Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds. Being and Event, 2 (New York, London: Continuum, 2009), 510.
Equally, a “revolution” is a turn, a roll-back (revolutio), a strophé that is in search of its own temporal dimension. However, this turn also can be a diastrophé associated with Gianni Vattimo’s concept of the Heideggerian Verwindung, which explains our time, a concept that “contains no notion of dialectical sublimation (Aufhebung) nor of a ‘leaving behind’ which characterizes the connection we have with a past that no longer has anything to say to us.” This turning may appear to us as a sudden reversal of that which is expected: as both a sudden end and a reversal against (strophé kata). This katastrophé is a crisis that enables the opportune, the pivotal moment (kairos) to appear. Incidentally Alain Badiou’s retroactive constitution of the event, the temporality of the futur antérieur, which in his account has always a catastrophic dimension, connects the repetitive gesture of temporality to the revolutionary, terrible event. See Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 7.
Boris Groys, “The Weak Universalism” e-flux journal no. 15 (October 2010). See →.
Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 82.
Agamben, ibid., 36–37.
See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge MA, University of Harvard Press: 2002), passim and esp. 101-119.
Agamben, ibid., 34.
Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping. Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) 6.
Agamben, ibid.,86.
See →.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (New York: Vintage, 1974), 37.
John Rajchman, Constructions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 2.
The aristocratic version of this figure of negativity is found in Theodor Adorno, who, in The Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 2006), declares radical and novel art—notably the music of Arnold Schönberg—to be “restricted to definitive negation.” In turn, for Edward Said, Adorno is a figure of lateness, “an untimely, scandalous, even catastrophic commentator of the present.” Although Said’s lateness: “fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present,” is tinted by ethno-biographical history, it could be easily be turned into a Nietzschean figure of active nihilism. Edward W. Said, On Late Style. Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 13.
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 13.
Related models that deny strict categorical privilege and function would be Marcel Mauss’ gift economy, which produces consensus through a reciprocal obligation to offer, or Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s concept of “agonistic pluralism” as the basis of radical democracy. See Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, New York: Verso, 2000), 80–107.
Groys, ibid.
Rancière, ibid, 12.
Rancière, ibid, 2.
Rancière has often pointed to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt aesthetic as a production model that will emancipate the spectator. See also Owen Hatherley, who has recently assessed the cinematic and avant garde components of Brecht’s Epic Theater in terms of their political and educational objectives and their functional democratization of the cultural apparatus.. Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (Winchester,UK, Washington, D.C., 2008), 116
Jacques Rancière, Fulvia Carnevale, and John Kelsey, “Art of the Possible,” Artforum (March 2007), 267.
Adorno, Philosophy of New Music.
Heidegger, Nietzsche,. 71. This is also Agamben’s view: “But the castle of culture has now become a museum in which, on the one hand, the wealth of the past, in which man can in no way recognize himself, is accumulated to be offered to the aesthetic enjoyment of the members of the community, and, on the other, this enjoyment is possible only through the alienation that deprives it of its immediate meaning and of its poietic (sic) capacity to open its space to man’s action and knowledge.” See Agamben, ibid., 111. The poietic in Agamben—from poiein “to pro-duce” in the sense of bringing into being—r—efers to the Heideggerian poet of truth (aletheia) who, in Alain Badiou’s view, is momentous, unpredictable and rare as opposed to Agamben’s homo aestheticus, the poet of continuation, application, and reiteration. See Alain Badiou, On the Truth-Process, An Open Lecture by Alain Badiou (2002). See →.
Heidegger, Nietzsche, 96.
Heidegger, ibid.,81.
The term amphitheater derives from the ancient Greek amphi-, meaning “on both sides,” and theasthai “to behold or view”,For one discussion of dispositifs in the current moment, see Agamben, What is an Apparatus and other essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Palo Alto, Stanford University Press: 2009), 1–23.
In this regard, the amphitheater functions as the political equivalent of the critical Deleuzian architectonic figure, the fold, see Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 1992).. As with the distinctive operations of Deleuze’s many arts: film, literature, music and film, Rancière’s amphitheater is kind an abstract architectonic and operative generator that creates other spaces, “not by reducing sense but by multiplying it….It is not a matter of architectures that refer back to their own rules of construction and nothing else. Rather, it is a question of constructing free spaces of unregulation, undetermined by any prior plan, which so loosen an arrangement as to allow for sensations of something new, other affects, other percepts.” See Rajchman, Constructions,8. According to Deleuze, if philosophy creates “concepts,” the arts create novel qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling, so-called “percepts” and “affects.” For a discussion of the term “affect,” see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2002). Equally, parallels can be drawn to Lacan’s baroque vision in which the topological figure of the torus, Lacan’s “doughnut,” constitutes an anchoring point in his theory of the constitution of a hollow subject. See Walter Seitter, “Lacans Barockismus” in Blühmle, Claudia and Heiden, Anne von der (ed.), Blickzähmung und Augentäuschung. Zu Jacques Lacans Bildtheorie (Berlin, Zurich: Diaphanes 2005), p. 355; Jean-Paul Assoun, Lacan (Paris 2003), p. 9, and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La folie du voir. Une esthétique du virtuel (Paris: Galilée 1987).
Rancière, ibid, 78.
Such a position signifies a Rancièrian affective turn that leads us beyond our current aesthetic regime. Aesthetics for Rancière means the collapse of an isomorphic mediation, “the continuity between thoughts and its signs in bodies, and also between the performance of living bodies and its effect on other bodies.” In Rancière’s vocabulary this mediation defines the mimetic regime of art, which has ended with the advent of the modern aesthetic regime by the end of the 18th century. Rancière, ibid, p. 72 and 62.
Rancière, ibid, 57.
