This is a guest post by Inger Cini.
The philosophers Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have provided contrasting perspectives on cinema. In this essay, I would like to comment on the similarities and differences in their thought under three main headings: how to read cinema, ideology in cinema, and the truth in cinema. Whilst Žižek calls Badiou an idealist opposed to his own materialist standpoint (Žižek 2006, 56), Badiou is an important figure for Žižek, as he himself elaborates on in his book The Ticklish Subject (1999). I will first look briefly at the distinction between film philosophy, philosophy through film, and film theory which should serve as a background to understanding the different departing points of the two. To conclude, I will favour Badiou’s “axiomatic judgement” of films, giving my reasons.
Cinema, Philosophy, and Theory
In her book Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009), Felicity Colman considers film theory and film philosophy as two different kinds of practices that determine values of an ethical and aesthetic nature generated through the “cinematic condition” (Colman 2009, 2). She finds that the two converge, inter alia, in that their common task is to “engage a conceptual approach that is ethically situated, empirically appropriate and theoretically adequate to address the diverse and complex concepts presented by screen-worlds” (Colman 2009, 7). Whilst both revolve around similar material (Colman 2009, 5) they differ in the issues they tackle, with film theory focusing more on cultural and sociohistorical issues emanating from critical theory and film philosophy addressing issues such as the analogy between film and mind and rhetoric (Colman 2009, 4).
Nonetheless, there is no homogenous interpretation; there are long-standing debates and discussions as to what film philosophy really entails, ranging from the position that film philosophy is the application of philosophical interpretations to films to those arguing that film is itself doing philosophy (Colman 2009, 2). For the purposes of this essay, I shall stick to the application of philosophical interpretations of film when referring to film philosophy. Colman also refers to the notion of ‘event’ in film as an ontological change brought about by screen forms and cinematic conditions (Colman 2009, 9), something which both Badiou and Žižek elaborate on. Badiou’s engagement with cinema is rooted in the philosophy through film tradition, whilst Žižek’s derives primarily from the film theory tradition. Though this can be linked to their own professional backgrounds, the lines delineating their work on cinema are far from straight, and there can be no single categorisation to fit the two.
Cinema as the ‘Seventh Art’ and as Philosophical Experimentation
Badiou is inspired by cinema and believes that philosophy can learn from it (Want 2019, 28). Amongst his works on cinema, he has engaged with the concept of cinema as ‘seventh art’ in around thirty texts (Badiou 2010, Foreward) and also dedicates an essay to exploring the relationship between cinema and philosophy (Badiou 2010, 201). Encapsulating his view of cinema in a couple of sentences it can be said that “For Badiou, ‘cinema supplies a formal power, which is put at the service of a universal value: human existence, freedom’ by affirming ‘human presence’ where even a fleeting filmic moment renders the human visible. Cinema’s hybrid nature, its ‘impurity’ by drawing on all of the other arts, means it ‘uses and magnifies them, affording them a distinctive emotional power’ and making it a ‘seventh art’” (Fraser 2018, 98).
Badiou in fact considers the concept at length in his essay ‘Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation’ (Badiou 2010, 208). He questions how it is possible for “philosophy to think cinema” (Badiou 2010, 208) and further extends his inquiry to other related issues including the importance of cinema as a medium of mass art and the relevance of cinema to new forms of thought (Badiou 2010, 208-209). Badiou then proceeds to identify five perspectives within which cinema can be analysed, namely cinema as an ontological art, time in cinema, the relationship between cinema and art, the relationship between cinema and what is not art, and in terms of ethics and morality (Badiou 2010, 209).
I will focus on Badiou’s elaboration on the relationship of cinema, the seventh art, to the other arts and what he calls the ‘non-art’. This, to me, is one of the distinctive points in Badiou’s thinking about cinema, although notably, he builds on a concept that was formulated by Ricciotto Canudo in 1923 (Ling 2010, 36). For Badiou, cinema relates to painting in that it retains the idea of aesthetics; it also relates to music in that it gives existence to sound coupled with vision, and therefore it gives sound an existential context (Badiou 2010, 209-210).
Cinema relates to the novel through its narrative and to the theatre by elevating the actor to a star. Not only does it relate to all of them but it is also the most accessible. In his words, “it opens up all the arts, strips them of their aristocratic value and delivers them over to the image of life” (Badiou 2010, 210).” Badiou does not mention the other two arts in this case however he refers elsewhere to poetry and dance in highlighting how one form cannot turn into another yet cinema effectively creates these movements (Badiou 2010, 92). (Badiou draws on the Platonic notion of the six arts being music, painting, poetry, dancing, sculpture and theatre (Ling 2006, 33), therefore whilst counting up to seven in this paragraph, novel and theatre would be one same category whilst sculpture is not mentioned.)
