John Roberts - The Limits of Negation in Badious Theory of Art

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Journal of Visual Arts Practice Volume 7 Number 3 © 2008 Intellect Ltd

Article. English Language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.7.3.271/1

On the limits of negation in Badiou’stheory of art

John Roberts University of Wolverhampton

Abstract Alain Badiou’s writing on art has achieved a certain visibility recently as partof a wider debate on the new forms of sociability in art (relational and post-relational aesthetics). Its resistance to these new forms of politicization is based on a renewed commitment to art’s negation and autonomy. In this, his writing takes its distance from the participatory and dialogic ethos of the moment,

emphasizing art’s powers of small-scale disclosure or subtractive difference. Yethe is no conventional modernist. His writing on art is intimately linked to apolitics in which the subtractive negations of art are the precursor of, and a pre-condition for, the revolutionary destruction of capitalist relations. In this articleI draw on Hegel and Adorno to reveal the weaknesses of this model of autonomy(Badiou fails to fully render art as a socialized category under capitalism) whiledefending the centrality of negation for any adequate theory of art’s autonomy.

In French philosophy, recently, there has been a prominent debate aboutart, sociability (dialogic engagement and interaction) and the legacy of theavant-garde. Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, two of the leading partici-pants in the debate, in many respects represent the two classically opposedviewpoints on these issues. Rancière holds to a quasi-neo-avant-garde posi-tion in which art extends its critical strategies and forms into the capitalist‘everyday’ (Rancière 2004) and Badiou holds to a version of art’s autonomy,in which the formal distance art takes from everyday social relations deter-mines its authenticity and value. However, if Badiou has little sympathy forthe ‘politicization’ of art in the historical avant-garde, nevertheless he retainsa theory of negation, which makes his position, philosophically at least, inkeeping with the world-transforming ambitions of the early avant-garde.

This makes his theory of negation a useful candidate for discussing the lim-its and possibilities of artistic autonomy, critique and the avant-garde today.For, the weaknesses of his theory of negation are offset by his recognitionthat a theory of negation remains a key requisite for any adequate theory of autonomy and the avant-garde.

In his essay ‘Destruction, Negation, Subtraction – on Pier Paolo Pasolini’,Badiou attempts to work out a notional theory of negation in art suitable(in his eyes) for a post-avant-garde epoch. Accordingly, he focuses on whathe considers to be its two key historical components: destruction and sub-traction. Destruction is, essentially, the absolute termination of the process

of negation, the process whereby one thing is destroyed and replaced byanother. Subtraction – a term, of course, that plays a major part in his

271JVAP 7 (3) pp. 271–282 © Intellect Ltd 2008

Keywordsautonomy

avant-garde

commodity

negation

sociability

subtraction



mathematical-derived philosophy – is the process whereby the real is notdestroyed, but purified or refigured in order to break or undermine its sur-face unity. In his discussion of the avant-garde in The Century he identifiesthis with the promise of a particular kind of modernism (expressly Malevichand ‘pure abstraction’) in which formal content is continually inventedthrough the production of small disruptions and revisions via a given arrayof negative strategies. As he explains:

[T]he other path that the century stretched out – the one that attempts to hold

onto the passion for the real without falling for the paroxysmal charms of terror –

is what I call the subtractive path: to exhibit as a real point, not the destruction of

reality, but minimal difference. To purify reality, not in order to annihilate its

surface, but to subtract it from its apparent unity so as to detect within it the

miniscule difference, the vanishing term that constitutes it.

(Badiou 2007a: 65)

What Badiou means here by the ‘miniscule difference’ is somewhat obscure,

but suffice it to say, what appears to be at stake in this distinction is somenotion of the autonomy of art (as subscribed to by modernism) as opposedto the ‘post-autonomous’ deflations and negations of art-as-such identifi-able with the historic avant-garde and neo-avant-garde. Indeed, across hiswritings Badiou has been an ardent critic of the historic avant-garde. ‘Theavant-gardes want there to be a pure present for art. There is no time towait… . The artist of the avant-garde is neither heir nor imitator, but ratherthe one who violently declares the present of art’ (2007a: 134–5). The avant-gardes were nothing ‘but the desperate and unstable search for…adidactico-romantic schema’ (2005: 8). This distaste for the self-declaredactionism of the avant-garde is predicated upon what Badiou sees as theavant-garde’s false fusion of art and politics. Given that revolutionary poli-tics is driven and shaped by collective actions and decisions, artistic-politicalwork that seeks to participate in or redefine the nature of the politicalprocess becomes subsumed under this collective process, producing aninevitable instrumentalization of art’s means and ends. Thus the mistakethe avant-garde makes – as all later neo-avant-gardes make – is that theyconfuse the truth claims of politics (universalizing, collective, violent andimportune) with the truth claims of art (subtractive, atemporal, interiorizing).It is the job of a radical modernism today, then, he insists, to break with themetaphysics of this fusion, and as such with the art of the recent past’s

