something abundantly clear in the ‘real world’). Or again, Neo figures an event (qua reflexive multiple) inasmuch as he (illegally) convokes his ‘real’ self – the self entirely cognisant of the matrix’s fabrication, free from its rules and regulations – in his ‘apparent’ self – the self caught in the web of the matrix – and thereby rises above (or is supernumerary with regard to) the numerically regulated world of semblance.30 To this effect Neo ultimately presents less a decoding of the matrix than its prescription, its evental measuring, something we witness not only in Neo’s literally seeing the matrix for what it really is (as a world of computer script) but also in his sudden ability to determine (and – fundamentally – overcome) the previously indefinite excess the Agents had enjoyed over their human subjects (Neo easily fending off the Agents’ attacks and even entering Agent Smith so as to destroy him from the inside out). What is fascinating about The Matrix is evidently not the old idea – running from Plato and his cave through Descartes’ deceiving demon, up to and including today’s late-capitalist ‘hyperreality’ – of suddenly discovering ‘reality’ to be little more than a highly sophisticated sham. Or again, The Matrix is not The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998). On the contrary, the cinematic as much as philosophical interest of The Matrix lies in its staging of an unpredictable rupture in an otherwise flawless onto-logical order, of the intrusion of being into appearance (or of the contamination of semblance by the real), which finally provides, analogically, an aesthetic of truth (or the transcendental dimensions of a truth procedure). It is in this precise sense that The Matrix proves to be an exemplary onto-logical text. The Matrix lays bare onto-logy itself (in all its logico-mathematical austerity) while at the same time premising its consistency on a simple – albeit necessary – glitch in the system, a temporary caesura of the very laws of existence, namely, in the necessary malfunction of onto-logy itself. Which is finally to say that The Matrix’s power lies

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in its successfully staging, for a mass audience, the materialist dialectic underlying Badiou’s philosophy. This is precisely why, contrary to (yet paradoxically in keeping with) Badiou’s own assertions, The Matrix is finally less a ‘test’ of philosophy than its popular reinforcement (or again, The Matrix is not an artistic film, rather, it sketches an aesthetic of truth). Let us take a moment to realign ourselves. At the core of this book lies the question ‘can cinema be thought?’. We recall that, when considered properly, this question turns out to be threefold in nature, being: what is cinema? (the ontological question); what does cinema think? (the artistic question); and how is cinema to be rethought? (the philosophical question). Thus far, aside from a lengthy critical examination of Badiou’s cinematic writings and his broader philosophy, I have focused primarily on the first aspect of our question, namely, ‘what is cinema?’ (its ontological constitution, its peculiar status as an onto-logical art, etc.). This is, of course, not to say that cinema’s being the exemplary onto-logical art fails to operate on any inaesthetic level. On the contrary, as we will see, Badiou’s elaboration of a logic of appearance and reconceptualisation of categories like the event-site can be seen to directly invoke a certain cinematic logic. Accordingly, our following investigations will focus more acutely on the second and third – the artistic and the philosophical – aspects of our principal question. Thus we move from aesthetics to inaesthetics proper, as we consider cinema as a temporal art. For as Andrey Tarkovsky contends, ‘time, printed in its factual forms and manifestations: such is the supreme idea of cinema as an art’.31 Indeed, it is in the question of time that we find perhaps the most immediate way to broach the inaesthetic question of how it is that cinema comes to ‘test’ philosophy, not simply in the sense that it might render ‘visibly uncertain the certainty of the visible’, but moreover how it might, like the event itself, deliver something real in semblance. Notes 1. Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2, p. 101. 2. Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, p. 72. 3. Such an approach has been attempted elsewhere. See Hair, ‘Ontology and Appearing’. 4. Žižek, ‘Reloaded Revolutions’, p. 198. 5. As Elie During remarks, ‘introducing Plato in a futuristic kung fu movie is an amusing idea, but once you add Schopenhauer and Descartes,

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7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

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Buddha and Jesus, the Gnostics and the theoreticians of artificial intelligence, the atmosphere quickly becomes stifling’, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. See, for example: Marinoff, ‘The Matrix and Plato’s Cave’; Partridge, ‘Plato’s Cave and The Matrix’; and Bénatouïl, ‘La Matrice ou la caverne?’. Following Plato, Badiou entirely subordinates the question of education with that of truth, explicitly holding that ‘the only education is an education by truths’ (HI, p. 14). For a detailed reading of Badiou’s relation to Plato and education, see Bartlett, The One Drachma Course. ‘Aesthetics’ for Rancière denotes ‘the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise’ (PA, p. 13). Cohen, ‘Comments of the Foundations of Set Theory’, p. 15. As Badiou states, ‘beyond the identification of real ontology, which must be ceaselessly taken up again, philosophy is also, first and foremost, the general theory of the event. That is, the theory of that which subtracts itself from ontological subtraction. Or the theory of the impossible proper to mathematics’ (TW, p. 97). As Logics of Worlds substantially revises the concept of the event, it is useful to provide a brief sketch of its position in Being and Event. In this earlier work a site is conceived as a radically singular multiple, namely, a presented (but not represented) multiple such that none of its elements are situationally presented: whilst the site itself is presented, the same cannot be said for any of its constituents (all those elements huddled ‘beneath’ the site). Such a multiple is said to lie on the edge of the void, insofar as, from the situation’s perspective, the site is constituted solely of unpresented multiples (or again, beneath the site there is, for all intents and purposes, nothing). An event proper is the sudden advent of a multiple paradoxically composed of all the (unpresented) elements of the site and the event itself. Thus, if we have a site X belonging to a historical situation H (that is, X [ H), then an event (written ex) is composed of all those unpresented elements x belonging to X (or, x [ X) and itself, ex. Thus the paradoxical matheme of the event: ex = {x [ X, ex}. So in the case of an event we have simultaneously all those unpresented elements of the site suddenly becoming presented, and the presentation of this very presentation itself. As we will see, Badiou’s reconceptualisation of the event and the site in Logics of Worlds involves something of a conflation of these terms. This is perhaps the most obvious ‘switch’ between Being and Event and Logics of Worlds, inasmuch as in the former work it was the event – entirely distinct from its site – which constituted the paradoxical reflexive multiple, being composed of all the unpresented elements of the site and itself, or, ex = {x [ X, ex}.

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13. ‘An event is a site which is capable of making exist in a world the proper inexistent of the object that underlies the site’ (LW, p. 452). 14. In Being and Event Badiou contrarily upholds the fundamental nature of evental nomination – which is less an independent trace than the subjective tracing of the event – insofar as it is only in its naming that the event is situationally constituted: ‘the essence of the [subjective] intervention consists . . . in naming this “there is” and in unfolding the consequences of this nomination in the space of the situation to which the site belongs’ (BE, p. 203). However, while Badiou for a time held that ‘there exists no other beginning for a truth than the one that accords a poetic name’ (OB, p. 22), Logics of Worlds sees Badiou abandon this ‘recourse to a mysterious naming’ (LW, p. 361) in favour of a ‘less miraculous’ trace. 15. To be more precise, ‘a post-evental body is constituted by all the elements of the site which invest the totality of their existence in their identity to the trace of the event’ (LW, p. 467). 16. See BE, pp. 391–2, and LW, pp. 55–6. 17. In Being and Event the event left no such mark – its disappearance was absolute – and the subject was accordingly born in a pure decision regarding the vanished event’s having happened, a groundless affirmation which involved the naming of the event. The purity of this subjective decision is thus attested to inasmuch as there can be no knowledge of the event, for the simple reason that, were it ‘knowable’ (and hence decidable) by virtue of the given terms of a situation, then it would in no way be evental. Meaning that, in Being and Event, it was in effect the subject that produced the evental trace (qua nameof-the-event). To this all-important nominal decision Badiou gave the name intervention. However, Being and Event’s theory of intervention of course gives rise to the accusation of an event’s effectively constituting two events (the groundless nominal intervention being arguably equally evental). 18. ‘Roughly speaking, a point is a “projection” of the transcendental of a world onto the set {0, 1}, which is itself structured as a transcendental by the relation 0 ≤ 1. Conceptually, this means that the structure of a transcendental, which might be infinite, is made to appear before the tribunal of the decision (or the pure choice, or the alternative), which comes down to saying “yes” (1) or “no” (0). The subjective metaphor of the point can be expressed as follows: To decide is always to filter the infinite through the Two’ (LW, p. 468). 19. In extremely reductive terms, the generic set ‘avoids’ every nameable (constructible, statist) property in the situation by ensuring that, for each and every property, it contains at least one element that negates this property, as well as at least one that affirms the same property (the latter being, as we will see, none other than its very being).

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20. ‘Truth is always, according to the dominant law of the count, subtracted from the count’ (SP, p. 11). 21. The complexities of Cohen’s generic set theory – together with his concomitant concept of forcing – lie far and away beyond the scope of this book. While one should of course consult Cohen’s Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis, Badiou’s own summations are excellent and make up the final meditations of Being and Event. Hallward too offers an extended account in the appendix to his Badiou: A Subject to Truth (along with a useful overview in his chapter on ‘Subject and Event’). Mary Tiles’s The Philosophy of Set Theory also presents an excellent and accessible overview (see especially pp. 185–91). 22. As Badiou nicely glosses in the preface to Logics of Worlds, ‘a generic subset is identical to the whole situation in the following sense: the elements of this subset – the components of a truth – have their being, or their belonging to the situation, as their only assignable property. This is what legitimates the word “generic”: a truth attests in a world to the property of being of this world. The being of a truth is the genre of being of its being’ (LW, p. 36, translation modified). 23. Such linguistic transformation must occur inasmuch as ‘the process of a truth – puncturing the strata of knowledge harboured by the situation – inscribes itself within the situation as indiscernible infinity, which no thesaurus of established language has the power to designate’ (NN, p. 27). 24. Badiou, ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’, p. 25. 25. As Badiou reminds us, ‘the present is also the same thing as the eternal. It’s a very old idea in the philosophical theory of time. The pure present is something eternal, so a new present signifies something like a new possibility which is eternal’, ‘Truth Procedure in Arts’. 26. ‘Self-belonging annuls itself as soon as it is forced, as soon as it happens. A site is a vanishing term: it appears only in order to disappear’ (LW, p. 391). 27. In point of fact, in his absolute certainty in Neo’s destiny, Morpheus is paradoxically opposed to the very possibility of the aleatory event: in his own words, ‘I do not believe in chance’. 28. Thus the dual levels of Morpheus’s obscure – and fundamentally resurrective – faith in Neo. In Morpheus’s words, ‘after [the first One] died, the Oracle prophesised his return, and that his coming would hail the destruction of the matrix, end the war, bring freedom to our people. That is why there are those of us who have spent our entire lives searching the matrix, looking for him’. Clearly Morpheus’s faith operates simultaneously on an evental level (Neo is ‘the One’, the reincarnation of the event) as much as a subjective level (Neo is the next in line, the new messiah). So too this explains the naïve certainty of the One’s return (as prophesied by the Oracle): as an illegal occurrence of being,

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the very possibility of the event can be drawn only from its having previously occurred. Here we encounter the kernel of Badiou’s evental theory of time, that is, that ‘time – if not coextensive with structure, if not the sensible form of the Law – is intervention itself, thought as the gap between two events’ (BE, p. 210). I will consider Badiou’s conception of time in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 6. 29. Recall that a truth is always the truth of the situation whence it arises. 30. This intermixing of the real with semblance (or being with appearance) is further attested to in Neo’s literal resurrection (after he is ‘killed’ by the state-Agent) by way of an intrusion of the real, namely, Trinity’s kiss, which, whilst confined to the ‘real world’ (Trinity is not ‘wired’ into the matrix), directly affects the world of the matrix, reviving Neo by setting his heart racing. 31. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 63.

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CHAPTER 5

An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze To overturn Platonism is first and foremost to relieve essences of their duties in order to substitute for them events as bursts of singularities. Gilles Deleuze1

5.1

CINEMA DECONDITIONED Film is now, I would say, in a certain way the paradigm of art. Jacques Rancière2

Clearly the status of the event is crucial to Badiou’s thought. As we have seen, Badiou designates the tension integral to his philosophy – the one which runs between being and event, between knowledge and truth – a materialist dialectic. So too have we seen how this dialectic constitutes Badiou’s philosophical maxim, within which we find the three principal strata comprising his thought, namely, the ontological (the thinking of being), the logical (the thinking of appearance) and the subjective (the thinking of truths). Yet these three terms alone are meaningless without a fourth, this being of course the ‘abolished flash’ (LW, p. 144) that is the event. We can discern here a clear conditional divide between the first three terms (ontology, logic, thought) and the fourth (event), insofar as whilst the former are each thought mathematically by virtue of three distinct scientific events – respectively the Cantor-event (set theory), the Grothendieck-event (topos/category theory), and the Cohen-event (genericity and forcing) – mathematics can say nothing of the event itself. On this point Badiou is unequivocal: if real ontology is set up as mathematics by evading the norm of the One, unless this norm is reestablished globally there also ought to be a point wherein the ontological, hence mathematical field, is de-totalized or remains at a dead end. I have named this point the ‘event’. (TO, p. 60)

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Crucial here is the fact that mathematics (ontology) can think the event only to the extent that it can think its own real qua impasse. In other words, mathematics, which is ‘traversed by a principle of errancy and excess that it itself cannot measure’ (HI, p. 20), conceives the event only inasmuch as it axiomatises its own aporetic structure (as we see for example in Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and the work of Easton and Cohen). Thus, while mathematics certainly ensures a space for the event-site (in its aporias), it can say nothing of its constitution (save in mathematically illegal formulas). Contrarily, the event, of which science must remain silent, and on which the idea of truth relies absolutely, is thought under condition of art.3 Being that it is art and art alone that thinks the event qua event, we might go so far as to argue that the real nexus of Badiou’s materialist dialectic lies with the artistic condition. Or to be more precise, the dialectic hinges on the peculiarly subtractive poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, whom Badiou holds up as the exemplary ‘thinker of the event-drama, in the double sense of its appearance-disappearance . . . and of its interpretation which gives it the status of an “acquisition for ever”’ (BE, p. 191).4 Thus Badiou notes immediately after introducing his materialist dialectic that in its principal assertion (‘there are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths’) ‘one will recognise here the style of my master Mallarmé: nothing has taken place but the place, except, on high, perhaps, a Constellation’ (LW, p. 4).5 So the sequence of scientific events (Cantor–Grothendieck–Cohen) principally conditioning Badiou’s philosophy is supplemented by the Mallarmé-event, exceptional in its singular, non-mathematical and axial status. Of course this separation of poetry and mathematics is far from innocent, being on the contrary illustrative of a fundamental antagonism lying at the (voided) interval of art and science.6 Accordingly, within Badiou’s inaesthetics the ‘imperial poem’ – which, we recall, ‘makes truth out of the multiple, conceived as a presence that has come to the limits of language’ (HI, p. 22) – takes pride of place. We might even go so far as to note that, at least prior to Badiou’s recent elaboration of a theory of appearance, it was the expressly literal arts – those arts of the letter: of poetry as much as theatre and the novel – which commanded Badiou’s closest attention, to the extent that, as Jacques Rancière suggests, ‘ultimately only two arts are required in Badiou’s system of the arts: the poem as affirmation, as inscription of a disappearance, and theatre as the site wherein this affirmation turns into mobilization’.7 Beyond these expressly literal arts, art becomes for Badiou arguably less artistic, and

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 109 decidedly less amenable to inaesthetic consideration. Hence dance (as we have seen) falls short of true artistic status (serving instead as its metaphor), while painting – though clearly itself an art – by virtue of its decidedly non-literal form, proves itself somewhat difficult to justify artistically. Of course, this is to say nothing of sculpture or architecture, let alone the myriad other ‘illiterate’ arts. The reason for this artistic demotion arguably lies in the fact that it is plainly more conducive for a philosophy which is ultimately one of letters to consider those arts which themselves find concrete support in the letter.8 This is, however, not to say that artistic inscription itself is directly at issue – on the contrary, it is, as we know, precisely inscription (of a world’s inexistent) which serves as the overriding imperative of art qua truth procedure – but rather to highlight the problem of transmissibility, which might be formulated as follows: how might the il-literate be transmitted by way of the letter?9 Gilles Deleuze for one pointed out that cinema-ideas are ‘irreducible to any communication’, where communication is understood as ‘the transmission and propagation of information’.10 This difficulty is not one Badiou shies from acknowledging. On the contrary, he has been refreshingly forthcoming about the problem the visual arts present to philosophy, admitting (in a pre-Logics interview) that: of all the arts, it’s the one that intimidates me the most. Its intellectual charge is the greatest. In front of great painting, contemporary as well as past, I’m often seized with emotion. So turning to visual art philosophically has always been rather difficult for me. It’s not a feeling of ignorance at all, but a feeling that the mode in which intellectuality proceeds irreducibly into complex and powerful sensory forms . . . really, painting intimidates me.11

With this in mind we might provisionally conclude that the apparent hegemony of the ‘literal arts’ in Badiou’s inaesthetics is ultimately one of convenience, resulting as it does from the simple fact that the il-literate consistently fails to render a wholly – perhaps even partially – transmissible knowledge.12 Yet, however problematic it may be to express literally, painting, as we have seen, is for Badiou clearly an art, whereas cinema remains – indeed must remain – artistically unclear. Nor can we escape the fact that Badiou’s own writings on film are distinguished foremost by a deep ambivalence. This can easily be observed on a rhetorical level, in his liberal use of pejorative (or, at best, equivocal) terminology. Here I refer less to his penchant for drawing on obviously loaded words (‘contaminated’, ‘impure’,

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‘inconsistent’, ‘parasitic’, and so on) than to his reliance on ostensibly ‘safe’ terms such as ‘liking’, ‘fable’ and ‘democracy’. We have already discussed the unfortunate classicist (as opposed to inaesthetic) connotations of the word ‘liking’, implying as it does a mere ‘“imaginarization” of truth’ (HI, p. 4) rather than any real truth-effect. So too the word ‘fable’ poses a similar problem. Indeed, in ‘Dialectiques de la fable’ Badiou happily points out how he grants ‘a certain primacy to the fable, to the narration, to that exercise which is after all fundamental to social life: describing a film’ (DF, p. 121). Why – outside of his conspicuous jump from eidos to muthos, or from Plato to Aristotle13 – should this be surprising? Because, in Badiou’s words, ‘a ‘fable’ is that part of a narrative that, so far as we are concerned, fails to touch on any real, unless it be by virtue of that invisible and indirectly accessible residue sticking to every obvious imaginary’ (SP, p. 4). We can thus read Badiou’s privileging of the fable as either another way of writing off (artistically speaking) cinema as being incapable of offering anything more than an impotent ‘imaginarization of truth’, free from any real content, or, as I have already argued, as a means of articulating – if only allegorically – how the real might only be grasped in semblance. A further difficulty lies with Badiou’s use of the word ‘democracy’ – recall that his most recent (and, for that matter, positive) cinematic text is titled ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’ – inasmuch as Badiou has garnered a certain degree of infamy for his contention that ‘the enemy today is not called Empire or Capital. It is called Democracy’.14 Or again, as Badiou states in his Handbook of Inaesthetics (thus in explicit reference to art as a truth-condition), ‘our times are worth more than the label on which they pride themselves: “democracy”’ (HI, p. 15). Needless to say, the ‘democracy’ Badiou rails against here and elsewhere is effectively synonymous with, on the one hand, the consensual (and fundamentally truthless) rule of opinion – what Badiou designates ‘democratic’ materialism – and, on the other, that ‘mediocre political appendage, capitalo-parliamentarianism’, neither of which have much to do with the otherwise ‘fine word “democracy”’ (SP, p. 7). ‘Genuine democracy’, on the contrary, signifies for Badiou ‘equality in the face of the Idea, the political Idea’ (MS, pp. 91–2). Which is why Badiou immediately ameliorates his words on ‘democratic cinema’ by linking ‘activist democracy’ with ‘communism’ (CD, p. 2), or more precisely, ‘generic communism’, being Badiou’s name for any politics whose central axiom is nothing less than unqualified equality.15 We might then suppose a certain

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 111 equivalence in Badiou’s vocabulary between democracy and communism inasmuch as ‘the communist hypothesis’ is nothing other than ‘a pure Idea of equality’ (MS, p. 100). That said, we should bear in mind how Badiou equally holds as an ‘essential point’ that, historically, ‘the communist hypothesis in no way coincided with the “democratic” hypothesis that would lead to present-day parliamentarianism. It subsumes a different history and different events’ (MS, pp. 100–1). Moreover, cinema’s ‘democratic’ nature clearly chimes with the circulation of what already is (as opposed to what happens), as is evidenced in its impure status (whereby cinema re-presents Ideas first taken from other arts while at the same time figuring their ‘active democratisation’), and thereby reinforces its seemingly non-artistic (or non-evental) position. Communist or not, the fact remains that the signifier ‘democracy’, even when Badiou employs it positively, necessarily carries a sting in its tail. Equivocation aside, Badiou clearly recognises cinema to have been an art, his frequent citing of the ‘thinking cinema’ of Griffith, Welles, Chaplin, Murnau, Lang and Eisenstein (as much as Godard, Kiarostami, Visconti, Straub, Oliveira . . .) amply attesting to this fact. More than this, cinema’s artistic status would seem to have been confirmed far in advance of Badiou’s own inaesthetic incursions, inasmuch as film has clearly served to condition the philosophy of others, most notably that of Gilles Deleuze. As Badiou points out: however supple [Deleuze’s] individual film descriptions may be in their own right, this malleability seems nevertheless to function in philosophy’s favour, rather than to fashion, in any way whatsoever, a simple critical judgement that film enthusiasts could draw on to enhance the authority of their opinions. (D, pp. 15–16)

Deleuze’s apprehension of film’s intraphilosophical effects would thus seem at first glance an absolutely inaesthetic operation (this being accordingly incongruous to any aphilosophical thinking of cinema – namely, any other consideration of cinema whatsoever – which simply fall into the thoughtless and self-interested realm of opiniatry). And yet Badiou proceeds to isolate Deleuze’s conceptual understanding of cinema as the primary example of Deleuze’s ‘monotonous’ production of concepts, insofar as his two cinema books propose in the end ‘a creative repetition of concepts and not an apprehension of the cinematic art as such’ (D, p. 16).16 Which is to say that those concepts Deleuze so assiduously plucks from cinema are in fact – at least on Badiou’s account – not so much found, as

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re-found.17 Thus the Deleuzian screen – mediated as it is by the thought of Badiou – finds itself stripped of its genitive powers, revealing a space through which the former deploys concepts which, whilst certainly immanent to cinema, are themselves anterior in nature. Needless to say, this is wholly in keeping with Badiou’s conception of cinema as an ‘impure’ art. By thus attesting to the (conceptually as much as manifestly) representative nature of cinema Badiou implicitly determines film to not in fact condition Deleuze’s philosophy: the concept is not born of cinema, rather, it passes through (or is borne by) the works themselves. As Badiou explains, in Deleuze’s philosophy: concepts, which are never ‘concepts-of’, are only attached to the initial concrete case in their movement and not in what they give to be thought. This is why, in the volumes on the cinema, what one learns concerns the Deleuzian theory of movement and time, and the cinema gradually becomes neutralized and forgotten. (D, p. 16)18

In thus demoting Deleuze’s ‘philosophical cinema’ to a mere cinema of philosophy we might be forgiven for supposing that Badiou has effectively ‘deconditioned’ film, thereby cementing its status as an art ‘beneath’ art. Before we jump to such a conclusion, however, given the purportedly transitory-repetitious nature of these concepts, we would do well to consider precisely what it is that constitutes Deleuze’s theory of movement and time. Moreover, given the fact that Badiou appropriates Deleuze’s various theses on movement (immobile, false, global, etc.) in his own cinematographic writings, we should examine how these concepts are (implicitly or explicitly) rethought in Badiou’s own philosophy. Or again, we know that Badiou effectively ‘borrows’ the movement-image from Deleuze, but in what form precisely? And what can we say of the time-image? 5.2

THE WHOLE PROBLEM

We have in effect already been treated to much of Badiou’s reconceptualisation of the movement-image in our brief consideration of the global and the local movements in Chapter 2. In point of fact, were we to confine ourselves at this stage to the level of appearance, Badiou’s cinema would seem to remain for the most part a decidedly Deleuzian edifice, the peculiar twist or torsion here being that this ‘Deleuze’ is a distinctly Badiouian ‘Deleuze’. Or to be more precise, Badiou’s ‘Deleuze’ is a ‘Platonised’ Deleuze, a Deleuze subjected to

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 113 Platonic mediation in the guise of the impure, the eternal and the Ideal, and who is at the same time divorced of each and every transcendental supposition (the Whole, the Open, Duration, Relation, etc.). This Platonised Deleuze is, of course, in no way limited to the cinematic case, Badiou explicitly holding Deleuze’s entire philosophy to be ‘fundamentally a Platonism with a different accentuation’ (D, p. 26). Further, Badiou clearly has no interest in what is after all the real aim of Deleuze’s cinematographic analysis, namely, taxonomy, both cinema books being at base an ‘attempt at the classification of images and signs’ (C1, p. xix) to which cinema gives rise. Rather, Badiou extracts from Deleuze’s cinema books only those elements which can be seen to complement his own thought, and, as Badiou is at pains to point out, the sign has no place in his philosophy.19 With this in mind, in what follows I will focus my attention upon the elementary forms of the movement and time-images, leaving aside their manifold differentiations (into noosigns, lectosigns, onirosigns, and the like). I have noted that Badiou’s own conceptualisation of cinema is effectively limited to a variation of the movement-image. In order to explain this position we need first remind ourselves of what exactly the Deleuzian movement-image is. Two points immediately present themselves. First, the movement-image peculiar to cinema is, rather obviously, that which presents movement in image. In Deleuze’s words, ‘cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image’ (C1, p. 2). Second, the movement-image provides an indirect image of time, or again, it implies – as opposed to directly presents – time. Which is to say that, with the movement-image, time is wholly subordinated to movement. Clearly these points bear some investigation. We know that at its most basic level the movement-image expresses on the one hand relations between the basic parts constitutive of the whole – namely the equidistant intervals separating each ‘immobile section’ or frame from the next – and on the other the relation of the whole to the complex arrangement of its parts. Which is to say, the two sides of the movement-image are the local and the global movements. Or at least this is how Badiou filters Deleuze’s conception of the movement-image. However, on Deleuze’s (by way of Bergson’s) account, the whole means something far grander than a mere finite (or, for that matter, infinite) set. On the contrary, the Bergsonian whole to which Deleuze subscribes, namely the ‘OneAll’, is not a closed but an ‘open’ set, a paradoxically creative totality – ‘an indivisible continuity’20 – the nature of which ‘is to change

