Can contemporary art educate us for truth ?

The preceding quote already suggests that the ambivalent montage known as "inaesthetics" translates less a theoretical contradiction or tangle (as Rancière suggests) than a concern for the ethical and political efficacy of art. What is at stake is the educational potential art. Badiou makes the wager, not only that art is capable of producing immanent truths, but that art teaches truth. As we saw, this very education must occur under the condition of philosophy, so to speak. It is philosophy’s responsibility to claim that art can provide an education to truth. And it is indeed a wager, which brings us back (this time most directly) to our first question : how much truth can art still bear ? Because the whole problem comes from the fact that truth, like the event, is rare. In the beginning citation, the definition of inaesthetics stems from "the existence of several independent works of art." What to do, in this case, with most artistic productions ? Must these be relegated to the ranks of non-art, placed alongside standard products of the culture industry that feed the usual aesthetic consumption ? And what to do if, as Badiou writes, "art is dubious," if "the present of art is only its own uncertainty, its fusion (or confusion) in the vague productions of bodies (or of capital-bodies) ?" What to do if "art repudiates all truth, or creates truth from the consumable absence of all truth ?" (24) "Inaesthetics is clear if art is obvious. As the horizon of art, does not non-art impose, strangely, an aesthetic ? An aesthetic of chaos, for example ?" In this case, inaesthetics must defend the axiomatic strength of art, "and reclaim, if need be, a return." The work is twofold. First, philosophy must pull itself together and not abandon its own productions to a commentary that, "under the guise of its devotion to the experimentation of the body of art," increasingly "incorporates production, fills a gap, compensates as best as it can in the chalky concept, the sinister deficiency of the sensible." Second, it is necessary to dream, to invoke (short of creating it) "a new regulated art" : "as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star." (25) This formula of Badiou’s occurs in the twelfth of his fifteen theses on contemporary art (collected under the title "Draft for a Manifesto of Affirmationism"). How to say it more clearly ? Despite all its "latent aesthetic," inaesthetics is not just another aesthetics : it’s a slogan.