essential Romanticism.One would be forgiven for thinking that Badiou was setting out to revive

a Greenbergian and Friedian modernism for our times; his emphasis on thesubtractive powers of the miniscule difference and distaste for art-as-event,would appear to have a certain affinity with, on the one hand, the formalistanti-theatricality of Fried’s writing, and on the other, the modernist politics of ‘non-communication’, attributable variously to Mallarmé, Adorno (at variouspoints) and Beckett. Indeed there is a certain ‘naivety’ and historical gauch-eness in Badiou’s writing on art and the avant-garde that allows him to makesuch sweeping claims about the virtues of subtraction. The avant-garde did

not pursue the ‘destruction of reality’, but the destruction of the bourgeoisseparation of the real and cultural praxis. There is an under-historicization

272 John Roberts



of the historic avant-garde, then, that is reflected in the absence of any ref-erence to similar arguments on the virtues of subtraction in recent debateson aesthetics, and to the now massive historical and critical literature onthe avant-garde itself. Yet, suffice it to say, Badiou is not a ‘new formalist’,nor he is an advocate of the de-politicization of art, as enshrined in laterGreenberg and in Fried. He remains committed to the promise of the revo-lutionary function of art, and the place of social and cultural critique within

it. This is reflected in both how unstable his critique of the avant-gardeactually is in his writing, and conterminously, how unstable is his coredistinction between the truth-claims of art and the truth-claims of politics.In a way, it is as if he does not quite believe in his own rhetoric. This is why‘Destruction, Negation, Subtraction’ is such an interesting piece, if nonethelessproblematic.

Written in 2007 Badiou’s essay appears to have taken note of those crit-ics of his philosophical writing who have emphasized its non-dialecticallimitations.1 Badiou’s insistence on philosophy as fundamentally a non-relational practice – as that which is based on the formulation of the break

and on the exacting division as fundamental principles of political, culturaland ethical organization – has presented problems for him in upholdingthis principle in art, given the overwhelming historical evidence for thepolitical/aesthetic failure of his programme of subtractive modernism (theidea that a politics of modernism lies solely in its formal disclosures). Thisis because it is hard not to acknowledge how the formal, material substrateof this process of disclosure in visual art – abstract painting – is utterlyexhausted as an intellectual, cognitive and cultural programme. Nowhere inBadiou’s writing is a defence of the virtues of the ‘marginal differences’ of subtraction actually linked to the practical problems of producing convinc-ing modernist painting on the ground today (even Fried has gone missing,so to speak, on this question, working mainly on photography-as-painting –a form of artistic relationality clearly not on Badiou’s radar) (Fried 2008). Inother words, subtraction, in this context at least, is mere gesturing; indeed,to hang subtraction on the legacy of abstract painting is to actually dissolvethe meaning of the avant-garde as a critique of painterly form.

So, what we find in ‘Destruction, Negation, Subtraction’, I would con-tend, is a covert renegotiation with the primary issue of non-relationality inhis philosophy. Indeed – as in certain parts of The Century where Badioudiscusses theatre and Brecht (2007a: 42–43) – there is an attempt to recon-struct an interrelational position on the truth claims of art and the truth

claims of politics. Thus, far from opposing subtraction to destructionBadiou poses a tacit reunion between destruction and subtraction without,however, one term coming to subsume the other. The concept of negationis suspended between destruction and subtraction, identifiable with neitherone, nor the other. In this way he re-establishes the creative link betweenpolitical negativity and artistic negativity. By broadly identifying destructionin art with the popular forces of negation ‘from below’ in the spirit of thehistoric avant-garde, the dialectic between art and anti-art – the determi-nate relation for all advanced art in the twentieth century – is restored to itsvisibility. In art and politics ‘negation is the eventual concentration of a

process through which is achieved the complete disintegration of an oldworld’ (Badiou 2007b). But, if the non-aesthetic, as the index of art’s fractured

273On the limits of negation in Badiou’s theory of art

1. Most prominent hasbeen Peter Hallward,see Hallward (2003) A Subject to Truth,foreword by SlavojZizek, Minneapolisand London:University of Minnesota Press,

Minneapolis andLondon, andHallward’s editedvolume (2004), Think Again: Alain Badiouand the Future of French Philosophy,London: Continuum.