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constantly, or to give rise to something new’ (C1, p. 10). But what is this ever-changing open whole actually the whole of? In a word, it is the set of all the differences and relations, past and present, that characterise what is (inasmuch as what is is necessarily complicated with everything that was). The whole is thus equally the unity of real time qua duration, where duration effectively figures as ‘the being of time’ (D, p. 61), or ‘pure time’ wholly divorced from its arbitrary chronologisation. As Deleuze succinctly puts it, ‘we can say of duration itself or of time, that it is the whole of relations’ (C1, p. 10). Yet the parts of the whole remain ‘closed’ sets, and to this effect present a mundane or ‘commonsense’ image of time (as entirely subordinated to space). It is for this reason that Henri Bergson derisorily refers to the ‘artificial’ vision of an arbitrarily spatialised time as a fundamentally ‘cinematographic illusion’.21 Because, cinematically speaking, while the whole expresses the being of time (Duration), its parts – those individual frames or immobile cuts – nevertheless reinforce an ‘illusory’ mechanised time, a time which has been compartmentalised, quantified, bastardised. Pace Bergson, Deleuze holds that cinema has from the first equally expressed – if indirectly – both the open whole and its parts. Indeed, the Deleuzian movement-image is conceived precisely as a ‘mobile slice’ of duration. This means that the movement-image, according to Deleuze, extends simultaneously in two contrary directions, the one toward the parts which express the open whole, and the other towards the open whole which expresses its parts. The point of course being that for Deleuze each and every local point is pregnant with the whole (and vice versa).22 Or again, if duration unfolds itself in closed sets, so too closed sets enfold duration.23 According to Deleuze, it is precisely this conception of movement which is on offer in cinema. The frame (qua ‘immobile cut’), for example, when isolated or paused – when it delimits a closed set apparently devoid of movement – allows us to ‘approach the ideal limit of a space free of [duration], within which motion is conceived of as a succession of instantaneous slices of space regulated through an abstract time’.24 However, the frame is itself equally framed (that is, spatially delimited), which, as we have seen, is as much an exclusive as an inclusive gesture. We have previously observed this all-important excluded content as the ‘out-of-field’ and equated it (alongside the cut) with the void proper to cinema. Deleuze, however, further differentiates between a ‘relative’ and an ‘absolute’ out-of-field, the former being the logical continuation of the image (or what is immediately cut or

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 115 subtracted from the frame), while the latter figures ‘a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogenous space and time’ (C1, p. 18), namely, Duration itself. The shot on the other hand, being of course constituted of frames (and equally framed), is an image which endures in time, and as such ‘translates the relative movement of the immobile cut while expressing the absolute movement of the mobile cut of [duration]’.25 Or as Deleuze puts it: the shot, of whatever kind, always has . . . two aspects: it presents modifications of a relative position in a set or some sets. It expresses absolute changes in a whole or in the whole. The shot in general has one face turned towards the set, the modifications of whose parts it translates, and another face turned towards the whole, of which it expresses the – or at least a – change. (C1, p. 21)

To this effect ‘the shot is the movement-image’ (C1, p. 22). So too is the shot the intermediary between the frame and the final term of our filmic troika, namely, montage, which is very simply ‘the determination of the whole’ (C1, p. 30). We should keep in mind here the strict equivalence of montage and the global movement: as Deleuze (following Eisenstein) notes, ‘montage is the whole of the film, the Idea’ (C1, p. 30). Which is to say that montage is the final ‘composition, the assemblage of movement-images as constituting an indirect image of time’ (C1, p. 31). In sum, frame, shot and montage each point equally towards the whole and its parts: the frame is at once an immobile section and testifies to duration (in the out-of-field); the shot is literally the movement-image, presenting at once ‘the relationship between parts and . . . the state of the whole’ (C1, p. 20); and montage is equally the composition of parts (or the assemblage of movement-images) and ‘the determination of the whole’. It is in this manner that montage (qua global movement), which is the film itself, can finally present an indirect image of time, a time which is ‘no longer measured by movement, but is itself the number or measure of movement’ (C2, pp. 259–60).26 Badiou for his part sides with Lacan and his contention that that ‘there is no whole, nothing is whole’,27 rejecting the notion of the OneAll as mathematically inconsistent and philosophically transcendent. Indeed, in direct contrast to Deleuze’s famous contention that an ‘inversion’ of Platonism is equally an overturning of transcendence, Badiou holds that ‘in order to have done with transcendence, it is necessary to follow the thread of the multiple-without-oneness’

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(TW, p. 80). So too Badiou dismisses Deleuze’s opposition of open to closed sets (not to mention his decidedly abstract conception of ‘infinity’) as pre-Cantorian and hence anachronistic, insofar as a set is precisely ‘that neutral-multiple which is originally subtracted from both openness and closure’ (TW, p. 72). It is precisely for these reasons that Badiou’s cinema finds its limit in the global movement, whereas Deleuze carries on to extrapolate this movement onto a more ‘fundamental’ conception of the open whole. Thus we arrive at a preliminary ‘Badiouian’ definition of cinema: cinema presents movement-images subtracted from any thought of the whole. Nonetheless, Deleuze’s conception of cinema as simultaneously expressing an open whole and its closed sets (thereby providing an indirect image of time) would seem to be complemented by Badiou’s own elaboration of the twentieth century’s didactico-romantic approach to art, which was, in the final analysis, an epic – if ultimately unsuccessful – attempt at having done with romanticism. Indeed, this period bore witness to art’s becoming ‘a question of movement, of what we get to rather than the abolition of this “getting to”’, as art became nothing more than ‘the trace of its own action’.28 To explain, we know that Badiou designates romanticism – in its holding art as the realisation of the sublime descent of the infinite Idea into the finite work – to be the principal enemy of any real materialism. Thus, as we have seen, the paradox of a truly materialist (or ‘atheistic’) conception of art lies in its being able to think the infinite as in – or immanent to – finitude. Or again, real art must be able to think the infinite as in-finite. As we have seen already, this is a difficult problem indeed. We have just now witnessed the Deleuzian answer, namely, considering montage as expressing how ‘the whole contracts into a minimum movement of the variable present and dilates into a corresponding form of the infinite’.29 So too have we seen how, in subsuming the infinite under the whole, Deleuze’s solution necessarily falls short of its materialist mark. On this point Deleuze remains romantic through and through. Badiou for his part, in a move which resonates strongly with Deleuze’s, explicates how the twentieth century tried to find its answer by simply ‘acting as if the infinite were nothing but the finite, once the latter is conceived not in its objective finitude, but in the act from whence it arises’ (TC, p. 155). The key to comprehending twentieth century art, Badiou tells us, lies in understanding how the infinite is nothing but a qualitative determination of the finite, or again, how the infinite is not something to be captured in form, but rather ‘transits through form’ (TC, p. 155).

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 117 This is a complicated movement to say the least. In order to think such infinity-in-finitude Badiou finds recourse to the preeminent thinker of the whole, Hegel, who first tells us that ‘finitude and infinity . . . each already has in it the moment of the other’.30 In reaching this position, Hegel first acknowledges that the finite is, in its concrete reality, always a movement (or becoming), albeit one ruled by repetition, for ‘the finite is what comes out of itself only in order to remain within itself’, or again, ‘the finite is what surpasses within itself’ (TC, p. 157).31 While the result of this process exemplifies the ‘bad infinite’ (the infinite of sterile repetition, the insistence of the Same), when thought in its very act such ‘surpassing’ reveals its own creative essence, which is to say that ‘there is something really infinite in the “bad infinite”, namely the act of self-surpassing, provided one manages to separate it from repetition’ (TC, p. 158). The fundamentality of this insight cannot be overstated: The infinite as pure creation is thereby obtained by taking hold of that which makes the obdurate activity of surpassing count ‘in itself’, and not by virtue of subsequent repetitions. It is this immanent creative power, this indestructible capacity to overstep boundaries, which is the infinite as quality of the finite. (TC, p. 158)

Under its didactico-romantic banner, the art of the twentieth century attempted to make perceptible this infinity-in-finitude by way of its privileging of the artistic act over the result (the work itself). As Badiou puts it: ideally, the twentieth-century artwork is nothing other than the visibility of its own act. This is the sense in which it overcomes the romantic pathos of the descent of the infinite into the finite body of the work . . . because the artwork has nothing infinite to show, save its own active finitude. (TC, p. 159)

In holding that ‘the act, as the intense power of beginning, can only be thought in the present’ (TC, p. 136), twentieth-century art – specifically that of the avant-gardes – charged itself with forcing the recognition of a pure present of art, a present cut off from its past as much as from its future. We would, however, be wrong to equate this ‘pure present’ with the eternal present of a truth procedure, inasmuch as art in this sense is ‘no longer a production of eternity’ (TC, p. 134), but rather a singular point of creative intensity: abrupt, disconnected, entirely given over to the present (which must itself be constantly surpassed), such art finds itself caught in the ‘suicidal chimera’ (TC, p. 136) of permanent revolution. Moreover, the problem, as Badiou

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is quick to point out, now becomes that of the trace: ‘if our only infinite resource is to be found in pure activity, what is the trace of this quality which would allow it visibly to separate itself from repetition?’ (TC, p. 159). Which is to say, how to isolate the act from its result? The answer, Badiou tells us, lies in formalisation, where ‘form’ must of course be understood in its Platonic sense, as ‘an Idea as given in its material index, a singularity that can only be activated in the real grip of an act’ (TC, pp. 159–60). Simply, artistic formalisation is here nothing other than the coupling of the work to the real of its act. It is precisely in this manner that the artists of the twentieth century sought to destine the infinite to the finite. While such formalisation no doubt goes some way towards overcoming the romantic pathos of the infinite descent, it nonetheless fails the test of thinking change as such (or again, it fails to truly think). For this thought of infinity-in-finitude – even when the act is successfully subtracted from its result – is equally the thought of continuity, of uninterrupted becoming, of revolution in the sense Lacan infamously gave the term (that is, as ‘going around in circles’). Even if we assume the synonymity of the act and the event – and, as we know, the event is ‘a pure cut in becoming’ (LW, p. 384) that configures a space in which ‘finite form can be equivalent to an infinite opening’ (TC, p. 155) – such a conception of art nevertheless finds itself limited to the horizon of the event (as distinct from the event’s horizon). This is because it restricts itself to the pure present of the act (the opening of the event) and thereby remains blissfully ignorant of its true consequences (or what the event opens up, namely, the possibility of a new artistic truth). For the ‘infinite opening’ of the event is a not only a spatial but moreover a temporal opening, a real beginning which demands a thought far in excess of the happening of a static present. In reducing art to a pure present of infinite intensity (but not of infinite extensionality), the question of infinity is effectively ripped away from that of eternity, which, as we have seen, is fundamental to any truly post-romantic conception of in-finitude. On the contrary, what we need to think is an extensive or eternal present, namely, a present – a true contemporaneity – born in an event, which stretches on to infinity. Thus the artistic question finds itself properly temporalised, shifting from a problem concerning the finite and the infinite to one lying between the instant and eternity, the absolutely intensive and the absolutely extensive, the instantaneous act and its eternal truth which ‘presents us with the present’ (LW, p. 384).

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 119 It is for this precise reason that Badiou holds the art of the twentieth century to have ‘inscribed itself paradigmatically between dance and cinema’ (TC, p. 160). For dance is itself nothing but its act – it is ‘the paradigm of a vanishing art’ (TC, p. 159) – while cinema offers (as Benjamin famously expounded) an absolute reproducibility. Simply, if dance is the figure of the instant which opens onto eternity – this being precisely why dance serves as a metaphor for thought – then cinema is the figure of eternity played out in instants. Thus, between dance as pure act and cinema as pure repetition: lies the question of what a non-religious art could be. An art in which the infinite is drawn from nothing besides the effects of the act – real effects of what at first is only established as a repetition. An art of formalization rather than of the work. (TC, p. 160)

The artistic objective can thus be seen to be that of surpassing repetition in-itself, that is, of delineating the course of newness in the very act of repetition – the gradual accretion of a new subject-body being fundamentally a repetitious programme, an interminable and aleatory seeking out of connections to a single and same trace – so as to establish the ground for a new eternal present. Before moving on it should be pointed out that even art’s being inscribed between dance and cinema in no way guarantees cinema any actual artistic status. In fact, inasmuch as we know that for Badiou ‘dance is not an art’ – being rather ‘the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body’ (HI, p. 69) – it seems almost inevitable that we understand cinema as, like dance, the sign of the possibility of the infinite as inscribed in the finite. Indeed, what better dramatises the in-finite as that which ‘surpasses within itself’ than cinema, a medium whose basic operation (the local movement) involves the infinite revolution of the Same (the finite, immobile frame) ‘surpassing itself’ in the direction of the Other (the mobile or movementimage) only to return to the Same (the movement is false, the image is in truth immobile)?32 All this would, of course, mean that cinema merely serves an enunciative function, declaring as it does the possibility of other truly formalisable arts (this being of course one of the ways we might understand cinema as an ‘impure’ art). How then to overcome this conception? In effect, following Badiou’s own formula, cinema must impurify the Idea proper to dance. Or to give it a Deleuzian accentuation, cinema must conceive itself in terms of its becoming-dance.33 Simply, cinema must come to think the event, not simply as narrative postulate (as we saw in The Matrix), but as

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integral to its apparent constitution (as much as to its constitutive appearance). To think cinema’s becoming-dance, however, we must, perhaps paradoxically, turn from the question of movement to that of time. For it is in the question of time that we find the true thought of the event. 5.3

A TIMELESS-IMAGE? Philosophy’s sole aim is to become worthy of the event. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari34

We have noted that Badiou’s consideration of the mechanics of cinema is effectively limited to a certain reconceptualisation of the movementimage. So what becomes of the famous time-image? Deleuze holds that the time-image supersedes the ‘classical’ movement-image, coming to prominence after the Second World War – in strict accord with the apparent collapse of the sensory-motor schema of actionreaction (which had served to underscore the movement-image) – in the sudden proliferation of ‘situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe’ (C1, p. xi). The earliest (Western) instances of the time-image are accordingly found in the ‘purely optical’ situations littering Italian neorealism, wherein questions of action and reaction are seemingly neutralised by the introduction of spaces of pure passivity, of absolute immobility. According to Deleuze, these impotent spaces – what, following Pascal Augé, he calls ‘any-space-whatevers’ – not only designate a definitive rupture with the logic of reaction (the sensorymotor schema), but also serve to open a window onto time itself. For in stark contrast to the movement-image, the fully fledged time-image is an image directly imbued with duration, a point at which ‘Time, “a bit of pure time”, rises to the surface of the screen’.35 The time-image thus effectively inverts the movement-image, inasmuch as with the birth of the time-image movement finds itself suddenly subordinated to time, a time which ‘appears in itself and itself gives rise to false movements’ (C2, p. xii). Of immediate concern to us is the fact that, with the time-image, the global movement takes on a new function: as Deleuze notes, in the modern cinema of the time-image, ‘montage doesn’t necessarily vanish, but it plays a different role, becomes what Lapoujade calls “montrage”’.36 Moreover, with the time-image, the open whole – which, we recall, was extrapolated from the global movement – ‘undergoes a mutation’: the whole now ‘ceases to be the

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 121 One-Being, in order to become the constitutive “and” of things, the constitutive between-two of images’ (C2, p. 174). No longer is the question that of the association of images, but rather becomes that of the interstice, of the space between images, ‘a spacing which means that each image is plucked from the void and falls back into it’ (C2, p. 173). The modern cinema of the time-image thus ‘does away with all cinema of the One’ (C2, p. 174) in favour of a cinema of the Oneless – of the void – which Deleuze, invoking Blanchot, designates the Outside: whereas the whole was the open, it is now the outside, the proper thought of which – as we earlier anticipated – lies with the cut. Simply, with the time-image, ‘the fissure has become primary’ (C2, p. 174). Which is precisely why post-war cinema finds its hallmark in ‘irrational cuts and incommensurable relations between images’,37 inducing entirely false continuities, false movements. Conceptually, the time-image presupposes that the actual image and its virtual counterpart – the ‘virtual’ here being effectively another way of saying duration38 – enter into an absolute relation: ‘an image which is double-sided, mutual, both actual and virtual, must be constituted’ (C2, p. 262). The time-image is then a ‘crystal’, a point in which ‘the actual image and its virtual image crystallize’,39 where they become indiscernible from one another in a system of ‘perpetual exchange’ (C2, p. 262). To explain, Deleuze holds that every multiplicity is composed of actual and virtual elements. This division corresponds to the Bergsonian thesis of the ‘splitting’ of time, being the manner by which time ‘splits into two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past’ (C2, p. 79). It is in the crystal, in the cohesion of the actual – which is precisely the eternal ‘passing of the present’40 – and the virtual, that we literally see this splitting and thus bear witness to ‘the perpetual foundation of time, non-chronological time’ (C2, p. 79), namely, Duration. As Deleuze succinctly puts it: what we see in the crystal is no longer the empirical progression of time as succession of presents, nor its indirect representation as interval or whole; it is its direct presentation, its constitutive splitting in two in a present which is passing and a past which is preserved . . . It is time itself which arises in the crystal, and which is constantly recommencing its splitting in two without completing it, since the indiscernible exchange is always renewed and reproduced. (C2, p. 262, translation modified)

Deleuze contends that it is the crystal that we see in modern cinema, for example in the ‘disconnected and fragmented image’ (C2, p. 172)

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of Bresson, or in Resnais’s decidedly topological spaces, in which various incommensurable pasts interweave in a single and same present. So what does all this mean for Badiou? For one thing, recalling our filmic ontology from Chapter 3, we can see that the shift from the movement-image to the time-image effectively details the move from one void to another, that is, from the void external to the film to its internal void, from the out-of-field to the cut itself. To be more precise, the jump from the movement-image to the time-image denotes a shift from the ‘inside outside’ of the film (the whole being the very idea of inside, of the absolute – and fundamentally paradoxical – containment of the One-All) to the ‘outside inside’ of the film (qua cut). What exactly do these voids – the ‘inside outside’ and the ‘outside inside’ – constitute? Of course for Deleuze they each designate, either directly or indirectly, something of the One (Duration, Relation, the Open . . .). But so too we have seen how Badiou abandons all thought of the One in the face of the pure multiple. Which is to say that Badiou cannot abide the virtual, for, in fabricating the One, it constitutes a transcendence, a ‘ground’ for the actual. Simply, Badiou’s materialist dialectic holds that there is only the actual, which is without end, and whose ground is void.41 Clearly, in moving from the Deleuzian to the Badiouian screen, we pass from the One-void to the voided-One, or again, from (the) everything to (the) nothing. So what would all this entail for a Badiouian revision of the time-image? Precisely this: that ‘modern cinema’ – which Badiou for the most part conflates with an increasingly rare beast, namely ‘anti-narrative, anti-representational cinema’42 – is profoundly antistatist. Which is equally to say that modern cinema has an inherently political bent (something Film Theory recognised only too well). If modern cinema is for Deleuze defined first and foremost by the direct presentation of time, it is (or at least should be) contrarily for Badiou essentially an interminable attempt at an internal subversion, a constant struggle to overthrow its own arbitrarily imposed order, to invert the prevailing transcendental (qua statist) regime, in which the cut inexists. Or again, modern cinema’s true aim can only be to destroy the consistency of the global movement. Which means, this time in more ‘evental’ terms, ‘true cinema’ is that which measures the immeasurable – recall that for Badiou ‘the global movement is false because no measure is adequate for it’ (HI, p. 81), being essentially an infinitely complex system of relations – by bringing forth its void. This convocation of the void has, I believe, significant ramifications

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 123 for the Deleuzian conception of cinema, with regard to the questions of both space and time. First to the question of space, which revolves around the historically indexed collapse of the sensory-motor schema and the subsequent proliferation of ‘any-space-whatevers’, namely, spaces which ‘exist at a maximum distance from the domain of conventionally deliberate action’.43 According to Deleuze, the any-space-whatever is ‘not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places’. Rather: it is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. (C1, p. 113)

However – as is exemplary in the case of Antonioni, who, let us not forget, Deleuze contends pushes the any-space-whatever ‘as far as the void’ (C1, p. 123) – the any-space-whatever equally delineates ‘an amorphous set which has eliminated that which happened and acted in it. It is an exhaustion or a disappearing’ (C1, p. 123). In this reading the any-space-whatever constitutes something like an absolute subtraction or evacuation. Consequently Deleuze holds there are two phases of the any-space-whatever, a state of deconnection and a state of emptiness. Moreover: these two states are always implied in each other, and we can only say that the one is ‘before’ and the other ‘after’. The any-spacewhatever retains one and the same nature: it no longer has coordinates, it is a pure potential. (C2, p. 123)

The ‘pure’ any-space-whatever would thus be simultaneously a state of absolute de-relation (or un-binding) and of absolute subtraction. Needless to say, such an absolutely exhausted space is precisely what Badiou conceptualises as the state of being, thought in its austerity, and which is after all nothing but pure potential (recall everything that is is woven from the void).44 To this effect the anyspace-whatever would in fact be – contra Deleuze – ‘in all times, in all places’, inasmuch as such universality is perhaps the defining characteristic of the void. This voided space, however, nonetheless appears, inasmuch as appearing is a fundamental law of the moving image (suffice to recall our earlier example of Beckett’s Film). As I will argue, it is in this precise sense that modern cinema can be seen to attempt to draw forth its own being in its appearing (which is of course the very formula of the event).

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Incidentally, this gives us pause to identify Italian neorealism as an artistic sequence proper to cinema. For in rejecting Deleuze’s philosophy of the time-image – yet conceding that he isolates a radical rupture in cinema (with regard to the filmic presentation of time and space) – we can argue his historical indexing of the birth of modern cinema to the Second World War to be in truth an evental indexation, born not in the war itself but rather in the Rossellini-event that sparked a new artistic subject, retroactively designated neorealism.45 Indeed, it is arguably for this reason – namely, neorealism’s constituting a generic truth procedure – that there remains to this day no satisfactory definition of neorealism, it being variously defined as an aesthetic sequence (seeking the beauty in the banal), a moral sequence (expressing the movement from the personal or particular to the universal), a realist sequence (being committed to a certain reportage), a formal sequence (being defined by distinct formal traits), and so on. No one realised this better than André Bazin, who immediately recognised the generic nature of this sequence which ‘by definition rejects analysis, whether political, moral, psychological, logical, or social, of the characters and actions. [Neorealism] looks on reality as a whole, not incomprehensible, certainly, but inseparably one’ (WC2, p. 97). In constituting a generic set, neorealist films cannot be categorised or grounded in any particular logic, which is why Bazin can say, writing in 1955, that ‘neorealism as such does not exist’ (WC2, p. 99). Rather, in accordance with the logic of a subjective truth procedure, neorealism will have existed. Neorealism to one side, it is useful to reconsider Deleuze’s historical indexation of the time-image in light of what Badiou has called the ‘passion for the real’. For we might as easily consider the sudden proliferation of cinematic any-space-whatevers (the supposed ‘birth’ of the time-image) as less a reaction to the war than a symptom of the very passion animating it, a passion which, we recall, has both a destructive and a subtractive face. Briefly, the destructive tendency treats the real as identity and as such involves purification tout court, violently hammering out semblance to arrive at the ‘pure thing’, while the subtractive approach contrarily treats the real from the first as a gap and attempts to measure this ‘minimal difference’: it is, as Badiou puts it, the ‘art of obtaining the subtlest and most durable results, not through an aggressive posture with regard to inherited forms, but through arrangements that place these forms at the edge of the void, in a network of cuts and disappearances’ (TC, p. 132). If the destructive tendency can be most obviously identified with

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 125 the century’s tumultuous political events (such as the Second World War), then the subtractive passion finds its most perfect articulation in the great artistic works of the century. In point of fact, Badiou argues the very essence of the subtractive approach is located in Malevich’s 1918 painting White on White, where both colour and form are sacrificed to leave only a ‘geometrical allusion’ which ultimately serves to provide ‘the support for the abstract difference of ground and form, and above all, the null difference between white and white, the null difference of the Same’ (TC, p. 55). Of course, this ‘abstract difference’ which places forms ‘at the edge of the void’ is precisely what we see in cinema all the time, which is itself at base a subtractive art (its principle is that of the cut; the local movement subtracts the image from itself, etc.). To register cinema’s affinity with the subtractive orientation one need only compare Badiou’s remarks concerning Malevich to those of Claude Ollier, who, in his discussion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Eclipse (1962) – a discussion cited by Deleuze in his explication of the any-space-whatever – marvels at how Antonioni’s: very geometric framing, composed entirely of parallels and diagonals, pre-exists [the characters]; and the fixity of this system markedly suggests a spatial discontinuity, as if the character, still invisible yet made present by his voice or the noise of his footsteps, finds himself in an empty space [une zone de vide], a ‘waste’ ground, white on white, impossible to film. In this virtual and occasionally discontinuous space, objects in their broadest sense – things – acquire a purely ‘excessive’ importance.46

Put simply, my contention is that modern cinema is less the result of the collapse of the sensory-motor schema in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War than the realisation of cinema’s inherent subtractive potential. If poetry, in directing language toward the void, displays the generic truth of presentation qua presentation, then we can see that cinema’s first power lies in its expressing appearance as appearance, or appearance brought to the edge of what appears, displaying the minimal difference between appearance and inappearance (as we saw, for example, in Beckett’s Film). Needless to say, what separates cinema’s power from that of painting (which also directs image toward the void) is the fact that cinema is equally a temporal art, one that ‘transforms time into perception’ (CD, p. 3). Simply, cinema’s power of appearance is intricately entwined with the question of time, in particular the time of an ‘eternal present’. This leads us rather nicely to our second port of call: time. The

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problem here lies in the fact that the time of which Deleuze speaks (duration) must, in its ultimate unicity, be understood as properly atemporal, static, immobile. For, as Badiou points out, ‘pure duration, the great total past that is one with the virtual, cannot be qualified as temporal because it is the being of time, its univocal designation according to the One’ (D, p. 62). This is of course to say that the time-image, in drawing forth ‘a piece of pure time’, is in truth a point of detemporalisation, less a presentation than a radical withdrawal of time: the true Deleuzian time-image is, properly speaking, a timeless-image. Our problem, in considering cinema as a temporal art, thus becomes that of retemporalising the image. Our contention will be the following: cinema does not simply (directly or indirectly) present time: rather, cinema – or more precisely, some cinema, cinema attuned to its own unique and specific possibilities – actively creates time. To establish this we require a new theory of time, an actual time, divorced from all virtuality, from all thought of the One. Happily for us, this is precisely what Badiou offers. Indeed, as we have seen, Badiou conceives of time not in terms of continuity but of discontinuity: his is an evental time, a time conceived as ‘the gap between two events’ (BE, p. 210). Of course, this time is equally the birth of time and its forgetting in the promise of eternity, in the eternal promise of the to-come of a truth. For truth is ultimately ‘the forgetting of time itself: the moment when we live as if time (this time) had never existed’, when we live ‘as if we were immortal’ (D, p. 65). Hence an event is precisely what interrupts time to introduce a new time, to which Badiou gives the name ‘eternal present’. As Badiou puts it: the event extracts from one time the possibility of an other time. This other time, whose materiality envelops the consequences of the event, deserves the name of new present. The event is neither past nor future. It presents us with the present. (LW, p. 384)47

