Badiou Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts

He has been regarded with suspicion by some, as an anti-postmodernist who dared to write about unfashionable concepts such as truth and meaning. But in recent years, the philosopher Alain Badiou has risen in prominence, pioneering new ways to produce, conceptualise and discover art. Badiou Reframed is an original book about an original thinker which applies—for the first time—Badiou’s philosophy to the visual arts. The three central concepts of this philosophy—’being and appearing’, ’event and subject’ and ’truth and ethics’—are elucidated through detailed analysis of a range of visual artworks, including the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the cubist works of Picasso and Braque, the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi and Ossip Zadkine, Kazimir Malevich’s suprematist paintings and Steve McQueen’s film Hunger. In focusing on Badiou’s critical relationship with the visual arts, Alex Ling reinterprets and represents not only the man, but art itself.