Dance and Subtraction: Notes on Alain Badiou's Inaesthetics

In an essay entirely devoted to the subject of dance in Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics [Petit manuel d'inesthétique (Badiou 2005b)], we find the following contentious statement: "Dance is not an art, because it is the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body" (69). At first glance, this statement seems strangely familiar to the reader versed in writing about dance, particularly philosophical writing. "Dance is not an art": Badiou critiques Mallarmé as not realizing this as the true import of his ideas.¹ It is familiar because it attests to a certain problem in aesthetic thinking, one that relates to the placement and position of dance and the works that comprise its history into what can be seen as certain evaluative hierarchies, particularly vis à vis the relation of dance to other art forms, and in particular, those involving speech and writing. Dance seems to suffer from a certain marginalization, subtraction, or exclusion, and its practice seems to occupy a place of the perennial exception, problem, or special case. The strangeness of the statement, on the other hand, relates to the widespread view outside of academic writing that the status of dance "as art" is actually completely unproblematic. What follows therefore is a critical commentary on this assertion of Badiou, placed both in the context of Badiou's writing, and in the wider one pertaining to the problem of exclusion just outlined.

"Dance is not an art:" Badiou is able to conclude the essay with this statement via an elaboration of six "principles" of dance, which see it defined subtractively from related principles for theater.² This method of subtractive "purification" will be familiar to anyone versed in Badiou's philosophy, but as will be seen in what follows, the problematic of the nature of dance and its placement leads to some important critical questions about Badiou's aesthetic theory (which he prefers to term "inaesthetics"), and indeed his philosophy in general, that this essay aims to elaborate.

What are these six principles of dance, as Badiou sees them? They arise from an initial assertion that dance, as a pure activity of the body, remains at the level of the presubjective, or preconceptual. Dancing gestures appear only to disappear, and therefore demonstrate "thought as event, but before this thought has received a name—at the extreme edge of its veritable disappearance; in its vanishing, without the shelter of the name" (61). This concept of "event," which is central to Badiou's entire philosophical project, will require a detailed explication later. But first, Badiou's conception of dance can be summarized via the following six "axioms." First, dance requires a "pure site" (63), or a space situated on the edge of the void of space. It takes place, or should take place according to Badiou, in a completely neutral and "virginal" spatial situation, devoid of theatrical décor and demands "space and spacing, and nothing else" (64). Second, the anonymity of space/setting extends to one of character. Badiou claims that dance, in stark contrast to the needs of theater, has no need of narrative structure (it deploys no roles), and, in terms of its characterization, "depicts nothing" (Badiou 2005b, 64). Third, it asserts the "erased omnipresence of the sexes" (Badiou 2005b, 64): It reveals only a pure form of sexual difference, in such a way that the couple male dancer/female dancer cannot be reduced or superimposed onto the couple man/woman.³ Fourth, dance should effect a "subtraction from self" (65); following the seemingly paradoxical statement of Mallarmé—"the dancer does not dance" (Mallarmé 2001, 109). The (true) dancer never knows the dance she dances, the dance itself appearing as immanently spontaneous, improvisatory—a pure emergence of gesture without any appeal to pre-existing knowledge, belief, orthodoxy, etc. Fifth, dance should have no need for adornment, and essentially reveals "nudity" (Badiou 2005b, 66), an absence of the décor of costume. The sixth and last principle relates to the spectator rather than the dance itself, and requires of him or her a kind of rigorous impersonality, free...