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Paradigms of Jouissance
J
ACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

Art and Philosophy
A
LAIN BADIOU

The Work-of-the-Art
G
ÉRARD WAJCMAN

Run, Isolde, Run
S
LAVOJ ZIZEK

Cultural Ideation:
Recent Works by Tunga and Terry Eagleton
D
AVID EBONY

Ghada Amer
C
ATHY LEBOWITZ
Interviews
J
OSEFINA AYERZA



























        

Art and Philosophy

 

 

Alain Badiou

translated by Jorge Jauregui

A bond that is forever affected by a symptom, one of oscillation, of throbbing.

From the very beginning there is Plato's judgement ostracizing poetry, theatre and music. By and large the founding father of philosophy - a refined connoisseur of the arts no doubt - preserves, in The Republic, only military music and patriotic chants.

On the other hand, you find a pious devotion to art, a contrite bending of the concept, reasoned as technical nihilism, against the poetic word that alone proffers the world at the latent Openness of its own angst.

Yet, after all, Protagoras the sophist, singled out the apprenticeship of arts as the key to education. There was an alliance of Protagoras and Simonides the poet, which Plato's Socrates attempts to thwart the casuistry and enslave the rationalšs intensity to his own benefit.

An image comes to mind, an analogous matrix of meaning: philosophy and art are historically coupled the way the Master and the Hysteric coalesce in Lacan. You know how the hysteric confronts the master and says: "The truth speaks through my tongue, I am 'there,' and you, who knows, do tell me who I am." And you surmise that whatever wisdom and subtleties lie in the master's reply, the hysteric will let him know it is not as yet that, that her "there" evades the catch, that all should be resumed, and a lot of effort is required to please her. She thereby takes command over the master and becomes maîtresse du maître. As it is, art is always already there, addressing the thinker with the silent and scintillating question of its own identity. However, through constant invention - its metamorphosis - art dismisses whatever the philosopher has to say concerning its own self.

[...]

 

Art: Leandro Erlich, The Swimming Pool, mixed media, 1999
Courtesy of the artist

 



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