ABSTRACT
Our present time is characterized as The Pornographic Age. The latter is the title of Alain Badiou’s small book, a dense and provocative text, based on his reading of Jean Genet’s play The Balcony. Another contemporary thinker, Byung-Chul Han, independently of Badiou, has also used the term ‘pornographic society’ in his The Transparency Society. Following them, in this Epilogue I claim that the contemporary ‘mass arts’, architecture and cinema, are under the illegitimate ‘regime of the image’ in the contemporary ‘pornographic image society’. Both forms of ‘mass art’ are anaesthetized forms that must be ‘disimaged’—Badiou’s term. I return to the central thesis I pursued in this work, which goes as follows: Should the thought of architecture be rethought, it must be reconfigured along the lines of the philosophical teaching of cinema when, as the revolutionary ‘art of masses’, it was the true training ground of the collective human perceptual apparatus and the individual apperception in the early decades of the twentieth century. But, more importantly, it must be reconfigured now as the ‘art’ of contradiction, that is, dialectic, which Badiou has reserved for cinema alone.