The relationship of cinema to that which is not art, on the other hand, is what makes it universally understandable (Badiou 2010, 210). He refers to certain stereotypes, cliches, or banal images as the non-art in cinema, which feature in all kinds of film. These for Badiou exemplify the most common feelings as an entry point to higher things (Badiou 2010, 10) explored and exposed in cinema. He applies this to the relationship between cinema and democracy and aristocracy and finds that cinema is politically significant for this reason, for it converges ordinary opinions with works of thought. It does not add to the other arts but uses them as a springboard to create something that “subtracts them from themselves” (Badiou 2010, 89). Cinema is what democratises the other arts and that is what makes it a mass art (Badiou 2010, 238).
In his consideration of the relationship between cinema and philosophy, Badiou tackles two questions, one on how philosophy regards cinema and the other on the power of cinema to transform philosophy (Badiou 2010, 210). His position is that cinema is a “philosophical situation” or rather the creation of “new ideas about what an idea is” (Badiou 2010, 210). Badiou uses the Platonic concept of Idea as a symbolic ideal, a ‘visitation’ which can only reach the sensible through the “poetics of cinema” (Badiou 2010, 89-91). He in fact sees cinema as an idea comparable to the shadow in Plato’s allegory of the cave.
He exemplifies this, as well as in other ways, by referring to a specific film, The Crucified Lovers (Mizoguchi, 1954) and exploring how the conclusion of the film brings out a philosophical situation in contrasting the event of love and ordinary life rules, which makes us think about change in life (Badiou 2010, 204). Badiou here refers to the event, the happening which brings about an unexpected outcome or brings to light new possibilities (Badiou 2010, 9). He proposes the exceptionality and rupture with the ordinary caused by the event as possibilities of new synthesis (Badiou 2010, 204), which I will return to in the third section of this essay. Notably, Badiou concludes that cinema is an ontological art for the paradox it represents in the relations between “being” and “appearing” (Badiou 2010, 207).
Transversing the Fantasy with Žižek
In the very beginning of his book The Fright of Real Tears: Krystof Kieślowski between Theory and Post Theory, Žižek outlines that cinema in the early 21st century is a struggle between theory and post-theory. This is the first indication that Žižek’s relationship to film is, in contrast to Badiou’s, rooted in film theory. This notwithstanding, similarities with Badiou on issues discussed start emerging from the very first chapter where he discusses the “paradoxical relationship between universality and its constitutive exception” (Žižek 2001, 18) – the constitutive exception being comparable to the notion of event. What Žižek is analysing here, in reality, is different to Badiou’s relation to the event, as Žižek is questioning whether the meaning of a film can be received universally by worldwide audiences or has a subjective perspective.
Žižek extends his project to consider extensively poststructuralist as well as postmodernist theories by authors such as Foucault, Butler, Derrida, and Deleuze (Nicol 2001, 143) in questioning the subjectivity arising from the decline of the paternal authority function which is “now envisaged as a liberating process of ‘performativity,’ of continually reshaping and choosing alternative subject positions” (Nicol 2001, 143). From the very introductory chapter of his book, he notes there are parallels between the effects of the antagonism between theory and post-theory and certain philosophies (Žižek 2001, 2-3).
Closer to Badiou’s notion of the event that causes rupture, Žižek refers to the proper philosophical scandal which “disturbs the very substance of the communal being” (Žižek 2001, 3). He further applies the Lacanian notion of the ‘big Other’ to refer to the community values and beliefs that we are unknowingly following (Žižek 2001, 3) when discussing the ‘scandal’. With the notion of the big Other comes the notion of the Gaze of the big other as ‘innocent observer’ (Žižek 2001, 147) which will be further discussed in the third part of this essay.
In his article ‘As If: Transversing the Fantasy in Žižek’, Bran Nicol refers to Žižek’s work as reversing the traditional relation where theory is used to read contemporary culture so as to use examples from art and culture to question philosophical, psychoanalytical, and cultural theory (Nicol 2001, 142). He later states that Žižek’s ultimate goal is, however, “to present an accurate version of the complex constitution of the (post) modern subject” (Nicol 2001, 142). Similarly, Colin MacCabe comments in the preface to Žižek’s The Fright of Real Tears that “It makes clear that there can be no fundamental analysis of film which is not theoretically informed – but that theory must always revive itself in a real love of the cinema” (Žižek 2001, 5).
