(self)-valorization methodologies in arts&politics, Center for Drama

Art (CDU), Zagreb (16 June 2011)

The Art of Capital:

Artistic Identity and the Paradox of
Valorisation

Benjamin Noys (2011)

I
What I want to consider here is the paradox of valorisation for the
artist and for artistic practice. This paradox is simply stated: on the
one hand, the artist is the most capitalist subject, the one who
subjects themselves to value extraction willingly and creatively, who
prefigures the dominant trend lines of contemporary capitalism:
precarity, flexibility, mobility, and fluidity. The artist is the figure of
contemporary labour the most extreme instantiation of the present
and hence the one whos self-valorisation is most plugged into
capitalisms self-valorisation. On the other hand, the artist is the
least capitalist subject, the one who resists value extraction through
an alternative and excessive self-valorisation that can never be
contained by capitalism. In their work they prefigure non-capitalist
relations of the refusal of work, creativity, and play to do one

thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in

the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise [or make art] after
dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter,
fisherman, herdsman or critic [or an artist], in Marxs well-known
words.1 The artist is the de-coupling of valorisation from capital, the
figure of another form of wealth detached from the dictates of
commodification.
The classical resolution of such a paradox, derived from Marxs
analysis of the position of the proletariat, is to argue that the most
capitalist subject is the least capitalist at the same time: the one
most subjected to capitalism is in the position of the one who
prefigures the exit from capitalism. Again, to use the language Marx
uses to refer to the proletariat, those with radical chains are the
dissolution of class society because they suffer a general wrong,
and so also suffer the complete loss of man [that can] hence can
win itself only through the complete re-winning of man.2 Rancire
remarks that this inscription of emancipation in a logic of
development predicates it on the subjects impotence and
disempowerment, and also implies a culture of distrust based on a
presupposition of incompetence.3 For this reason, and for others,
notably its historical failure, this way of settling the paradox via
historical necessity is no longer widely held (except perhaps in
Negris thought), for both the proletariat and the artist. The alliance
of the artistic avant-garde with the proletariat, as complex and often
imaginary as this was, now seems definitively ruptured on both

sides. We witness a broken dialectic and the dominant trend

appears to be that the artist as proto-communist subject, as one
half of the path to an artistic communism, in Stewart Martins
phrase,4 has strayed off onto the path of artistic capitalism,5 with
little means for resistance.
This, I would say, is the story today, at least in contemporary
theorisations of artistic identity and artistic practice. It is this story I
want to tell, to probe the contradictions and tensions of this
narrative, and to consider more precisely the problem of valorisation
and self-valorisation that runs like a red thread through it. I am
certainly not supposing or proposing a resolution to the paradox of
valorisation in regards to the artist, but rather interested in
considering what we might call the aesthetic and political figuration
of this problem and the possibility of grasping or assessing the limits
of such figurations.

II
In one of his Letters on Art, written 1 December 1988, Antonio Negri
remarks that Art has always anticipated the determinations of
valorization.

So

it

became

abstract

by

traversing

real

development, by creating a new world through abstraction. 6 What

Negri economically indicates is the equivocation of valorisation and
the complex role of art within and against the unwinding of
valorisation. In this case he suggests that the plunge of art into
abstraction during high modernism anticipated new forms of

capitalist valorisation the determination of production through the

deepening of real abstractions. The paradox of this position of the
artist is that they run ahead of capitalism, but only to prefigure it, to
capture it in advance, at the level of art. In this way the selfvalorisation of the artist, their act of creation, anticipates new
modes of capitalisms self-valorisation as automatic subject.
This could lead to the well-worn path of anxieties concerning
recuperation, or even the trope that Christopher Connery calls
always-already cooptation,7 in which any critical move against
capitalism is pre-empted and contained to serve capitalism. In this
case the artists self-valorisation is absorbed into capitalism, and so
rather than their being any tension between the artist and
capitalism we find a collapsing of functions aesthetic capitalism.
This is the thrust of Boltanski and Chiapellos argument that
aesthetic

critique

has

fallen

prey

to

capitalism,

has

been

internalised by it as its modus operandi. 8 In fact, the work of Thomas

Frank, notably his Conquest of Cool (1998),9 had already traced a
disturbing narrative in which so-called counter-cultural tropes of
artistic self-expression, liberation, and play (broadly Romantic
notions), were already being deployed by American advertising and
business in the 1950s and early 1960s. Here it is not so much a
matter of recuperation and cooption, but a parallel discourse, in
which advertising men behave like artists, long before this was
supposed to be the norm.

