On Love: Between Lacan and Badiou

by

Youngjin Park

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

© Copyright by Youngjin Park 2018

On Love: Between Lacan and Badiou

Youngjin Park

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

2018 Abstract

This thesis considers love through the interlacing of psychoanalyst and philosopher . Engaging with the problematic of love as an in-between (metaxú) in

Western thought and intervening in the contemporary scholarship around Lacan and Badiou, this thesis examines love in the works of Lacan and Badiou and conceptualizes the consequences that remain implicit and unexplored in the two authors’ thoughts on love. Chapter 1 addresses love through mathematics. Noting that mathematics plays a pivotal role in Lacan’s and Badiou’s approaches to love, I discuss love through the sexuation formulas, numericity, modality, topology, and knot theory, elaborating the concept of amorous void. Chapter 2 addresses love through politics. Noting that politics resides where the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou reaches a peak, I examine the enigmatic knot between love and politics through the contemporary crisis of love, the reinvention of philia, community, and humanity, elaborating the concept of amorous unpower. Chapter 3 addresses love through antiphilosophy and philosophy. Referring to

Japanese writer Murakami Haruki’s Tony Takitani as a facilitator for the dialogue between antiphilosophy and philosophy, I examine how love straddles both the psychoanalytic symptom and the philosophical , the analytic act and the philosophical operation. I conclude this chapter by elaborating the concepts of sinthomatic truth and archiamorous acts. Chapter 4 reads

Letter to D by French philosopher André Gorz. Discussing Gorz and Dorine’s amorous itinerary ii from their first encounter to their joint suicide, I address how Gorz and Dorine weave both the

Lacanian side and the Badiouian side through their “Bacanian” love. In Conclusion, I revisit love as an in-between in relation to intermediate daemons in ’s Epinomis, from which are drawn the interlacing of the analyst as a participant of pain and the philosopher as a discerner of truth.

Developing the problematic implied in this interlacing, I argue that the of love comes between the enigma of love as the loveless that is indiscernible to love and the principle of love as the love that infinitely surpasses itself.

iii

Acknowledgements

This thesis is dedicated to each and every subject of love.

I am indebted to Lacan and Badiou from whom I learned a lot. It is time for me to move on and explore my own thoughts on love and invent my own way of loving.

Many thanks to my family for always there with me.

Many thanks to my thesis supervisor, Mark Kingwell and my committee members, Eric Cazdyn and Ken Kawashima. Without their support, I would never have finished this work.

Many thanks to the University of Toronto where I am given an opportunity to produce this work.

Love is the impossible to say and write. I attempted to do my best here. I hope that this small work will contribute to the thinking of love whose enigma will persist insofar as humanity survives.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….iv

Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………….v

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………….vi

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….1

Chapter 1

Mathematics and Love…………………………………………………………………………...35

Chapter 2

Politics and Love………………………………………………………………………………..117

Chapter 3

Antiphilosophy, Philosophy, and Love…………………………………………………………196

Chapter 4

A Bacanian Love: Reading of Letter to D by André Gorz……………………………………..242

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...262

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………275

v

List of Figures

1. The Formulas of Sexuation…………………………………………………………………....37

2. The Humanity Function……………………………………………………………………….45

3. The Torus……………………………………………………………………………………...65

4. The Triskel, the Trefoil Knot, and the Borromean Knot……………………………………...82

5. The Formation of the Sinthome……………………………………………………………….84

6. The Four …………………………………………………………………………123

vi 1

Introduction

In American minimalist writer Raymond Carver’s short story entitled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (1981), the narrator’s friend Mel McGinnis touches on an essential point concerning love: “What do any of us really know about love? … It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.”1 To talk about love is a difficult task. To carry out this task, one often depends on theory or knowledge. But this only ends up intensifying the confusion, for love is of the order of anti-knowledge or anti-theory. There is no such thing as a theory of love or knowledge of love. To follow the Beckettian of saying formulated by Badiou that “all saying is an ill-saying (mal dire),”2 one could state that the saying of love is the most radical ill-saying. Will it ever be possible to talk about love in the right way? In fact, the connection between saying and love is a classical problem, obliquely addressed by Plato in his Phaedrus. While what is at stake in Phaedrus is to establish an opposition between the dialectical argumentation of a philosopher () and the rhetorical narration of an orator (Lysias), this opposition bypasses and conceals a more problematic issue: the (im)possibility of the well-saying of love. One does not know what one is talking about when one talks about love. Nevertheless, one never stops talking about love. It is both necessary and impossible to talk about love.

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the philosopher Alain Badiou committed to this difficult task. Both of them were engaged with the problem of love throughout their intellectual careers. In the analytic situation, love was an everyday yet grave affair that Lacan had to constantly deal with, insofar as transference is not merely an inauthentic emotional tie between the analysand and the analyst based on the analysand’s amorous history, but a painful and sudden “truth of love.”3 Although no single seminar was exclusively dedicated to

1 Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” in Where I’m Calling from: New and Selected Stories, New York: Vintage Books, 1989, p. 176, 178. 2 Alain Badiou, On Beckett, eds. and , Manchester: , 2003, p. 90; hereafter referenced as OB. 3 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXI: Les non-Dupes Errent, 1973–1974, March 19, 1974 (unpublished). 2

love, one can see Lacan commenting on love in every seminar by employing the terms that he was working on at different periods. And since Lacan did not stop revolutionizing his thoughts, there are also various terms that constitute the Lacanian love4: desire, drive, fantasy, object a, knowledge, jouissance, and sexual non-relation, in addition to his three orders of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, to name a few. What characterizes Lacan’s approach to love through these terms is that he did not make a unified or systematic doctrine about love. Lacanian love amounts to a puzzle in in which a displacement of one piece changes the entire configuration.5 It varies depending on which piece one employs and looks like a moving kaleidoscope. In sum, Lacanian love is presented in descriptive fragmentation.

For Badiou, love occupies the position of a singular truth among others (politics, art, and science) that “conditions” philosophy, which is enough to signify the importance of love for the philosopher. Philosophy exists because some rare amorous truth forces philosophers to think in a coherent and systematic fashion. In accordance with his idea that the task of the “philosophical operation” is to discern truth from non-truth such as opinion or knowledge, Badiou also engages with a critical diagnosis of the crisis of love in the contemporary world. Badiou argues for a unified and normative principle of love through concepts such as , truth, fidelity, the subject of truth, the body, the point, the scene of the Two, humanity, true life, and happiness. What characterizes Badiou’s approach to love is that he accepts, rejects, and refashions Lacanian love. For instance, narcissism as imaginary love, which remains valid to some extent even for late Lacan, is ruled out for Badiou. In contrast, when Badiou develops the idea of love as the scene of the Two, he builds on the Lacanian approach to sexual non-relation. Among multiple lines of thought in Lacan, Badiou picks out one line and elaborates it in accordance with his overall philosophical perspective. In this regard, Badiouian love is presented in a prescriptive consistency against the backdrop of Lacanian love.

What can we make of these two figures’ contributions to the problem of love? Do they repeat the same old illusion that one pretends to know what one is talking about when one talks

4 These terms have to be taken in the broad and neutral sense. For instance, desire and love are looked upon as almost interchangeable (both of them have something to do with lack), but times as rigorously distinct (desire is of the order of the symbolic, love of the imaginary). As another example, jouissance is distinct from love (jouissance is of the order of the real, love of the symbolic) and also inseparable from love (love contains some portion of jouissance). 5 Jean Allouch, L’amour Lacan, Paris: EPEL, 2009, p. 447. 3

about love? Or do they offer unprecedented approaches to love? This thesis examines the ways in which Lacan and Badiou revolutionize the thinking about love with their practice and thought, and argues that love marks the point at which Lacan and Badiou are interlaced.

This thesis has two main purposes. The first purpose is relatively more contemporary and discursive, while the second one is more transhistorical, problematic, and conceptual. The first one is to engage with and intervene in the scholarship on Lacan and Badiou. Briefly taking a look at several examples of such scholarship, we will note that all of them are explicitly or implicitly involved in what is referred to in this thesis as the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou, which will be unpacked later in this chapter.

Slavoj Žižek is arguably one of the most prolific authors in this field. Clarifying the irreducible gap between Lacan and Badiou, Žižek’s works have been critically engaged with Badiou in many aspects. For instance, in Less Than Nothing, Žižek challenges the Badiouian distinction between the human animal and the subject of truth.6 From the Lacanian perspective, there is no such thing as a self-regarding human animal that pre-exists the event and becomes the subject of truth later by participating in the consequences of the event. The Lacanian human animal at the mercy of is not simply self-regarding but constitutively out of joint. Unlike animals with natural instincts, humans do not know what to do with their sexuality, since language cannot represent sexuality, although they dwell in and resort to language, as speaking animals. Ontologizing this issue, in opposition to Badiou, who equates the Lacanian real of the sexual non-relationship with pure multiplicity, Žižek notes that the sexual non-relationship is a primordial deadlock that precedes any multiplicity. Thus, according to Žižek, the “ultimate ” between Badiou and Lacan is that while the former presents an affirmative project (event, truth, fidelity), the latter focuses on negativity (sexual non-relationship, ).7 Siding with Lacan, Žižek applies this difference to love. The amorous encounter as an event is doomed to a failure. As Stanley Cavell puts, the only true marriage is the second marriage with the same person, since the first marriage is supposed to be misfired. Moreover, since the sexual non-relationship as negativity is more primary than the amorous truth as positivity, one should “push through love to confront the

6 Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of , New York: Verso, 2014, p. 824. 7 Ibid., p. 836. 4

limit of sexual difference.”8 While this amounts to a properly Lacanian gesture against Badiou, this thesis attempts to look into love through the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. For us, love defies the distinction between negativity and positivity. As much as one should push through love to confront the limit of sexual difference, one should equally push through sexual difference to construct the amorous truth. In fact, what Žižek often develops is precisely this interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. While Deconstructing Badiou’s notion of the human animal, Žižek expands the binary between the human animal and the subject of truth into the quadripartite positions: the individual (Badiou’s human animal); the human (the individual who is aware of his mortality); the subject (Badiou’s subject); the neighbor (the inhuman Ding).9 This thesis attempts to do the similar thing in relation to love, articulating a framework to render the intersection between Lacan and Badiou possible.

In The Not-Two, Lorenzo Chiesa addresses the link among logic, God, and love as a semblance from the Lacanian viewpoint.10 One of the main interrogations here is: while the sexual non-relationship as the impossibility of making the One amounts to the logical truth of incompleteness, can God turn even this incompleteness into truth about truth? That is, is it possible that the sexual non-relationship is reduced into the One through the onto-theological presupposition of the One? For Lacan, it is an open question. On the one hand, Lacan’s definition of love as “a desire to be One”11 seems to point out that such a reduction is possible. On the other hand, his critique of the Freudian eros as the fusion into the One and his axiomatic conclusion that “two have never becomes one”12 seem to deny such a reduction. Indeed, the problem of love and the One is a complex issue. Here, Chiesa asks whether there is a “true love” beyond love as a semblance in Lacan that acknowledges the sexual non-relationship and goes beyond the reign of the One, which he states he will address in a separate book. Along with Chiesa, this thesis notes that mathematics and logic are crucial in Lacan’s reinvention of love beyond the Christian love of God, which is why we engage with the problem of mathematics and love in Chapter 1, addressing not only the numerical formulation of love but other mathematico-logical formulations of love. This thesis notes that

8 Ibid., p. 839. 9 Ibid., p. 826. 10 Lorenzo Chiesa, The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016, p. xii. 11 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: Norton, 1999, p. 6. 12 Ibid., p. 47. 5

the problem of the Two not only occupies the central position in Lacanian love but also serves as a point of intersection between Lacan and Badiou. However, this thesis does not support the distinction between love as a semblance and true love at least in relation to Lacan, insofar as transference (as an authentic/inauthentic love) is precisely what deconstructs such a distinction. One may as well rather turn to the tension between the Lacanian indistinction between semblance and truth in love and the Badiouian elaboration of love as truth beyond Lacan. That is to say, the idea of “true love” can hold out only against the background of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. In fact, as with Žižek, Chiesa himself experiments with that interlacing in his recent article by mapping the Badiouian modification (as a mere becoming without real change) onto the Lacanian human animal,13 which comes closer to the problematic of this thesis.

In Badiou and Politics, challenging the readings of Badiou based on the binary between the miraculous event and trivial being, Bruno Bosteels explores Badiou’s philosophy as a dialectical thought.14 Particularly notable is Bosteels’ claim that politics is “the most consistent and elaborate” truth process compared to art, mathematics, and love.15 While it may be an open question whether politics is the Truth of truth, this thesis claims that instead of establishing a hierarchy between singular truth processes, one may as well focus on the very tension coming out of the coexistence of truth processes in order to critically engage with and expand Badiou’s thought. It is from this point of view that this thesis addresses the problem of politics and love in a non-reductionist and non-deterministic way in Chapter 2. Also notable is Bosteels’ claim that Theory of the Subject serves as the key to understanding Badiou’s entire works. Although Bosteels does not directly engage with Lacan like Žižek does, this observation is crucial for us because Theory of the Subject not only elaborates the revolutionary political subjectivity by remaining faithful to the Althusserian idea of philosophy as a class struggle within the field of theory but also presents his complex relationship with Lacan. Since Badiou responds to Lacan more as a political theoretician than as a philosopher to an antiphilosopher at that moment, one can locate many traces of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. For instance, drawing on the four elements of anxiety,

13 Lorenzo Chiesa, “The Body of Structural Dialectic: Badiou, Lacan, and the ‘Human Animal’,” in Journal of Badiou Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2014). 14 Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 15 Ibid., p. xxviii. 6

courage, superego, and , which Lacan either briefly mentions or seriously addresses, Badiou develops a systematic subjective , taking one step further than Lacan. This thesis aims at an exploration of precisely how love appears through the lens of this dialectical relationship between Lacan and Badiou. In fact, as in the case of Žižek and Chiesa, Bosteels’ earlier article16 in which he reconstructs the polemic between (Žižekian) Lacan and Badiou in comparison to the “Kant with Sade” (“truth or dare” can serve as a felicitous formulation about the polemic between philosophy and antiphilosophy), and his introduction to Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy17 in which he offers an outline of the relationship between philosophy and antiphilosophy, shows that Bosteels too is fully susceptible to the project of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou, which this thesis attempts to embark on in relation to love.

Despite his critique of Lacan and Badiou in his more recent works, Adrian Johnston presented a notable insight in his Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations. For Johnston, the problem of Badiou’s philosophy is that it exclusively addresses the post-evental “after” without taking into account the problem of the pre-evental “before.”18 That is, Badiou considers only the possibility of the individual’s becoming the subject of truth without due consideration for the pre-evental darkness within which an as yet unsubjectivized individual is embedded. While the post-evental has creative and emancipatory potential, the pre-evental can be disempowering and conservative. And since every truth process contains an interaction between the post-evental and the pre-evental, the problem of the pre-evental has to be taken seriously. In this regard, Johnston supplements Badiou by arguing that there must be a “pre-evental discipline of time,”19 such as the communist patience with a careful investigation of the constitutive flaws of capitalism in opposition to the ever-accelerating flow of capitalism. Johnston also points out that instead of passively waiting for the occurrence of an unpredictable event, one has to actively engage with the status quo with the courage and confidence of taking the risk of going outside the dominating system. Courage is thus not merely a post-evental affect of holding on to the truth process but a pre-evental affect

16 Bruno Bosteels, “Badiou without Žižek,” Polygraph, 17 (2005). 17 Bruno Bosteels, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels, New York: Verso, 2011. 18 Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009, p. 18. 19 Ibid., p. 35. 7

of a change prior to the event. For our part, the problem of the pre-evental is recontextualized as the problem that should be addressed in terms of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. That is, we generalize and expand the binary between the pre-evental and the post-evental into the couple of Lacan and Badiou. For example, this thesis notes that even when one is participating in an amorous process, one is not liberated from one’s symptoms as his/her pre-evental (and post-evental) real, which might discourage and even discontinue the amorous process. But, at the same time, the extent to which the amorous process works through each subject’s real affects whether one could truly attain the amorous infinity. In this regard, the amorous fidelity of holding on to the amorous process is entwined with the quasi- analytic experience of working through the subjective real.

At this point, it is also worthwhile to turn to Levy Bryant’s intervention into the field in his “Symptomal Knots and Evental Ruptures.” As with Johnston’s critical supplementation to Badiou, Bryant points out that Badiou’s account of the event and the subject “underestimates the attachment of individuals to the situations to which they belong” by bypassing too quickly the problem of the pre-established law.20 Particularly interesting is the way Bryant explores the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. The Lacanian subject is determined by language as the Other, and thus it is a barred subject. However, it is important to note that the Other is also incomplete because the Other as the signifying chain has the structure of a differential system. Because of its differential quality, any reference to a signifier will lead to a further reference to another signifier. This implies that even if the subject’s identity formation depends on the battery of signifiers, there is no such thing as “the signifier” that can provide the subject with an ultimate, fixed identity. His identity remains precarious and open. While this aspect of openness can be integrated into the Badiouian idea that the human- animal is open to the event beyond the law of the situation, it also poses a problem to Badiou because the subject, oblivious to this openness, reduces his lack of being into a substantial being by undoing the movement of the signifying chain. For Badiou, when the incompleteness of the Other as the void of the situation is revealed, it makes an event. But Lacan shows that the subject may screen himself from this revelation. By making the Other complete through his fantasy, the subject may settle for and repeat his imaginary/symbolic identity. In sum, the subject may preclude the occurrence of the event with fantasy. For us,

20 Levy Bryant, “Symptomal Knots and Evental Ruptures: Žižek, Badiou and Discerning the Indiscernible,” in International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2007): 2. 8

this confirms the necessity to pay attention to the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. While Badiou focuses on an amorous encounter as the event that ruptures the narcissistic limit and the sociopolitical norms, Lacan allows us to see an amorous encounter against the backdrop of each subject’s unconscious structure. For Lacan, the encounter is not the pure event or absolute real, but the “event-in-the-world” or “the real-of-the structure.” We will confirm this point in Chapter 4 by noting how André Gorz attempted to repress the encounter with Dorine because of his identity as a “poor Austrian” guy. One cannot construct the amorous process or even recognize the amorous encounter without dissolving this anti-amorous identity as the joint effect of the imaginary identification and the symbolic hierarchy. In this regard, this thesis elaborates Bryant’s point that “there is no Badiouian subject without the Lacanian subject” with regard to the problem of love,21 while simultaneously analyzing how the Badiouian subject of love reconfigures the Lacanian subject of love in an inventive way.

While these works constitute the field into which this thesis intervenes, there also exists a much larger field with which this thesis attempts to engage. This field is related to the second purpose of this thesis: to think of love as a pure in-between which poses an aporia to thinking and reformulate the problem of love as an in-between through the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. Love is an elusive enigma because it brings thinking to the place of in-betweenness without beginning or end, entry or exit. As Carver’s story suggests, we do not know what we talk about when we talk about love, for love serves as a chimerical in-between for thinking. Love occupies the space of an in-between so that it makes thinking space out. With its labyrinthic spacing, love puts thinking to the test. But it is also this in-betweenness of love that provokes and reinvigorates thinking interminably. With its nonsubstantial generosity, love leads thinking, to use Beckett’s axiom, only to “fail better” and recommence in a new way. Love thus simultaneously activates and deactivates thinking. Moreover, love engages not merely with the thinking proper to love, as in the lover’s “I am thinking of you,” but with thinking in general. Love rejects subordination into any particular style or form of thinking, thereby pervading and permeating thinking in itself. For instance, love may begin with dialectical thinking because it authorizes the patient movement of negativity, but it may end up with anti-dialectical thinking, because it reveals the effortless flash of positivity. As an in- between, love triggers thinking all over the place and yet appears placeless to thinking. Love constitutes a “nullibiquitous” (nowhere/everywhere) kernel of thinking.

21 Ibid., p. 7. 9

In fact, love as an in-between traces back to Plato, but one can see it keep turning up in disparate contexts and heterogeneous concepts. It constitutes a unique problematic that is constantly refashioned in the history of Western thought. It constitutes an unresolvable question that cannot be fully repressed and ceaselessly returns in a radical way. Starting with Plato, let us construct its brief , which will lay a foundation for the love that cuts across Lacan and Badiou.

In Symposium, Socrates introduces what Diotima told him about eros. Diotima situates eros as an in-between (metaxú) in various contexts.22 Eros is an in-between of resource and poverty because he is the son of his father poros (resource) and his mother penia (poverty). Eros suffers from lack and teems with excess. From this, it is drawn that eros is neither mortal nor immortal, because he lives when there are resources and fades away in poverty after a time. Finally, eros is between wisdom and ignorance. From this, it is drawn that eros is a philosopher. No wise man pursues wisdom because he is already wise, and no ignorant man pursues wisdom because he is blind to wisdom. Only a philosopher loves wisdom because he is in a middle state between wisdom and ignorance. In sum, eros is between resource and poverty, mortality and immortality, wisdom and ignorance.23

In Nicomachean Ethics, defines happiness as man’s ultimate good and points out that happiness comes with the exercise of virtue.24 Among many virtues, Aristotle evokes philia, which is a necessary virtue not only for an ideal relationship but for a political community. But the idea of philia as virtue raises difficulty as soon as Aristotle states that most people wish to be loved (phileisthais) rather than to love (philein) because of the love of honor (philotimian). People want to be loved, yearning for the recognition of the community. The problem here is that while the love of honor can facilitate the nurturing of virtue, it can also hamper it and even nurture vice (kakia). In Politics, Aristotle does not fail to point out that philia is not unconditionally addressed to virtue. In fact, most voluntary wrongdoing comes from the love of honor (philotimian) or the love of money (philochrēmatian).25 With

22 Plato, Symposium, eds. M. C. Howatson and Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, trans. M. C. Howatson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 40–41 (202b–204c). 23 One could reapply this idea to Pausanias’ distinction of two forms of love: heavenly love (Aphrodite Urania) and common love (Aphrodite Pandemos). Love is between heavenly nobility and common vulgarity. 24 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. D. P. Chase. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998. 25 Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord, Chicage: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 77(1271a17). “And yet most voluntary acts of injustice among human result from ambition or from greed.” 10

, one may address a kind of philia that cannot be categorized under “brutality” (thēriotēs, coined by Aristotle) as the worst moral state: necrophilia (love of a corpse). Thus, the idea that philia amounts to a virtue is destabilized. Rather, philia is between virtue and vice.

For Augustine, love is defined as a craving (appetitus).26 “To love is indeed nothing else than to crave something for its own sake.”27 What matters for Augustine is then the type of object that craving aims at. If a craving aims at the secular world, this age (saeculum), and the self, then it makes cupiditas (or libido) the root of all evils. On the other hand, if craving aims at eternity, God, and neighbor, then it makes caritas the root of all goods. However, Christian love ultimately represses this division immanent to love, reinforcing the link between love and God as the highest good. Anticipating Aquinas, who claims that just as grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, caritas as supernatural love transfuses and perfects natural love, Augustine implements a similar gesture in his Confessions. “When I love my God,” I love “not the brightness of light,” yet I still “love some kind of light,” and this light that “shines within my soul can be contained by no space.”28 The love of God dialectically synthesizes the sensible and the supra-sensible. God monopolizes the field of love by traversing the natural and the supernatural. Against this Christian presupposition about the absolute type of love and the consequent reduction of the in-betweenness in love, this thesis suggests that one return to the following statement by Augustine: “Love, but be careful what you love,”29 since caritas is only a particular form of craving and love as craving is irrevocably divided between cupiditas and caritas.

With literary figures such as Dante and Petrarch (and other poets from dolce stil novo of the 13th century in Italy, who sing their love for the ideal woman in their vernacular language as the “faithful servants of love” (fedele d’amore)), theological and religious love is transposed to and projected into the space of amorous poem. In their poem, the transcendental and the supra-natural are localized and embodied within a single woman as the origin of their art. Dante and Petrarch met their ladies, Beatrice and Laura, only a few times in their lives. Both

26 I am here relying on ’s dissertation on Augustine. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, eds. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 27 Augustine, cited in Ibid., p. 9. 28 Ibid., p. 25. 29 Ibid., p. 17. 11

of the women were married to other men, and both of them died at an early age. But the lack of contact and relationship did not obstruct their inflamed love. It was precisely the women’s inaccessibility, regardless of whether they were alive or dead, that rendered the poets’ love for them inexhaustible. For Dante, Beatrice is even compared to the embodiment of the Lord of Love for her miraculous beauty and nobility. Beatrice awakens the Lord of Love where he is sleeping, and makes the Lord of Love come into being where he is not.30 For Petrarch’s part, he writes in Canzoniere,

Twenty-one years Love kept me burning gladly within his flame and full of hope in sorrow; then, since my lady and my heart as one went up to Heaven, another ten years weeping.31

How can one approach to this kind of unquenchable love? Following Agamben in his Stanza, let us note that these poets’ love is addressed to the unreal phantasm,32 which allows us to specify love as an in-between at least in three senses. First, Dante and Petrarch were afflicted by an amorous melancholia because of the logic or rather patho-logy of “appropriation such as no other possession could rival and no loss possibly threaten.”33 Beatrice and Laura were neither possessed nor lost by the poets. One can only appropriate the phantasm, which is suspended between possession and loss. Second, the love for the phantasm is absolutely pure, without any self-regard or demand for the return of love, but this pure love is accompanied by excessive attachment or “immoderate contemplation,” the term which the courtly love theorist Andreas Capellanus used to define love. The love for the phantasm is thus between fin’amor (pure love) and fol’amor (mad love). Finally, the phantasm is neither alive nor dead. With the phantasm, love becomes spectral and “hauntological,” suspended between presence and absence. In sum, for these poets, love is between possession and loss, purity and madness, presence and absence.

30 , Vita Nova, trans. Andrew Frisardi, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009, p. 26. 31 Francesco Petrarch, Petrarch: The Canzoniere or Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, trans. Mark Musa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, p. 509. 32 , Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Agamben writes, “The medieval discovery, so often (and not always cogently) discussed, was the unreality of love, of its phantasmatic character” (pp. 81–82). 33 Ibid., p. 20. 12

In Passions of the Soul, Descartes addresses love through his theory of passion. For Descartes, passions refer to the soul’s reaction against the stimuli of external objects. While Descartes offers a thorough explanation for the mechanism of passions, which starts from external objects to the soul through the movement of bodily spirits (the particles in the blood that are responsible for physical stimulation), what is notable is the neutral way Descartes estimates passion. Far from the classical definition of passion as disease or the Stoic rejection of passion (apatheia), Descartes, rather than simply dismissing passion, takes a pragmatic take on it. Passion is not useful or harmful in itself. Passion can be useful or harmful depending on the kind of thoughts that it forces the soul to have. Here, instead of the Descartes armed with cogito and reason as in his Principles of Philosophy, we encounter the Descartes who meditates on passion and life. Certainly, he maintains his confidence in the power of reason, as is revealed by the distinction between weak souls who are carried away by their passions and strong souls who follow determinate judgments to regulate their passions. However, the concluding remark of Passions of the Soul supports the appropriate use of passions in life rather than the control over passion with reason: “It is on the passions alone that all the good and evil of this life depends.”34

An exploration of the ambivalence of passions appears in the work of another modern rationalist, Spinoza. On the one hand, Spinoza accepts that insofar as passions refer to the state of being determined and guided by external causes, passions decrease our power and virtue. This kind of passion belongs to sorrow (tristitia). On the other hand, Spinoza notes out that some passion increases our power and virtue. This kind of passion belongs to joy (laetitia) as the transition to greater perfection. For Spinoza, love is defined as “joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause.”35 Love is a transitional movement between lesser perfection and greater imperfection, lesser power and greater power. Like Descartes, Spinoza emphasizes the ideal of life under the guidance of reason. But this life does not come at the expense of passion but passes through the experience of moderating passion. While passion often enslaves us, it is nevertheless by eliciting knowledge from passion that freedom can be achieved. It is also in this context that one should consider the ultimate form of Spinozian love, the intellectual love of God, as a paradoxical passion that guarantees a true freedom: “it

34 René Descartes, Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 404. 35 , Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley, London: Penguin Classics, 1996, p. 105(E3p13s). 13

is a true freedom to be, and to remain, bound with the loving chains of his [God’s] love.”36 In sum, for Descartes as well as for Spinoza, passion is between a ruthless master and an enlightening assistant in one’s life.

In “Idea for a Universal History,” Kant raises an issue that is fundamental to any constitution of human community. For Kant, a mutually contradictory tendency is ingrained in human nature. On the one hand, men tend to organize a and live as its members. On the other hand, men have an equally strong tendency to break the social bond and live as independent individuals. The problem is that the tendency of individualization and the tendency of socialization do not peacefully co-exist, but violently collide, threatening any formation of a moral society. Man can neither “bear” his fellows nor “bear to leave” his fellows.37 Antagonism is bound to run rampant in any community. Human nature is constituted by “unsocial sociability (ungesellige Geselligkeit).”38 However, Kant regards this antagonism itself as a part of nature’s pre-designed hidden plan for men’s moral development. Kant observes that antagonism will eventually result in a law-governed social order. Natural barbarism will necessarily turn into a cosmopolitan civilization, and a pathological union will turn into a moral whole. Leaving aside this hidden necessity in nature, which amounts to an imaginary notion of harmonious society, let us note that the same problem is reformulated in Schopenhauer’s hedgehog’s dilemma.39 When hedgehogs come close and form a group to share heat against cold weather, they hurt one another with their sharp spines. The best thing they can do is then to find a distance among group members. This distance, which is reduced in Kant’s moral society or Schopenhauer’s politeness, serves as an irreducible gap in any community. In sum, the amorous community is divided between sociability and unsociability.

Here, it is worth invoking the way Hegel considers marriage in his Philosophy of Right, insofar as marriage is precisely the place where love is divided between sociability and unsociability. For Hegel, who criticizes Kant’s idea of marriage as a mere civil contract, marriage is not merely a legal contract between separate individuals but also an ethical

36 Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, in Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002, p. 100. 37 , “Idea for a Universal History,” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 44. 38 Ibid. 39 , Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Vol. II, trans. E. F. J. Payne, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 651–652. 14

relation that sublates their natural individualities into spiritual unity.40 Marriage as a self- conscious unity well illustrates the two moments in love in which one first experiences the fracture of one’s self-sufficiency and then finds oneself in another person, thereby attaining to a substantial unity of ethical spirit. The similar idea is also presented in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Here, love is equated with ethical life, in that both of them begin with the negation of abstract personality, extends it to universality, and ends by achieving universal and concrete personhood (Persönlichkeit).41 Love constitutes an itinerary from an abstract personality to a concrete universality. While these remarks seem to suggest that the Hegelian love leans towards the idea of a unity without any gap, it is not difficult to locate a passage that deserves to be the Hegelian formulation of love as an in-between, given that “love is the most tremendous contradiction.”42 In his Encyclopedia, Hegel propounds rather than resolves the speculative contradiction of love as follows: “We have here, on the one hand, the tremendous diremption of spirit into diverse selves, who are, in and for themselves and for each other, completely independent, absolutely impenetrable, offering resistance, and who are, on the other hand, nevertheless at the same time identical with each other and therefore not independent, not impenetrable, but who have as it were coalesced and unified with each other.”43 In sum, love is between diremption (entzweiung) and unification, between being sundered in two (entzwei) and being holistic in one.44

In Repetition, Kierkegaard describes the story of a lovesick young man from the perspective of the narrator Constantine as the young man’s mentor.45 For Constantine, the young man’s problem is that although he is passionate and self-effacing in his pure love, he was involved in recollection’s love. In recollection’s love, one always and already stands at the end of love even when love is incipient, which provokes a state of melancholic longing. As this melancholic longing outdoes and devours love itself, recollection’s love makes every party

40 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 111–112. 41 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. III: The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, Berkeley: The University of California press, 1998, p. 286. 42 Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, p. 261. 43 Hegel, cited in Robert R. Williams, Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 187 (E. §436Z). 44 Let us note in passing that the same idea is reformulated by Freud, for whom eros (the force of binding) and thanatos (the force of unbinding) always work in concert. 45 Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, ed. with introduction, Edward F. Mooney, trans. M. G. Piety, Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009. 15

unhappy and ends in tragedy. In opposition to this kind of love, Constantine introduces another kind, repetition’s love.46 For Kierkegaard, only repetition can induce happy love because it is devoid of sorrow, hope, and anxiety. It is full of the bliss of the moment and, at the same time, open to the unpredictable emergence of novelties. However, Kierkegaard also notes that recollection’s love is “an appropriately erotic mood” or “a sign of genuine romantic love.”47 Whoever does not pass through recollection’s love is not a genuine lover. While love must contain the sense of being done as in recollection, all the lover needs to do is to transform recollection’s retrogressive sense into the sense of a new beginning in accordance with repetition. The conflictual coexistence of recollection and repetition can also be justified from the fact that both the young man’s recollection and Constantine’s repetition love are partial reflections of the complex love between Kierkegaard himself and Regine. In sum, love is between recollection and repetition.

In The , Nietzsche likens love to art. This gesture seems grounded given that, for Nietzsche, art plays a pivotal role in overcoming the forms of decadence of man, such as religion, morality, and philosophy, and thus creating “the overman” (der Ü bermensch). Love resembles art in terms of the power of the false. As with the magic of Circe, love creates an illusion of becoming more attractive. Love is a dexterous lie rather than a listless truth. “One lies well when one loves, about oneself and to oneself: one seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect.”48 To use the concept in The Birth of Tragedy, this constitutes the “Apollonian” aspect of art as the creation of transfiguring and beautiful appearances that cover up the cruelty and suffering in life. But Nietzsche adds that one should not stop with the power to lie, since love provides for a real, not just illusionistic, transformation and what he calls a transposition of values. “The lover is more valuable, is stronger.”49 In what sense does love perform a transposition of values? A transposition of values is possible because love induces a total affirmation of life and existence. The lover becomes more valuable because he affirms even his most valueless part as it is. The lover becomes stronger because

46 Repetition is in fact a disquisition on the concept of repetition. Kierkegaard later points out that gjentagelsen (repetition) is a new metaphysical category that dissolves the Hegelian mediation, that it constitutes the structure of the world and our life, and that it is well-illustrated in Job’s restoration through his religious ordeal. 47 Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, p. 8. 48 , The Will To Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage, 1968, p. 426 (§808). 49 Ibid., p. 427. 16

he affirms his most unbearable sufferings in the name of “amor fati.” Here, the hierarchy within the existing value system is subverted, for love turns what appears to be most ugly and imperfect into what is most beautiful and perfect. It goes without saying that this subversion is also true of moral values. “Whatever is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil.”50 The amorous is not amoral but extra-moral. In sum, the transfiguration in love is possible thanks to “an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life”51 or “the highest world-affirmation and transfiguration of existence,” which Nietzsche calls the Dionysian.52 Therefore, although one might be tempted to regard love as exclusively Dionysian by picking up on the passage that love is “the most astonishing proof of how far the transfiguring power of intoxication can go,”53 let us draw a more subtle conclusion. Love as likened to art is between the Apollonian dream and Dionysian intoxication.

In “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Freud examines love through his theory of libido. For Freud, libido is divided into two types, ego-libido and object-libido, and the libidinal economy is based on a mutual antagonism between the two. When the amount of the former increases, the amount of the latter decreases, and vice versa. Notably, Freud regards love as the instance in which the development of object-libido coincides with the loss of ego-libido. (On the contrary, when libido is completely accumulated in the ego, this results in a paranoiac delusion). “Being in love consists in a flowering-over of ego-libido on to the object.”54 Love means transferring the libido contained in the ego to the special object as the sexual ideal. That is to say, love is a movement beyond narcissism. But this movement does not always occur, because libido can be repressed due to the influences of sociocultural morality. What happens when libido is repressed and love is impossible, then? What we might call “the cunning of the ego” reaches its peak here by retrieving another type of love, not object-love but narcissism. Freud writes, “the return of the object-libido to the ego and its transformation

50 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, eds. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 70 (§153). 51 Nietzsche, The Will To Power, p. 539. 52 Ibid., p. 541. 53 Ibid., p. 426. 54 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” [1914] in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, ed. and trans. James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press, 1957: 76 17

into narcissism represents, as it were, a happy love once more.”55 For ego, narcissism is both a component of love and a shelter against the incapacity for object-love. Since libido originally comes from ego, its return to ego may be legitimately called a happy love. Here, Freud adds, without further elaboration: “on the other hand, it is also true that a real happy love corresponds to the primal condition in which object-libido and ego-libido cannot be distinguished.”56 Note that this statement deconstructs the mechanism of libidinal economy. While both “being in love” (object-love) and “happy love” (narcissism) presuppose the fact that some libido can be identified and located in a specific spot, whether object or ego, this is not true of “a real happy love” in which the object-libido and ego-libido cannot be distinguished. While Freud’s remark on a real happy love clarifies the true nature of love, his remark cannot be elaborated within the libidinal economy that necessitates the identification and distinction of ego-libido and object-libido as its prerequisites. In sum, love is an inexplicable “aneconomy” (to use Derrida’s word) within the libidinal economy, for it marks the indiscernible point between object-libido and ego-libido.

Although Heidegger does not directly address love in his works, it is nevertheless possible to articulate the Heideggerian concept of love through Agamben’s reconstruction.57 Heidegger’s contribution to thought on love is that he clarifies why love is neither a relation between subjects nor a relation between subject and object. Love is an affair of , which is always and already open to the world and bound up with the beings it encounters in the world, prior to any subject-object constitution. According to Agamben, the central notions in Dasein’s love are and passion. Facticity is not a scientific or historical fact. It is a specific mode of Dasein’s Being. It is neither pure presence (“present-at-hand”) nor object of use (“ready-to-hand”), but a “character of Being” (Seinscharakter). Heidegger articulates what he calls the “factical experience of life (faktische Lebenserfahrung)” in relation to Augustine’s remark on man’s duplicity toward truth. “They love the truth when it reveals itself but hate it when it reveals them … this is precisely the behavior of the human heart. In its blind inertia, in its abject shame, it loves to lies concealed, yet it wishes that nothing

55 Ibid., p. 100. 56 Ibid. 57 I am here relying on Giorgio Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. 18

should be concealed from it.”58 For Heidegger, what marks Dasein’s experience of the truth of Being is this nexus of concealment and unconcealment. Facticity as the basic constitution of Dasein refers to the fact that truth is revealed and hidden at the same time. The same is also true of passion, which is defined by Heidegger as “the basic modes that constitute Dasein … the ways man confronts the Da, the openness and concealment of beings, in which he stands.”59 In this regard, both facticity and passion operate under the nexus of concealment and unconcealment. Love as the facticity of passion is not an intersubjective relation or a fantasmatic relation between subject and object, but the relation between concealment and unconcealment, clearing and sheltering, light and darkness. As Agamben states, “in love, the lover and the beloved come to light in their concealment.”60 The lover and the beloved do not relate to each other at the subjective or objective level. Both of them are helplessly and freely thrown into love, which is opaque and shining at once, since love is between concealment and unconcealment.

In Time and the Other, Levinas claims that eros is an exceptional type of relationship, in that eros is a relationship with the other. While this may reminds us of the standard Levinasian ethics based on hospitality toward the other who summons our ethical responsibility, Levinas’ take on eros in this text is not merely other-centered.61 It rather focuses on an erotic relation as an irreducible duality between the subject and the other. Despite the fact than eros divests the subject of its power and virility through the evental encounter with the of the other, “the subject is still a subject through eros.”62 In other words, “eros invades and wounds us, and nevertheless the I survives in it.”63 For instance, the caress, insofar as it is not sensible

58 Ibid., p. 190. 59 Ibid., p. 198. 60 Ibid., p. 204. Let us note in passing that the Nietzschean love as art is also true of Heidegger. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger claims that a work of art presents its truth through the strife between the world as self-opening and the earth as self-closing. “Earth rises up through world and world grounds itself on the earth only insofar as truth happens as the ur-strife between clearing and concealment.” , Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 32. 61 Let us nevertheless note that Levinas does sometimes equate ethics with love. For instance, he states, “I hesitate to use the word ‘love,’ I’m very wary, I often say that I’ve never used the word ‘love’; the word ‘responsibility,’ in the way I use it, is love’s stern name–love without concupiscence, love without reciprocity–in a way, an irreversible relationship.” quoted in Derrida, On Touching–Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 333. 62 , Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1987, p. 89. 63 Ibid. 19

contact with a person but a supra-sensible search for ungraspable tenderness without any aim or plan, constitutes one of the modes of the amorous subject. In sum, there is not only the event of the other but also the constitution of the subject in eros. This point is evidenced by the fact that Levinas alerts to the two extremes that are opposed to eros. On the one hand, eros is opposed to knowledge as the self-sufficient activity of solipsistic reason, which reduces the other’s alterity to the subject’s aliment. Here, the erotic duality is destroyed and there remains a subject-object relation. On the other hand, eros is opposed to ecstasis because ecstasis assimilates the subject into a component of the object whose materiality he enjoys, which is another way of reducing the duality of eros. Instead, “the pathos of love consists in an insurmountable duality of beings.”64 In sum, love is a proximate yet anti-fusional duality between the subject and the other.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari examine love from the perspective of “rhizomatics.” The paradigmatic example of a rhizomatic love happens between the wasp and the orchid (“your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid”65). The orchid entices the male wasp by providing an image similar to that of a female wasp, and the male wasp, who attempts to copulate with the image but ends up disseminating the orchid’s pollen, serves as the reproductive apparatus of the orchid. Deleuze and Guattari note that while one could see this phenomenon from the level of imitation or resemblance, there is also another level, the level of becoming. Traversing the species difference between animal and plant, the orchid becomes the wasp and the wasp becomes the orchid. Two heterogeneous organisms that have no genealogical kinship constitute a rhizome by participating in an asymmetrical evolution. A similar logic applies for human love as well. In terms of the subject, love is a relation between the masculine subject and the feminine subject. In terms of becoming, love is a coexistence of the becoming-woman of man and becoming-animal of the human. To use the distinction of two different multiplicities, at the subjective (and objective) level, love is a reproduction of the Oedipal structure of an arborescent multiplicity as a pseudo-multiplicity, a transcendental model with a fixed center. But at the level of becoming, love is the constitution of “a body without organs” in which the connection of unexplored rhizomatic multiplicities produces the deterritorializing flow of intensities in an immanent and acentered

64 Ibid., p. 86. 65 and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 25. 20

fashion. Significant for our discussion is the fact that “a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”66 Therefore, although Deleuze and Guattari write that “every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed,”67 let us follow through the logic of rhizome as middle to the end and draw a more subtle conclusion. Love is between subject and asubjective becoming, between an individual body and a depersonalizing body without organs.

