The Pornographic Age

Alain Badiou, A. J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350014800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia etica e morale

Offering a piercing indictment of what we have let ourselves become, this short, critical work is a damning critique of the current age and of the democratic systems that characterize it. Alain Badiou argues that any truly radical politics must begin with dismantling the obscene (or pornographic) qualities of neoliberal capitalism. In The Pornographic Age he asks us to hold up a mirror to ourselves and confront the debasement of the political realities in which we live, the shock of which must galvanize us into action. It is only through this realization, this crucial confrontation with the perversity with which we conduct our daily lives that we can prompt true revolution. Including an afterword from international Badiou scholars A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens and a commentary by William Watkin, this book is a philosophical call to arms: Badiou's radical indictment of the current age is an exciting, no-holds-barred exploration of both how we live and how we might live.

Minus something indefinable

A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens

Pornosophical philotheology

JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses

This little book first appeared in French in 2013 under the title Pornographie du temps présent, literally, Pornography of the Present Time. For a number of reasons, not least euphony, we decided to translate the title as The Pornographic Age (hereafter simply Pornography). This Afterword seeks to situate the book, its procedures and its claims, in some detail because – despite its brevity, accessibility and occasional nature – Pornography is simultaneously a dense and thoughtful text, whose preconditions and implications extend far beyond the facts of its immediate presentation.

As translators of several of Badiou’s little books and articles, as commentators on Badiou’s writings, and as editors of various collections of essays on his work, we have previously also been the authors of a number of such putative texts: introductions, commentaries, forewords, afterwords and so on.¹ If we ourselves wonder just how many such ‘comments’ to Badiou’s work anybody needs, themselves becoming pornographic in the sense discussed both above and below, we mark this relationship from the outset here in order thereby to emphasize the key problems and problematics of transmission, that is, pedagogy, itself a central consideration for Badiou’s philosophy. In Pornography, this problematic of transmission-pedagogy bears integrally upon the question of the construction, circulation and consequences of images today – that is, upon their pornographic nature.

Hence the book’s title. It asserts an essential connection between ‘pornography’ and the ‘times’, the ‘age’, in which we live. ‘Pornography’ is a genre that is often held to flourish in, if not exemplify, our age. One can even be surprised at the number and eminence of philosophers and critics for whom pornography has proven a central category for thought, bearing upon the aesthetics and politics of images, stages, gazes, not to mention time itself.² Yet its limits and conventions can seem, even beyond the intense controversies that the term constitutively inspires, complex and confused. As Ian Hunter, David Saunders and Dugald Williamson have put it, ‘pornography’ generally functions as a ‘circumstantial’ designation rather than a well-defined category, variously designating ‘an eroticising device, a target of medical and pedagogical programmes, a tradable commodity, an aesthetic category, an object of feminist and governmental reforms, [and] a legal problem’.³ This is certainly correct, but it is also the case that a certain historical and conceptual consistency characterizes the word. As Lynn Hunt notes:

The word pornography appeared for the first time in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1857, and most of the English variations on the word (pornographer and pornographic) date from the middle or the end of the nineteenth century. The words emerged in French a little sooner. According to the Trésor de la langue française, pornographe surfaced first in Restif de la Bretonne’s treatise of 1769 titled Le Pornographe to refer to writing about prostitution, and pornographique, pornographe and pornographie in the sense of obscene writing or images dated from the 1830s and 1840s.⁴

Moreover, as Hunt adds, ‘Significantly, it was only in the decades of the emergence of mass politics – the 1880s and afterward – that most countries began to produce their own indigenous pornography, a fact again suggestive of the link between pornography and democracy.’⁵ We would especially like to underline the historical bond that Hunt discerns here between ‘pornography’ and ‘democracy’, for it is one that Badiou too confirms, if here at the level of the concept rather than at the level of history, and with rather different ends in mind.

A well-known deadlock of what we now call ‘neo-liberalism’ – that is, the contemporary total economization of the cult of individual freedoms – is that the absolute primacy given to individual choice occludes structural oppressions, but attempting to counter such individualism by focusing on structural oppression occludes the potential for a universalism irreducible to an endless warfare of identities. This is part of the logic by which ‘democracy’ has become the dominant political watchword or symptom of our age. Moreover, it is bound up with how ‘pornography’ has become the dominant genre: pornography incites the uptake of new technologies as it moves from being a marginal to a billion-dollar industry by enforcing an absolute prohibition on the prohibition of images. Nothing, including this book, subject as it has been by the publishers to the essentially pornographic circulation of identities and markets, is allowed to escape being represented; but, in the ferocious turbulence of representations, the crucial difference between representations and the real is effaced. ‘So,’ as Julian Murphet writes, ‘while capitalism continues to thrive on the basis of a progressive rise in the degree of rationalization, it offsets that with an obscenely irrational compulsion to enjoy, a collective self-sacrificial ritual of unfulfillable pleasure at the altar of a ubiquitous pornography’.⁶ In this sense, then, the pornographic is not primarily the imagistic, graphic or embodied presentation of obscene acts, but a global restructuring of representation that mandates transgression-as-emancipation as a securing of order. Pornography, under such a description, is the agent and guarantor of the privatization of the means of communication as such.

