Friday 10 May 2024

Alain Badiou's "Love and Art" (Summary)


André Breton's The Century and Surrealism
• Breton's work promotes love as a metaphor for truth in the 20th century.
• Art is closely linked to love, as it represents the moment when an event breaks through existence.
• Surrealism aims to re-invent love by restoring its intense power.
• Breton emphasizes that love cannot be reduced to any law, as there is no law of love.
• Surrealists found nourishment in love and sexuality as potential support for a poetic revolution in language and existence.
• Breton suggests a concept of love that is less miraculous and more hard work, constructing eternity within time.

Literature on Love and its Endurance
• Literature on love often lacks a strong experience of its endurance over time.
• Plays like Marivaux's The Triumph of Love often depict the struggles of young lovers against the despotism of the family universe.
• Beckett, a renowned chronicler of despair and the impossible, is an example of the obstinacy of love.
• The theatre, in its origins, is a metaphor for what love would become later on.
• The theme of love as a game is crucial in the theatre, focusing on declarations.
• The Portuguese poet Pessoa's statement that "Love is a thought" is paradoxical, as love is a thought and its relationship with the body is marked by irrepressible violence.

Exploring the Relationship Between Theatre and Love

• Theatre is a powerful medium for exploring the complex relationship between love and the body.
• The theatre explores the abyss separating individuals and the fragile nature of the bridge that love creates between two solitudes.
• Theatre is often seen as a combination of politics and love, with the intersection of these two intersecting.
• The love of the theatre includes the love of love, as without love stories and the struggle to free love from family constraints, the theatre does not add up to much.
• Classical comedies like Molière's plays depict the struggle of chance love against implacable law or the old against the Church and State.
• The theatre bears a love that belongs to the order of a fraternity, an aesthetic expression of fraternity.
• The community of a theatre tour is precarious, with moments of great melancholia when the fraternity involved in performing and staging breaks up.
• The love of theatre is unique from the inside, as it requires the actor to give up their own body in prey to language and ideas.
• Philosophers are criticized for being magicians, but in Plato's Republic, Socrates changes his subject to "love," suggesting that actors should start with love as the starting point for understanding philosophy.


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