The Evaluation of Art's Status as a Condition of Alain Badiou's philosophy

Alain Badiou considers art as one of the fourfold conditions of his philosophy. That is, if there were no artistic truths for philosophy to address, there would be no philosophy. Such a relationship between philosophy and art, however, is challenging and has provoked critical responses. This article is aimed to evaluate this relationship, which Badiou called conditioning, and to demonstrate the fact that the true status of art in Badiou's philosophy is not the same as he claims. While encountering Mallarme's poetry, like other artistic works he encountered, Badiou regards it as a masked philosophy rather than “art”. He treats artists as if they are philosophers in other genres. Furthermore, there are reasons to conclude that, in spite of "the theory of conditions", there is no discernible interaction between art and philosophy in Badiou’s work.