Love is an occurrence in the night.68 In Lover’s , Barthes notes that the amorous subject experiences two distinct types of night in an alternate way. To borrow a distinction from the mystic John of the Cross, there are the night of “being in the shadows” (estar en tinieblas) and the night of “being in the dark” (estar a oscuras).69 The first night is formed around the ignorance of desire. One does not know what one wants. One is in search of the object of one’s desire, but attachment to things leads one into confusion and chaos. One is in the middle of blind desire. But there is another night. On the second night, one is involved in a calm meditation on the other as the other is. Although desire is still operative, one is not attempting to grasp the object of desire. Suspending interpretation and embracing meaninglessness, one is “sitting simply and calmly in the dark interior of love.”70 What is notable here is that, for the amorous subject as well as John, “the second night envelops the first and the Darkness illuminates the Shadows.”71 It is not day that illuminates night. In the amorous night, it is the darkness that illuminates the shadows. No bright exit is required from the impasse of love, since love is an alternation between dark night and shadowy night.

66 Ibid. Deleuze and Guattari take their cues from Kafka, who writes, “those things which occur to me, occur to me not from the root up but rather only from somewhere about their middle. Let someone then attempt to seize them,” adding that “it’s not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you’ll see that everything changes” (p. 23). This applies to the problematic of love as an in-between. 67 Ibid., p. 35. 68 For instance, Juliet proclaims as follows: Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, That runaway’s eyes may wink, and Romeo Leap to these arms untalked of and unseen. Lovers can see to do their amorous rites By their own beauties; or if love be blind, It best agrees with night. Come, civil night…(Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 2) 69 , A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, 1978, p. 171. 70 Ibid., p. 172. 71 Ibid., p. 172. 21

In one of his interviews in his bio-documentary film Derrida, Derrida poses a question on love.72 For Derrida, love can be approached through the question of the difference between “who” and “what.” Does one’s love aim at another as an irreplaceable, absolute singularity or something as a prescriptible property, quality, or image, like beauty, intelligence, or personality? If love is the movement of the heart, then this heart is afflicted by the split between who and what. Suppose that one falls in love with another because another is like this or like that, possessing a particular property that attracts one. Beginning with an attraction to that property, love comes to an end precisely because of that property. It may turn out that the beloved does not have what the lover loved, what the lover thought the beloved had. At this point, the lover revokes his love, disappointed at and disillusioned about the fact that the beloved does not merit his love. Love begins with “you are like this or like that,” and ends with “you are not like this or like that,” losing sight of “you are who you are.” The heart of love is fractured in an irredeemable way, since love is between who and what.

In The Way of Love, Irigaray explores the grounds for love based on the respect for difference and alterity. Particularly notable is the way she engages with the declaration of love, ‘I love you.’ For Irigaray, ‘I love you’ prevents the construction of a relation between two subjects by reducing the other’s subjectivity through the logic of possession and absorption. Moreover, oblivious to the asymmetrical difference that characterizes love, ‘I love you’ demands a necessary return of love by imposing an obligation on the beloved. ‘I love you’ implies not only ‘I take you’ but also ‘you should love me.’ Here, Irigaray offers a new formulation of love: “I love to you” (j’aime à toi). If we read the relation between the transitive verb and the direct object in ‘I love you’ (je t’aime), we see an irreducible separation between the subject and the other in ‘I love to you’. The ‘to’ prevents the reduction of the other to the lover’s object and guarantees the freedom of the other as another subject. But then this does not mean that I now revolve around you indirectly, taking you as an indirect object. Nor does it mean that I wander around as prey to your love, or vice versa. Rather, ‘I love to you’ promotes the respect for both my subjectivity and your subjectivity and the acknowledgement of the difference between us. It declares an intersubjective love based on the respect for difference. Irigaray writes, “it is, rather, around myself that I have to revolve in order to maintain the to you thanks to the return to me. Not with my prey–you become mine–but with the intention of respecting my nature, my history, my intentionality, while also respecting

72 Derrida, dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Zeitgeist Films, 2002. 22

yours.”73 Irigaray claims that the love of wisdom as nurtured by the phallogocentric must be transformed into the wisdom of love. According to the wisdom of love, love is between two subjects, who declare “I love to you” with respect for the to between you and I.

In The Coming Community, Agamben examines love as the experience of “whatever singularity.” According to Agamben, “love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is.”74 Love is not an attachment to a particular property, which entails a reduction of the beloved one into the lover’s property. At the same time, love does not aim at a general , which would result in either fanciful love or casual dating. Love is addressed to the beloved one’s “being-such” with all of his/her characteristics. Among these characteristics, some might be adorable and others might be detestable or even enigmatic for the lover, but the loved one is singular precisely because of his/her clandestine characteristics. Notably, the notion of whatever singularity is also expanded into the realm of politics, more specifically the realm of a political community. Agamben writes, “what could be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) nor by the simply absence of conditions (a negative community, such as that recently proposed in France by ), but by belonging itself?”75 In a revolutionary mass movement, we see a temporary formation of a community in which members who are disparate in terms of sex, status, and religion make themselves into a cohesive unity with a recognizable slogan. The logic of this community is based neither on the particular conditions of belonging nor on the absolute dismissal of belonging, but on belonging itself. In this regard, whatever singularity articulates the possibility of the intersection between love and politics. Since Chapter 3 discusses this issue, let us limit ourselves to confirming two things that whatever singularity tells us about love as an in- between. Love is between the particular and the general, and love is between love itself and

73 , The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček, New York: Continuum, 2002, p. 110. 74 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 2. 75 Ibid., p. 85. 23

politics in a porous way.

These constitute a brief genealogy of the instances of love as an in-between in Western thought. Without doubt, the list is not complete, for the problematic remains inexhaustible. Moving onto the literary field, the list may be innumerably expanded.76 The underlying motivation for the reconstruction of this genealogy of love does not lie in presenting the historical paradigm of love or reducing love to the general notion of in-betweenness. As in Carver’s story, the point is rather to emphasize that love is intrinsically elusive to theory and knowledge. While theory and knowledge tend to provide their object with a clear definition as if we know what we are talking about, no instance in the list is equivalent to a definition of love. Rather, all of the instances should be taken as ill-sayings about love. As an in-between, love is open to the indefinite and closed to the definite. To use the Lacanian triad, presenting a definition of love would mean closing the endless symbolic play of signifiers within an imaginary totality. But love as the real is impossible to define, because it is located between signifiers, in the gap of the symbolic where the imaginary remains inoperative. Indeed, we do not know what we are talking about when we are talking about love. And this is also true of the authors who have been invoked above.

As soon as one might advocate a prescriptive and evaluative theory of love (as in Descartes and Spinoza’s “reason” or Kierkegaard’s “repetition”), one immediately witnesses the factor that constitutes an intrinsic obstacle to prescription and evaluation (as in Descartes and Spinoza’s “passion” or Kierkegaard’s “recollection”). But this does not mean that what is at stake is not some of the binary relation through the reevaluation of the underrepresented term, since the deconstructive movement could be already at work and even explicitly affirmed (as in Freud’s love as the indistinguishability of ego and object despite the

76 To invoke just a few of the remarkable literary formulations about the amorous in-betweenness: For Heinrich von Kleist, love is, to use an ironic wordplay in German, between Küsse (kisses) and Bisse (bites). Asking deliriously whether she has bitten her lover, Achilles, to death, Penthesilea states, “It was a mistake. Kisses (Küsse), bites (Bisse), they rhyme, and whoever rightly loves from the heart, can easily take one for the other” (Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea, cited in J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 40). For Emily Brontë, love is between the foliage in the woods and the eternal rocks beneath. Catherine states, “My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees – my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath – a source of little visible delight, but necessary” (Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, New York: Penguin Classics, 1995, p. 82). For Fyodor Dostoevsky, love is between fancy and action, which we will come back to later in Chapter 4 (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff, New York: Penguin Classics, 1993). For Milan Kundera, love is between weight and lightness (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim, London: Faber and Faber, 1999).

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love for object as developmentally more mature than the love for ego). Considering that in case the aporeitic in-betweenness of love is explicitly affirmed (as in Kant’s “between sociability and unsociability and in Hegel’s “between separation and unification”), it soon gets allayed by the solutions based on teleology (Kant) or dialectic (Hegel), which begs the question whether the aporia remains indelible and irremediable. In fact, both teleology and dialectic do not always play a crucial role, because sometimes what is at stake is an alternation tout court (as in Barthes’ love undulating between two nights). In order to break down the presupposed theoretico-ethical grounds implied in common language, even a new formulation of love is performed (as in Irigaray). There is no delimiting the theoretical boundary of love because the field of love and other fields (such as Nietzsche and Heidegger’s art or Agamben’s politics of whatever singularity) are interpenetrative. Even the doctrine founded on divine providence and transcendence cannot erase the of amorous in-betweenness (as in Augustine’s cupiditas and caritas), which might signal the non-divine absoluteness of love.

In sum, what this reconstruction of genealogy shows is that love cannot become an object of theory with a clear definition, and that it is actually by facing this difficulty that the thinking of love could persist until now, tirelessly engaging in an ill-saying of love. Love as the problematic of in-betweenness keeps coming back, endowing the thinking of love with new frames and concepts and making an exhaustive theory of love doomed to failure.

Love as an in-between forces thinking not only to become anti-theoretical but also to engage with a singular ethics, an ethics that is susceptible to the inconsistencies of love. Love provides for the consistency of thinking only to keep an original inconsistency unresolved by thinking. Moreover, love makes thinking stay outside any desire for hierarchy, insofar as there is no reason why this type of love is superior to that type of love, and typology, insofar as classification of the types of love only turns into the privileging of a certain type of love, as is often revealed in the case in which the distinction between eros and agape ultimately leads to the assertion of the superiority of agape to eros, as a religious dogma. The ethics of the thinking of love rather lies in sticking to the troubles and paradoxes in love. As Nancy writes,

Charity and pleasure, emotion and pornography, the neighbor and the infant, the love of lovers and the love of God, fraternal love and the love of art, the kiss, 25

passion, friendship. … To think love would thus demand a boundless generosity toward all these possibilities, and it is this generosity that would command reticence: the generosity not to choose between loves, not to privilege, not to hierarchize, not to exclude. … Love in its singularity, when it is grasped absolutely, is itself perhaps nothing but the indefinite abundance of all possible loves, and an abandonment to their dissemination, indeed to the disorder of these explosions. The thinking of love should learn to yield to this abandon: to receive the prodigality, the collisions, and the contradictions of love, without submitting them to an order that they essentially defy.77

Love is between generosity and reticence, so that it bars any hierarchy and exclusion. The in- betweenness of love implies that the arche of the thinking of love lies only in staying true to the anarchy in love. The order of the thinking of love emerges only with the elaboration on the disorder in love.

At this point, the purpose of this thesis appears more specific. If the local purpose is to intervene in scholarship on Lacan and Badiou, its global purpose is to examine love through the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou, to examine love as what situates itself between Lacan and Badiou. In other words, this thesis attempts to intervene in the above genealogy of the thinking of love with the pair of Lacan and Badiou. What is at stake is to reformulate and expand the problematic of love as an in-between with “between Lacan and Badiou” as a singular case. Of course, one can find the trace of love as an in-between in both Lacan and Badiou. In the session of December 7, 1960, Lacan wrote a line in Greek that can be rendered as follows: “Redoubled desire is love, but redoubled love turns into delusion.”78 Here, love is between desire and delusion. For Badiou’s part, he, for instance, deconstructs the Platonic distinction between Aphrodite Urania (heavenly love) and Aphrodite Pandemos (common love). Love is a hard labor, between the sublime and the trivial. But our claim is that a more interesting and notable consequence can be drawn when one puts love somewhere between Lacan and Badiou because examining love from somewhere between Lacan and Badiou implies a lot of things. It implies examining love from somewhere between the real and truth,

77 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Shattered Love,” The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Lisa Garbus and Simona Sawhney, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 83. 78 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VIII: Transference, 1960–1961, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans, Bruce Fink, Cambridge: Polity, 2015, p. 403. 26

between act and event, between the sinthome and the idea, between the subject of signifier and the subject of truth, between fantasy and happiness, between jouissance and true life, between the discourse of the analyst and emancipatory politics, between antiphilosophy and philosophy, among other things. Considering that the task of thinking of love is not to repress its problematic gap of in-betweenness but rather to reveal it, this thesis contends that the “between Lacan and Badiou” serves as a tool to rethink the paradoxes and troubles of love rather than to resolve and overcome them. Engulfed by the problematic of the amorous in- betweenness, this thesis chooses the “between Lacan and Badiou” to grapple with the amorous in-betweenness. With the “between Lacan and Badiou,” we hope to demonstrate in a new way that we do not know what we talk about when we talk about love, exposing the aporia of love more rigorously and incisively.

Until now, we have discussed the “what” and “why” of this thesis. Let us now move on to the “how.” In fact, the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou is not just our subject matter. It constitutes the core of the methodology of this thesis. Before discussing whether this can serve as a legitimate methodology and whether there must be a more orthodox form of contextualization or historicization, let us first flesh out what we mean by the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou.

The relationship between Badiou and Lacan organizes a common front, constitutes a violent contention, and provokes a plane of possibility from which new problematics could emerge in an impersonal way. In sum, there is a complex interlacing of Badiou and Lacan, such that one might be tempted to invoke “Bacan” as a virtual conceptual figure. Let us break down this interlacing into three parts, all of which will be employed in this thesis in one way or another.

First, there is a conversation between Lacan and Badiou that is posed by Badiou himself―a retrospective Badiouian construction of Bacan. For instance, let us refer to the phrase in Lacan’s Seminar XX: “what makes up for the sexual relationship [qua nonexistent] is, quite precisely, love.”79 To “make up for (suppléer à)” implies the act of filling up a hole. Because a hole and a hole plug are disparate, one could pose that love and sexual relationship have distinct dimensions. In “The Scene of Two,” Badiou follows through this idea by identifying sexuality with being, love with event. This clear distinction, which is not present in Lacan, is introduced because, for Badiou, love begins with an evental encounter that disrupts the

79 Lacan, SXX, p. 45. 27

solipsistic One, and proceeds to a faithful construction of the Two. However, the problem is that Badiou is decontextualizing Lacan here, as Lacan’s formulation relates to courtly love: “What is courtly love? It is a highly refined way of making up for the absence of the sexual relationship”80; furthermore, this operation of “making up for” is regarded as a trickery (feinte), for it “elegantly pulls off” the sexual non-relationship. Therefore, while Lacan (or, as we will see, one line of thought in Lacan) regards love as a pretext to cover up the non- relation as the fundamental constituent of sexuality, Badiou focuses more on love in and against sexuality. Here, an orthodox might retort that this conversation is predetermined by the philosopher who extrapolates something illegitimately. However, it is still the case that Lacan accepts a categorical distinction between sex and love in Seminar XX: “When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex.”81 In this regard, we can recognize that among multiple lines of thought in the Lacanian orientation, Badiou chooses a certain line of thought and develops it. But the Badiouianized Lacan can be refuted from the perspective of a certain Lacanianism (one could refer to the dispute between Badiou and Žižek). And this will be certainly followed by Badiou’s retort, for Badiou is actually sticking to Lacan’s distinction between sexuality and love. Thus, we reach the pros and cons of the first part of interlacing. Although this part of interlacing is set up by Badiou, it can show us a controversial point between Lacan and Badiou in sharp relief.

Secondly, there are certain notions that are commonly used in Lacan and Badiou. Let us briefly discuss the real and truth. In Seminar XVII, Lacan addresses “the impotence of truth” and “the power of the impossible [the real]” (picked out by Jacques-Alain Miller) in two consecutive sessions, based on Freud’s observation that “the analytic relation is founded on the love of truth [Wahrheitsliebe] and on the recognition of realities [Realität].”82 In the first session, Lacan points out that the love of truth comes down to the love of weakness, insofar as truth hides castration that constitutes the original weakness of speaking beings.83 A philosophical love of truth is misleading and misplaced if it is blind to the fact that speaking beings are above all castrated by language. Whoever claims to love truth should turn to the

80 Ibid., p. 69. 81 Ibid., p. 25. 82 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg, New York: Norton, 2007, p. 165. 83 “The love of truth is the love of this weakness whose veil we have lifted, it’s the love of what truth hides, which is called castration. … That there is a love of weakness is no doubt the essence of love” (SXVII, p. 52). 28

love of castration as speaking beings’ inevitable condition. This redefinition of the love of truth then leads to giving attention to the power of the real in the next session. Here, refashioning the Freudian notion of reality into his notion of the real, Lacan manifestly puts the real before truth. Lacan notes that while truth is an intriguing deception that the analyst should be careful about, only the real, which is both an opportunity and a risk, can subvert a master discourse such as philosophy. In sum, refashioning Freud’s quote through the claim that the love of truth is suspect unless it reveals impotence and that the recognition of reality gives way to the paradoxical power of the real, Lacan here pits the real against truth in an antagonistic way.

This is not the case for Badiou, however. For Badiou, the real and truth are not only interrelated, but also inseparable. Truth is not, as classical doctrine argues, correspondence between reality and proposition, thing and word. In Being and Event, truth is a generic multiplicity that is indiscernible from the perspective of the encyclopedic knowledge. Truth constitutes the real as that which the symbolic order cannot classify and identify. Logics of Worlds supplements this ontological definition with the logical definition of truth as the evental consequences unfolded by the subject who holds the real points in the world. Truth is fabricated out of subjective involvement in the real. In this regard, the real and truth are not opposed, and the real does not outdo truth, either. Rather, the real is either equivalent to truth or integrated into truth as its risky yet positive constituent. Of course, Badiou does not simply disregard the Lacanian aspect of the real. For instance, in , Badiou notes that the real is “the source of both horror and enthusiasm, simultaneously lethal and creative.”84 But even this ambivalence of the real can be looked upon as a Badiouian extrapolation because the real for Lacan is the purely formal deadlock of the impossible with regard to the symbolic logic. In fact, as soon as creation is evoked, one is already implicated within the Badiouianized real. When the real is reconsidered through the Badiouian problematic, the real entertains a positive relation to truth.

In this regard, notions such as the real and truth, which are commonly employed by Lacan and Badiou, can serve as material to constitute the second part of the interlacing. It is as if one could elicit a virtual dialogue between the two authors with these overlapping notions.85

84 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano, Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2007, p. 32. 85 The authors of Lacan Deleuze Badiou mainly take this approach in their book by selecting four central 29

Concerning pros and cons of this approach, although it can serve as a useful tool, it limits itself to a static analysis of the commonalities and differences between the two authors and does not measure up to a dynamic interlacing of the two.

Finally, the third part of the interlacing focuses on how Badiou seems internally split into Badiou and Lacan and how the same also goes for Lacan. Here, Lacan and Badiou vanish into the spectral fragments that frustrate any identificatory labeling. Badiou’s early ethics in his Theory of the Subject appropriately illustrates this point. The revolutionary subject has four subjective qualities of anxiety, courage, superego, and justice. Anxiety and courage relate to short-term subjectivization, while superego and justice relate to a long-term subjective process. What matters here is that it is only in tension with anxiety and superego that courage and justice can exist, for anxiety and superego do not simply belong to the symbolic order. Anxiety and superego reveal “too-much-of-the real,” paradoxically supporting the exceptional brilliance of courage and justice. In sum, Badiou’s early ethics was able to constitute itself only by being interlaced with Lacanian ideas. Where there is Badiou, Bacan is already shown.

But, inversely, it is also the case that Lacan strongly anticipates Badiou. As an example, let us refer to the last phrase in Lacan’s Television: “The interpretation must be prompt in order to meet the terms of interpretation (entreprêt). From that which perdures through pure loss to that which does nothing but bet from the father to the worst (De ce qui perdure de perte pure àce qui ne parie que du père au pire).”86 For Lacan, the dogmatism in philosophy lies in its unwitting ignorance or defensive suturing of lack, loss, and hole. What is unthought in every philosophy is that the truth of the subject, being castrated by language, lies in the lost object. However, what is at stake in an analytic interpretation is not just the recognition of loss. It advances into a risky wager on the passage from the father to the worst. While the father incarnates the true-saying as the phallic function that fills up the hole, the worst goes to the contingent encounter with the hole as the sexual non-relationship. If “one can just as well bypass it [the Name-of-the-Father], on the condition that one make use of it,”87 isn’t it

notions of “contemporary,” “truth,” “event,” and “time.” See A. J. Bartlett, , and Jon Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. 86 Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copject, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, New York: Norton, 1990, p. 46 (translation slightly modified); hereafter referenced as Television. 87 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIII: The Sinthome, 1975–1976, ed. Jacques-Alain 30

because the father himself is lost (le père perte)? When one has a malfunctioning father, one has to navigate through the perilous path of the worst. In order for the talking cure to be practiced, the ill-saying [mal dire] is not enough. Interpretation aims at the production of the worst-saying [pire dire,] insofar as only the worst-saying as the most painful and laborious saying can articulate the subject’s underrepresented truth contained in the object a. When one focuses on the fact that the object a puts philosophy in trouble, one witnesses an antagonism between Badiou and Lacan. But Lacan’s passage in question not only contains the divergent point with Badiou (object a vs. philosophy), but also suggests the convergent, if not fully confluent, point with Badiou, for both the Lacanian worst and the Badiouian event commonly constitute deviations from preestablished norms, albeit in distinct contexts–the analytic work and the truth-procedure. Put simply, Lacan unwittingly cleared the way for Badiou. Where there is Lacan, Bacan is already emerging.

In sum, what we mean by the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou consists of three parts: the dialogue between the two that is retroactively constructed by Badiou, the conceptual analysis of the two based on commonly used terms, and the mutual co-implication of the two that surfaces in an unexpected way. All of these constitute the basic methodology of this thesis, and they will be employed throughout the thesis depending on the context.88

Now, let us address the question about whether this is a valid methodology. In general, historicization and contextualization serve as useful tools for to frame a discourse. For instance, psychoanalysis is not the bearer of some universal and eternal , since it was born with modern and capitalism. And herein lies the significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis. The Oedipus structure of father-mother- baby does not bear transhistorical validity. It merely reflects a presupposed image of thought about psychoanalysis as a theater where desire is repressed by the symbolic law, rather than as a factory where the real desire (“desiring machines”) is produced beyond the law. Thus, they call for the necessity of “schizoanalysis” where the flux of desire is affirmed. In this regard, historicization can not only serve as a critical apparatus but also articulate new concepts and problematics that have been underrepresented before.

Miller, trans. Adrian Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2017, p. 116. 88 For instance, I employ the three types of interlacing in consecutive order in Chapter 4, introducing Badiou’s reconstruction of Lacanian antiphilosophy, organizing a dialogue between the two with certain terms (the real and the truth, antiphilosophical act and philosophical operation), and finally presenting the terms (sinthomatic truth and archiamorous act) that can clarify the strong interlacing of the two. 31

The question is whether it is necessary to implement such an operation in attempts to address the Lacanian love. First of all, the Lacanian love is not anchored in a specific historicity. It is rather constituted by an assemblage of heterogeneous materials and discrete contexts, such as the investigation of the traditional paradigm of love like courtly love, the critique of the Freudian eros, topological formalism like knot theory, the historical phenomenon of the fall of paternal authority, the clinical situation of transference, the invention of a new concept of the object a, and so forth, all of which are addressed in different parts of this thesis. While it is futile to totalize all of these contexts into a single whole, it is also impossible to make a distinction between historicity and transhistoricity. Interestingly enough, if there is such a thing as a transhistorical structure of love that needs to be critically engaged, it would be philosophical discourse on love, as understood and redefined by Lacan himself. Therefore, this thesis suggests that one turn to Badiou, because it is Badiou more than any other philosopher who reinvents the traditional, philosophical discourse on love in his polemic with Lacan. Put differently, there is no better methodological tool to contextualize the Lacanian love as the assemblage of decontextualized materials than the Badiouian philosophy. Herein lies the necessity to invoke the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou.

A similar situation arises as well when one attempts to contextualize the Badiouian love. In Badiou, one can find the critique of the transhistorical structure (the family) that affects love, for an amorous truth starts where the existing structure stumbles. To contextualize this argument, one could turn to the fact that Badiou remains faithful to the significance of May ’68 in which family protected by authoritative patriarchy was regarded as “rotten structure.” However, apart from Engel’s critique of the family as an apparatus to sustain private property, it is not difficult to find out that love has been always at odds with family. For instance, Roman lyric poet Catullus writes,

Let us live and love, my Lesbia. Here’s A copper coin for the criticism Of elderly men with exalted morals. … Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred, Another thousand, a second hundred, … until we ourselves lose track of the score, confusing the kissing count as a sly 32

method of thwarting the evil eye.89

Love has always been reproached in the words of the elderly, and the amorous life can begin only when the amorous subjects overcome the moralizing gossips that pay attention only to the preservation of existing structures.90 What matters in the critique of the family and the words of the old is not a generational gap, a beautification of adultery, or the against the family institution itself. Its significance lies in the evocation for the need to analyze any type of law that makes lovers retreat from unfolding their amorous process. The point is that love is open to decay and insincerity, when lovers stop reinventing the amorous life, as has often occurred in many familial lives. Love can live only when it does not choose to be protected by the pretext of family. Concerning the words of the old, one could state that they are equivalent to the Lacanian notion of desire of the Other. In unfolding their amorous process, lovers are incessantly involved in the unconscious law formed by the Other’s desire, and the amorous life depends on how one deals with one’s inherited unconscious law and interacts with each other outside the leverage of this law. Otherwise, each partner becomes a sacrifice or marionette of the other’s unconscious law. In this regard, while the critique of the family can be certainly contextualized through Badiou’s fidelity to May ’68, its significance can stand out much better when it is combined with Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The same goes for the other side of Badiou’s take–this time historical rather than transhistorical–concerning the situation of contemporary society and family. While patriarchy no longer dominates society and family, the problem today is that patriarchy as the symbolic authority is replaced by the real power of sex and capital. Boys and girls remain un- symbolized (“de-initiated”) today in the absence of any reliable authority and thus vulnerable to the disorienting effect of sex and capital, which threatens the Badiouian truth of love. Here again, what is required for the analysis of the subjects who are born into de-patriarchialized yet pathological society and family is the Lacanian psychoanalysis. Therefore, while one can locate both historical and transhistorical approaches to love with Badiou, as with Lacan, the most useful way to support Badiou’s point is to pass through Lacan.

In sum, the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou is important as a methodological

89 Gaius Valerius Catullus, The Complete Poetry of Catullus, trans. David Mulroy, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, p. 6. 90 See Chapter 4 in which we discuss the reason why André Gorz’s mother was against the lovers’ marriage. 33

contextualization not only because their take on love blurs the distinction between the historical and the transhistorical, but also because, while Badiou is conducive to focalizing the decontextualized assemblage of the Lacanian love, Lacan is conducive to supplementing the consistent principle of the Badiouian love.

Let me describe the trajectory that this thesis is following. In Chapter 1, I address love by way of mathematics because mathematics plays a central role in the way Lacan and Badiou revolutionize the thinking of love. If there is a most conspicuous aspect that characterizes love between Lacan and Badiou, it is mathematics. Against this backdrop, I show how love can be approached using sexuation formulas, numericity, logical modality, topology, and knot theory. I conclude this chapter by discussing some consequences that can be drawn from Lacan and Badiou’s mathematical approaches to love but remain implicit and unexplored by them, introducing the concept of amorous void.

In Chapter 2, I address love in relation to politics. Any thinking of love encounters politics as a ticklish field because of love’s obscure relationship to politics. Love appears both revolutionary and anti-revolutionary, serving power as much as rupturing power. The link between love and politics is significant because politics constitutes the problematic field in which Lacan and Badiou entertain not only a violent opposition (conservative enlightenment vs radical emancipation) but also a complementary partnership (analysis of status quo and the idea of a new world). Against this backdrop, I address problems such as the contemporary crisis of love, the reinvention of philia, the amorous community, the link between humanity and love. I conclude this chapter by emphasizing the enigmatic link between politics and love, introducing the concept of amorous unpower (impouvoir).

In Chapter 3, I address love in terms of Lacanian antiphilosophy and Badiouian philosophy, which marks one of the most salient forms of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. Analyzing the characteristics of Lacanian antiphilosophy as presented by Badiou in his seminar on Lacan, I organize the dialogue between antiphilosophy and philosophy by referring to the short novel, as a facilitator for the dialogue, Tony Takitani by the Japanese writer Murakami Haruki. After showing how love is involved in both psychoanalytic symptom and philosophical truth, both analytic act and philosophical operation, I conclude this chapter by introducing the concepts of sinthomatic truth and archiamorous acts.

In Chapter 4, I read Letter to D: A Love Story by the French philosopher André Gorz and his 34

lover Dorine. This letter constitutes a singular example of love as situated between Lacan and Badiou to the extent that one might name it a Bacanian love. I address how Gorz and Dorine weave both the Lacanian side and the Badiouian side into their exceptional amorous itinerary, from their encounter and marriage, through their struggle against the symptom and power, to their joint suicide. I conclude this chapter by presenting the ideas of the Bacanian love.

In Chapter 5: Conclusion, I revisit the theme of love as an in-between in relation to intermediate daemons in Plato’s Epinomis, proposing the interlacing of the analyst as a participant of pain and the philosopher as a discerner of truth. Developing the problematic that this interlacing provokes, I finally argue that the place of the lover is a placeless in- between in which the lover both recognizes the enigma of love by encountering the loveless that is indiscernible from love and commits to the principle of love by faithfully creating an infinitely self-surpassing love.

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Chapter 1 Mathematics and Love

Mathematics is the science of the letter. Without referring to any external reality, mathematics constitutes a self-referential structure of what the letter is capable of. It is founded on the power of the letter to logically formalize the sui generis mathematical reality rather than represent the given reality. As Lacan puts, mathematics “takes its subject from a saying rather than from any reality, provided this saying is summoned from the properly logical sequence.”91 Contrary to the widely held opinion that nothing is far away from romatic words than mathematical saying, Lacan and Badiou claims that mathematics enables us to think of love as something that is distinct from psychological feeling, biochemical hormones, sociopolitical constructs, anthropological customs, and phenomenological meaning. Lacan and Badiou’s thoughts on love are rigorously formal.

Havind that said, what is notable in their formal approaches is that they also acknowledge the limit of mathematical formalization. They address the problem of love by going beyond mathematical approach through mathematical approach. For Lacan, mathematics is not a self- sufficient logical saying; it is a logical saying that grapples with its own incompleteness, inconsistency, indemonstrability, and undecidability.92 The reverse side of logical formalization in mathematics is the unformalizable, the impossible as the real. Love can be logically considered, but the real of love remains impenetrable to logic. Badiou, for his part, also emphasizes the necessity of formalism to think of love as an immanent truth, not as a religious dogma. “What we need to invent is something like a mathematics of love.”93 All the same, a philosopher worthy of its name would not stop at the invention of a mathematics of love. She would go further and launch into a meta-mathematical meditation on the truth of love. A philosophical thought on love is both mathematical and meta-mathematical. As Badiou nicely puts, “I hope that I say nothing imprecise in mathematics, but also nothing that

91 Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Seuil, 2001, p. 452. 92 Ibid. 93 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano, London: Continuum, 2009, p. 530; hereafter referenced as LW. 36

is mathematically proffered.”94

In sum, there is a certain relationship between mathematics and love both in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Badiouian philosophy. This relationship is based on the hypothesis that love in its singularity can be characterized by mathematical formalization and its limit. Love reveals itself both through the operation of formalization and the impasse of formalization. Love can be articulated through forms such as function, numbers, modality, and topology, though it calls these forms into question. The relationship between mathematics and love resides where the possibility and impossibility of formalization meet. Mathematics does not render love dry and insipid by calculating and rationalizing it, nor renders it transcendental and mystical by worshipping and glorifying it. Mathematics leads us into a formal approach to love with its irreducible limit.

In fact, this approach is quite classical, if one refers to the Platonic analogy of the divided line in Republic. Beyond eikasia that correlates with the visible and pistis that correlates with the imagery of the visible, Plato regards dianoia that correlates with mathematics as a superior method to reality. Thus, “let no one ignorant of geometry enter the academy”. Yet, there is another dimension, noesis that correlates with ideas, which is superior to dianoia. One is thus supposed to move through mathematics to ideas. However, neither Lacan nor Badiou accept the Platonic idea (although Badiou reappropriates the notion of idea). Rather, both of them are convinced that love is elusive and heterogeneous to idea as the pre-established regime of knowledge. Love punctures a hole in the existing regime of knowledge. They thus present their own terms, the real for Lacan and truth for Badiou. Badiou once wrote that “philosophy and psychoanalysis can be compossible, since the double paradoxical conditions of mathematics and love cross over.”95 They are compossible, since both philosophy and psychoanalysis take a formal approach to love. Nevertheless, they are compossible only with a violent dissensus, for Lacan focuses on the real of love, and Badiou focuses the truth of love while partially accepting the problematic of the real of love.

This chapter analyzes how Lacanian psychoanalysis and Badiouian philosophy converge and diverge in their formal approach to love. For this, I will discuss the five issues that are

94 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels, London: Continuum, 2009, pp. 209–210; hereafter referenced as TS. 95 Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran, London: Continuum, 2008, p. 208; hereafter referenced as C. 37

dispersed in Lacan and Badiou’s works in a reconstructive way. The five issues are sexuation formulas, numericity, modal logic, topology, and knot theory. In the last section, I will argue how their formal approaches allow us to affirm not just the real or truth of love, but the void of love.

Sexuation Formulas For both Lacan and Badiou, the problem of sexuation is neither naturally deterministic nor culturally constructed. Sexuation is a matter of the meaningless real that can be addressed using a logical function. Yet, they elaborate different theories of sexuation. If Lacan revolves around the phallic function (Φx) of castration to articulate the sexual non-relationship, Badiou revolves around the humanity function (Hx) of truth to articulate love as a generic, universal truth. Let us first discuss the Lacanian side and its implications for love.

It is well-known that Aristotelian logic developed a categorical proposition, that is composed of the universal affirmative, the universal negative, the particular affirmative, and the particular negative. By refashioning this logical tool, Lacan tackles the problem of sexual difference. The masculine position on the upper left column is constituted by the combination of x x and x x. That is to say, all men are under the effect of the phallic function or castration. Meanwhile, there exists an exceptional entity that is not under the effect of the phallic function. This is drawn from the Freudian mythical father, who possesses every woman in the tribe and thus deprives all his sons of jouissance through the law. The father is the basis of the universal law while he himself is exempt from it. There is “at least one (au mois un)” man who says no to castration, and this man makes all the other men subordinate to castration. “It is starting from there [there exists one (il existe un)] that all the others can 38

function.”96 The feminine position on the upper right column is constituted by the combination of x x and x x. Not all women are under the effect of the phallic function. Meanwhile, there is no woman who is not under the effect of the phallic function. Here, one might get the impression that these two quantifiers are contradictory, but the notion of “not-all” dissolves this impression. x x does not imply that there are some women who are not under the effect of the phallic function. As x x indicates, the feminine position does not permit an exceptional entity that is outside the phallic function. The feminine position recognizes that the belief about an exceptional, uncastrated entity is nothing but a myth. The absence of exception leads to the critique of all as supported by the phallic function. More radical is the fact that the phallic function is not simply discarded but delimited for the feminine position: “What is this not-all? . . . contrary to the function of the particular negative, namely, that there are some of them which are not so [castrated], it is impossible to extract from the not-all this affirmation. It is reserved to the not-all to indicate that somewhere and nothing more, she has a relationship to the phallic function.”97 Not-all implies that woman is under the effect of the phallic function in a partial and incomplete way. She only has a local (“somewhere”), not global, relationship to the phallic function. She neither affirms nor negates the phallic function, and is neither subordinate to nor exempt from it. Her mode of existence with regard to the phallic function is somewhere between presence and absence. Woman is “not contained in the phallic function without nevertheless being its negation. Her mode of presence is between centre and absence.”98 Woman is undecidable with regard to the phallic function.

Let us take a look at the lower left column. The masculine position is defined by phallic jouissance as $→a. This implies that man does not address woman as the Other, for he reduces the Other to his object of desire, which could satisfy his jouissance. Phallic jouissance is the jouissance of the organ that creates a barrier to the jouissance of the Other. It is masturbatory jouissance of the idiot. “Jouissance, qua sexual, is phallic–in other words, it is not related to the Other as such.”99 Let us also note that $→a amounts to the formula of

96 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XIX: …Ou Pire, 1971–1972, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Seuil, 2011, p. 36. 97 Ibid., January 12, 1971, p. 46. 98 Ibid., March 8, 1972, p. 121. 99 Lacan, SXX, p. 9. 39

fantasy. Phallic jouissance as fantasy implies that there is no such thing as the sexual jouissance of the Other. Rather, there is an unconscious fantasy that enjoys you, as “you do not enjoy the Other sexually … you enjoy the Other mentally … you only enjoy your fantasies … your fantasies enjoy you.”100 In light of the object a as surplus jouissance, phallic jouissance is an attempt to recuperate the lost Thing as mother after accepting the paternal law. Thus, $→a implies that the mother-son relationship is always behind sexual relationship. “Woman serves a function in the sexual relationship only qua mother.”101

On the lower right column, we can see that the feminine position is characterized by the barred Woman. Woman as a universal entity does not exist. More precisely, woman does not exist, for she over-exists with regard to the phallic function. As Lacan specifies, “it’s not because she is not-wholly in the phallic function that she is not there at all. She is not not at all there. She is there in full. But there is something more.”102 If woman’s presence in the phallic function gives her phallic jouissance, this “something more” gives her supplementary jouissance, the Other jouissance. The Other jouissance is a jouissance beyond the phallus. It is unnameable and infinite, as some feminine mystics witness in their ineffable experiences. Starting from Woman, the feminine position is constituted by two types of arrows, which respectively relate to the signifier of the barred Other (S(Ⱥ)) and man as the symbolic Phallus (Φ). Concerning the former (Woman → S(Ⱥ)), Lacan states that “woman is that which has a relationship to that Other.”103 Woman entertains a unique relationship to the real Other, for she recognizes that the Other is marked by the signifier as much as the subject of the signifier. She recognizes that the Other is not self-contained but incomplete, renouncing the fantasy about the Other as consistent substance. The true Otherness is thus not of wholeness but of hole (In linguistic terms, every signifier is differential so that there is no absolute reference). Meanwhile, woman also has a relationship with the Phallus on the side of man (Woman →Φ). The problem is that man does not possess this symbolic authority. This then explicates the structure of the feminine fantasy that woman yearns for the symbolic authority embodied by an omnipotent man. Here, the sexual non-relationship appears as the father-daughter relationship.

100 Lacan, SXIX, March 8, 1972, pp. 112–113. 101 Lacan, SXX, p. 35. 102 Ibid., p. 74. 103 Ibid., p. 81. 40

The sexuation formula thus tells us that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship at least in three senses. First, instead of sexual relationship, there are two asymmetrical jouissances. Whereas phallic jouissance erases the Otherness of the Other, feminine jouissance reaches some ecstatic mystery. “There is no such thing as a sexual relationship because one’s jouissance of the Other taken as a body is always inadequate–perverse, on the one hand, insofar as the Other is reduced to object a, and crazy and enigmatic, on the other.”104 Man is pervert, and woman is psychotic. Sexual relationship is a pathological relation between the pervert and the psychotic.

Second, instead of sexual relationship, there are two unconscious fantasies. Whereas man locates his mother in the place of woman, woman discovers her father in the place of man. “There is no sexual relationship, certainly, except between fantasies.”105 Sexual relationship is a parent-child relationship between lost mother and son, ideal father and daughter. “There is no sexual relationship, except for neighboring generations, namely, the parents on the one hand, the children on the other.”106

Third, instead of sexual relationship, there are two signifiers, ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Contrary to the common belief that sexual relationship is realized through the body, Lacan observes that our body is inscribed by the signifier. “Only signifiers copulate among one another in the unconscious, but the pathematic [pathèmatiques] subjects that result from it in the form of body are led to do the same, they call that fucking.”107 Man and woman as signifiers merely describe sexual non-relationship through the signifier of fucking. Man and woman are pathematic subjects, for they suffer from the effect of the signifier so that they cannot enact a harmonious (pre-symbolic) relationship or complete (non-symbolic) satisfaction through their sexual intercourse. Sexual relationship is a discursive relationship between two signifiers, which provokes the dream about making a bodily relationship. In sum, there is no sexual relation; rather, there are two disparate jouissances. Consequently, there is a relationship only between fantasies or signifiers.

104 Ibid., p. 144. 105 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXV: The Moment to Conclude, 1977–1978, December 20, 1977 (unpublished). 106 Ibid., April 11, 1978 (unpublished). 107 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXII: RSI, 1974–1975, March 11, 1975 (unpublished). 41

Let us now turn to how the thesis of sexual non-relationship is supported by the phallic function. Contrary to the common intuition that we “possess” our body, psychoanalysis notes that we are unaware of and even disoriented by the movement, sound, and smell of our bodies, for a body is asubjective substance of excessive vitality. It is only the signifier that allows us to have a body. Once the operation of the signifier is bracketed, our body is no longer ours. Since a body disorients the subject, a body-to-body relationship is more disorienting to the extent that it is impossible to discern which body obtains jouissance there. Moreover, if the bodily relationship as the irruption of jouissance is truly realized, it provokes mutual destruction, for the body that is enjoyed must be torn into pieces. Sadomasochism would be the clinical name for the actualization of this bodily relationship. “Apart from breaking it [another body] into fragments, it is hard to see what one can really do to another body.”108 The jouissance of the Other’s body, which necessarily usurps my body, is anxiety-provoking. Herein lies the importance of the phallic function. The phallic function does not merely tell us that the relationship between signifiers is more primary than the bodily relation because a body is inscribed by the signifier. It also tells us that the relationship between signifiers is more preferable than the relationship between bodies. It is the phallic function that produces pathematic subjects to ward off the collision of jouissance. In the clinical context, the pathos of the signifier is regarded as more bearable than the jouissance of the body.

This is why Lacan coins one of his neologisms about love, (a)mur–aportmanteau of love (amour) and wall (mur)–with the suggestion of his object a. Love between the two sexes must run across the wall of castration. Castration induced by the phallic function is the key determinant to sexual love. Sexual love is wallove. While this might provide the impression that the phallic function limits or domesticates the possibility of love,109 it is not necessarily the case. Just as the signifier alleviates jouissance, the phallic function should be seen as a mediator between fatal bodily relationship, and not merely as an obstacle. There must be some protector that prevents a direct bodily relationship, which is why the phallic function is inevitably required. “To get a sound [my emphasis] idea of what love is, one should perhaps base oneself on the fact that when it is played out seriously between a man and a woman, it always entails the stake of castration.”110 The point, of course, is not simply that there is such

108 Lacan, SXXII, December 17, 1974 (unpublished). 109 On the contrary, love is “impossible to domesticate” (Autres écrits, p. 197). 110 Jacques Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at Sainte-Anne Hospital, 42

thing as a healthy or sound love. The point is that the Lacanian analytic experience, which observes numerous cases in which love can only follow the logic of pathology, posits castration as a means to put out the fire of jouissance. Sexual love needs to be a love for castration before it is a love for one’s partner. Therefore, the phallic function, which defines sexual difference not through biological organism but through logical positions with regard to castration, makes sexual non-relationship not only logically recognizable but also clinically desirable.

