Badiou and Cinema

Alex Ling is Research Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at the University of Western Sydney.

• Introduction: Gorky's Maxim; 1. Presenting Alain Badiou; 2. Can Cinema Be Thought?; 3. In the Kingdom of Shadows; 4. An Aesthetic of Truth; 5. An Instant or an Eternity: Rethinking Cinema After Deleuze; 6. Alain Resnais and the Mise-en-Scène of Two; 7. The Castle of Impurity; Bibliography; Filmography; Index.

As learned as it is exciting, Alex Ling has produced a textbook example of how to investigate Badiou's Platonist Cinema with utter rigour and fidelity. From Hiroshima Mon Amour to The Matrix, he provides readings of films that mix his own ingenuity with Badiou's insights into the inessence of cinema. Yet Badiou and Cinema is more than simply an illustration of philosophical thought: it opens up the possibility of a truly thoughtful cinema, a cinema that thinks events in its own way, beyond the exigencies of both extant film theory and philosophy.