The Circus

Here’s a quick post about Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus, a brilliant example of the expressive power of silent cinema.

After the credit sequence, overlaid with the song Sing, Little Girl (composed and sung by Chaplin), a flat circular image of a dark star on a white background is suddenly burst open by a horse-rider jumping through a ring, and we are plunged straight into the world of the circus.

The tramp stumbles into this world by accident rather than design, an aribtrary sequence of misunderstandings and wrong turns driving him into the cirus tent with the relentless inevitability of fate. These opening scenes are some of the best in any Chaplin film, and demand more appreciation than I will give them here.

Once in the circus, the situation is a familiar one. The tramp falls in love with a girl (Merna) living in abject circumstances, only to be doubly frustrated as she falls for someone else and the tramp realises that it is this other suitor who can offer her a different life. This situation and its narrative unfold in a cinematic space created in and around the circus tent, passing through unnoticed adulation, unexpected success, farcical paralysis, and failure across different registers.

But it is the final sequence that I am interested in here. The tramp realises that Rex, the tight-rope walker, can remove Merna from her abusive father, and nobly organises their wedding. At first they form an unorthodox family, Merna clasping the tramp’s arm as she leaves the wedding ceremony with her new husband, the faint promise of an inclusive and open future that might disregard the comfortable insularity (and drearily predictable narrative closure) promised by the figure of the couple.

Once they return to the circus, however, the truth of the situation emerges. The newly-weds are assigned sleeping quarters in the first wagon of the circus train, while the tramp is told to find room at its tail. Merna and Rex beckon him into their new home, but he realises that there is no place for him, and assures them that he wil gladly make his way to the last wagons. At this point the horses are stirred into motion and the train begins to move. For a moment we worry that the tramp won’t board in time, but as the last wagon passes unnoticed we realise he never intended to. And here we come to the most beautiful images of the whole film. The tramp sits dejectedly on some object, in the middle of another circle (recall the opening image – though circles reoccur throughout), this time the outline of the now departed circus tent. This is all that remains of the world that sprung up around the events of the film, marking the outline of the cinematic space that Chaplin created and the world in which the tramp immersed himself. But time has passed and only these traces remain. The tramp reaches down to fumble with a crumpled fragment of the white paper circle with its dark star, overcome by nostalgia and sadness.

But only momentarliy. He realises that there’s nothing to be done, or not much anyway, crumples up the fragment, rises to his feet and adopts his usual jolting walk towards the horizon, stepping out of this final circle and the world it remembers towards something new.

I don’t want to labour points already made in my brief summary, but the economy of expression, what Chaplin gets across with a few simple images, as well as the resonances of this final sequence, are remarkable. For me it comes down to those closing moments, the circle, the tramp solitary and still in the middle of it, buried in the past, but then, on a moment’s resolution, up on his feet and ready to go on.

Building Blocks for the Critique of Pure Reason: “Mathematical Judgements are all synthetic”.

This is one of the more difficult sections of the Introduction, and I can’t pretend to fully understand what’s at stake in Kant’s claim.

The fact that mathematical judgements are a priori should be obvious from previous posts. As Kant says:

It must first be remarked that properly mathematical propositions are always a priori judgements and are never empirical, because they carry necessity with them, which cannot be derived from experience.

The question, though, is whether such judgements are analytic or synthetic. It is worth quoting Kant’s argument in full:

To be sure, one might initially think that the proposition “7 + 5 + 12″ is a merely analytic proposition that follows from the concept of a sum of seven and five in accordance with the principle of cotradiction. Yet if one considers it more closely, one finds that the concept of the sum of 7 and 5 contains nothing more than the unification of both numbers in a single one, though it is not at all thought what this single number is which comprehends the two of them. The concept of twelve is by no means already thought merely by my thinking of that unification of seven and five, and no matter how long I analyze my concept of such a possible sum I will still not find twelve in it. One must go beyond these concepts, seeking assistance in the intuition that corresponds to one of the two, one’s five fingers, say, or (as in Segner’s arithmetic) five points, and one after another add the units of the five given in the intuition to the concept of seven. For I take first the number 7, and, as I take the fingers of my hand as an intuition with the concept of 5, to that image of mine I now add the units that I have previously taken together in order to constitute the number 5 one after another to the number 7, and thus see the number 12 arise. That 7 should be added to 5 I have, to be sure, thought in the concept of a sum = 7 + 5, but not that this sum is equal to the number 12. The arithmetical proposition is therefore always synthetic; one becomes all the more distinctly aware of that if one takes somewhat larger numbers, for it is then clear that, twist and turn our concepts as we will, without getting help from intuition we could never find the sum by means of the mere analysis of our concepts.

