Love, Angus (2020) Alain Badiou’s twisted contemporaneity : inaesthetics and the contemporary. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis interrogates Alain Badiou’s philosophical project from the standpoint of theories of the contemporary and contemporary art, via an engagement with the spectatorship of installation art and the installation practice of Ilya Kabakov. Badiou’s major works Being and Event (1988) and Logics of Worlds (2006) construct a philosophical account of truth based on a mathematical ontology and militant account of the subject. For Badiou, art is one of four ‘conditions’ through which philosophy seizes contemporary truths in order to demonstrate their ‘compossibility’ or co-temporality in thought. Despite Badiou’s assertion of the contemporaneity of his philosophical project, his philosophy is marked by a failure to encounter contemporary art. This is evident in the modernist elitism of his artistic canon, the neo-classicism of his philosophical discourse, and what Jacques Rancière has termed the ‘twisted modernism’ of his ‘inaesthetic’ framework of art.

This thesis assesses Badiou’s project as articulating a ‘twisted’ relation to the contemporary, defined by Peter Osborne as the “disjunctive unity of present times”. I argue that the potential contemporaneity of Badiou’s concept of ‘compossibility’ is limited by the nature of his presentation of philosophical discourse. However, I demonstrate that his account of the present and concept of ‘saturation’ can be productively read alongside critiques of the ‘reduction to the present’ in the contemporary and postmodern. In my critique of Badiou’s ‘inaesthetic’ framework of art I argue that Badiou excludes audience relation in favour of a purified philosophical ‘seizure’ of the work of art. Finally, I consider the implications for Badiou’s project of the installation practice of former Soviet artist Ilya Kabakov, which I argue offers a means of de-purifying Badiou’s distinction between knowledge and truth. By expanding Badiou’s account of spectatorship beyond the theatre through an engagement with installation art, the thesis both identifies the limits of his project and its potential expansion via an encounter with the contemporary.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Badiou, Alain -- Philosophy, Badiou, Alain -- Criticism and interpretation, Kabakov, Ilʹi︠a︡ Iosifovich, 1933-, Modernism (Art), Art, Modern -- 21st century, Aesthetics
Official Date:	January 2020
Dates:	Date Event January 2020 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Purcell, Stephen, 1981- ; Docherty, Thomas, 1955-
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	viii, 183 leaves : illustrations (some colour)
Language:	eng

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