Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics, Mini-Review

Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics is now the 8th book I’ve read of Badiou’s since finishing his Being and Event back in October last year (2023). I’ve been looking forward to it because the topics it deals with are, on the face of it, on the farther reaches of what Badiou’s philosophy seems geared to engage. Mathematics and art: how to bring these together? Well, I read it, and, it’s probably the first book of Badiou’s that I’ve been somewhat disappointed by. So, as usual with things that bother me, I wrote something small about it. Here’s my mini-review of the book:

Now three months deep into my dive into Badiou, his Handbook of Inaesthetics marks, for me, something of a test. Not one for me, mind you, but for Badiou (or better: for me yes, but for Badiou too!). After all, how does a philosopher for whom “philosophy is an insensate act” deal wth the thorny question of aesthetics? Aesthetics, the sensorial field par excellence. Can Badiou, arch-rationalist, ontologist of mathematical austerity, have something to say about art, about the charms and force of the sensible, so often situated on the furthest shores of the rational? It turns out: yes, but... Badiou, as ever, is writer of masterful ability. His prose has a rhythm of poetry built right into it, at once lyrical but precise: Badiou is a philosopher with something to say on the aesthetic, and he does so, beautifully.

At that level alone might this book qualify as one on, or rather, ‘of’, aesthetics. But what does it say of the sensible, to what place does it accord it, in, or perhaps out of line with Badiou’s wider philosophical project? The clue is in the title: a book of inaesthetics. Which is what? In Badiou’s own words, it is an attempt to examine the “intraphilosophical effects” produced by the existence of certain works of art, and as such, one that “does not turn art into an object for philosophy”. One imagines this means respecting, in a certain sense, the independence of art from philosophy, and likewise, the independence of philosophy from art. Philosophy being that which neither pronounces, from the outside, what art is, nor being that which accedes to art any kind of exclusive access to “truth”, while philosophy, in stupor, can only stare on.

Instead, granting to art its own ability to produce truths (albeit non-exclusively), Badiou here remains ‘within’ philosophy, reaching out with a borrowing hand to see how philosophy might react to art, without at the same time colonising art from this sphere external to it. On its face, this sounds like a perfectly reasonable operation. But in execution, one is left, for all the brilliance of its acuity, feeling that the independence of art is precisely what is not respected in this movement from one to the other. For as it turns out, every work of art examined here - from the poems of Mallarme and Pessoa, to the novellas of Beckett, and the staging of theatre and dance - all of it seems to simply (or, being charitable, ‘complexly’) recapitulate Badiouian philosophy in terms other than those of Badiou.

That Badiou finds in these works in a mirror of his own philosophy, albeit in nearly unrecognisable keys, is not objectionable in itself. Indeed, watching Badiou at work, transforming Mallarmian nymphs into Badiouian Events, or Beckettian adages into yet more Badiouian categories is nothing less than astonishing, a practice of connoisseurship rarely found, and alone worth reading. Yet it all nonetheless feels appropriative, a certain assimilation that, rather than effecting any transformation of philosophy, ends up simply reinforcing what was already there. As an exercise in philosophy, using art as its material, the Handbook of Inaesthetics is a truly excellent collection, one perfectly consonant with Badiou’s ongoing attempt to cash out his philosophy in so many which ways. As an approach to the aesthetic, the ‘in’ in inaesthetic must be taken seriously - but in doing so does not make itself equal to the test of its own matter.