Badiou with Malabou and Žižek through Duchamp: Inaesthetics, Plasticity, the Symptom and the Infra-thin

This article attempts a close critical reading of two key essays by Alain Badiou: his considerations of the relation between Art and Philosophy in the opening of Handbook of Inaesthetics; and his short set of reflections on the work of the artist Marcel Duchamp. It takes as its departure point a dilemma – or interpretative ‘knot’ – affecting the current global paradigm of art historical scholarship, arguing that the inconsistencies in the prevailing discourse of ‘decoloniality’ point us towards what Badiou calls the symptomatic link between art and philosophy. From here, I offer a detailed overview of what Badiou sees as the three central doctrines that have historically structured this link, focusing specifically on his central hypothesis: (1) that the didactic-romantic schema which dominated the 20th century has reached a point of saturation and closure; so that (2) consequently there is an urgent need for a new schematic mapping of the relation between art and philosophy, one which brings back the pedagogical theme. In the first half of the essay, I use Badiou’s central propositions to make sense of his analysis of Duchamp, arguing that, for Badiou, Duchamp brings about the concrete actualization of a fourth – inaesthetic – modality. What, I ask, does it mean to build on Badiou by applying this inaesthetic model to the concrete conditions of art history, using Duchamp’s work as a central matrix? The second half the essay is guided by four central propositions: 1. To achieve what Badiou calls a simultaneity of immanence and singularity, one must take account of the still persisting effects of sublimation inherent in the didacto-romantic schema. 2. In doing so, one recognizes the need to supplement Badiou’s model with additional conceptual support: namely, Slavoj Žižek’s notion of the symptom and Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity. 3. These categories emerge, I argue, when the inherent limitations in Žižek and Malabou’s respective approaches become moments of encounter where a fusion of concepts becomes possible. 4. This new model – what I call ‘symptomatic plasticity’/‘the plasticity of the symptom’ – implicitly underpins Badiou’s discourse in the sense that it becomes explicitly concrete in the work of Duchamp: in the form of what Duchamp calls the infra-thin.