Alain Badiou is a major intellectual figure in France. Apart from his philosophical and political essays, his areas of interest and specialisation include mathematics, poetry and drama. He also recently published Black: The Brilliance of a Non-Colour, in 2016. He was therefore the ideal person to meet in order to provide a more philosophical perspective on our favourite subject.

INTERVIEW WITH ALAIN BADIOU IN PARIS, XIVth ARRONDISSEMENT

THE LIGHT OBSERVER : I would like to begin this discussion by evoking the often dual, ambivalent nature of light. As it is present in our daily lives, light is experienced every day, whether it is natural sunlight or screens, lamps, city lights, etc. Yet it remains a mysterious and elusive phenomenon.

ALAIN BADIOU : Yes, I do think there is a kind of ambivalence in light. In fact, even when looking at the historical knowledge regarding the subject of light, we can see that it has always been a very complicated matter. In some respects, light is perhaps the mixture of all colours. Is there a colour of light? The scientific investigation of light, already from ancient times, attempted to indicate that light is scientifically enigmatic, and this continues to this day. From the point of view of everyday experience, as you said, there is indeed a very important difference between natural light and artificial light. That is to say, the rhythm of light is quite singular. On the one hand, we have daylight, which still creates the feeling of day and night and provides an opposition that gives rhythm to our lives, even today. On the other hand, despite everything, we have a different kind of light at night - we're talking about city lights. So light and colours, light and darkness, natural light and artificial light, the notion of light is constantly crisscrossed by contradictions. Furthermore – and in philosophy this plays a considerable role – there is the philosophy of the Enlightenment: light has always been a metaphor associated with truth. And in that sense, we are referring to a philosophy of the Enlightenment. It has also been very strongly associated with religions, divine light, the light of inspiration, of the creation of the world. Light is ultimately charged with considerable complexity. I could go on indefinitely about the ambivalence of light: light as a support of visibility, but also light that can be excessive and therefore blinding, etc. Thus, light is a considerable intellectual work in progress and a biannual magazine will be welcome on the subject.

You write in your book dedicated to the colour black, that "it symbolizes, indistinctly, both lack and excess."1 {Alain Badiou, Black: The Brilliance of a Non-Color, Polity, 2016} By comparison what do you think light symbolizes?

I think that light has essentially symbolized affirmation, truth, certainty and also security. Because we have to realize, that for a very long time in human societies, darkness represented the moment of risk, danger. The history of cities is interesting from this point of view. The question of light in the city is a historically and technically decisive question. We all have images of streetlights at dusk and the fear of the dark. The fear of the dark, the childish fear of the dark, is also a very important subjective fact and, therefore, I think that, in a certain way, light symbolizes affirmation and security. That said, it can also symbolize excess; a person can be overwhelmed by a fixed light, like the sun, for example. A person can also desire the night. I am thinking, for example, of Wagner's operas, that of Tristan and Isolde, which is entirely inhabited by this great song on the loving hope of night, since lovers are more sheltered, more joyful, happier and more voluptuous at night than during the day. Consequently, night is a mixture of risk and protection, and, I would even say, that at night there is a mixture of ignorance and voluptuousness, or something like that, so it is ambivalent in of itself. Finally, it is very interesting to see that light and darkness make up an extraordinarily contradictory and complementary semantic network. I think that among all the philosophical metaphors, this opposition of day and night - which is drawn from our most constant, most obvious experience - is also the most complicated!

In regards to the notions of knowledge and truth, in French, the lexical field is intimately linked to light, in both philosophy and religion, as you mentioned. Christianity incites us to be guided by God's light, whereas with Plato "In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly considered sun-like".2 {Plato, The Republic} How can we explain that this metaphor has been used since the very beginnings of philosophy?