Simply, every truth constitutes a new time, a new eternal present, which is the ‘time of truth’, for ‘what within time is constituted as truth both marks a new time and, strictly speaking, exceeds the singularity of its time’:48 truths endure indefinitely, infinitely. Armed with this evental theory of time we can now come full circle, returning to the idea of cinema’s being, in its exhibition of any-space-whatevers, an intrinsically subtractive medium, so as to demonstrate how Badiou’s cinema is, for all that, fundamentally a Deleuzianism ‘with a different accentuation’. For in the final

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 127 analysis, what (some) cinema does is present the Idea of eternity. Not only does real cinema direct the image toward the void to express the minimal difference between appearing and inappearing (in the any-space-whatever), moreover, it seeks to present the very time of truth. Technically, we locate this presentation through our reconceptualisation – our materialisation – of the any-space-whatever and the crystal. This is, of course, to say that cinema is truly an evental art, not only in the sense that it convokes its being in its appearance – which is, after all, the very essence of the Deleuzian time-image (inasmuch as the crystal implicates the virtual in the actual) – but also insofar as it paradoxically presents this very convocation as the essence of its appearance. Or again, cinema’s role is not simply that of showing how ‘its images only bear witness to the real inasmuch as they are manifestly images’ (DF, p. 129), but also of showing that this real is precisely appearance itself, or rather, the real come to appearance (qua event). Further, the convocation of being in appearance, what Deleuze classifies as the crystallisation of the virtual and the actual, is precisely the point at which we bear witness to the cohesion of the instant and eternity – or of the event-site (which, we recall, figures the ‘ontological figure of the instant’) and its infinite subjective expansion – and are thereby granted a window unto the time of truth.49 Cinema’s power as a temporal art thus lies in its being able to render indiscernible the instant and eternity, in its ability to accomplish what the art of the twentieth century strove to do, that is, to make apparent the conflation of infinity-in-finitude (which is finally the essence of a truth procedure). All of which gives us pause to reconsider Erwin Panofsky’s famous definition of film’s ‘unique and specific possibilities’ as on the one hand the ‘dynamization of space’50 and on the other the ‘spatialization of time’ as being in effect less possibilities than preconditions (and as such are less evental than onto-logical).51 This is not to say that Panofsky’s (like Bazin’s) assertions need to be abandoned. Rather, they must be revised so as to take cinema’s ‘potentiality’ properly into account. This revision gives rise to two fundamental theses on the art of cinema, namely, that the ‘unique and specific possibilities’ of cinema lie foremost in the dis-appearance of space (in directing the image towards the void) and in the re-temporalisation of time (in directing spatialised time toward infinity). As this has been a dense chapter, a brief recapitulation would not be out of order. Unable to abide the virtual, Badiou thinks cinema in terms of the movement-image (refracted through the global and

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the local movements, where the Idea endures as a passage) subtracted from any thought of the whole. The (Deleuzian) shift from the movement-image to the time-image details the move from one void to another, from the film’s ‘inside outside’ (the out-of-field qua whole) to the ‘outside inside’ of the film (the Outside qua cut), or from the One-void to the voided-One. To this effect modern cinema reveals itself as a fundamentally anti-statist mechanism in its desire to convoke its own void. This convocation equally occurs at the level of space (in the proliferation of any-space-whatevers, spaces of absolute derelation and subtraction which lay bare the minimal difference between appearance and inappearance) and time (in the consequent indiscernibility of the instant and eternity which presents subjective time, or the ‘time of truth’). All this tells us that cinema’s unique powers lie in its ability to stage the dis-appearance of space and the re-temporalisation of time. So as to explore these complicated ideas we turn now to the cinema of Alain Resnais. Notes 1. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 53. 2. Rancière and Lie, ‘Our Police Order’. 3. Bruno Bosteels has recently raised an objection to Badiou’s contention that it is art that thinks the event qua event. Citing in particular Badiou’s pivotal meditation on Mallarmé in Being and Event – in which Badiou contends that it is Mallarmé who delivers the event of the event, or the ‘pure event’ – Bosteels worries that Badiou falls into the trap of simply using art to ‘demonstrate’ his philosophical theses. According to Bosteels: in the process of this demonstration, most events . . . become transposed into so many theories of the event, of truth, of the body, or of the subject, and so on. In other words, it is as if Badiou’s philosophy, instead of serving the truths that are produced outside of it in the four conditions or generic procedures, could not avoid looping these instances back upon themselves before tying them in with a strictly intraphilosophical apparatus – namely, his own. (‘Art, Politics, History’, p. 61)

Badiou for his part has offered a provisional answer to Bosteels’s charge, admitting: there can be no doubt that Mallarmé, above all, but also Beckett have been instructive for me on the question of the event, but if, in return, I do justice to this instruction from within philosophy, it is evident that I will make them out to be, more so than they actually are, theoreticians of themselves – which

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 129 they are, by the way, more so than others, and that is the reason why they have functioned as a condition for my philosophy. (Badiou and Bosteels, ‘Can Change Be Thought?’, p. 258)

We might also add that, while in some instances Bosteels’s accusation no doubt rings true, it is nonetheless vital to recognise the fact that art thinks the pure event. For if we take seriously Badiou’s contention regarding philosophy’s essential thoughtlessness, then we must be able to locate the thought of the event in one of its conditions, and the simple fact is that the other conditions are wholly incapable of delivering the matheme of the event. Most obviously, science, as we have seen, cannot by definition think the event, inasmuch as the event is precisely that which escapes mathematical thought. Nor do love and politics possess the means to think the event qua event, for, while both certainly have massive worldly ramifications, neither leaves an interpretable mark qua work (or again, neither can offer any lasting trace of the event of the event). To this end I will cite Clemens against Bosteels, who notes that: one of the difficulties that [Badiou’s] commentators have so far had is taking seriously the concept of ‘condition’. To the extent that they do so, they miss Badiou’s utter reliance on his conditions. Cantorian set-theory really is ontology for Badiou; Mallarmé’s poetry really does provide the matheme of the event. These are not ‘examples’, no matter how subtly one thinks the problematic of the example. They are absolutes. As such, they are the only possible foundations for a philosophical system. (Clemens, ‘Had We But Worlds Enough’, pp. 116–17)

4. ‘A poem by Mallarmé always fixes the place of an aleatory event; an event to be interpreted on the basis of the traces it leaves behind’ (BE, p. 191). I will consider Badiou’s conviction that Mallarmé’s poetry delivers the matheme of the event in more detail in Chapter 6. 5. See also Mallarmé, Collected Poems, pp. 142–4. 6. Badiou notes that in their subjective dimension ‘science proves to be the reverse of art’ (LW, p. 75). On this point we should also keep in mind that it is precisely Plato’s interruption of the poem with the matheme that designates the birth of philosophy proper, for ‘the matheme is that which, by causing the Speaker to disappear, by removing any mysterious validation from its site, exposes argumentation to the test of its autonomy and thus to the critical and dialogic examination of its pertinence’ (IT, p. 93). 7. Rancière, ‘Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics’, p. 235. 8. We know from Chapter 3 that ‘the only power that can be attuned to the power of being is the power of the letter’ (TW, p. 80) in the form of the matheme, which is itself a ‘pure, literal offering’ qua ‘empty suture to every multiple-presentation’ (MP, pp. 75–6). Justin Clemens has further demonstrated how ‘the letter in Badiou [is] at once an index of

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

his materialism and the foundations of his Platonic ontology. Badiou’s achievement in constructing such a bizarre creature – a Platonic materialism – is integrally due to this literalism’, ‘Letters as the Condition of Conditions’, p. 75. We should of course also keep in mind that truth itself escapes the power of the letter, inasmuch as ‘the existence of a truth is precisely that to which no inscription can attest’ (NN, p. 27). On this point we cannot help but think of both the Lacanian concept of the ‘pass’ and the ultimate aim of the analytic cure, which is at base to render ‘a knowledge that is wholly transmissible, without remainder’, Badiou, ‘The Formulas of L’Etourdit’, p. 81. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 320. Badiou and Sedofsky, ‘Being by Numbers’, p. 124. As Badiou admits, ‘I’ve never been very satisfied by the attempts of my predecessors to place themselves under the condition of painting. Nor have I ever found a regime of prose adequate to talk about painting’, Badiou and Sedofsky, ‘Being by Numbers’, p. 124. Badiou’s apparent privileging of Aristotle here equally suggests another move toward classicism (which is, we recall, Aristotelian in nature). Badiou continues: ‘with this term we mean not only the empty form of the “representative system”, but even more the modern figure of equality, reduced to equality before the offer of the market, rendering every individual equal to any other on the sole basis of virtually being, like anyone else, a consumer’, Badiou cited in Barker, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. xxviii. Elsewhere Badiou expands on the absolute importance of the signifier ‘equality’, demanding that ‘the word equality must be secured in the absence of any economic connotations (equality of objective conditions, of status and of opportunity). Its subjective trenchancy must be restored: equality is something that opens onto a strict logic of the Same. Its advantage, then, lies in its abstraction. Equality neither presumes closure, nor qualifies the terms it embraces, nor prescribes a territory for its exercise. Equality is immediately prescriptive, and the current resolve to denounce its utopian character is a good sign, a sign that the word has recovered its force of rupture’ (C, p. 173). Badiou holds the substance of every true political procedure to be equality, which is in truth an ontological equality, an equality of being which ‘logically’ translates into an ‘equality of existences’ (MS, p. 68). ‘Let us understand that, under the constraint of the case of cinema, it is once again, and always, (Deleuze’s) philosophy that begins anew and that causes cinema to be there where it cannot, of itself, be’ (D, p. 16). Or again, ‘cinema, with its proliferation of films, authors, and tendencies, forms a dynamic and constraining configuration, in which Deleuze comes to occupy the empty place of he who, under the massive power of the case, must once again cover the range of his capacities, refashion

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17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

what he has already produced, and repeat his difference, in differentiating it even more acutely from other differences’ (D, p. 15). This conception of course jars somewhat with Deleuze’s explicit assertion – cited by Badiou – that ‘a theory of cinema is not a theory “about” cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to’ (C2, pp. 268–9). We can discern a certain structural (as much as conceptual) homology between this assertion and Badiou’s own conception of cinema as ‘the passage of the idea, perhaps even of its phantom’ (HI, p. 77). In point of fact, Badiou identifies Deleuze’s theory of the sign as the problem lying at the heart of his ontology: ‘I am convinced that nothing acts as a sign, and that in retaining this stigmata, even in the extremity of its diminishment, of its exiguous differentiality, Deleuze still concedes too much to some sort of hermeneutics of the visible’, ‘Of Life as a Name of Being’, p. 197. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 32. Cf. ‘the whole is that which changes – it is the open or duration’ (C1, p. 20). Cf. ‘the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind’, Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 323. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze explains that ‘the present can be the most contracted degree of the past which coexists with it only if the past first coexists with itself in an infinity of diverse degrees of relaxation and contraction at an infinity of levels’, Difference and Repetition, pp. 104–5. Thus we see why Badiou cannot ‘register any kind of caesura between Difference and Repetition and the more detailed philosophical texts to be found in the two volumes on cinema’ (TW, p. 70). Cf. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, p. 27. Ibid. p. 41. Ibid. p. 44. In spite of Deleuze’s purportedly ‘antiplatonic’ conception of time, one cannot help but think here of Plato’s famous description of time as ‘an eternal image, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity’, ‘Timaeus’, p. 1241/37d. Lacan, Autres écrits, p. 440. Suffice to recall how Badiou’s assertion that ‘the one is not’ (BE, p. 23) tells us not only that what is is pure multiplicity (devoid of the one), but also that any conception of the whole qua ‘One-All’ falls victim to the paradox of the set of all sets. Badiou, ‘Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp’. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, p. 63. Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 226. Quantum alters and becomes another quantum; the further determination of this alteration, namely, that it goes on to infinity, lies in the circumstance that quantum is established as being self-contradictory. Quantum becomes an other; but it continues itself into this otherness; the other is thus also a

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Badiou and Cinema quantum. This, however, is not only the other of a particular quantum, but of quantum itself, the negative of quantum as limited; hence it is the unlimitedness of quantum, its infinity. (Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 225–6)

32. Thus, in his book on Deleuze, Žižek can remark that cinema is arguably ‘the ultimate case of the sterile flow of surface becoming’, Organs Without Bodies, p. 21. 33. On this point it is of no small importance to note that Mallarmé, the doyen of the art of the event, himself looked to dance as a form of writing and sought to ‘choreograph’ the poem. 34. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 160. 35. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 353. 36. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 52. There is no English equivalent for the portmanteau word ‘montrage’, which conflates the French montrer (‘to show’) with montage. The point being that with the time-image images cease to function as a secondary construction (via the workings of montage) to instead find their own direct expression, or again, the image moves from one of action to one of pure description. See also C2, p. 261. 37. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 63. 38. Deleuze variously defines the virtual in terms of duration (in his writings on and around Bergson), Ideas or structures (in Difference and Repetition) and the event (in The Logic of Sense). In his Bergsonism, for example, Deleuze tells us that ‘duration . . . is the virtual. To be more precise, it is the virtual insofar as it is actualized, in the course of being actualized, it is inseparable from the movement of its actualization’, Bergsonism, pp. 42–3. Duration is thus more precisely the exhaustion of the couplet virtual/actual, which, as Badiou points out, is the Deleuzian name for being: ‘“virtual” is without any doubt the principal name of being in Deleuze’s work. Or rather, the nominal pair virtual/actual exhausts the deployment of univocal being’ (D, p. 43). 39. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 52. 40. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 149. 41. It is the ‘postulate of materialism’ which ultimately staves off the virtual in Badiou’s onto-logy. This axiom, which simply states ‘every atom of appearing is real’ (LW, p. 218), effectively tells us that what appears is actually prescribed by its multiple-being. Or as Badiou puts it, it ‘stipulates that the virtuality of an apparent’s appearing in such and such a world is always rooted in its actual ontological composition’ (LW, p. 251). 42. Rancière, ‘Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics’, p. 229. 43. Hallward, Out of This World, p. 115. 44. As Deleuze points out early on in Cinema 1 (in a nice, albeit wholly unintended homology with Badiou’s own work), ‘the highest degree of rarefaction seems to be attained with the empty set, when the screen

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An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze 133 becomes completely black or completely white’ (C1, p. 14). Moreover, Badiou himself describes the generic set (which we recall refers solely to the being of the situation) as presenting ‘any multiple whatever’ (MP, p. 107, translation modified). 45. Emerging in the world ‘Italian cinema at the end of the Second World War’, neorealism’s evental birth can be traced to Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), and its subjective body incorporates works such as Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1947) and Europa ’51 (1952), Giuseppe de Santis’s Bitter Rice (1948), Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948), and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Umberto D (1951). The sequence arguably finds itself saturated in 1954 with Visconti’s Senso, Federico Fellini’s La Strada and Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy. 46. Ollier, Souvenirs écran, pp. 88–90. 47. It is interesting to note that Deleuze’s theory of time – and, for that matter, of the cinema – would appear equally evental and eternal. Indeed, as Badiou points out, for Deleuze ‘what matters is eternity or, to be more specific, the temporal atemporality that has received the name event’, Badiou, Pocket Pantheon, pp. 116–17. Unlike Badiou, however, Deleuze’s time is not punctual, but rather, complete. In Briefings on Existence Badiou elaborates on this fundamental ‘evental’ distinction, explaining how: Deleuze sets up an immense, virtuosic, and ramified phenomenological apparatus so as to be able to write the ontological equation as Being = Event. Yet at the minutest point of what this apparatus is able to seize, what appears is precisely that the being of this Being is never the event. The upshot is that Being remains equivocal. This is how, by seeking out to learn from this genius, I reached the conviction that the pure multiple, the generic form of Being, never itself greets the event as a virtual component. On the contrary, the event befalls unto it through a rare and incalculable supplementation. To achieve this, I had to sacrifice the Whole. (TO, pp. 70–1)

48. Badiou and Sedofsky, ‘Being by Numbers’, p. 118. 49. To return to our earlier consideration of The Matrix, we might note the final permutation of Neo’s name as ‘Eon’ as carrying with it no small temporal significance. 50. Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’, p. 291. 51. As Andrey Tarkovsky observes, ‘one cannot conceive of a cinematic work with no sense of time passing through the shot, but one can easily imagine a film with no actors, music, décor, or even editing’, Sculpting in Time, p. 113.

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CHAPTER 6

Alain Resnais and the Mise en Scène of Two

If art never ceases intersecting love, it is in the encounter, in the pure event, that it is finally grasped. Alain Badiou1

6.1

PARENTHESES IN TIME Cinema is the art of playing with time. Alain Resnais2

As is well known, any consideration of Alain Resnais’s cinema inevitably arrives at the question of time. Indeed, the relation of the former to the latter is now such a commonplace that ‘Resnais’ and ‘time’ have effectively come to function (at least in the discourse of film studies) as synonyms. As such, any invocation of the pair today carries with it the danger of sounding tired and clichéd. On top of this, the films that I will be examining in this chapter – Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year in Marienbad (1961) – suffer from an interpretive malaise similar to that of The Matrix, namely, that practically every theoretical orientation recognises itself in them. Nevertheless, I hope in what follows to provide something at least approximating a novel approach to the questions of time and love as they are thought in the cinema of Alain Resnais. Clearly Resnais’s cinema is as entwined with the question of time as are the lovers with each other in Hiroshima mon amour’s beautiful opening scene. Moreover, in both cases the embrace appears so all-consuming, so complete – even in its paradoxical incompletion (the lovers’ bodies are fragmented to the point of indiscernibility; Resnais’ great films as a rule eschew classical closure) – that it gives the impression of standing at a remove from both time and space: while Hiroshima’s lovers are here disembodied and depersonalised in an anonymous embrace, an amorous any-space-whatever (which is equally an any-time-whatever), so too Resnais’s cinema can be seen

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to create its own anonymous time, a time which is properly topological, constituting the set of relations of heterogeneous times, which, like Deleuze’s Relation (or Whole or Duration . . .), is finally nothing other than the timelessness of time, time outside of time.3 This is one of the more immediate ways by which we might understand Jacques Rivette’s observation that Hiroshima mon amour constitutes ‘a parenthesis in time’.4 The ‘parenthesis’ in question does not simply refer to the film’s ostensible circularity – whereby ‘at the end of the last reel you can easily move back to the first’5 in an infinite revolution of the Same – but highlights Hiroshima’s ‘timeless’ nature, its out-of-time-ness, even as it constructs, as we shall see, a radically new time.6 Were we to expand on Rivette’s words, we could say that Resnais’s cinema on the whole presents an (atemporal) parenthesis in (heterogeneous) time(s). It is this paradoxical atemporal heterotemporality that characterises Resnais’s films as topological. Moreover, it is in this precise sense that Resnais, much more than Eisenstein (or Vertov, or Dovzhenko, or Griffith, or Welles, or Murnau, or . . .), can be seen as providing the very Idea of montage (qua global movement), which is, as we have seen, ultimately an immobile movement, insofar as its real thought is topological (for, as Badiou is at pains to point out, the global movement is finally the measure of immeasurable relations). Rivette’s words, which are drawn from a marvellous Cahiers du cinéma roundtable discussion following Hiroshima mon amour’s initial release, ought, however, to be placed alongside those of his fellow discussants, in particular Eric Rohmer, who, in a particularly astute aside, contends that ‘Resnais is a cubist. I mean that he is the first modern filmmaker of the sound film’.7 As with Rivette, Rohmer’s is an astonishing assertion, one that can only be made sense of through recourse to the question of time. For if cubist painting at base involved the fragmentation and transposition unto the two-dimensional canvas of the depth and mobility afforded by threedimensional space, then does not the very principle of montage (of which, I repeat, Resnais presents the Idea) extend the cubist ideal, save the fragmented transposition is now that of four dimensions – horizontality, verticality, depth and temporality – unto two? Or again, setting Deleuze to one side, is not the principal act of cinema precisely that of mutilating time, of pressing time into space, of transforming time into perception?8 As Rivette and Rohmer each make explicit, this fragmentation and distortion of the fourth dimension is essential to filmic practice, as much in its overall ‘result’ (the global

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movement establishing what I above termed cinema’s ‘atemporal heterotemporality’) as in its ‘process’ (the production of a film being in general a stilted, non-chronological affair).9 To return, however, to Rivette’s observation that Hiroshima mon amour constitutes ‘a parenthesis in time’, one cannot help but be struck by the fact that his words are far better suited to Resnais’s immediately subsequent film, Last Year in Marienbad. On this point we would do well to consider Rivette’s final words on Hiroshima, in which he favourably compares Resnais to the writer Jorge Luis Borges, explaining that: with Resnais it is the same notion of the infinitesimal achieved by material means, mirrors face to face, series of labyrinths. It is an idea of the infinite but contained within a very short interval, since ultimately the ‘time’ of Hiroshima can just as well last twenty-four hours as one second.10

What interests us here is the fact that it is Last Year in Marienbad which is far more obviously an atemporal film. Indeed, time is literally effaced in Resnais’s second film in a number of immediate ways. On a superficial level, we are never told in what time the action takes place, but rather can only infer from the characters’ dress and their environs (which the narrator enigmatically informs us ‘belong to the past’). Moreover, while one might suppose the film to be largely constructed of jumps forward in time and flashbacks, this is never made explicit, as various discrete and frequently contradictory times (rooms seem to shift location, dress and decor alter inexplicably, incongruous events take place simultaneously . . .) collide in a single and same present, seemingly defeating all hope of chronologisation. That said, I believe it makes more sense to view Marienbad as less an atemporal than an intemporal (or inter-temporal) film, inasmuch as it situates itself entirely in a temporal rupture, in the very ‘cut’ between two (necessarily unpresented) times, namely, a pre- and a post-evental time. As we will see, this intemporal space is precisely the instant of the amorous encounter, which is none other than the event of love. Moreover it is in Resnais’s second film that we literally encounter the Borgesian ‘series of labyrinths’ and ‘mirrors face to face’ about which Rivette waxes lyrical. The hotel in which Marienbad’s ‘action’ takes place, for example, is a labyrinthine structure of mirrors and baroque intricacy, the film opening with a long, discontinuous tracking shot down indiscernible corridors (which the narrator describes

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as ‘endless’), passing mirrors mirroring mirrors (an effect Resnais intensifies later in the film by filming reflected and unreflected characters in the same shot), to finally arrive at a play which, in an overtly metafilmic gesture, echoes the film itself (together with the narrator’s preceding monologue). Marienbad accordingly presents something of a mise en abîme, its credo being without doubt repetition and reflection. It is thus hardly surprising that Deleuze holds that ‘the entire Marienbad hotel is a pure crystal’ (C2, p. 74), which is of course to say that Marienbad as a whole – its global movement – exemplifies an ellipsis, the very ‘cut’ in time which ensures the timelessness of the time-image. Hiroshima mon amour, on the contrary, does in fact play itself out in an ever-expanding time. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that Hiroshima is an exemplary temporal film. For its parenthetical structure (in the sense in which Hiroshima’s past bleeds into its present as much as its present collides with its past)11 is finally symptomatic of its intrinsic subjectivity (as we have come to understand the term). To put it bluntly, my contention is that while Hiroshima is a properly subjective film, a film which details a truth procedure and as such constitutes its own time, Marienbad is a wholly evental film – a film entirely caught in the grip of an event, an event which could ‘just as well last twenty-four hours as one second’ – and as such remains timeless (in constraining itself to the cut of the event, to the interstice or ‘between-two’ of heterogeneous times). The crucial question of Hiroshima mon amour is thus ethical in nature, being that of remaining faithful to the new fledgling present. By contrast, Last Year in Marienbad presents a temporal rupture, spanning as much an instant as an eternity, and is as such properly pre-subjective. For this rupture is the inter-time of the event itself, the cut which intervenes between times, cleaving the old (the decaying past) from the new (the eternal present which is, properly speaking, the ‘truth’ of the past). It is in this precise sense that we can say that Marienbad stages the mise en scène of the event. Before we dive headlong into Resnais’s cinema, let us remind ourselves of what it is that we are setting out to demonstrate. As we have argued, the question proper to the art of cinema – which ultimately lies in the collapse of the instant into eternity – is that of thinking a new present. Accordingly, we need to show how cinema (when it is truly ‘artistic’) does not simply present a ‘flattened’ transcendent time (à la Deleuze), but rather actively creates a radically new time, and as such can be seen to present ‘true’ time, the ‘time of truth’. More than

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this, we must justify our contention that modern cinema is eminently capable of drawing forth its own being in its appearing, a movement which we have said issues from that space of absolute derelation and subtraction – the purification of what Deleuze calls any-spacewhatever – which expresses appearance brought to the edge of what appears. To this effect we must demonstrate how cinema undermines the consistency of the global movement in making its void ‘appear’. In sum, we must demonstrate how it is that cinema ‘tests philosophy’ by revealing the real in appearance itself, and how this apparent convocation of being – what Deleuze calls the crystal, and what Badiou calls the event – is precisely the point at which we bear witness to the indiscernibility of the instant and eternity and are thereby granted a window unto a properly subjective time. Before we can do this, however, we need consider exactly what is at stake in the films themselves. 6.2

LOVE, INDETERMINED Love must desire Immortality. Plato12

Like Badiou and Deleuze, we will begin with the question of movement. We have contended that Last Year in Marienbad operates within a temporal rupture, which is equally to say that Marienbad is an intemporal text. The elliptical nature of Marienbad is, however, not limited to time, but is equally – perhaps even more immediately – registered in the film’s movement, which is at once incessant and directionless. Indeed, Marienbad’s many movements (be they incamera or of the camera itself) are characterised foremost by their possessing neither beginning nor end, being contrarily caught up in an interminable passing, a passing which takes place exclusively in a present which is without past or future, an infinite revolution of the Same. Suffice to recall once more Marienbad’s opening shot, in which the camera drifts (perhaps aimlessly, perhaps pointedly) along endless corridors, in an eternal movement which, as François Regnault might say, becomes reflexive of (the) film itself. Moreover, the endless nature of this movement is underscored by the narrator’s circular monologue, which repeatedly fades in and out of existence mid-sentence, as though caught in an infinite loop, ensuring we are forever held back from knowing where the words began and where they might end. The interminable and fundamentally immobile