In this case artistic self-valorisation collapses, or become no

more than another sign of the emergent neo-liberal tropes of the
self as enterprise machine. 10 In Negris hands this kind of dialectic
does not take place. Rather, he is concerned with competing forms
of valorisation, and already traces the intimate link between any
kind of self-valorising labour and capitalism. Working out of the
tradition of Italian operaismo and autonomia, he holds that
capitalist valorisation is always dependent on living labour as the
generator of value, and so the worker can exceed this sucking out of
value through their own proletarian self-valorisation. What emerges
is a conflictual schema as the self-valorisation of capitalism finds
itself parasitically dependent on the working class, which can then
develop its own excessive self-valorisation as a rupture with the
value-form. Transferred to the domain of art, we find that art
anticipates new modes of capitalist self-valorisation, but this does
not simply mean that art is merely anticipatory, a kind of laboratory
for capitalism that always recuperates this inventiveness, rather, art
also promises a traversal, an excess, and a rupture with the
schemas of valorisation through a kind of super-valorisation.
While Negri concedes to the usual tropes of the 1980s as a
time of the dominance of capitalist real subsumption, the increase of
real abstraction, and the falling away of use-value, found in a
number of thinkers, and especially thinkers on art, 11 he does not
simple concede to pessimism. Rather, the artist can reveal a truth
of abstraction,12 and he argues We have to live this dead reality,

this mad transition, in the same way as we lived prison, as a strange

and ferocious way of reaffirming life. 13 So, we do not simply have
the situation in which capitalist valorisation parasites artistic
valorisation, but rather a possibility of traversal or excess, as artistic
valorisation is one the side of the excessive self-valorisation of
labour-power that capitalism parasites on, but cannot exhaust.
This process operates, according to Negri, through an uncanny
reversal: There where the abstract subsumed life, life has
subsumed the abstract.14 Arts rendering of life as abstract
anticipates the capitalist real subsumption of life into the abstract,
eliminating the possibility to find spaces where poetic selfvalorization might preserve a corner of freedom for itself. 15 But
rather than this loss of a little corner of freedom being a defeat,
the penetration of capitalist abstraction to all realms of life
generalises life in abstract, creates, or relies upon, an excess that
the great works of abstract art also prefigured. In a sense then the
prefigurative function of art captures both sides of the paradox: the
emergent forces of capitalist abstraction and the possibility of
exceeding or developing those forces beyond the fetters of
capitalist control. In aesthetic terms the artist of the present can
harness and engage with these mutational and monstrous powers of
the abstract that have become the property of the multitude. Taking
the argument that capitalism generates a general intellect, the
productive powers of communication and cognition, we could add,
for Negri, that capitalism develops the general artist.

If this would be the later argument of Negri, in his 1980s texts

he suggests, cognisant more strongly of the experience of defeat,
that the role of the artist is tracing the truth of abstraction, and in
particular (in an oddly Lukcsian register), the possibility of a
realism of the abstract.16 In fact Negri will go so far as to argue for
a punk constructive realism.17 This rather fascinating possibility is
later sacrificed at the altar of the powers of the multitude, but I
think, and I will return to this, that it perhaps offers something to
think with that the reversibility solution to the paradox of
valorisation that Negri more usually proposes.

III
I have previously remarked that despite the well-attested to and
continuing hostility between Negri and Alain Badiou they are
something like secret sharers in terms of common diagnosis,
starting points, and aims.18 In terms of their analysis of art we could
say this is particularly clear in the sense of their common
affirmationism (to use Badious term) the stress on the powers
and inventiveness of art and their acceptance of the power of
capitalism to capture or control this inventiveness. The difference,
of course, is that Badiou rejects completely Negris contention that
the powers of capitalism are merely the powers of the multitude
displaced, or misplaced, a position Badiou regards as a dreamy
hallucination.19 In fact, in Logics of Worlds (2006), Badiou singles
out Negris analysis of art as the site of his embrace of the

ideological logic of contemporary capitalism, what Badiou calls

democratic

materialism that there are only

bodies

and

languages.20 It is the concern of Negri to fight on the terrain of

capitalism, and notably its effects of real abstraction, that, for
Badiou, turns his theorisation into an ideological apologia for
capitalism. In fact, we could add, and I dont think Badiou would
disagree, that Negris modelling of vital and excessive powers
flatters

capitalisms

self-image,

not

least

at

its

moment

of

devalorisation and crisis.

