Badiou and Cinema

As learned as it is exciting, Alex Ling has produced a textbook example of how to investigate Badiou's Platonist Cinema with utter rigour and fidelity. He provides readings of films that mix his own ingenuity with Badiou's insights into the inessence of cinema. Yet Badiou and Cinema is more than simply an illustration of philosophical thought: it opens up the possibility of a truly thoughtful cinema, a cinema that thinks events in its own way, beyond the exigencies of both extant film theory and philosophy.

John Mullarkey, Professor of Film and Television, Kingston University, London.

Alex Ling employs the philosophy of Alain Badiou to answer the question central to all serious film scholarship - namely, 'can cinema be thought?' Treating this question on three levels, the author first asks if we can really think what cinema is, at an ontological level. Second, he investigates whether cinema can actually think for itself; that is, whether or not it is truly 'artistic'. Finally he explores in what ways we can rethink the consequences of the fact that cinema thinks.

In answering these questions, the author uses well-known films ranging from Hiroshima mon amour to Vertigo to The Matrix to illustrate Badiou's philosophy as well as to consider the ways in which his work can be extended, critiqued and reframed with respect to the medium of cinema.

Alex Ling is Research Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is the co-editor of Mathematics of the Transcendental: Onto-logy and Being-there, (Bloomsbury, 2013).