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Breaking the Mirror: Alain Badiou’s Reading of Jacques Lacan

Authors

  • Jana Ndiaye Berankova Columbia University, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.03

Keywords:

Badiou, Lacan, antiphilosophy, psychoanalysis, subject, sophistry, sense, the One

Abstract

In this article, I focus on Alain Badiou’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Jacques Lacan and highlight his conceptual points of divergence with the psychoanalyst. I elaborate on Badiou’s distinction between philosophy, antiphilosophy, and sophistry as well as the notions of sense, ab-sense, and non-sense that he proposed in the book There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons on Lacan as well as in his seminar on Lacan. Unlike Lacan, who affirmed that philosophy is subject to the fantasy of the One, Badiou claimed that the One exists merely as a result of an operation of counting. In this manner, he contested Lacan’s conviction that philosophy forecloses the real. I argue that Badiou’s main point of divergence with Lacan is centred on the notion of the subject and on the localization of the void in relation to the subject. I also touch upon philosophy’s relation to the symbolic, namely its ability to raise powerlessness to logical impossibility.

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References

Badiou, Alain, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham, New York, Continuum, 2008.

Badiou, Alain, Conditions, trans. S. Corcoran, New York, Continuum, 2008.

Badiou, Alain, Theory of the Subject, trans. B. Bosteels, New York, Continuum, 2009.

Badiou, Alain, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. A. Toscano, New York, Continuum, 2009.

Badiou, Alain, Lacan, Anti-philosophy 3. The Seminars of Alain Badiou, trans. K. Reinhard and S. Spitzer, New York, Columbia University Press, 2018.

Badiou, Alain, Roudinesco, Elisabeth, Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue, trans. J. E. Smith, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014.

Badiou, Alain, Cassin, Barbara, There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons on Lacan, trans. S. Spitzer and K. Reinhard, New York, Columbia University Press, 2017.

Chiesa, Lorenzo, Philosophy and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2007.

Lacan, Jacques, “Responses to Students of Philosophy Concerning the Object of Psychoanalysis”, in Television: a Challenge to Psychoanalytic Establishment, New York, trans. D. Hollier et al., W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.

Lacan, Jacques, “De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la réalité”, in: Autres Écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, pp. 351–359.

Lacan, Jacques, “L‘Étourdit” in: Autres Écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, pp. 449–495.

Lacan, Jacques, Écrits, the First Complete Edition in English, trans. B. Fink, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Lacan, Jacques, …or Worse, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, trans. A. R. Price, Cambridge, Polity, 2018.

Tho, Tzuchien, “Antiphilosophy”, in Steven Corcoran (ed.), The Badiou Dictionary, Edinburgh, The Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

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Published

2021-12-31

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How to Cite

Ndiaye Berankova, J. (2021). Breaking the Mirror: Alain Badiou’s Reading of Jacques Lacan. Filozofski Vestnik, 42(1). https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.03