I think Plato inaugurated that metaphor, and if you look at the text closely it's a subtle message, because he says at the same time that he's going to use – to make people understand what the idea of good is, the supreme idea – the metaphor of the sun and light, but at the same time he says that when he uses the metaphor of the sun and light it's because he can't directly understand what the true idea is. And so here again, there is ambiguity: light represents what gives meaning to the idea, but at the same time, it is presented as a metaphor or an image. When it comes to the idea of good, which is basically truth or the idea of truth, he can only get an image of it. So light holds an ambivalent position, which in a certain sense allows us to understand something of the absolute, but which is not itself absolute: it is a metaphor for this absolute. This lexical field, with its ambiguity, runs through the entire history of philosophy. As we talked about earlier, there was a philosophy of the Enlightenment, but the idea that, ultimately, truth is like the light of experience, is something that remains constant throughout the history of philosophy.

In that regard, to what extent has the notion of light evolved over time?

The manner in which Plato concentrates this idea of light makes reference to the idea of the sun: the idea of an illuminating power and not just light as production. So I think there's an oscillation, that is to say, when we talk about light in philosophy, we can talk about what is the essence of truth or we talk about true knowledge in the sense that it sheds light on what it deals with, etc. Yet, there is also a certain ambiguity, which could be described as a dialectical ambiguity. Take the concept of "knowledge-ignorance," ignorance being associated with night. And as we go further in terms of philosophy and dialectics, for example with Hegel, we realize that the real problem of light perhaps resides precisely with the night. The question of ignorance that would be overcome by truth becomes a very important question. The absence of light, the dark, ends up playing an essential role in the investigation of light itself. I would say that deep down, even in Plato's metaphor, light also serves to indicate that truth is only discovered at the end of a complicated process that allows us to emerge from the darkness of experience. Coming back to Hegel, we realize that truth is the work of the negative, to use his expression. Light is the work of the dark, in other words, it is the play between night and day. It is the play of the darkness from which we emerge in order to reach the light. And therefore light itself becomes the result of a process, instead of simply being intuitive and immediate data. So light can be a settled notion, for instance when a divine power guarantees it, but it can also be elusive, fragile.

There is also the idea that light makes it possible to see, and the philosopher, in essence, seeks to see beyond appearances. How and to what extent is the philosopher the one who shows the way? Can they be considered as such?

The expression I mentioned earlier, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, seems to indicate that. The philosopher is the one who illuminates the world stage. One could say that they are the lighting designer after all. This is at first glance, but eventually all of the philosopher's work is to illuminate what they mean through light. That is the whole problem. What is the philosophy of the Enlightenment ultimately about? We realize that visibility is not enough, since the philosopher (and already Plato) immediately shows that the question of the visible is complex: are we sure of what we see? This prepared the ground for German idealism, Kant in particular, to say that experience after all may be purely subjective and not real. And if experience is completely subjective, then perhaps it is in the dark that we should look for, not in the visible world. In reality, while we believe we are in the visible, we could be in the darkness of the visible itself. That is to say, victims of illusions. And the idea of illusion is very important in this subject because the visible can be held or considered as an illusion. This dialectic of visibility and illusion runs throughout the entire history of philosophy. So there are two opposing camps. The empiricists, who think that experience gives us real access to the world, an access that is not totally real, but nevertheless that is where we have to start, there is no alternative. And then there are the idealists and transcendentalists who think that experience is a construction linked to the relative nature of our sensations, to our sense organs. There is no reason why the system of sight should give us access to reality; the real access to reality is elsewhere. For Kant it was in the moral imperative, while for others it would be something else. It has always struck me that this issue goes far beyond philosophy. If we take art, poetry, literature, etc., we notice that, in some ways, there are artworks clearly associated with daytime moments and others with nocturnal moments. Classical art is fundamentally an art of light, whereas Romantic art is a celebration of night-time, in a more or less constant way. The night is where love can unfold, where one can flee from the deceptive appearances of the world, where one can appreciate creative solitude. Therefore, admiration of the night, artistically, which is also a tribute to the hidden, is a characteristic of Romanticism. While, on the other hand, the admiration of what can occur in full light characterizes art’s classical epochs. We can truly say that this question runs through all intellectual or creative experiences.

