GEMINILOGGBOOKOBERDADAISTICUS

Time for another book review, and another deep dive into the topic of truth in art.

Alain Badiou : Petit manuel d'inesthétique

Art and philosophy are intimately linked, if not always living in peace with each other. Artists, critics, and curators refer to philosophy for justification, explanation, or simply for its intellectual veneer, whereas philosophers have criticised art or tried to understand what it is. Inasmuch as philosophers would impose limitations by defining what art is, artists are always free to take their practice in any other direction.

Badiou's Petit manuel d'inesthétique is a dense, barely penetrable text about the ways art and philosophy are linked. Erudite writing in French and an almost literary style contributes to the difficulty of the text for readers with another first language. I don't know if it has been translated, but often this kind of text does not fare well in the hands of a trattore/traduttore.

After the introductory essay, Art et philosophie, follows chapters about specific works of art, or sometimes more general musings on various art forms. Several chapters deal with poetry and literature, and there are also chapters on film, theatre, and dance, whereas examples from music and visual arts are well nigh absent. Badiou deserves credit for attempting to write about dance, although he does so rather abstractly. The analyses of Beckett and Mallarmé in contrast are detailed and focused on the works, to the point that it becomes hard to discern any connection with more general aesthetic questions, as the introductory chapter seems to promise.

I'll try to summarise the main points of the first chapter as far as I'm able to make sense of it. As said, Badiou's writing is often dense.

Art and truth

Badiou introduces a schematic classification of various possible relations between art and truth. At least his thinking isn't muddled by a postmodern rejection of the possibility of an objective truth, but I have the impression that he accords more importance to the opposite pitfall of Platonic essences.

First, there is the didactic scheme: Art is incapable of truth, and all truth is exterior to art.

> Dans le schème didactique, l'absolu de l'art est donc sous le contrôle des effets publics du semblant, eux-mêmes normés par une vérité extrinsèque. (p. 12)

Second, in the Romanticist scheme art alone is capable of truth. Art accomplishes that which philosophy can merely indicate.

Third, the classic, Aristetolian scheme: Art is incapable of truth, its essence is mimetic, its order is that of semblance. However, this isn't too serious, because art's destination isn't truth. Art's function is rather cathartic, it serves a therapeutic role and tries to please.

Badiou claims that the three "massive dispositions" of modern thought, marxism, psychoanalysis, and German hermeneutic philosophy, relate to this scheme as follows:

Marxism is didactic

Psychoanalysis is classicist

Heideggerian hermeneutics is romantic.

Then Badiou introduces the main idea of two criteria for the relationship between art and truth. These are immanence and singularity.

> « Immanence » renvoie à la question suivante : est-ce que la vérité est réellement intérieure à l'effet artistique des œuvres ? Ou bien l'œuvre d'art n'est-elle que l'instrument d'une vérité extérieure ?

> « Singularité » renvoie à une autre question : la vérité dont l'art témoigne lui est-elle absolument propre ? Ou peut-elle circuler dans d'autres registres de la pensée œuvrante ? (p. 20)

Immanence refers to the question whether truth is intrinsic in the work of art, or is the work of art only the instrument of an extrinsic truth?

Singularity has to do with the nature of this truth; is it unique to the artwork or is it something that can circulate also in other forms of thought?

In the Romanticist scheme the relation between art and truth is immanent, and not singular, because _the_ Truth of the thinker is essentially the same as that of the poet:

> car il s'agit de _la_ vérité, et la pensée du penseur ne s'accorde à rien qui diffère de ce que dévoile le dire du poète (p. 20).

Didacticism has a singular relation between truth and art, only art is able to expose a truth under the form of semblance ("seul l'art peut exposer une vérité _sous la forme du semblant_"), and truth being extrinsic, it is not at all immanent.

Classicism is associated with the imaginary and verisimilitude: "dans le classicisme, il ne s'agit que de ce qu'une vérité contraint dans l'imaginaire, sous les espèces du vraisemblable" (p. 20).

In this model, which is the Cartesian product of immanence and singularity, three combinations have been covered. But there is a fourth possibility.

Badiou goes on to say that art itself is a truth process:

> l'art _lui-même_ est une procédure de vérité. [...] L'art est une pensée dont les œuvres sont le réel (et non l'effet). Et cette pensée ... [est] irreductible aux autres vérités ... l'art est irreductible à la philosophie (p. 21).

The truth in art is other than the truth of science, politics, or love; nor does art, as a singular form of thought, reduce to philosophy.

This leaves us with the following correspondances:

> Immanence : l'art est rigoureusement coextensif aux vérités qu'il prodigue.

> Singularité : ces vérités ne sont données nulle part ailleurs que dans l'art. (p. 21)

Finally, Badiou makes some further remarks on the being of works of art with respect to concepts such as infinity/finitude, and the work as an event. I believe Badiou has treated these concepts thoroughly in earlier works, which I am not familiar with. He makes no effort to explain these concepts in this brief chapter, which ends in cryptical territory.

Badiou claims that the work of art is essentially finite. It is finite in space and time, it represents an achievement and a perfection, and altering a work is destructive. Clearly Badiou didn't have process-oriented or generative works in mind.

Then there is a brief and enigmatic remark about events. All truths originate from an event, Badiou writes (p. 24); one cannot invent unless something happens. It is impossible to say of the work of art that it is at once a truth and the event that originates this truth.

I'm not sure what to make of this, and the last pages of the chapter are even harder to make sense of. Vattimo also writes about art as an event, as something of great consequence, but I suspect his and Badiou's conceptions of art as event are different.

References:

Alain Badiou: Petit manuel d'inesthétique. Éditions du Seuil, 1998.

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