Rather than discuss the legitimacy of Kant’s claims, I want to think about precisely what he is claiming here.

Let’s start with the following claim:

One must go beyond these concepts, seeking assistance in the intuition that corresponds to one of the two, one’s five fingers, say, or (as in Segner’s arithmetic) five points, and one after another add the units of the five given in the intuition to the concept of seven.

Kant cannot mean that we literally have to look at our fingers to do arithmetic, otherwise judgement would not be a priori; rather, he is drawing our attention to the fact that that a process is involved in mathematical judgement.   Furthermore, this process is a synthesis of intuitions/combination of concepts, rather than a process of analysis and refinement of concepts.

Obviously with lower numbers this process is negligible – it doesn’t require much thought to work out that 7 + 5 = 12; however when we move to larger numbers, the process becomes more apparent: I cannot work out 1578 + 22567 without some thought. But is this thought a process of synthesis rather than analysis, as Kant claims? The statement ’1578 + 22567′ seems to contain all the information we need to reach a correct conclusion, suggesting that the judgement is analytic.  But the question is how we reach this correct conclusion.  Implicitly, Kant is claiming that this is not through an analysis of the concepts involved, but through a synthesis and amplification of them. To demonstrate this, try analysing whatever concepts you have of ’1578′, ‘+’, and ’22567′, individually. You will not reach the figure 24145 through this process alone, because it is not contained in any of the concepts by itself. In contrast, try the same procedure on whatever concepts you have of ‘bachelors’, ‘are’, and ‘unmarried’. Analysis of the first concept – ‘bachelors’ – should be sufficient to reach the correct conclusion that bachelors are indeed unmarried, because it is an integral part of the concept.

However this is not just synthesis in the sense of bringing together the statement into a sensible whole with normative force (i.e. seeing that ’1578′,  ‘+’,  and ’22567′ are combined in such a way that we ought to see that the answer is 24145).  As Kant says, it is not a question of what we should think, but what we actually think.  This is not a point about our inaptitude for mathematics; rather, the normativity of proposition does not mean that we follow it through to its conclusion by analysis alone.  Kant is suggesting that the reason we are capable of reaching a correct conclusion is because we have a priori structures available to us in pure intuition which provide us with the basis – the justification – for our reaching the conclusion that ’1578 + 22567 = 24145′.

Although each individual numerical concept doesn’t contain within it the concept of every other number,  a proper mathematical understanding does require us to have a conceptual (?) background sufficient for the manipulation of these numbers by various mathematical functions. We don’t pick up mathematical concepts one at a time, understanding the concept ’1′, then the concept ’2′, then ’3′, etc.  If this was how our understanding worked, basic arithmetic would be incredibly difficult.  Instead, our understanding of, say, the natural numbers and the mathematical functions that we apply to them, is based on something like a structured complex of concepts which must be available to us in toto if we have even a rudimentary understanding of arithmetic.  Mathematical judgement – according to Kant – requires a process of synthesis within this conceptual complex, even though the whole structure is available to us a priori.

The key question is whether this conceptual background is equivalent to, or at least analagous with, the transcendental structures which Kant will later claim shape any possible intuition for creatures like us, and which are available to us through reflection on the pure form of our intuition, i.e. a priori, without contemplating the content of any particular intuition – basing this judgement on a particular fact in the world.  Taking mathematical judgement as a paradigmatic example of synthetic a priori judgement, we can see that other cases of synthetic judgements should work in the same way.  They require a structured complex of concepts available to us a priori, such that our judgements take place through a process of synthesis within this a priori structure.  I will return to this in subsequent posts.

Kant, Badiou, and Necessity

As an addendum to this post, I wonder whether a philosopher like Badiou is drawing a similar distinction to Kant, only shifting into a different register.

Kant draws a general distinction between our knowledge of truths which are, respectively, necessary and universal or contingent and specific. His examples make it clear that he is primarily concerned with the standard types employed in analytic philosophy: mathematical propositions, scientific propositions, basic epistemological propositions.