Science too has an important role to play in our relationship with light and its apprehension, as you mentioned in the preamble. How do scientific discoveries affect our understanding of light?

This question is very interesting because the relationship between science and philosophy, and even between science and popular opinion, is a very complicated one. In fact, we often find that science, which presents itself as truth, is conceived by personal experience as quite paradoxical and bizarre. This is very striking and has been an obstacle from the beginning. For example, the fact that the earth is round and not flat, even some of us today have a hard time believing that to some degree. The great philosopher Husserl said that in truth our Mother Earth is flat; it does not turn. The fact that it turns is explained by a theoretical explanation and mathematical proof. Regarding light it's a bit similar. Science has immediately decomposed it. White light being actually a composition of the colour spectrum. There is nothing simple about light, just like matter (Alain Badiou touches the wooden coffee table in front of him); it seems like there is hard compactness, but in reality it is composed of atoms which themselves are composed of electrons, etc., etc., etc. In the end, it is a kind of absolute dispersion. It also happens with light. We could think that light is unified, while, from the very beginning, science has seen it as an enigma, something very complicated, and which remains so even today, as quantum logic is still being developed.

Despite the scientific complexity of light, its speed, according to Einstein, is an absolute reference for the mathematics of our universe.

The idea of a speed of light is an idea forged by science. For us, light is perfectly still, so we can only speak of its speed when we are on a cosmic scale, and the cosmic scale is not a permanent scale of our experience, fortunately indeed! It is true that there are constants in the universe and among these constants there is at least, in Einsteinian relativism, the speed of light. This is very interesting, because for us humans, light is precisely not a speed, it is an intensity. This intensity is not constant; we have gradations, from total darkness to dazzling light, which has nothing to do with speed. And yet science tells us that what is absolute in light is its speed, you have to get used to it... (he smiles). 

You often say that we must beware of philosophical truths. That ultimately there are scientific and artistic truths, rather than philosophical truths.

What I think is that as long as philosophy supports assertions that can be controlled, these assertions are more or less subject to a certain state of non-philosophical knowledge. It is said that philosophy is at the origin of everything, but it is rather a result of everything. And we can see this very clearly in its history; if we think that rational philosophy started during Greek antiquity - "the truth that argues" – this is not based on religious convictions. We realize that Plato's thinking derives from the work of mathematical thinkers of the time, from the political debate opened up by the invention of democracy and Greek tragedy. I have to say I agree with Hegel when he writes "the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in."3 {G. W. F. Hegel, "Preface," Philosophy of Right} It's a nice metaphor to say that philosophy comes after all the rest. That is to say that in "the day of knowledge" for Hegel there are experiences, knowledge, human creations, on the one hand, which constitute the day of human existence, and, on the other hand, the philosophy that comes at dusk, afterwards. As we can see historically and factually, all philosophers, if we look at the texts, have been nourished by considerations concerning what I call the four conditions of philosophy: science, politics, the effects of love as well as artistic and poetic creation. That would mean, to come back to our subject, that philosophy is more nocturnal than diurnal.

Referring to Plato's illuminating power, how can the search for absolute truth – in philosophy or religion – lead to blindness?

In my opinion, the main form of blindness is when one believes oneself obliged to think the truth, in whatever sense one conceives it, as some kind of transcendental absolute. Namely when we associate truth with a single entity, when we leave behind the unmistakable multiplicity of our experience. When you look at anything: it is a multiplicity. There is no such thing as one absolute truth, but the temptation of this concept is constant and finds its supreme form in religion, where "the one" is often personified. This is a very general temptation and I think we must defend ourselves against it and accept that all clarity always comes from multiplicity. We can never reduce or concentrate everything in a single figure. Even less, declare a unity that would be transcendent, that would be outside experience. The experience of blindness is when one places oneself in the light of "the one." I think this can be found in Plato's work too. It's not quite by chance that he established this transcendental idea, which is kind of "the idea of the idea," with the metaphor of the sun. And as La Rochefoucauld said, the sun cannot look itself in the face (he smiles). 