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character of this movement – which equally extends to a physical immobility (the hotel guests having a rather unnerving habit of freezing mid-action, only to reanimate moments later) – might lead one to suppose that Marienbad presents us with an image of purgatory (if not hell). Indeed, the ghostly pall surrounding the characters as much as their environs – recall Marienbad’s iconic long shot of a garden in which the characters cast shadows while the trees do not – would seem to support this idea. For my part, I contend the very opposite, that is, I hold that Marienbad – and Hiroshima even more so – is foremost a film about life, about real beginning, a subjective birth that is finally located in the amorous encounter, which is nothing other than the in(ter) vention of love. For what is Last Year in Marienbad if not the eternal encounter, amorous in nature, of X and A?13 Moreover, the endlessness of this encounter lies not so much in its being infinitely repeated (denied, forestalled, postponed . . .) as in its being undecided. Did X and A actually meet last year in Marienbad (or Frederiksbad, or Karlstadt)? Did A agree to leave M for X? This undecidability equally holds for the film’s violence: did X rape A? Did M kill A? All these questions (which the film steadfastly refuses to answer) are but subsidiary effects of Marienbad’s central undecidable event: are X and A in love? Simply, inasmuch as Marienbad is, as I contend, wholly contained within an amorous event, the only escape – the only way the film might strictly speaking end – must be through a truly decisive act, in deciding the undecidable: either X and A are in love; or they are not. One of the masterstrokes of Resnais’s film – also one of the indicators of its eventness – is the fact that this decision belongs as much to us (the spectators) as it does to X and A. This central ambiguity is beautifully mirrored in the statue of the man and woman observed by X and A in the garden (a statue which, X notes, could as easily be themselves).14 Is the man holding the woman back, protecting her from some hidden danger (X’s position)? Or is the woman contrarily urging him onward, toward something ‘breathtaking’ (A’s position)? Following their ponderous exchange on the subject of the statue Resnais abruptly shifts to a different locale, X and A no longer regarding the statue itself but rather its representation in a map of the grounds (mirroring the removed position held by Marienbad’s spectators with regard to the text’s central undecidable), while the same conversation (or a variation thereupon) ensues. At this point M makes his appearance so as to ‘clarify’ the situation, authoritatively stating that the statue depicts Charles III and

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his wife at ‘the Oath before the Diet’ immediately prior to his trial for treason. M (who here clearly embodies the state) thus attempts to reinscribe the un-known back into the field of knowledge. However, M’s ‘explanation’ fails to touch upon the undecidable content of the statue, namely, the ‘truth’ of the figure’s (in)actions. Moreover, his story is a fabrication.15 Simply, (statist) knowledge cannot account for the undecidable: radical decision is contrarily the sole province of subjective intervention. Hence the dreamlike, illogical structure of Marienbad: in situating itself firmly within the amorous encounter – in the undecidability of the event itself – Marienbad effectively subtracts itself from knowledge. It is precisely for this reason that Marienbad appears to this day as something of a perplexity, a mystery with no solution, an enduring novelty. As Resnais himself contends – and we with him – ‘Marienbad is an open film which proposes to everyone an experience, a choice’.16 Simply, Marienbad is not a film to be known, but rather one to be decided. This decision is, quite literally, the entire ‘point’ of the film. Still, whence this ambiguity, this undecidableness? Clearly it arises from its frozen nature, from its having been ripped out of time (as M notes, the statue ‘is not of the period’) to persist in another time (the insistence of time being a fundamental rule of cinema: a film always passes). This of course applies equally to the lovers, the statue, and the image itself. Plucked out of time, immobilised, ‘held up, suspended, inverted, arrested’ (HI, p. 78) – this being after all the basic operation the camera performs on the visible – they find themselves divorced from both cause and effect: X and A are caught between several possible pasts and an equally possible future (if deprived of all certainty); the statue is suspended between action and reaction; the image is cut from its ‘proper’ relational network. It is their very suspension that designates their undecidability: divorced (suspended) from their ‘natural’ framework, each effectively becomes a singularity. Of course we have seen this singular ambiguity before, in the timeless embrace of the lovers that opens (and effectively envelops) Hiroshima mon amour. Inasmuch as I am arguing that Marienbad stages the opening of an event while Hiroshima presents a scene of amorous subjectivity, we could even maintain that the entirety of Marienbad is contained within Hiroshima’s opening embrace, which as we have seen takes place in a space outside of space, in the interval between times, namely, the ‘atemporal instant’ (LW, p. 384) of the amorous event which cleaves the past from the present. The

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vertiginous nature of this embrace is underscored by its juxtaposition with historical and contemporary images (both fictional and real), impressing on us the idea that their embrace, much like Marienbad’s statues, at once exceeds and is excised from history. Simply, this image, which we might designate (in deference to Deleuze) an ‘anyspace-time-whatever’, is both squeezed out of and transcends its own historicity. This exceptionality with regard to time and space – the eternity of their embrace – is of course highlighted by the dust which settles on their entwined bodies (a dust that could signify the dust of time, or perhaps ash from Hiroshima, or even Pompeii . . .). Resnais thus literally presents us with what Andrey Tarkovsky might call a ‘sculpture in time’: petrified, suspended, Hiroshima’s amorous bodies accede to a new world, a new life. Such is the evental birth of love. But what exactly is love, philosophically speaking? Clearly love is, for Badiou, wholly entwined with the register of truth, and as such ‘radically exceeds both sentimentality and sexuality’.17 In fact, Badiou’s take on love essentially departs from the infamous Lacanian thesis that ‘there is no sexual relation’ (S20, p. 71). This thesis raises a paradox, for while there is but one Humanity – which is precisely what is attested to by the existence of truths (which are, after all, generic) – there are nevertheless two positions of experience, the one masculine, the other feminine.18 Moreover, these positions – which constitute not a form but a law of being – are absolutely unrelated, inasmuch as ‘nothing in experience is the same for the positions of man and woman’.19 It follows that this disjunction is radically unknown, for the simple reason that all knowledge, being necessarily situated, must be positioned within the disjunction itself. In order to say anything of this disjunction, we therefore require an event, for ‘where an inexistence or a lack holds, only an excess can come as supplement’.20 This event is none other than the amorous encounter, whose trace (generally in the form of a declaration of love) invokes the void (or the un-known) of the disjunction (the generic statement ‘I love you’ bringing together two fundamentally incongruous positions), and its ensuing truth is precisely the ‘treatment’ of the paradox of sexual disjunction. However, this invocation of the void – which, as we know, is the sole guarantee of a truth’s universality – is only ensured inasmuch as the trace remains an ‘absolutely undetermined, non-describable, non-composable’21 term. As such, aside from being shared across two otherwise disjunct positions, this term (qua evental trace) can only have a relation with (the) nothing. To this effect love can be defined as that which makes truth of sexual dis-junction.

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Meaning love makes manifest the truth that the world harbours two radically disjunct positions. Or again, love brings about the Two, it is ‘the experience and thought of what the Two is’ (TC, p. 145). This Two must, however, be carefully distinguished. For one thing, contra Aristophanes, it is not the Two of fusion (whereby the Two counts as One). Nor for that matter is it the Two of summation (wherein one plus one equals two). On the contrary, the law of absolute disjunction means that neither position can have any real experience of the other, hence the impossibility of either their subsumption or addition (both of which would necessarily involve an illegal interiorisation).22 As Joan Copjec observes, ‘the madness of love consists in [the] creation of Two where there never was a one and which is not itself one’.23 For the Two that is invented in love – which is, I repeat, the truth of sexual disjunction – is finally an immanent Two, a Two ‘counted from itself’, a Two which lies ‘in excess of that which composes it, without, for all that, annexing the Three’.24 As Badiou puts it, ‘the Two which operates amorously is properly the name of the disjunct apprehended in its disjunction’.25 Moreover, this means that, prior to love, there is no real experience of sexual difference. Or again, ‘the sexes do not pre-exist the amorous encounter, being instead its result’ (OB, p. 65). Returning to Resnais’s cinema, we can clearly see that this evental progression (from the One to the Two) is precisely what is at work in Last Year in Marienbad. In point of fact, it is this real divide separating X from A that is the true source of the film’s mystery, a disjunction which is principally encapsulated in what Lyotard would call their ‘differend’ concerning the supposed events of the previous year. For when we get down to it, we see that X – whose world, as narrator (for the most part), we effectively inhabit – has no real relationship with A (although he himself cannot know this). His is thus a persistent (and ultimately hopeless) persuasion, a desperate imploration that A ‘remember him’ and concede to their relationship. Thus time and again X attempts to bridge their sexual divide, to prove in one way or another their apparent ‘connection’. Which is why, to pursue our earlier example, when confronted with A’s refusal to acquiesce to his own interpretation of the statue, X immediately attempts to overcome their opposition by observing how both explanations are possible at the same time, pronouncing: the couple had left home and had been walking for days. They’ve just come to the edge of a cliff. He holds her back to keep her from the edge, while she points to the sea stretching out to the horizon.

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Needless to say, his attempts are fruitless: there is no existing bridge to span the sexual divide; only a supplement can broach this disjunction. Moreover, this is why it is only at the close of the film, when X and A leave the hotel together, when the event is finally ‘decided’, that the Two truly emerges, this Two being attested to in the final words of the film, that is, in X’s recognition that A now exists ‘alone, with me’. For this ‘alone, with me’ is the very essence of the immanent Two, the convocation whereby the void of the sexual relation invoked in the event – this being precisely what the whole of the film bears witness to – is attested to, in the opening of an amorous truth procedure. Love is then absolute fidelity to the sudden emergence of the Two, attested to in the amorous declaration (‘I love you’, or more pointedly, ‘You exist alone, with me’). Needless to say, love, like every truth, unfolds (subjectively) in the world as ‘a material procedure which reevaluates the totality of experience, traversing the entire situation bit by bit, according to its connection or its disconnection to the nominal supposition of the Two’.26 Numerically speaking, love is therefore the process whereby we pass from the One through the Two to infinity. So far as Resnais’s cinema is concerned, it is with this third passage – the properly subjective path wherein the Two opens onto infinity – that we pass, non-chronologically, from Last Year in Marienbad to Hiroshima mon amour. For in this move we shift from the event proper to its subjective realisation, from the intemporal instant of the amorous encounter – by way of deciding the undecidable (which ‘finishes’ Marienbad) – to the birth of a new time in the construction of what Badiou calls ‘the scene of Two’, namely, a new properly subjective world in which the Two appears.27 Thus, insofar as I am arguing that Hiroshima details the path of the post-evental subject (or the gradual accretion of a new body of truth), I will say that Resnais’s film presents us with the mise en scène of Two. For, unlike Marienbad, our fundamental thesis regarding Hiroshima mon amour is that the event of love has already vanished, that it is an entirely post-evental film, a film that opens not in but from an event. While we are not immediately privy to Lui and Elle’s (or Him and Her’s) initial encounter, we do, however, bear witness – if only tangentially – to this event in two ways: in the fragmented image of the lovers entwined bodies (which, in occupying a time and space ‘beyond’ the film, symbolises the intemporality of the amorous event); and in the effective restaging of their initial encounter in the film’s concluding ‘pick-up’ sequence (which provides the most

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immediate meaning to Rivette’s observation that Hiroshima constitutes a ‘parenthesis in time’). Thus, as we have noted, Hiroshima situates its narrative not within but without the event, in the nascent world which – like the one Marienbad will have given rise to – is simultaneously together and alone, a world in which the ‘absolute Two’ appears. It is to this effect that Hiroshima continually highlights the indetermination of sexual disjunction. Indeed, from the first lines of the film in which the lovers stubbornly hold antithetical positions with regard to knowledge – Lui repeatedly telling Elle that she ‘saw nothing in Hiroshima’ while she contends ‘I saw everything’ – through to the final acknowledgement of their absolute disjunction and the radical experiential difference this entails (in their mutually designating each other ‘Hiroshima’ and ‘Nevers’), the Two never ceases to be in operation. It is moreover in this precise sense that Hiroshima mon amour must be read as an ethical film. This of course raises the question of what exactly Badiou means by ethics. In his brief discussion of the ‘ethical entry’ into film in ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’, Badiou contends (following Bazin) that the ‘ethical’ role of cinema, as a mass art, lies in the fact that it ‘proposes a kind of universal stage of action and its confrontation with common values’ (CD, p. 5). As such, cinema addresses humanity by proposing a ‘moral mythology’ (CD, p. 5). To this effect the ethical entry, as Badiou describes it, can be seen to perform a primarily pedagogical function, inasmuch as it teaches a mass audience to separate what is ‘right’ from what is not, or again, it educates its spectators on ways of ‘being’. Accordingly, we might list films we have already considered such as The Matrix as (by dint of its allegorical nature) ‘ethical’ films, to say nothing of the great neorealist works (Bazin for one holding the ‘fundamental humanism of the current Italian films as their chief merit’ (WC2, p. 21)). But Hiroshima? What moral mythology does Hiroshima propose (outside of trite formulations such as ‘give peace a chance’ or ‘bombs are bad’)? Moreover, can we not see in this ethical approach a reinforcement of the same didactic schema Badiou designates as holding art and truth at arm’s length? Indeed, Badiou’s ‘ethics’ here effectively corresponds to what Jacques Rancière isolates as the ‘ethical regime of images’ (and, rather unsurprisingly, attributes to Plato). In this regime, ‘it is a matter of knowing in what way images’ mode of being affects the ethos, the mode of being of individuals and communities’ (PA, p. 21). Or, as Gabriel Rockhill glosses:

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the ethical regime of images characteristic of Platonism is primarily concerned with the origin and telos of imagery in relationship to the ethos of the community. It establishes a distribution of images – without, however, identifying ‘art’ in the singular – that rigorously distinguishes between artistic simulacra and the ‘true arts’ used to educate the citizenry concerning their role in the communal body.28

Needless to say, such a conception of cinema poses a serious concern for any thinking of cinema as a singular art. The problem, it seems, is that Badiou’s ‘cinematic’ conception of ethics bears little resemblance to his own ethical project. Indeed, ethics, as it figures in Badiou’s philosophy, is contrarily entirely dependent on events and the truths they (can) give rise to. Clearly this has little to do with the banal project of proposing some ‘moral mythology’ to a vast audience. For Badiou’s is a truly subjective ethics, that is, an ethics of the subject. Moreover, by virtue of his peculiar conception of subjectivity, the whole of contemporary ethics (under which we might list such ‘moral mythologies’) appears in Badiou’s eyes as little more than a vast synonym for negativity, today’s dominant ethical ideology of ‘respect for the other’ being for Badiou a fundamentally statist edifice whose principal role is that of ‘prohibiting any idea, any coherent project of thought, settling instead for overlaying unthought and anonymous situations with mere humanitarian prattle’ (E, pp. 32–3).29 Contrarily, for Badiou, any true ethicality must be of the subject and accordingly (it amounts to the same thing) not of the Other but of the Same. Meaning that Badiou’s subjective ethics is in essence an ethics of in-difference (for, as we know, what a truth gives rise to is precisely that which is in-different to the situation). It should hardly surprise us then that Badiou strictly opposes any a priori concept of ethicality: ‘there is no ethics in general’ he tells us, rather, ‘there are only – eventually – ethics of process by which we treat the possibilities of a situation’ (E, p. 16). Further, as the subject only comes into being by virtue of an event, and subsists only by maintaining a militant fidelity to this event’s having happened, Badiou’s is ultimately a situated ethics, an ethics of the situation. In sum – and in stark contrast to the contemporary understanding of ethics as natural, objective, a priori, a-situational and fundamentally of the Other – Badiou’s ethics are evental, subjective, a posteriori, situational, and, crucially, of the Same. Clearly the core of Badiou’s ethics is the evental prescription of the subject, that is, the absolute necessity to remain faithful to a fidelity – to continue being a militant of truth – which he rather

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nicely summarises in a single imperative: continuez! Simply, outside of the chance supplement of an event, there is no subject, nor truth nor ethics – there is solely difference (which is simply what is) and an otherwise inconsequential biological species counted as human, ‘a “biped without feathers”, whose charms are not obvious’ (E, p. 12). In light of his theory of subjectivation Badiou accordingly reinterprets Lacan’s famous ethical imperative ‘ne pas céder sur son désir’ – ‘don’t give way on your desire’30 – as the necessity to ‘seize in your being that which has seized and broken you’ (E, p. 47), to remain faithful to the vanished event, to hold on at all costs to an indiscernible truth, to never extinguish the light of the new present. This absolute fidelity – the roots of which clearly lie in the amorous condition31 – is what Badiou designates the Good. Of course, from Good comes Evil, which, for Badiou, comes in three forms: betrayal, terror and disaster. The first, betrayal, simply denotes the failure of a subject to live up to a fidelity – which is less a renunciation than the determined act of becoming ‘the enemy of that truth’ (E, p. 79). Terror (or alternatively, ‘simulacrum’), on the other hand, presents itself as the gross imitation of the event, involving the convocation not of the void (whose in-difference alone allows for the universality of a truth) but rather of the plenitude of a situation. Lastly, disaster (or totalisation) results from going too far: put simply, a subject cannot force everything in the situation; there will always remain inconsequential elements, terms which cannot be treated as an evental consequence. In this last sense the corruption of a subject lies in ‘the process of treating as a possible consequence of an event something that is not in fact a consequence’.32 In sum, evil exists, après l’événement, in three guises: betrayal (the negation of the ethical imperative in the form of evental treachery), terror (the convocation not of the void but of the plenitude of the situation), and disaster (the totalisation of a truth through forcing what is inconsequential to be consequential). Badiou’s ethics thus combines under its imperative (‘continuez!’) those ‘resources of discernment (do not fall for simulacra), of courage (do not give up), and of moderation (do not get carried away to the extremes of Totality)’ (E, p. 91). With regard to love, the ethical imperative is clearly that of remaining faithful to a fidelity. That is to say, in love, being Good involves remaining positively connected to the truth of an absolutely indeterminate disjunction by placing more and more objects into the mise en scène of Two. That said, the Good of love can easily turn

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into Evil. Love becomes betrayal when a fidelity is actively denied. Likewise, love turns into terror when the truth of sexual disjunction is forsaken in the dream of total fusion (where the Two is conceived of as a One).33 Lastly, love is a disaster when objects of no amorous consequence are deemed consequential. With regard to Hiroshima mon amour, it is betrayal and terror that most immediately concern us. For if Hiroshima is, as I am arguing, a truly subjective (and consequently ethical) film, it is only inasmuch as it presents a mass audience with the terrible struggle of holding firm to an amorous fidelity in the face of two opposing temptations: the temptation to renounce the fidelity (reaction); and the temptation toward romantic fusion (obscurity). The ethicality of Hiroshima mon amour thus lies in remaining firm in the face of these dual temptations, in continuing to be a faithful subject of love. This imperative is reiterated by Pierre Kast, who, in the same discussion cited above, notes how Hiroshima presents ‘a kind of long struggle between love and its own erosion through the passage of time. As if love, at the level of the instant it happens, were already threatened with being forgotten and destroyed’.34 Naturally, this entropic dimension is part and parcel of every subjective procedure, for the simple reason that truths are entirely uninterested in the various ‘bipeds without feathers’ who support them. Indeed, is there a more perfect encapsulation of the fundamentally Good yet wholly indifferent nature of a truth than Elle’s pitiful mantra ‘you’re killing me, you’re good for me’? The dual motif isolated by Kast – of the corrosive power of time and the simultaneity or instantaneity of beginning and end – is in fact metaphorically enacted again and again throughout the film, in the omnipresent theme of the atom bomb, that other powerful representation of eternity wrapped up in an instant (‘200,000 dead and 80,000 wounded in nine seconds’), as much as the haunting image of the lovers’ entwined bodies, their flesh so close that they seem almost to fuse (mirroring the devastating effects of the bomb which ‘made metal as vulnerable as flesh’), the dust of time all the while threatening their skin.35 Indeed, such fusion appears at first glance to be the dominant face of Evil in Hiroshima in the fabrication of an obscure subject. Certainly fusion is the prevailing metaphor of the film: in the bleeding of the past into the present (most notably in the collapse of the events of Nevers into Hiroshima); in the chaste idealisation of bodies enmeshed, as though in sex the corporeal Two might fabricate a fleshy One; in the bomb whose explosion fuses time and space, capturing the instant for eternity, creating bouquets of

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bottle caps and making statues of living people (foreshadowing the guests of Marienbad). Of the numerous amorous obstacles (or ‘points’) littering the world of Hiroshima – Will they stay together? Are they indeed in love? Will they forsake their respective marriages? – the most significant is, however, not the risk of fusion. Rather, the central concern of Hiroshima is whether or not love can be reborn, or to be more precise, whether an amorous truth can be resurrected. At this point we encounter the ethical kernel of Resnais’s film, namely, the oscillation between reactive and resurrective subjective positions. Will Elle deny new love in deference to the past, to the love she lost in Nevers (and thus become a reactive subject)? Or will she contrarily reactivate amorous subjectivity in ‘another logic of its appearing-intruth’ (LW, p. 65)? Needless to say, this reactive/resurrective theme is linked, like everything else, to the bomb, Hiroshima asking on the one hand how Elle can love again (after Nevers), and on the other, how the ‘temporary survivors’ of Hiroshima can carry on with their lives (when women risk giving birth to deformed children, when men risk becoming sterile, where even rain can be deadly)? In truth, rather than formulating a reactive subject (or instigating the Evil of denial), the tragedy of Nevers ultimately serves to reinforce the disjunction at work in the situation – to crystallise the mise en scène of Two – by at once attesting to the original Two (the amorous union in Nevers of the radically disjunct worlds of Nazi Germany and occupied France) and further emphasising or ‘indetermining’ the absolute disjunction of the lovers (suffice to recall the final naming of the lovers as ‘Nevers’ and ‘Hiroshima’, a mutual designation that explicitly announces their experiences as simultaneously separate and shared). It is in this precise manner that we can attest to Hiroshima’s ethical subjectivity, in its navigation of a new world in which the ‘absolute Two’ appears, while faced with the dual temptations of betrayal and terror. For if Marienbad presents the intemporal instant in which we pass from the One to the Two, it is only in Hiroshima that we begin to move towards infinity, and it is precisely such an infinite expanse that provides the ground of true ethicality. Let us end this section on a pedagogical note. By now we can see that the crucial difference between the ethical approach Badiou espouses in ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’ and his more philosophical consideration of ethics elsewhere lies in the all-important category of truth. Simply, the ‘ethics’ Badiou invokes in his cinematic writings is simultaneously too Platonic and not Platonic enough,

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being on the one hand too tied up with what Rancière calls the ‘ethical regime of images’ (which divorces art from the question of truth), and on the other too divested from Badiou’s own recommencement of philosophy by way of a return to Plato (whose sole object is truth). Alternatively, such an ethics might be better understood in terms of ‘morality’, proposing at best a truthless fable which, as Badiou himself points out, ‘fails to touch on any real’ (SP, p. 4). In short, such morality remains resolutely objective, whereas real ethics can have no meaning unless it is subjective through and through. It is to this effect that the moral approach has little pedagogical purchase, even if it does propose to teach a mass audience to separate how to be from how not to be. For, as Badiou asserts in his Handbook of Inaesthetics, ‘the only education is an education by truths’ (HI, p. 14). Thus, education, like most everything else in Badiou’s philosophy, only operates insofar as there is some truth at work in the situation. 6.3

APPARENT SINGULARITIES The screen speaks of love. René Clair36

Anticipating our final chapter, we might well ask ourselves if all this is singular to cinema. For surely much of what we have seen thus far might equally be found in the realm of literature or the other arts (although cinema, as a mass art, no doubt ensures these ideas enjoy a far greater audience). Indeed, both Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year in Marienbad were scripted by ‘new novelists’ (Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet, respectively). Further, in both of his major interventions into the subject of love – ‘What is Love’ from Conditions and ‘La scène du Deux’ from the collection De l’amour – Badiou begins by drawing explicit connections between art and love. Hence, in ‘What is Love?’, Badiou immediately remarks that ‘what has been said of the true reality of love, precisely outside of its Platonic inauguration – and before psychoanalysis unsettled the notion – has been in the order of art, and most singularly in novelistic prose’,37 while in ‘La scène du Deux’ he concedes that ‘what art can’t help but acknowledge . . . is love as process, or duration, or construction of a scene’.38 So let us try and isolate precisely what it is in Resnais’s cinema that no other art can lay claim to. Clearly this unique power must lie with those ‘big’ questions on which we ended

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the first section of this chapter, namely, of how cinema draws forth its being in its appearing and actively creates time. Moreover, it is evidently questions such as these that underscore exactly how it is that cinema ‘tests’ philosophy. Unsurprisingly, we will look for our answer on the side of the event. As such, we will for the remainder of this chapter limit our scope to Resnais’s truly ‘evental’ film, Last Year in Marienbad. To answer this question we need first to remind ourselves of what exactly the event is. We also need to point out once more that in Being and Event, an event, which, as we know, is a momentary aberration of the laws of onto-logy, was conceived of as wholly separate to its site – Badiou making perfectly clear in this earlier work that ‘an event is not (does not coincide with) an evental site’ (BE, p. 182) – the latter figuring as a radically singular multiple such that none of its elements are situationally presented. Or again, while the site itself was presented, its elements were not. An event proper thus involved the sudden coming-to-be of a reflexive or supernumerary multiple, namely, a multiple paradoxically composed of all the unpresented elements of the site as well as the event itself. Thus, given a site X, an event (ex) was composed of all those unpresented elements x belonging to X, as well as itself. Thus the matheme of the event: ex = {x [ X, ex}. An event therefore involved the sudden presentation (and equally sudden withdrawal) of all those unpresented elements of the site, together with the presentation of this presentation. With Logics of Worlds, however, the narrative of the event shifts somewhat. Here the event and the site are effectively fused, inasmuch as an event comes to be understood as a site in extremis. Thus a site is now considered as an illegal object, being one that comes to count itself in the referential field of its own indexation and as such ‘summons its being in the appearing of its own multiple composition’ (LW, p. 363). To this effect, it is now the site – not the event per se – that constitutes a supernumerary term. The illegality of this reflexivity of course means that the site is ‘an ontological figure of the instant: it appears only to disappear’ (LW, p. 369). Moreover, in its giving its own being a value of existence, a site bridges the fissure separating being from being-there and involves ‘the instantaneous revelation of the void that haunts multiplicities’ (LW, p. 369). An event proper thus involves the sudden and brief attribution of a maximal intensity of existence to the site as a singular object, the (apparent) consequences of which are maximal. These maximal consequences are precisely the sudden and absolute existence of that which formerly inexisted