It seems to me that Badiou maintains a similar distinction but, as it is thoroughly embedded in his own system, with concerns that are distinct from those analytic/anglo-american philosophy inherited from Kant, its content shifts slightly. Whereas for Kant, contingent, non-universal judgements cover all the propositions we assent to on the basis of experience (whatever their register), with no immediate ethical import, for Badiou they concern ‘the indispensable exhange of opinions, which, like talk of the weather, is most often about what life promises or withdraws by way of pleasant and precarious moments’. The contingent and non-universal is connected to the humdrum realities of our daily lives, guided as they our by our impulse to live. A necessary and universal truth, on the other hand, is what allows us to become askew to all this, to break with time’s cruelties and our animal existence.

Formally, I think, the distinction is the same, but its content – or perhaps its import – differs. Actually, now I think about it, perhaps the distinctions aren’t so different, given what goes on elsewhere in Kant’s system. More on this another time if I think its going anywhere.

Building Blocks for the Critique of Pure Reason: analytic vs. synthetic judgement.

Here is Kant’s outline of the difference between analytic and synthetic judgements:

In all judgements in which the relation of the subject to the predicate is thought (if I consider only affirmative judgements, since the application to negative ones is easy) this relation is possible in two different ways. Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A as something that is covertly contained in the concept A; or B lies entirely outside the concept A, though to be sure it stands in connection with it. In the first case I call the judgement analytic, in the second synthetic. Analytic judgements (affirmative ones) are thus those in which the connection of the predicate is thought through identity, but those in which the connection is thought without identity are to be called synthetic judgements.

The distinction itself is well known in analytic philosophy, and I won’t dwell on it for long. The standard examples go as follows.

In the judgement ‘All bachelors are unmarried’, the predicate – ‘are ummarried’ – adds nothing to the subject – ‘all bachelors’. Bachelors are married by definition, so, as Kant puts it, ‘the predicate [are married] belongs to the subject [all bachelors] as something that is (covertly) contained in this concept’.

However, in the judgement ‘All bachelors smoke cigarettes’, the predicate – ‘smoke cigarettes’ – does add something to the subject. There is nothing in the concept ‘bachelor’ to justify our judgement. Of course, it might turn out to be true, but the only way we can determine this is by looking beyond the concept into the world to see if all bachelors do in fact smoke. Again, using Kant’s phrasing, ‘[smoke cigarettes] lies entirely outside the concept [all bachelors], though to be sure it stands in connection with it.’

If I can go on a tangent quickly, the thought that the predicates of synthetic judgements lie outside their concepts but still stand in some connection to them is an interesting one. Obviously its a necessary qualification: there is a particular type of connection that characterises the subjects and predicates of possible synthetic judgements. For example, ‘my dog is hungry’ is a possible synthetic judgement; ‘the number ’2′ is hungry’ is not. Although being hungry is not contained in my concept of my dog, it is still connected to it in some way, where as the only thing connecting the number ’2′ and being hungry is their non-connection…

Anyway, Kant expands his definition to include the role played by each type of judgement in building our store of knowledge:

One could also call the former judgements of clarification, and the latter judgements of amplification, since through the predicate the former do not add anything to the concept of the subject, but only breaks it up by means of analysis into its component concepts, which were already thought in it (though confusedly); while the latter, on the contrary, add to the concept of the subject a predicate that was not thought in it at all, and could not have been extracted from it through any analysis.

All judgements based on experience are synthetic, as experience itself would be redundant if there were no need to look beyond the concept. Kant’s example is the connection between the concepts ‘body’ as subject, and ‘weight’ as predicate. There is (says Kant) no necessary connection between these concepts. Nonetheless, the concept ‘body’ designates a certain kind of object that we come across in experience, allowing us to connect other parts of experience (i.e. further predicates) to it:

I can first cognize the concept of body analytically through the marks of extension, of impenetrability, of shape, etc., which are all thought in the concept. But now I amplify my cognition and, looking back to the experience from which I had extracted this concept of body, I find that weight is also connected with the previous marks, and I therefore add this synthetically as a predicate to that concept. It is thus experience on which the possibility of the synthesis of the predicate of weight with the concept of body is grounded, since both concepts, though the one is not contained in the other, nevertheless belong together, though only contingently, as parts of a whole, namely experience, which is itself a synthetic combination of intuitions.