Badiou responds to Lacan in “What is Love?” Unlike Lacan, who mainly supported a close link between sexuality and love while occasionally disassociating the two, Badiou acknowledges that love and sexuality are linked but ultimately separates them. Unlike psychoanalysis, which addresses sexual love, philosophy addresses sexuality only through love. For philosophy, it is not sexuality that conditions and frames love. It is love that creates and produces a transfigured form of sexuality, an amorous sexuality beyond the biological sexuality and castration-induced sexuality. Badiou thus calls into question the Lacanian sexual non-relationship and desire to present love as what exceeds those two. Lacan once wrote that love “makes up for (supléer)” the absence of the sexual relationship. According to Badiou, this idea reduces love to a makeshift decoration to veil sexuality as the real. It belongs to the nihilist conception of love by the French moralists, who argued that love does not exist and sexuality is all that exists. On the contrary, Badiou affirms that love “supplements (supplémenter).”111 In other words, love is a production of truth that is neither a compensation for structural failure nor a repetition of the status quo. Badiou also proposes a clear distinction between desire and love. In fact, Lacan often makes desire and love interchangeable in Seminar XX. Love is the desire to be One. The mainspring of love lies in the amorous signs that provoke desire. By contrast, Badiou affirms that although love must pass through the object of desire, it is ultimately supported by the subject of love. Love, though unable to remove the effect of the Lacanian a, is nevertheless not subordinate to it. The amorous body is not equivalent to the desiring body. As Badiou states, “love does not deal with the same body as desire, even as this body is precisely ‘the same.’”112

Badiou then proposes his own definition of love. He first detaches love from any trans. Adrian Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2017, p. 98. 111 Badiou, C, p. 182. 112 Ibid., p. 190. 43

psychological, empirical, and phenomenological perspectives on the grounds that it is impossible to draw any knowledge of love from the experience of the loving subject. Rather, what is at stake is a logical definition of love. “All the pathos of passion, of error, of jealousy, of sex and of death must therefore be held at a distance. No theme requires more pure logic than that of love.”113 Love thus should be defined in the following axiomatic way: “love as the scene of the Two forms the truth of the disjunction and guarantees the one of humanity.”114

To support this definition, Badiou provides four theses. First, there are two sexuated positions, man and woman, as in Lacan. What is important here is that since philosophy addresses sexuality only through love, it is not the case that the two positions pre-exist. Rather, love establishes the two positions. Secondly, the two positions are totally disjunctive. There is no connection between man and woman. Thirdly, there is no third position. Linking the idea of two disjunctive positions to the idea of the absence of a third position, Badiou argues that the amorous Two is uncountable. The amorous Two exceeds every count. It is the Two as a procedural construction, which Badiou calls “the scene of the Two”. Lastly, there is only one humanity. Humanity here does not refer to anthropological species but the support of the generic procedures, as the trans-human body of truths. H(x) designates that “if a term x is active, or more precisely activated as Subject, in a generic procedure, then it attests that the humanity function exists.”115 The humanity function indicates that every human animal has a chance and potential to become the subject of truth. Since truth is universal, the subject of truth addresses him/herself to humanity. This implies that truth is trans-positional beyond the two sexuated positions. Herein lies the paradox of love: love is a production of truth as the sexual disjunction and an expansion of this truth as an appeal to one humanity. It supports the egalitarian One by means of the pure disjunction. “Although worked over by the disjunction, the situation is exactly as if there is a One. […] In our world, love is of the universality of the true. It elucidates the possibility of universality, because it makes truth of the disjunction.”116 As always, the problem lies in the use of “as if”. Love actualizes the “as if” of humanity. “As if” of the amorous humanity implies that love has an intimate

113 Ibid., p. 183. 114 Ibid., p. 187. 115 Ibid., p. 184. 116 Ibid., pp. 189–190. 44

relationship with politics (we will discuss this problem in Chapter 2).

At this point, Badiou engages with the Lacanian sexuation formula at a deeper level. For Lacan, the different ways of relating to the phallic function and thus the different types of jouissance lead to the absence of sexual relationship. For Badiou, man and woman develop two different knowledges with regard to the disjunctive Two as the truth of love. Man’s knowledge affirms “the nothing of the Two” (rien du Deux), while woman’s knowledge affirms “nothing but the Two” (rien que le Deux).117 In other words, man states that “what will have been true is that we were two and not at all one,” while woman states that “what will have been true is that two we were, and that otherwise we were not.”118 More concretely, man focuses on the logical change from the solipsistic One to the amorous Two. Man attempts to logically demonstrate that there has been a shift from One to Two. Meanwhile, woman focuses on the ontological situation that the scene of the Two has been instituted. Woman aims to discern that Two is purely and simply Two. While these formulas, based on the notion of the Two, are aimed at the critique of Lacan’s inaccessible Two (we will discuss this issue in next section), let us here note that love as truth is both ontological and logical. Love is between an ontological Two and a logical transition into the Two. The amorous Two constitutes the point where being qua being and existence in the world converge and diverge. The amorous Two is the way in which the “onto-logical chimera”119 presents itself.

Finally, Badiou defines man and woman in terms of how each sex relates to H(x) as the knot of the four types of truths. Notable in this definition is the fact that woman reveals a singular link between humanity and love: “The woman position is such that the subtraction of love modifies it with inhumanity for itself. […] The function H(x) can take on value insofar as the amorous generic procedure exists.”120 Woman states that there is no humanity without love. There are four generic procedures for Badiou: art, science, politics, and love. Regardless of one’s biological sex, anyone is a Badiouian woman if he/she regards love as the Truth–the truth that holds together all of the other truths. This can be thought of in terms of the Lacanian sinthome as a fourth ring which holds together the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Without love, the other types of truths, art, science, and politics cannot hold out. Love is

117 Ibid., p. 194. 118 Ibid. 119 Badiou, LW, p. 378. 120 Ibid., p. 195. 45

the Truth of all truths. This implies that anyone who participates in a truth procedure, regardless of the type, is a lover in the Badiouian sense. Love and truth are coextensive. The name of this coextension is precisely philosophy–the love (philia) of truth (sophia). In this regard, a true philosopher, as someone who loves the truth, necessarily occupies the feminine position.

More specifically, while man unfolds H(x) in the way each truth “metaphorizes” the other truths, woman unfolds H(x) in the way love “knots” (another Lacanian overtone) all of the other truths. If man’s relation to H(x) is analytic with the equalized commitment to each truth, woman’s relation to H(x) is synthetic with the conception of love as a singular truth. The formulation of H(x) ultimately aims at the critique of Lacan’s Φ(x) and feminine not-all. For Badiou, (amorous) sexuation is structured in relation to truth, not to language. Man and woman in love become subjects of truth, going beyond their preconstituted identities as speaking animals. Moreover, the way in which woman relates to H(x) shows that love is the guardian of universality and the protector of humanity. If love is unlinked from the other truths, then every truth will disintegrate and humanity itself will thus disappear. There would be a blind power struggle and a cruel survival game among human animals. Badiou concludes that “love is that which, splitting H(x) from Φ(x), returns to women, within the complete range of truth procedures, the universal quantifier.”121 The transition from Φ(x) to H(x) results in the transition of the feminine position from not-all to universality. Therefore, woman is not man’s symptom. Rather, she is the subject of love that summons humanity by organizing a network of truths based on love.

121 Ibid., p. 198. 46

Numericity Lacan once declared that “I am deciding that number forms a part of the real.”122 If this decision is proper, it would be possible to get access to the real of love through number. Let us discuss how Lacan and Badiou engage with this issue.

Lacan’s numerical description of love can be divided into two types. The first one revolves around the a. Lacan develops the logic of the a in which the a is algebraically characterized by the equation 1 / a = 1 + a. To solve the equation, a = 0.618, which is the golden number. Contrary to the classical conception of the golden number as the symbol of harmony, Lacan focuses on the golden number as a means to reveal the disharmony between a and 1. As an irrational number, the a has no commensurable relationship with 1. There is no relation between 1 and a. “No proportion is ever graspable between 1 and a. […] There will never be a copulation of any kind between 1 and a.”123 Throughout his seminars, Lacan related 1 to various ideas such as sexual relationship, symbolic unit, and masculinity. The 1 in question refers to masculinity. As in Badiou’s wordplay, the masculine is “mascul-One (mascul’Une),”124 whereas the feminine is the Other. The a intervenes in the relation between the masculine One and the feminine Other. Since there is no woman (Woman), the Other does not exist; rather, the masculine fantasy makes the sexual Other exist in the form of the a. No matter how hard man attempts to attain a sexual unity by repeating sexual acts, he bumps into the a, which, far from guaranteeing sexual relationship or the jouissance of the body of the Other, provokes the emergence of the fantasy. Thus, love does not concern two sexes who can make One. Instead, it concerns the non-relation between the One and the Other and the fantasmatic relation between the One and a. Let us note that 1 + a = 1.618. In this regard, one could state that Lacanian fantasy makes the numericity of love reside between 1 and 2. Love does not correlate with 1 or 2. It rather correlates with something of the One. The psychoanalytic maxim concerning love is that there is something of the One (Il y a du l’Un).

Something of the One implies both the critique of the One and the analysis of the semblant of

122 Lacan, SXIX, December 8, 1971 (unpublished). 123 Lacan, SXXII, January 21, 1975 (unpublished). 124 Alain Badiou, Lacan: L’antiphilosophie 3, 1994–1995, Paris: Fayard, 2013, p. 68. 47

the One. Since Aristophanes’ myth, love has been considered to be an aspiration to recuperate the originary One. The thesis of sexual non-relationship implies that this originary One as the fusional sexual relationship guaranteed by complete jouissance is originally impossible. “What is known as sexual jouissance is marked and dominated by the impossibility of establishing […] the One of the relation ‘sexual relationship.’”125 At the same time, psychoanalysis does not simply dismiss the problematic of the One but engages with it by revealing how the relationship between masculine One and the feminine Other can be analyzed as the effect of the masculine fantasy based on the operation of the a. Psychoanalysis addresses the pseudo One by debunking that the One is nothing but the product of fantasy. In sum, the thesis of something of the One aims at the revealation of the Onelessness of love through the analysis of the fantasmatic One. What does psychoanalysis tell about the amorous Two, then? This leads us to turn to the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou because this is where Badiou diverges from Lacan by articulating the amorous Two.

Before that, let us first discuss how Lacan’s numerical description of love revolves around the Two. With the emergence of the problematic of the Borromean knot, love cannot make the Two. In the Borromean knot, three rings are interlocked so that they form one consistent knot. There is no “two by two linking.” In the Borromean knot, one ring goes above or below the other ring at every point, so that they are not linked. If one unties a certain ring from the other two rings, then the other two rings are also untied, for they are superimposed, not linked. In this regard, contrary to the numerical order, three precedes two in the Borromean knot: “The Two can be nothing other than what falls together from the Three.”126 Several months later, Lacan articulates once again: “The Borromean knot illustrates for us that the Two is only produced from the junction of the One to the Three.”127 In the Borromean knot, the fact that three rings form one knot is more primary than the (non-)relationship between two rings. By participating in becoming three-in-one, each ring makes the other two rings hold in a state of unlinking. 2 comes from the conjunction of 1 and 3. Here, Lacan provides the figure of love: “The figure of love–they are outside two/beside themselves (ils sont hors deux)–as I told you, it is lalangue, anyway which mathematics is expressing: 2 = 1 v 3, which implies that 2 or 1

125 Lacan, SXX, pp. 6–7. 126 Lacan, SXXI, December 11, 1973 (unpublished). 127 Ibid., March 12, 1974 (unpublished). 48

is equal to 2 or 3.128 Without explicating this formula, Lacan states that we can make whatever we like of it.

Let us read the formula in a consistent way. Deux (two) is a homonym of d’eux (of them), so that “outside two (hors deux)” is homonym of “beside themselves (hors d’eux)”. Lovers are out of their minds when they are outside two. They are outside two because they cannot directly deal with the Two, for the Two only comes from the conjunction of One and Three. The figure of love “2 = 1 v 3” refers to the Borromean quality that the formation of one knot with three rings is more fundamental than the problem of the Two. This is why 2 can be factorized into 1 and 3. 2 vanishes, and 1 and 3 appear. However, let us point out that 2 never simply vanishes for Lacan; rather, it is the notion of “of them/two” (d’eux/deux) that constitutes the core of Lacan’s numerical description of love. Just as there is something of the One instead of the One, there is of them/two instead of the Two. If “2 = 1 v 3” is a numerical translation of the Borromean knot, “of them/two” constitutes a Lacanian matheme of love that straddles lalangue (unarticulated and meaningless linguistic materiality) and number.

“Of them/two” is a matheme because it is distinct from both the Gnostic and mathematical conceptions of number. Number is required, since number allows us to approach the mathematical real beyond the religious imaginary. Contrary to the Gnostic tradition that maps number onto mythical quality, subtracts the numerical order from “all its ideal or idealized privileges” by reducing this order to its “articulatory possibilities.”129 With the emergence of set theory, number comes to be independent of any reliance on the notion of essence. For instance, the Two is of the imaginary order when this Two is related to the essential quality of the romanticized Two. Two is nothing more or less than One plus One, without any suggestion of a passionate couple with an exclusive bond. At the same time, this distanciation from the imaginary conception of number does not imply the acceptance of the mathematical conception of number. In Seminar XXI, Lacan equated his three orders with numbers: the real is 3, the imaginary is 2, and the symbolic is 1.130 Here, one could suppose that 3 refers to the Borromeanized three rings as the real object, that 2 refers to two imaginary beings in a harmonious relation, and that 1 refers to the symbolic unit as an articulatory

128 Ibid., December 18, 1973 (unpublished). 129 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVI: From an other to the Other, 1968–1969, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Seuil, p. 270. 130 Lacan, SXXI, May 14, 1974 (unpublished). 49

element. This equation is nevertheless contestable because, as Lacan himself interrogates in Seminar XXII, one could ask, “Is a knotted number still a number? Or indeed is it something else?”131 A knotted number cannot be an ordinary number, for having three interdependent rings implies that the numerical order among 1, 2, and 3 collapses and that 1, 2, and 3 become knotted. After all, 2 cannot be derived from the conjunction of 1 and 3 in mathematics. Thus, “of them/two” is distinct both from the imaginary representation and the mathematical conception. How then does this matheme relate to love?

The key to a response lies in the fact that late Lacan had a complicated relationship with the Two, especially from Seminar XIX to Seminar XXI. Let us take note of several notable contexts. First of all, the Two as the structure of sexuality as the real is affirmed. “That sex is real is beyond doubt. And its structure itself is the dual, the number two.”132 The unified One, like the Freudian Eros, is criticized from the perspective of the Two. “D’eux is not melted into One, nor One founded by D’eux.”133 Most crucially, “of them/two” serves as the matheme that formulates the sexual non-relationship as the real. “Of them/two” implies that “making two-together of them [faire d’eux deux-ensemble] reaches its limit in ‘making two’ of them [‘faire deux’ d’eux].”134 Love concerns “the impossibility of establishing the relationship between ‘them-two’ (la relation d’eux).”135 “Of them/two” refers to the real (impossible) relationship between the One and the Other, which often emerges in the fantasmatic relationship between the One and a in reality. Moreover, “eternal two is a symptom.”136 Eternal two does not refer to an ideal sublimity of love but to a symptom as a defense against the aporia of sexual non-relationship. Love is an eternal symptom of speaking animals that constantly cope with the problem of the Two even if they have no knowledge about instinctual sexual relationship. The Two is also seen as a mystery, for it is a hole that is unrepresentable by the unconscious knowledge. “Knowledge, even unconscious, is precisely what is invented to supply for something which is only perhaps the mystery of the two.”137

131 Lacan, SXXII, May 13, 1975 (unpublished). 132 Lacan, SXIX, May 4, 1972, p. 154. 133 Ibid., May 17, 1972, p. 181. 134 Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 491. 135 Lacan, SXX, p. 6. 136 Lacan, SXXI, December 11, 1973 (unpublished). 137 Ibid., March 12, 1974 (unpublished). Let us note in passing that the Two is not a matter of substantial being but of a mysterious may-be (“perhaps”). 50

Finally, the Two refers to two unconscious knowledges that were originally divided but are open to the possibility of overlapping. Articulating that love is the irremediable division without any mediation, Lacan adds that love is also “the connectiveness between two knowledges insofar as they are irremediably distinct. When that happens, it creates something quite privileged. When the two unconscious knowledges overlap, that makes an awful hotchpotch.”138 Sometimes the amorous Two emerges as the intersection of two divided knowledges. This would be an event, privileged and awful, blissful and abyssal. Love is a hotchpotch of two knowledges.

In sum, while the Lacanian Two pertains to various contexts such as the structure of sex, the separated sexes, sexual non-relationship, the symptom, the mysterious hole, and divided and connectible knowledges, these references to the Two suggest one thing in common. The amorous Two, which is deeply affected by the problem of sexuality, remains doubtful for Lacan. In fact, this is a clinically reasonable and ethical position for a psychoanalyst who is too conversant about the fatality of the amorous Two. In his early writing (“The problem of style and the psychiatric conception of paranoiac forms of experience and motives of paranoiac crime: The Crime of the Papin Sisters”), Lacan links “the malady of being two (mal d’être deux)”, which is taken from Mallarmé, to the mortal passion as imaginary love.139 Considering that late Lacan emphasizes the psychoanalytic contribution to the emegerce of a more “civilized”140 love, it would be fully legitimate to expand the implication of the malady of being two beyond the imaginary level. Based on late Lacan’s definition of the real as that which does not work, one could state that being two in love is the state in which something does not work not only imaginarily because of mortal passion but also really because of discordant jouissance. Insofar as the symptom refers to what does not work in the real, every amorous Two is symptomatic. Pathology is immanent to and ingrained in the Two. Love is a pathological prison without entry or exit, in that lovers cannot go outside two (hors deux) because they are beside themselves (hors d’eux). If so, wouldn’t the clinical distancing from the malady of being two have prevented Lacan from articulating the amorous Two? At most, the amorous Two is a hodgepodge. At least, the amorous Two is deconstructed by the sexual

138 Ibid., January 15, 1974 (unpublished). 139 See Bruce Fink, Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference, Cambridge: Polity, 2016, p. 85. 140 “That jouissance may suffer when love becomes something a little civilized, namely, when people know that it is to be played as a game–in fact it is not sure that this will happen” (SXXI, March 12, 1974). 51

Two. “Of them/two” is the designator of this deconstruction. Here arises a question: is it possible to affirm love as the Two, instead of being discreet in talking about the Two and playing it with “of them/two”? Badiou intervenes here by unhesitatingly saying yes.

In “The Scene of Two” Badiou first engages with Lacan’s statement that love supplies for the sexual non-relationship by distinguishing between love as event and sexuality as being. Love belongs to the order of what happens, whereas sexuality belongs to the order of what is. An amorous event does not supply for a sexual being but supplements it. Badiou thus reverses the psychoanalytic qualification of love through the sexual. “It is love which makes the truth of which sex is capable, and not the inverse.”141

Badiou then discusses three types of theses that can be extracted from the Lacanian sexual non-relationship. The segregative thesis holds that a non-relation absolutely outdoes a relation. In this case, the sexed positions are nothing but the two juxtaposed solipsistic Ones, rather than the amorous Two. The Aristophanic thesis holds that a fusional relation absolutely outdoes a non-relation, since the sexed positions are complementary despite their disjunction. Finally, the humanistic thesis holds that “an approximation of a relation”–which passes through the pitfalls of non-relation and takes vigilance against the fusional relation–is attainable. In this case, the sexed positions work in concert to elaborate the amorous Two. An approximation of a relation is possible due to an amorous encounter based on the unanalyzable element of μ. μ works in a double way. On the one hand, it provokes an encounter based on the shining charm of the object cause of desire. On the other hand, it constitutes a point from which the amorous procedure can be instituted, allowing the access to the being of the opposite sex beyond his/her objectal aspect that fits into desire. μ supports both the One from which the Two is undetermined and the One from which the Two can be unfolded. With the operation of μ, love wavers between the One and the Two.

Ultimately, Badiou leans toward the affirmation of the Two. Love is a “limping march” of the precarious and pertinacious Two, for it requires a laborious process to work through this double function, which is also why love is not to be romanticized as a sublime spirituality nor debased as a trivial corporeality. “The essence of love is to be neither trivial nor sublime. This is why, as everyone knows, it is on the order of hard labor, which is the limping march of the

141 Alain Badiou, “The Scene of Two,” trans. Barbara P. Fulks, 21 (2003): 42. 52

double function of the atom μ.”142 The scene of love is not a matter of phenomenological experience but of subjective construction. The catch here is that this scene is forever under reconstruction, for lovers always march poorly between the expansion of the Two and the return of the object that threatens the Two. Psychoanalysis may point out that lovers march poorly because he/she is oedipal (Oidípous) in the literal sense: namely, having a swollen foot. For Badiou’s part, he goes on to propose another function, t. The function of t lies in subtracting μ from the sexed position. It is thus a non-sexual material of the amorous procedure, making the scene of the Two independent from the sexual. Whereas μ concerns an encounter between two sexes, t concerns the various unpredictable fragments of the scene of the Two, such as marriage, cohabitation, children, and numerous crises/opporunities in love.

Just as the Lacanian Two is a matheme that is distinguishable from the mathematical number, so is the Badiouian Two. The amorous Two is immanent. It is counted only from itself. It is not counted as One, for it is not fusional but disjunctive. Nor is it counted as One by the Three, for there is no neutral, objective perspective that could identify the Two from outside or above. The Two does not pre-exist the amorous procedure that is triggered by an encounter with μ and consists of the procedural inquiries about t. The resistance against the One and the Three is the reason why the amorous Two is atheistic. “Neither absolute transcendence, nor the Trinitarian doctrine. It is from this point of view that one can see to what degree love is atheistic.”143

Contrary to Lacan who only hovers around the amorous Two, Badiou thus affirms that love is the truth of the Two. If Lacan presents his figure of love as a translation of the Borromean quality, Badiou presents the numericity of love as truth: 1, 2, infinity. What matters for our discussion is a rigorous distinction between 1 and 2. The One is related to desire, for desire reduces the being of the Other as an inconsistent multiplicity to the object as a consistent One. The One is related to passion, which strives towards mortal unity. The One is related to ego, which calculates one’s own interest, and this is why the enemy of love is not rivalry but ego. Finally, the One is related to solipsistic closure.144 Therefore, there is no love in the regime

142 Ibid., p. 52. 143 Ibid., p. 55. 144 In contrast, Lacan regards solitude as the inevitable fate of speaking beings who are stuck in sexual non- relationship. “That which speaks deals only with solitude, regarding the aspect of the relationship” (SXX, 120). I address the problem of solitude in Chapter 3. 53

of the One for Badiou. In love, there must be an encounter that breaks down the regime of the One and a process that institutes a new regime of multiplicity–the scene of the Two. Meanwhile, the Two is not the last word, for the Two is connected to infinity. But what kind of infinity is it? Here, Badiou brings in the experiential and sensible dimension of love, which has been repressed in his formal approach. Love can be seen as a truth, for it allows us to experience the world infinitely anew from the perspective of the Two. “Love […] is a quest for truth, […] in relation to something quite precise: what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one?”145 The scene of the Two does not limit itself to the intimate organization of an exclusive Two. Rather, it opens itself to the infinite adventure about the sensible in the world through the lens of the Two. If the Two as a limping march requires hard labor from the subject, the Two that is interlocked with infinity could bring metaphysical happiness to the subject. It is an amorous infinity that convinces the subject that love as labor is a labor of love. At the same time, one should consider that the worldly infinity might interrupt and threaten the invention of the amorous infinity. After all, lovers cannot change the entire world while creating their own amorous world. This implies that amorous infinity is created only subjectively through the refashioning of the worldly infinity from the perspective of the Two. In sum, the numericity of love implies that “the Two fractures the One and meets with the infinity of the situation.”146

Concerning the problem of infinity, Lacan and Badiou diverge. As Badiou analyzes in “The Subject and Infinity,” Lacan defines infinity in terms of inaccessibility. In Seminar XIX, Lacan states that “a number is accessible inasmuch as it can be engendered either through the summation, or through the exponentiation, of numbers smaller than it. Thus, it can be shown there is inaccessibility in the starting numbers, and very precisely at the point of 2.”147 The idea is that we cannot engender 2 by means of 0 and 1, either through summation or exponentiation. There is an unbridgeable gap between 1 and 2. 2 is infinite because it is inaccessible. However, we know that 2 is accessible through 1 + 1. Thus, the argument of inaccessibility would amount to a sophistry. Why would Lacan have then contrived this sophistry? The reason is because he dismisses the Cantorian infinity. In the same seminar,

145 Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, with Nicolas Truong, trans. Peter Bush, London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012, p. 22; hereafter referenced as IPL. 146 Badiou, C, p. 189. 147 Ibid., p. 222. 54

Lacan applies the notion of inaccessibility to the level of the aleph zero, which is the cardinal of the set of all natural numbers–the first actual infinite for Cantor. “What is constituted on the basis of 1 and 0 as the inaccessibility of 2 is only given at the level of the aleph zero, that is of the actual infinite.”148 For Badiou, this conception of 2 and the aleph zero as equally inaccessible shows that the Lacanian infinity remains pre-Cantorian and outdated. Lacan is unable to think of the actual infinity that became thinkable because of set theoretical mathematics. In a sense, this is inevitable for Lacan. As Badiou points out, the gap between 1 and 2 is derived from the Lacanian logic of the signifier. Since every signifier is constituted by the differential network, there is a gap between two signifiers. One signifier (S1) cannot reach another signifier (S2). Badiou also invokes the passage in which Lacan himself maps the finitude of the drive onto the sexual non-relationship. “One only managed to draw up the catalogue on the basis of analytic discourse in the perfectly finite list of drives. Its finitude is related to the impossibility which is demonstrated in a genuine questioning of the sexual relation as such.”149 After all, there are only finite numbers of the Lacanian drive (oral, anal, scopic, and invocatory drive), and the thesis of sexual non-relationship is employed to support the finitude of the drive. Badiou thus concludes that the Lacanian infinity is inadequate and the Lacanian subject is finite.

In sum, both Lacan and Badiou criticize the fusional and unifying One. However, while Lacan focuses on the pathology of the sexual Two, Badiou focuses on the possibility of the amorous Two. While Lacan hovers around the Two with his matheme “of them/two (d’eux)”, Badiou believes in the power of the Two as truth. For Badiou, love is the procedural Two that engages with the infinity of the world. The Two is not inaccessible, insofar as you decide to keep following the limping march in love. The Two serves as a mediator to create an amorous infinity through and beyond the sexual non-relationship and the finitude of the drive.

Modality Lacan often emphasizes that logic, as the science of the real, helps psychoanalysis to explore the unconscious. In Aristotelian logic, we find four modalities: impossibility, contingency, necessity, and possibility. Late Lacan recasts this modal logic in terms of writing and employs

148 Ibid., p. 225. 149 Ibid., p. 226. 55

it for the discussion about the problem of love.

First, impossibility–as “that which does not stop not being written”–refers to sexual non- relationship. The question here is in what way love is affected by the sexual non-relationship. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou criticizes Lacan’s “moralizing pessimism which suspects that love is nothing but an imaginary supplement for sexual dereliction.”150 Following the tradition of French moralists, there is only sexuality, but not love. Moreover, this sexuality is not about carnal pleasure but about the immanent deadlock of sexuality as the sexual non- relationship. Thus, one is doomed to a state of sexual “dereliction.” Without the hole of sexual non-relationship, love as an imaginary stopper would not exist. Love bumps into the wall of the impossible. All one can do is adorn this wall in the name of love, and pretend as if one can get away with this wall, as in courtly love. As a non-sexual act of homage and loyalty that the knight dedicates to the lady, courtly love presents a refined and elegant way of making up for the sexual non-relationship.151 Love is not a spontaneous action but a dissimulating reaction to the sexual non-relationship. Courtly love tells us that “love is brought into existence […] by the impossible of the sexual bond with the object.”152

However, this psychoanalytic pessimism is not the last word of Lacan. In a sense, Lacan foreshadows Badiou by affirming that love must confront sexual non-relationship as a test, which can be tied to Badiou’s theory of “point” as the condition for the creation of truth, which we will discuss soon. Consider the following statement by Lacan: “Isn’t it on the basis of the confrontation with this impasse, with this impossibility by which a real is defined, that love is put to the test? Regarding one’s partner, love can only actualize what […] I called courage with respect to this fatal destiny.”153 The mediator between love and the impossible is courage. Love is not a matter of ability or circumstances but of courage against the impossible. Courage is what allows us to bear the impossible and love beyond the impossible. Supported by courage, love does not merely react to but actively confronts the fatal destiny of the sexual non-relationship. Filling up the impossible, love is an imaginary supplement. Passing through the impossible, love is a courageous adventure. Love is not giving ground to the impasse of the sexual non-relationship but passing through this impasse with courage.

150 Badiou, LW, p. 530. 151 Lacan, SXX, p. 69. 152 Lacan, SXXI, January 8, 1974 (unpublished). 153 Lacan, SXX, p. 144. 56

Second, contingency–as “that which stops not being written”–refers to an encounter. Love begins with the contingent encounter. If sexual non-relationship serves as the root or test of love in an ambivalent way, then the encounter serves as the origin of love. “Love thus proves to be contingent in its origin.”154 In Seminar XX, Lacan also links the encounter to symptoms and being. First, an amorous encounter is “the encounter in the partner of symptoms and affects, of everything that marks in each of us the trace of his exile from the sexual relationship.”155 In an amorous encounter, one does not overcome sexual non-relationship but faces the indelible trace of sexual non-relationship in his/her partner. This trace is equivalent to the symptom because every subject develops unique symptoms by dealing with sexual non-relationship in a different way. In this regard, the fantasy about a miraculous and revolutionary encounter, which our romantic often narrates and promotes, is dispelled. What one faces in an encounter are the symptoms. Since the symptom is the primary unconscious formation, the encounter of the symptom amounts to “the recognition of the way in which being is affected qua subject of unconscious knowledge.”156 An amorous encounter concerns the recognition of the fact that your lover is determined by his/her unconscious knowledge, beyond the (mis)recognition of the imaginary other.

Second, an amorous encounter concerns being of the other. “It is love that approaches being as such in the encounter.”157 Although this statement seems to imply that an encounter is an evental revelation of the truth of your partner, Lacan frustrates this reading by asserting that the relation of being to being is not convivial but antagonistic. Lacan adds, “doesn’t the extreme of love, true love, reside in the approach to being? And true love gives way to hatred.”158 The problem of ambivalence is thus addressed in terms of the approach to being. Love offers us an access to the other’s being, while simultaneously troubling us with the problem of ambivalence. In an encounter as the approach to being, both love and hate are at stake. An encounter does not necessarily lead to the amorous procedure, unlike in Badiou’s philosophy. Lacan even connects being with hate: “A solid hatred is addressed to being”, as is

154 Lacan, SXXI, January 8, 1974 (unpublished). 155 Lacan, SXX, p. 145. 156 Ibid., p. 144. 157 Ibid., p. 145. 158 Ibid., p. 146. 57

revealed in the word play between il hait (he hates) and il est (he is).159 What connects being with hatred is jouissance. Hatred comes from jealousy or “jealouissance” that it is the other that exploits my jouissance. “We remain stuck at the level of the notion of jealous hatred, the hatred that springs forth from ‘jealouissance.’”160 In sum, an amorous encounter does not concern one’s lover as a whole but his/her symptoms, which signals sexual non-relationship, and being, which leads to ambivalence.

Third, necessity–as “that which does not stop being written”–refers to two different things: the phallic function and the symptom. In Seminar XX, Lacan associates the phallus with necessity, which is in actuality nothing but contingency. “Analysis of the reference to the phallus apparently leads us to this necessity. […] The apparent necessity of the phallic function turns out to be mere contingency.”161 The phallic function is originally not an inevitable givenness but a makeshift construct designed to deal with the sexual non- relationship. Once the phallic function is deconstructed and replaced with another function– for instance, Badiou’s humanity function–the two sexed positions might find themselves engaged in a completely different situation from the impasse of the sexual non-relationship. However, although the phallic function is a contingent apparatus to cope with the sexual non- relationship, speaking beings, for the time being, need to depend on the phallic function to establish some kind of relation from non-relation. Here, discourse plays a pivotal role in the production of a stable relation. In fact, discourse and the phallic function cooperate, in that discourse makes a social link based on language and the phallic function implies the castrating effect of language. Discourse authorizes and promotes only the pre-established and legitimate forms of relations. In case of love, contemporary discourse mobilizes sexual relationships that conform to romance, family, reproduction, and capitalism. This is why Lacan states that the drama and the destiny of love lies in the transition from contingency to necessity. Love is a passage from contingent encounter to necessary relation, and an itinerary from the evental encounter to lawful link. For a more healthy love that empties out bodily jouissance, reliance on the phallic function is necessary. All love ends up being summoned before a court of law. “All love, subsisting only on the basis of the ‘stops not being written,’ tends to make the negation shift to the ‘doesn’t stop being written.’ […] Such is the substitute

159 Ibid., p. 99. 160 Ibid., pp. 99–100. 161 Ibid., p. 94. 58

that constitutes the destiny as well as the drama of love.”162

Meanwhile, in Seminar XXIV, Lacan regards necessity as the symptom that prevents the analysand from saying his/her truth.163 As long as the symptom itself says truth by de- centering the analysand, it stands to reason that the analysand cannot say his/her truth. The analysand cannot control or regulate his/her access to the symptomatic truth. At best, truth is half-said in an analysis. At least, truth remains unsayable due to severe repression. There are always some remainders in the analysand’s “said.” Only his “saying” guarantees some revelation of the unconscious truth.

What is notable for our discussion is that the symptom pertains to both contingency and necessity. Love is often said to be a play of contingency and necessity. The Lacanian viewpoint intervenes in this classical issue by proposing that the amorous procedure begins with an encounter with the symptom as the trace of the sexual non-relationship and leads to the working through of the symptom as the repressed kernel of subjectivity. Concerning the difference between the phallic function and the symptom, let us note that even if both of them concerns sexual non-relationship, the phallic function is a stopper to cope with sexual non- relation, while the symptom is a telltale sign that suggests sexual non-relation. The symptom, in this sense, reveals the defectiveness of the phallic function, just as the hysteric accuses the master of his/her insufficient knowledge.

Finally, possibility–as “that which stops being written”–refers to different things at different moments of the seminars. For our part, let us first note that Lacan couples necessity with possibility. “The order of the possible is connected to the necessary.”164 A similar statement appears two months later in the same seminar. “Only the possible can be necessary, namely, what I situate by ‘that which stops to be written’ is precisely something which does not stop to be repeated.”165 The coupling of necessity and possibility is correlative to masculine position, which combines universality with exception to universality. More specifically, universality is linked to possibility, and exception is linked to necessity, and this masculine

162 Ibid., p. 145. 163 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIV: l’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre, 1976–1977, April 19, 1977 (unpublished). 164 Lacan, SXXI, February 19, 1974 (unpublished). 165 Ibid., April 9, 1974 (unpublished). 59

position (all and exception) constitutes the logic of a discourse. Necessity and possibility work in concert as the modalities of a discourse. Meanwhile, the feminine position evades a discursive logic, for woman as not-all resides both inside and outside of a discourse. “A man seeks out a woman qua that which can only be situated through discourse, since there is always something in her that escapes discourse.”166 Here, discourse is equated with phallic jouissance. By locating his lost object in woman via phallic jouissance, man is subject to discursive logic. On the contrary, woman, who has a supplementary jouissance in addition to phallic jouissance, is undecidable by discursive logic. Nevertheless, the conjunction of necessity and possibility implies that the power of discourse reaches its summit here. A discourse stipulates that it is not only necessary but also possible that a normative relation that reduces and regulates sexual non-relationship exists. Necessity implies that “sexual relationship must be reconstituted by a discourse.”167 In sum, possibility implies that sexual relationship could be reconstituted by a discourse. Sexual relationship could be reconstituted, for it must be. It must be, for it could be. Love, structured by sexual non-relationship and triggered by an encounter, is destined to be subordinate to the laws of relation, whose power joins necessity with possibility.

Let us move onto Badiou’s approach to love in terms of modal logic. As with Lacan, an amorous encounter corresponds to a contingency. However, sexual difference is not, contra Lacan, determined by the phallic function but by the amorous encounter. “Sexual difference is unthinkable except from the point of view of the encounter, as it unfolds within the process of love.”168 Regardless of one’s biological sex, without an encounter, there is no masculine or feminine position. An encounter makes two sexes exist. Concerning the power of the encounter, Badiou follows Beckett, for whom this encounter is something that exceeds sentimentality as well as sexuality. “To meet […] in my sense exceeds the power of feeling, however tender, and of bodily motions, however expert.”169

Second, if Lacan links necessity to the phallus and the symptom, Badiou links destiny to

166 Lacan, SXX, p. 33. 167 Lacan, SXXIV, April 19, 1977 (unpublished). 168 Badiou, OB, p. 27. 169 Ibid., p. 28. 60

amorous declaration.170 After the encounter as an event, the statement “I love you” amounts to the name of the event that comes to be circulated in a situation or a world. The amorous procedure will be constructed through the inquiry of the connection between this statement and all of the other elements. “I love you” would function as the central material to meet with the worldly infinity and create the amorous infinity. “The absolute contingency of the encounter with someone I didn’t know finally takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny.”171 Unlike Lacan for whom destiny refers to the phallic function as the operator of relation, destiny refers to love as truth for Badiou. However, the transition from chance to destiny does not simply lie in the statement “I love you” but in a subjective process to organize the meta-stable order of the Two by overcoming chance as an unorganized disorder. Love as destiny is only possible due to the retroactive operation of fidelity that exceeds the power of the encounter. Badiou articulates this point by invoking the Mallarmean idea of poetry as chance defeated word by word. “In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure, through the birth of a world.”172 Fidelity here is not moral non-betrayal or fixed dogma. It amounts to a reinventive movement, not a static . It refers to the consistent creation of something new that is able to reinvigorate the discontinuous power of an encounter. It refers to the construction of a subjective world through the struggle against and the victory over the randomness of an encounter. Only fidelity can complete the work of love that transforms the encounter into destiny, as instituted by the amorous declaration.

In sum, the conjunction of amorous declaration and fidelity constitutes love as destiny. Considering that love is a procedural work of truth, its temporality takes on the future anterior. If the amorous declaration allows love to take on the appearance of destiny, then fidelity allows love to become “what will have been destiny” as long as the work of love continues. There is no such thing as destined love, for love is provoked by contingency. However, love will have been destiny when it arrives at the destination of a new existential world by retroactively overcoming the contingency.

170 Note that Badiou employs the existential (if not romantic) notion of destiny, and not the formal notion of necessity. The formal and the meta-formal go hand in hand. I develop this point at the final section of this chapter. 171 Badiou, IPL, 43. 172 Ibid., pp. 45–46. 61

The contrast between Lacan and Badiou becomes clear at this point. For Lacan, love “lasts for a time.”173 Or, “love slips away as it does elsewhere.”174 This implies that Lacan focuses on love as an encounter, not on love as a process. Love as encounter is evanescent and volatile, for it exists at the moment when “that which does not stop not being written” is tied to “that which stops not being written,” namely, the brief moment when impossibility is punctually marked by contingency. The rest of the affair–namely, the transition from contingency to necessity/possibility–is secondary compared to this incandescent yet instantaneous moment because, although it constitutes the drama and destiny of love, it merely reflects how love is pre-determined by the phallic function and discursive operation. For Lacan, love as an encounter comes closer to the true picture of love than love a process. By contrast, Badiou focuses on love as a process. The encounter obviously matters for Badiou, for the amorous process cannot be instituted without an encounter. However, love does not lie in glorifying the occurrence of an encounter, but in elaborating the consequences of this occurrence and triumphing over the randomness of this occurrence. Badiou’s critique of André Breton’s “l’ amour fou” as exclusively fixated on the encounter touches upon this point. Beyond the form of love that mythologizes the moment of meeting, Badiou supports “a concept of love that is less miraculous and more hard work [hardworking], namely a construction of eternity within time, of the experience of the Two, point by point.”175 What provides for the glory of love is not an encounter that induces the Two, but the faithful creation of a new subjective world from the perspective of the Two. Only the pertinacious devotion and indomitable commitment to the faithful process can support love as a construction of eternity within time.

Coming back to the Badiouian modality, Badiou does not discuss love directly in terms of impossibility and possibility. However, one could reconstruct his position. In Being and Event, Badiou claims that being as such is pure, inconsistent multiplicity and that the function of the law turns inconsistent multiplicity into consistent multiplicity. There is no One. One is the result of the operation of the count. In set-theoretical terms, every multiple is either presented as an element that belongs to a set, or re-presented as a part (subset) that is included in a set. A multiple is a multiple because of the necessary law of the count. However, one set evades

173 Badiou, SXXII, January 21, 1975 (unpublished). 174 Lacan, Television, p. 41. 175 Badiou, IPL, p. 80. 62

this count: the void as empty set. The void as the first multiplicity shows that the operation of the count is doomed to failure at some point. Devoid of any element, the void is a multiple of nothing beyond the law, for it is not counted as one. The void is neither presentable nor representable. The void wanders like a phantom in a situation and becomes discernible only retroactively. The void constitutes the impossible within the situation. The void, which usually remains invisible and unlocatable, occasionally manifests itself at a specific locus. This unpredictable and situated revelation of the void is what Badiou calls an event. Now, an amorous encounter as an event evades the operation of the One, whether the One concerns the ego as individual narcissism or the family as collective narcissism. An encounter, which provides for the institution of the Two, is that which has been considered impossible from the perspective of the One. The possibility of the Two was the impossibility from the viewpoint of the One, for the function of the law lies in the organization of the demarcation between what is possible and what is impossible. Once the amorous encounter as the impossible happens, this impossibility serves as a foundation from which to generate new possibilities. The experience of the world from the perspective of the Two evokes possibilities that are unknown to the egoistic or familial experience of the world. Fidelity to an amorous encounter provides for infinite possibilities that can be mobilized to create a new world. What is at stake in love is thus a reorganization of the distinction between possibility and impossibility, a redeployment of the very framework that divides possibility and impossibility.

Here, let us note that the symptom/destiny constitutes one form of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou.176 The creation of amorous destiny is inseparable from the working through of the symptom. The amorous process is constituted by the nexus of the Lacanian symptom and the Badiouian destiny. If love is a procedural work of truth, it cannot but face the process of working through the symptom as the kernel of subjective truth that one repeats without knowing, even at the expense of love itself. Each partner’s idiosyncratic subjective truth must be recognized rather than dismissed to create a common truth of amorous infinity. Without this recognition, love fails to institute an infinite play of difference. For Badiou, love is a struggle against the regression into ego as the One and for the continuation of the Two. Here, Lacan would add that ego is not a unified One but a term within the dyadic relation–the imaginary relation between ego and ideal ego. Ideal ego nourishes and guides ego. For Lacan,

176 See Chapter 4 in which I elaborate the interlacing of the symptomatic real and the amorous truth through a specific literary text. 63

ego does not negotiate with id, superego, and reality as for Freud; instead, it forms a relation with its constitutive double. A clinically notable point here is that one might risk death to faithfully serve this ideal ego, while misrecognizing this ideal ego as one’s own subjectivity. Fixation on the ideal ego is so powerful that it strengthens the narcissistic fortress. As long as one serves one’s ideal ego, one is lovable, regardless of love in one’s real life. In this regard, a truly amorous fidelity is the conjunction of the pursuit of the Two and the vigilance against the imaginary. There should be both the fidelity to truth and the counter-fidelity against the ideal ego. The subject of love has to operate within the Two, while moderating (if not removing) the leverage of the egoistic One.

