Hegel, the Arts and Cinema

Abstract

Alain Badiou embarks on a close reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics to consider how his own recently-developed concept of the “index”—designating the crucial point of mediation between finite works and the absolute (or the means by which “works of art obtain their seal of absoluteness”)—might figure therein, as well as to explore what Hegel would have made of cinema, had he lived to experience it. After first examining the various ways that this “index of absoluteness” functions in the Hegelian conception of art—both according to its canonical forms (sculpture, architecture, painting, music, and poetry including theatre) and its historical classifications (classical, symbolic and romantic)—Badiou proceeds to investigate whether Hegel’s aesthetic system could and should have foreseen the eventual birth of cinema, together with its general characteristics; and whether this new development would ultimately refute or confirm his famous thesis on the end of art.