Concept and Form, Volume 1: Selections from the Cahiers pour l'Analyse by Verso

by Peter Hallward

Edited by a small group of students—including Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault—at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, the Cahiers pour l’Analyse appeared in ten volumes between 1966 to 1969. The journal was conceived as a contribution to a philosophy based on the primacy of concepts and the rigor of logic and formalization, as opposed to lived experience or the interpretation of meaning. The Cahiers published landmark texts by the most influential thinkers of the day, including Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, and Lacan, and were soon recognized as one of the most significant and innovative philosophical projects of the time.The two volumes of Concept and Form offer the first systematic presentation and assessment of the Cahiers legacy in any language. The first volume translates a selection of original Cahiers texts.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published August 2, 2012

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turns out I read about half of this in the unauthorized S.XII. I still can't care enough to get into (early) Badiou. But it all suffuses me with a borrowed sense of nostalgia for an intelligentsia that would write as if everything depended on it. Must've been exciting to be a pallbearer at The Death of MAN. It's not one shattering frisson after another, though: not only were Badiou's offerings inscrutably subpar, Regnault's "Dialectic of Epistemologies" could pass for the toneless structuralist lullaby, and the strangely isolated "Questions for Foucault" are strictly of interest to specialists. Which, come to think, is true of it all. "Suture" remains canonical.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the 1960s in Paris, a bunch of nerds had a wild idea: what would happen if we formalized the intersection of Marxism and Freudianism using the formal models constructed by linguistics, logic and mathematics? They had previously been limited to the scope of the Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes but after a disagreement with Linhart and Ranciere they decided to publish their own journal; the Notebooks for Analysis were born. The texts were primarily focused on epistemology, though the authors charmingly insist that their notation has profound political significance.

Some highlights. Irigaray's definition of specular language. Derrida's iconic reading of Rousseau and Levi-Strauss. Canguilhem's observation that psychologists resemble cops. Bouveresse's formalization of Wittgenstein theory of pathological language games. Martial Gueroult's adoring review of Fichte. Thomas Herbert's reduction of ideology critique to mindless automatic syntactic manipulation. Milner's brilliant psychoanalytic reading of Plato. Grosrichard's majestic reading of Machiavelli.

Most interesting, however, is the debate between Miller and Badiou. To cut a long and fascinating story short, it concerns the status of 0. Miller interprets it, misleadingly, as outside the scope of any chain of signifiers. Badiou interprets it, correctly, as the necessary foundational groundwork for any well-formed expression.

The translation work from Pete Hallward and the Kingston team is excellent, and the additional online apparatus is thorough and filled to the brim with interesting suggestions for further research.

The potential of these texts has not yet been exhausted. One hopes that these unjustly forgotten texts will be remembered, applied, and extended by both Marxist-Freudians and formalists.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the star-studded feature list, this collection exists for one primary reason, which is to recapitulate the encounter between Miller and Badiou, via "Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)" and its response, "Mark and Lack." The disagreement thus rehearsed is relatively simple for all that: via Frege, Miller argues that mathematical zero stands in for the split subject of psychoanalysis, due to its double status as both a zero and a one (it is both counted and not). Badiou's response is that there is precisely no subject to be found in the epistemological domain of pure mathematics (what he calls "science"), and that Miller is importing a (Lacanian) psychoanalytic notion of "lack" from the outside, whereas zero merely functions as a "mark" within this field. This helps clarify Tupinambá's move, in The Desire of Psychoanalysis, specifically as regards the "imperialism of the signifier": Tupinambá is positioning himself as Badiou's heir, and levels nearly the same charge against the Millerians as Badiou originally did against Miller.

[Slow Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars because Miller's "Suture" and Badiou's riposte, "Mark and Lack" are life changing essays for anyone interested in Lacan (or Althusser's theory of ideology)