Now, there is no better place to locate where ego falters than in the symptom, for the symptom is the asubjective jouissance, which decenters the mastery of ego and also deviates from the ideal ego. The symptom is not reducible to the One, given that it marks the failure of the One. The symptom is a telltale sign that the One has an internal gap. The symptom reveals that the One exists only as something of the One. In the presence of the symptom, the One emerges as onelessness. But the fact that the symptom is against the One does not automatically mean that the symptom is equivalent to amorous truth to be created. Rather, it is posed as a test (or a point, to use Badiou’s term) that amorous truth should accept and undergo. The symptom reveals the incompleteness of the egoistic One, but it does not guarantee the existence of the amorous Two. The symptom resides somewhere between the limit of the One and the possibility of the Two.

The symptom serves both as an obstacle to and as an opportunity for the amorous Two. In the majority of cases, one seldom touches on the symptom of oneself and the beloved, let alone works through it, for the symptom is a hidden truth that is unbeknownst even to the one with the symptom. Lovers repeat their symptoms without knowing. When the symptom emerges as an issue, working through the symptom is a painful and painstaking job, for it requires a reconstitution of the preformed unconscious structure. The insistence of the symptom might interrupt or terminate the amorous process because it is difficult or even impossible to understand and tolerate another’s symptom. The symptom appears as the enigmatic core of heterogeneous otherness of one’s partner. At the same time, the amorous process must go through the test of the symptom rather than deny or repress it. Without engaging with the incompleteness of the One, the possibility of the Two never opens up. The Two does not simply emerge out of nothing. The Two can only be launched into where the egoistic One no 64

longer holds. The Two can emerge out of the process of exposing and sharing each other’s failure as the One. Without making use of the symptom as a positive material for the amorous process, the construction of the scene of the Two will be easily reduced to the power struggle between aggressive Ones. It is by recognizing and embracing the symptom that fidelity can truly prevail over contingency and create an amorous infinity. If love is a procedural construction of subjective infinity, it cannot but include the process of transforming the symptom as a threat into love to the symptom as the resource for the work of love. With the subjective fidelity, the danger to love will have become the symbol of the richness of love, and an ugly stigma will have become an endearing foible. In sum, we can define an amorous process by coupling the psychoanalytic problems of ego and the symptom with the Badiouian fidelity and destiny. An amorous process combines the fidelity to the Two with the counter- fidelity to the egoistic One, while making use of the symptom as the sign of the failure of the One and overcoming the test of the symptom as an internal threat to the Two.

Let us conclude. For Badiou, love is a precarious fidelity. Nothing guarantees the necessity of the creation of amorous truth, and amorous truth can be constructed only through the subjective elaboration. As long as this fidelity persists, love creates a kind of xenocryst (a splendid crystallization induced by an arduous work of incorporating something alien) in the name of destiny–Here, (Badiouianized) Lacanian psychoanalysis would add that one should consider the symptom both as a useful material of love and as a threatening obstacle to love. In order to transform love as an episodic encounter into love as an indelible destiny, the subject of love has to grapple with one’s and the partner’s symptoms. The symptom is an unavoidable and indispensable component of creating an amorous infinity. In this regard, an amorous destiny would be, to use Derrida’s word, destinerrance–the conjunction of destiny (destin) and wandering (errance), which blurs the distinction between the necessary and the contingent, the possible and the impossible. The contingent process of wandering around the symptom paradoxically proves that lovers are molding their amorous destiny, reshuffling the existing borderline between the possible and the impossible. Lacan would also support this direction, insofar as it is “in this impetus (erre)” as the wandering (errer) “that we can wager on rediscovering the real” beyond the realm of fantasy.177 The subject of love not only decides to be duped by the unconscious but also yields to its real, wandering effect. The wayward real of love reveals itself only for someone who dares to wander. In sum, love is

177 Lacan, SXXI, June 11, 1974 (unpublished). 65

destinerrance insofar as the construction of destiny necessitates the errancy around symptoms.

Topology Topology is the mathematical study of spatial qualities that are preserved despite the transformation of the form of objects, such as bending or stretching. For instance, topology observes that a sphere and a regular polyhedron are homeomorphic. By contrast, a sphere and a doughnut are not homeomorphic, for a sphere cannot be transformed into a doughnut through continuous deformation, due to the central hole in a doughnut; they do not have a topologically same value. For Lacan, topology is useful in his thought about the correlation between the symbolic and the real beyond the imaginary. Topology clarifies that “structure is the real that emerges in language. It has of course no relationship to ‘good form.’”178 Lacan thus appropriates mathematical topology to articulate psychoanalytic topology. Throughout his intellectual career, Lacan referred to four topological objects: torus, Möbius strip, Klein bottle, and cross cap. Here, let us address a torus in relation to love and conceptualize what we might call “toric love.”

A torus is primarily characterized by two heterogeneous circuits: (1) one that revolves around the surface of the torus, and (2) the other that revolves around its central hole. By linking the first circuit to demand and the second to desire, Lacan regards a torus as the structure of neurosis. “A torus […] is the structure of neurosis, in as much as desire can, from the indefinitely innumerable repetition of demand, be looped in two turns.”179 Suppose that a neurotic is located at a point on the surface of the torus. Each time the neurotic articulates his/her demand, the neurotic moves, turning around the surface and finally carrying out a turn around its central hole. Numerous turns of demand amount to a turn of desire. This implies that the neurotic does not realize that his demand hides its “beyond”, namely, desire.180 He

178 Lacan, “L’étourdit,” Autres écrits, p. 476. 179 Ibid., p. 486. 180 “Although it always shows through in demand, as we see here, desire is nevertheless beyond demand.” 66

does not know that the level of desire is more fundamental than that of demand. He does not know that his subjective truth lies in desire rather than in demand. Moreover, since a torus has the structure of Möbius strip, carrying out twice a turn around the central hole leads the neurotic to the starting point, which is also the end point. This implies that the neurotic does not realize that his desire is caused by its constitutive void. “A torus has a hole only for someone who looks at it as an object.”181 The neurotic, who resides inside the torus, would not recognize the existence of the central hole. Thus, he is in a stalemate with regard to his desire, constantly repeating his symptom over and over again without any change. Analytic work then aims his subjective change by leading him into penetrating that his desire contains a central hole.

The central hole of a torus is a topological hole. A topological hole is not, for instance, an empty space inside a bag. It is a hole that blurs the very distinction between inside and outside. “The efforts I am making to bring you a topology are to account for form to allow us to conceive of these anomalies which are ours, concerning those problems of inside and outside.”182 Psychoanalytic topology is supported by the problematization of inside and outside. The central hole of a torus is “extimate” in that it simultaneously occupies the interior and the exterior of a torus. As Lacan states, “a torus’ peripheral exteriority and central exteriority constitute but one single region.”183 This hole, which is both peripheral and central, is an essential part of a torus, which prevents it from being reduced to a common cylinder. The radicality of this hole is that it cannot be regarded as emptiness, which can be substantialized as being. While one could think of filling up an empty bag with objects, this kind of reduction of a hole is not applicable to a topological hole. The central hole of a torus is an irreducible one. Due to this hole, a torus and a jug are topologically homeomorphic. The neurotic’s impasse of desire must be treated through the exploration of this hole.

Notably, Lacan in his Seminar XXIV links a torus to man in general, not merely to the structure of the neurotic. This is in line with the Freudian insight that everyone is more or less

Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: Norton, p. 634. 181 Lacan, “L’étourdit,” Autres écrits, pp. 485–486. 182 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis, 1965–1966, June 8, 1966 (unpublished). 183 Lacan, Écrits, p. 321. 67

neurotic. “Man goes round in circles because the structure of man is toric.”184 Human animal is first and foremost speaking animal, living in the prison of language. Contained by language, man cannot get access to his object-cause of desire. The toric structure of man implies that man cannot be delivered from the repetition of demand and the ignorance of desire. This toric structure of man is crucial to the problem of love. If man is toric, man’s way of loving would be influenced by his toric structure. His love would be “toric love.” Let us address toric love in two ways.

First, toric love as neurotic love can be examined in terms of the Lacanian triad of need, demand, and desire. As living organisms, human beings have biological needs. To satisfy these needs, human beings must rely on demand as the verbal expression of needs, as in a baby’s cry. Need is thus replaced by and transformed into demand. The problem is that as soon as the need for an object is satisfied, this takes on the proof of love offered by the Other. The existence of the Other, who takes care of us by responding to our demand, in turn generates our unconditional demand for love. Although the Other can never satisfy this demand for love, in the subject’s psychical reality, the Other has to remain as someone who can satisfy this demand. Put differently, it is demand that makes the Other give what the Other does not have: namely, love. “Demand already constitutes the Other as having the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs, that is, the power to deprive them of what alone can satisfy them. The Other’s privilege here thus outlines the radical form of the gift of what the Other does not have–namely, what is known as its love.”185 Demand structures a situation in which the mother as the first Other is ambivalent for the child. She is both a caretaker who gives an unconditional love and a master who wields the power of love. Once demand for an object is satisfied, demand constitutes the Other as someone who can satisfy and thus love the subject. However, the subject soon realizes that the Other cannot fully satisfy him/her. Mother is not always there for him/her. Consequently, there emerges a necessary gap between the satisfaction of need and the demand for unconditional love. Desire is precisely born of this gap. “Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.”186 Desire thus has no positivized substance, for it is a pure gap between the demand for the satisfaction of need and

184 Lacan, SXXIV, December 14, 1976 (unpublished). 185 Lacan, Écrits, p. 580. 186 Ibid. 68

the unconditional demand for love. Desire is an unsatisfied lack. What, then, is desire that is proper for the neurotic?

The neurotic is characterized by the desire to be the phallus for the Other by filling up the lack of the Other. His desire reaches an impasse, for it is stuck onto the imaginary relation between the subject and the Other, as if the child wishes to become unified with the mother by serving as her phallus to fill up her lack. In terms of the dialectic between having the phallus and being the phallus, Lacan describes, “the phallus, the receiving and giving of which are equally impossible for the neurotic, whether he knows that the Other does not have it, or that the Other does have it, because in both cases the neurotic’s desire is elsewhere–to be it [the phallus].”187 The dyadic relationship between the child and the mother is originally impossible due to the imaginary phallus, which the Other’s desire heads for. The phallus emerges as the symbol of the Other’s desire. Here, the child (mis)believes that insofar as he/she becomes the mother’s phallus, an imaginarily harmonious relationship can be sustained by satisfying her desire and filling up her lack. When this yearning for the imaginary totality is solidified, it establishes the neurotic structure. The desire of the neurotic, whether male or female, goes beyond having or giving (not having) the phallus. The neurotic desires to “be” the phallus for the Other. Analytic work then lies in leading the neurotic to assume castration. The neurotic must accept that he/she cannot be the imaginary phallus. “Whether male or female, man must accept to have and not have it, on the basis of the discovery that he isn’t it.”188

A neurotic’s desire to be the imaginary phallus has a crucial implication for love in two senses: first, “since I complete you by filling up your lack, I am eligible to dominate you.” Here, love turns into a means to dominate the Other. Second, “without you, I cannot take on the privileged role to complete you, I am afraid of missing you.” Here, love turns into a fear about losing the Other. Neurotic love thus means either the desire for domination of the Other or the fear of loss of the Other. In both cases, love is reduced to power, either the power that subordinates the Other to oneself or the power that subordinates oneself to the Other. Neurotic love is a power struggle around the imaginary phallus that avoids lack and castration. Neurotic love is based on the blindness to the lack in the Other. The neurotic demands that

187 Ibid., p. 537. 188 Ibid. 69

the Other be a perfect lover. However, there is no one as a perfect lover who can gratify the unconditional demand for love. In sum, demand for love and desire to be someone’s phallus as a master key to his/her lack constitute the impasse of the neurotic way of loving.

Let us now move onto toric love in terms of the object a and jouissance. Recall that the central hole actually orients and structures the turns on the surface. The circle of desire is present and yet hidden from the perspective of the circle of demand. In other words, demand cannot catch up with desire. Addressing the link between the neurotic and a torus in a passage of Seminar IX, Lacan states that “the neurotic will try to make what is the object of his desire pass into the demand, to obtain from the Other, […] the satisfaction of his desire, namely, to have its object.”189 However, the neurotic attempt to conform the object of desire to demand is doomed to failure. Since desire is a pure gap, desire cannot find satisfaction in any object. Moreover, it is impossible to obtain the object of desire from the Other. Rather, the object of desire is marked by the fact that the Other cannot satisfy my demand. “The object itself as such, qua object of desire, is the effect of the impossibility of the Other to respond to the demand.”190 To address this object of desire, the object a, let us return to the triad of need/demand/desire. When need is articulated through demand, desire emerges as a gap between need and demand. At the same time, need is transformed into the drive via demand. Biological need is transformed into unconscious drive via language. The problem is that the satisfaction of the drive, namely, jouissance, is emptied out by language. “Jouissance is prohibited to whoever speaks.”191 Complete jouissance and the object that could satisfy jouissance are lost to speaking animals. The only way for speaking animals to get access to complete jouissance is fantasy. Fantasy reifies jouissance in the form of an object. Fantasy provokes the mirage that complete jouissance is possible if one can obtain this object. In this regard, the object in reality is nothing but a lure supported by the fantasy, while the object in the real is loss itself. Let us take the oral drive, as an example. As Freud pointed out, the structure of the drive appears more vividly in pathological cases than in normal cases. The case of bulimic patients shows that the object of the drive is neither food (the object of need) nor mother’s care (the object of demand) but the void as the object a. Their suffering does not

189 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book IX: Identification, 1961–1962, March 14, 1962 (unpublished). 190 Ibid. 191 Lacan, Écrits, p. 696. 70

lie in eating too much; rather, they eat too many nothings, which is why the oral drive remains excessive and ultimately destroys the subject. Contrary to appetite, the oral drive cannot be satisfied, for it aims at the circulatory movement around the lost object in the real, not a in reality. It is impossible to satisfy something that is not in its place. As Lacan states, “No food will ever satisfy the oral drive, except by circumventing the eternally lacking object.”192 The central hole in a torus refers to this object a around which the subject turns. Since the object a is void, what is at stake in the drive is not to fill up this hole. A blind and repetitive movement of turning around this hole will do.

The central hole in a torus implies that man’s love is grounded in loss. To fall in love is to re- encounter loss. To be in love is to wander around loss. Loss does not merely refer to the fact that there was something original and then it was lost. Loss can also precede and structure thing. Loss can become embodied as the object of the drive. While the object of desire in our daily lives is a fantasmatic substitution or compensation for this loss, the object of the drive is loss itself, which provokes the endless repetitive movement around it. The object a stands in for “Loss” that goes beyond particular loss and gain. The object a itself is a reified semblant of loss. With regard to a torus, the numerous turns of demand is nothing but the movement to recuperate the lost jouissance by obtaining object a. In love as demand, “there is but the request for object a, for the object that could satisfy jouissance.”193

To flesh out the relation between loss and love, one could refer to Descartes’ letter to his friend Chanut, in which Descartes writes that his attraction to squint-eyed people originated from his love of a squint-eyed girl whom he met when he was a boy.

The impression made by sight in my brain when I looked at her cross-eyes became so closely connected to the simultaneous impression which aroused in me the passion of love that for a long time afterwards when I saw persons with a squint I felt a special inclination to love them simply because they had that defect. […] So, when we are inclined to love someone without knowing the reason, we may believe that this is because he has some similarity to something in an earlier object of our

192 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977, p. 180. 193 Lacan, SXX, p. 126. 71

love, though we may not be able to identify it.194

Strictly speaking, Descartes did not feel an inclination to love people with squint eyes; rather, he was inclined toward his own loss. His partner was his own unconscious structured by the loss of the girl. Lacan would classify Descartes’ passion toward people with squint eyes into phallic jouissance as fantasy. Descartes’ case illustrates how phallic jouissance, which seeks to recuperate the lost Thing through the objects of desire, disguises itself as love. The loss of the beloved leads one to find someone with a trait that reminds one of that figure. The loss of the beloved leads to the consequence that one comes to love not someone per se, but some aspect that evokes the beloved. In the case of Descartes, the squint eyes served as the determinant factor for future love. Once the girl as the Thing was gone, the squint eyes served as a master signifier that orients Descartes’ unconscious. Here, love is not what someone makes with someone but what someone makes with something. In toric love, love is not a matter of who the beloved is but of what the beloved is, more precisely, something that exceeds the beloved and resonates with the lover’s loss. The subject of love takes a step back, and the object of love rules. Here arises the Lacanian declaration of love in Seminar XI: “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you, I mutilate you.”195

In a novel by Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death, the anonymous woman responds to the man’s question about how love happens, in the following way: “Perhaps through a lapse in the logic of the universe.” Toric love expands the woman’s point by showing that this lapse in the logic of the universe is intrinsic to the universe. To illustrate this point, Lacan would articulate the idea of “aspherical” topology for which the hole of a torus is important. “If there was something to be done to imagine the subject in relation to the ideal sphere, always the intuitive and mental model of the structure of a cosmos, it would be rather that […] it would be to represent the subject by the existence of a hole in the aforesaid sphere.”196 If spherical topology is characterized by the ideal accord between ego and reality, aspherical topology is characterized by the subject as a hole, the subject whose substance as jouissance

194 René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 3, The Correspondence, eds. and trans. J. Cottingham, et al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 322–323. 195 Lacan, SXI, p. 263. 196 Lacan, SIX, March 14, 1962 (unpublished). 72

is emptied out by the signifier. It is often said that animals are sad because they cannot speak. Meanwhile, speaking animals are sad because they lost something unknown that is accessible only through the fantasy. For speaking animals, the universe is neither cosmos nor chaos, but a sphere with an empty center. Wandering in the aspherical universe and yearning for the recuperation of jouissance, the subject cries out à la Valery. “I am in the place [where jouissance is lost] from which ‘the universe is a flaw in the purity of Non-Being’ is vociferated.”197

A delicate point here is that the flawed universe is not merely due to the interdiction of jouissance by the Law. “For it is pleasure that sets limits to jouissance, pleasure as what binds incoherent life together.”198 As in the , jouissance of the Thing as the mother is, on the one hand, interdicted by the paternal law. On the other hand, more crucially, jouissance as the nexus of pleasure and pain is contradictory and impossible from the perspective of the pleasure principle. Animals are characterized by the pleasure principle as natural instinct. For speaking animals for whom there is no such thing as nature, or for whom there is only a flawed and dislocated nature, it is the pleasure principle itself that prevents the subject from getting close to jouissance. Pleasure, while pointing toward excessive pleasure, serves as a restricting law. Consequently, what is supposed to provide pleasure no longer seems to guarantee pleasure. Speaking animals are put in the dialectical prison of pleasure, oscillating between the pleasure principle and the impossible beyond of the pleasure principle.

Let us conclude. Torus shows us that the neurotic love (the neurotic demand for love) is not love but power struggle due to his ignorance about desire as lack. Torus also shows us that the subject of love is not a jouisseur, but someone who disquietingly hovers around the lost jouissance in this aspherical universe. Just as a lapse is intrinsic to the universe, and a hole is internal to a torus, loss is indispensable to love for speaking animals. There is no gaining or losing something in love, for love is the game of “Loss,” either in the form of the dissimulation or revelation of loss.

Let us now turn to Badiou’s topology in his Logics of Worlds. Contrary to Being and Event, which employs the axiomatic set theory to support that the doctrine of being qua being is mathematics, Logics of Worlds employs descriptive topos theory to address being-there or

197 Lacan, Écrits, p. 694. 198 Ibid., p. 696. 73

appearing. If Being and Event addresses the being of truth, Logics of Worlds addresses the appearing of truth, namely, how truths appear in a determinate world. Supplementing the thesis that there are truths and the subjects of truths, Badiou now questions whether truths appear in a world, both at the subjective and the objective level. Considering that topology is a study of place, it is no coincidence that Badiou uses topology for the discussion of the problem of being-there. Unlike the Lacanian topology that deals with topological objects that are studied in standard mathematical discourse, the Badiouian topology is based on reconceptualized philosophical notions such as a world, a point, and a body of truth.

A world refers to the place in which objects and relations between objects appear. What matters here is that the appearing of an object always goes through an evaluative marking of being, which Badiou calls the “transcendental” (of a world). Although the foundation of an object is being, being is retroactively affected and infected by appearing. When an object appears or exists in a world, it is evaluated by laws of appearing or logics of existence. With this transcendental evaluation, there exists a world with objects that vary according to their intensities of appearance. A world is a confused and complex space with the objects at infinitely various levels of gradation, nuance, and density.

Occasionally, this complex intensity of appearance can be concentrated into an instance of the Two, as in the Kierkegaardian choice of “either/or,” which Badiou calls a “point.” What matters for our discussion is that “the points of a world form a topological space.”199 A world can be considered to be a topological space, for a world contains some points, whose topological operation amounts to “localization”: the localization of infinity into the Two. A point is both subjective and objective. It is subjective because it requires a subjective decision. It is objective because it is a test imposed by the world on the subject. It is a test in the sense that only one of the two possibilities is conducive to the continuation of the truth-process. For instance, a political conjuncture can be constituted by the point of people’s power or party’s power. Only the choice of the people’s power, which amounts to a successful passing of the test imposed by the world, is the good one for the persistence of the revolutionary mass movement as a political truth. In Badiou’s summary, “a point is that which the transcendental of a world imposes on a subject-body, as the test on which depends the continuation in the

199 Badiou, LW, p. 414. 74

world of the truth-process that transits through that body.”200

A point plays a crucial role in the formation of the subject-body. One of the theoretical breakthroughs in Logics of Worlds lies in the elaboration of this notion of a body of truth or a subjectivizable body. What is a body in general? Like any other object, a body is an object in a world. A body as a physical object is of no interest for Badiou, for it is fixated on self- centered interest and pleasure. What Badiou focuses on concerning a body is its capacity to become the subject of truth. A body can be reborn as a support for the subject of truth, when it creates immanent truths in a world. “A body is this very singular type of object suited to serve as a support for a subjective formalism, and therefore to constitute, in a world, the agent of a possible truth.”201 The link between a body and the point is important, for a body can be subjectivized to the extent that it treats some points in a world. A subjectivized body is considered to possess the “efficacious organs” to treat the points, thereby sustaining the truth- process. Insofar as a body of truth appears, “points deploy the topology of the appearing of the True.”202 In sum, a world is topological due to the points that a body may treat to become a subject of truth.

However, the presence of points in a world is by no means a necessary state of affairs. It is possible that a world is devoid of points, which Badiou calls “atonic worlds.” Atonic worlds are either too complex or too simple, so that there is no transforming the banal infinity into the critical two. Since there is no point in atonic worlds, there is no truth. Badiou here points out that sexuality in the contemporary world becomes atonic. For instance, deconstructive discourse claims to rescue sexuality from metaphysical duality, recasting it into multiple sexual identities. Against this position, Badiou affirms the value of sexual duality as the point that the amorous procedure must deal with. “Sexual duality, making the multiple appear before the Two of a choice, authorizes that amorous truths be accorded the treatment of some point.”203 The idea of multiple sexualities ends up supporting the power of discourse (identity politics) or market-based sexuality, but not the emergence of amorous truths. Multiple sexualities often uphold what Badiou calls democratic materialism that there are only bodies and . To affirm the exceptional existence of amorous truths against

200 Ibid., p. 400. 201 Ibid., p. 451. 202 Ibid., p. 409. 203 Ibid., p. 421. 75

democratic materialism, Badiou upholds the Lacanian heritage of sexual difference as the real. Note that Badiou actually compares the point to the Lacanian real, referring to the point as “those occurrences of the real that summon us to the abruptness of a decision.”204 An atonic world as the world of sex is a world in which the point as sexual difference is not recognized and is not transformed into the amorous truth. An atonic world knows only desiring One or capitalism-friendly multiplicities. By contrast, the world of love is a “tensed world” in which sexual difference is affirmed so that the possibility of the subjective creation of the scene of the Two out of sexual difference is open. Badiou also points out that a seemingly atonic world could be a product of ideological operation and that most of worlds are in between tensed worlds and atonic worlds. What matters, then, is a thorough investigation of the points in a world and a decisive wager on the right one to support the truth process.

While Logics of Worlds regards a world as a topological space with points, it also articulates the beyond of topology, which concerns an event and its trace. In order for truths to be created, it is not enough that the points are in the world. Something must happen to the world. The condition of the creation of truths in the world includes not only points but an event. The problem here is what would constitute an event as a real change and a radical rupture. If a being simply appears in a world without rupturing the transcendental of that world, this does not make an event. It is a banal “modification,” which is totally subordinate to the laws. Usually, it is by going through the laws of appearing that being comes to appear. Rarely, it is by subverting the laws of appearing that a being manifests itself, which Badiou calls an (evental) “site.” “It can happen that a multiple-being, which is ordinarily the support for objects, rises ‘in person’ to the surface of objectivity. A mixture of pure being and appearing may take place.”205 In a site, being as a multiplicity self-objectivates beyond the transcendental, while objectivated by the transcendental. A site provokes the real change of the world, for it presents an unprecedented logic of the world. A site has the same traits as an event characterized in Being and Event. A site is a self-belonging multiple beyond the laws of being, a revelation of the void as an empty set, and an appearance which soon disappears.206 If this definition of a site concerns the ontological level, what is new in Logics of Worlds is the elaboration of the notion of a site at the logical level.

204 Ibid., p. 451. 205 Ibid., p. 360. 206 Ibid., p. 369. 76

Logically, a site can be thought of in four aspects: the intensity of existence, the impact of consequences, the existence of the inexistent, and destruction. Badiou illustrates this point with the example of Rousseau’s The New Heloise as a world, a world in which love between Julie and Saint-Preux is, despite being unfulfilled, unfolded as an enduring procedure full of the fits of passion after the encounter. If love ends up as an ordinary encounter without carrying the maximal intensity of existence, it is merely a “fact.” Love between Julie and Saint-Preux is not a fact but a “singularity,” for it carries a powerful intensity of existence. As Saint-Preux proclaims, “it is a miracle of love; the more it exceeds my reason, the more it enchants my heart.”207 Moreover, their love is not “a weak singularity” with non-maximal consequences but “an event” as a strong singularity with maximal consequences. As Julie remarks, “tried as I did to stifle the first sentiment that gave me life, it concentrated itself in my heart.”208 Their love follows the logic of the inexistent, for it summons up the sensuality latent in Julie’s heart. Through their love, sensuality, which was the inexistent, comes to exist maximally. “An instant, a single instant set my own [heart] aflame with a fire that nothing can put out.”209 Finally, their love destroys the dominant idea of love, love between “you” and “me.” When “you” and “I” participate in the amorous process, “you” and “I” exist not as two individuals but as one subject of love. Saint-Preux thus affirms that “two lovers love another? No, ‘you’ and ‘me’ are words banished by their tongue; they are no longer two, they are one.”210

Love is irreducible to a vanishing encounter, for it is possible that an encounter leaves ineffaceable traces in a world. These traces, which compensate for the ephemeral side of love, constitute the very material of the amorous process. One cannot verify an encounter, but one can verify its traces in a world, through the intensity of an encounter, the consequence of an encounter, an encounter’s capacity to transform the inexistent into existence, and an encounter’s destruction of existing norms.

A world as everything that appears as an object forms a topos. In this topos, a paradoxical object, a nexus of being and appearing, manifests itself sporadically. A world-topos is sometimes haunted and disturbed by an event-site. An event happens to the world, rupturing

207 Ibid., p. 372. 208 Ibid., p. 376. 209 Ibid., p. 377. 210 Ibid., p. 380. 77

the laws of the world. An event may leave ineffaceable traces in a world. These traces provide for the change of a world. A world-topos can become different through an event-site. Likewise, an exceptional encounter can subvert and transform the lover’s whole life. In this regard, love is not merely topological but hetero-topic. Love is addressed not only to sexual difference as the point in a world, but also to encounter and its consequences as a possibility for a different world. Let us articulate the same idea in terms of the subject. Logics of Worlds defines the subject as a relation between the trace of an event and a body in a world.211 What makes a body into the subject of truth? A body becomes a subject when it incorporates (incorporer) into the evental trace. Participating in the evental trace, a body literally becomes the body (corps) of truth. In the case of love, an amorous subject is born through the incorporation into the traces left by an encounter as a vanishing event. With this incorporation into the consequences of the encounter, the subject creates a new world that is different from the world prior to the event.

In sum, love is topological due to the connection between a body and the points, and is beyond topology due to the connection between a body and an event. Although the love between Julie and Saint-Preux is situated in a specific world, it nevertheless resonates beyond the limit of a specific world and traverses across distinct worlds. The fact that the love between Abelard and Heloise was recreated by Rousseau would prove this point. Love as truth and the amorous subject as the subject of truth are both intra-worldly and trans-worldly. For the Badiouian topology, love does not concern an indistinction between interiority and exteriority, and the amorous subject is not a hole in the toric asphere. Love makes an event and the world superimposed, and the amorous subject weaves an encounter into a nexus of time and eternity, which Badiou calls “present.” An amorous subject is someone who creates a new horizon of temporality by making eternity inscribed in time beyond the confinement of a specific world.

Let us conclude. In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes writes that Socrates as the beloved embodies atopos, “unclassifiable originality.”212 With Badiou, we can state that love is a truth of atopos, not simply because it is spatially placeless, but because it helps create an evental present that exceeds the logic of place. Evental temporality supplements the

211 Ibid., p. 79. 212 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 34. 78

topological spatiality. Love is both torically spatial and eventally temporal. Love is inscribed as much in the topological hole that suspends the passage of time as in the subjective present that goes beyond the boundary of space. Love is an internal chimera for topology, a chimera that engages with and disengages from a topos, hetero-topic with the evocation of another world and ultra-topic with the creation of a present.

Knot Theory For late Lacan, the real is a matter of knots. The real can be approached through nodology (theory of knots). This entails that the real of love can be also examined in terms of the knot. Beyond his problematization of love as the imaginary, Lacan states that the Borromean knot explains that “love is not designed to be tackled by the imaginary.”213 However, the Borromean knot does not constitute the entirety of Lacanian nodology. In this section, we will address love in terms of three types of knots: the Olympic knot, the Borromean knot, and the sinthomatic knot.

In the Borromean knot, when one of the rings is missing, the whole thing disintegrates. In Seminar XXI, Lacan introduces a structurally different type of knot, the Olympic knot. The Olympic knot is characterized by the fact that one of the three orders takes the position of the middle so that if the middle ring is missing, the whole thing disintegrates, and if an extreme ring is missing, the other two rings still hold together. Only the failure of the middle ring can dissipate the knot. With three types of the Olympic knot, Lacan addresses three types of love: divine love, courtly love, and masochistic love.

In the context of Seminar XXI, the real corresponds to death, the symbolic to jouissance, and the imaginary to the body. The real is death in that it is impossible to represent death with any image or signifier. The symbolic is jouissance in that for late Lacan signifier can serve as a vehicle of jouissance, as in lalangue or Joyce’s letter. The imaginary is the body in that the form of the human body is the foundation of every idealized totality. Now, when the symbolic occupies the middle that mediates the real as death and the imaginary as the body, this makes divine love (RSI). Here, Lacan refers to the symbolic, which is the middle, as love itself. Divine love “ensures that on the one hand, the body becomes dead, death becomes the body

213 Lacan, SXXI, March 12, 1974 (unpublished). 79

on the other hand, and that it is by means of love.”214 This seems to intimate that the symbolic as the Word/God governs our body and death, just as the signifier registers itself on the subject’s body and regulates the subject’s symbolic death. Lacan does not explicate how divine love as the symbolic connects the body with death, except for the brief reference to Original Sin or the pre-Christian myth of levitation of the body. Ultimately, Lacan estimates divine love in a critical way. He states that “symbolic taken qua love, divine love is there in the form of this commandment which puts at the pinnacle being and love.”215 Divine love concerns the perverse form of love, for love is preached and proclaimed in the form of law. This pays the price of the ignorance about sexual love, as the commandment “love thy your neighbor” as an imaginary maxim subtracts love from sexuality as the real impasse. Moreover, since divine love couples being and love, it does not recognize that love concerns lack of being rather than being. Divine love attempted to chase away the problem of desire and lack. For this, divine love adopted the crafty strategy of replacing desire with end. After all, the only desire that is appreciated in divine love is God’s own desire that is unfolded as a supreme teleology. “Divine love is the supposition that God desires what is accomplished for all ends.”216 Here, psychoanalysis intervenes by attesting to the leverage of desire and lack, observing that the strategy of divine love was unsuccessful. The problem of the interlacing of desire and love is still pressing and valid. In sum, lacanian love is not divine love.

Secondly, when the imaginary occupies the middle as the body that mediates the symbolic as jouissance and the real as death, this makes courtly love (SIR). Here, Lacan takes a historical perspective that courtly love is not a rectification of divine love, but the reemergence of an ancient order that is based on the imaginary of the beautiful in Catullus’ homage to Lesbia or Plato’s Symposium. The idea is that the imaginary of the beautiful serves as a defensive shield from the traumatic real. This is why love that is triggered by beauty is essentially a deception (tromperie). In courtly love, beauty is embodied in the image of the Lady’s body, and the idealized beauty of the Lady’s body provokes the imaginarization of jouissance and death. “Courtly love imagines about jouissance and about death.”217 Notably, this knot shows that “love has always had the place of the middle” and that “the imaginary taken as the middle is

214 Lacan, SXXI, December 18, 1973 (unpublished). 215 Ibid. 216 Ibid. 217 Ibid. 80

the foundation of the true place of love.”218 Courtly love confirms that love takes root in the imaginary. But Lacan immediately adds that it is precisely the imaginary that psychoanalysis should protest against in order to approach love in a new way. “It is the imaginary of the beautiful that it [psychoanalysis] has to affront, and it is to open up a path of a re-flowering of love insofar as l’(a)mur is what limits love.”219 L’(a)mur summarizes the way in which psychoanalysis works against the imaginary love. Psychoanalysis posits that true love is not based on the imaginary of the beautiful which captivates and frustrates us alternately, but on the rupture of the imaginary and the revelation of the limit that is immanent to love. Love is wallove, for castration reveals that behind the idealized beauty there is a lack. Love is wallove, for the object a, which correlates with loss and fantasy, orients love. Love is wallove, for the sexual non-relationship reveals that there is no such thing as a harmonious unity in love. In sum, psychoanalysis reinvents love by affirming its proper limit.

Thirdly, when the real occupies the middle as death that mediates the symbolic as jouissance and the imaginary as body, this makes masochistic love (SRI). Without explicating death as the middle, Lacan observes that masochism rivets psychoanalysts and provides the foundation of psychoanalytic theories. According to masochism, a body is an enjoying substance, about which the subject wants to know nothing. “A body enjoys itself. It enjoys itself well or badly.”220 Here, Lacan articulates love with jouissance, which is notable in that love no longer belongs to the imaginary. “Jouissance is not lacking to this thing that is pursued blindly under the name of love! It is there by the shovelful!”221 Masochism shows us that love and jouissance belong together. Love works in concert with its furtive excess of jouissance. Jouissance renders love blind and deadly. Love is exciting and thrilling, for one participates in the game of love blindly, without knowing its rules. “They play a game whose rules they do not know. So then if this knowledge must be invented in order for there to be knowledge, it is perhaps for that that analytic discourse may be of use.”222 Masochism rivets psychoanalysts, for it reveals the blind chaos of jouissance. At the same time, masochism provides the foundation of psychoanalytic theories, for it evokes the necessity to invent the

218 Ibid. 219 Ibid. 220 Lacan, SXXI, March 12, 1974 (unpublished). 221 Ibid. 222 Ibid. 81

rule of this game. In accordance with the critique of courtly love as based on the imaginary, this rule cannot but belong to the symbolic. If analytic discourse as knowledge is useful to the problem of love, it is because it constructs a new symbolic order that pacifies and mitigates jouissance. Here, the unconscious turns out to be constructed, not supposed. A new love in one’s life comes with the inventive reconstruction of one’s unconscious structure. This will then lead to the consequence that love will be more civilized along with the loss of jouissance. The loss of jouissance will appear painful or impossible in an ironic sense (the analysand is pathologically attached to his/her own symptom more than anything else), but the cause of psychoanalysis lies in the invention of a rule of love through the symbolization of jouissance. “Jouissance may suffer when love becomes something a little civilized, namely, when people know that it is to be played as a game.”223 In sum, love is to civilize the uncivilizable.

Lacan thus addresses love in terms of three types of the Olympic knot: divine love (RSI), courtly love (SIR), and masochistic love (SRI). At the same time, Lacan keeps a distance from each of these. He protests against divine love for the concealment of desire and the avoidance of sexuality, courtly love for its appeal to the imaginary of the beautiful, masochistic love for its blind chaos of jouissance. On the contrary, Lacanian love is composed of working through desire beyond divine love, confronting its immanent limit beyond courtly love, and inventing its rule beyond masochistic love.

Ultimately, Lacan considers the Olympic knot as a failure, a failure of subjectivization. While the construction of the Borromean knot as the support of the subject amounts to a successful subjectivization, the Olympic knot shows “how easy it is to fall into the middle [love]”224 as the crisis of subjectivization. Recall the critical role of the middle in the Olympic knot. It is the middle that determines whether the knot holds or not by mediating the other two extremes. If it is knotted, the subject holds out. If it is unknotted, the subject disappears. Indeed, it is the middle ring that plays a decisive role in each of the three types of love: the symbolic commandment of God, the imaginary body of the Lady, the real jouissance of the masochist. When love takes the position of the middle, it is easy to fall into love as the middle. When one falls in love, love is almost everything for the subject. With an excessive love for God, a believer may turn into a crusader. With a blind devotion to his Lady, a knight may serve as

223 Ibid. 224 Ibid., December 18, 1973 (unpublished). 82

her plaything.225 With a self-destructive attachment to his jouissance, the masochist may turn away from the analyst (“negative therapeutic reaction”). Here, love endangers the subject by enlivening him or vice versa. Love is capable of desubjectivizing the subject. The Olympic knot shows that the subject of love, who falls in love, wagers on the perilous possibility of love that could make him/her collapse. For this reason, psychoanalysis alerts that there is no such thing as the subject of love. There is only the patient of love.

Let us now move onto the connection between the Borromean knot and love. To discuss this point, it is essential to refer to the Name-of-the-Father. For early Lacan, the Name-of-the- Father is the primordial signifier that authorizes the play of signifiers and provides the consistency to the signifying chain. In the clinical context, the Name-of-the-Father stands for the paternal function that makes the subject enter into the symbolic order by metaphorizing the mother’s desire, thereby instituting the phallic signification as the organizer of meaning. With the Name-of-the-Father, the child is no longer subordinate to the mother’s desire. He finds his own place in the symbolic world. It thus serves as a dividing line between neurosis and psychosis, for the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father provokes the psychotic structure by rendering the symbolic order of the subject incomplete. The Name-of-the-Father is the bulwark of the symbolic law.

For late Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father is regarded as the organizer of the Borromean knot. Technically, the Borromean knot is made out of the triskel. The triskel is not a knot but a bundle of three batons, for the Lacanian three orders are inchoate and incomplete. The triskel can turn into the trefoil knot in which the three orders are put in continuity. Clinically, Lacan regards the trefoil knot as a paranoiac personality, which means that the symbolic order is not yet settled down (For the paranoiac who lives in the flood of signification, what matters is not

225 In Seminar VII, Lacan reads a poem by Arnaut Daniel in which the case of Bernard de Cornil, who was asked by his Lady to blow her horn in keeping with his name (“corn” means “horn”), is informed. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter, New York: Norton, 1992, p. 162. 83

the play of signifiers but the meaningful link between the signifier and the signified). Or, the trikel can turn into the Borromean knot, and it is the Name-of-the-Father that plays a pivotal role in turning the triskel into the Borromean knot by providing the consistency to each order while keeping the discontinuity among the three orders.

What matters here is that Lacan maps love onto the Name-of-the-Father by bringing in the Freudian idea of a boy’s identification with the father, understood as the earliest emotional tie with another person. “There is only love because of the fact that the Name-of-the-Father makes a buckle of the three of the triskel.”226 Recall that the Borromean knot perfectly fits into the thesis of sexual non-relationship, for there is no two by two linking. Two can only be supported by the conjunction of one (knot) and three (rings). The Borromean knot, then, refers to the paternal function that deals with sexual non-relationship in the name of love. The paternal function supplies for the hole of sexual non-relationship and overlay this hole with love. Going one step further, the father also prescribes eternal love by structuring the Borromean knot. “The Node Bo is merely the translation of the following, love, and into the bargain the love that one may qualify as eternal, is addressed to the function of the father.”227 However, eternal love is nothing but a discursive fiction formulated by the paternal function. Rather, the identification with the Name-of-the-Father clears the ground for the emergence of ambivalence. As Freud notes, a boy’s identification with his father, which exists along with the object-cathexis toward his mother in the context of the Oedipus complex, soon takes on an antagonistic tone. The wish to be like an idealized father is replaced by the aggressive wish to remove the father to monopolize the mother. As Freud writes, “identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal.”228 Expanding this idea, Lacan affirms that love as supported by identification is lovehate from the beginning. “With the Borromean knot, what we have within our reach is something that for us is essential, what I stated as a first truth, namely, that love is hainamoration (lovehate).”229 Unlike Aquinas, psychoanalysis thus notes that love is concerned with the well-being of the other (velle bonum alicui) only up to a certain point.

226 Lacan, SXXII, April 15, 1975 (unpublished). 227 Lacan, SXXIII, p. 130. 228 Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” [1921] in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18, ed. and trans. James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press, 1955: 105. 229 Lacan, SXXII, April 15, 1975 (unpublished). 84

Moreover, properly speaking, it is not the case that love turns into hate, as tenderness turns into aggression in Freud’s observation. Love is hainamoration, as the conjunction of enamoured (enamouré) and hate (haine), and this is the first truth of psychoanalysis.230 Love is lovehate, insofar as love is based on the identification with the Name-of-the-Father.

If Seminar XXII addresses the Name-of-the-Father as the fourth ring that holds together the three other rings, Lacan soon reformulates the name of this fourth ring: the sinthome. The conception of the sinthome is based on the possibility that the Borromean knot could fail. Because the unknotting of the Borromean knot amounts to the triggering of psychosis and the disintegration of the subject, a supplementary support of subjectivity is required.