sociability, is reintroduced into the aesthetic as a locus of art’s universaltransformative promise, this is not identifiable with the avant-garde’s sub-sumption of art into life, or the dissolution of ‘aesthetics’ into social technique.On the contrary the interrelationship between destruction and subtractionis to be one of checks and counter-balances, producing a tensile conjoiningof one with the other, a ‘complex interplay between destruction, negationand subtraction’ (Badiou 2007b). Indeed Badiou (2007b) comes up with a

kind of relational art/politics formula: if subtraction is separated fromdestruction, ‘we have as [a] result Hate and Despair’, but if destruction isseparated from subtraction, we have as a result aestheticism and nihilism(art without collective agency). This leads to, according to Badiou, the keyquestion of negation in art and politics today:

[T]he political problem of the contemporary world cannot be solved, neither in

the weak context of democratic opposition, which in fact abandons millions of

people to a nihilistic destiny, nor in the mystical context of destructive nega-

tion, which is an other form of power, the power of death … Neither subtrac-

tion without destruction, nor destruction without subtraction. It is in fact theproblem of violence today. Violence is not, as has been said during the last

century the creative and revolutionary part of negation. The way of freedom is

a subtractive one; but to protect the subtractive itself, to defend the new king-

dom of emancipatory politics, we cannot radically exclude all forms of violence.

(Badiou 2007b)

Thus, if Badiou sets about establishing a new avant-garde dialectic in thisessay, his relinking of political negativity and artistic negativity is given aweakly symmetrical relationship. The promise of the avant-garde’s transval-uation of all forms provides a kind of off-stage social framework to theunfolding, diurnal rhythms of subtraction, in which negation floats betweena normative aesthetic role in ‘subtraction’ (the unfolding work of marginaldifference across a range of practices) and an exceptional and historicallyinterruptive role in ‘destruction’ (the future work of collective transforma-tion). This is a strange and (quasi) Hegelian balancing act for someonewho has maintained a resolute distance from the Hegelian tradition, andwhat he calls its failure to produce or defend ‘real difference’ (Badiou 2005:168). As Badiou says (2005: 162) in Being and Event, in Hegel, ‘the “still-more” is immanent to the “already”; everything that is, is already “still-more”’. In other words, for Badiou (2005: 169), Hegel is unable to imagine

the possibility of ‘pure disjunction’. Well, it might be said that here neithercan Badiou. Destruction, as the motor and force-field of the ‘pure disjunc-tion’, is given a subsidiary position in relation to subtraction, producing alack of clarity over just how, and in what ways, the ‘interplay’ betweendestruction and subtraction is to be given social agency and material formnow. This presents a number of problems in our reading of Badiou’s use of negation in art.

Badiou’s HegelClearly – at least in this essay – Badiou is more of a Hegelian than we might

be led, or he might lead us, to believe. That is we need to recognize, formallyat least, the Hegelian character of Badiou’s theory of art, the fact that his

274 John Roberts



pairing of destruction with subtraction is remarkably close to Hegel’s fun-damental correlation between ‘first negation’ (determinate negation) and‘second negation’ (absolute negation).2 Yet Badiou’s definition of a complexinterplay between destruction and subtraction is actually vague as ‘dialec-tics’ and as a theory of the (post) avant-garde, and not best representativeof what is best in Hegel; indeed Badiou misconstrues Hegel. Or to put itanother way: Badiou makes a Hegelian-type move in order to render the

relations between subtraction and destruction coherent, but does not dojustice to its ramifications.

For Hegel first negation, as determinate negation, is the process of liv-ing, negative self-movement; second negation, in contrast, is the leap tofreedom through the negation of the negation of self-movement, the forcethat Hegel believed was immanent to all human praxis and which he calledAbsolute negativity (Hegel 1975: 477–8). As the embodiment of freedom,absolute negation, however, is not the end of the historical process, aclosed ontology, as commonly misconceived (by Badiou, Deleuze, Negri,Postone and others). Rather, it represents the unity of theory and practice

through freedom: the ‘identity of the theoretical and practical idea’ (Hegel1975: 292). And this for Hegel represents a new beginning , a point of depar-ture, and not the resolution of the historical process or the unification ordissolution of difference.3 Indeed, what defines this new beginning as secondnegation is not just the removal of the old – which is still for Hegel the formof death: ‘for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self’(Hegel 1977: 360) – but the production of qualitative new human relations.More importantly consciousness of the Absolute is not postponed as theascending, emancipatory ‘end-point’ of the historical process, as if all ‘sec-ond negation’ embodies for those living now is ‘hope’. On the contrary:‘The Absolute is rather directly before us, so present that so long as we think,we must, though without express consciousness of it, always carry with usand always use it’ (Hegel 1975: 40).

