It is helpful to read Badiou's recent book Five Lessons on Wagner in the context of his larger work, especially his ideas about art as a “truth procedure.”1 For Badiou art is one of four fields of activity (along with science, politics, and love) in which new “truths” may be constructed by exploring and developing the implications of prior “events,” immanent ruptures within the general consensus that explicitly or implicitly organizes a particular situation or world. The procedures involved in constructing a new artistic truth are distinct from those employed in politics, love, and science; and it is only on the basis of what Badiou calls the actual “compossibility” of all four types of truth procedures at a particular historical moment that philosophy (which produces no truths of its own) or what we tend to call “theory” can operate. The philosopher-theorist depends on the truths produced in art, politics, science, and love as the conditions of his or her properly theoretical activity, which involves clarifying and coordinating those truths. The question for Badiou is never what can theory tell us about art, but what can theory learn from art about the emergence and development of new truths.
K. Reinhard (Sun,) studied this question.