1. Jezt aber tagts! Ich harrt und sah es kommen,

2. Und was ich sah, das Heilige sei mein Wort.

1. (But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come,

2. And what I saw, the hallowed, my word shall convey.)

Truth and the four conditions

To avoid a suture between philosophy – or more broadly human understanding – and any of its four conditions (politics, art, love, science), this final chapter will range freely across the domains Badiou apportions to the truth functions of art and politics. The aim is to concretize the new dialectical understanding of musical modernism I have been advancing throughout the book and formalized in Chapter 4, and to show through the example of Walton's music how the generic truth procedure presented by musical modernism interacts with politics in ways that continue to prepare the ground for an overturn of our present situation. This will effect – in fact it will require – a return to Heidegger.

The four truth procedures proper to the ‘conditions’ can be readily comprehended in the light of the general theory of the subjective destinations of truth outlined in the preceding chapter. I shall précis them one by one, beginning with politics. The main focuses of this chapter are politics and art, but because Badiou's theory of the truth processes of art and science causes problems that must be resolved before a final materialist–dialectical study of music can be achieved, I will outline all four of the conditions here.