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within the world in question. Badiou names these consequences the trace of the event. It cannot be stressed enough how, for Badiou, it is not mathematics but art – or rather, the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé – that delivers the matheme of the event. For it is Mallarmé who, in giving us the ‘thought-poem of the event and the undecidable’ (C, p. 298), allows us to think the dissolution of the impasse of ontology in measuring the amount by which the state infinitely exceeds its situation. Or as Badiou puts it in Being and Event, ‘a poem by Mallarmé always fixes the place of an aleatory event’ (BE, p. 191). Accordingly, in Mallarmé’s poetry we can clearly discern those crucial properties of the event. It is, however, for Badiou uniquely in Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés (‘A Throw of the Dice’) that the event qua event is truly thought, for in this poem ‘the event in question . . . [is] that of the production of an absolute symbol of the event’, the stakes of the eponymous dice-throw being precisely that of ‘making an event out of the thought of an event’ (BE, p. 193).39 According to Badiou, the event takes the form of ‘a throw of the dice’ inasmuch as it is itself both a chance occurrence and an absolute, something ‘which cannot be inferred from the situation, yet which is nevertheless a fixed multiple’ (BE, p. 193), being finally ‘the unique Number which cannot / be another’.40 In this manner ‘a cast of dice joins the emblem of chance to that of necessity, the erratic multiple of the event to the legible retroaction of the count’ (BE, p. 193). In the poem, the radically undecidable nature of the event – for as we know, an event, being absolutely un-known, cannot be inferred from the situation41 – takes the form of an interminable indecision on the part of the dice-thrower, namely, the figure of the master who casts ‘from the depths of a shipwreck’42 (the ‘shipwreck’ providing the symbol of the site). This hesitation is absolute, meaning we will never see the master throw the dice, forever caught as he is between the decision to ‘play / the game’ and ‘not to open the hand’.43 For to ‘play the game’ would decide the event’s presentation in the situation (thereby extinguishing its event-ness), whereas ‘not to open his hand’ would mean: ‘nothing / will have taken place / but the place’44 (rendering it ineffective in its invisibility). To this effect Mallarmé shows how ‘the only representable figure of the concept of the event is the staging of its undecidability’ (BE, pp. 193–4). Further, Mallarmé demonstrates that even in fixing the place of the event (in the final ‘number’ the dice throw would present) the abolition of undecidability remains impossible – Mallarmé proclaiming:

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‘if / it was the number / it would be / chance’45 – insofar as, its fixity thus guaranteed, the event would either find itself swallowed whole by the regime of presentation, or simply remain void. In either case it is clear that ‘nothing will have taken place but the place’.46 However, immediately after declaring this non-event event, there appears in the night sky – ‘in a lightning flash / which imposed / a limit on infinity’47 – the constellation of the Great Bear (‘the Septentrion’), that ‘essential figure of number’ (BE, p. 197) whose seven stars (the combination of a four and a three) realise ‘the successive shock / in the way of stars / of a count total in formation.’48 Thus the number (‘which cannot be another’) itself emerges to mark, in the face of a supposed non-event, an evental result. From the quasi-transcendence of this result – positioned as it is ‘on some vacant and superior surface’49 – we must conclude that Mallarmé’s assertion that ‘nothing’ has taken place ‘means solely that nothing decidable within the situation could figure the event as such’ (BE, p. 197), for, ‘as an un-founded multiple, as self-belonging, undivided signature of itself, the event can only be indicated beyond the situation, despite it being necessary to wager that it has manifested itself therein’ (BE, p. 197). Or again, while it is from within the situation that we must intervene in the event and declare its (non-)being, it is solely from outside of the situation that we can actually know anything of the event (for the simple reason that, were it knowable and hence decidable, by virtue of the given terms of a situation, then it would in no way be evental). The event’s intrinsic undecidability – the loss of which risks the event’s becoming a non-event – is thus compensated for on the final page of the poem, where we find that nothing has taken place but the place, ‘except / on high / perhaps / a constellation’.50 Which is to say that the absolute need to maintain the equivalence of gesture and non-gesture (or the master’s absolute hesitation concerning playing the game and keeping his hand closed) is finally remunerated ‘by the supernumerary emergence of the constellation, which fixes in the sky of Ideas the event’s excess-of-one’ (BE, p. 197). Or again, the event’s intra-situational undecidability is ultimately supported by its supernumerary nature: as the event literally ex-sists above and beyond the ‘known’ of the situation, with regard to deciding the event’s having happened, ‘it is given to us to bet’ (BE, p. 198). It is to this effect that the Badiou of Being and Event holds Un Coup de dés to be ‘the densest text there is on the limpid seriousness of a conceptual drama’ (BE, p. 197), literally providing the matheme of the event which marks both the chance emergence of

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an undecidable multiple together with the possible opening of a new truth (for, as Mallarmé ends his poem, ‘all thought emits a throw of the dice’).51 Accordingly, if we distil the above we arrive at what is essential to the concept of the event as it is presented in Being and Event, namely: that the event is a chance supplement; that it is separate to its site; that it is a reflexive multiple; that it is radically undecidable; that it quantifies what was otherwise unquantifiable; and that it is of itself inconsequential. Yet, as we know, with Logics of Worlds at least three major changes take place, for here the event is reconceptualised as consequential (it leaves a trace), fused with its site (it is a site in extremis), and involving the complication of being with its appearance (it is that which ‘makes itself, in the world, the being-there of its own being’ (LW, p. 363)). Badiou for his part looks to the poetry of Paul Valéry – specifically his Le Cimetière marin (‘The Graveyard by the Sea’) – in Logics of Worlds to ‘update’ the event.52 While in no way disagreeing with Badiou’s contention that it is Mallarmé who thinks the ‘pure event’ at an ontological level, we nevertheless must question whether poetry is in fact capable of staging this newly conceptualised evental drama. Indeed, for reasons that should by now be clear, I contend that while in Being and Event mathematics is foremost supplemented by poetry, it is assuredly cinema that best bespeaks the logics of worlds. For while the power of the poem – even when concerning delivering the event of the event – lies foremost in its pushing presentation to the edge of unpresentation, the event itself is now hopelessly complicated with the question of appearance. Simply, the thought of the event – which, as we have seen, can only be given artistically – must be apparent in its constitution. And, as we have seen, cinema is the preeminent art of the relations between being and appearance. So can cinema think the event? First, as we know, ‘the only representable figure of the concept of the event is the staging of its undecidability’ (BE, pp. 193–4), which is precisely why Badiou’s holding Un Coup de dés as presenting the ‘event of the event’ lies foremost in its poetic coupling of pure undecidability (the eternally uncast dice) with the fragility of an exceptional result (the barely visible constellation). This in mind, do we not bear witness to such a presentation in Last Year in Marienbad, in its undecidable (did X and A meet and fall in love last year in Marienbad?) as much as its result (X’s declaration that A exists ‘alone, with me’)? In keeping with Badiou’s contention that ‘the event can only be indicated beyond the situation, despite it being necessary to wager that it has manifested itself

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therein’ (BE, p. 197), we immediately recognise Marienbad’s evental result to be as remote as that of Un Coup de dés. For just as the undecidable of Marienbad remains absolutely un-knowable – Resnais providing nothing by which we might decide whether X and A have previously met – so too does its result fall at the world’s outer limits, X declaring that A exists ‘alone, with me’ only as they escape the hotel’s evental matrix, his final words being delivered over a distant shot of the hotel, where all that remains of its timeless baroque intricacy is a vague outline, its form barely distinguishable from the night sky. However, unlike Mallarmé’s constellation, this result is hardly precarious. For what we see here is rather the consequence (qua trace) of the event, being the sudden intense existence of what had previously inexisted (namely, sexual disjunction) in the form of X’s amorous declaration. Simply, this event is not constrained solely in a subjective (and equally evental) nomination, rather, it leaves its own existential mark. So too does Resnais’s work figure the question of evental appearance. For while Mallarmé and Valéry operate exclusively on a poetic ‘other scene’, a place where being is thought less in terms of its appearance than its presentation, Resnais’s film is, like every film, concerned foremost with the relations between being and appearing. Indeed, given what we have argued thus far, we might say that Marienbad stages the mise en scène of the event. Further, Resnais’s work concurrently treats the question of time – something effectively absent from Un Coup de dés – by constructing on the one hand what we have characterised as an ‘atemporal heterotemporality’ (designating the intemporal ‘cut’ of the event), and on the other the birth of a new singular time in an evental result, a time which finally escapes its parenthetical constraints to open onto eternity. Moreover, the crucial question (again lacking in both Mallarmé and Valéry) of the evental complication of being with appearance is in Resnais’s work itself wholly complicated with the question of time. For as we have seen, the atemporal heterotemporality characterising Marienbad not only designates the inter-time of the event, but also gives us the very Idea of montage, inasmuch as the latter is as we know the infinitely complex system of relations constituting the film (what Badiou calls the global movement, whose real thought is topological and thus atemporal). Or, in more explicitly Badiouian terms, montage is the state of the film. The evental result of Marienbad, however, testifies to a radical interruption of the logic of the global movement. This rupture with the infinite complexity of the global movement to bring

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forth a singular time is precisely the logical (or apparent) equivalent of the ontological measuring of the immeasurable (qua delimiting the superpower of the state, or, in Mallarmé’s terms, providing the ‘unique Number which cannot be another’). Finally, the ‘constellation’ of Marienbad – its consequential trace – equally testifies to the film’s having ‘[summoned] its being in the appearing of its own multiple composition’ (LW, p. 363). Which is to say that Marienbad, in thinking the event, draws forth its own void. Needless to say, this void-being of cinema is none other than the cut itself, being the very ‘stuff’ of montage – for without the cut there can be no montage – which is nevertheless radically excluded from its result. For the atemporal heterotemporality of Marienbad paradoxically ensures that the cut itself appears absolutely – being drawn to the fore by virtue of the manifold impossible relations (between incongruous times as much as spaces) which constitute Marienbad’s global movement – only to disappear with the emergence of its trace (qua count), which is precisely the consequence of its illegal apparition. Needless to say, this ‘cut’ should be understood in both its filmic (the interstice or edit) and sexual (the ‘cut’ of sexual disjunction) senses. Which is to say that Last Year in Marienbad, in accordance with the logic of the event, as much as the interminable passage of cinema, can sustain the complication of being with appearance – or the appearance of being – only for a time, a time that itself passes. It is to this effect that we can say that, while Mallarmé thinks the ontological structure of the event, it is Resnais who supplies its logic. While Resnais’s work can certainly be seen to ‘do something’ concerning philosophy, his cinema, while undeniably popular, hardly covers any real ‘mass’ terrain. In a word, his cinema is too artistic. Yet it is cinema’s mass address that is without doubt its most powerful asset. As such, let us turn finally to that which assures cinema’s real universality by considering film as an impure art.

Notes 1. Badiou, ‘La scène du Deux’, p. 180. 2. Resnais cited in Sweet, The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais, p. 5. 3. As Badiou points out, ‘Deleuze’s intuition culminates in the complete determination of the whole (or the One) – qua the founding intemporality of time – as Relation’ (D, p. 63). 4. Domarchi et al., ‘Hiroshima, notre amour’, p. 69. 5. Ibid.

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6. Cf. ‘[Hiroshima mon amour] is a film about reflection, on the past and on the present. Now, in reflection, the passage of time is effaced because it is a parenthesis within duration. And it is within this duration that Hiroshima is inserted’, ibid. 7. Ibid. p. 61. 8. One thinks here less of Deleuze than of Bazin and his famous contention that cinema ‘makes a molding of the object as it exists in time and, furthermore, makes an imprint of the duration of the object’ (WC1, p. 97). 9. Of course the non-chronological nature of production is ‘undercut’ (to an extent) in those films which attempt to disavow the cut such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and more recently Alexsandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002). 10. Domarchi et al., ‘Hiroshima, notre amour’, p. 69. 11. The past of Hiroshima mon amour bleeds into its present foremost in the fact that the film’s ‘drama’ revolves around how Elle’s love in Nevers ‘infects’ – perhaps fatally – her newfound love in Hiroshima. With regard to how the film’s present collides with its past, we will suffice ourselves by observing that the film’s closing sequence – the nightclub ‘pick-up’ sequence – stages their initial (unseen) encounter, meaning the film effectively concludes at the precise point it begins. Moreover, insofar as we are here reading Hiroshima as a properly subjective film we can say that its beginning and end do indeed intersect in the event, for, as we know, an event – which in Hiroshima represents (or rather, unpresents) the decisive cut between two presents, between Elle’s love in Nevers and her love in Hiroshima – is precisely that which ‘extracts from one time the possibility of an other time’ (LW, p. 384). 12. Plato, ‘Symposium’, p. 490/207a. 13. While in the film the characters remain nameless, in the script they are designated X, A and M, respectively denoting the male narrator, the woman (who is the object of X’s desire), and the other man (whom we assume to be A’s husband). 14. Marienbad’s various characters are of course constantly referred to (and depicted as) statues throughout the film. James Monaco even goes so far as to call Marienbad ‘an opera of statues’, Alain Resnais, p. 63. 15. Lynn A. Higgins points out that ‘although the three historical markers given – Charles III, an oath before the Diet, a treason trial – sound authentic enough, there is no such historical personage. M’s intervention is fiction invented out of historical materials, a historical discourse without historical reference’, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics, p. 104. 16. Resnais and Baby, ‘Entretien avec Alain Resnais’. Similarly, Marienbad’s scriptwriter, the ‘new novelist’ Alain Robbe-Grillet, asserts ‘we have

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17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

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decided to trust the spectator, to allow him, from start to finish, to come to terms with pure subjectivities’, Last Year in Marienbad, p. 13. Badiou, ‘Figures of Subjective Destiny’. Needless to say, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ positions are irreducible to biology: as Badiou points out, his approach is ‘strictly nominalist: there is no question here of an empirical, biological, or social distribution’, ‘What is Love?’, p. 40. Ibid. Badiou thus holds firm to Lacan’s contention that love involves the ‘intersection of two substances that have no part in common’ (S20, p. 17). Badiou, ‘La scène du Deux’, p. 178. Ibid. p. 183. ‘There is a real of the disjunction, which is, exactly, that no subject is able to occupy at the same time and under the same relation the two positions’, Badiou, ‘What is Love?’, p. 49. Copjec, ‘Gai Savoir Sera’, p. 124. Badiou, ‘La scène du Deux’, p. 178. Badiou, ‘What is Love?’, p. 45, translation modified. Ibid. As Badiou asserts, ‘initiated without doubt in evental excess, love is no less coextensive with its duration. Which means that love must attach itself to the construction of the scene of Two, while its paradox is that sexual disjunction is simultaneously its material and its obstacle’, ‘La scène du Deux’, p. 180. Rockhill, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. 1. Rancière also notes that ‘in the ethical regime, works of art have no autonomy. They are viewed as images to be questioned for their truth and for their effect on the ethos of individuals and the community. Plato’s Republic offers a perfect model of this regime’, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes’, p. 135. Badiou thus places himself firmly at odds with the ‘ethics of otherness’ espoused, for example, by Lyotard and Derrida (respectively by way of Kant and Levinas), demanding instead that ‘the whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned’ (E, p. 25). See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, p. 319. As Badiou notes in his book on Saint Paul, ‘the subjective process of a truth is one and the same thing as the love for that truth’ (SP, p. 92). Badiou and Hallward, Beyond Formalisation, p. 133. ‘All love ultimately establishes itself in the joy of the empty space of the Two of the sexes which it founds, and from this point of view the romantic idea of a full, fusional love, under the purified sign of the one, is precisely the Evil of love’ (NN, p. 161). Domarchi et al., ‘Hiroshima, notre amour’, p. 65.

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35. Hiroshima mon amour in fact takes every possible opportunity to make explicit the connection drawn between the event of love and the atom bomb: from the metaphor of the explosive instant which rips the world asunder, through the sweat (connoting as much the heat and intensity of passion as the heat and intensity of the blast) and ash which clings to the lovers’ bodies, up to the absolutely incomprehensible nature of both events. Indeed, Resnais goes so far as to have Elle analogise the horrors she did or did not witness at Hiroshima with love, saying ‘just as the illusion exists in love, the illusion you can never forget, so I was under the illusion I would never forget at Hiroshima. Just like with love.’ 36. René Clair cited in Breton, ‘As in a Wood’ , p. 74. 37. Badiou, ‘What is Love?’, p. 37. 38. Badiou, ‘La scène du Deux’, p. 179. 39. We should keep in mind that Badiou’s reading of Mallarmé is, in his own words, always absolute, inasmuch as he holds that: Mallarmé’s poetic machine, though opaque when looked at from the outside, nevertheless possesses only a single meaning. We must put an end to the laziness that has so many readers bypass the obstacle in order to claim that the enigma’s virtue consists in allowing a hundred underlying answers. This absolute dialectician does not present any ‘polysemy’. (Theory of the Subject, p. 92)

40. Mallarmé, Collected Poems, p. 130. 41. As Badiou puts it in a separate discussion of Mallarmé’s poetry, ‘nothing within a situation – salon, tomb, marsh, or surface of the sea – can force the recognition of the event as event’ (HI, p. 139). 42. Mallarmé, Collected Poems, p. 126. As Badiou points out, ‘the “shipwreck” alone gives us the allusive debris from which . . . the undecidable multiple of the event is composed’ (BE, pp. 192–3). 43. Mallarmé, Collected Poems, pp. 130/132. 44. Ibid. p. 142. 45. Ibid. pp. 138/140. 46. In fixing its place the event would become situationally presented, ‘but this presentation would either engulf the event within the natural regime of indeterminate presentation . . . [thus] allowing its evental essence to escape, or, having no graspable relation with its regime, it would be “worse / no / more nor less / indifferently but as much / chance”, and consequently it would not have represented either, via the event of the event, the absolute notion of the “there is”’ (BE, pp. 195–6). 47. Mallarmé, Collected Poems, pp. 136/138. 48. Ibid. p. 144, translation modified. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid.

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52. In Logics of Worlds Badiou contends: it is the question of the ‘pure event’ that connects the Mallarmé of ‘A Dice Throw’ with the Valéry of ‘The Graveyard by the Sea’: under what conditions can the poem capture what lies beyond what is, what purely happens? And what then is the status of thought, if it is true that such happening strikes at thought’s corporeal support? (LW, p. 516)

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CHAPTER 7

The Castle of Impurity

I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art or provincial minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Ralph Waldo Emerson1

7.1

FIFTEEN THESES ON IMPURIFICATION It has to be made clear once and for all that if cinema is an art it cannot simply be an amalgam of the principles of other, contiguous art forms: only having done that can we turn to the question of the allegedly composite nature of films. Andrey Tarkovsky2

We begin this final chapter with a difficult but fundamental thesis: cinema is an inessential art. Obviously this is not to say that cinema is unimportant artistically; rather, cinema is an art devoid of essence. We have seen something of this thesis already, in our assertion that cinema is at base a superficial art, an art of surfaces (it cuts from what appears, not what is). For if film is, as Badiou states, at its heart ‘nothing but takes and montage’, then it can by definition have no essential properties. Or again, there is no such thing as ‘quintessential’ or ‘pure cinema’ (save in the impotent dream of a blank screen on which is projected a silent and imageless vacuum).3 For a ‘take’ must first be understood in its literal sense – as something that is ‘taken’, ‘held up’, wrested from its proper place – while ‘montage’ is itself nothing but a film’s final arrangement (qua statist counting), the ultimate coupling and uncoupling of all of these ‘taken takes’. Cinema is then a purloined art, being first and foremost the art of taking. Simply, what is proper to cinema is precisely its impropriety, its inessentialness, its figuring as an empty site of appropriation. However, cinema should not be shunned for its impropriety. Rather,

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cinema takes because that is what is does. It is in part for this reason that we can speak, with Rancière, of ‘the radical innocence of the art of the moving image’ (FF, p. 171). Crucially, however, cinema’s pilfering extends beyond its immediately apparent relation to the visible – which, as we have seen, is precisely how cinema figures as an onto-logical art – to include the other arts. It is precisely for this reason that Badiou designates cinema the ‘plus-one’ of the arts, the art that ‘does not add itself to the other six while remaining on the same level’ (HI, p. 79). Simply, according to Badiou, cinema’s inessential nature – its ‘incurable impurity’ (HI, p. 85) – means that it ‘takes’ from the other arts without, for all that, actually giving anything back. Moreover, it is precisely in its ‘parasitic’ nature, in its thriving off of its sister arts, that cinema draws its power. For, as Rancière (after Badiou) notes, ‘if there is something proper to cinema, it is the way it accumulates powers that it takes from elsewhere’.4 To take up our most recent example, in spite of the fact that it does something concerning philosophy, Last Year in Marienbad is clearly an absolutely impure text. Its narrative, for example, is essentially poetic, while its staging is theatrical (to say nothing of the sizeable debt it owes to music, sculpture, painting, architecture and dance).5 Yet, as we know, while cinema liberally ‘takes’ from the other arts, it is precisely this movement that ‘weakens their aristocratic, complex and composite quality’ (CD, p. 4), and thereby helps to ensure their popularity. For cinema, as Bazin never tired of pointing out, can provide ‘an open sesame for the masses to the treasures of the world of art’ (WC1, p. 167). Which is to say that cinema does in fact give something back to its sister arts, namely, a public.6 Accordingly, we might say that cinema is that which ‘illuminates’ the arts. This is of course not to say that cinema presents the Wagnerian dream of Gesamtkunstwerk, the ‘total work of art’, if only for the fact that, in taking from everything, cinema’s impurity is necessarily entangled with the non-artistic realm, and as such occupies a ‘place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art’ (IT, p. 111).7 This indiscernibility is, however, crucial, for it is precisely its nonartistic complication that ensures cinema’s generic address, its contemporaneity only being assured inasmuch as its principle internal referent remains a ‘common imagery’, made up of those ‘ideological indicators of the epoch’ (IT, p. 113). Moreover, such ‘commonality’ is one of the principal reasons philosophy looks to cinema, for

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the cinematic art is ‘the supreme witness to the resources of the present’, the one that best ‘instructs philosophy on the vagaries of the present’.8 Simply, cinema is a real art only inasmuch as it paradoxically remains beneath the ‘dignity’ of art. The ‘incurable impurity’ of cinema, however, presents a further paradox (which, as we know, is the principal indication that philosophical investigation is required). For while a film’s impurity on the one hand testifies to its inessential nature – cinema being at base nothing but takes and montage – on the other it ensures its artistic power. In considering these paradoxes we will proceed by way of fundamental theses derived from the investigations conducted in the previous chapters. 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

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Cinema is an inessential art. We have just now considered this thesis and so can quickly move on. Suffice it to say that cinema has no ‘essence’ to speak of; it is of itself ‘immaterial’, in that it has no base material that is its and its alone. Cinema is a superficial art. Again, we have already examined this idea, observing cinema to be an art of surfaces, of appearances, pure and simple. Which is equally to say that film is an art of ‘taking’ (as opposed to ‘being’); it is the cipher of the visible and the audible. Cinema is a subtractive art. As we have seen, cinema’s basic operations are subtractive in nature (the image is first subtracted from the visible, the local movement subtracts the image from itself, the impure movement subtracts the arts from their proper position). Moreover, we have determined cinema’s power to lie foremost in the dis-appearance of space, in the subtractive movement which directs image toward the void. Cinema is an onto-logical art. We have been arguing this point for some time now. Briefly, if poetry serves as the artistic paradigm for thinking the subtractive purity of presentation, cinema is the art which best illuminates the logic of appearing.9 Cinema is an unexpected art. Put simply, we do not in general suspect cinema of being artistic. On the contrary, the ‘art’ of cinema is something that catches us by surprise. If cinema is indeed a ‘Saturday night art’, then this is equally its ‘great democratic advantage’, namely, that ‘you can go there on a Saturday evening to rest and rise unexpectedly’ (CD, p. 4). Cinema is an art that ‘lifts’ you when you least expect it, an art that seduces you by claiming to be something other than it is.

