Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3

by Alain Badiou, Kenneth Reinhard (Translator), Susan Spitzer (Translator)

Alain Badiou is arguably the most significant philosopher in Europe today. Badiou's seminars, given annually on major conceptual and historical topics, constitute an enormously important part of his work. They served as laboratories for his thought and public illuminations of his complex ideas yet remain little known. This book, the transcript of Badiou's year-long seminar on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, is the first volume of his seminars to be published in English, opening up a new and vital aspect of his thinking.

In a highly original and compelling account of Lacan's theory and therapeutic practice, Badiou considers the challenge that Lacan poses to fundamental philosophical topics such as being, the subject, and truth. Badiou argues that Lacan is a singular figure of the "anti-philosopher," a series of thinkers stretching back to Saint Paul and including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, with Lacan as the last great anti-philosopher of modernity. The book offers a forceful reading of an enigmatic yet foundational thinker and sheds light on the crucial role that Lacan plays in Badiou's own thought. This seminar, more accessible than some of Badiou's more difficult works, will be profoundly valuable for the many readers across academic disciplines, art and literature, and political activism who find his thought essential.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Theory

312 pages, Hardcover

First published September 4, 2013

About the author

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

Reviews

[Goatboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this quite a bit although I can see how it might not be for everyone. Not to be read as any kind of introduction to Lacan. Similarly, not to be read as an introduction to Badiou. This feels more like a niche-mapped scenic route for both of them. However, if you're interested in Badiou's thoughts on anti-philosophy in general - and Lacan's brand of such in particular - then you are in the right place. Although Badiou doesn't go too deeply (or hermetically) into Lacanian theory, some knowledge of Lacan definitely helps you understand why Badiou explicates him as he does. I'm not sure if I'm ready to try groking Being and Event or Theory of the Subject, but after this book and Badiou's book on ethics, I'm definitely finding myself more and more interested in him.

Also, realizing this may only matter to some, but the feel and quality of the hardback from Columbia University Press really is exemplary. Everything from the proportion of the book to the feel of the paper provided some small amount of joy while reading.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note that this is not an introduction to Jacques Lacan (indeed, you'll want to be pretty familiar with his work going in), but as an introduction to Alain Badiou, I found this to be absolutely stupendous. Besides thrilling engagement with Lacan, especially terrific local readings of the "anti-philosophers" Pascal, Rousseau, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining and ultimately persuasive seminar on Lacan. For Badiou, "Lacan developed the first immanent anti-philosophy and, as such, it is the last anti-philosophy. Because if it is real, then it attests to itself as knowledge." A key section in the text details Lacan's equation between religion and meaning, demonstrating that after psychoanalysis no meaning is held to be self-evident. The section on dissolution and the philosophical plugging of the hole of politics is fascinating. The book is peppered with interruptions from the audience, a decision that correctly insists on the jaggedness of dialogue.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Badiou’s approach to Lacan through the rubric of anti-philosophy is methodical and cleanly laid out. I enjoyed the focus Badiou put on the psychoanalytic act.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's not much of a stretch to go from the Freudian statement that young boys falsely imagine that their mothers possess a penis to Lacan's observation that women paint their faces and doll themselves up to conceal the truth that they lack the masculine phallus and the sexual power associated with it. Recently I have been reading books by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, both contemporary philosophers that are noted for their voluminous output, and it seems to me that these two men are united on another, more nefarious, level. The fact that, while on one hand, Slavoj Zizek writes books that approach philosophy from a political locus of technical concern while, on the other hand, Alain Badiou writes books that approach philosophy from a logical atmosphere and with an overall analytical patina, begs the question whether these two men are at odds in their philosophical viewpoints and their fundamentally confused belief-systems. In their attempts to establish the connection between modernism and postmodernism, they seem to have overlooked that the essential changes in the rate of production in the modern age have had considerable effects on the exploitation of the commodity-quality of human labor-power. Whether the post-structural theories of Jacques Lacan or any other thinker can be used to alleviate this dystopian situation is itself the primary task of a philosophy that aims to contribute to the human sciences. The horrifying effects of the real subsumption of labor to capital appear to be something that both Badiou and Zizek seem to have forgotten. Two stars.

[Христо · Rating 5 out of 5]

This seminar is to Lacanian theory what Badiou calls counter-symbolization is to the rush for symbolization. It regulates the seduction of quick and final interpretations, or of what Lacan has called "After [attending my seminar] you may think you know everything. Don't." It is Lacanian theory's anxiety. And therefore needs to be studied thoroughly, even and especially in its impasses.

The central thesis of Badiou is that Lacan is an anti-philosopher, in that he destroys truth, the thought of the one, and the love of knowledge (and these sound way more trivial than they are). The climax is that Lacan does not, and cannot, offer an answer to "What is to be done" because he is afraid of philosophizing, for only a totalizing discourse could answer that, and such a discourse is philosophical -- and philosophy fills the hole of politics; the hole which Stavrakakis calls "the political itself". But if one looks closely, one can see several categorical blunders in Badiou's commentary, namely regarding the libertine who does not want to wager on an act. Zizek would say the libertine, in rejecting involvement, has already foreclosed his wager; so Badiou very much forecloses the retroactive nature of the act.

In any case, the last session is an amazing dialogue as regards Jean-Claude Milner's "A Search for Clarity", which one is sure to enjoy. This book is to be studied as a counter-balance to the all too giddy Zizeko-Lacanian student, with the stern advice not to give way to his sinthome.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this series of lectures on Jacques Lacan given to his students, Badiou places Lacan firmly in the tradition of the anti-philosophers that includes St Paul, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. This was a great find for me as I have had a growing interest in both Lacan and Badiou over the last four or five years. The whole experience was great giving major insights into both of them. It may not be the easiest of reads, but if you have a basic grounding in Lacan, the ideas are quite clearly presented. The only negative is the fact that this appears to be the only one of Badiou’s Anti-philosophy seminars that is translated in English. A five star read for me!

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Less about what Lacan believed and more about what Badiou believes about Lacan and his position in the Anti-Philosophical canon, though it never proports to be anything but.

[0 · Rating 1 out of 5]

"badiou" would have been a more accurate title

[Keomar · Rating 2 out of 5]

meh