Alain Badiou par Pierre Gaultier: L’hypothèse communiste [interview]

"Because it is impossible to legislate the relationship between art and politics from a purely formal point of view. On this point, the avant-gardes had no more success than the Stalinist 'socialist realism.' Destroying old forms does not necessarily lead to politically useful results, but filling these old forms with revolutionary content can just as well be a state rhetoric. The whole question is to know where the power of the Idea, its capacity to change, at least a little, individuals passes in a given political and aesthetic context. And this can not be decided unilaterally, either from the point of view of artistic forms or from the point of view of political exigencies. We are at a crossroads of two distinct truth procedures, and there is no meta-discourse that can organize these crossings. It is necessary to experiment, and to react according to the effects." [source]