What we can see is a shared narrative of the power of
capitalism, but very different conclusions drawn when it comes to
the role of the artist and art within that horizon. Badiou, again like
Negri, valorises the moment of high modernism as a moment of
invention, but unlike Negri he does not coordinate this with a
prefigurative

function.

Instead,

in

highly-contestable

amalgamation, he runs together the aesthetic and political projects

of high modernism into a common bloc that attests to the powers of
monumental construction.21 It is the power, he claims, which has
been lost in the embrace of the delights of the margin, of
obliqueness, of infinite deconstruction, of the fragment, of the
exhibition trembling with mortality, of finitude and of the body. 22 It
is this option that Badiou identifies with Negrian postmodernism,
omitting to note the similarity in their conception of the constructive
powers of art.

If we align this analysis with the schema that Badiou develops

in The Century we can argue that we have passed into the
saturation of the avant-garde and revolutionary sequence of the
passion for the real that dominated the short revolutionary 20 th
century

(1914-1989).

At

that

moment

common

vitalism,

emphasising the heroic powers of the will and the body, contested
the value-regime of capitalism. Although Badiou does not draw this
conclusion I would suggest that the saturation of this sequence is its
dispersal into what he calls democratic materialism. 23 Whereas the
passion for the real animated the collective bodies of the avantgarde and political vanguards (and, of course, beyond), we could
say that a figuratively degraded passion for the real now finds its
locus in the suffering of the individual body. This involution of the
passion for the real is not, for Badiou, to be valorised as the site of
reversibility into a recaptured collective power of the multitude, but
must be resisted through a subtraction from the coordination of the
contemporary actuality of capitalist power with any dialectic of
reversibility.
In terms of the artist and art the operation of subtraction
requires the finding or construction of an independent affirmation
(my emphasis).24 Unable to rely on the encrypted powers of
liberation secreted within actuality, la Negri, instead the artist
must refuse the horizon of the present to break the dialectic of
valorisation. This working of subtraction still takes its inspiration
from high modernism, but a high modernism split into two. We have

to break off from the passion for the real animated by destruction
and the bad infinity of the relentless attempt to track the Real
outside of representation, and trade this for the subtractive ascesis
evident in a work like Malevichs White on White (1918), which
figures subtraction as the tracing of a pure minimal difference
rather than the maximal drive of extracting the Real itself. 25 The
difficulty is, however, recapturing and reworking this moment in the
present. It is the very power of capitalism that seems to debase any
monumental construction almost in advance, and Badiou has very
little to offer in the way of examples or instances of contemporary
art or artists who measure up to the criteria of probing a subtractive
minimal difference.
If, for Negri, we are all artists, then we might say for Badiou,
no-one is, or should be. The last thesis of his Third Sketch of a
Manifesto of Affirmationist Art is: it is better to do nothing than to
work formally toward making visible what the West declares to
exist.26 Not necessarily bad advice in a time of the hyper-production
of art, nor in the increasing integration of art and art practice in the
circuits of the market and state, not least through the integration of
so-called creative practices in education, but it does seem to leave
monumental construction as firmly a thing of the past. Such a risk
is further reinforced by Badious own theorisation of contemporary
capitalism in the form of the ideology of democratic materialism.
His contention in Logics of Worlds that we live in an atonal world
seems to leave the purchase of any subtractive orientation moot. As

10

he puts it: Empirically, it is clear that atonic worlds are simply

worlds which are so ramified and nuanced or so quiescent and
homogeneous that no instance of the Two, and consequently no
figure of decision, is capable of evaluating them. 27 This lack
condemns us to an effect of disorientation or, if we take Badious
remarks on subtractive politics as a model for thinking art, stuck
with trying to construct enclaves that are somehow resistant to the
overweening powers of capitalism, or performing what Badiou
describes as an originary subtraction capable of creating a new
space of independence and autonomy from the dominant laws of
the situation.28
The point of tension, or even failure, in Badious theorisation
appears symmetrical to that of Negris. Whereas Negri seeks
redemption in the reversible power of capitalism that for him is
merely the displaced power of the multitude, and so risks merely
confirming that power, Badiou seeks redemption from this power
through subtraction, and yet cannot clearly identify this possibility.
In both cases power is at stake, and yet it everywhere seems
lacking. The very dominance of artistic capitalism seems to be the
sign of arts prospective power, but it never seems able to take that
next step into artistic communism.