Perhaps one other thing thatdistinguishes Žižek from Badiou is the former’s complete immersion in the film itself, not only in his filmic creations but also in his written work. His filmic style involves displacing the characters in the original scenes with his own image, as if bringing to light his subconscious self and also creating the possibility of an alternative subject position. Although lacking the visual part his writing echoes this methodology. Colin MacCabe finds that rather than theorising on films, Žižek understands them as “living effective forms that themselves lucidly sketch out the structures of desire and lack that psychoanalysis theorises in less vivid terms” (Žižek 2001, viii). On the contrary, others somewhat criticise Žižek’s enthusiasm and active participation in film as a persuasive tactic for arguments that lack propositional factuality and formal validity (Slugan 2013, 732).
Certainly, whilst the above is a very brief introduction to Žižek’s style, his work is not easy to classify and “relies on intersubjective assertions about the text in question and arguments based on these assertions in order to secure their rhetorical effect, that is, to persuade their readers into accepting them as accurate descriptions of the text” (Slugan 2013, 749). What is recurring in the structure of his interpretative practice, drawing from Lacan, is the use of the notion of “traversing the fantasy” signifying the acknowledgement of subjective responsibility brought about by psychoanalysis (Colman 2009, 310) as well as the triad of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real (Slugan 2013, 744) and the Gaze of the big Other.
Cinema as Ideology?
In one of the essays in his earlier mentioned book, Badiou discusses the grounds on which film is judged or, in his terms, can be “spoken about” (Badiou 2010, 94). He refers to what he calls “indistinct judgement”, which he gives the same weight to talk about the weather. On the other end is the “diacritical judgement”, which Badiou defines as the defence against the indistinct judgement and that which draws out the spectator from the mass of the public. In the latter, the spectator identifies the singular style of the author, whilst in the former reference is made to the actors or some cinematic effect. Diacritical and indistinct judgement are both prone to being forgotten, and whilst diacritical judgment designates a certain quality over indistinct judgment, Badiou finds it still does not bring out the artistic relevance of a film (Badiou 2010, 95). It is rather its artistic ideology that needs to be assessed, as it is ideology that art should aim to challenge (Badiou 2010, 95).
It follows that the third way of judgement should assess film on its commitment to draw out all the possible consequences of film as art (Badiou 2010, 95). Badiou terms this the “axiomatic attitude”, which relates to the effects of thought of a particular film. Thus for Badiou, it is rather the idea that is to be discussed about film. Technical considerations are only to be considered if they contribute to the “touch” of said idea or to capture its “native impurity” – the impurity identified as emanating from the very liminal nature of cinema as a seventh art (Badiou 2010, 96). Badiou gives an example of this by referring to the omen of immanence in certain scenes in the film Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922), through the use of overexposure and thunderous cuts (Badiou 2010, 96). Arguing that axiomatic judgement unfolds an idea in line with the take and editing, he stresses that the importance of this judgement is that it demonstrates how a particular film exposes and unfolds an idea in a particular way, which leads us to discover something that we would not have discovered through the other arts alone (Badiou 2010, 98).
For Badiou then, films, whilst operating within an ideological context, are not necessarily ideological in themselves. This is represented by most of Godard’s films, which, according to Badiou, were not politicised but rather aimed at highlighting their contemporaneity (Badiou 2010, 114). Rather, film can perform an ethical function in offering humanity a “moral mythology” (Badiou 2010, 211). Films that ideologically identify with a specific theme often might still have a role in the sequence of a political context. Badiou specifically refers to New Wave cinema when exemplifying this. He explains how the apparently romantic genre with no political relevance still had to do with laying the ground for the 1968 political unrest by exposing the figure of an unstable character (Badiou 2010, 116).
Film also has the power to break with the objective realities within an ideology and expose the subjective truth experienced instead. This is exemplified by the film Érica Minor by Van Effenterre (Badiou 2010, 68). Badiou argues that film lingers in a “fruitful middleground between the urgency of ideological conviction and the slowness of time” seemingly promoting the idea that rebellion is right amongst its spectators (Badiou 2010, 249). Perhaps it can be said that, for Badiou, film has the capacity to highlight ideology in breaking away from ideology.
Ideology in cinema can be seen as the most significant point that distinguishes between Žižek’s thinking and Badiou’s position on cinema. For Žižek, ideology is one of the central objects of inquiry (Flisfeder 2011, 76). Here, rather than attempting as Badiou does, to listen to what the film is telling the spectator, Žižek tries hard to understand what the text is trying to say (Flisfeder 2011, 76) beyond what is evident. His departing point is that “the supreme lure of ideology is to procure the illusion of ‘openness’ by rendering invisible the underlying structural necessity (the catastrophic ending of the traditional ‘realist’ novel … as the outcome of a series of [un]fortunate contingencies)” (Žižek 2010, 299-300).”