Accordingly ‘second negation’, as the unification of theory and practicein freedom, is embedded in ‘first negation’, in determinate negation, in asmuch as cognition of the Absolute is of necessity embedded, and invokedin, the struggles of everyday practice (the appearance, famously, of the ‘infi-nite’ in the finite). Thus if Hegel is quick to attack those (idealists) whowish to go beyond the determinate and to be immediately in the Absolute,he is also quick to attack those who formally separate first negation fromsecond negation, of the negation of negation from Idea (where conscious-

ness of the unity of theory and practice in freedom is identified andsecured). In this respect, as Raya Dunayevskaya, one of the most insightfuldefenders of ‘second negation’ in Hegel (and its centrality to Marx, youngand old), declares, ‘The Absolute Idea is the method of cognition for theepoch of the struggle for freedom’ (Dunayeskaya 2002: 109).

Now, Badiou’s conjunction of destruction and subtraction operatesaccording to this Hegelian principle. The interplay of destruction and sub-traction is clearly cognate with this interrelationship between first negationand second negation. But, nevertheless, Badiou is not interested in pre-senting this interrelationship in the form of the dialectical penetration of

second negation into first negation. Indeed, as I have suggested in myopening discussion of the avant-garde, this would require him to explicitly


2. For a discussion of the importance of Hegel’s ‘first negation’and ‘second negation’in relation to art andnegation, see Roberts(2009, forthcoming)‘Art and Its Negations’,in J. Roberts (ed.),

‘Art, Praxis, and the‘Community to Come’,Third Text.

3. One contemporaryFrench philosopher,who has workedagainst the grain of this closed ontology,is Jean-Luc Nancy.‘Hegel neither beginsnor ends; he is thefirst philosopher forwhom there is, explic-

itly, neither beginningnor end’ (Nancy(2002), Hegel: TheRestlessness of theNegative, translatedby Jason Smith andSteven Miller,Minneapolis andLondon: Universityof Minnesota Press,p. 9). Yes, but…absolute negativitysecures a qualitativelynew beginning.



link the avant-garde with the continuing revolutionary legitimacy and forceof second negation; and this he will not do, because of his general resis-tance to the conflation of art’s truth claims with the truth claims of politics.Hence we have a ‘complex interplay’ between destruction and subtraction,but without the pre-determinate presence of absolute negativity in firstnegation, a force – given Badiou’s political commitments – that is actuallyin a position to carry through and preserve the promise of the ‘pure dis-

junction’. It leaves his theory of negation and the avant-garde, then, in akind of ideological limbo.

The suspensive avant-gardeQuite rightly Badiou argues that in non-revolutionary periods under bour-geois culture the concept of negation is necessarily positioned betweendestruction and subtraction (this is what his concept of ‘interplay’ is designedto cover). The avant-garde is locked into an active, but subordinate, rela-tionship to its historic forms. In this respect Badiou’s model follows mostcritical theories of the avant-garde in the present period (in particular, Hal

Foster, Andrew Benjamin) in producing, what I have called, a suspensive the-ory of the avant-garde.4 Without a recognition of this suspensiveness‘destruction’ collapses into psychosis and transgressive madness, and‘subtraction’ into ineffectual aestheticism. Suspensiveness, then, refersgenerally to the re-positioning of the avant-garde as a neo-avant-gardeacross the reception of the avant-garde as a revolutionary event and thepost-war development of art as immanent critique. Thus, in alignment withthese recent theories of the avant-garde, Badiou’s rejection of the polarity of destruction and subtraction, is correct: in non-revolutionary periods thedestructive (transformative) potential of any avant-garde or neo-avant-gardes is purely formal or promissory; just as the transformative potentialof subtraction is localized, practical and symbolic, close in fact, to the recur-sive operations of autopoiesis (aesthetic self-development) in art.5 But thisis not to say that subtraction cannot act as placeholder for the promise of destruction. Indeed, from a Hegelian perspective, the first negation of theneo-avant-garde is able to act as the memory and active trace of the secondnegation (the historic avant-garde). Thus once the neo-avant-garde is seenas a placeholder for destruction as a matter of praxis, the fears about artisticpraxis collapsing into either aestheticism or nihilism are neither here northere. In short Badiou’s notion of ‘interplay’ fails to recognize that subtrac-tion is the belated, mediated work of destruction. Subtraction, as Zizek puts

it, already is the ‘negation of the negation’ (Zizek 2008: 410).This lack of attention to mediation is made explicit in Badiou’s short

thematization of negation, the essay ‘Three Negations’ (2008). Badioudivides the truth content of an Event (the revolutionary and emancipatoryEvent which breaks the prevailing order of the world) into three modes of reception and engagement: classical, intuitivistic and paraconsistent. Theclassical concept of negation accepts that a break has occurred and worksto secure the reality of this interruption and its promise in the future. Theintuitivistic concept of negation recognizes something has happened, but itis of little note, and as such can be assimilated into the prevailing order.