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Cinema is an impure art. This thesis, central to Badiou’s cinematographic writings, has been espoused in various ways throughout cinema’s short history, be it in Bazin’s passionate defence of ‘impure cinema’ – Bazin admirably deriding film’s puritan detractors by pointing out that ‘to be annoyed by this is as ridiculous as to condemn the opera on behalf of theatre and music’ (WC1, p. 168) – or Canudo’s aspiration that cinema might one day present ‘the synthesis of all the arts and of the profound impulse underlying them’,10 up to and including Film Theory’s stressing cinema’s capitalistic nature (every film being, in the final analysis, a commodity circulating in a global network, produced by a certain number of labourers, which is manufactured within a system of economic and ideological relations) together with Badiou’s own writings on the subject. Moreover, cinema is, as we know, the product of a union between art and non-art alike, involving theatre, photography, music, literature and painting, as much as vaudeville, magic shows, the circus, puppetry and so on. Indeed, it is precisely this ‘non-artistic’ derivation that ensures the universal address of, for example, Chaplin’s pathos-laden slapstick, deservedly lauded by the various philosophers of cinema. All the arts are impure. While cinema is doubtless an absolutely impure art, this in no way means that the other arts are by contrast ‘pure’. No one has demonstrated this better than Jacques Rancière, who substitutes his own ‘aesthetic regime of the arts’ for the otherwise ‘incoherent label “modernity”’ (PA, p. 24). In doing so Rancière discredits the prevailing idea of modernism as involving the emancipation or autonomisation of the arts – as the exclusive and elusive commitment of each art to its own medium, the final laying bare of their ‘pure form’ – by demonstrating that the arts have always relied on a certain impurity with regard to their sisters. Rancière thus points out, for example, that Mallarmé’s project was ‘not so much about the “autonomy” of poetry as it was about inventing a spatial language of poetry, the model of which was the model of the feet in dance’ (one need but glance at the arrangement of Un Coup de dés to appreciate this fact), while modern dance itself involved ‘an attempt at defining a new form of theatrical performance whose forms were borrowed from antique painting and sculpture’.11 So too theatre, under such figures as Artaud and Mayakovsky, liberally ‘borrowed’ from dance, cinema,

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Badiou and Cinema the circus, gymnastics and so on.12 Moreover, even the most ‘modern’ of modernist works would appear to be hopelessly complicated with non-art. Marcel Duchamp’s famous readymades for example, most notably his infamous 1917 work Fountain, clearly demonstrate an indiscernibility between art and non-art, an acknowledgement that the very material of art is first and foremost non-artistic.13 Rather – this is especially obvious in the case of Duchamp’s urinal – it is art’s subjacent or non-artistic material that becomes art. This is why Badiou can hold, at one and the same time, that ‘art is pure Idea’,14 and that ‘the real of art comprises an ideal impurity as the immanent process of its purification’ (P, p. 146). For impurity is in fact a fundamental law of art, inasmuch as real art always involves the formalisation of what was previously formless, the radical becoming-art of what was heretofore considered non-art, or what, according to the artistic world in question, did not previously exist. ‘Purification’ must therefore not only be understood as a subtractive (or even destructive) movement, whereby apparent impurities are eliminated to arrive at the ‘pure thing’, but also as a fundamentally creative or affirmative gesture, as the act of formalising or bringing into form what was previously formless (or pure-ifying what was impure). Indeed, it is precisely this movement that Badiou holds cinema to ‘democratise’, namely, ‘the movement by which art drags itself from non-art . . . by making from impurity the thing itself’ (CD, p. 5). Nothing is pure. More precisely, only (the) nothing is pure. Meaning the only purity there is, is precisely what simply is, which is nothing other than being itself, pure multiplicity. Indeed, let us not forget that philosophy begins with Plato’s interruption of the poem with the matheme, and it is precisely mathematics – in its pure intelligibility – that ‘makes truth out of the pure multiple’ (HI, p. 22). Moreover, as Badiou is wont to point out, Plato himself held Ideas – those supposed bastions of purity – to be mixtures. Indeed, we can even regard a truth as a ‘pure impurity’, for, in convoking the void and constituting a generic set, a truth is at once a ‘pure’ sequence – its sole reference being (the) void – while at the same time remaining absolutely impure, for to say that a truth is indiscernible, that it has no discernible properties or that it is aparticular, is not the same as to say that it is pure. On the contrary, a generic set,

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as we have seen, effectively ‘contains a little bit of everything’ (TW, p. 107).15 Cinema is the most impure of the arts. This is of course a direct consequence of our first thesis, namely, cinema’s being an inessential art. However, as we have repeated ad nauseum, it is from its absolute impurity that film derives both its power and its purpose. In a word, the generic address of the other arts loses out to cinema for the simple fact that they are not impure enough, and as such can never gain a mass audience on their own terms. This does not, however, mean that we must confine cinema – as both Badiou and Rancière at times appear to do – to the fable, to the mere ‘“imaginarization” of truth’ (HI, p. 4). Indeed, we have already seen that cinema has its own powers, its own Ideas. Cinema’s presentation of time, for example, in its properly subjective form, can in no way be reduced to the impurification of something supposedly singular to music. It is for this reason that we should consider cinema less a Gorkian ‘Kingdom of Shadows’ than a quasi-Mallarméan ‘Castle of Impurity’. Cinema is a mass art. This is of course the principal thesis of ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’. While the arts in general are inescapably tied to what Badiou designates a ‘proletarian aristocratism’ – namely, ‘an aristocratism exposed to the judgement of all’ (P, p. 147), absolutely indifferent to its ‘clientele’ – only cinema constitutes a truly ‘mass art’, at once aristocratic and proletarian, obstinate and universal, which can and must take its public into consideration. At the summit of this spectatorial inclusion stand the cinemas of Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin (whose Tramp character even iconically represents art’s ‘aristocratic proletarianism’ in his famous attire, being dressed somewhere between a lord and a beggar). This is why one of cinema’s roles as the most impure of the arts is to provide popular support for those arts from which it takes. Cinema is what democratises the inherent (proletarian) aristocratism of the arts. Moreover, cinema’s being a mass art equally necessitates a certain political responsibility. Simply, cinema must never forget its obligation to the masses. Cinema must ceaselessly impurify itself. Purity, not impurity, is the enemy of cinema. Were cinema to purify itself absolutely of its representative status – were it to become truly presentative, what Bazin calls ‘total cinema’ – then cinema would literally

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Badiou and Cinema efface itself. On the other hand, were cinema to purify itself absolutely of its content, as was the explicit aim of many of the twentieth century’s avant-gardes – suffice us to cite as an example Ferdinand Léger’s contention that ‘painting’s mistake is the subject [whereas] cinema’s mistake is the scenario’16 – as much as that of the now-saturated subtractive sequence that Badiou designates ‘modern cinema’, then cinema would find itself little more than a soundless, imageless void. Cinema would become, quite literally, nothing. Again, cinema would be abolished. To this effect, if cinema’s artistic operations are, as Badiou argues, ‘incompletable purification operations’ (IT, p. 111) – if a film can only be truly artistic inasmuch as it enters into an interminable process of self-purging – then it must conceive of a moderative function, which is properly speaking ethical in nature. This leads us to our next thesis. Cinema is a moderate art. Cinema’s artistic imperative is, as we have just seen, that of impurifying itself. However, as we know, every subjective procedure is equally an ethical process, and Badiou’s ethics combines under its imperative those ‘resources of discernment (do not fall for simulacra), of courage (do not give up) and of moderation (do not get carried away to the extremes of Totality)’ (E, p. 91). Simply, cinema needs to be constantly aware of its own limits. Cinema must hold on to its Ideas. This imperative is, once again, Badiou’s. Not only must cinema ‘organize the passage of the immobile’, it must ‘organize the immobility of passage’ (HI, p. 87). Needless to say, such ‘immobile mobility’ is a complicated affair. Arguably, we see it most clearly in Italian neorealism (in its many any-space-whatevers, those spaces of absolute derelation and subtraction of which Deleuze waxes so lyrically), though it is equally apparent in French new wave cinema (for example in the celebrated final image of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), whose ambiguous suspension ensures its very permanency). Such immobile mobility, however, need not be understood so literally. For the ‘immobile’ – or more precisely, ‘the immobile side of the idea’ (HI, p. 87) – is equally the ‘eternal’, the time of the Idea. As I have already argued, it is precisely the figuring of such eternity that is the most immediate manner by which cinema can be seen to ‘do something’ with regard to philosophy. This is after all the principal concern of Resnais’s cinema, to the point that we

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can say that his films present the very Idea of time. Thus, while Badiou holds that cinema invokes the Idea only inasmuch as it facilitates its passage – as opposed to its ‘donation’ (as in painting) or its subjective ‘encounter’ (as in theatre) – we can see that its ‘true’ power lies in ‘holding up’ this passage, in demonstrating that the passage itself is eternal (or – it is the same thing – in undermining the consistency of the global movement). Thus we can argue, contra Badiou, that it is in fact cinema, more than music, that truly invents ‘a pure time of the idea’ and as such ‘[explores] the configuration that the influence of thinking may adopt’ (HI, p. 87). Cinema illuminates the generic procedures. Not only does cinema democratise the other arts and impurify (or ‘idealise’) the Ideas they give rise to, but it can equally be seen to ‘popularise’ those truths drawn from other amorous, scientific and political worlds. This movement is of course hardly singular to cinema (we know, for example, that ‘what art can’t help but acknowledge . . . is love as process, or duration, or construction of a scene’).17 Of the various arts it is, however, cinema that best accomplishes this conditional impurity. Again, it does so foremost by virtue of two facts: that it is a mass art (thesis 10); and that it is an inessential art (thesis 1). We have already seen how Last Year in Marienbad presents the event of love. We could equally show how Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) impurifies the political Idea (or, for that matter, albeit more fantastically, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), or even Joss Whedon’s Serenity (2005)). Badiou himself offers a detailed reading of Pasolini’s unrealised film based on the epistles of Saint Paul as an exceptional political tract in his Saint Paul.18 Simply, cinema serves to bring other thoughts – thoughts which spring from outside of art – quite literally, into light. All of which leads us, perhaps unsurprisingly, to our final thesis. Cinema reproduces philosophy. From our first thesis on the inessential nature of cinema onwards we cannot help but observe how cinema parallels philosophy. Indeed, the very truthless-ness of philosophy announces its own inessential nature. For philosophy, like cinema, is itself an empty site of appropriation, its sole role being that of ‘compossibilising’ truths. These truths, taken – or as Badiou puts it, ‘seized’ – from outside of itself, are themselves wholly indifferent to the

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Badiou and Cinema ‘Truth’ that philosophy finally constructs. Which is to say that philosophy, like cinema, does not remunerate its conditions. The congruence is difficult to ignore: cinema’s ‘impurification’ clearly corresponds to philosophy’s ‘compossibilisation’; film’s ‘taking’ translates into philosophy’s ‘seizure’. Moreover, cinema’s artistic imperative to impurify or ‘idealise’ the Idea, making of it a new cinema-Idea, is clearly analogous to philosophy’s own concerted task to ‘rethink thought’. Badiou himself has stated that ‘after the philosophy of cinema must come – is already coming – philosophy as cinema, which consequently has the opportunity of being a mass philosophy’ (CD, p. 5). For our part, we can say that after the cinema of philosophy must come cinema as philosophy. Or again, cinema must cease resembling philosophy and instead begin its reassembly.

An inessential art, a superficial art, a subtractive art, an ontological art, an unexpected art, an impure art, a mass art, an art of ceaseless impurification, a moderate art, an immobile art, a philosophical art. These theses will serve to guide us throughout our final considerations on cinema. And who better to serve as our case study than ‘the most famous filmmaker of all’,19 Alfred Hitchcock. 7.2

AN IMPOSSIBLE PURITY: HITCHCOCK AND MALLARMÉ To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which derives from the pleasure of step-by-step discovery; to suggest, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol. Stéphane Mallarmé20

Surely no name better emblematises the idea of cinema’s being a mass art than Alfred Hitchcock. As Jean-Luc Godard proclaims in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, ‘perhaps there are ten thousand people who haven’t forgotten Cezanne’s apple, but there must be a billion spectators who will remember the lighter of the stranger on the train’.21 Artistically innovative, intensely self-reflexive, gloriously droll and phenomenally popular, Hitchcock’s films reach the farthest heights of cinema’s pure impurity. Moreover, Hitchcock was acutely aware of cinema’s inessential, superficial nature. One need only consider the pervasive (and decidedly meta-filmic) use of rear projection in his films to register this fact.22 His works have done more than simply endure, they have even entered the museum, that redoubtable

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yardstick of true ‘artistry’. In sum, Hitchcock provides indisputable testimony to each of the theses we have just now advanced. Moreover, he demonstrates not only the incredible address of cinema but also its extraordinary power, which is why this artist of non-art can be described – by no less than Jean-Luc Godard – as ‘the greatest creator of forms of the twentieth century’.23 For a director who arguably encompasses the very definition of cinema as a mass art, who Deleuze holds ‘brings the cinema to completion’ (C1, p. 209) – and who, it must be noted, is curiously absent from Badiou’s own cinematographic writings – the method of Hitchcock is surprisingly similar to that of Mallarmé. In his Conditions, Badiou describes the latter’s ‘subtractive’ procedure as one of isolation and separation. These procedures, Badiou tells us, constitute two distinct schemas of rupture. The former involves the ‘cutting out’ of a multiple so as to bring about ‘the purified consciousness of a . . . detotalised multiple’ – without, for all that, directly presenting the multiple itself – inventing a ‘sort of scene in which all that belongs to it can be inventoried and enumerated’ (C, p. 60). The latter contrarily consists in ‘bringing forth a contour of nothingness which extirpates the given from all proximity to what it is not’, thereby allowing us to pass from the counted or ‘impure’ multiple to its very being, to ‘a power of ontological purity’ (C, p. 60). This means that ‘separation’ performs an absolute subtraction (the thing itself is cut from its surroundings and brought into heightened focus), while ‘isolation’ involves an absolute de-relation or purification (all proximities and connections to the thing are gradually suppressed or suspended until we arrive at the purity of the thing-in-itself).24 We would be forgiven for immediately supposing a certain pre-cinematic logic to be at work here, inasmuch as cinema’s first operation is precisely an act of separation, of cutting images from the visible so as to ‘bring forth, indivisibly, both their singularity and their ideality’ (HI, p. 78) – or, as Canudo puts it, ‘[immobilise] the essence of things and their universal meanings in a particular and clear configuration’25 – while the process of isolation clearly resonates with cinema’s ‘anyspace-whatevers’, those sites of absolute purification and derelation Deleuze identified as characteristic of modern cinema. But what does any of this have to do with Hitchcock? The Master of Suspense operated at a remove from such cinema, never so much as flirting with the Ideas that neorealism gave rise to. Indeed, Deleuze characterised Hitchcock’s cinema as lying at the outer limits of the movement-image, pushing cinema as it were to the brink, to its

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veritable saturation, the crisis of its very being.26 Moreover, while he was clearly influenced by the symbolists – by Mallarmé as much as Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Maeterlinck – Hitchcock’s films can more immediately be seen to draw upon German expressionism, to say nothing of surrealism and the work of Edgar Allan Poe (who was, after all, one of the principal precursors of the symbolists). For our part, Hitchcock represents the very essence (or rather, ‘inessentialness’) of cinema, being the author of works that are at once absolutely impure (and thereby ‘proletarian’) and wholly artistic (thus ‘aristocratic’). So – Mallarmé momentarily to one side – in considering Hitchcock’s works as the epitome of ‘impure art’, we are not interested in his proclivity for reworking literature (Rope clearly refiguring Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, Notorious (1946) and Rebecca (1940) invoking Perrault’s Bluebeard fable . . .), nor his habit of foregrounding paintings (the clown in Blackmail (1929), the portraits of Carlotta Valdés in Vertigo and of Maxim de Winter’s ancestor in Rebecca, the abstract work in Suspicion . . .) and theatre (Murder! (1930) and Stage Fright (1950) directly exploring the relationship between stage and screen . . .), nor even his deliberate – invariably Wagnerian – musical invocations (the prelude to Tristan und Isolde in Murder!, Bernard Herrmann’s insistent homage to this same piece in Vertigo . . .). What concerns us is rather Hitchcock’s peculiar artistic paradox, one that François Truffaut recognised immediately, openly admiring the fact that this ‘director who, through the simplicity and the clarity of his work, is the most accessible to a universal audience is also the one who excels at filming the most complex and subtle relationships’.27 It is this Hitchcock that interests us, the Hitchcock whose work testifies to art’s inherent ‘proletarian aristocratism’ and simultaneously ‘democratises’ its address.28 Moreover, inasmuch as we are considering Hitchcock’s method as analogous to that of Mallarmé, our concern lies with exactly how it is that Hitchcock maintains his democracy without falling into the trap of artistic exclusivity. Or again, our interest rests with Hitchcock’s peculiar method of moderation – what Godard calls his ‘control of the universe’ – designating the properly ethical dimension of his films (which, as I have argued, has little to do with the banal representation of Good and Evil, but rather concerns the very substance of the work, its essential impurity). So, to return to our initial question, how might we consider the relation of Hitchcock, the artist par excellence of showing, to Mallarmé, this poet who firmly believed that ‘there must only be allusion’?29 Or more pointedly, how does Hitchcock’s cinema put

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into play the ruptive schematas of separation and isolation? Perhaps unsurprisingly, we will look for our answer in Hitchcock’s famous ‘objects’, which, as Andrew Sarris astutely notes, constitute ‘the very substance of his cinema’.30 As is well known, Hitchcock’s films revolve around at least two kinds of object. The first is of course the famous ‘McGuffin’, which, as Hitchcock explains, is at base ‘nothing at all’.31 Rather, it is ‘an empty place, a pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion’,32 such as the Pommard bottles filled with uranium in Notorious, the secret clause in Foreign Correspondent (1940), the microfilm in North by Northwest (1959), the stolen money (or even Marion herself) in Psycho, and so on. The other object – the one that principally concerns us here – is one we have glimpsed already, in our preliminary consideration of the ‘maximal object’ of Hitchcock’s filmic worlds: the jewelled pendant in Vertigo, the embossed lighter in Strangers on a Train, the glass of milk in Suspicion (or indeed the ring in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the keys in both Notorious and Dial M for Murder (1954) . . .). This is the absolutely singular object, the object cut from the real and brought into such sharp focus that it literally ‘overshadows’ the film itself, at once transcending the work and bringing it together (something highlighted in its frequently being an object of exchange, passing from – and in this process binding – character to character). Moreover, it is by virtue of this object that the film establishes a scene wherein ‘all that belongs to it can be inventoried and enumerated’ (C, p. 60) (separation), as much as one where everything can be progressively purged (isolation). For, in the final analysis, the set of everything that ‘belongs’ to (or is ‘enveloped’ by) this object constitutes the whole of the film. Simply, contra Godard (who sees in the Hitchcockian object a ‘pure image’, wholly divorced from its surroundings), the object in fact serves as the locus of all relations, and as such is precisely what determines the work itself (and vice versa): it is the heart of the global movement, the centre of the whirl. However – this point is crucial – the object is not the subject of the scene it establishes. Rather, while the object, in enveloping all the elements to be enumerated, effectively ‘sets the scene’, its true role – in accordance with the Mallarméan axiom prohibiting direct representation (as much as cinema’s imperative to maintain its impurity) – is ultimately that of preventing the direct presentation of the scene’s true subject. To this effect we can consider the Hitchcockian object as being at once an example of, and a metaphor for, the crucial intra-filmic process of moderation.

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Of Hitchcock’s many singular objects, perhaps the most perfect incarnation is the jewelled pendant in Vertigo – a film which, in its languorous pacing and stylistic embellishments, might equally be considered his most ‘aristocratic’ work – being the object that constitutes both the core of the abyss and the dizzying summit to which the ‘vertigo’ of the film’s title alludes. For this object functions as a brute presence that at once dissolves the film’s consistency (so much so that it sends Scottie momentarily mad) and provides its suturing point, bringing the whole of the work into stark relief (finally all of the pieces ‘fit’). Before we can properly understand this paradox, however, we first need to observe how Vertigo’s narrative is itself sharply divided between two equally vertiginous narratives, two spiralling trajectories, the one centripetal (the inevitable downward spiral that ends in Madeleine’s death and Scottie’s coma), and the other centrifugal (the ensuing ‘ascension’ which culminates in the discovery of the pendant and Judy’s final fall). Moreover, while they operate on different levels and in fundamentally different directions, both stories are at base investigations of the same woman, namely, Madeleine, someone who does not in fact exist (as opposed to Judy, who does). Reductively, while the former seeks to deconstruct Madeleine so as to uncover her ‘essence’, the latter simply plucks her likeness from the world and gradually constructs her from scratch, bestowing imperfect form upon her perfect idea. Thus we find in the abstract symbol of ‘Madeleine’ the dual themes of isolation and separation that Badiou discerns in Mallarmé’s poetry: while the one seeks to gradually unravel her so as to expose her in her purity, the other endeavours to separate her from the world and ‘catalogue’ her qualities, so as to, as Mallarmé would have it, ‘bring to light a state of the soul’.33 Needless to say, these investigations serve as a metaphor for both the reception of a film – the spectator moving from a position of ‘ignorance’ to one of ‘knowledge’ (albeit a knowledge that will never be ‘absolute’) – and the process of impurification, which, as we are only too aware, cannot be completed. Reminding ourselves once again of Mallarmé’s conviction that ‘the goal of literature . . . is to evoke objects’,34 we can observe that it is precisely the pendant-object that stands in the way of Madeleine’s total presentation (whether this be through Scottie’s initial efforts to exorcise Carlotta from Madeleine, or his subsequent Svengali-like attempts to mould Judy into ‘Madeleine’, or even Judy’s own desire to ‘be’ Madeleine for him). For this object is at once an absolute presence – the ‘maximal object’ of the film-world, the steady centre of

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the whirl that is the set of the film’s relations (qua global movement) – and a stain that gets in the way of the subject’s direct presentation. Thus, in the first, ‘isolatory’ half of the film the pendant metonymically figures Carlotta herself, the spirit keeping Madeleine from ‘being’ Madeleine, the knot that cannot be unravelled, however hard Scottie pulls; while in the second, ‘separative’ section it simultaneously ‘reveals’ Madeleine (as Judy) while denying this very revelation (Madeleine does not exist, she is a form lacking substance). On this point it is worth considering the argument of Mladen Dolar, who sees in Carlotta’s necklace (in Freudian–Lacanian terms) not objet a, but rather das Ding, being a ‘massive non-transparent presence . . . incorporating a blockade around which all the relations circulate’.35 For Dolar, the pendant-object thereby presents ‘the core of her identity, her “material equivalent”, the little-bit-of-Real’.36 For our part, we can contrarily observe the object to constitute the core of her non-identity: it is the very gap that ensures that Madeleine will never be identical with herself (which, we recall, is precisely Badiou’s definition of existence; ‘to exist’ meaning to have some degree of self-identity). It is in this sense that we can say of the object that it is paradoxically absolute there (it is a ‘non-transparent presence’, the ‘maximal object’ of the film-world) and absolutely indistinct (it is real, in the Lacanian sense, and as such radically unsymbolisable). Simply, the object is the stopgap in the evocation of its subject (Madeleine), the ineradicable presence that guarantees the insistence of impurity, the crisis point which ensures that all description can only endlessly spiral around its subject, never directly encountering it. Thus, while Madeleine is sketched countless times over (by Judy, by Scottie, by Elster, by Midge . . .), she remains, by virtue of the pendant-object, ultimately elusive. And indeed, as if to ensure her singularity and her immortality, she dies – twice, no less – falling into the very abyss that the object summons forth. Ultimately, Madeleine is a symbol who does not – nor, for that matter, ever did – exist; she was only evoked in her perfect impurity. 7.3

REVOLUTIONARY CINEMA The question of art today is a question of political emancipation. Alain Badiou37

Like many of his contemporaries, Badiou has increasingly come to see art and politics as entwined.38 For art, Badiou explains,

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constitutes ‘a real possibility to create something new against the abstract universality that is globalisation’.39 The political aspect of art, however, lies not only in the visible act of creation per se – of keeping alive (by making immediately apparent) the very possibility of radical novelty – but moreover in the way that it creates a new form of abstract togetherness. As Badiou anticipates: could not art, and especially cinema, function to invent a kind of anonymous ‘we’, like that which unites mathematicians in agreement over a demonstration, or lovers in their traversal of the world? I believe so, and this is also why I study the immediate arts.40

Thus art both enforces the crucial idea of radical genesis and constitutes a new kind of collectivity, an anonymous inclusion based not on any conception of the Other but rather on a strict logic of the Same. Accordingly, art invents a ‘we’ wholly divorced from the egoism of the ‘I’, as much as from the notion of ‘place’. In today’s obscure political climate, contemporary art can thus be seen to ‘instruct’ (after a fashion) politics. For what is required today is a politics ‘beyond the domination of the places, beyond social, national, racial places, beyond gender and religions. A purely dis-placed politics, with absolute equality as its fundamental component’.41 As Badiou sees it, the wholly abstracted ‘we’ established by art points toward such an ‘anonymous’ politics. Moreover, this ‘we’ is in itself political, involving as it does a substantial departure from artistic logic in terms of both subjectivity (which, as we know, concerns the works alone, excluding even the artist) and address (art being of itself wholly disinterested in its audience).42 Yet at the same time the ‘we’ that art invents is fundamentally different to the committed ‘we’ of political subjectivity. It is in no way the properly political ‘we’ of fraternity, of the ‘we’ which, firmly rooted in equality, is realised, sans lieu, in militant commitment to common, egalitarian goals (in short, in a political truth procedure). Rather, the ‘we’ that art invents is an empty ‘we’, ‘the disparate “we” of togetherness’ (TC, p. 97). This is achieved both within and without the work: ‘within’, in what the work exposes in terms of its themes and forms; ‘without’, in the relationship of one spectator to another (an abstract collection whose common reference is the work itself). The artistic ‘we’ thus circulates between the abstraction of equality and the materiality of fraternity. Meaning that the properly political question of art is that of reducing this divide: on the one hand, of how to turn the transient notion of ‘togetherness’ into the intransigent idea of equality; and on the

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other of how to transform an insubstantial ‘we’ into a substantial fraternity. As the significance of artistic creation to politics is rather straightforward (creation being the brute substance of all real politics, which is at base a procedure that brings something fundamentally new into the world), we will instead focus our attention on art’s peculiar invention of an anonymous ‘we’. Moreover, we will do so on a formal as well as a spectatorial level. That said, we cannot help but note that cinema finds itself on this point in something of a bind. For while it is cinema, as the only truly mass art, that clearly has the greatest potential to establish such a politico-artistic ‘we’ – the first half of the syntagm ‘mass art’ underscoring cinema’s political capacities – we know that cinema must continually work to ensure its own impurity, an impurity that necessarily brings with it a host of particularities (qua ‘ideological markers of the epoch’). Yet at the same time the institution of an anonymous ‘we’ would seem to require of the work something of a departicularisation or abstraction. Indeed, it is crucial for Badiou that every true artwork be ‘abstract’, inasmuch as all real art ‘is abstracted from all particularity and . . . formalizes this act of abstraction’ (P, p. 146). After all, true art, in its fundamental novelty, can but appear at first as something abstract (or un-known) to the world in which it appears. Take, for example, what Badiou considers to be the goal of pure drawing, namely ‘to institute a new world, not by the strength of means, like images, painting, colors, and so on, but by the minimalism of some marks and lines, very close to the inexistence of any place’.43 Here we see the artistic establishment of an anonymous space, of a space devoid of place (or a dis-placed space), by subtractive means not entirely dissimilar to those of Malevich. While such subtraction or dis-appearance is hardly unprecedented in cinema (neorealism, Antonioni . . .), this can only be sustained for a time if cinema is to retain its mass address. Clearly cinema’s ‘we’ must operate on a fundamentally different (which is to say ‘impure’) level. Accordingly, in considering the ‘we’ that cinema invents we will first turn once more to the hugely popular works of Alfred Hitchcock. While this would appear at first glance a counterintuitive move – for few would designate Hitchcock an expressly ‘political’ director – we should keep in mind that what we are concerning ourselves with here is not the political question but rather the political address of cinema. For if we agree with Badiou that ‘there is something political in art itself’44 – which today perhaps involves less an immediately politicised content than the idea of radical creation and

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the substantiation a new ‘we’ – then it is not very difficult to observe the political character of Hitchcock’s cinema. Skipping over the obvious but ultimately ineffectual way that cinema constructs an anonymous ‘we’ simply by virtue of its being cinema (inasmuch as the mere act of going to the cinema (im)mobilises a collection of individuals), we will instead begin by considering the method by which Hitchcock’s films – in a gesture which seemingly runs counter to the proletarian–aristocratic address of art – actively construct a space for their audience, thereby facilitating the construction of an anonymous ‘we’. To do so we need look to a special subject at work in his films, a subject that, in a manner wholly separate to that of his objects, denotes a kind of pure presence (albeit a presence which is, paradoxically, an absence). Of this subject we might say that it is the reverse of the famous McGuffin, being someone or something that does not necessarily exist, yet is nevertheless absolutely present. I speak here of Hitchcock’s ‘empty subjects’, namely, characters who carry the film in one way or another, affecting its action and its appearance, but who are at the same time not, strictly speaking, there. Countless examples of such paradoxical subjects abound in Hitchcock’s oeuvre: from the overbearing maternal presence of Rebecca’s Mrs Danvers or Notorious’s Mme Sebastian – figures who occupy less a physical space than an (invariably punishing) idea – culminating of course in the literally non-existent Mrs Bates of Psycho (1960), through to the empty subjective forms of Vertigo’s Madeleine and North by Northwest’s George Kaplan. In fact, just as Hitchcock found in the microfilm of North by Northwest his ‘best McGuffin’ – ‘the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd’45 – so too does he find in Kaplan his perfect empty subject, the void waiting to be filled out by Roger O. Thornhill (who, in a particularly suggestive aside, gleefully explains that the ‘O’ in his name ‘stands for nothing’), a radical absence whose very invocation constitutes a kind of pure presence. These empty subjects serve to ‘open up’ the film, providing something of a ‘suturing’ function whereby we at once see the work for what it really is (namely, a film, a projected fantasy, itself a substanceless presence) and at the same time find ourselves projected further into the fantasy (these subjects providing an essentially objective space, a space devoid of real identity, wherein we might, after a fashion, place ourselves). The crucial point here is that the method by which we ‘enter’ the film – for every true film facilitates a certain subjective permeation (lest it fall foul of the disaster of ‘pure cinema’) – does not involve

