An inessential art? : positioning cinema in Alain Badiou’s philosophy

Alain Badiou’s philosophy is nothing less than a rigorous attempt to think novelty itself; at one end, a thinking of how something new – and, crucially, universal – arrives in a world, and at the other, of how real global change can come about. Which is equally to say that his principal concerns lie with the possibility of thought per se: of thought as divorced from the perambulations of knowledge; of thought as what cuts through or ‘interrupts repetition’ and delivers to us something truly new; of thought as ‘the existence of a possible relation to truth, and nothing else’.1 Needless to say, such original thought is fundamentally rare, and doesn’t occur just anywhere. In fact, as is by now well known, Badiou holds there to be but four generic fields in which real thinking might take place, being the fields of art, politics, science and love. It is moreover by virtue of this fact that these four fields also constitute the sole conditions of his philosophy, insofar as the single (and singular) objective of philosophy, as Badiou defines it, is that of bringing together (or ‘compossibilizing’) these disparate thoughts. Put simply, philosophy is nothing less – and, it must be said, nothing more – than ‘the thinking of thought’ (D 21). Or to be more precise, it is the (re)thinking of the real thought that truth-procedures think.