And the paraconsistent is unable to see or accept anything different hasoccurred; indeed the Event is not perceptible. Today, more than ever,

276 John Roberts

4. See in particularFoster, H. (1994),‘What’s Neo Aboutthe Neo-Avant-Garde,October , No. 70,Fall, and AndrewBenjamin, A. (1991), Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde, London

and New York:Routledge. For acritique of Foster’sand Benjamin’ssuspensive theories,see Roberts, J.(2007a), ‘The Avant-Garde AfterAvant-Gardism’, ChtoDelat?, No. 17.

5. For a recent defenceof autopoiesis(directed against the

legacy of ‘secondnegation’) seeLuhmann, N. (2000) Art as a Social System(trans. Eva M.Knodt),Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press.



Badiou declares the prevailing social and historical conditions are paracon-sistent: every event is deemed identical. Moreover, under these conditions ahistoric reversal takes place: non-events or false events take on the redemp-tive character of authentic Events for the ruling powers. Thus, if this modeldoes not exactly rule out any mediation between the classical and the para-consistent, it nevertheless places an enormous strain on their co-articulationacross varied sites and locations, leaving the promise of the classical space

of negation unmoored.This lack of mediation between subtraction and destruction is also

reflected in Badiou’s link between subtraction and aesthetic renunciation inthesis fourteen of his affirmativist manifesto (Badiou 2006: 148). In orderto avoid compromising art with the daily appearances of the capitalist sen-sorium and its pseudo-democractic vitalism and pluralism, the artist mustadopt a process of formal self-censorship. It is only through the courage of this move that a genuinely new symbolic (political/aesthetic) regime can becreated, and new forms of collective identification produced. The pursuit of this, Badiou admits, presents inordinate problems for artists (in the

absence of transformative social forces), but, this should not encouragethem to default to the postmodern line of least resistance; on the contrary,it should embolden artists to ‘withdraw’ (in righteousness) rather than‘participate’ (in misplaced commitment). The idea that social agency in artrepresents a form of pseudo-transgression in a ‘paraconsistent world’ iscertainly diminished in ‘Destruction, Negation, Subtraction’, as it is incertain sections of The Century. Yet Badiou’s failure to produce any ade-quate discussion and understanding of the social dynamics of new kinds of artistic form that might correspond to the ‘interplay’ between subtractionand destruction is still evident overall. This wider problem is addressedrecently by Ben Noys in an article on Badiou, art and culture. As he says:

part of the fault can be laid at Badiou’s own high modernism, which itself

seems to close off sequences of [avant-garde] fidelity of which he may be

unaware or which he may regard as not meeting his stringent criteria for true

creation.

(Noys 2009 forthcoming)

Indeed, Badiou’s high modernism stretches the sociability of art tobreaking point, allowing little room for the debased and ‘fallen’ materialsof commodity culture to enter the symbolic and affective space of art.

Consequently, it is as if, in an idealist, speculative inversion of first negationand second negation, he asks subtraction to actually do the work of destruction – an, impossibility obviously, as Badiou’s recourse to thenotion of ‘interplay’ between destruction and subtraction acknowledges. Inthis sense we might talk about the incomplete or deflected Hegelianization of the avant-garde and negation in Badiou, leading him to conflate destructionand subtraction when they should be separated and separate subtractionand destruction when they should be conjoined. If this is the result of Badiou’s unwillingness to defend a first-order social function for art, this inturn rests on the absence of any reflection on the political form of the com-

modity in his writing. This is one of the reasons why Badiou’s version of thesuspensive theory of negation in art operates in such a formal and restricted




fashion – he dismisses or discards the fetishistic identity and structure of the artwork under commodity relations. The rejection of sociability and theexpulsion of the everyday appearances of the capitalist sensorium from theartwork are identified with the rejection of art’s commodity form. Badiou isled to make this move because he believes, above all, that at a fundamentallevel the truths of art remain independent of the operations of capitalism,and therefore are not subject to its laws of constraint (the law of value).

