Fidelity
Posted on | March 5, 2007 |
‘… cultural studies’ primary deficiency is in providing a satisfactory theory of the event. Cultural studies has been remarkably tight-lipped about the various reasons why so many people have made history by rejecting their cultures in favour of something that happens to render them null and void: the rapture of listening to a prophet who liquidates everything one has previously stood for; the staggering implications of a drought, a depression or an alien encounter. The discipline should learn again the extraordinary political passions implicit in St Paul’s epistle to the Romans, the great and serious joy many millions of people have experienced over the centuries in abandoning their existing cultural coordinates, for truths that dance all over them like sheet-lightning. If it can recognise the profound significance of truths’ shattering passage athwart the matrices of everyday life, and the revolutionary responsibilities of fidelity to such events, then it will have managed to come face to face with the deep paradox of its own constitution as a discipline, as an analytic of the ordinary which refuses to decide on the purport of its own capacities for critique.’
- Julian Murphet, “Cultural Studies and Alain Badiou”
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5 Responses to “Fidelity”
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March 6th, 2007 @ 12:08 am
‘Belonging’ to a rather focussed and materially productive ‘professional’ discipline I am not ever really sure about what kind of relationship I should have with the field of cultural studies. It is interesting to consider the excerpts you’ve presented here. This one struck me (no pun intended) for the author’s ‘evangelical’ turn of phrase. I am particularly interested in following up what this commentator has to say (if anything - it’s probably not relevant to the case being made in this book) about A.B. and truth in the poetic, which I’ve always understood as a anvil-to-ground type realisation rather than a dance in the clouds. Is there something there for me? I’m curious.
About ‘the event’ - A.B’s ‘characterisation’ of this as being like falling in love is pretty cool I reckon.
March 6th, 2007 @ 12:25 am
I’d recommend the full chapter, there’s more on truth & cultural studies generally that you’d probably find interesting. And yeah - cool all right: even in Julian’s passage above, falling in love felt to me like the key example left implicit. It certainly describes a few things I’ve been grappling with lately.
March 10th, 2007 @ 1:33 am
there is an online essay of Badiou’s on love:
http://www.cjs.ucla.edu/Mellon/Badiou_What_Is_Love.pdf
_handbook of inaesthetics_ deals with truth, poetics and dance!!
March 12th, 2007 @ 4:44 pm
Thanks for that link, sir. I am gathering quite the amour-y of resources … [smack me for that very bad pun :-\ ]
May 5th, 2007 @ 12:13 am
actually, badiou seems quite antithetical to “cultural studies.” as he writes in _st. paul_, ‘culture’ obliterates ‘art’, ‘technology’ obliterates ‘science’, ‘management’ obliterates
‘politics’, and ‘sexuality’ obliterates ‘love’… “cultural studies” is precisely a system of management that relativizes the very truth-process of art…