Remainders of Disjunction

I spent much of this week reviewing Alain Badiou’s lectures on Lacan, and I’m increasingly convinced that he is the strongest reader and foremost inheritor of Lacan’s thought to date — someone whose work not only cuts to the bone of Lacanian psychoanalysis but also, crucially, extends Lacan’s project in wildly new yet thoroughly Lacanian directions.

Consider, for instance, Badiou’s account of the real in his lectures on Lacan:

It is essential to understand that the real in the Lacanian sense of the term is in a position of radical exteriority to knowing, including to that particular form of knowing that is “not knowing.” The unknowable is only ever a category of the knowable, a form of the knowable: it is its opposite, but in the same regime . . . To say, then, that the real is unknowable would in fact be to say that the real belongs to the same regime as reality, because it is open to the question of knowing, even if only to fail in relation to it. “Real” thus denotes something so alien to knowing that it can’t be thought of as unknowable either.

All of which, Badiou rightly concludes, means that “a point of access to the real will have to be found that is apparently supernumerary to the All in its analytic sense, namely, A and not-A, or being and not-being, or knowable and not-knowable."

And even more succinctly — for those of you already know why 1 + 1 = 3 in Lacan’s thought: “The real is the remainder of the disjunction between the knowable and the unknowable.” 🔥

As for extending Lacan’s thought in wildly new yet thoroughly Lacanian directions, note the moment in Badiou’s lectures where he plainly states and clearly shows that Lacan’s thought — notably Lacan’s critique of the One — was the “absolute point of departure” for Being and Event. Boom!

If you tuned in to our recent series on The Logic of Fantasy (Seminar XIV), you know it was in search of Lacan’s critique of the One — or at least it’s origin — that we leaped from the drive to the fundamental fantasy, and why we’re heading into to Seminar XVI next.

Here’s to following Badiou’s lead!