Between the Science of the Sensible and the Philosophy of Art

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Notes

notes

Portions of this essay were presented at “The Substance of Thought: Critical and Pre-Critical,” organized by the Theory Reading Group at Cornell University (10–12 April 2008), as well as at the seminar “Late Modernism, Past and Present,” organized by Philip Wegner at the Modernist Studies Association's Annual Meeting, “Modernism and Global Media,” at Vanderbilt University (13–16 November 2008). For their insightful criticisms of earlier versions of this essay, I am indebted to John Hicks and Audrey Wasser, as well as to an anonymous reader at Angelaki.

1 In addition to the writings of Badiou, see, for example, Bruno Bosteels’ “The Jargon of Finitude” and Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude. I address Meillassoux's anti-Kantianism in “Toward a Speculative Realism.”

2 Badiou's affirmation of classical rationalism does not, of course, entail an uncritical acceptance of the sort of substance metaphysics prevalent during the seventeenth century. Rather, Badiou endorses the epistemological ambitions of the rationalist project, the willingness to see through to its conclusion the Parmenidean axiom of the identity of thought and being.

3 In addition to celebrating the work of a number of figures from the classical-philosophical pantheon, Badiou also singles out a handful of twentieth-century thinkers who have successfully opposed the hegemonic rendering of the relationship between the finite and the infinite, especially as this has been determined by the relationship between philosophy and mathematics. These figures include Jean Cavaillès, Albert Lautman, and Jean-Toussaint Desanti (TW 244). Very little has been written in English on the line of twentieth-century French rationalism to which Badiou alludes; I owe much of my own understanding of it to the pioneering work of Knox Peden. Peden presents an historical account of post-war French rationalism in his dissertation “Reason without Limits: Spinozism as Anti-phenomenology in Twentieth-Century French Thought.”

4 The distinction between philosophies of consciousness and philosophies of the concept is developed by Cavaillès at the conclusion of his Sur la logique et la théorie de la science (78).

5 Badiou groups the various schemata through which philosophers have linked art to truth according to the categories of immanence and singularity as follows:What can we immediately observe? First, that in the romantic schema, the relation of truth to art is indeed immanent (art exposes the finite descent of the Idea), but not singular (because we are dealing with the truth and the thinker's thought is attuned to something different from what is unveiled in the thinking of the poet). Second, that in didacticism, the relation is certainly singular (only art can exhibit a truth in the form of semblance), but not at all immanent, because the position of truth is ultimately extrinsic. And third, that in classicism, we are dealing only with the constraint that a truth exercises within the domain of the imaginary, the “likely.” (HI 9)The romantic, didactic, and classical schemata persist in the present in hermeneutics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, respectively. “In these inherited schemata,” Badiou concludes, “the relationship between artworks and truth never succeeds in being at once singular and immanent” (9).

6 Baumgarten presents his best-known definition of aesthetics at the beginning of his 1750 Aesthetica: “Aesthetica (theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulchre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientia cognitionis sensitivae” (10) (Aesthetics (theory of the liberal arts, lower gnoseology, art of beautiful thinking, art of reason's analogue) is the science of sensible cognition). (My trans.)

7 Heidegger discusses Kant's “recoil” in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (118).

8 For a detailed treatment of the role of the transcendental in Badiou's Logics of Worlds, see Justin Clemens’ “Had we but worlds enough, and time, this absolute, philosopher … ” and Peter Hallward's “Order and Event: On Badiou's Logics of Worlds.” For a sophisticated reading of Logics of Worlds that rejects Badiou's claim to have done with Kant, see Adrian Johnston's “Phantom of Consistency.” Johnston provides a helpful gloss on the distinction between Kant's and Badiou's understandings of the transcendental:Kant's transcendental, as characterized by Badiou, involves four features, with it being: one, subjective (this scaffolding of possibility conditions for a reality of presentable objects is associated with the mind of a cognizing individual agent); two, singular qua universal (there is one, and only one, fundamental skeletal structure of these possibility conditions shared by all mental agents); three, necessary (without this singular, trans-individual matrix common to all individual minds, there is no reality); and, four, transcendent (this transcendental, of necessity, isn’t internally included within the field it nonetheless makes possible). Badiou's transcendental is the mirror-image inversion of this, with it being: one, asubjective (there is no central mental agent or cognizing individual invariably organizing worlds of appearances); two, multiple qua non-universal (given both the co-extension of transcendental regimes with worlds as well as the alleged plurality of worlds, there are as many transcendentals as there are innumerable worlds – thus further justifying the denial of a unique transcendental subject à la Kant); three, contingent (given the open-ended multiplicity of worlds with varying transcendental regimes, no one transcendental configuration is absolutely necessary); and, four, immanent (those things functioning as conditions of possibility for a particular world simultaneously appear as elements within this same world). (356–57)I would like to thank an anonymous reader at Angelaki for bringing Johnston's essay to my attention.