Žižek incorporates this thinking in his film The Perverts Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2013) when speaking of the film Titanic (Cameron, 1997). He says that “the catastrophe saved the love story forever (1:10:06). We can see how the ideology works on two levels – all the fascination of the accident, then the love story … all this is just a trap something to lower our attention threshold to open us up to be able to accept the true conservative message above. She says I will never let go while at the same time she pushes him off – a vanishing mediator.” Ideology is then central to Žižek’s reading of films but accidental to Badiou’s. For Žižek, in fact, the rule is that in narrative closures ideology must be inscribed in the text (Žižek 2010, 299).
Žižek further relates ideology to the subjective and seeks to illustrate how ideology operates through fantasy, resting somewhere between the level of fanstasy and the Lacanian Symbolic (Flisfeder 2011, 79). This can be seen in Žižek’s own comment in his film The Perverts Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2013), where he says that “fantasies are the central stuff our ideologies are made of … fantasy covers up a certain gap in consistency.” He later compares ideology to a filter “a frame so that if you look at same ordinary reality through that frame everything changes … not the frame changes but it opens up the abyss of suspicion.”
Žižek regularly speaks of the ideology behind opposites such as the ‘inside and outside’ and the ideological opposition of public and private. Speaking about the film Murder! (Hitchcock, 1930) he relates the ideological tension within opposites to the subject, calling the opposite extremes ‘subjectivisation’ within the power of language and ‘subjectivisation’ beyond the power of language (Žižek 2010). He brings out how Hitchcock presented this situation in the mentioned film where the murderer also dresses as a woman in a circus performance and later commits suicide when he realises he has been discovered by a certain Sir John, a juror in the original suspect’s (a female) trial. Sir John was trying to lure the murderer to confess through a staged theatrical audition. Here Žižek argues how the notion of masculine performativity which is usually juxtaposed with female theatricality is inverted through an act which is in itself a staged theatrical act by a man who would himself have been deemed an impostor were it not for the dignity of his act (Žižek 2010, 204-205).
The Truth of Cinema
Within his larger philosophical work, Badiou designates art as one of the four pillars – the other three being love, politics, and science – as the fields which actuate truth and refers to truth as a passage which by its infinite nature is always becoming (Ling 2010, 20). In the foreword of Badiou’s Cinema (2010), Antoine de Baecque introduces Badiou’s concept of film as a “sensible configuration of the truth of the world” whilst stressing the social and political importance of the art for the philosopher. Badiou himself later mentions that “Of all the arts, this is certainly the one that has the ability to think, to produce the most absolutely undeniable truth” (Badiou 2010, 18).
In his essay ‘Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation’ (Badiou 2010, 210), which I have already mentioned in the first section of this essay, Badiou establishes cinema as a philosophical situation. He then moves on to delineate the tasks of philosophy in such situations (Badiou 2010, 204). Here he argues that one of the tasks is “to clarify the distance between thought and power, the distance between the state and truths” as well as “to clarify the value of the exception, the value of the event, the value of rupture” (Badiou 2010, 204). This is the power of truth (Badiou 2010, 206).
Philosophy, through the intervention of film, becomes something that is useful in real life as it shows the link between fundamental choices of thought, distance between truths, and exceptionality (Badiou 2010, 205). It is in this spirit that he heralds Swiss cinema as a space that allows truths that are otherwise unnoticed to be portrayed (Badiou 2010, 68) and calls it the “Swiss event” (Badiou 2010, 71). It is for this reason that Badiou concludes another essay, ‘On Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’, with the hope, modelled on Platonic myth defeating his allegory, that following philosophy of cinema there will come philosophy as cinema that could be a “philosophy of the masses (Badiou 2010, 241)”.
Moving towards the psychological realm, Badiou finds that one of cinema’s most important contributions is in its “description of temporalized psychological states” and its ability “to uncover the temporal roots of that state, the way in which the shimmering of the present captures its own past like a reflection” (Badiou 2010, 30). He exemplifies this by referring to films which rely on flashbacks and, quoting more specifically a scene in Miss Julie (Sjöberg, 1951), he notes how past and present are integrated momentarily in an image (Badiou 2010, 31). Like Žižek, Badiou also returns again and again to the ‘gaze’; he refers to the dialectic of the gaze as embodied by the camera, the truth of the gaze in ascribing particular effects, the ambiguity of a gaze in dissipating objectivity (Badiou 2010, 28-32). He also refers to the “insurmountable distance between the revisionist political eye and the object of its gaze: the wholesome unity of the people” (Badiou 2010, 38).
