ABSTRACT
Not only theater but also cinema is the allegory of Plato’s cave. It has been cited numerous times by film critics. For example, Jean-Louis Baudry once said that ‘the allegory of the cave … haunts the invention of cinema and the history of its invention’. But the treatment of this allegory in Alain Badiou’s ‘translation’ of the Republic, with which I am mainly concerned in this chapter, is quite extraordinary. The core in this allegory for Badiou is the question of the relationship between cinema and philosophy. Returning to Plato’s cave, Badiou reiterates that Plato created cinema in the allegory of the cave: ‘Plato in the allegory of the cave presents the world, the real world, as a very big cinema, where all humanity is seeing images and these images are confused because nobody can distinguish between the images and the real because there are only images and so we are in the big cosmic cinema.’
