The truth of Badiou’s return to modern art

Philosophy

Abstract

The article approaches the French philosopher Alain Badiou and his account of the present-day state of mind in art and aesthetics, turning away from the Lyotardian postmodernity and reaffirming modernity, while taking into account the insights of the last couple of decades. The main topic of the discussion is Badiou’s critique of aesthetical and political status of truth in postmodernism, as well as its reaffirmation of crucial philosophical notions, especially a notion of truth. The article continues with an account of Badiou’s attitude in view of a broader reflection on aesthetical and ethical aspects of the age we live in, the name of which is in philosophy aconstant apple of discord. Badiou’s return to anti-romantic, unphysical and impersonal art, to somehow neoclassical vision, attracted a repulsing debate. Rather then the elimination of author’s role, as some french structuralists already had suggested, we can attest a kind of revival of author, even if a writer’s attention is just to seem authentic. On the other hand, a lot of contemporary texts are collage of intimate journal and philosophical essay with the expressive tendency to expose an author’s existential subjectivity.The mixture of literature and philosophy undermines Badiou’s key thesis of the need of separation between art/literature and philosophy.