Negation, autonomy and the commodityIt is not surprising then that the move from very high modernism in theHandbook of Inaesthetics to high modernism in ‘Destruction, Negation,Subtraction’ is unsuccessful. Whatever concept of ‘sociability’ is introducedin the latter bypasses the key terrain of the debate on sociability in art undercapitalism: the artwork’s ‘divided’ commodity status. Artworks under capi-talism are commodities of a particular kind. That is, they are neither purecommodities (identical solely with the operations of exchange-value and thevalue-form), nor purely autonomous (wholly free from the operations of

exchange-value).6

Rather they are commodities and autonomous objectssimultaneously. This is because autonomy in art (independence from exotericor instrumental use) is the very outcome of the penetration of commodity-relations into the realm of art (the historic separation of art’s production andconsumption from exoteric and instrumental uses). Consequently, defini-tions of the use-value of ‘autonomy’ in art (its critique of exchange-value) areinseparable from the process of commodification itself. This is why theemergence of autonomy in art (after the 1840s) is not a static thing.Autonomy’s emergence as a concept is defined by its parallel and relentlessdestruction, meaning that autonomy is not an attribute attached to certainkinds of artworks under capitalism – something that capital donates to artas a kind of ‘gift’ and which art embodies – but, rather, is something that iscontinually formed out of the social relations of art, as art is relentlesslydomesticated and dissolved by capital, and therefore needs to be re-posi-tioned and retheorized as a condition of art’s possibility.

This dialectical understanding of autonomy is, of course, central toAdorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Adorno 1984). What remains vital about Adorno’swriting on this question is that he places at the centre of the retheorizationof the autonomy of art the thing that autonomy embraces: the artist’sfetishistic investment in the artwork’s imagined independence from thecommodity-form. That is, it is precisely the autonomous artwork’s adoption

of the illusion of the independence from exchange-value (through the rejec-tion of the customary forms of production and reception of art) that actu-ally provides a real space for a reflection on the gap between art and theheteronomy of the commodity form. Thus, in turning itself into an imag-ined ‘thing apart’, the autonomous artwork highlights that not all thingscan be reduced to the logic of exchange-value. In these terms, in the lan-guage of Hegel, autonomy provides a space or glimmer of the Absolute(freedom from exchange value) within the realm of commodity relations.But, as soon as artists insist on the fetishistic coherence of autonomousworks of art as part of a given sequence or tradition (as in late modernism),

the invoked autonomy of the artwork simply becomes academic or orna-mental. Which is why key to Adorno’s dialectical theory of autonomy – and

278 John Roberts

6. For an extendeddiscussion of thisdistinction, seeRoberts, J. (2007b)The Intangibilitiesof Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade,London and New

York: Verso.



what separates it from conventional theories of modernism proper – is itsinsistence on the determinate negative relationship between the productionof autonomy and the forces of heteronomy. If autonomy is the internalizedand transitive ‘other’ of commodity relations, it cannot define its separationfrom commodity-relations through fixed forms of purification or subtrac-tion. For this leads to the formal elevation of autonomy above the actualheteronomous conditions constitutive for the making of works of art.

Autonomy can only practice its strategies of negation in messy negotiationwith these dominant conditions of production and exchange. As such het-eronomy is precisely that which provides the conditions of possibility forthe production of the illusion of autonomy. As Stewart Martin puts it in hisrecent work on Adorno’s aesthetic theory:

The aporia of fetishism at stake here forces autonomous art into a self-critical

dialectic with anti-art, with art’s heteronomous determination, in order to avoid

asserting its autonomy in a conservative or mythical form… [Consequently,]

‘[l]aments over the decline of autonomous art in the commodification of cul-

ture, including Adorno’s, need to be confronted with insights into how theautonomous artwork is inherently entwined with commodification. Similarly,

the insistence that we have entered some ‘post-art’ epoch needs to be con-

fronted with the question of whether this should not be recognized as the

scene of new forms of autonomy? If autonomous art is an immanent contra-

diction of the commodity form, it remains an inherent potential within a com-

modity culture.

(Martin 2007a: 23–24)7

Autonomy, subtraction and sociabilityBadiou would no doubt concur with the latter point; his amended theory of ‘subtraction’ in ‘Destruction, Negation, Subtraction’ is essentially, an unde-clared theory of autonomy. But, as I have suggested, he fails to render sub-traction coherent as a fully socialized concept internal to commodityrelations.8 The problem, then, is not that Badiou constructs a theory of autonomy from a mechanical opposition between subtraction and destruc-tion (as he might be accused of in the earlier writings), but that his theoryof the ‘interplay’ between subtraction and destruction lacks critical formand social agency. The question we need to ask, therefore, of any suspen-sive theory of the avant-garde is: how, and to what ends, and with whatmeans, is the notion of art as a ‘thing apart’ to be theorized?

