Nothing is Not Always No-One: (a)Voiding Love

Abstract

Alain Badiou credits Jacques Lacan with the formulation of an idea of love that demands to be granted a central place in the structure of any contemporary philosophy worthy of the name. However, at the same time, Badiou is understandably wary of the psychoanalytic tendency to dismiss the amorous as epiphenomenal in relation to the libidinal, to treat love as disguised lust (a tendency allegedly shared by psychoanalysis and the sort of French moralist tradition exemplified by La Rochefoucauld). In both avoiding the indefensible move of strictly partitioning the amorous and the libidinal by situating them as two poles of a mutually-exclusive opposition as well as refusing to reduce one to the other, it must be asked: How does desiring something (i.e., being temporarily infatuated with the little-other as a fungible object-thing of fickle desire) occasionally become loving nothing (i.e., remaining faithfully linked to the Real Other as a singular, irreplaceable no-thing/non-object)? The true challenge for a joint philosophical-psychoanalytic delineation of the amorous is to develop the basis for an explanation of how love miraculously emerges from lust, that is, of how the interplay between various libidinal factors (in particular, the factors of need, demand, and desire as defined by Lacan) creates the amorous seemingly ex nihilo via ontogenetic processes in the midst of which transpires what appears as a dynamic of transubstantiation elevating lust to love."