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any identification (how can we possibly identify with the empty subjects of George Kaplan or Mrs Bates?) but is rather figured through a radical absence, a space devoid of place. For identification, involving as it does the place of the ‘I’, is the enemy of any anonymous and properly politico-artistic ‘we’. We might say that Hitchcock’s empty subjects work precisely to disrupt identification, not in the standard Brechtian sense (which is more the province of Godard, who we will discuss momentarily), but rather in a wholly ‘objective’ manner (even if this process is paradoxically facilitated by ‘subjects’). On this question of identificatory rupture Psycho proves itself an exemplary text, involving as it does something of an identificatory ‘drift’, the narrative focus famously passing from one character to the next (Marion, Norman, Lila, Arbogast, Sam . . .) to the point that the very question of identification is voided.46 Indeed, Psycho’s final locus of ‘identification’ is none other than ‘Mother’ herself, the empty subject qua absent presence (or ‘placeless space’) whose impenetrable stare belies the very possibility of identification. Of course, it could be objected that the political address of an artistic work lies in its abstraction, in its refusal to interpellate its audience, whereas Hitchcock, in a manner wholly incongruous to art’s ‘proletarian aristocratism’, was especially famous for controlling his audience, Psycho providing indisputable testimony to this fact. Indeed, if we return to our tenth thesis on impurification, we can say that Hitchcock was the greatest artist of the cinema to have truly taken his audience into consideration.47 To take but one well-worn example, Psycho’s famous shower scene which inspired so much terror in its audiences is, on close inspection, a decidedly chaste sequence, the knife never so much as glancing off Marion’s discretely framed body. As Hitchcock explains, the scene’s violence ‘was in the minds of the audience so strongly that one didn’t have to do much more’.48 However, while no doubt directing his audience (to the extent that this is possible) on an affective level, Hitchcock has no real ‘lessons’ to impart. Of course there is no political message to Psycho. Nor for that matter do Hitchcock’s manipulatory techniques amount to any kind of spectatorial identification (which might negate its abstract address). On the contrary, in this film the audience finds its space not through identification (something promptly severed in Marion’s murder) but rather through an absence, an identificatory void compounded by a pure presence (namely, the empty subject ‘Mother’). Simply, in negating the process of identification by way of the presentation of a radical absence, Psycho encourages the construction

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of an absolutely deindividuated (or dis-placed) space in which the work and its audience are brought together on a wholly anonymous level, a space of pure abstraction, devoid of particularity. It is for this precise reason that we can say that Psycho, this resolutely apolitical film, presents cinema with its perfect democratic envoy, and as such paradoxically figures as emblematic of a politico-artistic ‘we’. Of course, in focusing on the political address of cinema – on how it establishes and even intensifies an anonymous ‘we’ – we have in no way answered its political question. For, as we recall, inasmuch as the artistic ‘we’ occupies a space between abstract equality and concrete fraternity, art’s properly political question must be that of broaching this divide. Needless to say, this is not an easy question to answer today. Indeed, while there was a time when cinema could explicitly complement real politics – for example in the post-1968 works of the Dziga Vertov Group such as Le Vent d’est (Dziga Vertov Group, 1970) and Tout va bien (Jean-Luc Godard and JeanPierre Gorin, 1972) (films that also sought to revolutionise their own means of production and reception) – the political question is today at best obscure. Accordingly, as we have seen, the role of cinema is now that of preceding politics, of militating its anonymous audience around a possible political site. But in what way exactly? To answer the political question of art we need first consider in more detail exactly what it means for cinema to constitute a ‘democratic emblem’. We have seen that, despite his many railings against the word, Badiou nonetheless holds democracy to designate at base ‘equality in the face of the Idea’ (MS, p. 91), meaning ‘democracy’, properly thought, is in effect another word for ‘communism’. However, Badiou’s violence against democracy – attacks worthy of Plato himself – cannot be so easily overcome. Accordingly, as we have seen, having designated cinema a democratic medium (and taking into account his own mixed feelings on the subject), Badiou immediately conflates ‘activist democracy’ with ‘communism’. So why use the signifier ‘democracy’ at all? We might suppose it to be a concession to other philosophers who take a special interest in film, such as Stanley Cavell or Jacques Rancière.49 I believe, however, that the influence of Plato – who, let us not forget, is Badiou’s true master – is at work here. Indeed, we should keep in mind how Plato famously condemns what he calls ‘theatrocracy’ as a model of democracy involving the ‘evil “sovereignty of the audience”’.50 Of particular interest here is the parallel between Plato’s invoking theatre (as the ‘mass art’ of the time) together with democracy and Badiou’s own

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espousal of ‘cinema as a democratic emblem’. This parallel gains credence when we consider once more Badiou’s attestation that: ‘having said of theatre all the evil that he thought, Plato nonetheless gave his philosophy from the first a theatrical form. Today, however, philosophy begins anew, this much is certain. Cinema to start over what theatre began? Why not?’51 Simply, Badiou’s equation of cinema with democracy is Platonic in nature, and there is nothing innocent about it. So how does this equation operate? Let us begin with Plato’s own railings against democracy. In his Laws Plato parallels democracy with theatre, holding the former to induce ‘a sort of vicious “theatrocracy”’, the disaster of which lies in its engendering a situation wherein ‘the audiences, once silent, began to use their tongues’.52 Against a republic in which everyone is allotted a ‘proper place’, democracy, in distributing ‘a sort of equality to both equals and unequals alike’,53 negates the very idea of orderliness. True democracy would thus appear at first glance to be at once Plato’s fear and Badiou’s hope, constituting as it does a finally ‘placeless’ politics. However, in the final analysis what Plato found so concerning about democracy was that it gave free rein to opiniatry, inasmuch as it ‘gave the ordinary man not only a taste for breaking the laws . . . but the arrogance to set himself up as a capable judge’.54 Now, as we well know, truth is for Badiou precisely that which cuts a swathe through the field of opinions. Meaning that once we properly divorce real democracy from the realm of opinions that Plato (rightly) feared, then we are left with a political form grounded in the Idea of equality, pure and simple. Thus we would seem to have saved democracy from itself, turning it into a truth in its own right. However, in turning to cinema as a ‘democratic emblem’, surely Badiou runs up against a paradox, for while only a small proportion of cinema partakes of truth, there remains much ‘truthless’ (and at the same time wholly democratic) cinema that is worthwhile, and indeed warrants philosophical investigation (suffice to recall our earlier example of The Matrix). Indeed, it is for Badiou precisely the particularity which so permeates cinema that makes of it a democratic emblem, being at once a mass art and ‘the supreme witness to the resources of the present’55 (further accentuating its interest to philosophy). That said, as we have just seen, cinema would equally appear to have ‘solved’ Plato’s problem regarding the impertinence of the democratic subject by introducing the element of anonymity. Indeed, in contrast to the theatre, which, for Plato, involved ‘the

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noise of the mob applauding itself as it applauds its actors’,56 the cinema’s audience remains silent. To underscore this point we would do well to compare Badiou’s understanding of the political component of art to the avowedly anti-platonic considerations offered by Jacques Rancière. For while Badiou conceives the political nature of art in a subtractive manner, involving the invention of an abstract and anonymous ‘we’ in radical excess of the ‘I’, Rancière sees art’s emancipatory potential as lying contrarily in: the power [of spectators] to translate in their own way what they are looking at. It is the power to connect it with the intellectual adventure that makes any of them similar to any other insofar as his or her path looks unlike any other. The common power of the equality of intelligences.57

Rancière’s vocal mass – his ‘emancipated community’ which is ultimately ‘a community of storytellers and translators’58 – would thus appear at first glance to be fundamentally opposed to Badiou’s anonymous collection or placeless space.59 For Rancière’s emancipated audience is precisely that which Plato fears, namely, an audience of boisterous and opinionated actors. However, while Badiou certainly holds art’s political nature to lie in its ability to establish an anonymous collection, this in no way means the ‘we’ that it creates need be passive. On the contrary, the political power of art is precisely that of activating its audience, in breaching the divide between abstract equality and concrete fraternity. Indeed, as Badiou points out in a recent essay on Udi Aloni’s film Forgiveness (2006), in constructing an artistic idea a film is entirely ‘capable of transforming its spectator, or its voyeur, of modifying our thought’.60 Moreover, of all of the arts, cinema is clearly best placed to do so, by virtue, once again, of its impurity. This is accomplished not through simple identification (which, as we have seen, must be abolished before any authentic ‘we’ can be established) nor through translation (à la Rancière and his ‘emancipated community’ of acting spectators and spectating actors), but rather through education. I use this word advisedly, well aware that Badiou, following Plato, holds that ‘the only education is an education by truths’ (HI, p. 14). However, as Badiou points out in the same paper: education (save in its oppressive or perverted expressions) has never meant anything but this: to arrange the forms of knowledge in such a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them. (HI, p. 9)

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Which is to say that an education by truths is equally an education through truths and for truths.61 And inasmuch as cinema is today according to Badiou the art that best ‘instructs philosophy on the vagaries of the present’,62 we can see that cinema’s task is precisely that of presenting us with these knowledges for rearrangement. This transfiguration is, however, accomplished in a very particular way. Not, as we have seen, through a process of identification – this being the common failure of many ostensibly ‘political’ films, where the supposedly political idea at work ultimately rests on some trite variation of ‘respect for the other’63 – but rather through a subtle, quasi-Mallarméan process of revelation, a process less political than ‘pre-political’, involving the ‘bringing to light’ of a site of political possibility, a space in which politics might come to be. This is, for example, precisely what Bazin recognised in the ‘prerevolutionary’ films of Italian neorealism, holding these works as presenting ‘a revolutionary flavor in which terror has yet no part’ (WC2, p. 22). Likewise, Badiou contends that ‘ideas in art do not so much carry a judgement upon the world as they indicate the point from which the world could be transfigured’.64 This holding back of judgement is of course crucial if cinema is to retain its universal address.65 Simply, the revelation of cinema is at once the illumination of what is and of what can be. Such is cinema’s most immediate – and today, most precious (and indeed precarious) – power, derived as much from its being an onto-logical art as an impure art: cinema presents us with the materials with which to induce a truth. This double provision – of the materials for investigation and the invention of an anonymous or placeless ‘we’ – finally designates the ‘political’ power of cinema, the manner by which it can be seen to ‘impurify’ not only the political Idea (in the invention of a new ‘we’) but also the political condition itself. The canonical figure with regard to such a ‘revelatory’ or pedagogical cinema – one that reserves judgement to instead ‘indicate the point from which the world could be transfigured’ – is Jean-Luc Godard. For not only does Godard offer in Deleuze’s words an effective ‘pedagogy of the image’ (C1, p. 14) (and in this manner delivers an insistent critique of cinema’s standing as an onto-logical art), but his cinema figures a pedagogy of worlds, of the places (qua networks of relations) in which the image first appears (the ‘real’ world) and then re-appears (the world of the film). Or to put it in more explicitly Badiouian terms, Godard’s cinema educates with regard to both abstract appearance and its concrete appearing (or on the logics of

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worlds and worlds of logic). All of this can be rather pithily summarised by reversing Deleuze’s words, for what Godard presents us with is in fact less a ‘pedagogy of the image’ than ‘the image of pedagogy’. This pedagogical operation takes place on three distinct registers, namely, a filmic level, an intra-filmic level and a pro-filmic level. Of these three, it is the first (filmic) level – which is exclusively concerned with appearance qua (re)appearance – that is at once the most immediately apparent and, it would seem at first, of the least concern to us here (belonging as it does to our earlier considerations of the ontology of cinema and cinema as an onto-logical art). Indeed, Godard is perhaps most famous for his relentless critique of the representational nature of the filmic image – one need only think of his famous aphorism ‘not a just image, just an image’ to appreciate this fact. This critique is foremost carried out in three ways. First, through a decidedly structuralist acknowledgement of the arbitrary and representative nature of the image (much in the manner of Magritte’s The Treachery of Images and its famous ‘ceci n’est pas une pipe’). Suffice us to think of Godard’s standard practice of disarticulating the sound/image couplet, for example in the non-diegetic gunshots in the famous opening sequence of Breathless (1959) or the intermittent music (coupled with Godard’s ‘subjective’ narration) in Bande à part’s (1964) wonderful dance number. Second, through the isolation and critical evaluation of individual images (which concurrently provides a temporary, if only illusory, ‘halting’ of the film’s otherwise inexorable local movement). For example, Godard and Gorin’s deconstruction of the famous L’Express image of ‘Hanoi Jane’ in their Letter to Jane (1972), or his paean to Hitchcock’s effective ‘icon-images’ in Histoire(s) du cinéma. Third, through a more phenomenological investigation of the nature of objectivity (together with its ‘necessary’ corollary, subjectivity). Suffice us to recall here the famous ‘cosmos in a coffee cup’ sequence from Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), where an extreme close up of a simple cup of coffee slowly comes to encompass an entire universe (much like Keaton’s eye in Film), represented by the swirling ‘galaxies’ which form and bubble on the liquid’s surface (as though this ‘universe’ were itself teeming with life). With this sequence Godard explores how the infinite depth and complexity of a single and ostensibly finite object is held in tension with the equally infinite expanse separating one object from another, implying not only the impossibility of subjective representation, but also objective (i.e. filmic) re-presentation.

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The second, intra-filmic level, entwined with the filmic register but operating at the level of montage (or of the image’s concrete appearing-in-a-filmic-world), would seem to be of more immediate interest to us. Here Godard presents a pedagogy of the world (namely, the world of the film, its global movement qua montage), inasmuch as he teaches us at once ‘to see’ and ‘not to see’. Alberto Toscano calls this dialectic of seeing and not seeing (with regard to the world of the film) Godard’s ‘didactic anti-didacticism’, whereby Godard literally teaches us not to be taught, by ‘constantly frustrat[ing] that organisation of the image which would allow the overlay and imposition of meaning from director/producer to viewer/audience’.66 Simply, the didactic practice (equally apparent in Hollywood and standard ‘Marxist’ films) that literally ‘tells’ the viewer what they are seeing (as much as how they should be viewing it) is anathema to Godard. Rather, in Godard’s cinema, as Toscano points out, ‘the requirement of the viewer-as-participant is induced by various ways of hindering the formal unity that would trigger a comforting, totalising knowledge’.67 Simply, Godard’s cinema does not constitute a coherent ‘whole’ (something especially evident in his films from 1967 onwards, beginning with La Chinoise, which itself includes a telling intertitle designating it ‘a film in the making’). Rather, Godard’s filmworlds can be said to incohere (which is not at all to say that they are incoherent). In this sense they metaphorically display the indefinitely infinite excess of the state (qua ‘cohering’ montage/global movement) over its ‘incohering’ filmic situation. Moreover, in refusing their own ‘absoluteness’ – their own hermetically sealed and cartographically mapped ‘worldliness’ – these films demand that we actively search for their absent centre, the missing piece that would presumably ‘complete’ the puzzle. In a word, Godard’s films openly acknowledge their inapparent core; they direct us through the labyrinth of filmic existence toward the non-appearance of their proper inexistent (whose formal marker is, as always, the void qua cut).68 Of the third, and last, pro-filmic level of Godard’s pedagogical cinema, we will simply say that his films equally detail the ‘real situation’, providing a complex map of the world-as-it-is – the ‘real’ world whose image cinema has captured – together with its constitutive inappearances. It is in this precise sense we can say of Godard – in spite of his modernist (or even postmodernist) inclinations – that he is at heart a realist, inasmuch as his cinema seeks ‘to penetrate the laws governing objective reality and uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships

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that go to make up society’.69 Take, for example, La Chinoise and Tout va bien. At once modernist (in form as much as execution) and realist (in the encyclopaedic scope of their situational analysis), these films effectively serve to catalogue the pre- and post-evental worlds of France, 1967, and France, 1972. We might say that what is at stake in these films is a (pre)political cartography. More precisely, in mapping the political climate in France in the disparate worlds of 1967 and 1972 – worlds which are connected by a real event (May ’68) that is either about to happen or has long since vanished – these works can be said to scour the grounds of the event, seeking out the inapparent or voided place where an event might come to be, the precise ‘point from which the world could be transfigured’.70 In a word, Godard’s cinema exclusively concerns itself with the search for sites that do not as yet exist. It is for this reason that we must always study Godard, this great cinematic cartographer, this cataloguer of worlds, who teaches us, through anti-didactic means, to always keep our eyes fixed on the void and never be afraid to peer over its edge. To conclude on a polemical note, we cannot help but observe that the contemporary films that really live up to their political responsibility – such as the works of Udi Aloni or Abbas Kiarostami (to take but two examples singled out by Badiou) – paradoxically do not carry with them the mass appeal that less immediately political films do (just as truly artistic films do not find the mass audience they deserve while ‘popular’ films almost invariably neglect their political responsibilities). Thus our one and only cinematic prescription: cinema must truly become, not only in address but also in form, a mass art, an art of and for the masses. For, politically (as much as artistically) speaking, it is only in really embracing its democratic nature that cinema might live up to its true potential.

Notes 1. Emerson, Nature, p. 91. 2. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, p. 64. 3. Bazin’s contention that ‘just as the blank page of Mallarmé and the silence of Rimbaud is language at the highest state, the screen, free of images and handed back to literature, is the triumph of cinematic realism’ (WC1, p. 141) is of course the direct inverse – albeit with equally disastrous results – of the fanciful accomplishment of ‘total cinema’. 4. Rancière and During, ‘L’affect indécis’, p. 147.

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5. On this point we should also keep in mind that prior to Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year in Marienbad Resnais’s cinema was highlighted by his works on painting, notably his Van Gogh (1947) and Guernica (1950). 6. Bazin of course famously defended the idea of ‘impure cinema’ against its many detractors, observing that ‘the truth is that there is here no competition or substitution, rather the adding of a new dimension that the arts had gradually lost from the time of the Reformation on: namely a public. Who will complain of that?’ (WC1, p. 75) 7. As Badiou points out, every film ‘bears absolutely impure elements within it, drawn from ambient imagery, from the detritus of other arts, and from conventions with a limited shelf life’ (IT, p. 111). 8. Badiou cited in Boyer, ‘Présents du pays’, p. 11. 9. To this effect we can argue that the passage from Being and Event to Logics of Worlds equally designates a shift from poetry to cinema (or at the very least, a shift from poetic to cinematic logic). 10. Canudo, ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, p. 293. 11. Rancière et al., ‘On Medium Specificity’, p. 100. 12. Note that cinema is ‘by nature what the arts of the aesthetic age had to strive to be’ (FF, p. 9), inasmuch as the ‘aesthetic revolution’ that Rancière promotes in place of modernism means first of all ‘the ruin of any art defined by a set of systematisable practices with clear rules . . . [being] in the end, the ruin of the whole hierarchical conception of art’, Rancière and Hallward, ‘Politics and Aesthetics’, p. 205. While clearly sympathising with Rancière’s position, Badiou holds that this ruin has not yet taken place, noting that the exploration of the possibilities peculiar to cinema is yet to produce ‘a decisive shift in the direction of a fundamental overhaul of the classification and the hierarchy of the arts’ (SM, p. 136). 13. Duchamp himself observed that ‘since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are “readymades aided” and also works of assemblage’, ‘Apropos of “Readymades”’, p. 83. 14. Badiou, ‘Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp’. 15. Recall the generic set ‘avoids’ every property in the situation – save its very being – by ensuring that, for each and every property, it contains at least one element that negates this property, as well as at least one that affirms the same property. 16. Léger cited in Penley, The Future of an Illusion, p. 5. 17. Badiou, ‘La scène du Deux’, p. 179. 18. See SP, pp. 36–9. 19. Païni, ‘Associations, Constellations, Likenesses, Construction’, p. 16. 20. Mallarmé and Huret, ‘Interview’, p. 141. 21. Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, p. 88.

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22. In his far-reaching analysis of Hitchcock’s use of rear projection, Dominique Païni discusses how rear projection can be seen ‘as a kind of duplication within the film itself, a symmetry of pictured pictures, the junction of two surfaces that, as they slide past each other, create a conceptual space in which the characters move and act’, ‘The Wandering Gaze’, pp. 69–70. The sense of layering or ‘optical epidermis’ thereby created further resonates with our own designation of cinema as a ‘superficial art’, and equally highlights cinema’s standing as an ontological art. 23. Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, p. 91. 24. In Mallarmé’s words, the duty of poetry is ‘to evoke an object little by little, so as to bring to light a state of the soul or, inversely, to choose an object and bring out of it a state of the soul through a series of unravelling’, Mallarmé and Huret, ‘Interview’, p. 141. 25. Canudo, ‘The Birth of a Sixth Art’, p. 62. 26. ‘Hitchcock has a special place in cinema: he goes beyond the actionimage to something deeper, mental relations, a kind of vision. Only, instead of seeing this as the breaking-down of the action image, and of the movement-image in general, he makes it a consummation, saturation, of that image. So you might equally well say he’s the last of the classic directors, or the first of the moderns’, Deleuze, Negotiations, pp. 54–5. 27. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 18. 28. As Slavoj Žižek notes, drawing on the paradigms of realism, modernism and postmodernism, ‘Hitchcock is of special interest in so far as he dwells on the borders of this classificatory triad – any attempt at classification brings us sooner or later to a paradoxical result according to which Hitchcock is in a way all three of them at the same time’, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 29. Mallarmé and Huret, ‘Interview’, p. 141. 30. Sarris, The American Cinema, p. 59. As Sally Shafto observes (in a passage that would no doubt please Bazin), it is Hitchcock’s objects that most immediately separate him from expressionism, for ‘the very solidity of his objects belies the shimmering inchoate aura of Expressionism’, ‘Hitchcock’s Objects’, p. 137. 31. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 139. 32. Žižek, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 33. Mallarmé and Huret, ‘Interview’, p. 141. The Symbolist conception of ‘woman’ in Hitchcock’s cinema has of course not passed by unnoticed. For a markedly different approach to my own, see Tanski, ‘The Symbolist Woman’, pp. 147–53. 34. Mallarmé and Huret, ‘Interview’, p. 142. 35. Dolar, ‘Hitchcock’s Objects’, p. 46. 36. Ibid. p. 45. Of course, on another level, we can see the pendant as in fact presenting the core of the film’s identity, its real. For in constituting

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37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49.

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the central object that determines all of the film’s relations, the pendant clearly functions as a ‘stand-in’ for the superstructure of the film, namely, its global movement or montage. Badiou, ‘Fifteen Theses’, p. 107. While the conditions are, of course, of themselves wholly separate (no art will ever be politics, just as no love will ever be science, etc.), Badiou concedes that there frequently appears ‘a crossing of two distinct truth procedures’, even though ‘there is no meta-discourse which can organise these intersections’, Badiou and Gaultier, ‘L’hypothèse communiste’. Badiou, ‘Fifteen Theses’, p. 107. Clearly we are here not far removed from Rancière’s conception of the political capacities of art, where ‘an artistic invention can be political by modifying the visible, the ways of perceiving it and expressing it, of experiencing it as tolerable or intolerable’, Rancière et al., ‘Art of the Possible’, p. 259. Badiou and During, ‘Le 21e siècle n’a pas commencé’. Badiou, ‘Drawing’, p. 48. It should be pointed out that this dis-placed politics is entirely in line with the political thought of Marx and Engels, who in The Communist Manifesto declared ‘the Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties’ and that ‘in the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, [the Communists] point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality’, The Communist Manifesto, p. 234. ‘Art is made, and says what it does, according to its own discipline, and without considering anybody’s interests’ (P, p. 147). Badiou, ‘Drawing’, p. 49. Badiou, ‘Fifteen Theses’, p. 107. Hitchcock cited in Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 139. As Hitchcock avers, ‘I think that in Psycho there is no identification with the characters. There wasn’t time to develop them and there was no need to. The audience goes through the paroxysms in the film without consciousness of Vera Miles or John Gavin. They’re just characters that lead the audience through the final part of the picture. I wasn’t interested in them’, Hitchcock and Bogdanovich, ’1963 Interview’. As Deleuze notes, ‘in the history of cinema Hitchcock appears as the one who no longer conceives of the constitution of a film as a function of two terms – the director and the film to be made – but as a function of three: the director, the film, and the public which must come into the film, or whose reactions must form an integrating part of the film’ (C1, p. 206). Hitchcock and Bogdanovich, ’1963 Interview’. Cavell holds that ‘movies have an inherent tendency toward the democratic, or anyway the idea of human equality’, The World Viewed,

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50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

p. 35. As for Rancière, we can immediately identify certain similarities between Badiou’s ‘activist democracy’ and Rancière’s notion of democracy as wholly divorced from its governmental perversion, being to the contrary the name for those versatile and sporadic acts of political subjectivisation that serve to re-distribute the sensible, where the only possible idea of a ‘permanent democracy’ lies in ‘the continual renewal of the actors and of the forms of their actions, the ever-open possibility of the fresh emergence of this fleeting subject’, Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, p. 61. Plato, ‘Laws’, p. 1389/701a. Badiou and During, ‘Le 21e siècle n’a pas commencé’. Plato, ‘Laws’, p. 1389/701a. Plato, ‘Republic’, p. 1169/558c. Plato, ‘Laws’, p. 1389 / 701a. Badiou cited in Boyer, ‘Présents du pays’, p. 11. We should keep in mind here the underlying ambivalence of Badiou’s words, his assessment of cinema clearly chiming with his description of ‘Great Modern Sophistry, linguistic, aestheticizing and democratic [which] exercises its dissolving function, examines impasses and draws the picture of what is contemporary to us. It is just as essential for us as the libertine was to Blaise Pascal: it alerts us to the singularities of the time’ (MP, p. 98). Rancière, Les Scènes du peuple, p. 174. Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, p. 278. Crucial to Rancière’s thought is the idea of an ‘equality of intelligences’ – which should not be confused with Badiou’s ‘equality of existences’ (MS, p. 68) – that constitutes ‘not an end to attain, but a point of departure, a supposition to maintain in every circumstance’, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 138. At base, the idea of an ‘equality of intelligences’ rests on the fact that ‘from the ignorant person to the scientist who builds hypotheses, it is always the same intelligence that is at work: an intelligence that makes figures and comparisons to communicate its intellectual adventures and to understand what another intelligence is trying to communicate to it in turn’, Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, p. 275. Ibid. p. 280. While Rancière envisions politics as fundamentally theatrical, Badiou contends the reverse, for while ‘it is true that holding a meeting in the midst of riots is essentially theatrical, even down to the details . . . [everything] works in the other direction: it is theatre, in the circle of its provisional repetition, that figures the knotted components of politics’, ‘Rhapsody for the Theatre’, p. 193. Badiou, ‘The Dimensions of Art’. For a detailed consideration of the theme of education in Badiou’s philosophy (and its relation to Plato), see Bartlett, The One Drachma Course.

