The idea for this issue arose when we begin working on our film A Border Musical, whose screenplay is also printed here. This film is based on a study of the situation on both sides of the Russian-Norwegian border: we were interested in how a range of differences, which inevitably serve as sources of conflict in border areas, shape the subjectivity of people in daily contact with each other.

Borderlands always aggravate differences – political and social, behavioral, linguistic and economic, and so on. The border’s physicality, particularly in the form of rigid paramilitary zones impeding the free circulation of people, causes anyone who becomes caught up in their force fields to re-examine the world and themselves. On the map of the world, such areas have always been not only the focus of geopolitical tensions, but also special habitats encouraging the development of new forms of language, behavior and culture. The border is a place for experiment, a zone of mobility and change.

The history of state borders has always been a history of violence: a history of wars, militarization, securitization, bureaucratic control, biopolitical regulation, forced displacement, flight and migration. Historically, state borders are shaped by the balance of violence. The winners dictate them to the losers, without taking into account either real geography or ethnicity. Borders separate “us” from “them,” and these divisions are set down in documents determining state loyalties and citizenship. Paradoxically, borders, which are always artificial forms, are an essential factor of existence, shaping not only the lives of people, but also impacting the natural environment and the animal world.

1. Art is not the sublime descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and sexuality. On the contrary, it is the production of an infinite subjective series, through the finite means of a material subtraction.

2. Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone.

3. Art is the process of a truth, and this truth is always the truth of the sensible or sensual, the sensible qua sensible. This means†: the transformation of the sensible into an happening of the Idea.

We cannot, on this newspaper’s pages, offer you a complete, coherent introduction into the work of Alain Badiou, who is one of the most significant and original thinkers of our time. We can only clarify a few things that the “proletarian aristocrat” Badiou did not find necessary to explain.

In his first thesis, Badiou is obviously referring to the psychoanalytical interpretation of art. He agrees with Lacan that art’s main gesture is subtraction, abjection, and ellipsis. But he also opposes Lacan’s Kantian ontologism of the Infinite and Unreachable “Real” and its constructive pathos: subtraction affords the possibility for the appearance of the subject, the subject of event, truth and political action.