The fundamental difference between Badiou’s and Žižek use of ‘the gaze’ is in the application of the term to their reading. They both use the term to bring out objective–subjective effects as they deem necessary; however, Žižek largely anchors his whole work on the notion of the gaze. Based on Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is central to the ‘parallax’ method that ultimately never proposes a single truth.
In the foreword to his book The Parallax View (2006), Žižek refers to reading a text in a “short-circuit” fashion which brings out its “unthought” effect. He is referring to reading a major text through a different perspective such as the view of a minor author. He uses the term minor by referring to Deleuze’s notion of the same that is not intended to signify a hierarchy of quality but rather to refer to someone who is marginalised or less known and suggests Lacanian psychoanalysis as a suitable instrument for this approach (Žižek 2006, ix). Later on, he defines parallax as follows:
The standard definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective”, due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stances, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently “mediated”, so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself. Or – to put it in Lacanese – the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its “blind spot”, that which is “in the object more than the object itself ”, the point from which the object returns the gaze (Žižek 2006, 17).
Žižek finds that in its purest form, the parallax function results in an irreducible gap between two positions revealing the “truth” of the two without enabling a real solution to be found (Žižek 2006, 20). There is no “deeper truth” in situations which are diametrically and inherently opposed, such as the position of the worker-producer and the consumer (Žižek 2006, 53). This ties into Žižek’s view of truth being inconsistent with its very nature, “in itself non-all” (Žižek 2006, 24). Differently to Badiou, who believes that there is an unnameable Real which is external to the process of truth, Žižek draws on Lacan to affirm that, instead, this unnameable real is absolutely inherent (Žižek 2006, 65).
Conclusion
Whilst fascinated by Žižek’s reading of cinema for his capacity to bring out the subliminal and connect what is on screen with their hidden underlying messages, I am more drawn to Badiou’s reading of film as one which is wider in scope, more solid in structure, and closer to the viewer in subject and in time. I share his view that films “afford an idea of the world that is always contemporary” (Badiou 2010, 2) and that cinema bears witness to the human experience “in its immediacy” (Badiou 2010, 6).
In bringing out the ‘axiomatic attitude’ of reading films, Badiou focuses on the effects of thought provoked by film (Badiou 2010, 95). Notably, he proposes “cinema as an imaginary voyage, as an instrument for a thinking of the Other” (Badiou 2010, 8), as an enabler of “laughter as the vision of another possible world” (Badiou 2010, 13), a proposition in thought (Badiou 2010, 18), a representation of exteriority larger than man himself (Badiou 2010, 17) but mainly as something which his profoundly personal. He states, “I write about a film because it has produced some effect on me. … But philosophically, I ask myself why I was affected by a film and I accept the situation of being affected by a film that’s not part of the pantheon of auters.” This is, in sum, what, for me, makes Badiou’s reading of film so captivating.
References
Badiou, Alain. 2010. Cinema. Malden, USA: Polity.
Badiou, Alain and Turby, Fabien. 2010. Philosophy and the Event. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Cohen, Tom. 1995. ‘Beyond “The Gaze”: Žižek, Hitchcock, and the American Sublime’. American Literary History 350-378.
Colman, Felicity. 2009. Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers. Taylor & Francis Group.
Flisfeder, Matthew. 2011. ‘Between Theory and Post-Theory: Or, Slavoj Žižek in Film Studies and Out’. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 75-95.
Fraser, Ian. 2018. Political Theory and Film: From Adorno to Žižek. London: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model.
Ling, Alex. 2010. Badiou and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Nicol, Bran. 2001. ‘As If: Transversing the Fantasy in Žižek’. Edinburgh University Press 140- 155.
Slugan, Mario. 2013. ‘The Rhetorics of Interpretation and Žižek’s Approach to Film’. Slavic Review 728-749.
Want, Christopher. 2019. Philosophers on Filmfrom Bergson to Badiou. New York: Columbia University Press, New York.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). New York: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. The Fright of Real Tears: Krystof Kreslowski between Theory and Post-Theory. London: BFI Publishing.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. ‘The Ongoing “Soft Revolution”‘. Critical Inquiry 292-323.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject. Verso.
Žižek, Zlavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. USA: MIT Press.
Inger Cini is a lawyer with over 10 years of experience in corporate and commercial law. She also nurtures an interest in the broader humanities fields of philosophy and psychology. Currently reading an MA in philosophy through film, Inger is keen on existential and phenomenological perspectives and their practical implications. In her free time, she practises long-distance swimming and running, having completed a number of long-distance running and swimming challenges. Her motto in life is in medio stat virtus (“virtue stands in the middle”), as taught by Aristotle.