A few points, before we move on. Experience provides the possibility of the synthesis of the concept and predicate, which means that the resulting judgement (‘bodies are heavy’) is characterised by the features I outlined in my earlier post: contingency, specificity, and falsifiability. The concepts are found to belong together as part of a whole which is itself synthetic: experience.

Its worth noting that this might suggest two distinct levels of synthesis: one at which experience itself is constituted, and another at which general judgements based on this experience are made. Alternatively it might suggest a single process of synthesis, so that contingently true judgements come about in exactly the same way – by the same faculties undertaking the same processes – as experience itself. Another way of putting this would be to say that EITHER there are two distinct forms of synthesis – synthesis of intuition (the ‘raw material of sensible sensations’ that are prior to experience proper), and synthesis of cognitions (whose material is experience in the robust sense, synthesised intuitions). OR an identical process is involved in both. Either way, the implications are enormous, and more than I can cover in this post.

So, experience provides the material for a posteriori synthetic judgements. But with a priori synthetic judgements, this extraneous material is entirely absent. And here Kant asks his most important question:

If I am to go beyond the concept A in order to cognize another B as combined with it, what is it on which I depend and by means of which the synthesis becomes possible, since here I do not have the advantage of looking around for it in the field of experience?

In other words, how are synthetic a priori judgements – judgements that amplify rather than clarify our a priori knowledge – possible? What material is available for synthesis?

Of course, Kant has yet to show that such judgements are possible. This comes in section V of the <B> Introduction, and I’ll deal with it properly in a later post. At this point, he uses the following proposition as an example: ‘Everything that happens has a cause’.

Hume had apparently shown that there was no necessary connection between our concept of an effect and our concept of its cause. Kant seemingly assents to this:

In the concept of something that happens, I think, to be sure, of an existence that was preceded by a time, etc., and from that analytic judgements can be drawn. But the concept of a cause lies entirely outside that concept, and indicates something different than the concept of what happens in general, and is therefore not contained in the latter representation at all.

The idea is that it ought to be necessarily true that ‘Everything that happens has a cause’, and yet this cannot be an analytic a priori judgement (because the concept of a cause is not necessarily connected to the concept of something happening), nor can it be a synthetic judgement based on experience (because then it would only be contingently and specificly true). So if we are right in saying that necessarily, everything that happens has a cause, our justification can only come from an a priori synthesis. A priori because this will characterise the judgement as necessary, universal, and non-falisfiable; synthetic because the two concepts do not belong together of themselves.

Kant puts it as follows:

How then do I come to say something quite different about that which happens in general, and to cognize the concept of cause as belonging to it, indeed necessarily, even though not contained in it? What is the unknown = X here on which understanding depends when it believes itself to discover beyond the concept of A a predicate that is foreign to it yet which it nevertheless believes to be connected with it? It cannot be experience, for the principle that has been adduced adds the latter representations to the former not only with greater generality than experience can provide, but also with the expression of necessity, hence entirely a priori and from mere concepts.

So synthetic a priori judgements rest on an unknown = X, which is distinct from experience. We now know some of the characteristics of such judgements, even if we are not sure about the existence or features of the unknown = X that grounds their possibility. Why are they important? Kant says:

Now the entire aim of our speculative a priori cognition rests on such synthetic, i.e. ampliative principles; for analytic ones are, to be sure, most important and necessary, but only for attaining that distinctness of concepts which is requisite for a secure and extended synthesis as a really new acquisition.

Building Blocks for the Critique of Pure Reason: a priori vs. a posteriori cognition.

A very brief post, drawing out something implicit in the preceding one. There we saw that Kant allows for at least two distinct sources and types of knowledge.

The first – knowledge which can be adequately rooted in experience – is characterised by the fact that its truths are contingent, specific, and falsifiable. The justification for such knowledge is a posteriori cognition: our experience of the world.

The second – knowledge which cannot be rooted in experience – is characterised by the fact that its truths are necessary, universal, and non-falsifiable. The justification for such knowledge is a priori cognition: we do not need to look to our experience of the world to know that it is true.

Building Blocks for the Critique of Pure Reason: experience and necessity.

