Immanence and Infidelity: Fifteen Ways to Leave Badiou

This essay analyzes the recent book Fifteen Ways to Leave Badiou, produced by the Egyptian curator Bassam El Baroni for the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF). For the project, which was carried out in 2011, concurrent with the events of the Arab Spring, El Baroni invited a group of artists from the Middle East to produce works responding to Alain Badiou’s text “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art”. The essay has three objectives, the first of which is to situate Fifteen Ways… relative to the ongoing encounter between contemporary global art and Western philosophy. Next, it considers how the works in the project can be said to stage an immanent critique of Badiou’s aesthetic theory. Lastly, the essay examines the book within the context of the popular uprisings of 2011.

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