Art, politics and philosophy: Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière

Abstract

Taking the publication in English of several works by Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière as its point of departure, this review article attempts to outline what may be at stake in reading these two authors together. Looking especially at the works on politics and on aesthetics (particularly Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics and Rancière's Politics of Aesthetics), the article also draws on other major texts by these authors as a way of clarifying their basic philosophical principles. Under the rubrics of 'the axiom of equality' (Rancière) and 'the empty set' (Badiou), these two thinkers establish links with their tradition in ways that are mobilized towards invention or transfiguration in spheres of both politics and art.