What defines the concept of autonomy in Adorno – and this is some-thing Badiou implicitly draws on – is the notion that authentic use-value inart is that which is opposed to a debased communicability or sociability.Indeed, without this distance from what is perceived as a debased socia-bility under capitalist relations, autonomy in art becomes incoherent as acritique of exchange value. In defining autonomy there has to be somesense that art resists the pressures of transparency and instant culturalutlilizability. But what distinguishes Adorno from Badiou, on this score, isthat this proposed distance is the outcome of the artwork’s theoreticalpositioning within the relations of heteronomous culture. Autonomy,

therefore, is not simply co-extensive with anti-representation or with thedematerialization of form (strategies of formal exclusion or dissolution


7. Martin has produceda number of significantinterventions aroundthe political form of the commodity inrelation to contempo-rary aesthetics. Seealso ‘Culs-de-sac’(2005), Radical

Philosophy, No 131,May/June, and‘Critique of RelationalAesthetics’ (2007b),Third Text, Vol. 21Issue 4, July.

8. However, inherent toBadiou’s ‘interplay’between destructionand subtraction is thememory of modernistartistic practice inwhich sociability

and intellect areco-extensive with apartisan collectiveculture; a culture of thecommunist New Man.This is why Brechtstands in such anambiguous position inThe Century: he isboth the figure thatsteers art into an over-weening and illusorysociability under latecapitalism (the cul de

sac of transgressiveartistic praxis), yet atthe same time,defines what realsociability in art associal praxis can meanand accomplish. AsBadiou declares, whatis exemplary aboutBrecht is that herepeatedly asks of hisactors and hisaudience, how canone ‘represent the

development of thesubject while at thesame time elucidatingthe play of forces thatconstitute it, butwhich is also thespace of its volitionand its choices?’ (TheCentury, p. 42). If onewas being charitablehere, then, there issome evidence in theframing of this ques-tion that Badiou is notwholly persuaded by



familiar from the avant-garde), but the outcome, as Adorno insists, of art’sdeterminate conceptualization (Adorno 1984: 461).9 That is, autonomy is pre-cisely a second-order theorization of art’s formal and expressive possibili-ties; autonomous art does not follow various formal strategies or moves, itmediates such strategies or moves or counter-strategies and counter-moves in the light of their subordinate or dominant position within therelations of art’s production and reception. As such, the function of auton-

omy is not as the protector of purity or formal integrity in art, but themediator of the shifting symbolic relations of art’s internal and externaldivisions. Consequently, if autonomy cannot be figured through any pre-given forms or strategies, this is because these forms and strategies aresubject to changing use-values dependent upon changing social and cul-tural circumstances. But this in turn, does not mean that autonomy ismerely a practice of feints and dodges (or as Badiou puts it, ‘a network of cuts and disappearances’) (2007a: 132). Rather, as the name for the con-ceptualization of art’s own conditions of possibility, autonomy’s emergentidentity is only sustainable through a first-order critique of capitalist rela-

tions. Without this first-order critique, autonomy’s attempt to think art asa ‘thing apart’ is simply a process of autopoiesis. Autonomy, therefore, isthe unfolding and transitive site of the conflict or tension between theemancipation from heteronomy and the forces of heteronomy. In thisautonomy is a space of differentiation and distinction, where the dominantconditions of heteronomy are tested, discarded and worked through. ‘[N]ewforms of commodification need to be examined as the heteronomousscene of new forms of autonomous art; and new forms of art need to beexamined as the contradictions of new forms of commodification’ (Martin2007a: 24). Consequently, in identifying itself as that which works throughheteronomy, autonomy is not definable simply as that which stands asidefrom or above a debased communicability or sociability, but a process bywhich the channels of authentic communication and sociability are keptviable and open. In other words, autonomy does not oppose pure use-value (authentic non-communicability) to a debased exchange-value (inau-thentic communicability), but is, rather, the space from within which thestruggle over authentic use-values takes place.

Accordingly, it is not good enough simply to talk about the ‘interplay’between destruction (heteronomy) and subtraction (autonomy), for auton-omy is not brought to realization through the corrective forces of sociability(destruction), it is itself an emergent – if constrained and delimited –

agency of sociability, as in the image of Hegel’s embeddedness of secondnegation in first negation. In Hegel’s language, then, the pursuit of auton-omy must pass through heteronomy in order for autonomy and sociabilityto converge as the expression of the unity of the ‘theoretical and practicalidea’. This is because the struggle for autonomy is essentially a struggleover how art’s use-values might contribute to the realization of new formsof sociability and community (of socialized singularity). This is why socia-bility is not opposed to autonomy. On the contrary it is the space throughwhich the struggle for autonomy is defined, negotiated and secured. Undercommodity relations, there is no ‘art’, as such, to defend against the forces

of heteronomy, only the promise of autonomy in art immanent to commodityrelations.