In the Borroeman knot, the three rings hold together despite the absence of two-by-two linking. However, through some mishandling of the knot, the knot could fail. As the picture above shows, this failure could happen at two points (X). In order for the three registers to hold together, the symbolic should have gone over the imaginary at those two points. However, the symbolic actually goes under the imaginary as in the second figure. Thus, the knot disintegrates, for the three registers are simply superimposed. For the repair of this Borromean knot, a supplementary knot as the sinthome (Σ) must be added to the symbolic. The sinthome supports not only the symbolic but the whole thing. It is the sinthome of the fourth ring that sustains the three rings that are exposed to the possibility of unknotting. Notably, the final figure shows that the symbolic and the sinthome constitute a new symbolic. Lacan describes this as “Σ + S, which gives us a new type of S.”231 This consequence is not a coincidence because only the symbolic can be divided into two: the symbolic as the differential network of signifiers and the symbolic as the singular letters that contain

230 Already in Seminar VIII, Lacan states that “love in its primordial, ambivalent coupling with hate is a self- evident term” (SVIII, p. 16). 231 Jacques Lacan, “Conférences et entretiens dans les universities nord-américaines,” December 2, 1975 at the Massachusetts Institute of . 85

jouissance. Stated differently, there are two types of the unconscious: the symbolic unconscious that is analyzable and the real unconscious that is unanalyzable. Stated differently, there are two types of the symptoms: the symptom to be dissolved through the analytic work and the sinthome to be recognized as a support of subjectivity. The clinical significance of the sinthome is that the unconscious is not merely supposed or given but can be constructed or refashioned. The sinthomatic knot thus refers to the possibility of a new symbolic order and thus a change of subjectivity.

The sinthomatic knot also implies the change of the status of the Name-of-the-Father. Lacan occasionally identifies the sinthome with the Name-of-the-Father. “The father is this fourth element … without which nothing is possible in the knot of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.”232 However, the Name-of-the-Father no longer refers to the operation that composes the Borromean knot. It refers to a material to be employed in the act of naming to build a new symbolic order. The father himself rather appears to be a symptomatic figure. The point is here not simply that one should divest Name-of-the-Father of its ungrounded authority. One could even utilize it, thereby dispensing with it. As Lacan states, “psychoanalysis, when it succeeds, proves that the Name-of-the-Father can just as well be bypassed. One can just as well bypass it, on the condition that one make use of it.”233

What implications does the sinthome have for love, then? The sinthome organizes a relationship between one sex and the other sex through the sublation of the sexual non- relationship. It is the bearer of the relation of the non-relation. As Lacan states, “where there is a relation, it is to the extent that there is sinthome, that is to say, to the extent that the other sex is supported by the sinthome.”234 The crucial question here is whether this relation is regulated by the phallic function and the discursive operation. This seems to be the case, for Lacan repeats his idea of woman as man’s symptom in the same seminar. While woman is man’s symptom, man is woman’s ravage.235 Woman is man’s symptom, for woman as the Other sex is reduced to the object a due to the masculine symptom of the phallic jouissance. Meanwhile, man is woman’s ravage, for man can provoke woman’s psychotic episode by making woman confront her excessive jouissance beyond the phallic function. If so, even

232 Lacan, SXXIII, p. 147. 233 Ibid., p. 116. 234 Ibid., p. 84. 235 Ibid. 86

though the sinthomatic knot supports the relation, this relation turns out to be structured by the pre-established law and discourse, for the asymmetrical relation between symptom (woman) and ravage (man) is ultimately affected by the phallic function. Let us note that this point is not consistent with the point that the sinthome serves as a mediator for a new symbolic order. The sinthome cannot be on the same level as the phallic function, for the sinthome makes use of the phallic function to bypass it. The only exit from this problem is an “intersinthomatic relation” in which man is a sinthome and woman is a sinthome, and this is what Lacan indeed articulates soon. “There is a sinthome ‘he’ and a sinthome ‘she.’ This is all that remains from the so-called sexual relation. Sexual relation is an intersinthomatic relation.”236 Note the difference between sinthome “he”/sinthome “she” in 1978 and homme “he”/homme “she” in Seminar XIV. In the latter, man (homme) belongs both to “he” and to “she.” This implies that the relation between man and woman is masculine, as this relation is established by language, discourse, and the phallic/paternal function. In the former, the common denominator is the sinthome, meaning that this relation is no longer a normative stopper for the hole of the non-relation. The intersinthomatic relation rather preserves the aporia of sexual non-relation. At the same time, it builds a non-discursive, non-phallic, and non-paternal relation, which amounts to a rule of the game of love to be tackled by psychoanalysis. In this regard, the intersinthomatic relation is the proper name of the psychoanalytic reinvention of love.

The intersinthomatic relation amounts to the conjunction of singularities. Note that the Lacanian notion of singularity is defined as S + Σ. “It is insofar as the unconscious is knotted to the sinthome, which is what is singular to each individual, that we may say that Joyce … identifies with the individual.”237 The intersinthomatic relation thus requires the process in which each sex reconstitutes his/her unconscious structure and builds a new symbolic order that intermingles with (rather than represses) his/her subjectivity. To be man-sinthome as a singularity, man should work through his unconscious structure based on phallic jouissance and accept that the Woman does not exist (that she cannot be defined according to phallic function). To be woman-sinthome as a singularity, woman should insist on her undecidable position with regard to the symbolic order and renounces her fantasy about the exceptional

236 Jacques Lacan, “Conclusions–Congress de L’École Freudienne de Paris,” in Lettres de l’École, 1979, no. 25, Vol. II, p. 220. (July 9, 1978). 237 Lacan, SXXIII, p. 147. 87

phallus. After this, the task of the invention of an amorous rule and the problem of how to conjoin two (or multiple) singularities remain. This is quite challenging, which is why love in an intersinthomatic relation is so rare. Love often ends up in the antagonism of symptoms, not to mention leading to the sinthomatic subjectivization of the symptom and the formation of a singular sinthomatic relation. At this point, the problem of the end of analysis is conducive to clarify and substantiate the correlation between the sinthome and love. In fact, the end of analysis, the sinthome, and love are interdependent problems. If psychoanalysis is involved in the problem of love, it is in the sense that the end of analysis as the goal of analytic work can be defined as inventing a new way of loving. A new way of loving is possible only with a change of subjectivity, and a change of subjectivity is precisely what comes at the end of analysis. It is then important to note that one of the Lacanian ends of analysis is the “identification with one’s sinthome,” for someone who cannot identify with one’s sinthome could hardly make an intersinthomatic love.238

In sum, knot theory implies that love is no longer addressed to imaginary ego, symbolic lack, real jouissance, but to sinthomatic singularity. Love is to constitute a singular response to the question concerning “how to communicate the virus of the sinthome.”239 Love is to construct my own sinthome, accept the other sinthome as another singularity, and organize the conjunction of sinthomatic singularities. Love is to create an intersinthomatic relation that sublates the sexual non-relationship, working through the unconscious symptom and developing a new symbolic order. Love as an intersinthomatic relation no longer depends on the operation of the Name-of-the-Father, and it goes beyond love as ambivalence. Along with the Borromean knot, the psychoanalytic first truth that love is hainamoration was affirmed. Along with the sinthomatic knot, this first truth is subverted, and the new maxim about love (and the end of analysis) ensues: “Identify with your own sinthome, and create an intersinthomatic relation!”

238 Let us nevertheless note that the sinthomatic subjectivity does not necessarily lead to the intersinthomatic relation, as in the case of the Joycean sinthome. Joyce did not reach an intersinthomatic relation with his wife Nora, despite his sinthomatic subjectivity. Joyce’s relationship with Nora amounts to a sexual relation based on his unconscious in which Nora is reduced to something like a “glove” he slips on, rather than being recognized as a subjective singularity. Nora is only a particular case that fits into the general notion of woman as an objectifiable glove. “For Joyce, there is but one woman. She follows the same model, always, and he only slips on this glove with the keenest repugnance” (SXXIII, p. 68). A notable point here is that the sinthome, which marks the end of analysis, does not guarantee the success of a new love or indoctrinate the principle of love. Psychoanalysis prefers to preserve the enigma of love, rather than prescribing an ideal figure. I will come back to this point in conclusion. 239 Lacan, “Conclusions–Congress de L’École Freudienne de Paris,” p. 220. 88

Badiou, for his part, does not address love in terms of a knot. Although Badiou employs the Borromean knot when he defines the concept of a philosophical institution through the interdependent elements of address, transmission, and inscription, this is not relevant to the problem of love. Moreover, Badiou’s critique of the Lacanian Borromean knot in Theory of the Subject and his presentation of the communist Idea in terms of the Borromean knot pertain to the political issue, which will be discussed later. However, it is possible to reconstruct the Borromean knot of an ethics of love, in that the Badiouian love is possible only through a subjective ethics.

Against the contemporary ethical such as human , minority as victims, , the Levinasian responsibility for the Other, capitalist , and cultural relativism, Badiou presents an “ethics of truths.” This ethics is first based on the event as an immanent rupture with the opinion of the situation, an unpredictable supplementation to the knowledge of the situation. This ethics is possible, for “what happens” occasionally pierces through a human animal whose interest is usually regulated by the law of “what is.” Secondly, this ethics is based on fidelity as the procedural investigation of the situation from the perspective of the event to construct a new situation. In this faithful process whose maxim is “keep going,” a human animal perseveres in that which exceeds his/her finitude and renders him/her immortal. Finally, this ethics is embodied by truth as what fidelity to the event produces in the situation. When a truth that punctures a hole in the objective language of the situation is supported by the subject, the subject develops the language that carries truth, “the subject-language.” This subject-language has the power to reorganize the language of the situation, gradually constructing a new situation. In sum, the ethics of truths declares: “Continue to be this ‘some-one,’ a human animal among others, which nevertheless finds itself seized and displaced by the evental process of a truth.”240

Love, due to its erratic and protean nature, problematizes every form of ethics. In this regard, Lacan affirms that “analysis has brought a very important change of perspective on love by placing it at the center of ethical experience.”241 Psychoanalysis notes that eros, as a lawless chaos, challenges ethics. Love poses an aporia to the moral law as a dominant norm. In a similar thread, Badiou also contends that love does not follow such moral law. The Badiouian

240 Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. , London: Verso, p. 91. 241 Lacan, SVII, p. 9. 89

ethics of love implies that as long as truths are supported by subjective ethics, love as one of truths can be also characterized in ethical terms. If psychoanalysis examines an ethics of love in a negative way by asking how eros poses a problem to ethics, Badiou develops an ethics of love in a positive way by contending that love, as a truth, is possible only with a unique subjective ethics.

An ethics of love can be thought of in terms of the Borromean knot of event, fidelity, and truth. Without event, fidelity cannot be launched into and truth cannot be produced. Here, love is reduced to a repetition of the pre-established law, the reign of the narcissistic One. Without fidelity, an event cannot be elaborated and truth loses its consistency. Here, love is reduced to a transitory encounter or an evanescent episode, as in a casual date. Without truth, the consequences of an event cannot be registered in a world and fidelity remains impotent. Here, love is reduced to the exclusive and barren Two that is unable to create an amorous infinity. If one of the three elements among event, fidelity, and truth is missing, the ethics of love disintegrates, and love as truth collapses. In this regard, the ethics of truth must be vigilant against the failure of each of these three elements, which Badiou defines as three types of evil. This then clarifies how love is closely bound up with the problem of evil.

The ethics of truth contend that a human animal is not given any intrinsic value in terms of its biological quality and life, for its value only depends on whether it becomes and continues to be a subject of truth. In this regard, the Nietzschean idea that life is beyond good and evil is reversed. Life is, rather, beneath good and evil. “Without consideration of the Good, and thus of truths, there remains only the cruel innocence of life, which is beneath Good and beneath Evil.”242 The idea is that truth is indifferent towards life. Unlike truth as a philosophical category, life is not a matter of philosophical thinking. However, evil is a different matter. Leaving the innocence of life out of the discussion, the ethics of truth note that evil is as important as good. Evil is not the absence of good, but a possible consequence of good. Evil, which only exists due to the existence of truths, mobilizes its own subject and reappropriates the truth in some way. The task of ethics, then, lies in protecting the truth process against the evil that the truth process itself makes possible. Badiou identifies three types of evil– , betrayal, and disaster–and links them to event, fidelity, and truth, respectively.

First, the event is the summoning of the void of the situation, for it reveals what is

242 Badiou, Ethics, p. 60. 90

unrepresentable by the law of the situation. By contrast, simulacrum summons a particular substance that already existed in the situation. For instance, Nazism instituted a politically revolutionary sequence by appealing to the “German” people as a mythical and national substance. Here, evil appears in the form of simulacrum as pseudo-event. Secondly, fidelity as the truth process follows an uncertain trajectory. It is constantly exposed to internal crisis, which may lead to the temptation to give up on the truth or even to the retroactive cancellation of truth. One could think of a militant activist who actively revokes his/her emancipatory commitment in the past. Here, evil appears in the form of betrayal. Thirdly, truth has the power to reorganize the existing knowledge of a situation. This can lead the subject of truth to believe mistakenly that truth possesses a totalizing power so that the subject-language of truth can name all of the elements of the situation. However, there is always at least one element of the situation that cannot be named. For instance, concerning the classical mathematical thought as founded on the principle of non-contradiction, Gödel’s theorem reveals that one cannot demonstrate, within a mathematical system, the non- contradiction of that system. Non-contradiction itself cannot be named by mathematics. To name the unnameable with the belief in the absolute power of a truth provokes evil in the form of a disaster. Therefore, the ethics of truth, constituted by event-fidelity-truth and challenged by evil as the undercurrent of truth, supports discernment against the simulacrum, courage against betrayal, and moderation against disaster.

Let us transpose this discussion onto the context of love. First, love turns into a semblant when the event is a simulacrum. In a human animal’s life, it is very probable that love of another person will be triggered by pseudo-events such as money, sexuality, appearance, career, or, any particular quality that can be classified as attractive under the psychic/social code of romance. By contrast, love as event is triggered by void or je ne sais quoi. This je ne sais quoi prevents love from being captured by any existing knowledge. Love is empty, for even if it seems to aim at a particular person or thing, it is actually addressed to none or nothing, not as purely negative, but as unidentifiable from the perspective of dominant knowledge. The ethics of love thus stipulates, “Let your love be triggered by void, not plenitude.” In this regard, one could anticipate Badiou’s critique of courtly love. Insofar as courtly love is based on the imaginary beauty of the Lady, it belongs to love as a semblance. Moreover, any form of love that is based on identification (for instance, Lacan’s hainamoration that is based on the identification with the Name-of-the-Father), belongs to 91

love as a semblance, for identification presupposes that there is some substance to be identified.

Secondly, love is erased when one betrays fidelity. Fidelity does not simply refer to a physical and mental commitment. It refers to the subjective process to constantly reinvent and expand the amorous situation. Let us think of the situation in which lovers live together. Living together implies that lovers are inevitably supposed to negotiate and cooperate to build a new living environment. In this situation, even a tiny difference–for instance, the dispositional difference between the nocturnal and the diurnal–could provoke a conflict between lovers and make the amorous process come to a halt. Betrayal also takes the form of an active negation of love. Confronted with the problem of living together, lovers might declare that there was no love from the beginning and that each one was the wrong person to one another. Betrayal thus implies both the cessation of the amorous process and the retroactive revocation of the existence of love. What would be a deeper cause of this betrayal against the amorous play of difference? Why difference emerges in the form of antagonism in so many loves? Recall that the Badiouian subject is divided between the subject of truth and the ego as human animal. What blocks fidelity is not a third party or a love triangle, but ego that persists within the amorous subject. “The difficulties that love harbors don’t stem from the existence of an enemy who has been identified. They are internal to the process: the creative play of difference. Selfishness, not any rival, is love’s enemy.”243 It is the selfish ego that tempts the subject of love to cease the work of love and revoke the existence of love. Considering that ego acts as a little master in an imaginary way, fidelity would be an act of courage to surpass this little master and grapple with its idealizing lures and saccharine deceptions. Love requires courage not to surrender to ego and to remain subject to the process of experimenting with the possibility of the Two. The ethics of love thus stipulates, “Continue the faithful procedure with courage against betrayal.”

Thirdly, love becomes monstrous when it is assumed to possess a total power. As in Gödel’s theorem, it is impossible to name the entire real of the situation from the perspective of the truth. There is at least one unnamable element in the situation for truth. By forcing the naming of the unnamable, truth turns into disaster and the subject of truth falls into dogmatism. Here, Badiou comes close to Lacan, for the concept of the unnamable of a truth

243 Badiou, IPL, p. 60. 92

is based on the Lacanian real, the real as an untotalizable fragment that cannot be represented by the power of the truth (not by the power of preexisting knowledge). “Let us say that this term [the unnamable] is not susceptible of being made eternal, or not accessible to the Immortal. In this sense, it is the symbol of the pure real of the situation, of its life without truth.”244 Regarding the unnamable of the amorous truth, Badiou specifies that “jouissance as such is inaccessible to the power of the truth (which is a truth about the two).”245 Jouissance is inaccessible to the power of the Two, for it reveals asubjective satisfaction of drives. In jouissance, one cannot discern which body is enjoying or not, whether ill or well-off. Jouissance leads one to forget about the power of the two, mostly reinforcing the volatile One. Jouissance does not belong to the subject of love, but rather to the body of drive. Jouissance is not a matter of truth, but of the real. While the scene of the Two aims at the creation of an amorous infinity, this creation is possible only insofar as it respects the exceptional point of the real. The amorous Two is powerless in dealing with jouissance, and the best way to deal with jouissance would be just leaving it as it is, not forcibly naming it. Just as life is beneath good and evil, one should let go of jouissance. Jouissance is that which love must not speak of. The ethics of love thus stipulate that the subject of love must be silent regarding jouissance.246

In sum, love as a truth is supported by ethics. The ethics of love requires that there be an event, fidelity, and truth in the form of the Borromean knot. However, just as Lacan deals with a possibility of a failure of the Borromean knot, the possible risks of evil are always present for Badiou. An encounter may be a pseudo-event like a casual date. Fidelity as the creative play of difference may be betrayed in favor of masterful ego. The power of the Two may attempt to name the unnamable jouissance. As a means to fix the failed Borromean knot, Lacan presents the sinthome that remains indispensable for the subjective consistency and thus has to be acknowledged as an incurable kernel, distinct from the symptom that has to be interpreted and removed by analysis. Likewise, the three forms of evil in the Badiouian ethics of love encourage us to propose that a fourth element as a kind of the sinthome is necessary to sustain the ethics of love. This fourth element could be named as “erothics” (eros + ethics),

244 Badiou, Ethics, p. 86. 245 Ibid. 246 Later, Badiou revokes this notion of the unnameable because the unnameable gives us the impression that truth is finite, which Badiou wants to refute. This point is significant in terms of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou, in that Badiou is internally divided between late Badiou (the negation of the unnameable) and quasi- Lacanian early Badiou (the affirmation of the unnameable). 93

which refers to how love fuses with ethics in an inseparable way. While the ethics of love form the Borromean knot of event, fidelity, and truth, erothics form the sinthomatic knot that supplements that Borromean knot in the case of its failure. While the ethics of love mainly addresses philosophical conceptions about love, erothics would cover both the philosophical conception about love and the psychoanalytic critique of love (in terms of fantasy, masterful ego, jouissance, etc). Erothics as an extended ethics of love require us to approach love through the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou.

Although Badiou seems to suggest an ideal form of love (the subordination of sexuality to love, the articulation of the amorous Two and infinity, the trans-worldly subjects of love, etc.), his ethics meets with Lacan via the recognition of evil in love. Here, the binary between the pessimism about the evil of love and the optimism about the good of love breaks down. Without evil, the ethics of love loses its significance. It is the presence of evil in love that makes us move towards a radical encounter, the dauntless fidelity, and the moderate power of the Two. Love completes itself by grappling with evil. As writes, “Evil is to love, what mystery is to the intelligence.”247 Just as intelligence goes beyond itself throuth mystery, love goes beyond itself through evil. Love is bound up with its internal excess of evil. While love as pure good is transcendental and illusionistic, love as pure evil is destructive and vain. Love is an in-between between good and evil.

The Amorous Void In the introduction of this chapter, it was pointed out that although both Lacan and Badiou take a formal approach to love, they are also at odds with one another because Lacan focuses on the real of love and Badiou focuses on the truth of love. This chapter then examined how Lacan and Badiou converge and diverge with regard to five issues. Let us summarize our findings.

In terms of sexuation formulas, while Lacan employs phallic function to articulate the sexual non-relationship, Badiou employs Humanity function to articulate the subjective universality of love. In terms of numericity, while Lacan employs formulations such as “something of the One” (du l’un), “of them/two” (d’eux/deux), and “beside themselves” (hors d’eux) to suggest

247 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 75. 94

the ideas of fantasy, sexual non-relationship, and amorous pathology, Badiou affirms the scene of the Two that extends to infinity beyond the desiring One. In terms of modality, while Lacan links the impossible to sexual non-relationship, the contingent to encounter, the necessary to the phallus and the symptom, the possible to discourse, Badiou links the contingent to encounter, destiny to amorous declaration and fidelity. In terms of topology, while Lacan allows us to articulate toric love based on the neurotic impasse of desire and the loss of jouissance, Badiou allows us to consider the topological world with the point of sexual duality and the ultra-topological event of an encounter. In terms of knot theory, while Lacan employs the Olympic knot to critically engage with divine love, courtly love, and masochistic love; the Borromean knot to affirm love as lovehate; and the sinthomatic knot to articulate an intersinthomatic relation, Badiou affirms the Borromean knot of event, fidelity, and truth as the ethics of love and necessitates the working through the evil in love.

To put in terms of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou, one can state that love is troubled by the impasse of the sexual non-relationship, but it entertains its universality as a truth of humanity; that the amorous Two often fails due to its pathology but also has the potential to extend to infinity; that love as destiny can be constructed by faithfully working through the symptom; that love is constituted by a loss in the world and also by an encounter that bears the possibility of creating a different world; that the subject of love engages in different kinds of love against the triggering of psychosis–this will be discussed soon–and is encouraged to elaborate a singular ethics. To compress a little bit further, the link between the Lacanian real and love is represented by sexual non-relationship, the inaccessible Two, the symptom, loss, and psychosis, and the link between the Badiouian truth and love is represented by the universality of love, the Two of infinity, destiny, encounter, and ethics.

Here, this thesis suggests that one examine more closely the relationship between love and the formal apparatuses that Lacan and Badiou use. Without this examination of the relationship between the formal and love, the real and truth override love itself, and love will be subordinate to the problematic of the real and truth. As we showed, the Lacanian approach and the Badiouian approach to love are characterized by formalism. However, their approaches are also grounded in the extra-formal, the real for Lacan and truth for Badiou. For instance, Lacan’s formula of love (2 = 1 v 3), as the outcome of a translation of the idea that the Borromean triplicity-in-unity precedes duality (“two can be factorized into one and three”), is designed to support and reinforce the thesis of the sexual non-relationship as the 95

real. Here, what is primary is not love but the real. Badiou, for his part, argues for the invention of a mathematics of love, and yet he ultimately allows the philosophical (i.e., meta- mathematical) truth to define love. Here, what matters is not the truth of love, but love as truth and philosophy as the love of truth. In this regard, this thesis suggests that one critically interrogate whether the Lacanian-Badiouian link between the formal and the real/truth alienates love and underestimates the importance of the relationship between the formal and love. That is to say, one could supplement the discussion about how Lacanian and Badiouian (extra-)formalisms innovate the thinking of love with the discussion about how love poses an enigma to the formal. In doing so, we will try to render to love the things that are of love by resisting the mastery of the real and the truth over love. For this, let us show how love has a stereographic relationship with the formal in a way that remains unexplored by Lacan and Badiou’s problematization about love. This will let love go beyond the Lacanian real and the Badiouian truth through Lacan and Badiou, and show how love remains elusive and irreducible not only to formalism and but also to the extra-formal real and truth. In this regard, the void comes first in any formal approaches to love, and the real and the truth rather constitute two different ways of managing the amorous void.

Let us begin with sexuation formulas. Although Lacan and Badiou employ different functions as the fulcrum of sexuation (Φx, Hx), both of them employ the same signifiers or positions: “man” and “woman.” The question here is whether love has potential to nullify this duality of man and woman and summon a different type of psychoanalytic and philosophical sexuation formulas. Let us discuss Lacan’s first.

For Lacan, man and woman are only signifiers. This implies that while sexuation depends on the symbolic order, sexual difference itself lies at the level of the real. Sexual difference is something that speaking beings in the symbolic order cannot understand and master. Sexuality in the form of sexual difference remains forever disturbing and traumatic. Sexuality haunts speaking beings who reside in the symbolic without being able to symbolize the real. Thus, man and woman are pathematic subjects.

Here, let us invoke another pathematic subject: a transgender. Psychoanalysis is not primarily interested in a transgender’s minoritarian social position or sociopolitical discrimination against a transgender. Psychoanalysis’s interest in a transgender stems from the fact that a transgender is a subject who paradigmatically embodies the Freudian drive as the gap 96

between the physical and the mental in sexuality. A transgender refers to anyone whose physical organ and mental orientation do not coincide. No subject demonstrates better than a transgender the Freudian idea that one can hide from external pressure in reality by evading it but not from internal pressure, or the Lacanian idea that one cannot become mad by deciding it. A transgender did not become a transgender by deciding it, but a transgender has to live with an inescapable internal gap, that ends up in transfiguring the physical organ. In this regard, a transgender’s affliction resembles that of the psychotic. At the same time, there is a difference between the two. If a psychotic resides outside the discursive space, a transgender resides at the interstice of the discursive space, namely, between man and woman.

A transgender’s love is a complex issue. Both Freud and Lacan note that love has nothing to do with sexuality. In other words, given that sexuality is polymorphous and love is multiform, one cannot find a causal and logical connection between the amorous and the sexual. A transgender fits into this aporeitic relation between the amorous and the sexual because a transgender’s love can be linked to sexuality only at the price of the transformation of sexuality. Without this price, a transgender’s love is purely Platonic, absolutely disconnected from the sexual. In other words, a transgender interrogates the condition of possibility of the link between the amorous and the sexual. A transgender evokes a transcendental critique about the link between the amorous and the sexual. The existence of a transgender constitutes an in-between between the amorous and the sexual. For Lacan, what mediates the sexual and the amorous is phallic function. But a transgender does not fit into this function because a transgender interrogates the very link between the sexual and the amorous. A transgender thus asks for an alternative function.

Here, let us recall that Lacan criticized the Freudian mythical father.248 The father is already a castrated man. There is no exceptional father. Man as the conjunction of exceptional and all is contestable, for the exception is only mythically imposed or patriarchally constructed. Let us also recall that Lacan invoked the seemingly necessary but ultimately contingent property of the phallic function. To address sexuation through the phallic function would be a contingent discursive act, far from some eternal truth.

248 At the same time, Lacan is sober enough to recognize that “there is no trace of an antiphallic nature in the unconscious” (Television, p. 134). What is at stake in the analytic work is then to transform the existing phallic structure of the unconscious into a different kind of structure, for instance, a sinthomatic structure. 97

In this regard, in reference to the idiosyncratic position of a transgender that is alien to the phallic function’s distribution of man and woman, one can envision an alternative sexuation formula. In this formula, the two sexed positions would be “cisgender” and “transgender,” not man and woman.249 The fulcrum of this formula is the gap between the physical and the mental with regard to sexuality, not the phallic function. This formula employs majoritarian and minoritarian, not universal and existential, quantifiers. A transgender is not only an internal minoritarian because of the gap between the physical and the mental, but also an external minoritarian against social convention. What is paradoxical is that this formula, which is anchored in a singular case, offers a universal insight about love: In love, one has to deal with not only one’s inner split but also one’s conflict with the world. Love is to situate and constitute oneself as a foreigner to oneself and the world.

Let us move on to Badiou. The main idea of Badiou’s sexuation formula is that the amorous can refashion the sexual. “Sexual love” would be contradictory for Badiou because, while the sexual resides at the level of being and the status quo, the amorous resides at the level of event and truth. The sexual does not precede the amorous. Rather, the amorous pervades and restructures the sexual. The Badiouian sexuation is neither a matter of the human animal’s biological property nor a matter of the Lacanian phallic function, but of the subjectivization of truths. While man seizes the four truth procedures through metaphorization, woman seizes the four kinds of truth procedures through knotting in which love plays a central role.

As we noted, Badiou’s sexuation formula aims at the critique of the phallic function and the advocation of the subject of truth. Nevertheless, one could turn to an alternative amorous sexuation formula, which can expand the Badiouian idea about love, by invoking polyamory.

Polyamory is an inclusive, long-term, and non-possessive way of love among multiple partners that respects the value of integrity, responsibility, and commitment. The key component of polyamory is “compersion”: joy or happiness about a beloved’s other relationship. When a polyamorist finds out that a beloved loves someone else, he/she does not see it as the loss of love but as the expansion of love. Put simply, polyamory is an amorous practice based on the triumph over jealousy.

249 One could apply Lacan’s problematic of the “invention of a new signifier” (SXXIV, May 17, 1977) to the term “cisgender,” for cisgender is a signifier that is considered to be impossible prior to its invention. 98

In Proust and Signs, Deleuze observes that a beloved implicates a world that a lover cannot penetrate.250 Within this unknown world there might be a beloved’s other love. Thus, jealousy is the core of the Proustian sign of love. Once there is jealousy, a beloved’s amorous sign appears much more obscure and even deceptive. A lover then holds a conviction that a beloved cheats on him/her, and this certitude soon turns into hatred.

In his recent unpublished seminar, Badiou opposes jealousy and love in terms of two different ways of dealing with a paradoxical element in the test of the real.251 In any truth process, one meets with a paradoxical element characterized by the topological indistinction between interiority and exteriority. According to Badiou, Proust exemplifies the first way, namely, a nihilist way of dealing with this element. Here, one is constantly obsessed with and overconscious about the interiority or exteriority of the other. One doubts whether the other’s interiority or authenticity is in reality the other’s exteriority or semblance. Here, jealousy outdoes love. The second way, a dialectic way of dealing with this element, regards this paradoxical element as the very place for the construction of the amorous process, which fits into the Badiouian love. Here, one takes the unavoidable interstice between interiority and exteriority on board, and works through it, rather than being frustrated and hurt by it. In sum, the Badiouian love sees the test of the topological real not as the proof of a failure of love but as a positive material of love, which is what polyamory attempts to do.

Polyamory attempts to overcome jealousy by coming to terms with the secret presence of the unknown world in love, exposing and sharing it as sincerely as possible. Polyamory faces and grapples with the interiority/exteriority of the other rather than regarding it as the signal of the end of love. Polyamory is not only ethical, in that it “attempts” to overcome jealousy despite possible catastrophes,252 but also logical, in that the problem of interiority/exteriority of the other is problematic even for the other so that one only needs to face and share it.253

250 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, London: Continuum, 2008, p. 90. 251 Alain Badiou, L’immanence des verities (2): Séminaire d’Alain Badiou, 2014–2015, November 10, 2014, unpublished. Available from: www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/14-15.htm. 252 One could refer to the film Kollektivet (The Commune) by Thomas Vinterberg on this point, which depicts experimental communal living that was fashionable in Denmark around the 1970s. A couple (Anna and Erik) organizes a commune at Anna’s suggestion. While Anna adapts herself to a life with their extended family, Erik enters into another intimate one-to-one relationship. The commune then faces a crisis when Erik brings her new partner into the commune. Despite Anna’s attempt to live in the commune with Erik and his new partner, it was impossible for her to do so, due to the absence of an intimate relationship with Erik. 253 Let us recall Hegel’s remark that the secrets of the Egyptians were secrets also for the Egyptians themselves. 99

If there happens to be a new love that truly moves the heart, polyamorists do not denounce and repress it through the lens of jealousy and one-to-one fidelity, but recognize and celebrate it, upholding the possible expansion of love. While a nihilist vision of love remains discouraged by the risk that the unknown world of a beloved threatens love, a dialectic vision of love turns the unknown world into a point to construct a new amorous process that is open to ceaseless reconstruction, which is precisely the core of compersion-based polyamory.

In fact, there is no better practice of love that can implement Badiou’s idea that the amorous refashions the sexual than polyamory. What matters for a polyamorist is not a monopolistic right to possess the sexual/amorous body but a radically open and ethical attitude toward love. Badiou’s statement that the enemy of love is not a third party but one’s ego is also notable, considering that jealousy feeds on ego’s illusionistic belief about the ability to possess a beloved. Recall that Lacan defines jealousy as “jalousissance.” Against ego’s imaginary illusion that a beloved enjoys more than I and ego’s masterful demand that a beloved must not enjoy more than me, a polyamorist welcomes a beloved’s joy by working through the irresistible movement of the heart as the real. For a polyamorist, the sharing of amorous joy outdoes the possession of egoistic jalousissance.

In the contemporary world, except for some tribal groups that practice polygyny and polyandry, monogamy is operative as the law of amorous community. Historians observe that the human animal’s mating system has moved from promiscuity to monogamy. However, whether this movement amounts to progress or advanced civilization is unclear. As Freud notes that civilization is doomed to failure due to the intensifying conflict between superego and id, a normativized monogamy often leads to tragic and hypocritical adultery. Polyamory intervenes here through a dialectic double negation of promiscuity. While the first negation of promiscuity as the real reaches monogamy as the law, the double negation of promiscuity creates an unprecedented possibility of love beyond the animalistic chaos and the double- faced law.

Therefore, let us envision an alternative amorous sexuation formula in which the two positions are monogamist and polyamorist. The fulcrum of this formula is the test of the amorous real–such as the unknown world of a beloved or the irresistible openness in love. A monogamist’s position, in dogmatic fashion, is constituted by the disingenuous repression of irresistible openness in love through conjugal law and the return of the repressed in the form 100

of the secret of adultery or the love overridden by jealousy. A polyamorist’s position is constituted by the arduous construction of a compersive community through communication about each one’s world without reserve and acknowledgment of the irreducibility of love to conventions and institutions. According to this formula, love is not an imposition of the existing law but an invention of a singular rule. To use Badiou’s wordplay, what matters in love is a laborious task of working through the real “gap (battement)” in love and reinventing the “beating (battement)” of the heart. Where the gap in love was, the new beating of the heart shall arrive.

Second, let us address the numericality of love. While both Lacan and Badiou approach love in terms of number, both of them also deflect and reconceptualize the mathematical number as in Lacan’s “of them/two” (d’eux) or Badiou’s procedural Two. While this (meta-)numerical qualification of love can be justified to imply their theses (sexual non-relationship or truth process), the relationship between numericality and love remains unquestioned. Let us explore this point.

Although the Two can serve as the anchoring point to address the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou, Lacan employed various numbers to describe love. Let us begin with the One. For Lacan, there is something of the One, instead of the One. Psychoanalysis debunks the fiction of the integral One against the Aristophanes’ myth and the Freudian eros. Every amorous passion that desires to be the One is only the effect of an imaginary ignorance. Instead, there is something of the One as a consequence of the operation of the fantasy. Yet, Lacan as the analyst is not and even cannot be dogmatically against the One, for he has to deal with the numerous clinical cases in which the analysand attempts to form the amorous One and suffers from it. It is up to psychoanalysis to deal with this clinical situation by allowing the analysand to move from the painful reenactment of the fantasy about the amorous One to the encounter with the something of the One.

As we examined, Lacan is skeptical about the amorous Two. The amorous Two is considered to be mysterious, pathological, and inaccessible. From the clinical perspective, the Two as constituted by ego and its imaginary other must be overcome or regulated by the coordinator of the Three, the symbolic Other, insofar as the imaginary relation is ingrained in mutual aggressivity and narcissistic illusion. Moreover, the Other as the third party already structures the imaginary dyad, just as the (imaginary) phallus is already involved in the dual 101

relationship between child and mother. In the context of love, the sexual relationship between man and woman must be coordinated on the basis of the phallus, for human beings do not possess an instinctual knowledge for sexual intercourse. Finally, as we noted, the Borromean knot reinforces this thread by proposing that the Borromean triplicity precedes the Two. The Two remains essentially inaccessible, for it can be produced by the junction of the One and the Three.

Thus, we move on to the Three that precedes the Two. But the Three also has a problem. The Three as the representative of the pre-estalished law does not make a panacea. The Other as the third party between two egos is incomplete. The phallic function as the mediator cannot name the feminine jouissance. The discursive link between man and woman cannot nullify the sexual non-relationship. While one could trust the regulatory role of the Name-of-the- Father, the paternal function also often fails (carence). The Joycean sinthome of writing constitutes the very case that supplements this failure of the Three and stabilizes his subjective structure. Hence, the necessity for the Four emerges.

Notably, Lacan evoked the necessity for the Four in 1960, foreshadowing the ideas of the Borromean knot and the sinthomatic knot: “There cannot be a two without a three, and that, I think, must certainly include a four, the quadripartite … The whole psychology of the psychotic develops insofar as a term may be refused, a term that mains the basic system of words at a certain distance or relationship dimension. Something is missing and his real effort at substitution and ‘signifierization’ is directed in desperation at that.”254 Without the Three, there is no Two. But the Three “must” include the Four. The structure of a psychotic shows that a privileged signifier of the Name-of-the-Father as the coordinator of the Three (“a term”) is missing. Thus, against the triggering of psychosis, the subject plunges into the invention of an alternative tool that stabilizes his/her subjectivity and can substitute for the malfunctioning Three. When the Three stumbles, the Four must intervene. Only the sinthomatic Four can sustain the subject in a metastable state by holding his body-image, unconscious, and jouissance. In terms of love, where love-in-Three that depends on the pre-constituted law was, love-in-Four that goes beyond the law by making use of the law must arrive.

In sum, the Lacanian numerical analysis of love goes as follows: Analyzing the fantasmatic One leads us into the inaccessible Two, and the Two should be assisted by the regulatory

254 Lacan, SVII, pp. 65–66. 102

Three, but the Three often fails so that there must come the supplementary Four. The question here is the identity of this Four.

In Lacan on Love, Bruce Fink writes, “for Onan and Narcissus, it takes only one. For Aristophanes, it takes two who become one. For Kierkegaard, we love another in a third, so, like for Lacan, it takes three. But Freud holds the record; for him it takes at least six: the two partners and their two sets of parents as well.”255 Fink’s numbers, like the Lacanian One, Two, and Three in our discussion, are quantifiable. What is at stake is the exact number of persons required for love to exist. In contrast, what is at stake at the level of the sinthome could be personal or impersonal, subjective or objective. It could be addressed to an unquantifiable world, as in the world of literary writing that served as the sinthome for Joyce. For Badiou, scientific investigation, political activism, or amorous fidelity could serve as the sinthome. But not all sinthomes should be extraordinary as in Joyce or Badiou. Anything or anyone that can stabilize the subjective structure against the fatal, asubjective event of psychotic triggering and substitute for the flaw of paternal function will do. In sum, the sinthome as the representative of the Four might contain a world. The intersinthomatic relation might contain the interlacing of two worlds that the subjects in question bear. With the Four or the conjunction of the Four, there arises a meta-numerical dimension in love.

In this regard, a numerical approach to love results in a meta-numerical consequence. Any mathematical number, whether natural number or real number, is discrete. The amorous number is, on the contrary, implicative. While the formal number operates through analytic decomposition, the amorous number operates through implicative precision. The sinthomatic Four is a specific Number that implies a layer that exceeds the four. The point of the sinthomatic Four is not merely that love is unprescribable through number. The point is that love dislocates the sequence of the numerical while locating itself in a specific number. This explains why lovers take so seriously their anniversary. The anniversary is important not because of its meaning or belief that a number proves their love, but because of the whole world implied therein.

With Badiou, one could expand this line of thought. As we discussed, Badiou’s amorous numerical sequence is 1, 2, infinity. The amorous Two ruptures the sexual One and engages with the worldly infinity to construct an amorous infinity. What is at stake here is how to

255 Fink, Lacan on Love, p. 200. 103

think of this worldly infinity.

Although Badiou deals with the worldly infinity in a phenomenological and experiential sense, which compromises his formalism, one could nevertheless attempt a formal analysis of the worldly infinity. The worldly infinity is a multiple composed of complex relations between objects. To flesh out this configuration, let us refer to crucial theorems and employed in Being and Event.256 The power-set axiom proves that the subsets of any given multiple will be numerically greater than the initial multiple. Now, when this axiom is implemented at the level of infinity, one cannot measure how the former is greater than the latter. The gap between a set and its power set is immeasurable in numerical terms. In this regard, the worldly infinity appears as an incalculable excess. Moreover, against the

Continuum Hypothesis that posits that the set of parts of w0 is equal to the successor of w0, w1, Easton’s theorem proves that the set of parts of w0 is equal to any cardinal among the successors of w0. Therefore, the sequence at the level of infinity is a sequence that is out of sequence, and one cannot normalize or domesticate the excess in terms of hierarchy or order. The numerical includes what Badiou calls the errancy of excess, which proves the impasse of . The real of the multiple, which set theory cannot manage, haunts set theory from within as a phantom. The worldly infinity is traversed by its own excess.

What is notable is that it is at this point that the objective, the worldly dimension leads into the subjective. Badiou observes “that it is necessary to tolerate the almost complete arbitrariness of a choice, that quantity, the very paradigm of objectivity, leads to pure subjectivity; such is what I would willingly call the Cantor-Gödel-Cohen-Easton symptom. Ontology unveils in its impasse a point at which thought has always had to divide itself.”257 Because there is no objective solution to the gap within the objective, there can be only subjective reactions to this gap. The worldly infinity is symptomatic in that it necessarily includes an arbitrary excess. This arbitrary excess can only be addressed at the subjective level. The symptomatic worldly infinity necessitates the subjective decision. Here, let us return to the amorous Two.

The amorous Two, as the limping march goes on, is supposed to meet with all sorts of

256 See Badiou, Being and Event, trans. , London: Continuum, 2005, pp. 84, 426; hereafter referenced as BE. 257 Badiou, BE, p. 280. 104

worldly infinity. The problem here is that the worldly infinity is not necessarily conducive to the elaboration of the amorous process. For instance, money, one of the crucial organizers of contemporary infinity, has an uneasy relationship with love. The amorous process should not let money dominate it, but at the same time, it cannot simply disregard money. Just as the amorous needs to reconstitute the sexual, the amorous needs to reconstitute money. In this regard, when one states that the amorous Two is operative as the truth, it means above all that the Two makes its own infinity out of the worldly infinity. The sustainability of the amorous Two depends on its subjective capacity to incorporate the worldly infinity into itself in an inventive way.

In this regard, the Badiouian Two, like the Lacanian Four, is also implicative. Insofar as the procedural Two constructs its proper infinity, this Two already must imply the worldly infinity in a subjective way. The Two must work through the errant excess in the world as the test of the real in order to redeploy that excess rather than being subordinate to it. In terms of the relationship between the numerical and love, the Badiouian Two presents a messeage similar to that of the Lacanian Four. Love is not simply unprescribable through number. It can be inscribed by the Number that faithfully passes through the impasse within the numerical. In sum, the amorous number is an extra-numerical number.

Third, let us address the modality of love. While both Lacan and Badiou approach love in terms of modality, the relationship between modality and love can be elaborated further. Let us show one way to do it.

As we discussed, Lacan reconceptualized modality in terms of writing and negation. The starting point is sexual non-relationship, “what does not cease not to be written.” Love is rooted in the impossible. Sexual non-relationship is the structural origin of love. Then, there is an encounter as the genetic origin of love. In Seminar XX, love is related to an illusion in that an encounter gives us the impression that what does not cease not to be written ceases not to be written.258 An encounter makes love emerge out of sexual non-relationship in a contingent and mirage-like way. Then, there is love as destiny. Although lovers meet by chance, a phenomenological sense emerges as if they were meant to be together. Love institutes a necessary bond out of non-relationship in a retroactive way. In sum, the amorous sequence is: the impossible → the contingent → the necessary.

