Badiou: Art & Philosophy

About

In October we’re reading Art & Philosophy, the first chapter of Alain Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics, which links up with and extends our previous discussions of Jacques Ranciere, Boris Groys and Susan Sontag. This discussion will be chaired by Kerry W. Purcell.

Kerry Purcell is doing a PhD at Birkbeck on the role of ‘history’ in the development of Badiou’s thought. He will focus on the specificities of the Artistic Event (as opposed to the other Badiouian events of Science, Love and Politics). By ‘specificities’, Kerry means the phenomenological experience of undergoing such an event. Some of the Badiouian questions that emerge from this are:

What constitutes an artistic Event?
What does it mean (phenomenologically) as a ‘subject’ to experience such an Event?
How do we think “change” within art history?
By their very nature of being something radically new, are all artistic Events “abstract” (this is one of Badiou’s contention)?
How do artists/historians name what (the early) Badiou termed ‘infinity points’ in the historical discourse of art?
What happens when an artist betrays the ‘revelation’ offered by an epistemological rupture?
Following Badiou, how do we think ‘truth’ within art?

Symposium brings together a supportive community of peers who discuss their research interests around specific texts every month. All decision-making is collective and anyone can propose and chair the reading of a text on a selective and voluntary basis.