280 John Roberts

his own separation of art’s truth-claims fromthe truth-claims of politics. In fact, thisquotation mightbe said to reveal inskeletal form apoliticization of thecommodity form that

his theory of negationlacks. But, this theorynever arrives, because,in a strange fashion,Badiou sees theatreas actually genericallycloser to politics thanthe other arts. ‘In thetwentieth century, the-atre is more than justputting on plays’(p. 42). Whateversociability art mightideally possess,

therefore, is identifiedsolely with whattheatre shares withpolitics: the capacityfor active reflectionon events and socialintervention.

9. ‘a widely acceptednotion – a bowd-lerized theorem of aesthetics –… [is]that art per se ought tobe visual. It ought not.

Art belongs squarelyin the conceptualrealm’.



References

Adorno, T. W. (1984), Aesthetic Theory (trans. C. Lenhardt), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Badiou, A. (2005), Handbook of Inaesthetics (trans. Alberto Toscano), Stanford:Stanford University Press.

Badiou, A. (2006), ‘Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’, Polemics(translated and introduced by Steve Corcoran), London and New York:

Verso.Badiou, A. (2007a), The Century (translated with a commentary and notes by Alberto

Toscano), Cambridge: Polity Press.

Badiou, A. (2007b), ‘Destruction, Negation, Subtraction – on Pier Paolo Pasolini’,Graduate Seminar, Art Center College of Design, Pasedena, February 2007, avail-able at http://www.lacan.com/badpas.htm

Badiou, A. (2008), ‘Three Negations’, Cardozo Law Review, 29: 5, available athttp://www.cardozolawreview.com/PastIssues/BADIOU.29.5.pdf

Benjamin, A. (1991), Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde, London and New York:Routledge.

Dunayeskaya, R. (2002), The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic inHegel and Marx , edited and introduced by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson,Boston and Oxford: Lexington Books.

Foster, H. (1994), ‘What’s Neo About the Neo-Avant-Garde, October , 70, Fall.

Fried, M. (2008), Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, New Haven: YaleUniversity Press.

Hallward, P. (2003), A Subject to Truth, foreword by Slavoj Zizek, Minneapolis andLondon: University of Minnesota Press.

Hallward, P. (2004), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of French Philosophy ,London: Continuum.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1975), Hegel’s Logic , translated by William Wallace with a forewordby J.N. Findlay, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller and fore-word by J.N. Findlay, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Luhmann, N. (2000), Art as a Social System (trans. by Eva M. Knodt), Stanford:Stanford University Press.

Martin, S. (2005), ‘Culs-de-sac’, Radical Philosophy, 131, May/June.

Martin, S. (2007a), ‘The Absolute Artwork Meets the Absolute Commodity’, Radical Philosophy, 146, Nov/Dec.

Martin, S. (2007b), ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’, Third Text, 21:4

Nancy J.-L. (2002), Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative (transl. Jason Smith andSteven Miller), Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Noys, B. (2009), ‘Monumental Construction: Badiou and the Politics of Aesthetics’,in J.

Rancière, J. (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (trans.Gabriel Rockhill), London and New York: Continuum Books.

Roberts, J. (2007a), ‘The Avant-Garde After Avant-Gardism’, Chto Delat, P. 17.

Roberts, J. (2007b), The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After theReadymade, London and New York: Verso.

Roberts, J. (2009), forthcoming, ‘Art and Its Negations’, in J. Roberts ed., ‘Art,Praxis, and the ‘Community to Come’’ Third Text.




Roberts, J. (2009) (ed.), forthcoming ‘Art, Praxis and the ‘Community to Come’’,Third Text.

Zizek, S. (2008), In Defence of Lost Causes, London and New York: Verso.

Suggested citationRoberts, J. (2008), ‘On the limits of negation in Badiou’s theory of art’, Journal of

Visual Arts Practice 7: 3, pp. 271–282, doi: 10.1386/jvap.7.3.271/1

Contributor detailsJohn Roberts is Professor of Art & Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. Heis the author of a number of books, including, Philosophizing the Everyday:Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory (Pluto, 2006), and The Intangibilitiesof Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (Verso, 2007). He also con-tributes to Oxford Art Journal , Third Text, Radical Philosophy and Historical Materialism.He lives in London.

Contact: E-mail: [email protected]

282 John Roberts

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John Roberts - The Limits of Negation in Badious Theory of Art