The Event, the Subject, and the Artwork

Partly guided by Alain Badiou’s controversial Century and its interpretation of the events and art of the last century, this book opens debates about these for the twenty-first century. This book examines the extent to which such debates can be applied to the first decades of the twenty-first century and the extent to which analyses of events and subjectivities in the twentieth century can be re-thought from the perspective of this century. This book is also partly guided by Gilles Deleuze’s construal of the event as a synthesis of forces, not a happening, but something that has become actual. An event, therefore, is always there in its potentiality, but may not be recognized at the time of its occurrence. This collection combines essays responding to seemingly datable events, such as the memorialised city of Hiroshima, the coup d’état in Fiji, or the aftermath of Vietnam, as well as the more pervasive emergence of managerialism and the anti-psychiatry movement. At the same time, this book specifically explores the event’s relationship with art and its subject in the sense of both what and who is depicted. The collection engages in debates over the extent to which modernism is an unfinished event; avant-garde moments herald events; socio-political events are mediated in and by artworks; and artistic responses to events and subjects come to represent temporal ruptures and rifts, if not harbingers of an indescribable future.