I was recently re-reading Georges Pérec's Les Choses, and it happens that he ends his novel with a quote from Marx: "The means are part of the truth, as well as the result. The search for truth must itself be true [...]".4 {Georges Perec, Les choses: A Story of the Sixties, Grove Press, 1967} This idea could be assimilated to the work of the philosopher, what do you think?

I'll take that idea, but from a slightly different angle. What I think is that every truth is actually a production. If you look closely at the truth it is not something that is given, it is something that is conquered, always. It is also just one specific truth, unless we fall back into "The Truth," in the sense of transcendence. On this point science is paradigmatic: a mathematical truth, for example, is the result of a demonstration, if you don't have the demonstration, there's no point in asserting that it's true. From that point of view, Mathematics is an ethical school, a tough school by the way! If you don't understand the demonstration, you won't understand in what sense the result is true. I think we can generalise that, in the notion of proof, and if we look at all the things that can be considered as true, they are all the result of a process. You can consider that there is a truth in a great novel, for example. After reading Proust, you learn something about jealousy and so on. Yet the novel had to be written, so it is the result of an actual process. I think that the idea of process, of construction, has to be accepted as immanent to the idea of truth itself and that all truth is a result. What we must then understand is what kind of result can be named as truth. And so as to your question, eventually it is a question of universality. What in a process, which is always particular, can ultimately prove to have universal value? That is to say, to agree or be recognized as such, independently of space, language specificities and so on. The question of absoluteness does indeed exist. We must abandon the idea of truth as a figure of contemplation and consider truth as a figure of production. And if light is a good metaphor of truth, if we accept to see it as such, then it would be an artificial light, in the end, rather than natural light – in the sense that it would be the result of a construction, a labour, an artifice, and not the fact that the sun shines.

We were talking about poetic truths and I would like to read you an excerpt from a poem by Yves Bonnefoy, whom I know you admire: "What I’ve picked up is a letter—tossed Yesterday into the grass, beside the path. It has rained: the pages are stained with mud; ink overflows from the words, illegible. And yet the iridescence of these signs, decomposed, now is almost light. The downpour has drenched a promise; the ink has become a puddle of sky."5 {Yves Bonnefoy, Briefwege, Together Still}

There is a whole poetics of reflection. That's what it's all about. In Debussy's La Mer, at a given moment, we hear the reflection of the sun on the sea. Here is the problem of the relationship between light and space; I am very interested in this story of reflection because light is both totality and, at the same time, extraordinarily temporary. It has this dialectical flexibility, of being simultaneously what makes the totality of any given scene in which we find ourselves, but also, at any given moment, something temporary, captive. There is also the light of the lightning bolt; light as an absolutely localized phenomenon, which can be found in general darkness. I understand very well the fact that memory retains the intensity of these perceptions of light, in a concentrated way. 

To continue on the topic of the relationship between light and space, I would like to read an excerpt from La lumière du Sud-Ouest by Roland Barthes: "it is light-as-space, defined less by the colours it imparts to things (as in the other Midi) than by the eminently habitable quality it communicates to the earth. I find no other way of saying it: it is a luminous light."6 {R. Barthes, The Light of the Sud-Ouest, L'Humanité, 1977} It is interesting how he feels that light can make a place habitable.

This is true, but it should not be separated excessively and resolutely from the nostalgia for the night that we spoke of earlier. Light can function as aiding in habitability. On the other hand, it is not always good that things are brought to light. There is nostalgia for habitability induced by a calm, pleasant light, just as there are overwhelming lights: the unbearable light of the desert does not make it habitable at all. Sometimes there is the idea that night is when a place becomes habitable, as described by numerous poets. 

Once again, light and darkness sometimes induce the same feelings. 

They are permutable; sometimes they occupy the same function, absolutely. 

To come back to your book dedicated to the colour black, there is a chapter on the painter Soulages, known for his large canvases entirely painted in this colour. And you say: "The artist who shows to the viewer infinite luminosity, the new luminosity latent in the colour black."7 {Alain Badiou, Black: The Brilliance of a Non-Color, Polity, 2016} So in other words, his work is fundamentally about light. 