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62. Badiou cited in Boyer, ‘Présents du pays’, p. 11. 63. The underlying identificatory imperative at work in the concept of ‘respect for the other’ is especially prevalent in so-called ‘Hollywood left’ films such as Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), notably in the sympathetic figure of the reformist Prince Nasir, who at one point declares, to the delight of Western audiences, ‘I studied at Oxford. I have a PhD from Georgetown. I want to create a parliament. I want to give women the right to vote. I want an independent judiciary.’ 64. Badiou, ‘The Dimensions of Art’. 65. As Badiou points out, the reason that ‘political’ films are often simultaneously ‘laudable and unconvincing’ is precisely because ‘they fail to make a point of the universal, and therefore dialectical, signification of what they stand for. Immersed in the battle, they act, as Mao Zedong would have said, “unilaterally”’ (P, p. 203). Suffice to consider Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), whose political significance is ultimately usurped by its underlying monotheistic narrative. 66. Toscano, ‘Money, Militancy, Pedagogy’. On this point (being taught not to be taught) one cannot help but think of Daniel Dayan’s seminal 1974 essay on cinematic ‘suture’, ‘The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema’ (which, incidentally, bases its structuralist critique on Badiou’s own writings). 67. Toscano, ‘Money, Militancy, Pedagogy’. 68. Film Theory is of course no stranger to such a search for inexistence or inappearance. Badiou argues that the standard Derridian deconstructive technique, for example, is precisely a quest for the inexistent, inasmuch as, for ‘whatever form of discursive imposition one may be faced with, there exists a point that escapes the rules of this imposition, a point of flight’ (LW, p. 545), being that which Derrida famously names ‘différance’, and which Badiou effectively renames ‘inexistence’. Moreover, the recent reconceptualisation of Lacanian film theory around the gaze qua objet petit a is precisely concerned with inappearance, inasmuch as the gaze, as an instance of the real in the visual field, can only be inscribed on the basis of an impossibility of inscription, as an absence which ‘gives body to a void’ (McGowan, ‘Looking for the Gaze’, p. 35), which is why it can only be encircled asymptotically and never ensnared, remaining itself unrepresentable. 69. Lukács, ‘Realism in the Balance’, p. 38. 70. Badiou, ‘The Dimensions of Art’.

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Conclusion: The Future of an Illusion

Cinema is today the only art which is cut to the measure of the world. Alain Badiou1

Of all the arts cinema is without doubt the most universal, the most immediate, and the most paradoxical. As a mass art, cinema speaks to (generic) humanity in a way that no other art is capable of doing. So too cinema’s mechanical, reproductive basis means that it is available like no art before it. On top of all of this, cinema can be seen to simultaneously (re)define and confound the very notion of ‘art’, inasmuch as every film, in a single and same gesture, draws a border and erases the distinction between art and non-art. This is further compounded when we consider cinema’s intimate relation to philosophy. Indeed, from its primordial connection to Plato’s cave (which allegorically charts the journey of the philosopher, not the artist) through its inessential and impure being (cinema figuring an empty site of appropriation) up to its ‘unique’ artistic imperative (impurifying or idealising Ideas which are first taken from elsewhere), cinema has from the start been hopelessly entangled with philosophy. That said, cinema is foremost an art (albeit a singularly complicated art), which is to say a condition of philosophy, and the absolute separation of philosophy from its conditions is crucial lest philosophy succumb to the disaster of ‘suture’.2 Thus cinema is torn between two heterogeneous (and fundamentally repetitious) procedures, being at once the reproduction of art and the reproduction of philosophy. Yet cinema is at the same time a producer of art, or again, cinema thinks. This was after all the fundamental question we set out to answer in this book, namely, can cinema be thought? Broken down, this question presented a tripartite enquiry: can we really think what cinema is, at an ontological level; can cinema actually think for itself, that is, is it truly artistic; and how can we can rethink philosophically the thought that cinema thinks. In answering these questions we

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have given rise to further paradoxes. While cinema can be thought ontologically – and is indeed the exemplary onto-logical art – it is in itself a wholly inessential art, being at base nothing but ‘takes and montage’. Moreover, while cinema can be seen to be truly artistic, it is so only to the extent that it remains paradoxically non-artistic, that it complicates itself with that which it is not. Further, while cinema informs philosophy on the logic of appearance and the ‘illogic’ of the event, it does so at the expense of its own ‘cinematicity’, of its being cinema, caught as it is between its conditioning and its democratising not only the other arts but also philosophy itself. Simply, the more that cinema impurifies and thereby democratises real Ideas, the less cinema is cinema and the more it becomes a kind of philosophy in its own right. In their introduction to On Beckett, Nina Power and Alberto Toscano arrange something of a poetic ‘trilogy’ of the event, wherein we find: Beckett as the courageous preparation for the event (‘before’), Rimbaud as the defeatist decision against the undecidable of the event (‘during’), and Mallarmé as the protocol of fidelity in the subtractive ‘relationship’ to a disappearance and to the isolation of a pure multiple (‘after’).3

For our part, we can easily locate in Godard the cinematic equivalent of Beckett, whose films forever map out the grounds of the event without ever actually encountering it. It is precisely for this reason that we can say – if I might be excused a Beckettian pun – that we are still today ‘waiting for Godard’. Moreover, is not Resnais precisely cinema’s Rimbaud, existing in the inter-time of the event, forever caught in the grip of the undecidable? Which leaves us with our cinematic Mallarmé, Hitchcock, whose films, as we have seen, are wholly concerned with the properly subtractive ‘isolation of a pure multiple’. Given this state of affairs, and in response to our above imperative (that cinema must truly realise itself as a mass art), we might say that the destination proper to cinema lies with a further impurification, namely, the impurification of these three cinemas into one, giving us a single cinema which aligns Godard’s pedagogy with the artistry of Resnais, together with the pure cinema of Hitchcock. What is called for today is less a purification of cinema than an intrafilmic impurification, a concerted complication of the cinemas of Hitchcock, Resnais and Godard, the result of which might finally deliver to us a truly mass art.

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This cinema will present neither a Bazinian ‘total cinema’ nor an avant-garde ‘pure cinema’ (either of which would be fatal). Rather, it will offer a wholly impure cinema, a cinema at once abstract and familiar, particular and universal, entertaining and educative, individual and collective. It will be a truly thoughtful cinema. It will be a cinema that folds in upon itself, being equally conditional and philosophical (for cinema, as Badiou points out again and again, is an art that both thinks and rethinks). It will be an art of real illumination, an art that brings to light not only what had lain in shadow but also that which already shines brightly in its own right. This cinema – the cinema – has not yet appeared. Only when it does will cinema finally be able to leave the Kingdom of Shadows once and for all and enter the Castle of Impurity. Notes 1. Badiou and During, ‘Le 21e siècle n’a pas commencé’. 2. A suture occurs when, ‘instead of constructing a space of compossibility through which the thinking of time is practiced, philosophy delegates its functions to one or other of its conditions, handing over the whole of thought to one generic procedure’ (MP, p. 61). Badiou holds that philosophy is suppressed or suspended whenever such a suture takes place. 3. Power and Toscano, ‘Think Pig!’, p. xxi.

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Filmography

Bande à part, Jean-Luc Godard, 1964. The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966. The Bicycle Thief, Vittorio De Sica, 1948. Bitter Rice, Giuseppe de Santis, 1948. Blackmail, Alfred Hitchcock, 1929. Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, 1959. Brief Encounter, David Lean, 1945. Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón, 2006. La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard, 1967. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, 1941. The Convent, Manoel de Oliveira, 1995. Cube, Vincenzo Natali, 1999. Dial M for Murder, Alfred Hitchcock, 1954. The Divine Comedy, Manoel de Oliveira, 1991. eXistenZ, David Cronenberg, 1999. Eclipse, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962. Europa ’51, Roberto Rossellini, 1952. Film, Alan Schneider, 1965. Foreign Correspondent, Alfred Hitchcock, 1940. Forgiveness, Udi Aloni, 2006. The 400 Blows, François Truffaut, 1959. Germany Year Zero, Roberto Rossellini, 1947. Guernica, Alain Resnais, 1950. Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais, 1959. Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard, 1988–1998. In the Cut, Jane Campion, 2003. The Last Laugh, F. W. Murnau, 1924. Last Year in Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961. Letter to Jane, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972. Local Angel, Udi Aloni, 2002. Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999. The Matrix, Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999. The Matrix Reloaded, Larry and Andy Wachowski, 2003. The Matrix Revolutions, Larry and Andy Wachowski, 2003.

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Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin, 1936. Murder!, Alfred Hitchcock, 1930. Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, 1968. North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock, 1959. Notorious, Alfred Hitchcock, 1946. Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock, 1960. Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock, 1940. Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini, 1945. Rope, Alfred Hitchcock, 1948. Russian Ark, Alexsandr Sokurov, 2002. Senso, Luchino Visconti, 1954. Serenity, Joss Whedon, 2005. Shadow of a Doubt, Alfred Hitchcock, 1943. Stage Fright, Alfred Hitchcock, 1950. La Strada, Federico Fellini, 1954. Strangers on a Train, Alfred Hitchcock, 1951. Suspicion, Alfred Hitchcock, 1941. Syriana, Stephen Gaghan, 2005. La Terra Trema, Luchino Visconti, 1948. 300, Zac Snyder, 2006. Tout va bien, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972. The Truman Show, Peter Weir, 1998. Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Jean-Luc Godard, 1967. Umberto D, Vittorio De Sica, 1951. Van Gogh, Alain Resnais, 1947. Le Vent d’est, Dziga Vertov Group, 1970. Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958. Voyage to Italy, Roberto Rossellini, 1954.

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Index

Adorno, Theodore W., 53n Althusser, Louis, 4–5, 12n appearing, 9, 16, 55, 65–72, 78, 79–82n, 107, 132n cinema and, 9, 33, 42–4, 55–9, 69–79, 82–3n, 86, 88, 101–2, 123, 125, 127–8, 138, 150, 153–5, 160, 162, 175, 181–4, 189n, 191 existence and, 68–9 of an event, 19, 25, 30–1n, 90–1, 104n, 150, 153 Aristotle, 22, 54n, 110, 130n art, 11n, 21–7, 30n, 43–4, 116–19, 125, 163–4, 170, 173–6, 178, 180–1, 187n cinema and, 3–4, 8–10, 11n, 32–7, 39–41, 43–8, 51–3n, 82n, 111, 119, 124, 161–5, 167, 170, 175–6, 184, 185n, 190–1 relation to philosophy, 9, 19–27, 29–31n, 44, 46, 108–9, 116–18, 125, 128–9n, 151, 153 subject of, 25–6, 38, 124 axioms (set theory) empty set, 63–4 extensionality, 66 foundation, 90, 98 power set, 64–5 Bande à part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964), 182 Bartlett, A. J., 103n, 188n The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), 167 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 3–4 Bazin, André, 8, 13n, 35, 43–5, 49–50n, 52–3n, 55–9, 82n, 85–6,

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124, 144, 156n, 161, 163, 165–6, 181, 186n, 192 Beckett, Samuel, 9–10, 54n, 72–9, 83n, 123, 125, 191 being, 9, 16, 27, 58–66, 78, 79–81n, 89–92, 95–7, 103–5n, 107–8, 123, 129–30n, 132n, 150, 153–5, 164, 169, 185n, 190 appearing and, 43, 55–6, 65–9, 79–80n, 82n, 90–1, 101, 127, 132–3n, 138, 150, 153–5 event and, 58–9, 89–91, 95, 98, 101, 103–6n, 107–8, 150–5 presentation of, 60–5, 90, 95, 103n, 129n, 150, 152–4 void and, 61–5, 67, 81–2n, 90–1, 96, 103n, 123, 150, 155, 164 belonging (set theory), 60, 63–5, 67, 95–6, 103n, 105n, 150 impossibility of a set belonging to itself, 90, 97, 150 see also inclusion; presentation, Russell’s paradox Benjamin, Walter, 30n, 119 Bergson, Henri, 113–14, 121 Berkeley, George, 72–3, 77 The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), 133n Bitter Rice (Giuseppe de Santis, 1948), 133n Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929), 170 Bordwell, David, 4; see also post-Theory Bosteels, Bruno, 128–9n Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959), 182

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Badiou and Cinema

Bresson, Robert, 121–2 Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), 31n Cantor, Georg, 80n, 94, 107–8, 116, 129n; see also set theory Canudo, Ricciotto, 13n, 36, 49–50n, 53n, 163, 169 Carroll, Noël, 4–6, 57; see also post-Theory category theory, 66–7, 81–2n, 107 Cavell, Stanley, 57–8, 82n, 178, 187n Clemens, Justin, 28n, 81n, 129–30n Chaplin, Charlie, 43, 53n, 111, 163, 165 Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), 189n La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967), 183–4 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), 56 Cocteau, Jean, 13n, 49n, 53n Cohen, Paul J., 95–6, 105n, 107–8; see also forcing; generic set theory communism, 110–11, 178, 187n; see also democracy; politics Comolli, Jean-Luc, 5; see also Film Theory conditions of philosophy, 3, 9, 19–20, 29n, 31n, 32, 48, 107–9, 111–12, 128–9n, 146, 167–8, 181, 187n, 190–2 The Convent (Manoel de Oliveira, 1995), 49n Copjec, Joan, 72, 142 count-as-one, 60–1, 63–5, 81n, 90, 92–3, 95–6, 105n, 150–1, 160, 169 Creed, Barbara, 12n, 72, 83n Critchley, Simon, 77–8, 83n Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1999), 86 Dayan, Daniel, 189n Deleuze, Gilles, 8–9, 13n, 15, 33, 35, 45, 49n, 50–2n, 62–3, 77–9, 109, 111–28, 130–3n, 135, 137–8, 141, 166, 169–70, 181–2 death, 69, 91–2

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democracy, 6–7, 16, 43–4, 110–11, 178–80, 188n cinema and, 9, 43–5, 47, 51n, 53n, 110–11, 162, 164–5, 167, 170, 178–84, 191 democratic materialism, 16–17, 110 see also communism; politics Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), 171 The Divine Comedy (Manoel de Oliveira, 1991), 49n Doane, Mary Ann, 72 Dolar, Mladen, 173 Duchamp, Marcel, 164 During, Elie, 102–3 Eagleton, Terry, 12n Easton’s theorem, 65, 108 Eclipse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962), 125 education, 43–4, 86, 103n, 148–9, 180–1 cinema and, 10, 43–4, 86, 144–5, 180–4, 192 Eisenstein, Sergei, 51n, 54n, 111, 115, 135 empty set, 63–4, 81n, 87; see also void encyclopaedia (of situation), 17–18, 29n, 67 ethics cinema and, 10, 45–6, 137, 144–5, 147–9, 157n, 166, 170 of truths, 145–9, 166 Europa ’51 (Roberto Rossellini, 1952), 133n event, 7, 12n, 17–19, 24–6, 29–30n, 38, 42, 46–8, 65, 89–93, 95–7, 100–1, 103–6n, 107–8, 118, 126–7, 133n, 137–8, 141, 146, 150–5, 191 as artistically conditioned, 29, 108, 128–9n, 151–5 as non-being, 89–90, 95, 152 revision of, 90, 103–4n, 150–1, 153, 155 site, 19, 24, 90–1, 103–4n, 108, 150 subject and, 19, 25–6, 30n, 93–4, 96–9, 145–6

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Index trace, 19, 25–6, 30n, 90–4, 96–7, 104n, 141, 153–5 truths and, 7, 24, 38, 92, 94–5 undecidability of, 18–19, 65, 93–4, 104n, 139, 151–4, 158n evil, 46, 146–8, 157n, 170 existence, 68–9, 79, 173 event and, 90–2, 104n, 150, 154 eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999), 86 Feltham, Oliver, 12n fidelity, 18–19, 29n, 92, 98–9, 137, 143, 145–7 Film (Alan Schneider, 1965), 9–10, 72–9, 83n, 85, 123, 125, 182 Film Theory, 4–5, 7, 12n, 31n, 77, 122, 163, 189 forcing, 95–7, 105n, 107, 146 Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), 171 Forgiveness (Udi Aloni, 2006), 49n, 180 The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959), 166 Gance, Abel, 13n, 49n, 53n generic, 17, 19, 38–9, 43, 76–7, 79, 92, 94–6, 105n, 110, 124–5, 133n, 141, 161, 164–5 humanity, 27, 43, 48, 54n, 74, 76, 190 procedure, 19, 128n, 167, 192n set theory, 19, 25, 92, 94–6, 104–5n, 107, 124, 133n, 164–5, 185n see also conditions of philosophy; truth Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1947), 133n Godard, Jean-Luc, 10, 13n, 49–50n, 58, 111, 168–71, 177–8, 181–4, 191 Gödel, Kurt, 108 Gorky, Maxim, 3, 10, 71 Guernica (Alain Resnais, 1950), 185n Hallward, Peter, 11n, 17, 105n Hays, Will, 53n Hegel, Georg, 117, 131–2n

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211

Heidegger, Martin, 21, 30n Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), 9–10, 134–41, 143–4, 147–9, 156n, 158n, 185n Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988–98), 49n, 168, 182 Hitchcock, Alfred, 10, 50n, 71, 82n, 156n, 165, 168–73, 175–8, 182, 186–7n, 191 Horkheimer, Max, 53n Husserl, Edmund, 74 impurification, 10, 30n, 37–8, 40–1, 45–7, 111, 119, 161–8, 171–3, 175, 177, 181, 185n, 190–2 In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2003), 83n inaesthetics, 9, 20–8, 46–8, 108–9, 111 inclusion (set theory), 61, 64–5, 92, 95; see also belonging; re-presentation inexistent, 18–19, 24, 26, 69, 91–2, 104n, 109, 122, 141, 150–1, 154, 183, 189n intervention, 94, 104n, 106n, 140, 152; see also subject knowledge event and, 18–19, 24, 29n, 38, 65, 91, 104n, 140–1, 151–2 truth and, 1, 6–7, 11–13n, 17–18, 25, 95–6, 105n, 107, 180–1 Lacan, Jacques, 4, 81n, 88, 115, 118, 130n, 141, 146, 157n, 173 Lacanian film theory, 4–5, 11–12n, 72, 83n, 189n see also Film Theory The Last Laugh (F. W. Murnau, 1924), 49n Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), 9–10, 134, 136–44, 148–50, 153–5, 156n, 161, 167, 185n Letter to Jane (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972), 182 The Life of Plato, 11n, 33 Local Angel (Udi Aloni, 2002), 49n

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Badiou and Cinema

love, 10, 11n, 29n, 52n, 129n, 134, 136, 139–44, 146–9, 156–8n, 167, 174, 187 Lukács, Georg, 80n McGowan, Todd, 72, 189n Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999), 49n, 52n Malevich, Kazimir, 52n, 125, 175 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 31n, 90, 108, 128–9n, 132n, 151–5, 158–9n, 163, 165, 169–72, 181, 186n, 191 Marx, Karl, 30n, 81n, 187n Marxism, 4, 12n materialist dialectic, 16, 89, 96, 102, 107–8, 122 mathematics event and, 65, 89–90, 95–6, 103n, 107–8, 129n, 150–1 logic and, 66, 79–82n, 88, 107 ontology as, 20, 27, 63–7, 79–80n, 89, 95–6, 103n, 107–8, 129n, 164 philosophy and, 1, 15, 107–8, 129n, 164 see also Cantor; set theory The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999), 9–10, 86–9, 97–102, 105–6n, 119, 133n, 134, 144, 179 The Matrix Reloaded (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 2003), 88 The Matrix Revolutions (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 2003), 88 Metz, Christian, 4, 72 Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936), 53n movement-image, 50–1n, 112–16, 119–20, 122, 127–8, 169–70, 186n; see also Deleuze, Gilles multiplicity consistent, 59–65, 80n, 92 pure or inconsistent, 16, 27, 59–4, 68, 78, 80–1n, 96, 122, 131n, 164, 169, 191 Mulvey, Laura, 4, 72 Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock, 1930), 170

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Narboni, Jean, 5 Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968), 167 North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), 50n, 171, 176 Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946), 170–1, 176 objects (theory of), 16, 58, 66–8, 71–2, 76–9, 80n, 82–3n, 86, 90–4, 96, 100–1, 104n, 150 Ollier, Claude, 125 ontology, 16, 20, 29n, 59–69, 79–81n, 89–91, 95, 107–8, 129n, 132n, 151 cinema and, 8–9, 35, 38–9, 44, 50n, 55–9, 62–3, 69–72, 77–9, 88, 102, 122, 182, 190–1 impasse of, 65, 89, 151 onto-logy, 9, 18, 56, 58–9, 66, 78, 79–82n, 88, 90, 97, 101, 132n, 162 Païni, Dominique, 186n Panofsky, Erwin, 53n, 57, 127 Parmenides, 59 Plato, 1–3, 6–9, 11n, 16–17, 19, 21, 31n, 33, 37–8, 59, 61, 80n, 101, 103n, 112–13, 115–16, 129–31n, 144–5, 148–9, 164, 178–80, 190 cinema and, 2–3, 8–9, 11n, 33, 36, 38, 48, 85–6, 110, 112–13, 178–80, 190 politics, 11n, 20, 29n, 43–4, 81n, 110–11, 129–30n, 174–5, 178–9, 181, 187–8n art and, 26, 43–4, 173–5, 178, 180, 187n cinema and, 5, 10, 43–4, 110–11, 122, 165, 167, 175–84, 189n equality and, 110–11, 130n, 174, 178–80, 188n post-Theory, 4–8, 11–12n, 57 postulate of materialism, 132n Power, Nina, 191 presentation, 27, 30n, 47, 59–65, 84n, 90, 93, 95, 103n, 125, 150–4, 158n, 162

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Index Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), 50n, 171, 176–8 Rancière, Jacques, 13, 29n, 38, 43, 49n, 86, 103n, 108, 144–5, 149, 157n, 161, 163–5, 178, 180, 185n, 187–8n Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), 170, 176 Regnault, François, 50n, 62, 138 re-presentation, 27, 36, 47, 56–8, 64–5, 82n, 95, 103n, 111–12, 165, 182; see also state (of situation) Resnais, Alain, 9–10, 122, 128, 134–44, 147–50, 153–5, 156n, 158n, 161, 166–7, 185n, 191 Rivette, Jacques, 135–6, 144 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 149, 156–7n Rockhill, Gabriel, 144–5 Rohmer, Eric, 135 Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945), 133n Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948), 156n, 170 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 81n Russell’s paradox, 97 Russian Ark (Alexsandr Sokurov, 2002), 156n Schönberg, Arnold, 25–6 Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954), 133n Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005), 167 set theory, 63–4, 66–7, 80–1n, 95, 105n, 107, 129n; see also Cantor, Georg; category theory; mathematics Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943), 171 Silverman, Kaja, 72 singularity, 24–5, 30n, 38, 89, 91, 103n, 118, 150; see also event site see event situation, 17–19, 24–6, 29n, 39, 60–7, 81n, 89, 152, 183–4 event and, 12n, 18–19, 24, 29–30n, 91, 103–4n, 150–3, 158n philosophical, 42 truth and, 12n, 18–19, 25–6, 29n,

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39, 92, 94–6, 104–6n, 133n, 143, 145–6, 185n world and, 65–7 Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950), 170 state (of situation), 18–19, 22, 24–5, 29n, 65–6, 81n, 87, 89, 92, 95–6, 104n, 122, 128, 140, 151, 154–5, 160, 183; see also re-presentation La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954), 133n Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951), 71, 171 subject, 15–16, 18–19, 26, 31n, 38, 46, 54n, 90, 92–9, 104n, 107, 145–7, 166 artistic, 25–6, 30n, 38, 124, 133n, 143, 174 body, 92, 94–6, 98, 100, 119, 133n faithful, 18–19, 92, 97, 98–9, 145–7, 166 obscure, 98–9, 147 reactive, 98–9, 148 resurrected, 98–100, 148 subtraction, 13n, 18–19, 23, 26–7, 29–31n, 59, 61, 65, 76, 95, 103n, 105n, 108, 116, 118, 123–5, 164, 169, 175, 180 cinema and, 34–5, 37, 41, 50n, 52n, 58, 74–6, 78, 114–16, 123–6, 128, 138, 140, 162, 166, 168, 175, 191 Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941), 71, 170–1 suture, 61, 129n, 189n, 190, 192n Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005), 189n Tarkovsky, Andrey, 102, 133n, 141 La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948), 133n 300 (Zac Snyder, 2006), 83n Tiles, Mary, 105n time, 9, 35, 44–5, 97, 102, 105–6n, 112–16, 120–8, 131–3n, 134–8, 140–1, 143–4, 150, 154–5, 156n, 165–7, 191 of truth, 105–6n, 126–8, 137–8, 154, 166–7 time-image, 112–13, 120–8, 132n, 137; see also Deleuze, Gilles

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Toscano, Alberto, 51n, 183, 191 Tout va bien (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972), 49n, 178, 184 trace, 19, 25–6, 30n, 90–4, 96–100, 104n, 141, 153–5 transcendental, 66–71, 81–2n, 86, 90–1, 101, 104n, 122 Truffaut, François, 166, 170 The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), 101 truth, 1, 3–8, 11–13n, 16–19, 24–6, 30–1n, 38–9, 86, 92–7, 103n, 105–6n, 126, 130n, 141, 145–6, 164–5, 179 knowledge and, 1, 6–7, 11–13n, 17–18, 25, 95–6, 105n, 107, 180–1 philosophy and, 3, 19–20, 29n, 46–7, 167–8 procedure, 17–20, 24–6, 29n, 38, 46–7, 51n, 54n, 86, 93–7, 99, 101, 109, 117, 124, 127, 137, 143, 174, 187n see also event; generic; subject

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Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967), 182 Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, 1951), 133n Van Gogh (Alain Resnais, 1947), 185n Le Vent d’est (Dziga Vertov Group, 1970), 178 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), 50n, 71, 170–3, 176 void, 15, 30–1n, 61–5, 67, 81–2n, 87, 90–1, 93, 96, 103n, 114, 122–5, 127–8, 138, 141, 143, 146, 150, 155, 162, 164, 183–4 Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954), 133n world, 16–18, 26, 65–9, 80–2n, 86, 88, 90–4, 105n, 132n film as, 69–72, 76–7, 171–3, 181–4 Žižek, Slavoj, 11–12n, 72, 86, 132n, 186n

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