Trash or Treasure? Alain Badiou and the Problem of Cinema

Dr Alex Ling (Western Sydney University), Alex Ling

Cinema appears to present a significant problem for Alain Badiou. While recognising that philosophy is obliged to engage with cinema in so far as it presents a unique ‘philosophical situation’, he nonetheless notes that even great films can be compared – ‘with only slight exaggeration’ – to the treatment of waste. In making sense of this strange situation, the paper first provides a broad overview of Badiou’s understanding of cinema itself – taken in the generic sense, as an art almost entirely defined by its relation to other arts – before drawing out some of the artistic and philosophical consequences of his position. In particular, the paper isolates two central problems cinema poses to his ‘inaesthetic’ program (specifically surrounding the crucial concepts of ‘singularity’ and ‘immanence’), as well as a number of challenges it presents his philosophical system as a whole.

Bio:

Alex Ling is Research Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at Western Sydney University. He is the author of Badiou Reframed (I.B. Tauris, 2016) and Badiou and Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), and co-editor and translator of Mathematics of the Transcendental (Bloomsbury, 2014).