“It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance.”

- Michel Foucault

This seminar takes its point of departure from what Alain Badiou, at the end of The Century, terms the joint disappearance of man and God. In the place of God and man, we encounter instead a void. To confront the void entails coming to terms with this radical loss of foundation, the vacancy left by God’s absence (Nietzsche’s death of God) and “the void left by man’s disappearance.” This vacant place, the place of the void, has radical implications for the metaphysical foundations of literature, art, and cinema. This is admirably captured by a remark by the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni upon visiting the studio of Mark Rothko. Rothko’s art, according to Antonioni, concerns the presentation of nothing “with precision.” The effort of the seminar will be to think the void and its varied avatars – absence, lack, emptiness, nothingness – with precision. Traversing the late work of Samuel Beckett, Foucault’s analysis of Valázquez’s Las Meninas, Badiou’s subtractive ontology, and Deleuze’s conceptualization of Antonioni’s neo-realist cinema, we will bring the void into focus, dwelling on the paradox of its slippage from absent presence to present absence.

Works

Michelangelo Antonioni, L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’Eclisse (1962)

Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998)

             The Century (2005)

“Samuel Beckett’s Method” (2021)

Samuel Beckett, Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, The Time-Image (1985)

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966)