258 Lacan, SXX, p. 145. 105

But in Seminar XXI, Lacan presents an alternative sequence: the necessary → the impossible. “What does not cease to be written, the necessary, is the very thing that necessitates the encounter with the impossible, namely, what does not cease not to be written.”259 Let us propose one way of reading this statement. In Seminar XXIV, Lacan identifies the necessary with the symptom. The symptom is the very thing that forces lovers to confront the sexual non-relationship. As the subjective real that constitutes the idiosyncratic core of the subject, the lover often backs off when he/she encounters the other’s symptom. The symptom serves as an obstacle to their harmonious relation. The symptom necessarily reminds the lover of the fact that there is no such thing as sexual relationship.

With the possible, one could present another sequence: the contingent → the possible. The possible refers to the discursive function. In the context of love, it refers to marriage. Love begins with an encounter and moves on to marriage. However, marriage often turns into the substitute of love, not the subsidiary of love. Marriage makes love give ground by foregrounding reality, money, and family. Marriage does not guarantee that the lovers share their lives at the level of their subjective real. Marriage as the generalized law of love might even repress the symptom as the real constituent of love. With doubt, lovers feel fatigue in their limping march. The true problem happens when the fatigue leads them to resort to marriage as if it were a security law instead of reinventing the amorous process. Here, marriage functions as the semblance of love that slowly encroaches on and ultimately devours love.

What is notable in these modal scenarios is that there is a difference between the Aristotelian modality and the Lacanian modality. In the former, each modality is independent, and the transition from one modality to another happens externally. In the latter, all of the modalities are intertwined because each modality is constituted by writing and negation, and the transition from one modality to another happens internally with the handling of negation. For instance, with the transition from “what does not cease not to be written” to “what ceases not to be written,” one of the two negations is removed. With the transition from “what ceases not to be written” to “what does not cease to be written,” the negation shifts its position. The Aristotelian modality merely opposes the four components, while the Lacanian modality triggers an interplay among them. Unlike the formal modal logic, the amorous modal logic in

259 Lacan, SXXI, January 8, 1974 (unpublished). 106

which each mode shares writing and yet differs in terms of negation is open to metamorphosis. The possibility of this metamorphosis proves that “love is a good test for the precariousness of these modes.”260 Recall that the test is the term that Badiou uses to engage with the Lacanian real. Love serves as the real with regard to the modal logic, showing that each modality has no fixed identity and that each modality can easily transform into another. Working back on the formalism of modality that analyzes love by dividing it into quarters, love challenges modal logic by presenting an anomalous modal logic. Love does not reside in any specific modality or specific sequence of modality. It permeates between each modality and provokes the metamorphosis of modality. As Lacan states, “These modes are veritable and even definable by our pinpointing of writing. They quarter the verification of love, and in a way that, by one of its faces, founds what is called wisdom. Except for the fact that wisdom cannot in any way be what results from these considerations on love. Wisdom only exists from elsewhere. For in love it is of no use.”261 Wisdom, more specifically, wisdom based on modal logic, is useless in love. The formal analysis to quarter love remains futile. Love remains unverifiable in terms of modality, because love punctures a hole in the modal system.

Let us refer to a specific example. In Maladies of Death by Marguerite Duras, who is one of the most authoritative proponents of the thesis of sexual non-relationship in the literary field, we witness that the man loses the woman even before he meets her. Their meeting only reveals the subjective lack within the man. The man does not meet her but his own unconscious structure and thus encounters the impossible relationship between them. Their meeting is nothing but an opportunity to realize their non-relationship. The modal sequence of this case would be circular: the contingent ↔ the impossible. This confusion of modalities happens because love is, to use our term, an in-between between the contingent and the impossible. As an in-between modality, love causes the interlacing of modalities. In sum, the Lacanian modal approach to love reveals that love is an unprecedented and unquarterable modality.

One can also think of the uneasy relationship between modality and love with Badiou, but in a different direction from Lacan. For Badiou, an amorous encounter is a contingent event beyond the necessary law in the ordinary course of life. At the same time, Badiou emphasizes

260 Ibid. 261 Ibid. 107

the importance of conquering the power of the contingent with the amorous process, which starts with a declaration of the Two and continues with the subjective fidelity. Here, one can already recognize the mixture of modalities. Although the core of an amorous process lies in conquering the contingent and elaborating a destiny, this process is not predetermined or necessary. The Badiouian Two refers to the process of elaborating an amorous infinity through the oscillation between the One and the Two. The amorous process contains all sorts of twists and turns. It constitutes an aleatory and precarious itinerary. In this regard, an amorous destiny blurs the distinction between the contingent and the necessary.

The same is also true of an encounter. An amorous encounter is something that was considered to be impossible from the perspective of the One. It thus reminds of the fact that the division between the possible and the impossible was a product of the law. Moreover, insofar as the subject of love elaborates the consequences of this impossible event, the division between the possible and the impossible becomes refashioned. In this regard, love blurs the distinction between the possible and the impossible, too.

Notably, there is one Badiouian concept that proves that love engages with an unprecedented modality: second encounter.262 Second encounter refers to the case in which one falls in love again with one’s partner with whom one has been in love. Second encounter belongs to the contingent, for it does not happen by the law, as in the first encounter. Second encounter also belongs to destiny, for it does not come from the pre-evental ordinary world, but from the post-evental subjective world. Second encounter even has a complex relationship with the possible and the impossible. Since the amorous process already works on the re-articulation of the possible and the impossible, second encounter, which is an extraordinary effect of the faithful amorous process, modifies the re-articulation of the possible and the impossible one step further. In this regard, second encounter is related to every modality, but it cannot be located in a specific modality. It belongs to every modality by not belonging to any modality. It does not simply blur the distinction among modality but concentrates the indistinction among modality. It amounts to crystallizing the non-modal into a singular modality. Unlike the Lacano-Durasian pre-encounter loss that correlates with subjective lack and sexual non- relationship that await opening, second encounter amounts to the “mastery of loss”263 or the

262 Second encounter is discussed in Chapter 4 in relation to the love between Gorz and Dorine. 263 In Theory of the Subject, Badiou criticizes Lacan for the one-sided, structural notion of the subject whose 108

gift of an infinity that provides for inexplicable novelties. Second encounter is an impossibly, necessarily, and contingently possible grace of an amorous infinity. Here again, love is elusive to modal logic. With the second encounter, love becomes an immoderate modality of subjective infinity.

Fourth, let us move on to the topology of love. As we discussed, Lacan invents a psychoanalytic topology that can be illustrated in terms of a torus. A torus visualizes the structure in which the neurotic subject, constituted by the ignorance of desire, constantly repeats his demand for love. A torus also shows the toric world in which speaking beings suffer from the loss of jouissance due to the operation of the signifier. Mapping this onto the problem of love, we coined the term toric love. Toric love refers to love structured by an original loss and unconscious repetition that ensues from the loss, as in the experience of Descartes.

However, this does not confirm such a thing as a psychoanalytic pessimism about love because it is at this point that analytic work intervenes to provoke a change of the subject and evoke a new way of loving. The neurotic impasse of desire can be addressed through the analysis of fantasy as the cover of desire. The reconstruction of fantasy leads to traversing the fantasy in which the unified subject of fantasy experiences his subjective division, namely, his reduction into the object a in the form of subjective destitution. The subject then comes to realize that his subjective truth does not lie in his fantasmatic identity but his real loss. The birth of a subject of desire becomes possible here, which correlates with a search for a new way of loving. The subject learns how to love through/despite the prism of lack and loss, instead of leaning toward fantasy as the reduction of the Other sex. When man renounces his fantasy based on phallic jouissance, woman is no longer his symptom but “woman-sinthome” as a singularity. When woman renounces her fantasy based on symbolic authority, man is no longer her ideal but “man-sinthome” as a singularity. Here, the space for a new kind of love is opened up.

To sum up, man who dwells in the toric world loves in a toric way. However, the toric world should not be taken as the only world, if the cause of psychoanalysis lies in supporting the analysand to work through his subjective structure and engage with a new way of loving.

ignorance about loss necessitates repetition of place. Badiou then articulates another side of the subject whose destruction as the mastery of loss can summon the unrepeatable force and novelty. Badiou, TS, pp. 132–147. 109

Thus, one could rewrite Lacan’s statement that the world is toric, following Beckett who states, “stony ground but not entirely.”264 The world is toric, but not entirely. Love is toric, but one can navigate through this toric world, endeavoring after a love that is delivered from fantasy and loss. According to Lacan, there is “the fundamental topology which stops us from saying anything about love that holds water.”265 However, more precisely, if we cannot say anything about love that holds water, it is not because of the topology but because of love, love that deviates from logic and thus topology. Love is irreducible to logos about topos.

The uneasy relationship between love and topology can be confirmed in Badiou as well. For Badiou, the world is considered to be topological because of the point. A point concentrates the infinity in the world into the Two. Insofar as the subject-body passes the test of a point by choosing the right one of the Two, a truth process is instituted and the subject of truth is born. This implies that the world contains the potential for change. If the subject passes through the potential, a hetero-topos will be unfolded point by point. While the point makes the existing world topological, truth as the breakthrough of the point makes the existing world changed. The Badiouian world with points is thus both topological and heterotopic.

In the context of love, the point is sexual difference. Sexual difference as the test of the real makes the world topological. If the subject passes this test, a world that supports the amorous process will arrive. The world without any point, such as the contemporary world that promotes the capitalist self-identity, erases sexual difference in love so that love is reducible to market-based sexuality. However, the world devoid of a point is nothing but an ideological product. There are always some points to contain the chance for another world. Love is an occasion for hetero-topos.

Moreover, the Badiouian world is also open to change due to the event-site. The existing world can be a different world because an event not only happens in the world but also to the world. Applied to the problem of love, an event-site as an encounter ruptures the law of the existing world. In our lives, an unprecedented encounter comes several times. Whether the subject incorporates himself into the trace of this event and elaborates on the consequences of this event or not is up to the subject. Whether the encounter becomes an episodic happening or a strong singularity with maximal consequences (the “event” in its pure sense) depends on

264 , “Enough” in First Love and Other Shorts, New York: Grove Press, 1974, p. 54. 265 Lacan, SVIII, p. 43. 110

the subject. What is certain is that there are amorous encounters in this world to change the lives of the subject. “Several times in its brief existence, every human animal is granted the chance to incorporate itself into the subject present of a truth.”266 We move from one world to another. With an evental encounter, we can move from the world in loneliness to the world in love. Within the world, something that does not conform to the law of the world happens to world. This event is not a matter of the transcendental Event or divine grace but of “the purely logical grace of innumerable appearing.”267

In this regard, both the point and the event make the Badiouian love irreducible to topology. Insofar as the point of sexual difference and the event of an amorous encounter offers us a chance to get access to another world, love and topology are in a dissensus. Insofar as the subject passes through sexual difference and elaborates the consequences of an encounter, love straddles both the topological potential and the hetero-topic creation. Love constitutes a topological paradox, marking a gap within the world and provoking a change of the world.

The last theme is concerned with the relationship between the knot and love. As we discussed, if Lacan approaches love in terms of three kinds of knots, Badiou articulates the ethics of love with the Borromean triplicity. This implies that both of them are naturally led to the problem of the subjectivity of love, for the knot serves as a formal tool to analyze the configuration and structure of subjectivity. However, love is also a problem of desubjectivization. Love sometimes leads the subject to the abyss of madness or makes the subject vanish. Expanding Lacan’s diagnosis that “for the psychotic a love relation that abolishes him as a subject is possible,”268 one could state that any lover, whether psychotic or normal, must go through some self-abolishing experiences.

For Lacan, the knot is regarded as the support of subjectivity, and the event of an unknotting is regarded as the triggering of psychosis. What is notable here is that the three types of knot, which we addressed, can be distinguished in terms of the relationship that the subject entertains with psychosis and desubjectivization.

In the Olympic knot, the collapse of the middle ring causes the collapse of the entire structure.

266 Badiou, LW, p. 514. 267 Ibid., p. 513. 268 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg, New York: Norton, 1997, p. 253. 111

The problem is that love takes the position of the middle ring and the subject easily falls into love as the middle. When love misfires, namely, when the collapse of the middle ring happens, the subject is faced with the triggering of psychosis. Thus, the Olympic knot suggests that the subject of love is rather the patient of love. The subject of love is subject to love.

The Borromean knot has a relatively more stable structure than the Olympic knot. However, the subjectivity of the Borromean knot is also not immune to psychosis because there could be always a failure of the knotting. Moreover, the relationship between the subjectivity of the Borromean knot and love remains perilous and precarious, for the kind of love that the Borromean knot correlates with is hainamoration (lovehate), as the first truth of psychoanalysis, and lovehate often irrupts in a violent and destructive fashion, bringing the subject to an extreme point.

Finally, if one regards the sinthomatic knot as an arduous subjective process, rather than a complete result, to restitute oneself against the triggering of psychosis, it is evident that this attempt is also susceptible to failures. In the case of Joyce, his writing served as the sinthome to supplement the unknotting of his subjectivity. However, not all writing would be prestigiously constructive and enduring like Joyce’s sinthome. Let us refer to the case of Gérard Primeau, which Lacan presented in 1976 at Saint-Anne Hospital and regarded as the typically “Lacanian psychosis.” Lucas was a schizophrenic afflicted by what he calls imposed words (paroles imposées) and thought broadcasting (the belief that others can hear all of one’s inner thoughts). Against the involuntarily emerging and meaninglessly fragmentary phrases, Primeau reacted by adding another phrase of his own (Primeau, for instance, writes, “They want to monarchize my intellect [imposed words]. But loyalty is defeated [his own reflection].”269). Despite his voluntary reaction to imposed words, Lacan’s diagnosis about Lucas is pessimistic. Primeau’s sinthomatic writing, unlike Joyce’s, fails to hold his subjectivity against the intrusive, psychotic real. Lacan concludes that there is no way for Primeau to recover his subjectivity. In sum, even the sinthomatic process of self-stabilization is never devoid of a possibility of destabilization.

269 Jacques Lacan, “A Lacanian Psychosis: Interview by Jacques Lacan,” in Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, ed. and trans. Stuart Schneiderman, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, p. 33. 112

In this regard, while the knot theory explores the structure and configuration of subjectivity, the knot theory also contains an inverse, namely, the desubjectivating, unknotting effect. This leads us to engage with the classical idea of love as madness. Lacan once supported this idea by directly linking psychosis and love: “Psychosis is a kind of insolvency (faillite) in what concerns the accomplishment of what is called ‘love.’”270 The most difficult thing in the accomplishment of love is to become a subject of love, for love is intrinsically desubjective, making the subject outside of himself. Becoming-subject of love necessitates the process of working through the desubjectivating effect of love. When this fails, psychosis as a catastrophe of subjectivization breaks out. Love requires one to assume the risk of psychosis. However, the amorous psychosis does not have to be uproarious and boisterous as in clinically addressable phenomena such as hallucination, delusion, depersonalization, and derealization. Love often subverts our lives in a silent way. Without making a fuss, love provokes a fundamental change in our lives. In this regard, the situation of the subject of love can be compared to the new clinical category of “ordinary psychosis,” a meta-stable subjectivity in which the latent unstable structure does not show any patent symptoms. Love is a calm calamity that resembles ordinary psychosis.

Moreover, note that another name of psychosis is freedom. The Lacanian freedom is radical in that it is indiscernible to psychosis. True freedom necessarily accompanies psychosis. “It is the free men who are mad . . . He does not cling to the locus of the Other through the object a, he has it at his disposal.”271 The Lacanian freedom is neither superegoic like the capitalist freedom as an alienation within a predetermined system, nor perverse like the Spinozian freedom as a self-subordination to the love of God. It is, to use Kierkegaard’s word, a possibility of possibility, an unbridled possibility without any tint of law, and a direct access to the traumatic real that bypasses the symbolic Other. Love is grappling with a tricky twin of freedom and madness.

In sum, the classical thesis that love is a singular type of madness can be confirmed in the work of Lacan. Insofar as love has a desubjectivizing effect, love is madness or even a serene madness as in ordinary psychosis. Here, the description of love in terms of knot theory faces

270 Jacques Lacan, “Conférences et entretiens dans les universities nord-américaines,” November 24, 1975 at Yale University, Kanzer Seminar. 271 Jacques Lacan, “La formation du psychiatre et la psychanalyse,” speech delivered at the Cercle d’Études directed by Henry Ey, November 10, 1967 (unpublished). 113

the inverse side of unknotting. Love straddles both the necessity of subjectivization and the impossibility of subjectivization. Love is to subjectivize the desubjective. Love is to make a singular knot out of the risk of unknotting, as if passing through the middle path between the Gordian knot and the Alexandrian cut.

For Badiou, love as the truth can be supported only by a specific ethics. As we discussed, this ethics constitutes the Borromean structure that consists of an event (aleatory encounter), fidelity (limping march), and truth (an amorous infinity produced by the enduring operation of the scene of the Two). However, a failure in the form of evil is always immanent to this ethics. It may be hard to tell event from simulacra as a pseudo-encounter. Fidelity may come across the temptation of betrayal as a renunciation of limping march. Truth may fall into a disaster by asserting the Two’s absolute power. An amorous ethics is necessarily exposed to the advent of these three forms of evil. Therefore, it should remain vigilant against its internal enemies, pursuing discernment against the simulacrum, courage against betrayal, and moderation against disaster. Thanks to these internal enemies, love entails ethics but not morality. That is to say, love is based on subjective procedures, not on pre-established norms. The point is not “thou shalt not commit adultery,” but “stay true to what exceeds the ordinary course in your life.” The point is not “marital law is sacred,” but “keep going with the rupture that traverses you.” If an amorous morality is based on a rigid distinction between good and evil in love, an amorous ethics (erothics) is based on a consistent struggle with the inseparability between good and evil in love.

This ethics, however, forces the subject of love who pursues it to pay the price. Desubjectivization is precisely the name of this price. Although the Badiouian ethics attempts to articulate a subjective ethics about truths, it is bound to include its inverse, the vanishing of the subject. At the conceptual level, the Badiouian subject is nothing but a fragment of the truth, a finite configuration of an infinite truth. This implies that insofar as the amorous truth can be protected, the identity and particularity of the individual who participates in the truth is a secondary matter. The subject must be ready to assume his own vanishing on behalf of the truth that he/she serves.

More precisely, the subject of love can be the subject of love only insofar as the subject proclaims to give priority to love itself, not him/herself. In the eyes of the subject of love, his or her sacrifice for the truth does not appear as tragic sacrifice but as fidelity with reason and 114

cause. For instance, for lovers who are willing to risk their lives for their love as a subjective consistency not as a mortal passion, death is not an end point but a point from which to push through their love.272 This is also in line with Badiou’s philosophy according to which death loses its ironical radiance.273 Death is nothing but a change of the intensity measured by the law of the world at the existential level. Death cannot affect or damage the composition of being as a pure multiplicity at the ontological level. Unlike the Lacanian death drive as the real, death is not even the test of the real as a point, but the change of the status according to the symbolic law. Death is not a surnumerary event but a pre-determined appearing. This explains why love as a truth is sometimes indifferent toward death. For the Badiouian lover, the death of the beloved is not the end. The deceased beloved rather lives immortally as the constituent of the amorous truth beyond the symbolic law. The deceased beloved is with the lover, as an indelible fragment of infinity.

Here, one could pose the following questions: Does the fact that the subject of love may vanish while participating in and committing to the amorous truth make the subject heroic? Is it not the case that the Badiouian lover is extremely rare and exceptional? According to Barthes, the vanishing of the amorous subject is heterogeneous to heroic pathos. Love entails the “outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment.”274 From time to time, the amorous subject has “a craving to be engulfed,” whether in misery or happiness. What is notable is that this evental and recurrent sense of self-annihilation does not have any tint of sublimity. Rather, subtle gentleness pervades it. “Misery or joy engulfs me, without any particular tumult ensuing: nor any pathos: I am dissolved, not dismembered; I fall, I flow, I melt … Nothing soleme about them. This is exactly what gentleness is.”275 If so, the subject of love is put not only in an ethical situation to struggle against the immanent evil but also in an archi-ethical situation to embrace the gentle abyss of self-annihilation. The sensation of vanishing is immanent to the amorous process.

In sum, the Badiouian love also brings one to the point where the nodological subjectivity is juxtaposed with and completed by unknotting desubjectivization. Love makes the subjective formation of the ethical knot coincide with the desubjectivizing sensation of the archi-ethical

272 See Chapter 4 in which I discuss the joint suicide of Gorz and Dorine. 273 Badiou, LW, p. 270. 274 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 10. 275 Ibid. 115

vanishing, which is not solemnly heroic, but inexplicably gentle.

Until now, we have discussed the uneasy relationship between mathematics and love through and beyond the Lacanian and Badiouian perspectives of love. While both Lacan and Badiou seem to be well aware of the point that love is situated where the formalization and the impasse of formalization meet, they do not engage in a detailed analysis about it, nor do they draw the consequences from it, which our discussion attempted to do. The reason for the absence of such an exploration in the works of the two authors is that they ultimately focus on the real of love or the truth of love. For our part, this gesture is in danger of putting the real or truth before love. The instances of the real such as sexual non-relationship, the inaccessibility of the Two, symptom, loss, and psychosis might outdo love. The instances of truth such as universality, the scene of the Two, fidelity, encounter, and ethics might outdo love. On the contrary, love remains elusive and chimerical, even for the real or truth. What matters then is to “give to the real or truth what belongs to the real or truth, and give to love what belongs to love.” This thesis proposes to name what belongs properly to love beyond the real of love or the truth of love as the void of love. In Lacan and Badiou, one can see a lot of discussion going on about the void of the subject (lack and loss) or the void of being (empty set as an inconsistent multiplicity), but not about the void of love.

Let us conclude by clarifying the amorous void at two levels. First, the amorous void encapsulates why love has an uneasy relationship with the mathematical-formal approach. Love pluralizes the sexuation formulas, producing alternative sexuated positions such as heterosexual and transgender, monogamist and polyamorist. Love makes the sequence of the numerical out of sequence by presenting the implicative Number, such as the Lacanian Four and the Badiouian Two. Love disturbs modal logic by provoking unprecedented modalities such as pre-encounter loss and second encounter. Love forces topology to go beyond itself, detotalizing the toric world and introducing a hetero-topic event. Love challenges knot theory with the possibilities of unknotting in the form of psychosis or vanishing. In this regard, the relationship between the formal and love is not simply a matter of possibility and impossibility. With the amorous void, one does not merely approve or disapprove a formalism of love. The amorous void pluralizes the formal, dislocates the order of the formal, presents the unprecedented formal, makes the formal go beyond itself, and exposes the inverse of the formal. The amorous void is not an obstacle to the mathematical approach to love but an indelible trace of the mathematical approach to love. The amorous void is a love 116

child of mathematics and love.

Secondly, the amorous void explains that the real of love and the truth of love are nothing but, to employ the Hegelian concept in Science of Logic, two explicitations of the “implicit contradiction” (Widerspruch an sich) of love. The amorous void refers to the fact that one cannot represent, demonstrate, and define love, for love is contradictory to itself. With the amorous void, love becomes a difference as such, an implicitly contradictory difference, preceding any interplay of identity and difference. The real of love and the truth of love constitute a derivational and secondary contradiction, compared to the void of love as a fundamental contradiction. However, the amorous void also deviates from Hegel, for whom “the resolved contradiction is therefore ground, essence as unity of the positive and negative.”276 For us, the contradiction between the real of love and the truth of love does not find a solution, nor does it constitute a unity. Due to the amorous void that is not grounded but rather groundless, the contradiction remains unresolvable and abyssal. The amorous void is an absolute in-between, between the real of love and the truth of love. All the same, that which remains unthought in the real of love and the truth of love constitutes the amorous void. Lacan would have stayed true to the amorous void, when the analyst who had tirelessly engaged in mathematical saying about love had confessed, “one cannot speak about love except in an imbecilic or abject manner.”277 Mathematical saying is, after all, a rigorously imbecilic approach to love. Badiou also would have stayed true to the amorous void, if the philosopher had followed his own principle that the ethics of philosophy is to maintain the category of truth as void, not as presence.278 The truth of love cannot violate love as void. Therefore, love does not lead mathematics to say about love, “fiat lux!” but rather “fiat vacuum!” Love remains an unavoidable void, both for the philosophical and psychoanalytic mathematics of love.

276 Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George Di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 378. 277 Jacques Lacan, The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst: Seven Talks at Saint-Anne, trans. Corman Gallagher, February 3, 1972 (unpublished). 278 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005, p. 134. 117

Chapter 2 Politics and Love

There is an enigmatic relationship between politics and love. To consider this enigmatic relationship from the perspective of Lacan and Badiou presupposes three preceding problems. First, it could be argued that politics and love are disjunctive so that there is no relationship at all between the two. In fact, Badiou intimates such a position in Being and Event by stating that politics belongs to a collective type of truth, while love belongs to an individual type of truth. While politics shows the capacity for the collective to organize itself beyond the dominant power structure, love is an individual type of truth, for it “interests no-one apart from the individuals in question.”279 Politics and love are disjunctive, and they are disparate types of truths. For Lacan, love is considered to be the linchpin of psychoanalysis. “The analytic cell, even if it is comfy and cozy, is nothing but a bed for lovemaking.”280 The problem is that this cell could serve as the bourgeoisie’s private room for lovemaking, immune to any political fuss. Lacan once stated that “the police are at the root of everything political” (the distinction between police and politics is later developed by Rancière).281 If so, politics and love do not meet except for when the police investigate a case in which a couch turns into indecent assault or sexual harrassment. Politics as the maintenance of public order and love as the secret of private pleasure have nothing do with one another.

Second, it could be argued that even if there is a relationship between politics and love, this relationship does not facilitate emancipatory or revolutionary politics. As Hannah Arendt remarks, “love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.”282 Let us refer to the amorous subject in a state of unworldliness. His is incarnated by coup de foudre, his utopia is fulfilled by the promise of rendezvous, and his concentration camp is embodied by the prison of libido. Experiencing his

279 Badiou, BE, p. 340. 280 Lacan, SVIII, p. 15. 281 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, 1964–1965, May 13, 1965 (Unpublished). 282 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edition, Chicago: Unversity of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 242. 118

existential “state of exception,” the amorous subject is submerged with an obscure force that is not only indifferent but resistant to emancipatory politics.

In an interview with Fabien Tarby, Badiou expresses his agreement with Arendt. To apply love to the field of the collective implies that love is instrumentalized to serve transcendental authorities such as God or a dictator. Love at the level of the collective amounts to “an indiscernibility of love and terror.”283 A similar point is true of Lacan. In psychoanalytic circles that follow Lacan, one takes the risk of loving Lacan as S1, the master signifier. Likewise, in a revolutionary movement that attempts to subvert the established regime, what revolutionaries aspire to is a master.284 Love could be employed, voluntarily and involuntarily, to aestheticize the logic of mastery, domination, and power.

Lastly, there is a problem of the debate between Lacan and Badiou, which is framed by Badiou. While Badiou argues that it is imperative for any contemporary philosopher to work through Lacan and his antiphilosophy, Badiou also sees Lacan as an idealist dialectician who could not overcome his conservative skepticism: “Lacan, bourgeois skeptic, also spreads the dangerous conviction that there is nothing new under the sun.”285 Indeed, referring to the influence of the imaginary formations such as signified, worldview, and spherical totality, Lacan affirms that “unless things change radically, it is not analytic discourse–which is so difficult to sustain in its decentring […]–that can in any way subvert anything whatsoever.”286 The main goal of psychoanalysis, which is supported by the analyst’s desire, is to maintain the unconscious as the discourse of decentrement. In a situation where achieving this goal appears difficult, addressing a condition of radical subversion can be regarded as a premature and preposterous task. This certainly does not satisfy Badiou’s conviction regarding emancipatory politics that things can change radically and his idea of the corresponding philosophical work to capture such a politics with a conceptual consistency. Moreover, psychoanalytic notions such as desire, jouissance, sexuality, symptom, fantasy, death drive, and finitude, which all characterize a human animal who is stuck on the repetition of the preconstituted identity, does not measure up to the Badiouian subject of truth as something

283 Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the Event, with Fabien Tarby, trans. Louise Burchill, Cambridge: Polity, 2013, p. 40. 284 Lacan, SXVII, p. 207. 285 Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels, New York: Verso, 2012, p. 12. 286 Lacan, SXI, p. 42. 119

new. Thus arises Badiou’s critique of Lacan throughout his works at the philosophical and political levels.

In sum, as if in the form of the Gorgiasian sophistry about being and knowing, it could be argued first that there is no relationship between politics and love; second, that even if there is, this relationship is not emancipatory; and third, that even if it is emancipatory, it cannot be thought of in terms of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou.

While acknowledging that this proposition is well-grounded, this chapter attempts to supplement the proposition by proposing that politics and love are interconnected, that an emancipatory knot between politics and love is possible in certain conditions, and that the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou holds true for this knot. Without dismissing that love and politics are heterogeneous domains, that love has an ambivalent relationship with emancipation, and that there is a gap between Lacanian politics and Badiouiain politics, this chapter attempts to explore the enigmatic knot between politics and love through the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou.

For this, I first analyze the contemporary crisis of love in terms of Lacan’s discourse theory and Badiou’s critique of democratic materialism. This analysis suggests that love is determined by a particular political context and that love serves as the vehicle of power.

Second, I examine Mohamed Bouazizi’s subjectivity and rebellious popular movement in the Arab Spring in terms of the Lacanian passage to the act and the Badiouian riot. This analysis tells us that love as reinvented philia–not as a mortal or blind passion for the imaginary, but as the “passion for the real”–fractures an existing political regime and serves as the catalyst of political change.

Third, pointing out that acts of martyrdom and mass movements are not enough for an affirmative and enduring political change, I show how the problem of the organization of community can be tackled by the Lacanian not-all and the Badiouian idea of . This analysis allows us to conceptualize the real but not ideal figure of the community organized by the emancipatory link between politics and love.

Fourth, I address the link between humanity and love through Lacan’s clinical session with Suzanne Hommel and Badiou’s reading of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999). Here, 120

the link between love and humanity appears not as a religious or moral commandment but as an immanent appeal to humanity’s broken heart and lonely figure, so that only the rare advent of the sinthomatic subject and the subject of truth can shed light on the possibility of the amorous humanity.

I conclude this chapter by arguing that the enigmatic knot between politics and love can be summarized by the notion of “unpower,” meaning that love constitutes a singular nexus of power and powerlessness.

The Contemporary Crisis In considering the knot between politics and love in the contemporary context, the first problem that stands out is the crisis of love. Today, love is surrounded and endangered by many political conditions, among which capitalism is one of the most critical ones. Lacan’s discourse theory allows us to analyze how love is constituted by the discourse of capitalism, and Badiou’s philosophy allows us to articulate what goes on with love in democratic materialism. In In Praise of Love, Badiou states that there are two philosophical-political notions that can combine politics and love in an emancipatory context: communism and fraternity.287 Communism for Badiou is not utopian but the real as the impossible, so that it must be supported by a subjective process that rearticulates the borderline between the possible and the impossible. If communism seems utopian, this only proves how thoroughly global capitalism takes hold of every possibility in the contemporary political field. Notably, although Badiou would recognize that capitalism affects both politics and economy, he also differentiates between the two by posing that politics is subjective and economy is objective.288 However, the problem is that capitalism nullifies a communist subject, namely, a politico-amorous subject, by mobilizing a specific type of subjectivity under the spell of jouissance. Therefore, a certain form of the critique of political economy is required. It is at this point that one could turn to the Lacanian discourse analysis.

Let us begin with the general features of discourse. In a lecture given at Louvain in 1972,

287 Badiou, IPL, pp. 62–63. 288 Alain Badiou, “Eleven points inspired by the situation in Greece,” trans. David Broder, Libération, July 8, 2015. Available from: www.liberation.fr/planete/2015/07/08/onze-notes-inspirees-de-la-situation- grecque_1345294. 121

Lacan defines discourse as follows: “I call discourse that ‘something’ which within language fixes, crystallizes, and uses the resources of language–of course, in a wider sense, there are many other resources–and it uses this so that the social bond between speaking beings functions.”289 Lacan’s discourse theory thus amounts to an expansion of his linguistic psychoanalysis to the socio-political level. Just as an individual subjectivity is determined by the unconscious structured like a language, our collective sociopolitical reality is constituted by a discourse. Discourse straddles both the network of signifiers and the network of human relationships.

Two components play a crucial role in discourse: language and jouissance. First, discourse is what makes a social link based on language. With the use of language, a stable intersubjective relation is established, such as teacher and student, father and mother. “What dominates [society] is the practice of language.”290 Discourse serves as a structure to (re)produce certain subjective relations via language. Now, language is comprised of two terms for Lacan: S1 as the master signifier and S2 as the rest of the signifiers, the network of signifiers, which Lacan calls knowledge (savoir). Knowledge is constructed in the guise of the totality of signifiers, and this totality is oriented and anchored by the exceptional signifier. Given S1 and S2, we are also given the subject because the subject is produced as the effect of language. It is not that an autonomous subject uses language. On the contrary, it is language as an autonomous law that determines the subject. Here, the well-known formula arises: a signifier is what represents a subject for another signifier. The subject exists as an unrepresentable gap between S1 and S2. The subject is divided ($) between two signifiers.

Second, a discourse has an ambivalent relationship to jouissance. On the one hand, discourse is “founded on the prohibition of jouissance.”291 Discourse tends to keep away from jouissance simply because it cannot handle jouissance, which is enigmatic, vanishing, and unnamable. On the other hand, despite the prohibition of jouissance, discourse is bound to be involved in some remainder that cannot be mastered: the surplus jouissance in the form of the a. Surplus jouissance is what speaking beings can obtain by renouncing the primary jouissance and going through symbolic castration. Surplus jouissance represents both the gain

289 Jacques Lacan, “Conférence de Louvain suivie d’un entretien avec Françoise Wolff,” (October 13, 1972) in Jacques Lacan parle. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HBnLAK4_Cc. 290 Lacan, SXVII, p. 207. 291 Ibid., p. 176. 122

of incidental jouissance authorized by language and the loss of a primary jouissance. Here, the between language and jouissance is blurred. Surplus jouissance is what the use of language allows for us, as a snippet of jouissance. It is a compensatory remainder that one could enjoy insofar as one assumes the fundamental loss. This is why production is equated with loss in the system of discourse. As Lacan states, “Anything that is language only obtains jouissance by insisting to the point of producing the loss whereby surplus jouissance takes body.”292 Nevertheless, there is an evental aspect in this remainder, for it is produced as an unpredictable effect of the practice of language. Thus, while primary jouissance is necessarily repressed by discourse, surplus jouissance is contingently encountered as an element of the real at the base of an effect of structure. Although a discourse is based on the exclusion of jouissance, it is bound to produce surplus jouissance as an unpredictable effect.

In sum, a discourse, which is characterized by language and jouissance, is also concerned with the subject of the signifier and the object of jouissance. It is thus composed of four elements: S1(master signifier), S2 (knowledge), $ (divided subject), and a (surplus jouissance). With these elements, there are four different positions in a discourse: agent, other, truth, and product/loss. The manifest situation at the upper level shows that the agent (top left) as a dominant position addresses the other (top right). The latent situation at the bottom level shows that the address between the agent and the other generates a contingent product (bottom right) and that the address of the agent is actually driven by a truth (bottom left), which is unknown to the agent. The product is uncontrollable, and the truth is hidden. Consequently, the address between the agent and the other is doomed to a structural failure. In other words, there is no relationship between the agent and the other, which Lacan calls impossible. In parallel, there is no relationship between the truth and the product, which Lacan calls impotent. The link between the agent and the other is impossible, and the link between truth and product is impotent. A discourse is marked by two disjunctions. Let us provide an example in love.

To his express his love, a lover as the agent sends a message to his/her beloved as the other. The beloved misunderstands this message and produces a strong misreading of the message, which is opaque even to the beloved. This misreading as a product does not have any relevance to the lover’s heart, which is unknown even to the lover. There is thus an

292 Ibid., p. 124. 123

impossible relationship between the lover and the beloved, and an impotent relationship between the lover’s heart and the beloved’s reading of the message.

Among his seminars between the late sixties and early seventies, Lacan regarded a capitalist as a modern master, and then linked the capitalist discourse to the discourse of the university, finally formulating the capitalist discourse as an anomaly to his four discourses–those of the university, the master, the hysteric, and the analyst. The primary trait of the master is that he pretends to be self-identical. A master is a transcendental “I” or conscious ego that resists against the logic of the unconscious and the division of the subject. “Acting the master is to think of oneself as univocal.”293 In the discourse of the master, the master (the agent) commands the slave (the other) who has knowledge about how to work. However, this command ends up producing the master’s loss of jouissance. The master has to be content with the gain of surplus jouissance as the object of fundamental loss. Recall that Lacan juxtaposes production and loss in accordance with the implication of surplus jouissance as the nexus of gain and loss. “Simply by fulfilling as master he [the master] loses something.”294 Moreover, the truth of the master is the divided subject ($). The master is not a omnipotent exception from castration. No one within a discourse can evade castration. “The master is castrated.”295 Finally, since there is a disjunction between the division of his subjectivity and his object cause of desire ($ ▲ a), the master discourse does not work through but rather

293 Ibid., p. 103. 294 Ibid., p. 107. 295 Ibid., p. 97. 124

excludes unconscious fantasy. This makes him completely blind to the psychoanalytic truth of the division of the subject.

With the counterclockwise turn of the elements in the discourse of the master, one obtains the discourse of the university. This formal turn corresponds to the emergence of the modern master such as capitalist or bureaucrat. The university discourse shows that unlike the classical master who is characterized by the self-identity based on the masking of his division, the modern master is characterized by S2 as the totality of knowledge or the tyranny of all- knowing which is driven by the hidden self-identical authority (S2 / S1). The master no longer wields his personal power in person but conceals himself behind objective and neutral knowledge. Knowledge that is backed up by the hidden master signifier commands, “keep on knowing more and more.” In the university discourse, the other who is deprived of knowledge and exploited by the system of knowledge is the student, who Lacan calls “astudied” with the suggestion of his object a.296 Exchanging money for credit, a student is addressed and alienated by the existing knowledge (S2 → a).297 However, although a student can be regarded as a waste of textbook knowledge, he ends up producing his divided subjectivity (a / $). “When one thinks like the university, what one produces is a thesis.”298 The thesis would embody the student’s subjectivity marked by and yet irreducible to the dominant knowledge. However, this subjectivity nevertheless does not affect the hidden master signifier (S1 ▲ $). The objective knowledge based on the self-same master has nothing to do with the student’s unique subjectivity. In the next section, we will address how the discourse in which the subjectivity is no longer simply alienated as the other but turns itself into the agent as a symptom of the system, namely the hysteric discourse, is bound up with a revolutionary subjectivity.

What matters for our discussion here is that Lacan explicitly equates the university discourse with the capitalist discourse, in reference to Marx’s commodification of labor and the exploitation of surplus value. “Surplus jouissance is no longer surplus jouissance but is inscribed simply as a value to be inscribed in or deducted from the totality of whatever it is

296 Ibid., p. 105. 297 One could refer to Lacan’s following statement. Although the object a is “a remainder that is irreducible to the symbolization that occurs at the locus of the Other, it nevertheless depends on this Other because how else would it be constituted?” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X: Anxiety, 1962–1963, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Adrian Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2016, p. 330. 298 Lacan, SXVII, p. 191. 125

that is accumulating.”299 This could be read as an account of S2 → a. S2 stands for the capitalist system as the totality of knowledge. The a stands for any real element that comes under the jurisdiction of this system. In some sense, this illustrates the ingenuity of capitalism. Anything on the planet or in the universe, whether human or natural, material or immaterial, can be subsumed under this totalized system. Recall that the a is irreducible to and yet constituted by the Other. Although the capitalist value system cannot exhaustively measure the a, it nevertheless manages to measure it without any difficulty. This is why we can regard “the worker as a unit of value.”300 If S2 stands for a new master as the accumulative value system, the a stands for new slaves as “those who are themselves products” that replace the ancient slaves.301 While the ancient slave was sold perforce, the modern worker voluntarily decides to sell him/herself in self-promotional activities. Moreover, recall that S2 always harbors the self-identical master in the university discourse. “Market is linked to the master signifier.”302 The capitalist value system is driven by the self-same logic of the market (S2 / S1). Capitalism is the discourse in which market serves as the clandestine master. Finally, there is a disjunction between this self-identical market and the worker’s subjectivity determined by exchange value (S1 ▲ $), which appears as the enormous economic inequality between the rich and the poor.

The equation of the university discourse with the capitalist discourse finally leads into Lacan’s formulation of the capitalist discourse. Referring the capitalist discourse as the substitute for the master discourse, Lacan states that the crisis of capitalism is overt because it goes so fast that it consumes itself.303 What matters for our context is how capitalism as dominant discourse affects love by provoking the crisis of love.

Let us address the fundamental characteristic of the capitalist discourse, which constitutes an anomaly compared to the other discourses. In a discourse, the agent is not someone who autonomously acts and commands. Rather, the agent is someone who is caused to act in a way by unconscious truth under the bar. In the capitalist discourse, the position of the agent is

299 Ibid., p. 80. 300 Ibid., p. 81. 301 Ibid., p. 32. 302 Ibid., p. 92. 303 Jacques Lacan, “Discours de Jacques Lacan à l’Université de Milan le 12 mai 1972,” in Lacan in Italia, 1953–1978: En Italie Lacan, Milan: La Salamandra, 1978, pp. 32–55. In English, Jack W. Stone, “On Psychoanalytic Discourse,” pp. 10–11. 126

occupied by the divided subject. However, this agent is not caused by his truth. Rather, he addresses his own truth (S1) by traversing the bar (note that the arrow goes from the upper level to the bottom level as $ → S1). While a discourse is characterized by the principle that the agent, driven by his unconscious truth, addresses the other, which leads to an unpredictable product, this principle does not apply to the capitalist discourse. The divided subject addresses the master signifier as his unconscious truth. This truth then addresses the other as knowledge, which then produces the lost object. What is important is that while a discourse is characterized by the fact that there is no relation between the agent and the other, product and truth, there is no disjunction at all in the capitalist discourse. Insteand, there is a hyper-relation among the terms. In this hyper-relation, one cannot identify who is the agent or the other and which is product or truth. Moreover, instead of two crucial disjunctions, one can identify only an uninterrupted circulation. Let us read ∞ in the configuration of the capitalist discourse, which one might call the capitalist bad infinite. And this bad infinite emerges as the infinite circulation of capital.