 

The fact that we have knowledge of truths that are both necessary and universal is one of the most basic building blocks of the CPR. Indeed, Kant draws attention to it in the first paragraph of the Introduction:

Experience is without doubt the first product that our understanding brings forth as it works on the raw material of sensible sensations. It is for this very reason the first teaching, and in its progress it is so inexhaustible in new instruction that the chain of life in all future generations will never have any lack of new information that can be gathered on this terrain. Nevertheless it is far from the only field to which our understanding can be restricted. It tells us, to be sure, what is, but never that it must be so and not otherwise. For that very reason it gives no true universality, and reason, which is so dersirous of this kind of cognitions, which at the same time have the character of inner necessity, must be clear and certain for themselves, independently of experience; hence one calls them a priori cognitions: whereas that which is merely borrowed from experience is, as it is put, cognized a posteriori, or empirically.

We can extract three key claims from this quote:

1. Experience is without doubt the first product that our understanding brings forth as it works on the raw material of sensible sensations. Note the implications of this sentence: experience is a product of work done by our understanding, not something given which our understanding goes to work on. If anything is given it is ‘the raw material of sensible sensations’, and Kant is careful, even at this early stage, to distinguish this from ‘experience’ in the full and proper sense. More on this in a separate post. The key point here is that, temporally speaking, experience is our first source of knowledge: we continually learn things from our interaction with the world, a process which could potentially go on interminably, so rich is the field of experience.
2. Nevertheless it is far from the only field to which our understanding can be restricted. So experience is not the only possible source of knowledge, even it is the first (again, because this will be important, the first in temporal terms). Already Kant is differentiating his work from that of the Empiricists – philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume – who argued that all knowledge has its basis in experience. Kant allows that experience is a reliable – indeed inexhaustible – source of knowledge, but it is not the only one
3. It [i.e. experience] tells us, to be sure, what is, but never that it must be so and not otherwise. Now the most important point: experience can tell me that such-and-such is the case – that my cup of tea is almost full, that my friend is fond of American detective novels, that Alaskan Bar-tailed Godwits have the longest non-stop flight of any migrating bird – but it cannot tell me that such-and-such must be so and could not be otherwise (a determinist might state that these truths were necessary, but this requires further argument, and it not apparent from the experiences themselves). In other words, experience provides us with a particular type of knowledge.

We can draw out three charasteristics of this type of knowledge. Either, such-and-such is the case, but it could have been otherwise, i.e. it is contingently true. For example, my cup of tea may be almost full, but this is not necessarily so – I could have drank most of it before sitting down to write; I could have made a cup of coffee instead; I could have no drink at all. Or, such-and-such is the case, but it is not universally true – again, although my cup of tea was almost full when I wrote the previous paragraph, it is now almost empty; alternatively, my friend may be fond of American detective novels at the moment, but there was a time when he had never read one, and possibly he will grow tired of them one day. Or, such-and-such is the case, but is subject of falsification based on another possible experience – it may in fact be true that the Bar-Tailed Godwit makes the longest flight of any migrating bird, but possibly we could have some experience which would show us that this is not the case – the discovery of a new species of bird, or a change in migratory patterns. Let it be clear that we are not challenging the characterisation of these pieces of knowledge as truths, or even as genuine examples of knowledge. Rather we are drawing attention to particular facts about the nature of such knowledge.

Importantly, not all knowledge is of this sort. We know some things which are not only true, but which could not be otherwise: that 7 + 5 = 12, for example. More controversially, that every effect has a cause, or certain facts about the nature and structure of space and time. For ease of exposition, I will use mathematical truths in all the following examples – hopefully I’ll get round to talking about the relative status of mathematical and other truths with regard to universality and necessity in later posts.

These truths, though they may have their origin in experience, cannot rely on it for their justification. They fail to meet the three criteria we established for such truths: they are not contingent (whatever the prior and future history of the world, it is always true that 7 + 5 = 12); they are universal, not specific or singular (it is always and everywhere true that 7 + 5 = 12); they are not subject fo falsification by experience (there is no possible experience which would lead us to conclude that it is not true that 7 + 5 = 12 – once one understands that this is true, it is impossible to imagine it being otherwise).

Because of these features, our knowledge of such truths cannot be justified by experience. And yet we do undoubtebly have knowledge of them. This is the first building block in Kant’s argument.

