16 February 2005
badiou on sci-fi
A comment below reminded me that Badiou has indeed written an essay on sci-fi, part of which I reproduce here (translated five minutes ago by the machine-like mild prince. Payment = a biscuit):
Science fiction is forced to construct a world, and by this very token, to elicit a comparison with the world that we already know. This comparative construction is always related – as was already the case in Plato with the myth of Er at the end of the Republic, or even with the cosmology of the Timaeus – to a kind of conceptual epic in images. It is demiurgic (creating the Whole) and normative (judging what is on the basis of what could be, or could have been). Science fiction resembles a metaphorical disquisition, because it elaborates a judgment regarding what is on the basis of a global fiction in which we experience, in particular, the momentous question of the relation between the structure of the world and the reality of the choices that one believes to be making within it, or the freedoms that one imagines to be exercising within it. (‘Dialectics of the Fable: Philosophical Myths and Cinema’ [an essay on Cube, The Matrix and Existenz], 2003, in Matrix, Machine Philosophique, Paris, Ellipses, 2003)
And I bet I've read more PK Dick than all of you put together!