There is no identifiable agent or specifiable disjunction, but only a self-enclosing and ceaseless movement. More precisely, this movement is the agent, the other, the truth, and product/loss, appearing as master signifier, knowledge, the subject of representation, and the object of production/loss. For Marx, this amounts to the self-exceeding, self-reproducing value that appears in turn as money and commodities. Endowed with the occult ability to reinsert surplus value into the existing total value, value is the only subject in capitalism. “In truth however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus- value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently.”304 Capital is that by which subject and substance becomes one through a recapitalizing process. Capital is a subject that asubjectively subjectifies an infinite circuit without any disjunctive gap. Capital accumulatively enjoys itself, without knowing anything, as a self-enclosed circuit of jouissance. Where there is an omnipresence of value, there is a flux of jouissance. This then implies that the capitalist discourse produces quasi-psychotic subjects under the spell of jouissance. Either the capitalist subject incorporates the untrammeled jouissance as his only destiny, or there is no subject except for the asubjective flux of capital. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, capitalism as the deterritorialized and reterritorializing flow routinely

304 , Capital, Vol. 1, London: Penguin Books, 1976, p. 255. 127

triggers schizophrenic madness. The contemporary world is thus characterized by the substitution of enjoying monads for amorous subjects. The contemporary crisis of love is that the subject finds no reason to love because he/she is already well-off with jouissance. To make a distinction between the subject of love and the subject of capital, one could state that the former is the subject without substance (sujet sans substance) and the latter is the subject as substance (sujet comme substance). If the capitalist subject is the subject whose identity remains filled up by the substance of jouissance, the amorous subject is the subject whose identity is emptied out by the chance-encounter and reshaped by the amorous process. Having that said, it is not the case that capitalism and love are purely incompatible. Lovers (or those who believe themselves to be the subject of love) definitely exist in the capitalism. The question, then, is how one actually becomes a lover within the contemporary capitalist system.

At this point, one could turn to Badiou’s diagnosis about contemporary love in terms of Meetic. As the online dating system in France, Meetic promotes the slogans such as “perfect love without pain” and “love without falling in love.” According to Badiou, love is under threat today because of the ideology that “love is a futile risk.”305 With the emergence of the dating market, love is reduced either to a bargain guaranteed by safety insurance or to regulated sexual pleasure without any dangerous passion. Everything is controlled, arranged, and mediated safely and properly. A contingent encounter is pre-programmed by the algorithmic partner selection system. The sui generis Je ne sais quoi in love, which defies any objective knowledge, is replaced by definite qualities that could satisfy the fantasy about one’s ideal type. The problem is that, as Lacan puts, love-insurance is essentially hate- insurance.306 The “zero risk” love is doomed to failure because love triggered by a pseudo- encounter or an ideal image cannot support love as a subjectively laborious process. Once the partner’s idiosyncratic subjectivity, as revealed through symptoms, appears, what has been thought of as love will soon appear as hate. This then implies that the technologically and commercially calculative system orchestrates the entire amorous procedure from encounter to breakup. Capital, while producing the subject who buys the experience of zero-risk love, actually acts as the invisible subject. Capital encounters, chooses, and goes through the amorous process. Love becomes a matter of outsourcing so that one no longers says, “I love you.” To recast Lacan’s statement that “it is not man who speaks, but in man and through man

305 Badiou, IPL, p. 10. 306 Lacan, “Létourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 476. 128

that it speaks,”307 one could state that “it loves,” with the subject of love foreclosed. However, there is a difference between the two. Contrary to “it speaks,” in which the lack-of- being of the signifier decenters the imaginary ego, “it loves” recenters ego under the spell of capitalist jouissance. “I enjoy” thanks to “it loves.” This jouissance also commands superego injunction to see love as a disposable product. You can get any other partner/product insofar as you are guided by the optimal algorithmic system. You just have to enjoy first in order to love.

In 1974, Lacan states that “there is only one social symptom: every individual is really a proletariat.”308 Let us map this observation onto the crisis of contemporary love with the emergence of Meetic. In the capitalist formation, the prevalent subjective position is “precariat” as the conjunction of precariousness and proletariat. People who cannot afford to bear the precarious subjective process plunge into love-insurance. People who are tired of the insecurity in their lives resort to the security system of love. People who are isolated within the regime of competition and production find an online shelter to refresh their minds with casual dating. In this regard, Meetic is a social symptom that shows the constitutive effect of capitalism on love. It produces a certain type of love and a certain type of amorous subject, enslaved to capitalism as a circuit of jouissance.

Ultimately, capitalism affects all the fundamental psychoanalytic categories such as new symptoms (affluenza, oniomania), fantasies (successful life and romance), signifiers (the world of brand names), desire (the Other’s desire as the desire of the market), and the unconscious in general (capitalist unconscious). The capitalist way of loving are bound up with these issues in which psychoanalysis is required to intervene clinically and politically. While we will address a specific case in which a capitalism-induced symptom is deeply involved in love in Chapter 3, let us here limit ourselves to the confirmation of the following point: The Lacanian capitalist discourse suggests that contemporary love cannot evade the problem of the power of capital, which is based on the fantasmatic sovereignty of jouissance and the consequent production of the precariat subjectivity as the servant of this jouissance.

Let us now move onto the contemporary link between politics and love from Badiou’s

307 Lacan, Écrits, p. 689. 308 Jacques Lacan, “La Troisième,” given at the VII Congress of the EFP in Rome, October 31, 1974. Available from: www.valas.fr/Jacques-Lacan-La-Troisieme-en-francais-en-espagnol-en-allemand,011. 129

perspective. According to Badiou, the contemporary world is submerged in the dominant ideology that “there are only bodies and languages,” which he calls “democratic materialism.”309 On the one hand, there are individual bodies, which are carried away by sexuality, doomed to death, protected in the abstract name of human rights, and experimented on as the objects of biogenetics. On the other hand, there are multiple languages in the world whose correlates are diverse cultures, religions, nations, and sexual orientations, all of which are based on the law that discerns and reinforces existing identitarian and communitarian particularities. In sum, there are only human animals’ bodies and languages that are inscribed in these bodies as law.

Recognizing bodies and languages as all there is in the world, democratic materialism declares that there is no such thing as truth. There is no art, science, politics, and love, all of which force animalistic and speaking bodies to become the material support of the immortal subjects of truth. At best, there are the counterparts or simulacra of truths such as culture, technology, management, and sexuality, all of which are reducible and well-suited to the logic of the market.310 In this regard, democratic materialism is a political variant of capitalism and a pseudo-democracy. The capitalo-parliamentary regime supported by financial oligarchy constitutes the political reality of democratic materialism. What rules is not the demos but capital, which captivates the demos and decapitates the power of demos for egalitarian politics.

The top priority of democratic materialism is individual freedom–against which philosophy affirms the happiness of truths in which freedom and discipline coincide. Applied to love, this freedom takes on the figure of sexual freedom, which is one of the paradigmatic ideals of democratic materialism. An individual is free to have the largest possible sexual pleasure with one’s enjoying body according to sexual taste. The zero-risk love offered by the Meetic is well-suited to this ideal. Anyone can purchase a pre-programmed encounter (liberal love), and anyone can enjoy sexual pleasure without painstaking amorous labor (libertarian love). Democratic materialism states that sexual freedom is “placed at the point of the articulation between desires (bodies) and linguistic, interdictory or stimulating legislations.”311

309 Badiou, LW, p. 1. 310 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 12. 311 Badiou, LW, p. 34. 130

Consider the double mechanism of zero-risk love. On the one hand, this system democratically calculates each individual’s desire insofar as one belongs to the system. On the other hand, this system excludes the possibility of the incalculable, risky love as a futile passion. Bodies are thus allowed and interdicted to desire to the extent that they are inscribed in the law. Nothing really happens to the body, since everything is mediated by the law. As a result, sexual freedom goes hand in hand with nihilistic asthenia, as in the saying that “every animal is sad after sexual intercourse” (Omne animal triste post coitum). The underside of sexual freedom looks pale, pallid, and depressive. In Badiou’s term, the world in which democratic materialism posits sexual freedom as a dominant norm can be called an atonic world. “The ‘world of sex’ is established as an entirely atonic world.”312 As we have noted in the previous chapter, the world is atonic when there is no instance of the Two that concentrates the possibilities of the world. There is no advent of sexual difference as the Two that can be only instituted by the encounter. Sexual freedom does not know an amorous encounter, for it makes an encounter disappear by system-mediated pseudo-encounters. The world of sex appears at once complex and homogeneous, atrophic and hypertrophic. There is nothing to wager here, and there is no point that requires a radical decision. Since there is no point, there is no truth, no amorous world that the scene of the Two creates.

Democratic materialism can be also addressed from the Lacanian perspective. In fact, the relation between a body and language is one of the typical Lacanian themes. The Lacanian body is not naturally given but symbolically structured. The body is inscribed in the Other and constituted by the signifying chain. “The body paves the way for the Other through the operation of the signifier.”313 Now, the central aim of Logics of Worlds is to provide a new concept of body, a subjectivizable body or body of truths. The idea is that the body of truth is not a relation between body and language but incorporation of a body into the evental trace. It is then not coincidence that Badiou critically examines the Lacanian body at the end of Logics of Worlds. On the one hand, Lacan definitely goes beyond democratic materialism. Lacan accepts that there are not only bodies and languages but also truth. As the body is inscribed by the signifying chain, the unconscious is established. The unconscious is a form of knowledge as the network of signifiers. However, this knowledge is organized around something that this knowledge cannot address. There is a hole in the center of the

312 Ibid., p. 421. 313 Ibid., p. 477. 131

unconscious, the hole of sexuality. Sexuality is the realm of the psychical truth, which defies any knowledge. “Sex, in its essence as radical difference, remains untouched and sets its face against knowledge.”314 Therefore, as Badiou admits, Lacan is not a democratic materialist. “We are steadfastly Lacanian with regard to the theme of subsumption of bodies and languages by the exception of truths.”315

At the same time, Badiou clarifies the distance between Lacan and himself. According to Badiou, there are two different bodies for Lacan, a living and objective body that one has and a symptomatic body that originates from the assumption of language. An instance of the second body can be found in the thesis of woman as man’s symptom. The linguistic/phallic unconscious structure reduces woman to man’s symptom. Here, Badiou argues that this symptomatic/linguistic body is linked to “the infrastructure of the human animal,” not to “the occurrence–as rare as it may be–of the present-process of a truth.”316 As we have noted before, the present refers to the consequences of an evental trace that can be unfolded to the extent that the body can treat the points in the world. The present refers to the process in which a truth changes the existing world into a new world if the body overcomes the test of the world.

Therefore, the Lacanian horizon is limited to the truths of structure and the finite human animal who is tethered by the linguistic marking of the body. Badiou states that such linguistic marking can be found even in the turtle that swims toward us and looks at us until we feed him. Against this, Badiou argues for the truths of the evental present and the trans- human subject whose singularity lies in incorporation into truths, not inhabitation in language. Nevertheless, Badiou confirms that Lacan is not a democratic materialist, for the body cannot be unified but divided. It is the division of the body, whether the division between the living animal and the speaking animal or the division between the human animal and the subject of truths, that destabilizes democratic materialism’s pursuit of the unified ego that only a liberal and cultured citizen who can engage in a beautiful romance is supposed to have. In this regard, both the Lacanian symptomatic body and the Badiouian amorous body constitute the unprecedented dimension of love for democratic materialism, which only knows about strong

314 Lacan, SXII, May 19, 1965 (unpublished). 315 Badiou, LW, p. 479. 316 Ibid., p. 481. 132

ego’s narcissistic love supported by individual sexual freedom. Lacan and Badiou, despite their internal divergence, constitute the common front against democratic materialism. Today, it is urgent to reinvent love.

Lacan once stated that “the unconscious is politics.”317 One way to read this is that the unconscious is constituted by the established regime. The contemporary knot between politics and love can be addressed in terms of capitalist discourse and democratic materialism. Contemporary love is under the circuit of jouissance and under the jurisdiction of sexual freedom. Enslaved to the dominant norm, love is calculatively bargained and democratically enjoyed. In this regard, Lacan was right when he equated the unconscious itself with the discourse of the master. The unconscious itself can be servile to the existing power. But there is another way to read this. The unconscious can also be reconstituted through the real change. Here, one could introduce the distinction between the political and politics following Badiou. “The political has never been anything other than the fiction which is punctured by politics as the hole of the event.”318 Evental politics punctures a hole in the fiction of the political. The unconscious can be restructured by an unpredictable event. If so, while there is a non- emancipatory knot between politics and love in capitalist democracy, one could think of an emancipatory knot in a different situation. There could be another knot between politics and love, a knot between evental politics and love.

Philia Reinvented While love, constituted by laws such as all-pervasive capital or instrumentalized sexuality, serves as the vehicle of established power, there could be also a link between politics and love that ruptures power. To examine this link, one is required to reinvent the classical name of love in the political context, namely, philia. For Aristotle, philia, which is more valuable than eros due to its non-exclusivity, can be based on utility, pleasure, or goodness. In Seminar XX, Lacan states that philia represents the possibility of a bond of love between two subjects who courageously bear the unbearable relationship to the supreme good outside sexual

317 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XIV: The Logic of Fantasy, 1966–1967, May 10, 1967 (unpublished). 318 Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? Paris: Seuil, 1985, p. 12. 133

difference or beyond sex.319 Contrary to phallic function, which is concerned with the necessity of a sexual bond between subjects, philia is concerned with the possibility of a- sexual bond between subjects. A new bond can be made up between any subjects. In this regard, the Lacanian philia does not have to be necessarily dismissed as phallogocentric. Moreover, since what is at stake is “bearing the unbearable,” this philia is not imaginary but real as an act of the impossible. Later, we will see that Badiou also attaches fraternity to the real. In sum, both Lacan and Badiou reinvent the Aristotelian philia in terms of the real. This section examines the recent Tunisian revolution as the most salient manifestation of the political real, in terms of the reinvention of philia.

It is generally believed that there are clear sociopolitical conditions to every revolution. The Tunisian revolution, which caused a grand wave of popular uprisings in the entire Middle East, is no exception. The combination of economic factors such as rising food prices, the 30% unemployment rate, and political factors such as the ongoing dictatorship of Ben Ali and corrupt bureaucracy, served as a motivation for the revolution. However, these social factors are not enough for a revolution to be triggered. There also has to be a subjective dimension, which psychoanalysis allows us to shed light on. Let us address this subjectivity of revolution in terms of the hysteric discourse and the analyst discourse.

The hysteric discourse is characterized by the fact that it places the divided subject, who serves as the agent of the discourse, in the dominant position. In the clinical context, this divided subject is characterized by the symptom, which reveals the hysteric’s unique mode of jouissance, the ever-unstable identity, and the ever-unsatisfied desire. In the political context, this subject is characterized by an excessive fervor for subverting the existing socio-political structure all at once. As the configuration of the hysteric discourse shows, the momentum of change does not lie in the master signifier or knowledge but in the subject. The hysteric discourse implies that every change necessitates the subjective action and thought. For Lacan, “revolution” stands for nothing other than the inevitable transition from one discourse to another. Note that the hysteric discourse is achieved through a clockwise turn of the master discourse. The hysteric discourse is a revolutionary (both in the common sense and in the properly Lacanian sense) discourse that questions the master’s authority by foregrounding the divided subjectivity.

319 Lacan, SXX, p. 85. 134

Let us follow the movement of vectors in the hysteric discourse. The hysteric with a specific symptom interrogates the analyst as the master signifier who fails to approach the truth of the hysteric by merely producing the general knowledge of the hysteric. Like Achilles who cannot catch up with the tortoise, the hysteric resists every response of the analyst by constantly repeating, “that’s not it.” Nothing can mitigate the hysteric’s pain that escapes the authoritative knowledge of the other. Nothing can satisfy the hysteric’s desire to become the precious object of the other, which constantly remains inaccessible to the other. While the hysteric wants the other to know better, the net result is that the other’s knowledge has no relationship with the hysteric’s truth (a ▲ S2). Here, recall that the a is constituted by the Other. The hysteric’s desire is ultimately the desire of the Other. In this regard, the hysteric entertains an ambivalent relationship with the master. Although the hysteric is not a slave, her protest is mixed with the aspiration toward the idealized master. The hysteric wants an idealized father precisely by turning every father into an impotent father. The hysteric exposes the master’s failure in the form of her symptom, while internalizing the master’s self- identical power. The hysteric wants the master to become more powerful and knowledgeable, as she demands and challenges him more and more harshly. Behind the hysteric’s gesture, there is an inverted desire of mastery. “What the hysteric wants is a master,” “a master she can reign over.”320 What truly orients the hysteric discourse is not the master but the hysteric, the hysteric not as a subject but as a precious object of the master. As we noted, Lacan affirms that revolutionaries want a master. He could have added, “a master that they could reign over.” A revolutionary’s protest contains a hidden desire of domination. The hysteric discourse is half-revolutionary or pseudo-revolutionary, unless this desire of power is worked through. It is also in this context that Lacan was skeptical about revolution due to its “passage to a superegoic function in politics, to the role of an ideal in the career of thought.”321 A revolution in the hysteric sense is merely Copernican but not Freudian, in that the master still remains at the center, as the imaginary unchanged ideal. “What is revolutionary in the re- centering around the sun of the solar world? … The figure of the sun is there worthy of imaging the master-signifier that remains unchanged…”322 On the contrary, a true revolution is characterized by the subjectivity with a self-decentering vigilance against the internalized

320 Lacan, SXVII, p. 129. 321 Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Seuil, 2001, p. 420 (unpublished English translation of Jack W. Stone). 322 Ibid., p. 421. 135

power with which the hysterical desire is united. In sum, the discourse of the hysteric is not enough to specify a new philia.

Although every revolution cannot be entirely devoid of this hysterical desire of unchanged mastery, there is one form of subjectivity in the Tunisian revolution that makes an absolute exception from the hysterical logic in revolution. It is the self-immolating subjectivity of Mohamed Bouazizi. As a street vendor who had to make a living for his entire family, Bouazizi set himself on fire after being harassed by a police official because of the lack of a vendor’s permit. The proper name of Bouazizi proves that the breakout of revolution cannot be merely attributed to sociopolitical factors such as unemployment and dictatorship. There must be an unprecedented act of the subjective dimension, which resembles the Lacanian “passage to the act” (passage à l’acte). For Freud, agieren was conceived of as the neurotic’s reproduction of repressed memories or fantasies by acting them out while not remembering them. For instance, as a transference behavior, the analysand could unconsciously act out his/her childish wishes before the analyst without verbalizing them. Lacan develops the Freudian agieren by distinguishing acting out and passage to the act. While acting out refers to a symbolic message to the analyst, passage to the act refers to “the subject’s absolute identification with the a to which the subject is reduced.”323 Since acting out concerns a demonstrative appeal to the Other, it moves within the coordinates of the desire of recognition by the Other. On the contrary, passage to the act implies that the subject accidentally becomes a real object without any regard to the Other.

Lacan’s theatrical metaphor is conducive to specifying the difference between the two. Acting out is an actor’s true/fictional or authentic/inauthetic action in the stage. Passage to the act is that an actor lets him/herself drop out of the stage or that a spectator jumps onto the stage from without, which is the sudden emergence of the remainder of the stage. Bouazizi’s act was not merely a protest against the police official who confiscated his cart or the governor who refused to listen to his complaint. His act was not a subjective complaint against the Other like those authorities who are supposed and expected to respond to his demand. It was an evental over-identification with the abject object that summons a radical exit from the Other.

The Other here would concern multiple levels of the law that constituted Bouazizi’s

323 Lacan, SX, p. 111. 136

social/psychic reality. It first refers to the political reality in Sidi Bouzid, whose law dictates that one has to bribe a police official to make a living as a street vendor. Nowhere is politics, and everywhere the corrupt police.

Secondly, there is the economic reality whose law dictates that one cannot feed his family unless one works for the fancy French companies tacitly in support of Ben Ali’s autocracy. The global economy today is indeed jointly governed by “local bosses” and the democratic, interventionist, and oligarchic global “godfathers.”

Third, there is the Islamic tradition whose law forbids suicide even when it is carried out as a political protest. Bouazizi’s suicide soon became controversial among Islamic circles. In a radical indifference to these multiple levels of the Other, Bouazizi made himself indelible proof that there is something abandoned and horrible that suspends and subverts the law of the social reality. It is his own body, which is inscribable by and yet unrepresentable by the existing political corruption, economic instability, and religious tradition. When there seemed no exit in reality, Bouazizi located an exit in the real where only his own body could serve as a pure point of resistance against the law of the Other, not as glorifying beauty but as burning derelictness. The subjectivity of revolutionary death drive does not await the Other’s gradual change. Everything has to start anew, here and now, suddenly and immediately. But to start anew, the waste must be incinerated first. Integrating the internal contradiction of the reality into the unsalvageable wretchedness of his own existence, Bouazizi declared that the stage is over by becoming the refuse of the stage. The martyr of the Arab Spring was thus born and has constantly risen from the dead, summoning other martyrs in numerous other regions in Arab.

What matters for us is whether this subjectivity of martyrdom can be read in terms of the analyst discourse. The analyst discourse is characterized by the fact that the analyst embodies the function of the cause of desire so that this cause allows the analysand to establish him/herself as a new subject of desire beyond fantasy and work through his/her subjective division (a → $). The analytic work then leads to the production of a certain master signifier that contains the analysand’s symptomatic jouissance ($ → S1). This signifier cannot dominate the rest of the signifiers due to the disjunction between truth and product (S2 ▲ S1). The master signifier can no longer serve as a master that stabilizes a preconstituted signification. Rather, the meaninglessness of the master signifier is revealed, as jouissance 137

attached to the master signifier is symbolized. In this regard, Bouazizi’s case is diametrically opposed to what the analyst discourse teaches us. At the clinical level, Bouazizi’s passage to the act belongs to the kind of accidents that the analyst must avoid during the session. All the analyst can and must do in the presence of this psychotic act is to become his secretary so that the subject could position him/herself as a subject in the delusional metaphor, escaping from the spell of mortifying jouissance. Moreover, unlike Bouazizi’s impulsive passage to the act that disregards the dimension of knowledge, the analyst discourse tells us that the analyst’s function as the cause of desire is supported by the knowledge (S2 → a) that is collected from the analysand’s dreams, failed action, and symptoms. This knowledge is a rigorously singular in accordance with the subjective real of the analysand. This knowledge of the real is not a totalizable knowledge that can be theoretically imposed and systematically applied, but a scrap of knowledge that is always put in question.324 Although this knowledge occupies the position of truth, it is nevertheless a fragmentary and incomplete knowledge. It is also why Lacan names the truth that psychoanalysis deals with as “varité,” which is the conjunction of variety (variété) and truth (vérité). There are only singular cases of various symptoms and jouissances, and the analyst is required to commit to the reinvention of psychoanalysis in order to address each singular case beyond the implementation of an imaginary totalized knowledge (connaissance).

All the same, Bouazizi’s subjectivity resembles one of the ideal subjectivities in Lacanian psychoanalysis: the saint. In Television, equating the position of the analyst with that of the saint, Lacan states, “a saint’s business, to put it clearly, is not caritas. Rather, he acts as trash [déchet]; his business being trashitas [il décharite].”325 If St. Assisi’s “holy poverty” or Mother Teresa’s “simple path” draws the crowd, it would be because the masses are enchanted by sublime charity, which only a chosen few called by God can practice. Meanwhile, within the marketing strategy of contemporary corporate world, anyone is asked to practice charity to the Third World countries, remaining oblivious to the immense profits made by global corporates that reproduce global inequalities. Charity is thus either idealizing and distanced as in the former, or facile and calculative as in the latter. Against these versions of charity, the saint rather reinvents caritas into trashitas, which is devoid of any spectacle of

324 Jacques Lacan, The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst: Seven Talks at Saint-Anne, trans. Corman Gallagher, February 3, 1972 (unpublished). 325 Lacan, Television, p. 15. 138

carus (dearness, high price). Now, although the saint occupies the position of trashitas as the refuse of jouissance, the saint also comes [jouit]. The saint keeps his/her idiosyncratic jouissance. It is just that the appearance of this jouissance is not pretty. Far away from every form of glory, beauty, and self-righteousness, the saint’s jouissance rather provokes surprising horror and eccentric disgust, as one can feel in the image of Bouazizi’s burning body. The saint does not practice charity. Rather, charity afflicts the saint. Charity becomes the irresistible symptom proper to the saint. The saint “does not give a damn for distributive justice.”326 Dispensing charity is the saint’s symptomatic act. The saint is transfixed by an enigmatic ethics in which an act forces one to go through subjective destitution. In a similar vein, Bouazizi’s act did not aim at the reform of the regime as a self-conscious militant. It was enough for him to become the symptomatic stain of the regime, making himself into the inflammable flesh. Appropriating the saintly ethics of the symptom, Bouazizi was faithful to the maxim that “where the a was, there I who commit passage to the act must be.”

Bouazizi’s revolutionary act triggered the mass uprising in Tunisia and many other countries. Here again, while sociopolitical factors definitely served as a main cause (many people were unemployed and disillusioned by dictatorship), psychoanalysis notes that becoming a revolutionary necessitates a specific logic. When an ordinary citizen becomes a rioter, there must be a mechanism, which one could call politics of affect. From the Lacanian viewpoint, one of the major political affects is shame. Concerning the critique with regard to the absence of the problem of affect in his teaching, Lacan used to state that he did address the problem of affect, focusing on anxiety as the affect of the real that does not deceive. Let us add shame as another affect of the real that does not deceive. Confronted with Bouazizi’s self-immolation, ordinary people in the Arab world would have felt the shame of doing nothing concerning the situation. According to Lacan, “a shame [honte] produces (h)ontology [hontologie].”327 Shame violently shakes the foundation of being with an awakening effect that the ontological situation should not continue as it is. Shame proclaims, “act now beyond the complacent being, or being lapses into decay.” Shame forces us to rupture the tautology of ontology as the repetition of the status quo. While identification with the ideal image supports narcissism or dictatorship, identification with the act provokes the shame of not acting or not dying. As

326 Ibid., p. 16. 327 Lacan, SXVII, p. 180. 139

Lacan states, being ashamed of not dying is related to the real.328 When this counter- ontological yet real affect of shame was transmitted, people assembled and marched on the street. Numerous serial attempts of self-immolation even occurred in many other countries. Through the contagion of shame, Bouazizi’s act instituted a minority community of martyrs and provoked a mass movement of rioters. Structures marched in the streets. According to Spinoza, shame is defined as “a sadness, accompanied by the idea of some action [of ours] which we imagine that others blame.”329 However, every participant in the Arab Spring would defy this definition. Shame is not concerned about some action which we imagine people blame, for it goes beyond the imaginary. Moreover, it is not triggered based on the criteria of other people because, just as the passage to the act disregards the desire for the recognition of the Other, shame operates outside the concern about what other people would think. It exceeds the internalized sense of guilt that the superegoic gaze that the Other imposes. In sum, shame, neither imaginary nor symbolic, is the affect of the real that does not deceive the idea that the contradiction of reality should not be reduced to a young man’s personal tragedy and that an alternative to the status quo must be launched urgently. The collective shame of the Tunisian people does not merely come from the sense of guilt that they let the young man die or did nothing to help him. It evokes the reality of their own derelict situation and enables them to partake in the evental intensity of passage to the act. Flowing through the masses, shame forces them not to bear the status quo, making everyone take responsibility for the unbearable.

Let us recall Badiou’s distinction between the political as the dominant norm and politics as the exceptional hole to the political. Shame is the affect of politics, not of the political, for “the dimension of shame reminds us of the hole from which the master signifier arises.”330 We can agree with Spinoza that shame belongs to sorrow as the decrease of power. However, we should add the paradoxical point that, in the revolutionary context in which the masses take on this decrease of power, shame also punctures the established power. Shame is an insurrectionary sorrow that prompts a collective political action, bringing every form of mastery back to the hole.

328 Ibid., p. 183. 329 Spinoza, Ethics, p. 109. 330 Lacan, SXVII, p. 189. 140

In sum, the logic of revolution consists of an evental passage to the act assumed by the subjectivity of martyrdom and a collective subjectivization of the masses awakened in shame by that evental act. In ’s term, love (amare) is concerned with “willing the well-being of the other (velle bonum alicui).” Lacan retorts that every altruism conceals narcissism and that one loves the well-being of oneself through the well-being of the (imaginary) other. Moreover, love as hainamoration (lovehate) serves as the stumbling block of altruistic love. To put simply, “the energy that we put into all being brothers very clearly proves that we are not brothers.”331 The possibility of the formation of fraternity is intrinsically limited. Our discussion suggests a different path. What the Tunisian revolution shows is that sometimes this energy manifests itself beyond narcissism and hainamoration. But strictly speaking, revolutionary fraternity achieves a reinvention of philia beyond the opposition between Aquinas and Lacan. Philia is not about the well-being of the other or the inverted form of my own well-being. It is about the “ill-dying” of some vanishing being and our own shameful and wrong being. Philia is reinvented when there is a collective commitment to the ill-dying of an abject object. The Arab Spring demonstrates that philia is a generic capacity of the masses to establish an unprecedented bond that shares, as a call for change, the ill-dying of a subject of martyrdom baptized by the real.

While Lacan allows us to engage with a psychoanalytic approach to the revolutionary subjectivities of Bouazizi and the masses, one can launch an overall diagnosis of the Arab Spring itself with Badiou. In the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution in 2011, Badiou provided a sober analysis of possibilities and limitations that the Arab Spring implied, based on his vision of politics. While Badiou does not engage deeply with Bouazizi’s subjectivity, let us attempt a Badiouian analysis of Bouazizi’s subjectivity in terms of the ethics of the subject presented in Logics of Worlds.

For Badiou as well, the problem of subjectivization is directly related to the problem of affect. A human animal’s body becomes a subject of truth by dealing with particular affects. Moreover, the continuation of the truth process depends on how the subject faithfully integrates these affects. Badiou presents four subjective affects: terror, anxiety, courage, and justice. The ethics of the subject lies in synthesizing all of these affects to change the existing world. These affects are differentiated according to the way in which the body treats “points”

331 Ibid., p. 114. 141

and “closings.” While points stand for the discontinuity that lies between the old world and the new world, and thus represent a violent conflict, closings stand for the continuity between the old and the new, and thus represent a peaceful negotiation. For the subject of truth, points and closings are equally important. Let us deal with the affects one by one.

Terror refers to “the desire for a Great Point.”332 It concerns a radical discontinuity that has the potential to change the world all at once, with the immense consequences that entails. Anxiety refers to “the fear of points” or “the desire for a continuity.”333 It is a regressive movement back to the world without any rupture, a hesitant reaction to the uncertain consequences of the decision. Courage refers to “the acceptance of the plurality of points.”334 It is an affirmation of the fact that the world contains the immanent possibilities of change. Finally, justice refers to “the desire for the subject to be a constant intrication of points and closing.”335 Justice constructs an equivalence between the continuous and the discontinuous. It does not retreat before the possibility of a violent discontinuity, nor does it disregard the possibility of a peaceful continuity. Coupling the old with the new, justice serves as the impetus of change. What matters is that these four affects are equally required for the construction of the truth process and the subject of truth. To discredit terror and anxiety as Evil is misleading. Just as Ethics encourages us to defend the truths against Evil as a possible inverse of truths, Logics of Worlds encourages us to work through terror and anxiety, heading toward courage and justice. In sum, “when the incorporation of a human animal is at stake, the ethics of the subject comes down to this: to find point by point an order of affects which authorizes the continuation of the process.”336 Ethics concerns how the body addresses the points of the world by organizing a discipline of affects to continue the truth process.

Evidently, Bouazizi’s self-immolation belongs to an act of terror. One could state that this terror amounts to the excessive implosion of the politico-libidinal drive. Self-immolation is rooted in the unconscious drive to change the world all at once. When this drive cannot be discharged into the external world, it is redirected towards and imposed on the body. When the drive cannot locate the outlet in reality, it is released at the level of the subjective real.

332 Badiou, LW, p. 86. 333 Ibid. 334 Ibid. 335 Ibid. 336 Ibid., p. 88. 142

The logic of revolutionary martyrdom implies that ordinary miseries and social inequalities that the world exerted on the subject are transformed into the terror that the subject afflicts with his/her body. A martyr of revolution incorporates him/herself into a pure terror without organizing an integrative disposition of affects. A martyr is a body of terror that assumes the terror of the world. A martyr does not bear an anxious desire for continuity but asserts an unprecedented point of discontinuity. A martyr does not accept the plural points but assumes a singular point. A martyr does not sustain the tension between closings and points, but serves exclusively a Great Point. If Bouazizi’s act did serve as the driving force of the Tunisian revolution, it was because it revealed the terror of the real in a Great Point.

Lacan once referred to anger as the subjective reaction to the non-correlation between the symbolic order and the response of the real.337 Bouazizi’s act opened up the gap between the sociopolitical order in Tunisia and that which serves as an impossibility for this order. The indignation of the Tunisian masses was a collective engagement with the absolute indignity of a young man that the existing law did not care about. Where a terrifying indignity burnt, the collective indignation shall arrive. Bouazizi’s act constitutes the zero degree of the political event. It is an event of event, which provokes the popular uprising in Tunisia. The intensities released by Bouazizi’s act were so great that they forced the masses to witness the gap between the real and the symbolic and commit to it.

In this regard, Bouazizi’s case makes a notable exception to the Badiouian subject and its ethics. It shows that the popular uprising as a historical event can be induced not by a leader or party, but by a subject that assumes terror though the archi-evental act. The subject of self- immolation is not post-evental or produced by an event à la Badiou in his Theory of the Subject, for whom “the mass movement, required for anay subjectivization, is a cause only insofar as it disappears.”338 Rather, the subject eventalizes him/herself in a self-imposed terror. The task of organizing the order of subjective affects is left up to subsequent rioters and the mass movement.

Let us then move onto a macrocosmic analysis of the Arab Spring. Despite its separation from the political, it is not the case that politics exists as a unified entity. History rather tells us that there are only sequences of emancipatory politics, which begin with the breakout of

337 Lacan, SVII, p. 103. 338 Badiou, TS, p. 322. 143

the event and finish with the exhaustion of its consequences. Following Badiou, one could identify a political sequence from the French Revolution to the and another sequence from the October Revolution to May 1968. This implies that the contemporary world during the period from 1980 until now would not make a political sequence, for it is determined by the logic of governance or management as the nexus of oligarchic capitalism and nominal democracy. However, this does not imply that there is no trace, movement, or symptom of emancipatory politics. In fact, we are now going through what Badiou calls an “intervallic period” in which the violent riots definitely expose some political possibilities, but the affirmative, organizational politics supported by the Idea of emancipation is not yet visible.339

Badiou thus regards the riots in the Middle East as “pre-political events.” They are events that clear the ground for politics to come, which consists of a world revolution and a powerful political sequence that is faithful to it. On the one hand, these events show the prevalent conviction that things should not continue as they are in the present. On the other hand, they are unable to implement any inventive alternative to the present regime. Nevertheless, the Arab Spring proves that History always contains some unpredictable events, if not political, pre-political events. History, which bears the eternally returning sequences of emancipatory politics, can thus be awakened with the riot. What saves History is not the dominant world, but the gaps and fissures that make an exception to it. In this regard, “the riot is the guardian of the history of emancipation in intervallic periods.”340

Badiou presents three different types of riots, immediate, latent, and historical riots. An immediate riot is a protest against the despotic oppression of the state, destructive and nihilistic, spread through imitation, located on the specific site where its participants reside. At its initial stage, the Tunisian riot was also an immediate riot, as a reaction of the masses to Bouazizi’s death caused by the state. In a latent riot like the protest against the pension reform in France, the scale of the riot becomes more extensive. Denying the social stratification imposed both by the state and the union, the protest enabled both workers and non-workers (the retired, the unemployed, intellectuals, and students) to rally together by constructing a new popular unity and occupying a shared localization. Finally, a historical riot,

339 Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso, 2012, p. 40. 340 Ibid., p. 41. 144

as exemplified by the full-fledged form of the riot in the Arab Spring, refers to the transformation of an immediate riot into a pre-political event.

Let us discuss a historical riot in detail. In a historical riot, the localization of the riot goes beyond the specific site such as square, factory, or university. In the case of the Yemeni uprising, we can see the riotous camp gradually expanding from Sana’a University to the president Saleh’s palace, through bloody struggles and numerous casualties. In a historical riot, what is regarded as an instantaneous happening turns into an ongoing assembly with violent passion, continuing over several months or years. In a historical riot, the masses, which are divided according to sexual, economic, generational, racial, cultural, and religious categories in ordinary life, produce a new dynamic unity. We can see Muslims and Copts performing their rituals alternately and protecting each other’s rituals. A historical riot also makes a commonly shared demand out of the nihilistic disorder of an immediate riot. We can see everyone in Tahrir Square marching together, declaring that they are Egypt, not Mubarak or the Western countries that befriended him.

In formal terms, a historical riot is composed of intensification, contraction, and localization. Intensification, as an evental passion for radical change, makes everyone act and think in a way that ruptures the norm in the dominant world. Intensification, however, cannot endure. It disappears as soon as it appears. The passion is immediately exhausted. Nevertheless, the intensity sometimes leaves a transhistorical effect in the world. Thus we witness, for instance, the sequences that revive the ancient Spartacus, such as Toussaint L’ouverture’s black Spartacus and Rosa Luxembourg’s proletariat Spartacus. Contraction, as the formation of a multifaceted minority that represents the entirety of the masses, induces the advent of “a sample of the generic being of a people.”341 The riot renders inoperative the social categories that divide the masses, thereby extracting the egalitarian being beyond the discriminative social existence. After all, the participants in a riot are a minority in terms of its actual quantity. However, it is this minority that presents itself in an intensive way that can not only represent but also reform the general will of the masses. Finally, localization refers to the creation of a site where a riot can situate itself. A riot without a site remains an episodic, nihilistic, and anarchic spurt. A riot takes on a universal address by occupying a specific site. As this site becomes more solid and extensive, the future of a riot appears more victorious.

341 Ibid., p. 91. 145

However, the Arab Spring, despite being a historical riot, has not succeeded in transforming the rebellious historical riot into a consistent organized politics. The awakened history has not attained true politics, which requires the construction of an organization that can preserve the effects of intensification, contraction, and localization. The evental popular uprising remains transitory without fidelity to expand its possibility in an affirmative way. What the Arab Spring lacked was the Idea of organizing the post-riot emancipatory politics. “For the moment, these protests are not generating the idea on whose basis fidelity to the riot can be organized.”342 To this day, the situation has not yet settled down. There are a lot of issues that only an inventive political organization can grapple with. Although the dictatorship is gone in many countries, there remains the previous political establishment and armed forces that take the place of the lost dictator. A new constitution has to be instituted. Poverty and unemployment are rampant. The Sunni-Shia problem is deep-rooted. The emergence of the Islamic States poses an additional threat to the masses. The riot is (mis)labeled by the western countries as the desire for a more civilized democracy, which would amount to the incorporation into the norm of capitalist democracy and thus the reduction of the unknown political possibilities of the historical riot. Therefore, while the Arab Spring signals that the reactionary or intervallic period from the late 1970s might be over now, it also shows how rare and difficult the political nexus of the event and the idea is. It is all too easier to rebel against and subvert the dominant regime. The true problem lies in organizing the affirmative program and collective discipline when the established regime is gone with the breakout of the event.343

Let us conclude. Both Bouazizi’s case and the Arab Spring attest to an emancipatory knot between love and politics in that a self-eventalizing act of terror and a historical riot as the pre-political event commonly belong to what Badiou calls “the passion for the real.” Passion,

342 Ibid., p. 47. 343 Let us note in passing that the recent issue of the Greek debt is not so different. The victory of SYRIZA was once hailed as an event. In its negotiation with the financial powers in the EU and IMF, however, SYRIZA has lost its momentum and disappointed the Greek masses. Given that the debt was not because of retrenched finances but because of the prevalent corruption, the forced admission to the EU, and the manipulation of global speculators, the Greek masses are given the task to organize an ongoing movement outside the electoral system for the complete removal of the debt. As Badiou states, “The ‘No’ in the referendum will only be a true force when it continues into very powerful independent movements.” Alain Badiou, “Eleven points inspired by the situation in Greece,” trans. David Broder, Libération, July 8, 2015. Available from: www.liberation.fr/planete/2015/07/08/onze-notes-inspirees-de-la-situation-grecque_1345294.

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originally constituted as an imaginary product, becomes extraordinary when it is attached to the real that the imaginary cannot unify and the symbolic cannot signify. It constitutes an exceptional commitment to that which the natural course of things in our reality cannot represent. It suspends the repetition and reproduction of the dominant world. In terms of liberty, equality, and fraternity, this passion can be regarded as fraternity. In Badiou’s words, “as for fraternity, it is the real itself pure and simple, the sole subjective guarantee of the novelty of experiences.”344 Without this fraternal passion for the real, a new political sequence could not be opened up. The passion for the real amounts to philia reinvented.

However, considering that Bouazizi’s act was terror-biased and thus failed to construct a synthetic order of affects as the ethics of the subject and that the mass movement in the Middle East is not proposing the affirmation of the Idea and the construction of the organization, Bouazizi’s act and the popular movement remain destructive purification. While destruction implies the mastery of antagonism and death, purification implies the self- identical conception of the real that there is some substantial, all-powerful, and teleological form of emancipation. The revolutionary passion thus risks the danger of judging the terrifying self-immolation to be the only effective way of resistance and the rebellious uprising to be the final form of politics. In this case, the passion may turn into a co- destructive delusion that is supported only by a nihilistic spark, and the real may turn into an expulsive mechanism appropriated by the power of a master.

Badiou suggests that one engage with another path, which is that of creative subtraction, “the one that attempts hold onto the passion for the real without falling for the paroxysmal charms of terror.”345 This path is also significant in terms of the necessity to supplement the Lacanian logic of revolution. Passage to the act–however saintly it is–and shame–however real it is–cannot serve as a master key for the construction of an emancipatory knot between politics and love. Therefore, the logic of revolution, addressed in terms of the subjectivity of Bouazizi and the masses in Arab, poses the question of how to mobilize the passion for the real in a creative way. One has to attempt to propose a new order that could contain the revolutionary fervor for real change. As one way to address this order, let us examine the problem of community.

344 Badiou, The Century, p. 101. 345 Ibid., p. 65. 147

Community In the middle of May 1968, describing the protestors as those with great courage who are “worthy of the events,” Lacan states that these protestors “are really at certain moments carried away by the feeling of being absolutely bound (soudé) to their comrades.”346 In the case of the Yemeni uprising, we can indeed see rioters in the front line block the fire of the armed forces with their bodies and get carried to the hospital by people in the rear line when they are injured or dead. A sense of binding one another, “a feeling of absolute community,” dominates those who participate in a revolution.

Here, one could distinguish at least three Lacanian concepts that connote relation: relation (rapport) as in the sexual non-relationship, link (lien) as in the discursive and linguistic link, and the binding (soudure) in question now. Binding as a political mechanism enables revolutionaries to form an absolute community of comradeship in defiance of the fear of death. However, the problem is that this community lasts only for a moment. Moreover, since this community is grounded in a “feeling,” however intensive it is, this community is equivalent to an imaginary product. When the gap between this imaginary community and the real of the situation is revealed, protestors will fail to launch into the post-revolutionary movement, or revolutionary comradeship will turn into self-deprecating depression, as if love at first sight often turns into hate. Therefore, the Lacanian contribution to the problem of community must not be situated at the level of the momentary irruption of an emancipatory situation but at the level of a daily yet unanalyzed micro-political aspect that hampers emancipation. With Lacan, we can investigate not how to form an ideal community but why a community is symptomatic–why every community is faced with its structural failure. In other words, one should articulate the community of not-all.