IV
It is just these kinds of narratives of increasing abstraction, of real
subsumption, of the dominance of the society of the spectacle, and

11

of the erasure of use-value at the expense of exchange-value, that

Jacques Rancire has been keen to dispute. He wants nothing of the
alternative Negri poses between preserving a corner of freedom
and embracing the monstrous mututational powers of capital as our
own, or Badious nostalgic invocation of a purified modernism
Rancire prefers twisted modernism 29 as model for a subtractive
practice without examples. Instead Rancires contention is that if
we break with the narrative of real abstraction or real subsumption
as totalising domination we also break with the false political
alternatives that terminate in either hyper-optimism or hyperpessimism. In staking this claim Rancire wants to pose more room
for manoeuvre for the artist, who is not simply trapped in the
dialectic of valorisation, which may also suggest at least one reason
for his popularity as a theorist amongst artists.
For Rancire, his thinking is designed to contrast so-called
historical necessity with a topography of the configuration of
possibilities,

perception

of

the

multiple

alterations

and

displacements that make up forms of political subjectivization and

artistic

invention.30

Therefore,

no

historical

necessity

simply

dictates the fate of the artist, and the philosophical construction of

an endlessly dominating capitalism serves an agenda that flatters
the freedom of the philosopher at the expense of the rest of us
dupes. Politics has not been eliminated by an atonal capitalism, or
left to the workings of the Spinozist practice of the multitude, but is
an art, precisely an aesthetic, of dissensus that attempts the

12

deliberate disruption of accepted roles, social stratifications and

arrangements, a way of reconstructing the relationship between
places and identities, spectacles and gazes, proximities and
distances.31 It is, to use the telling title of the interview I am quoting
from, an art of the possible.
In this way we see in Rancire a re-working of scale
capitalism

is

scaled

down

from

all-encompassing

monstrous

mechanism of capture, but also the demands of political art for the
fusion of art and life are scaled down as well. Instead, the art of the
possible works between these fusionary locutions to create a
necessary distancing and tension that is the site of the political. We
might note, unfortunately, certain echoes of Cold War tropes of the
rejection of the totalitarian for the freedom of non-political art, to
recent Latourian valorisations of the reticular as site in-between
grand abstractions, and on to the celebration of the modest minor
freedoms of relational art, in this kind of formulation. Rancire,
notably, adopts the pervasive contemporary trope of rejecting
critique as necessary or effective: If there is a circulation that
should be stopped at this point, its this circulation of stereotypes
that critique stereotypes, giant stuffed animals that denounce our
infantilization, media images that denounce the media, spectacular
installations that denounce the spectacle, etc.32
While amusing enough, Rancires point seems to blunt the
general question of critique by dismissing it en bloc and then
constraining the true merit of critical art to the role of refiguration,

13

which functions as a stand-in for critique, but is rather thinly

specified. In his formulation the aim of the artist and art is [t]o
discover how to produce forms for the presentation of objects, forms
for the organization of spaces, that thwart expectations. 33 Here,
again, we witness the scaling down of the role of art and the artist,
from any full-blown critique, but, at the same time, a scaling up of
possibilities. In Rancires dissensus model artistic valorisation finds
its power in disruption, re-arrangement, and the thwarting of
political expectations whether these come from existing power
arrangements or the formulation of counter-powers. Resisting what
he sees as the automaticity of Negris dialectic, and the pessimism
of Badious condemnation of capitalist nihilism, Rancire retains
qualified faith in the possibility of the artist or art work prefiguring
the

disruption

that

is

socially

characteristic

of

communist

moments.
And yet again, there is actually more in common between
Rancire and his antagonists than might first be supposed. While
the underlying narratives of capitalism strongly differ the conception
of the role of the artist and art bears certain similarities to that of
Negri and Badiou. In all three we can see a dissatisfaction with any
pedagogic hyper-political art, which is often couched in a critique or
historicising distance from the avant-gardes of the 1920s, but
perhaps might reflect a more local rejection of the re-invention of
such projects in the 1960s and 1970s. A certain wariness vis--vis
the Situationists, for example, is symptomatic of this. What we

14

witness is a waning belief in the political power or necessity of art,

although coupled in Rancires case to the reinvention of an art of
reconfiguration.
Therefore while appearing more hopeful or even, to use that
dread word empowering, Rancires thinking falls again within a
certain degree of pessimism or wariness concerning the paradox of
valorisation and the power of the artist. In fact, Rancire turns the
screw by suggesting the valorisation of critique itself as consonant
with capitalism, thereby taking onboard a Situationist analysis of
recuperation but then arguing that this is simply a problem to be
faced rather than to be avoided by a hyper-purism as in Badious
subtractive refusal. In the case of Rancire we appear to gain power,
but that power is drastically limited and, at the same time, the
horizon of capitalism is left largely untheorised and undetermined.

