ABSTRACT
Rethinking Benjamin’s notion of actuality [Aktualität]—applied to Benjamin himself—in the light of Alain Badiou’s singular philosophical thoughts on cinema in our time, as I suggest in this work, will go beyond its numerous accomplished readings pivoting on modernity and its contradictions. Not just the political, or aesthetic, or technological, but rather the philosophical imperative is the hallmark of this new rethinking: ‘cinema as philosophy’, or ‘philosophy as cinema’, to cite Badiou’s thought-provoking terms. At the crux is ‘to think cinema as a mass art’, as Badiou puts it, with the assertion that ‘mass art’ itself is a ‘paradoxical’ term, an argument I explore in this chapter. On the other hand, Benjamin’s theses on cinema must be thought as actual only because they are both timely and untimely, to put it in Nietzschean terms. In this chapter I demonstrate the affinity of thoughts on cinema as ‘mass art’ between Walter Benjamin and Alain Badiou.
