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, not 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). 

The screen, as well as our interaction with it, is maybe the ultimate and most iconic figure of technology. You managed to twist and fold it (Waterfall, Billow, Surge, Echo...), which somehow echoes an old dream of a flexible and fluid technology. Where do you see the future of technology in our societies and how do your artworks question/answer that?

It’s hard to avoid dystopian images of the future of technology. We are presently seeing how social media, for example, is becoming the favoured tool of autocratic overreach, a platform that is eroding cherished values of our democratic system. This trend emerges in opposition to the dream of fluid technologies that provide an incessant flow of knowledge. The algorithmic reality we are witnessing could be in its infancy, and generations from now, through years of corrective legislation, we could potentially see technology emerge as a powerful tool of personal and collective empowerment. I am aware of the potentially destructive nature of technology, but through art, I am trying to take on a more neutral perspective and see what else there is, discovering the inner pulse of a system that seems to have taken on a life of its own. Art strives to explore the issues of the times; and if there is any issue that deserves attention from the art world right now, it is the enormous impact that technology is having in our society.

What are you looking for in terms of experience in your installations? How do you want the public to react?

I attempt to grab the attention of the public via visually impactful experiential installations. Once captivated by the artwork, I hope a second tier of thoughtfulness will emerge, a more reflective state that invites the public to think more deeply about what is being experienced. I fundamentally strive to create a state of focused attentiveness that dissolves our perpetual state of distractedness. Art invites us to pay attention, to look more deeply, to enjoy the pleasure of being in the moment. 

Are there some technological developments and/or avant-garde artists challenging digital art that you are especially interested in at the moment?

I pay a lot of attention to artists that rummage through the ruins of our technological past, and try to assemble something new with the broken parts. I also look out for digital artists that explore the materiality of the electronic realm. These are two areas that are central to my work, and I am always curious how others take on similar concepts. Inspiration often comes from very unexpected places: lately I have been moved by the post-war existential dilemmas of abstract expressionists, big data in life sciences explored by computational biologists and pre-Columbian textiles from the Andes. These interests have filtered into my work, despite never imagining that such areas could provide such valuable references for my creativity. That’s one of the most remarkable aspects of making art: the journey it has taken me on never ceases to surprise me. 

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