9 Badiou's resolutely atheistic analysis of Saint Paul helps to concretize the relationship between event, subject, and truth. As Badiou reads him, Paul is the initiator of the truth procedure that is Christianity; this truth procedure is itself simply a militant fidelity to the punctual event of Christ's resurrection and an active following through of all its implications. In his fidelity to the event of the resurrection, Paul becomes a subject to its truth.

10 In his essay “Something Else is Possible: Thinking Badiou on Philosophy and Art,” Nico Baumbach does an admirable job of elaborating the apparently paradoxical character of art as the sensible manifestation of the untruth of the sensible.

11 Badiou provides his most detailed treatment of the twentieth-century's avant-gardes in the series of lectures given at the Collège International de Philosophie from 1998 to 2001 and published in English as The Century. Though Badiou frames his treatment of the avant-garde project as an historical analysis rather than as a call for a specific artistic program, it is fairly easy to see how close he remains to the aims of the avant-garde by comparing his remarks in The Century to his discussions of evental art in the Handbook of Inaesthetics and elsewhere.

12 Here, I am borrowing a distinction developed by the literary theorist Paul de Man. De Man develops his notion of “the emergence of a language of power out of a language of cognition” in Aesthetic Ideology (133). This emergence is synonymous with the shift from language in its functioning as a tropological system to language as performative. Badiou, of course, rejects the “linguistic turn” that de Man's critical writings exemplify.

13 Much of Badiou's work with L’Organisation politique has centered on the plight of the sans-papiers living in France. Following the confirmation of the 1993 Pasqua laws, immigrant workers lacking papers are officially treated as “clandestine” and, consequently, lack the social benefits bestowed upon French citizens. For a discussion of Badiou's work with the sans-papiers, see Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth 223–42.

14 For Hegel's discussion of the difference between spurious and genuine infinity, see The Science of Logic, esp. 109–56.

15 My treatment of the place of finitude in the Kantian idea structure is influenced by the reading of Kant developed by Martin Hägglund in Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. See, in particular, the first chapter, “Autoimmunity of Time: Derrida and Kant” 13–49. In sum, Hägglund demonstrates that, for Derrida, the supposed desire for full presence, immortality, and so on is really a desire for a still-mortal survival. In this sense, there is nothing beyond what Hegel calls “spurious infinity.”

16 Schopenhauer's treatment of the Apollo appears as part of a long line of reflections on the relationship between art and thought, life and death. Here, it is useful to recall the remarks on purification (καθαρ óς) and death included in Plato's Phaedo. After describing the philosopher's desire to have his mind purified, Socrates asks his interlocutor:what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body … ; the habit of the soul gathering and collecting herself into herself, out of all the courses of the body; the dwelling in her own place alone, as in another life, so also in this, as far as she can; the release of the soul from the chains of the body? … And what is that which is termed death, but this very separation and release of the soul from the body? (393)In a passage from an essay “On the Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy in General,” published in 1802 in the Critical Journal of Philosophy, Schelling (or Hegel – the authorship is disputed) quotes the above passage and provides the following gloss:Those … who insert something of an alien nature, a material form or the like, between the pure universal or infinite and the soul (whether this happens consciously, or because they fail altogether to rise to the consciousness of what they are doing) – they are never genuinely freed from that restriction, but forever drag the finite and the body along with them as something positive and genuinely actual. The true triumph and final liberation of the soul lies in absolute idealism alone, in the absolute death of the real (Reellen) as such. (379)Obviously, between Plato's remarks and Schelling's commentary we find Aristotle's reimagining of καθαρός in the Poetics, as well as the numerous eighteenth-century commentaries on the therapeutic or educative role of this καθαρός (up to and including those that appear in the writings of Lessing and Schiller). Though it is beyond the scope of this essay, it would only be necessary to recognize the importance of this tradition to the formation of absolute idealism, and to the latter's understanding of the relationship of art to philosophy in particular, to further complicate Badiou's distinction between the didactic, romantic, classical, and inaesthetic schemata. I would like to thank Robin Sowards for stressing to me the relevance of Aristotelian καθαρός to Badiou's conception of education-purgation.