In such a society of the spectacle – ‘the present age’! – is it still possible to turn the image against itself without simply repeating and extending its pornographic logic? If so, how? With what means? It is at this point that Badiou has recourse to the theatre, more particularly to a famous play by Jean Genet, The Balcony. If such a recourse, and the justifications for such a recourse, are of inherent philosophical interest, we should not overlook the ideological difficulties that this might cause Badiou in particular. If we can always ask ‘what is the role of the theatre in politics?’ and ‘what is the role of theatre for philosophy?’, the further issue here is this: how can a Platonist speak in praise of the theatre, when it is precisely theatre, its images, and the unconstrained affects that it supposedly licenses, that must be excluded from the Republic in the name of justice? Is not theatre finally in systematic solidarity with the pornography of the contemporary world? Is Badiou not risking performative contradiction with this reliance? Of course, one thing that Badiou does not do here is rely on the facile, contemporary conception of Platonism as authoritarian, joyless and frigid. Such a Platonism, ubiquitous in the schools, is itself a condition of our pornographic age.

Badiou’s engagement with the theatre is a lifelong commitment. Typically, as he recounts in the long interview with Nicholas Truong, it begins in an encounter. ‘The first theatrical production that really struck me I encountered in Toulouse when I was 14. La Compagnie du Grenier [The Attic Company], founded by Maurice Sarrazin, was putting on “Scapin the Schemer”.’⁷ Scapin is a character who will remain with Badiou. In one of his own plays, Badiou rewrites him as Ahmed the Philosopher⁸ and, according to Oliver Feltham, Badiou himself operates as Scapin, a man who, subject to diverse conditions, ‘creates as he finds his own milieu’.⁹ As Badiou tells it, this early encounter with Scapin, with Daniel Sorano’s performance of it, coupled with his own later performances of the character – critically praised, he notes, for recalling the Sorano original – will have seen him catch ‘the theatre bug’.¹⁰ But this is only concretized for him in an act of thought. He recounts the performance of Vilar in another of Molière’s plays, Don Juan: ‘the character was demonstrating his uncertainty, engaging in a tense examination of various hypotheses one could make in relation to an abnormal situation. Yes, this art of hypotheses, of possibilities, this trembling of thought before the inexplicable – this was the theatre in its highest expression’ (emphasis added).¹¹

We need not labour the point of the history of Badiou’s engagement with the theatre as player, writer, spectator, critic or even theorist, and indeed it seems apropos to note what he says in his extended work on the subject, Rhapsody for the Theatre, wherein the established complicity of theatre and the state is at stake. Speaking of François Regnault – ‘a man destined to theatre’ – and his work The Spectator, Badiou says: ‘His guide would give us a different outlook from mine: the outlook of the man of the theatre, which is what Regnault is and which I am not.’¹² What matters in terms of situating this text, The Pornographic Age, is to consider the terms of the impossibility of the relation between philosophy and theatre (and ultimately the not-impossible distinction between Theatre and State thereby) and precisely because, as he himself says in this text, concerned as it is with the domination of images, ‘[A]s often, my guide will be something non-philosophical, a piece of theatre …’.¹³ A piece of Theatre in order to see the contemporary state (of the situation).

We say the ‘impossibility’ of this relation precisely because Badiou the philosopher, as a Platonist, self-declared at least since 1988’s Manifesto for Philosophy,¹⁴ seems for these reasons to have set himself up with a real problem: that of rendering thinkable this very (non)relation, given philosophy founds itself on its subtraction from the poetics of theatre, from theatre’s predominant place in terms of the transmission of knowledge and, thus, finally, in terms of what knowledge is for an age or an epoch. Badiou’s atypical Platonism, to which we will return below, realizes an atypical question. Not: ‘how to have done with the theatre from the position of “philosophy”?’, but: ‘how can the knowledge of images, which is the theatre, help us subtract ourselves from the knowledge of images?’ This is to say that, for Badiou, for whom theatre is not, ultimately, an enemy of thought but one of its necessary conditions, how can the thought of theatre be thought? As we will see, this is not an aesthetics – always, in one way or another, the bringing of thought to theatre – but the means to put into thought what Theatre thinks as and for itself, what Theatre and only Theatre can stage and show.

This stake in knowledge that Plato recognizes in theatre, in poetry, in what circulates as knowledge, in terms of what conditions it and of what counts as knowledge, and what knowledge thereby counts to exist, is also a political question. The Greek theatre was a duty and a pedagogy. It put the polis on stage, as it were – the forms of its political representation were represented there for all to see, for all to know, for all, in effect, to repeat. But such theatre was also an effect of distance in so far as the figures of this polis were, as Badiou says, ‘unlikely’: ‘Theatre, conditioned by democracy, aims at it through a legendary monarchical distance.’ Even Genet’s The Balcony does this, populating the brothel with ‘a defunct republic of notables, from a Cross and a Sword that evoke Boulanger rather than Pompidou’. He continues: ‘And nobody, it must be said, has ever been able to play or put onstage his solar rebel – to the contrary, the unpunished vice of the text excels in supporting, on the stage, the dickhead of the police prefect.’¹⁵ The theatre, then, in this sense of the nexus of theatre and state, gives us what there is to see of the present – Genet’s brothel is our contemporary; every parliament, itself archaic, is proof of its representation – but it keeps it at arm’s length. The ‘rebel’, the people, the public, as the chance to not be such, are condemned to watch, not participate, given that we are none of these figures of representation – nor can we be!¹⁶

We know that the Republic, the ideal or just city, is founded by Plato on the basis of the impossibility of imitation or representation, the knowledge of the poets, being what counts as knowledge. In other words, to make representation or the knowledge of images impossible is the very condition of possibility for the just city. Hence the theatre of the poets, whether on stage or in the law courts or in the boardroom, as the pedagogy of representa...