V
Ive canvassed these different theoretical solutions to the paradox
of valorisation, while indicating my own scepticism with each. And
yet, each points to or re-formulates the problem, and it would be
unwise to claim any solution dialectical or otherwise. That is not
what I intend to do here. I do want to consider a little more the
posing of the problem of valorisation. In a sense I would take from
Rancire the point that our narrative of capitalism, or our conceptual
/ political understanding of capitalism, is crucial to our figuration of
the problem of valorisation. The difficulty I find with Rancire is that

15

this

problem

seems

to

be

elided

by

his

longue

dure

characterisation of art in terms of an aesthetic regime constituted in

the late 18th / early 19th centuries (what is usually regarded as the
period of Romanticism). While we could spend a long time debating
Negris periodisation of capitalism and art in terms of real
subsumption,34 or Badious periodisation of the short 20 th century,
we can say that they at least present a more fine-grained attempt to
grasp mutational shifts in capitalism and art. In the case of Rancire,
it seems, capitalism tends to drop out altogether, in favour of a
model of the political qua dissensus as continuous possibility.
At least Rancires deflationary approach recognises the
reality

that

artists

might

require

actual

employment

within

capitalism. That said, Rancire persists, I would argue, in misframing

the operations of capital qua transcendental horizon, to inflate
political and artistic capacities. In a sense, Badious fraught
articulation of subtraction, which all-too-often risks coinciding with
the usual consolations of enclave theory, recognises the delimiting
effect of capitalism on the possibilities of praxis. In fact, despite its
problematic reliance on a quasi-Christian model of transfiguration, 35
Negris immersive model thinking of Conrads in the destructive
element immerse at least figures a constructive or critical
engagement with the real abstractions of capitalism. Despite the
seeming magical thinking of reversal, Negris punk realism,
unelaborated as it is, tries to configure a necessity, in our continuing
moment of defeat, that has not passed; as Alberto Toscano

16

summarises: The quandary of art in the postmodern would thus lie

for Negri in the invention of an unprecedented realism, a nonrepresentational realism, capable of rearticulating the present into
something other than a system of global indifference. 36 Of course,
the question then is: what would that look like?
What is crucial to note is the paradox that although these
theorists all qualify or contest the pedagogic avant-garde and call
for alternatives mutation (Negri), subtraction (Badiou), and
dissensus (Rancire) within contemporary art practice there has
been more appreciation of the pedagogic avant-garde as an option
still open, if requiring re-invention. The response to the quandary
Negri poses, and which in different ways haunt Rancire and Badiou,
has been through the avant-garde and on to a realism not
regarded as antagonistic to that legacy (for example, in the work of
Allan Sekula, which integrates Brechtian montage with Lukcsian
realism37). Therefore, there has been an historical engagement with
the experience of abstraction and of defeat, that may be less heroic
but is, perhaps, more patient, in terms of the possibilities that
operate in the present. This is not to say that the temptation to
valorise the revolutionary value of art is not still present in
problematic fashions. In a sense, some of the realism that might be
regarded as necessary requires also an engagement with the
constraints and limits of the present, and the guarantee of political
bona fides should not be sought in the referencing of the past avantgarde as if that solved our problems,

17

Of course, advice to artists is a perilous, although popular,

genre. Here I prefer to think more about the way in which the
problem of value might be posed and the necessity for us to
confront and think this situation. That said, especially considering
the function of the abstract, I cant help but quote a remark by
Adorno: Those who create works which are truly concrete and
indissoluble, truly antagonistic to the sway of culture industry and
calculative manipulation, are those who think most severely and
intransigently in terms of technical consistency. 38 Again, this is an
open formulation, if we leave aside Adornos own aesthetic choices
and recommendations. What I think is useful is that it engages with
what something like what Negri calls a punk realism might be
(despite the fact this phrase would be anathema to Adorno and the
word punk carries a problematically nostalgic ring for me). While it
might be read as simply suggesting the path to the concrete is
attention to the concrete of technical means, I think that this is too
simple a reading, far simpler than Adornos own reflection. Instead,
it means that the concrete cannot simply be reached as is but
only through a process of mediation and engagement with
abstraction.
Adorno poses this problem in terms of philosophy: Because
concreteness has vanished in a society whose law condemns all
human relations to abstractness, philosophy wants desperately to
evoke concretion, without conceding the meaninglessness of
existence but also without being fully absorbed into it. 39 Whereas