Kant

I’m going to leave Badiou for now.  Over the next few weeks I will try to put some posts together about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.  Rather than dealing with Kant’s arguments in full, I want to write short posts dealing with specific features of the CPR, which will hopefully coalesce into a full treatment of the material.

Badiou and Grace

Place-holder for future posts, from Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism:

This de-dialectization of the Christ-event allows us to extract a formal, wholly secularized conception of grace from the mythological core. Everything hinges on knowing whether an ordinary existence, breaking with time’s cruel routine, encounters the material chance of serving a truth, thereby becoming, through subjective division and beyond the human animal’s survival imperative, an immortal.

Excuses; Badiou and Cinema

I have several half-finished posts on Spinoza floating around from a few weeks ago, but in the meantime here’s some notes I made on a chapter of Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics. I didn’t understand a lot of it, but this stood out:

There is a way of talking about film that consists in saying things like “I liked it” or “It didn’t grab me”. This stance is indistinct, since the rule of ‘liking’ leaves its norm hidden. With reference to what expectation is judgement passed? A crime novel can be liked or not liked. It can be good or bad. These questions do not turn that crime novel into a masterpiece of art or literature. They simply designate the quality or tonality of the short time spent in its company. Afterward, we are overtaken by an indifferent loss of memory. Let us call this first phase of speech “the indistinct judgement”. It concerns the indispensable exchange of opinions, which, like talk of the weather, is most often about what life promises or withdraws by way of pleasant or precarious moments.

Badiou then juxtaposes this with a second way of talking about film, opposed to the indistinct judgement. This new way tries to fix something singular about the film, an Idea (in a specific sense, remember), which is often explicated or designated by referencing the name of the director as author. Badiou calls this the diacritical judgement:

It argues for the consideration of film as style. Style is what stands opposed to the indistinct. Linking the style to the author, the diacritical judgement proposes that something be salvaged from cinema, that cinema not be consigned to the forgetfulness of pleasures. That some names, some figures of the cinema be noted in time.

But, as Badiou points out, this “salvages the films less than the proper names of the authors, the art of cinema less than some dispersed stylistic elements.” He suggests that the indistinct judgement is to actors as the diacritical judgement is to directors. This is ‘quality’ cinema, and “quality…designates less the art of an epoch than its artistic ideology.”

Finally, Badiou points towards the possibility of a third, axiomatic judgement. It is insensitive to ‘judgement’, whether a film is good or bad, liked, etc. He then goes on to talk about commiting to and drawing out Ideas in films, how this is necessarily subtractive, and how cinema suffers from being the ‘plus-one’ of the arts, coming late and frequently depending on the others for its material.

I get lost around here, but that’s plenty of material already. There’s a lot to disagree with or question. My main concern is that this is a rather impoverished way of talking about cinema, despite the attractiveness of the distinctions Badiou draws. Indeed, he could almost be talking about any art-form with populist/entertainment-based offshoots – there’s little that is specific to cinema here. As I remember, this is something Badiou himself admits to – he has little to say about the techinical features of film, such as the cut, montage, etc.

Indeed, I think his distinctions suffer a little because he pays insufficient attention to characteristics of cinema. The form of the indistinct judgement is particularly attractive, but saying that it designates ‘the quality or tonality of the short time spent in [the film's] company’ leaves a lot implicit. There are formal etc. features that characterise the tonality of time spent in front of a film which make it different from, say, time spent in the presence of an ice-lolly. Something more ought to be said here.

I love the way he characterises the diacritical judgement – ‘that cinema not be consigned to the forgetfulness of pleasures’ – and share his suspicions about the relative merits of ‘quality’ cinema. But when I reach the third judgement, which promises a way beyond these two, I lose all sense of what’s involved. Commitment to an Idea in a film? What does that mean? More generally, what exactly does Badiou mean by ‘subtractive’? Must look that up.

In short, I like the first two distinctions, the way he delineates two common and limited (although this is not necessarily a negative judgement) ways of approaching cinema. I am conscious of the limits of cinema as pleasure and cinema as culture. But without a rigorous definition of the third form of judgement (and one that I can understand!), any move beyond this seems like a convoluted way to shield one’s own likes and dislikes, so that they seem more than what they are – to make one’s own subjective opinions seem exceptional. Clearly this cannot be Badiou’s intention. And yet I still want a definition of art that goes beyond the pleasures of entertainment and the edification of culture.

Will come back to this.