He wanted to paint what you were saying: the dialectical reciprocity of darkness and light and get closer to what makes space. His paintings are very vast, but this space, instead of remaining vast, is uniform and worked in a minimal way, yet as a whole. To take up the metaphor from earlier, in essence, Soulages attempts to show the habitability of the colour black, considering it as light. Black has a beauty that makes it pleasant to the eye, but at the same time there is a secret light that lives in black canvas, that haunts it. It is a radical pictorial project.  

I imagine you had the chance to experience it. What did you feel in front of these paintings? 

These are rather peculiar paintings, for several reasons. The first is that you have to walk around, in front of the painting – in my experience anyway. If you sit in one spot to admire the painting you don't really see it. It's like the seaside; you have to walk along it a little bit. On a beach everyone walks because the thing is so complex that walking along the beach helps your understanding and experience. A painting by Soulages is kind of the same thing. You have to have several points of view, several perspectives on the painting, to consider the universe that it represents. It is a universe of a luminous black. And from there you have access to a secret light, a light of the black itself. We could say a light that comes from the non-light and that makes me think, philosophically, of Hegel. Because I think that Hegel is basically the philosopher with the clarifying power of negativity. It is the negative that creates the true visibility of the experience. Basically Soulages does a pictorial metaphor of this idea. And as a painter, it is through the colour black that he can understand more concretely what light is. 

In an interview, Soulages talks about Picabia, who, one day while visiting him in his studio, explains that light in painting comes from the painting itself. Giving birth to this idea, Soulages works on the material of his canvases, the surface and the light reflections that result from them. In the history of painting, he is at odds with a classical approach, from Caravaggio to Turner. 

Indeed. Instead of thinking that light should be captured as light projected onto something that inhabits light, a landscape, coloured forms that can be abstracted from elsewhere, he starts from the colour black as an absolute. Since that colour is the only one to occupy the canvas, the role of the painter is to show that this uniformity is infinite. Virtually infinite, that is to say. In reality, it is of infinite complexity. I think it comes close to the most radical attempts at night paintings. Already in the eighteenth century, people tried to depict night in painting, but it remained figurative, they show silhouettes, twilight. Poussin's work made attempts in this direction, but with Soulages it is an absolutely radical proposition. The difficulty with radical proposals is that they generally have no descendants, because nobody really wants to redo the blackness of Soulages. Nobody has redone the white of Malevich8. {Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918} In that sense I would say that it's an innovation, it's a rupture, but it will remain solitary, it won't give rise to another way of painting.

While talking together, I was wondering, do you have any memories attached to a specific state of light? Were there moments of light that were decisive for you? 

The moments of light that have always struck me, as far as I can remember, have always been moments of dying light, of light at the edge of darkness. Basically, the lights that touch me the most are lights that are either a bit “twilighty” or of first light, that is to say lights that are on the edge of night. It is likely that, ultimately, I prefer the night, but I do not make a philosophical doctrine out of it (he laughs). 

Finally, I wanted to ask you about the recurring association of light with the genesis of things. We talk about light at the creation of the universe or the birth of a child.

First of all, I think that the importance of the most elementary experiences should not be underestimated. When we see the dawn, when the day appears, it is like the world is appearing. The night is always more totalizing, even if we have forgotten that a little bit in big modern cities, because there is a lot of lighting nowadays. However, when I was a child I experienced much deeper nights, and indeed, the day is still the time when things appear. So I think that the association between light and creation comes from there, and in particular the order of God, may there be light and the light was. I was saying earlier that I prefer the night, but I prefer the night when it ends all the same. 

More like a parenthesis.

The idea of eternal night is hard to bear and so I prefer the night as long as the day comes after. If night is beautiful, it is beautiful as intervals to daytime. Again, this relationship between light and darkness. It should be called the dialectic of light and dark. One cannot be separated from the other.