Across the centuries, color has been defined by a translation of meaning that adapts to the very substance of the object that semantics aims to grasp, always without final conclusions. First it was a matter, then a light and today it is said to be a sensation. Damn, the thing does not bode well, especially if we conclude that sight is one of the least reliable senses we have to scrutinize the world. If, in addition, we are aware that the matter masks a convention whereby what for a tenth of humans is perceived in a certain way does not match the perception of the remaining ninety percent — color blindness to the choir — the data at our disposal when offering a scientific definition, that is, beyond any doubt until proven otherwise, is far from conclusive.
Alain Badiou
(Rabat, 1937) follows the trail of the great color researchers, with Michel Pastoureau among the most prominent authorities on the matter, and fixes his gaze on that no-color or that all-colors to offer a deeply personal take on a question that harmonizes lack and excess, the unknown and the limit, the tremor of fear and the relief of serenity.
Everything fits when it comes to black: fashion, beauty, ink, moods, magic, the cosmos or mourning. The brevity of the essay leaves out of the frame, not, however, out of the author’s reach, topics such as superstition about black cats, the peculiar baggage carried by referees, or the well-known connotations regarding sheep or ducks marked by the sign of revolution and the rebellion of the antihero, pirates aside.
Almost a lifetime old, Badiou remains an indispensable philosopher and an irrefutable citizen (a professor at the University of Paris and founder of the French Socialist Party), who leaves traces of his passage through the world in everything that falls within the sweep of his wide-ranging interests. Now the turn has come for black, and he tackles it with the confidence and audacity of someone who has almost nothing left to hide at his nearly ninety years of age. With a first part in which biographical weight takes on special prominence (there, in childhood, everything is simmered, he comes to tell us), Badiou begins his journey into blackness from the earliest sparks imprinted on the course of his days, and later approaches black as a phenomenon with a focus on literature, clothing, physics, biology, anthropology and, amid all this, showing his invaluable perspective on contemporary life. It is, therefore, a book of arrival, more than a beginning.
Black allows the playwright and novelist to reveal a brave view of a society in perpetual motion that fate has dealt him, without shying away from scrutinizing public figures who ought to model public virtue (“Sarkozy, that uncultured little man,” a volley lands on the audacity with which he lectured Africans, with a colonial blush unapologetic in spite of the current era), or trends that have given hypocrisy a charter and have turned infamy into something quotidian. Badiou does not dodge the problem of ethnic identification with colors, and ends by saying that in chromatic matters “humanity, as such, is colorless.” For this reason, Badiou’s little book is both fascinating and necessary: it presents an unprecedented gaze at the world, supported by a full and conscious life — redundancy perhaps, since one cannot have the one without the other — which obliges us to observe the tree from its roots and to remember that our history is full of dark places (that infamous Black Code with which 17th-century France regulated slavery in Caribbean territories, not to mention further afield, for to go further would reach the late 19th-century Spanish newspaper ads or, if we push further, contemporary trafficking in persons).
Black is black, as Los Bravos sang, but its reverse is not white, it is gray. Johnny Cash, AC/DC, Amy Winehouse, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and so many others have already sung to black. Now it is Alain Badiou’s turn, and the simple tune that results does not in the least diminish. Brief, if good…
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Author: Alain Badiou. Title: Black: Glints of a Color. Translation: Susana Prieto Mori. Publisher: Siruela. Sales: Todos tus libros.