View Alain Badiou video at the website of EUROPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL
Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou was interviewed by Greorg Weinand
camera and edit Jeanette Groenendaal en Zoot Derks
(Block 26, Truth Again, DasArts 2007)
(click on image to see video PART 1)
PART 2
PART 3
camera and edit Jeanette Groenendaal en Zoot Derks
(Block 26, Truth Again, DasArts 2007)
(click on image to see video PART 1)
PART 2
PART 3
CONTEXT
Block 26
Truth again
Block 26 commenced on 19 February 2007 and ended on 27 April 2007.
The semester commenced on 1 March 2007 and ended on 31 August 2007.
Mentors
Cornel Bierens (NL) writer, artist, clinical psychologist
Benda Hofmeyr (ZA) philosopher
About the block
Participants, mentors and guest lecturers joined forces in the quest to rediscover truth. The truth about what? Which truth? The various truths of Art, of Love, of Politics, of Science (and Religion as well). Both collaboratively and individually, they attempted to recreate Truth through Art.
The search for truth is often associated with the ivory tower of academia but in actual fact it falls within the purview of everyone who tries to get to the bottom of things. But does truth exist? Isn’t truth a goal that can never be attained?
Throughout the history of philosophy, this relativistic approach to truth has always been regarded as a reaction against absolutists. Relativism might have reigned supreme during the last decades of the 20th century but our present postmodernist era is drawing to an end. The recent upsurge of fundamentalism and extremism is symptomatic of the turning tide. These fanatical outbursts aside, it is no longer a shame to talk about truth, to believe in it. This is not a mere relapse into absolutism, however. Beyond these binary oppositions there is now talk of truth as something both personal and objective.
Our attempt to make the notion of truth productive in our work as artistic/cultural producers was informed by the thinking of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. According to Badiou, we only come into being in any meaningful sense in relation to an event of truth. A truth-event radically redefines the way things are and can take place in one of four possible settings: in the fervour of artistic production, in the passion of love, in the elation of a scientific discovery, or in the upheaval of a political revolution. Whether artistic, amorous, scientific or political, an event turns the world as we know it upside down. The challenge is to incorporate the implications of this fundamental break with the existing state of affairs, to continue onwards while remaining true to the event – to persevere in the interruption. There is no ethics in general, according to Badiou, but only an ethic of truth(s), i.e. fidelity to an event(s). The operative question in the ethic of truths is: how will I continue to exceed my own being? How to become the Immortal that I am capable of being?