Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts
- 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
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
5 - An Instant or an Eternity: Thinking Cinema After Deleuze
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts
- 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
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
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 DeleuzeCinema deconditioned
Film is now, I would say, in a certain way the paradigm of art.
Jacques RancièreClearly 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)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Badiou and Cinema , pp. 107 - 133Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010