18

Adorno had in mind phenomenology, one doesnt have to look far

today, consider merely the object and its recent adventures, to see
this desire to evoke concretion at work. In fact, the relative success
of such a philosophy in terms of art, which is of course often
composed of objects, indicates, I think, the problem of the jumping
too fast without mediation to the concrete. This only ever results in
another abstraction, and Adorno, reflecting on Benjamin, notes his
adding of the materialist salt that the object is inherently socially
mediated. It is here, in this realism of the abstract, that I think a
critical engagement with the paradox of valorisation lies not least
because such a paradox is rooted in the paradox of abstract labour.

19

Notes
Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845), Marxist Internet Archive,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm.
2
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right
Introduction (1843), Marxist Internet Archive,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm.
3
Jacques Rancire, Communists without Communism?, in Costas Douzinas and
Slavoj iek (eds.) The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010), pp.167-177, p.171,
p.172.

Stewart Martin, Artistic communism a sketch, Third Text 23.4 (2009): 481-494.
Ibid., p.482.
6
Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude, trans. Ed Emery (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p.4.
7
Christopher Leigh Connery, The World Sixties, in The Worlding Project:
Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, eds. Rob Wilson and Christopher
Leigh Connery (Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific Press. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic
Books, 2007), pp. 77107, p.87
8
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London and New
York: Verso, 2007).
9
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1998).
10
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France,
1978-79, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp.224-5.
11
See Gail Day, Dialectical Passions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011),
pp.182-229 for a critical analysis of this narrative in the work of Benjamin
Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Fredric Jameson.
12
Negri, Art and Multitude, p.5.
13
Negri, Art and Multitude, p.9.
14
Negri, Art and Multitude, pp.78-9.
15
Negri, Art and Multitude, pp.67-8.
16
Negri, Art and Multitude, p.54.
17
Negri, Art and Multitude, p.56.
18
Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2010), p.134.
19
Alain Badiou, Beyond Formalisation: An Interview, Angelaki 8.2 (2003): 111136, p.126.
20
Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London and New York:
Continuum, 2009), p.2.
21
Alain Badiou, Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art, in Polemics,
trans. and intro. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006).
22
Alain Badiou, Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art, p. 133.
23
See my discussions in Monumental Construction: Badiou and the Politics of
Aesthetics, Third Text 23.4 (2009): 383-392, and Either / Or: Badiou /
Kierkegaard, MonoKl: International Alain Badiou issue (Turkish / English)
(Forthcoming 2011).
24
Badiou, Third Manifesto, p.143.
25
Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity, 2007),
p.56.
26
Badiou, Third Manifesto, p.148.
4
5

Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p.420.

Alain Badiou, We Need a Popular Discipline: Contemporary Politics and the
Crisis of the Negative. Interview by Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith. Critical
Inquiry 34 (Summer 2008): 64559, p.653.
29
Jacques Rancire, Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics in Think Again: Alain
Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum,
2004), pp 21831.
30
Jacques Rancire, Art of the Possible: Fluvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in
Conversation with Jacques Rancire, Artforum (March 2007): 256-259, 261-264,
266-267, 269, p.257.
31
Rancire, Art of the Possible, p.261.
32
Rancire, Art of the Possible, p.266; for a parallel see Bruno Latour, Why Has
Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Critical
Inquiry 30 (2004): 22548.
33
Rancire, Art of the Possible, p.263.
34
See Alberto Toscano, The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude: Art and
Abstraction in Negri, Third Text 23.4 (2009): 369-382, pp.374-76.
35
See Toscano, p.377.
36
Toscano, p.378.
37
See the discussion in Gail Day, Realism, Totality and the Militant Citoyen: Or,
What Does Lukcs Have to Do with Contemporary Art?, in Timothy Bewes and
Timothy Hall (eds.) Georg Lukcs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence
(London: Continuum, 2011), pp.203-220.
38
Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature volume two, trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p.296.
39
Ibid., p.330.
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