ABSTRACT
In this essay, I adopt Badiou’s thesis in his The Pornographic Age to claim that the spectacle of the insurrection on 6 January 2021 amounts to a pornographic instance which exposes the inherent crisis in the institutions of ‘liberal democracy’. For this purpose, I invoke Badiou’s notion of ‘disimage’ to not only challenge this political system of representation, but also the architectural emblems sheltering it. According to Badiou, the order of representation is fundamentally the ‘order of the image’. To understand ‘the regime of images’, he contends, ‘A real analysis of the images of the present age’ must be undertaken. For him the ‘pompous emblems of power’ in the name ‘democracy’ constitutes the ‘image of the present’. He goes on to crucially state that ‘The result is that, for us, any advance within the images of the present age is largely the attempt to grasp what has no image. The Present of the present has no image. We must disimage, disimagine’.
