Kenneth Reinhard is Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English at UCLA and a longtime translator of the work of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. Formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and co-founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII, Badiou is known for his philosophical work on the concepts of being, truth, and modernity. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Reinhard discusses Images of the Present Time, a translation of Badiou’s 2001–2004 seminars on “Images of the Present Day,” and the influence of Badiou’s work on his own life.
What topics are discussed in the work, and why are they important to discuss?
Badiou’s seminar on “Images of the Present Day” ran for three consecutive years, from 2001 to 2004, at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. The central question he addresses in the first years of the new century is that of the present time: what constitutes the present and what does it mean to live in the present? The twentieth century was characterized by various attempts to create a present by either desperately clinging to the past or violently breaking with it for the sake of a utopian future. How can we live in a present that is more than an endless sequence of transient moments, on the one hand, and that repudiates neither past nor future on the other? Badiou pursues this project by means of an analysis of the cultural “images” in contemporary culture that serve to obscure the present time, including the reduction of ideas such as “democracy” and “freedom” to empty ideological emblems, and the proliferation of endless desire through consumer capitalism’s promises of unlimited enjoyment.
Liberal modernity, or “democratic materialism,” Badiou argues, believes that there are only “bodies” and “languages”—no third spiritual or divine element. While Badiou certainly agrees that this is the general state of things, he argues that there are occasionally exceptions to that rule, and these exceptions constitute the kernel of what he calls truths. A truth is not a representation of some particular aspect of a world, but a manifestation of something generic to the world as a whole (hence its truth), elements that are both ubiquitous and generally unremarked, connected only by their co-relationship to the “event,” the exception to or anomaly within the general rule of the established images that define and give stability to a particular world. And when human beings elaborate the connections among such elements, it is in the service of creating a new truth and, ultimately, a world. For Badiou, there are four basic fields or modes for the production of truths: science, politics, art, and love. Each has its own protocols or “truth procedures” that allow the implications of evental exceptions to be connected to each other and elaborated into new ideas, new structures, and new ways of being in the world and in the present time.
Which of the insights or conclusions do you find the most meaningful or the most exciting?
In the middle year of the seminar, Badiou focuses on the question of how a true present can be constructed by following the “tracings” of real exceptions across the surface of emblems. If there is no present today, it is because we are doubly alienated by what Badiou calls “repetition” and “projection.” When we become too caught up in history and tradition, we are liable to simply repeat the past, which becomes a dead weight on the possibility of creating a present. Repetition can also take the form of constant novelty, the endless marketing of minor differences as real innovations. But we can also fail to construct a real present by the radical destruction of the past in the name of the glorious “projection” of a future ex nihilo, as was the case at times for both the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Between these two modes of temporal alienation, the present is reduced to nothing more than a gap, the empty point of transition between past and future, with no consistency of its own. A real present, Badiou argues, is not something that we can simply inhabit, according to either orientation but is something that must be actively constructed. A real present requires the “torsion” of past and future, through which the past has not fully passed and the future, in some sense, is already here. That is, something from tradition must be transformed and sublimated to the status of the future. This is not simply the preservation of those parts of the past that we value, but the rewriting or reinflection of some precise points into the anticipation of something new.
How is this work relevant to the contemporary world and to Badiou’s previous work?
We can understand this “torsion” of past and future in terms of the two key modes of the production of change that Badiou describes in Being and Event, “fidelity” and “forcing”: on the one hand, a truth procedure involves the fidelity to an event as something that is always in the past. Fidelity is the work of insisting that there was an event and, by following its implications and consequences, of bringing it into the present. On the other hand, Badiou uses the concept of “forcing”—a mathematical technique for the production of unprecedented new sets that he borrows from Paul Cohen—to describe how the projection of a truth procedure into the future when it will have been completed can be used to generate useful knowledge in the present. To borrow a term that Badiou borrows from Deleuze, the “disjunctive synthesis” of fidelity to something in the past (repetition) and forcing of something in the future (projection) is required for the construction of a real present.
To live in the empty present of democratic materialism is not our fate; it requires our consent—which we can withhold. We can agree with the premise that there are only bodies and languages and still believe that occasionally, and as an exception, a truth too is possible, and that such truths transform how we think about both bodies and languages. We do not need to consent to the inevitability of emblems and the images that conceal from us our own capacity for becoming faithful subjects of a truth. We can live in a present that is woven from fibers drawn from evental ruptures in the past and the projections of a future that will have been.
Given your longstanding work on Alain Badiou, how have his ideas influenced you?
Alain Badiou’s work has had a profound impact on me; first on my intellectual life ever since I read him in the 1990s, and then on my personal life when I first met him at a conference I organized at UCLA on Saint Paul and Modernity in 2002. The final section of this seminar, Images of the Present Time, is titled “What Does It Mean to Live?” and Badiou’s work as a whole is an attempt to answer that question. For Badiou, a life worth living is one that is oriented by the pursuit of truths, that is, by the active participation in one or more “truth-procedures” whose possibility emerges in the wake of what he calls an “event.” The chance of participating in the work of constructing a truth—whether in politics, science, art, or love—is open to everyone, and it is the source of real human happiness. When I came to understand this by reading Badiou’s work and seeing how he himself enacted such works of truth, it became clear to me that this was indeed how I wanted to live my own life. Badiou’s conviction that there are indeed universal, infinite, and absolute truths goes against the grain of liberal democracy and what he calls “capitalo-parliamentarianism.” But it offers a powerful alternative to the relativism that has proven itself inadequate to the dogmatisms of both the right and the left today. For me, Badiou’s ideas have been a source of inspiration and orientation in our most disoriented present time.
Kenneth Reinhard
Kenneth Reinhard is Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English at UCLA. He is the general editor and co-translator of the Columbia University Press edition of the complete seminars of Alain Badiou. He writes on philosophy, psychoanalysis, religion, and opera.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