Throughout his seminars, Lacan is consistent in his critique of totality in various contexts. The specular image of his/her body that the child sees in front of a mirror as a totality in fact hides the multiple drives that render the body fragmentary. The total image of the mother gives way to the partial object of the breast. The subject of the signifier is regarded not as integral but as divided. The sexual relationship does not make a harmonious whole. One

346 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XV: The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967–1968, May 15, 1968 (unpublished). 148

could also refer to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Cantor’s actual infinity, which deconstructs any notion of totality. A totality is mathematically impossible and contradictory. Lacan thus affirms that the analyst should distrust any idea of totality.347 Significant for our discussion is that this critique is also advanced at the political level. “The idea that knowledge can make a whole is immanent to the political as such.”348 The psychoanalytic critique of the political revolves around any community based on totality. Let us specify this point on five levels.

First, a totalized community is produced by the power of self-identity. If individual narcissism is grounded in one’s self-image that reduces any external object, collective narcissism is grounded in the ingroup’s self-identical cohesiveness that excludes any outgroup. This is what Freud pointed out with the term of “the narcissism of minor differences.” “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”349 As is revealed in the conflicts among contiguous nation-states, a community feeds on minor differences–although the two nations actually share a lot of commonalities–while asserting its own constituted identity.

Collective narcissism shows how love at the interior level and aggressiveness at the exterior level are in fact interdependent. Any extraneous bodies will be labeled as enemies and sacrificed as scapegoats, which leads to ceaseless intercommunal antagonisms. In case there is no external group to discharge aggressiveness, antagonism will then infiltrate the group. This makes the members in a group aggressive toward one another so that the cohesiveness of the ingroup is threatened, eventually triggering its own destruction. The collective narcissism based on the discrimination of the ingroup and outgroup serves as an autoimmune disease of a community. A totalized community is thus not only externally antagonistic but also internally dissolvable. A totalized community proves why eros as the binding power and thanatos as the unbinding power coexist. A totalized community makes intermingled love and hate, connection and separation. A totalized community implies that there is no such thing as

347 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis, 1965–1966, May 11, 1966 (unpublished). 348 Lacan, SXVII, p. 31. 349 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents [1930] in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21, ed. and trans. James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press, 1961: 114. 149

an amorous community; there is only an ambivalent community.

Second, a totalized community comes from the denial of the non-relation. Apart from the sexual non-relationship, there is another notable non-relation for Lacan–or, we could state that this non-relation is a variant of the sexual non-relationship. In the other three discourses, we see that there is a link between S1 and S2. The presence of this link implies that the master signifier wields its power by securing a totalized knowledge and reproducing a pre- constituted signification. On the contrary, it is only in the analyst discourse that the link between S1 and S2 is blocked (S2 ▲ S1). The master signifier (S1) as the product of the discourse cannot reach the analyst’s knowledge (S2). This implies that it is not possible to depend on the pre-constituted signification. In other words, one cannot believe in the subject supposed to know. The analysand has to reach his/her own subjective truth by himself. The subject supposed to know is not the analyst but the analysand’s unconscious, in which the analysand should find a way to traverse fantasy, symbolize the excessive jouissance, and invent a new way of loving and desiring. Consequently, there is no relation between the analyst and the analysand. What is at stake in the analytic work lies in the transition from the impotence of relation between S1 and S2 to the impossibility of relation between the analyst and the analysand. The radicality of this non-relation lies in the nullification of the pre- constituted signification.

For instance, when the 2016 Olympics was held in Rio de Janeiro, local citizens were protesting against holding the Olympics, which caused a cutback in their health insurance. In contrast, the state promoted a harmonious relation among people to support the normative signification (the great international festival or the trickle-down effect in holding the Olympics). But this relation merely masks the internal deadlock. As Badiou states, “the State is not founded upon the social bond, which it would express, but rather upon un-binding, which it prohibits.”350 The state as a totalized community sought its specious unification to hold the successful Olympics as the normative signification by repressing its own underlying contradiction. A totalized community operates through the reduction of the fundamental non- relation to the social relation.

Third, a totalized community is constituted by the symbolic function. The symbolic is characterized by its structural failure, as the words cannot fully represent the thing. There is a

350 Badiou, BE, p. 109. 150

necessary gap between the symbolic and the real. Nevertheless, the symbolic is well operative in social reality as the unit of value and worth. For instance, it is hard to imagine a citizenship without SSN. The symbolic thus does not exist; it only functions by pretending to represent the real as the consistent unity. The problem is that one often takes the symbolic for the real. However, as Lacan puts, “the use of the one we find solely in the signifier does not at all found the unity of the real.”351 The real eludes the symbolic function, for the real as vanishing, fragmentary, and non-substantial ex-sistence is inaccessible to the symbolic unity. In other words, “the une bévue [the homophony of the Freudian unconscious, Das Unbewusste or a blunder as the unconscious formation] is a false whole.”352

For Lacan, there is no better place that illustrates the failure of the symbolic as the false whole than the feminine position. The symbolic as the signifying network is constituted by a series of binary oppositions such as presence and absence. But woman, located “between centre and absence,” deviates from this binary opposition. Woman is indeterminate with regard to the phallic function, for she is located both inside and outside the discursive operation. Woman is the subject of not-all. In the political context, using the Rio Olympics as our reference point again, the favela in Rio takes the position of woman. While the fancy facilities were built for the Olympics, people in favela had to go through their ordinary miseries and chronic despair. The degree of urban segregation was so severe that the residents lived in unauthorized buildings, scavenging residential and industrial wastes from all over Rio. The only dream left to the children in the favela is to be a drug dealer/gangster, which shows that an alienated element from a community’s symbolic order returns as the real alien to that community. People in the favela are without any symbolic value or have zero intensity of existence from the perspective of the Rio Olympics. The Olympics cannot represent them. They are not merely the unwelcomed guest of the festival but the internal parasitism that defies the control of the host of the festival. The favela marks the real blind spot of the Olympics by rendering its symbolic unity fictional.

Fourth, a totalized community is blind to the pathology of the symptom. To all of the thinkers who grappled with the problem of community, death played an important role. For Bataille,

351 Lacan, Television, p. 133 (January 15, 1980). 352 Lacan, SXXIV, December 14, 1976 (unpublished). 151

“a man alive, who sees a fellow man die, can survive only beside himself (hors de soi).”353 One could think of the serial attempts of self-immolation in the Arab countries after Bouazizi. Death as the ecstatic intensity makes a living man exist beside him/herself. For Blanchot, it is not “I” or “you” but “one/we (on)” who die(s). Death amounts to an impersonal event that establishes a community as indefinite and shared. For Nancy, “it is through death that the community reveals itself–and reciprocally.”354 Death, which fractures the self-identical subject through exposure to the other, affirmatively constitutes a form of “being-with.”

While it is the case that Lacan sometimes identifies the subject of the signifier as being toward death, let us replace the community of death promoted by these thinkers with the Lacanian community of the symptom. The symptom constitutes each subject’s opaque yet singular truth. The subject repeats the symptom as the idiosyncratic kernel of his/her subjectivity without knowing. What matters here is that the constitution of a community depends on each subject’s attitudes toward another subject’s symptom. The symptom could thwart the formation of a community or facilitate the construction of an unprecedented community. The symptom, which already dislocates the subject from within, could serve as a severe obstacle in living with another subject with his/her own symptom. However, just as a crisis is an opportunity, if subjects interact with each other at the level of the subjective real by exposing, developing, and refashioning their own symptoms, the possibility to form a singular community is opened up. In this case, the symptom would cause the unlinking of the normative social relation and render any totalized community fractured, while offering a chance to build an unprecedented relation. To form a community does not mean disregarding the symptom but living with the symptom, whether one’s own or another subject’s.

The essential point to be noted here is that these four points converge to the notion of the sinthome. The sinthome suspends any identitarian logic, accepts the impasse of the non- relation, supplements the failure of the symbolic, and supports the real singularity of a subject. The psychoanalytic critique of totality thus ends with the proposal of the sinthomatic community. In fact, it is the sinthomatic community that Lacan experimented on with his École Freudienne de Paris (1964–1980), namely the analytic community. In 1967, Lacan affirms that his school admits its own member based only upon “a work project,” “without

353 George Bataille, cited in Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris, Barrytown, N. Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988, p. 9. 354 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 14. 152

any consideration being given to provenance or to qualifications.”355 An analyst is not authorized by any external authority. An analyst authorizes him/herself by presenting his/her analytic experience of traversing his/her fantasy and recognizing the division of his/her subjectivity, which Lacan calls la passe. The community is open to anyone who dares to come to terms with the unconscious and work in concert with the real.

In 1972, however, Lacan declares that “my undertaking appears hopeless because it is impossible that psychoanalysts should form a group. Nevertheless the psychoanalytic discourse is precisely the one that can establish a social bond cleansed of any group- necessity.”356 Psychoanalysts cannot form a group, not because of their strong personalities or theoretical dissensus, but because of the division between person and the unconscious. The analysts are those who follow through this division, and they are well recognizant of the fact that they cannot form a group. It is impossible to form an analytic community. EFP thus amounts to an organization which attempts to perform the impossible.

At this point, one needs to turn to the distinction between group-effect and discourse-effect. If the group effect, which is based on a necessary link, outdoes the discourse effect, the analytic community becomes a totalized community with pre-established symbolic authorities and their disciples. It is only each analyst’s subjective fidelity to the discourse-effect embodied in the unconscious and the real that determines whether one can at least attempt to perform a community of the impossible. EFP could perform the impossible to the extent that its discourse-effect overcomes its group-effect. Here we reach the core of the matter. The community in which the discourse-effect outdes the group-effect, the community of the impossible is closely linked with an intersinthomatic relation, for an intersinthomatic relation is precisely a relation that fractures the power of necessity and works through the impossibility of relation. Let us name a community made up of intersinthomatic relations the sinthomatic community. The sinthomatic community is the community that grapples with its own a-communality, the community that is open to anyone who is willing to commit to the logic of not-all, or in Bataille’s term, the community of those who do not have a community. In the sinthomatic community, there would be a rigorous equivalence between relation and non-relation and an interstitial association beyond any identitarian norm of grouping together,

355 Lacan, “Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste de l’Ecole,” Autres écrits, p. 244. 356 Lacan, “L’étourdit,” Autres écrits, p. 474. 153

which cuts through anarchic disorder and autarchic order.

In 1980, EFP was dissolved by Lacan himself. It was probably because Lacan witnessed that his school could not escape the precedence of the group-effect over the discourse-effect. The school gave in the obscene effect of totalization. Lacan declares, “I am not going to make a totality out of them. No whole.”357 The analytic community finally failed to continue as the community of not-all, still less as the sinthomatic community. The sinthomatic community, therefore, amounts to a hypothesis. In principle, there would be no better community to contain the emancipatory link between politics and love than the sinthomatic community in which every subject refashions his own subjectivity in confrontation with the pre-established symbolic, the enigmatic real, and the narcissistic imaginary and interacts with each other at the sinthomatic singularity. In reality, however, even the analytic community tends to be reduced to an imaginary totality. But this does not imply that the failure of the sinthomatic community should discourage us. The critique of a totalized community renders the role of psychoanalysis to explore the logic of the formation of a community all the more relevant. In sum, this critique comes down to this: “let your community sustain itself at the level of not- all, if not at the level of the sinthome, without regressing into a totality!”

As we discussed above, Badiou’s critical observation about the Arab Spring is that it lacks in the idea to contain and support the mass movement in an ongoing organizational form. For Badiou, the only idea that can achieve this is the “Idea of communism.” To think of the emancipatory knot between politics and love in terms of the problem of community is thus to address the problem of communism. This would be why, despite his general suspicion of the so-called “politics of love,” Badiou states that “the word ‘communism’ brings with it new possibilities for love.”358 Let us first address the idea of communism and then the numerical formalization of emancipatory politics to supplement the idea of communism.

By employing the Lacanian three orders, Badiou defines the idea of communism as “the subjective operation whereby a specific real truth is imaginarily projected into the symbolic movement of a History.”359 The idea of communism is related to three levels, the political

357 Lacan, Television, p. 133. 358 Badiou, IPL, p. 73. 359 Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran, London: Verso, 2010, p. 245. 154

real, the historical symbolic, and the ideological imaginary. First, politics as such, neither the political nor realpolitik, is composed of the singular event and the construction of its consequences as truth. It is real in that symbolic law cannot represent it. Second, history is characterized by the narratival fiction and representational structure prescribed by the law of the state. It is symbolic in that the law of the state prescribes, as in the linguistic differential system, the distinction between what is possible and what is impossible. Third, ideology is redefined by Badiou as something that is relevant to the idea. The role of the idea is to support the becoming-subject of an individual body. Ideology is imaginary in that it allows the subject to consist as a subject of truth. As one can easily recognize, these three orders follow the Borromean logic. Politics, history, and ideology are interdependent. The political real is projected to the historical symbolic in an ideological, imaginary way. The idea of communism is a great hypothesis in that it interrogates whether an individual in his/her ordinary life, determined by the historical laws of the contemporary capitalist democratic regime and afflicted by various symptoms of the crisis of these laws, can nevertheless become an exceptional subject of political change in and against these laws.

What is notable here is that if one looks into the idea of communism from the Lacanian viewpoint, one then reaches the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou, more specifically, the interlacing of the Lacanian sinthome and the Badiouian idea.360 At the formal level, since the idea of communism is a subjective operation that integrates the three orders, it resembles the sinthome. However, Badiou rigorously distinguishes between the “creation” and the “sinthome.”361 While the former belongs to the trans-human body of the subject of truths, the latter belongs to the symptomatic body of the human animal. We will leave the problem of the coexistence of creation and sinthome open.362 Instead, let us simply suppose that the idea of communism is not the sinthome. If this is the case, there is only one way to flesh out the idea of communism at the formal level. As we noted in the section on knot theory, the Borromean knot is characterized by the fact that the Name-of-the-Father makes a buckle of

360 While this interlacing of the sinthome and the idea might be outrageous both for pure Lacanianism and Badiou himself, it nevertheless serves as a useful tool to expand both Badiou’s point and the thinking on communism. For instance, in The Actuality of Communism, Bruno Bosteels offers a critique of Badiou that communism coupled with “idea” remains the philosopher’s exclusive property and the product of “speculative leftism.” Communism as the sinthomatic idea serves as a response to this critique. It keeps communism from being monopolized by the philosopher and descending to a theoretical bluff. The approach to communism in terms of the sinthomatic idea renders the problem of communism more open and palpable. 361 Badiou, LW, p. 481. 362 Joyce is precisely a case in which creation and the sinthome imply each other. 155

the three orders. While not appearing as a particular ring, the invisible operation of the Name- of-the-Father (not the Name-of-the-Father as the fourth ring) provides a consistency to the Borromean knot. In this case, the idea of communism is the Name-of-the-Father. However, the Badiouian response to whether there is a link between paternal authority and the idea of communism would be negative, for communism today is not a matter of a heroically revolutionary father but of young boys and girls in their precarious destiny. In other words, communism in the 19th century was naive and unorganized, and communism in the 20th century was violent and statist. Both of the two paths were a total failure. In the communist movement, we are done with the paternal role.

The communist movement today should begin anew with a laborious invention of a new path by thoroughly recalling the failure of the previous movements. The father is gone, leaving only the traces of his own failure, which would prove the contemporary communist to be in a perplexing subjective position. This makes us lean toward the hypothesis that the idea of communism is similar to the sinthome. In fact, despite Badiou’s dismissal of the sinthome, the idea of communism is equivalent to the sinthome. For Lacan, the sinthome as the fourth ring is required to supplement the failure of, generally, the symbolic, or more broadly, any order among the three orders. Before his articulation of the Joycean sinthome, Lacan links the sinthome with the Freudian triad in three ways: the sinthome as the imaginary supplementation (inhibition), the symbolic supplementation (symptom), the real supplementation (anxiety).

Let us note that the Badiouian three orders are commonly open to a failure. The political real might be overflowed by the destructive passion for the real as a self-identical totality, which ignores the subtractive passion for the real as a self-differential possibility. The historical symbolic might be dominated by a few leading figures, as in the phenomenon of the cult of personality, while it is the masses who actually make history. The ideological imaginary might be threatened by the scenario in which an individual does not decide to incorporate him/herself to the process of projecting the political real into the historical symbolic or that the subject of truth, even after incorporating himself into the process, does not faithfully consist but rather betrays the process. These possibilities require the idea of communism to function as the sinthome to supplement the failure of each order. This is not to say that communism is doomed to a failed utopian project. Rather, it means that failure is integral to and inseparable from the operation of the idea of communism. Failure serves as an 156

indispensable political category. As Badiou affirms, “to fail means nothing, and it always happens. To fail is a category of politics. […] In politics, it is to consistency that the failure incorporates itself.”363

At this point, it is necessary to address consistency in detail, for consistency is the key point that allows us to articulate the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. In Theory of the Subject, Badiou draws a clear dividing line between Lacan and himself, in terms of lack and destruction. “Our entire dispute with Lacan lies in the division, which he restricts, of the process of lack from that of destruction.”364 If lack refers to what is absent in a pre- designated place organized by the law, destruction implies an excess beyond the existing law and the composition of a new order. If lack is based on the logic of place, destruction is based on the logic of force. Although Lacan’s thought addresses both place and force, structure and history, place and structure are more primary than force and history. “That which in Lacan is only the eclipse of its inscription” concerns “the wherewithal to carry out the excess over the law.”365 This critique then leads to another critique of the Lacanian real as the Borromean consistency. Pointing out that the Borromean consistency is “weak” due to its property of structural interdependence, Badiou calls for a “strong” consistency, a conflictual and destructive consistency. This consistency, understood as the political real rather than the Borromean real, is characterized by the absence of the imaginary. “The real of the subject guarantees consistency without the mediation of the imaginary.”366 On the contrary, Lacan’s consistency is weak, for it is the real contaminated by the imaginary.

This has a political consequence in that Lacan “lets consistency drop into the imaginary, communism into utopia, and revolution into the structural vacuousness of an algebra of the Same.”367 While algebra concerns the place of identifiable elements, topology concerns the force of disidentificatory neighborhood. What Lacan failed to recognize was that the algebraic connection of places cannot tame the topological excess of force. Therefore, the Lacanian dialectic was too conservative to articulate the communist subject who must interrupt a structural repetition and work toward the historical recomposition of a new

363 Badiou, TS, p. 322. 364 Ibid., p. 131. 365 Ibid., p. 233. 366 Ibid., p. 246. 367 Ibid. 157

structure. To the Borromean subjectivity that is composed of the consisting imaginary, the insisting symbolic, and the ex-sisting real, Badiou opposes the revolutionary subject in which destruction produces a new consistency out of excess beyond the law. While the Lacanian subject is “a consistent repetition in which the real ex-sists,” the Badiouian subject is “a destructive consistency, in which the real ex-ceeds.”368 In sum, the Badiouian consistency (based on the excessive real and a new symbolic) is destructive, while the Lacanian consistency is imaginary.

This situation changes with the formulation of the idea of communism. Badiou now links the communist subjectivity with the Borromean structure rather than with the linking of the real and the symbolic without the imaginary, which would amount to a psychotic desubjectivization. At the same time, consistency is redefined as the ideological, imaginary consistency of the subject who projects the real into the symbolic. What matters for our discussion is that if consistency is linked to the imaginary, then the sinthome is both that which ruptures imaginary consistency through real inconsistency and that which allows for a new consistency by holding the three orders together. In this regard, the sinthome can be named as the (in)consistency of subjectivity. The sinthome as the support of subjectivity provides a minimal consistency or a consistency without consistency to the structure of subjectivity.

Here, one could supplement early Badiou with the point that the sinthome authorizes the paradoxical nexus of consistency and failure. Let us repeat. “In politics, it is to consistency that the failure incorporates itself.” As we noted, this failure is not only formal (a possible failure of the Borromean knot) but also factual (failure as the positive category of emancipatory politics). The failure of the political real, the historical symbolic, or the ideological imaginary should be incorporated into the sinthome as the idea of communism that provides the minimal consistency. To continue with numerous failures is to remain adamantly as a militant who does not confuse politics with ethics by attributing his own act of giving up to the limit of politics itself. What spoils the subject with the idea of communism is not the failure as politics but the failure of ethics. A true counterpart against communism is a communist who gives up. As Marx and Engels writes in The German Ideology, communism does not refer to an ideal state above the status quo but rather a real movement in and against

368 Ibid., p. 239. 158

the status quo. “Communism for us is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality has to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”369

Communism is a movement in the sense that it goes on in humanity’s history in an intermittent yet interminable way. Its intermittency refers to the fact that communism is accompanied by its own intrinsic failure. Its interminableness refers to the fact that communism revives as long as the movement faithfully sticks to its own ethics. When the subject stops following the idea or repressing the sinthome by failing to working through the intrinsic failure, there is no communism.

Without taking the risk of the perverse argument that communism is virtually an inverse of capitalism, one could state that communism as an ever-incomplete movement is still on-going in the contemporary world. Consider the various movements such as cooperatives, workers’ councils, nonprofit organizations, social economy, solidarity economy, alternative financial services, redistribution networks, fair trade, ecology politics, knowledge commons, and self- governing and decentralized local cells. While these instances attempt to resist the dominant norms of capitalist inequality and state sovereignty, failure seems obviously palpable. Alternative financial services as the self-help of the masses easily turn into a model of competition over profitability. Workers’ councils often lose track of the real predicaments of the working poor. Cooperatives are not immune to the global economic crisis. Local cells are prone to lacking in appropriate knowledge and organizational power. Non-Western communities such as Ayllu (the traditional communal unit) in the Andes or the Kerala state in India, which represent the paradigmatic model of communist communities, also have their own issues. Ayllu is characterized by collective control of the means of production and a rotational political system (namely the rule of those without any entitlement). Kerala is characterized by the People’s Plan (education and medical services), a grassroots democracy organization, and the interaction between Panchayat (the traditional communal unit) and the official communist party.

While these communities are relatively independent from capital and state, they remain androcentric communities, showing a high level of sexual inequality. These communities are

369 Karl Marx and , The German Ideology, part 1, ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, pp. 56–57. 159

the very product of, in Derrida’s term, the politics of [masculine] friendship. In this regard, there is no such thing as a communist community; there is only communism as a movement to reach beyond the preestablished power structure, and, to support this at the subjective level, the idea of communism to supplement failures immanent to the movement. The communist movement is the collective drive of humanity, circulating around the inaccessible void of a communist community, and the idea of communism is a nomination of this drive to provide a subjective consistency. In other words, there is, on the one hand, the irresistible asubjective drive of communism and, on the other hand, the sinthomatic idea as the subjective support to provide a minimal consistency to that drive.

As points out, the contemporary political predicament comes from the nexus of invisible global elitism and self-enclosed local identities.370 Globalization allows trans-national oligarchic elites to wield their power internationally in a clandestine way. At the same time, our world is witnessing the spread of isolationism, ultranationalism, regionalism, and the reinforcement of securities, borders, and the police, which incapacitates the joint action to address issues of global politics such as refugees, nuclear weapons, terrorism, ecology, biogenetics, and technology. Herein lies the necessity to expand the Badiouian idea of communism. The idea of communism, especially today, is not a matter of an individual’s short-term subjectivization but of humanity’s long-term subjective process. It is a matter of whether the human community, regardless of whether Western or non-Western, pre-capitalist or post-capitalist, could retain its subjective support of the sinthomatic Idea to grapple with its impending issues. The contemporary human community is, more than ever, facing the subjective task of resuscitating the communist movement while fully recognizing its intrinsic failure.

Badiou often quotes Sartre’s remark that “if the communist hypothesis is not right, if it is not applicable, this means that humanity is not in itself something very different from ants or ferrets.”371 Here, let us expand Sartre/Badiou’s binary opposition between animality and humanity. Animality is not a fixed identity, since it can be employed and promoted by the laws of the status quo. For Badiou, the power of democratic materialism lies in reducing inhuman openness to animalistic humanity, without any radical possibility of forming an

370 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds, Cambridge: Polity, 2003, pp. 100–102. 371 Alain Badiou, “Is the word ‘Communism’ forever doomed?” (Henry Street Settlement, Harry de Jur Playhouse, New York City, Novermber 6, 2003), available from: www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=323. 160

emancipatory community.372 Homo economicus under the shelter of human rights is not so far from the animality constituted by the freedom of consumption, the communication of opinions, and the competition over profit and immediate satisfaction. As soon as humanity is endowed with one fixed identity, it loses its contact with the inhumanity which renders humanity open.

For our context, to render humanity open is to regard humanity as capable of embracing the inhuman possibility as the interlacing of the Lacanian side and the Badiouian side. Humanity with an emancipatory drive will be constantly devoted to the process of building a community without exploitation, domination, segregation, and discrimination. During this process, humanity nevertheless confronts the tortuous trajectories full of the internal deadlocks. Communism as a logic of community refers to the very process of elaborating the communist movement through the supplementation of the idea of communism. Communism proves that humanity as the vehicle of the inhuman is irreducible to any type of animality due to its emancipatory passion and its sinthomatic subjectivization. Here, the Lacanian community of not-all is couple with the Badiouian idea of communism: the community with the sinthomatic idea of communism, the greatest symptom of human community.

Humanity As the religion of love, Christianity proposes agape as the emancipatory knot between politics and love. While eros tends to be self-centered and conditional, agape is self- renunciating and unconditional, as it derives from God, who forgives the sinful humanity via Christ’s crucifixion. Given that a Christian subject is gratuitously blessed with this graceful agape, he/she is supposed to gratuitously practice agape, loving God, neighbor, and even enemy. Agape implies that while humanity might depend on law, it should ultimately steer its way to love.

Nevertheless, the entanglement of love and law remains a problem. For modern men, as Freud remarked, “love thy neighbor” appears as cultural superego. Agape can be reducible to law, thereby generating the sense of guilt as the correlate of law. Moreover, agape is generally considered to be true only of a saint. It is not certain whether love can outdo

372 Badiou, LW, p. 511. 161

satisfaction of aggressiveness, considering that love sometimes entails blind aggressiveness and unilateral drive. Modern secularization made “love thy neighbor” into a merely institutional dogma or empty morality. Is it the case that the Christian agape and its universality have lost their luster today? Can we still talk about universal love as the emancipatory knot between politics and love beyond the Christian paradigm? What is the link between humanity and love? This section presents the Lacanian and Badiouian responses to this issue.

In Gérard Miller’s film Rendez-vous chez Lacan, Suzanne Hommel narrates one of her analytic sessions with Lacan in 1974.

One day, in a session, I was talking about a dream I had, and I said ‘I wake up every morning at 5 o’clock. At 5 o’clock the Gestapo used to come get the Jews in their homes.’ Lacan leaped up from his chair, and came to me. He gently stroked my cheek. I understood ‘geste à peau’ [skin gesture]. Such a tender gesture! It was extremely tender. That surprise did not diminish the pain but it did transform it. Forty years later, when I tell you about that gesture, I can still feel it on my cheek. It’s a gesture that was an appeal to humanity, or something.373

The psychoanalytic discourse is unique because it is distinct from all the other discourses including the discourse of the analyst, for it is a discourse that is not mastered by the analyst or the analysand. Rather, it is the psychoanalytic discourse that produces the analyst and the analysand. The agency of this discourse is two types of saying, namely the demand of the analysand and interpretation of the analyst. The analysand’s demand concerns the cure of his/her suffering caused by an indelible trauma or a chronic symptom. Hommel asked Lacan whether the analysis would remove her war-induced suffering. Here, we see another cornerstone of the psychoanalytic discourse, transference supported by the presence of the analyst. The anticipation that there might be some Other who can penetrate into the unconscious truth of one’s suffering and can deliver oneself from it already lays a foundation for the psychoanalytic discourse. However, in accordance with Freud’s critique of the therapeutic ambition, Lacan replied to Hommel that she would have to cope with it all her life. In Seminar VII, Lacan states that the true termination of an analysis, which prepares one to

373 Rendez-vous chez Lacan, dir. Gérard Miller, Paris: Éditions Montparnasse, 2011. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA-SXCGwLvY) 162

become an analyst, is about “confronting the reality of the human condition.”374 Here, the human condition refers to the Freudian helplessness (Hiflosigkeit), which is so radical in that it makes one defenselessly exposed to danger. In helplessness, there is not even a signal for danger as a minimal protection, which is what anxiety sends in order to avoid the recurrence of a traumatic experience. The end of analysis does not lie in being cured but confronting one’s own helplessness.

To achieve this end, the psychoanalytic discourse requires the analysand to stick to a special ethics, an ethics of free speech that is conducive to the revelation of the unconscious. An analysis is not about making the unconscious conscious but about expressing the unconscious through speech. Those who do not follow this rule, those who try not to be duped by the unconscious, would only find themselves liable to err. The analysand must be rather faithfully duped by the unconscious. In parallel, the analyst’s ethics, the analytic neutrality devoid of any passion, can be justified only by the analyst’s sui generis desire to continue the psychoanalytic discourse. “There is no other ethics than to play the game according to the structure of a discourse.”375 Hommel thus talks about her dream in her session, and then a critical moment comes.

This moment allows us to look into the mechanism of trauma. As a young girl, Hommel lived through the wars and experienced the Nazi occupation of Germany. The Gestapo as the invasive real punctured her psychic reality, constituting the ineffaceable gaps in her life. The Gestapo not only acted as the traumatic gaps but also reconstituted her psychical structure after the trauma. “Gestapo” and “5 o’clock” became the master signifier that reigned Hommel’s reconstituted psychical structure. By the time Hommel talked about her experience to Lacan, there was no longer a Gestapo. Nevertheless, at every “5 o’clock,” the time of the Gestapo’s break-in, the Gestapo walked into her unconscious and marked Hommel’s body by forcing her to build the symptom of waking up at 5. Her body unconsciously repeats, in the paradoxical conjunction of pleasure and pain, the act of waking up at 5. The signifier “5 o’clock” is imperative, wielding the superegoic power to structure her jouissance. Hommel as the post-traumatic subject is neither a conscious individual nor an adaptive organism. She is ex-centric and de-centered as the subject of the unconscious, as her body is inscribed by the

374 Lacan, SVII, p. 303. 375 Lacan, SXXII, November 19, 1974 (unpublished). 163

signifier.

In a similar way, Lacan narrates his own experience with the baby in Seminar XI. Lacan repeatedly disappeared from the eyes of a baby who demanded his presence. Lacan’s disappearance constituted the baby’s trauma. At the same time, Lacan became “the living signifier”376 for the baby, as the master signifier that structures the baby’s psychic reality. In sum, a trauma begins with the intrusion of the real and ends with the institution of the master signifier accompanied by symptomatic jouissance. The influence of a trauma covers both the real and the symbolic. In his talk at the chapel of the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Lacan affirms that “as for the might of the symbolic, it doesn’t have to be demonstrated. It is might iself. There is no trace of might in the world prior to the appearance of language.”377 To engage with this power of the signifier, psychoanalysis intervenes at the same level, at that of the signifier.

Lacanian psychoanalysis is a practice of the signifier. In Seminar XX, Lacan articulates that the role of the signifier is ambivalent. On the one hand, “the signifier is the cause of jouissance.”378 Hommel’s symptomatic jouissance of waking up at 5 is activated by the signifiers “Gestapo” and “5 o’clock.” One unconsciously repeats self-destructive acts and thoughts based on certain signifiers. On the other hand, “the signifier is what brings jouissance to a halt.”379 One of the terms that late Lacan employs to refer to this second role of the signifier is “lalangue.” Lalangue refers not only to the unarticulated materiality of language but also to the analytic tool of symbolizing jouissance. “Lalangue civilizes jouissance.”380 Lalangue plays a crucial role in interpretation, for it activates the equivocal within the linguistic materiality rather than reinforces the pre-instituted meaning. Lalangue in interpretation has the unpredictable effect of touching the analysand’s symptomatic real and assisting the analysand to subjectivizing it. As Lacan puts, “the equivoque is all we [analysts] have as a weapon against the symptom … Indeed, interpretation operates solely through

376 Lacan, SXI, p. 63. 377 Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls, p. 32. 378 Lacan, SXX, p. 24. 379 Ibid. 380 Lacan, “La Troisième,” given at the VII Congress of the EFP in Rome, October 31, 1974. Available from: www.valas.fr/Jacques-Lacan-La-Troisieme-en-francais-en-espagnol-en-allemand,011. 164

equivoques. There has to be something in the signifier that resonates.”381

In Hommel’s case, the specific signifier that resonates with regard to her real unconscious is “geste à peau [skin gesture].” “Geste à peau” transfigures Hommel’s symptomatic jouissance charged by the master signifier “Gestapo.” This effect of the signifier is possible because language generates multiple possible significations and every enunciation accompanies equivocations. Hommel’s unconscious structure was dominated by the dominant signification or the enjoyed meaning [joui-sense] of the unbearable terror of death associated with the Gestapo. As the Gestapo and geste à peau are juxtaposed in resonation, the Gestapo loses its valence as the master signifier, for its meaningless real is exposed and its dominant signification is suspended. At the same time, the repetition of jouissance loses its ground. Certainly, the master signifier and its destructive effect cannot be completely erased. However, its effect on the subject can be changed through the mediation of another signifier effect on the subject. In Hommel’s words, “that surprise did not diminish the pain but it did transform it.” This transformation is possible because the analytic practice supports, instead of suppressing, the equivocal in language. The equivocal evokes that the existing unconscious structure is not permanent but open to change. This clarifies how psychoanalysis works. On the one hand, psychoanalysis soberly analyzes how the unconscious is conservative in its repetitive mobilization of master signifiers and the corresponding reproduction of self- destructive jouissance. On the other hand, it also reveals how a chance of change is immanent to the unconscious insofar as the unconscious is constituted by the network of signifiers. The signifier can either abuse us when it is charged with jouissance or joui-sense, or it can liberate us when it reveals, pacifies, and transforms the symptomatic real.

Here, it is also worth referring to Lacan’s declaration that a new signifier outside the inherited unconscious, an invented signifier with no meaning would open us to the real.382 Read against the backdrop of Lacan’s analysis with Hommel, this real does not refer to the real as jouissance or the real as the mathematizable. It refers to a real possibility of subjective change through the clinical intervention. What is at stake in the unconscious is not creation or destruction but refashioning, however slow and sinuous. Lacan’s session with Hommel shows that psychoanalysis, as a homeopathic practice of the signifier, can reconstitute the

381 Lacan, SXXIII, p. 9. 382 Lacan, SXXIV, May 17, 1977 (unpublished). 165

unconscious by promoting the equivocal in language, rendering the master signifier inoperative, and posing a new signifier in the real.

Hommel’s case is also notable in terms of the end of analysis. While psychotherapy regards the end of analysis as being cured from one’s symptom, one could not state that Hommel was cured of her symptom, despite Lacan’s signifying intervention that civilizes her jouissance. Although analysis is not supported by therapeutic ambition or reparative desire, it is possible and recommendable for an analyst to remove the analysand’s symptom. Lacan also does not deny this possibility. “The symptom is real; it is even the only real thing, namely, which preserves a sense in the real. It is indeed for that reason that the psychoanalyst can, if he is lucky, intervene symbolically to dissolve it in the real.”383 Indeed, Geste à peau serves as the medium of a symbolic intervention to destabilize the master signifier, which might luckily lead to the dissolution of the symptom as the real thing with its congealed sense.

However, one cannot assert that Hommel is cured of her symptom, for the unconscious follows the logic, not of nullification but of repression. The symptom necessarily returns, as Lacan stated that she had to cope with it all her life. We could state that removing her pain through analysis constituted Hommel’s fantasy and that Lacan provided her with an occasion for traversing her therapeutic fantasy. Cure is nothing but the derivative effect of analysis. The true end of analysis does not lie in being cured but in knowing how to deal with (savoir y faire) the unconscious symptom. Man as the animal of mental debility does not know how to deal with the unconscious, thereby repeating his/her jouissance and serving master signifiers. Knowing how to deal with the unconscious symptom implies the process in which the subject assumes his/her clandestine imperfections and works through his/her innermost weakness.

It is also here that psychoanalysis emerges as antiphilosophy, because it focuses on a singularization of the unconscious subject in his/her life, not on a systematic theory or a general guideline. “Knowing how to deal with is something different to know-how. […] One does not really capture the thing in a concept.”384 Considering that the transition from the analysand to the analyst is another way of reaching the end of analysis, the fact that Hommel is now practicing as an analyst is also significant. If she is an analyst, she must have found, or at least is supposed to find, her singular solution to manage her symptom.

383 Ibid., March 15, 1977 (unpublished). 384 Ibid., January 11, 1977 (unpublished). 166

Most importantly, as Lacan stated in his lecture at Yale University in 1975, “being trained as an analyst” is equivalent to “having seen how the symptom completes itself,”385 not having acquired a therapeutic capacity to remove the symptom. Let us suppose that the name of the completion of the symptom to the point of subjectivizing it thoroughly is the sinthome. The process of knowing how to deal with the unconscious symptom amounts to the process of recognizing the entangled subjective knot and untying or retying it into a sinthomatic subjective structure. “Analysis does not consist in being freed from one’s sinthomes, since that is how I write symptom. Analysis consists in knowing why one is entangled by them.”386

The end of analysis lies in the construction of the sinthome as the completion of the symptom. Here, one should also recall Lacan’s formulation about “S [the existing symbolic] + Σ [the sinthome],” which suggests a new symbolic order, or the role of the sinthome that holds together the three orders. While one is entangled by the symptom because of the existing symbolic, it is possible to transform the symptom into the sinthome by inventing a way that restructures the symbolic. Instead of liberating oneself from the sinthome, the end of analysis lies in completing the irreducible kernel of subjectivity beyond the pre-established law. While the exact term that Lacan uses is the “identification with the sinthome,” this identification is paradoxically both identificatory and disidentificatory. It is disidentification with the law and identification with the unprecedented subjectivity. It is a formation of a new subjectivity and a deformation of an old subjectivity. Hommel’s self-authorization as an analyst or her end of analysis would be confirmed not by being cured from her symptom but by how she transforms and completes the indelible symptom into the foundation of her sinthomatic subjectivity.

Now, let us discuss what kind of implications this clinical case has for the relationship among the analytic act, humanity, and love. In an analytic session, the analyst listens to the analysand, remains silent, or offers an interpretation, all of which can belong to the analytic act in its broad sense. Lacan specifies that the analytic act is first and foremost a signifying intervention, an act with the signifier. What is notable in geste à peau is that it is both a signifying interpretation and physical act. It is, so to speak, an analytic act to the second power. It is not merely a word play between Gestapo and “geste à peau,” for Lacan actually

385 Jacques Lacan, “Conférences et entretiens dans les universities nord-américaines,” November 24, 1975 at Yale University. 386 Lacan, SXXV, January 10, 1978 (unpublished). 167

made a tender gesture on Hommel’s cheeks. For Lacan, the analyst’s saying/act “should get into one’s guts,”387 and it is “meant to make waves (or the equivocal) (vagues).”388 Forty years later, Hommel can still feel Lacan’s touch on her cheek. It was an analytic act in its proper sense that got into Hommel’s guts, producing indelible waves for Hommel that not only transfigured her traumatic suffering through the equivocal but also provided an occasion for her decision to become an analyst.

As Hommel states, this analytic act was also an appeal to humanity. Although Lacan never addressed the link between love and humanity, let us draw some consequences from this point. While generally suspicious of the knot between love and politics, Badiou nevertheless notes that there is an artistic genre that can articulate a point of intersection between love and politics: theatre. The session between Lacan and Hommel could be read as a short theatrical scene. The main character, who actually does the work of an analysis, is Hommel. The supporting character is Lacan, who dives into the hole of the unconscious. “In analysis, there is no scene except when there is a passage to the act. There is no passage to the act except as a dive into the hole of the blower, the blower, of course, being the unconscious of the subject.”389

A traumatic scene makes a hole in the subject’s psychical reality. The unconscious is constituted as an interpretative reaction to the unrepresentable hole as the real trauma. Once it is constituted, it works as a self-reproducing system. In Hommel’s case, the traumatic or troumatique (hole/traumatic) hole was war-induced, and her unconscious repeats the bodily symptom of waking up at 5. Lacan, the supporting character, dives into this war trauma with passage to the act. This passage to the act is a self-vanishing act in which the analyst serves as trashitas of the analysand’s subjective real, not as caritas of the religious law. When the curtain comes down, the spectators witness what this analytic-amorous scene has left: an appeal to humanity. Contrary to Badiou’s position that “saying” as a signifying act does not make a true event and remains an existential modification within the law, psychoanalysis notes that some saying definitely has an evental effect. Lacan’s geste à peau as a signifying

387 Lacan, SXXI, February 19, 1974 (unpublished). 388 Lacan, “Conférences et entretiens dans les universities nord-américaines,” November 24, 1975 at Yale University. 389 Jacques Lacan, “Conférences et entretiens dans les universities nord-américaines,” November 24, 1975 at Yale University. 168

and physical act produced the waves of an evental appeal to humanity. To think of the implication of this event, one could refer to Wittgenstein’s note in 1944: “No cry of torment can be greater than the cry of one man. Or again, no torment can be greater than what a single human being may suffer.”390

Psychoanalysis as a radically non-universal and non-authoritative practice addresses the suffering of a single human being and his/her cry of torment, focusing not on cure but on the construction of the sinthome. What is notable in Hommel’s case is that this single human being’s suffering is directly related to the “crime against humanity,” the term before which we should be more precise. As Badiou notes, the fascist is not some unthinkable evil but a specific form of subjectivity. mobilizes “obscure subject” whose body makes a transcendental and mythical Body out of a particular blood and race through the denial of the body of truth.391 What this subject ultimately aims at is the co-destruction of itself and the world, thereby serving the power of death as its master. In this sense, the Gestapo is not a crime against humanity but a symptom of humanity, an actual revelation of real potentialities that are immanent to human subjectivity. The kind of humanity that psychoanalysis deals with is not an amorous and harmonious humanity but a humanity that imposes aggressiveness, violence, and power struggle on itself. Hommel’s case shows that the inhuman inside humanity can pass through a single subject, and that one figure of humanity as the Gestapo can be juxtaposed with another figure of humanity as amorous touch. This then leads us into the great paradox of humanity and love.

There is no such thing as humanitarian, cosmopolitan, or universal love. These nomenclatures can be inverted into perverse dogmas that obey the law of love and end up as hollow words. At worst, these slogans can be defiled and abused by a secretly self-centered power system. For this reason, psychoanalysis notes that there is no amorous humanity. There are only singularities to love and be loved. Without love of singularities, there is no love of humanity. The love of singularity makes a condition of the possibility of amorous humanity. Where there is an amorous singularity, there might be an amorous humanity. Where there is a sinthomatic subject who works through the inhuman symptom of humanity, there might be an amorous humanity.

390 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright, trans. Peter Winch, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 45. 391 Badiou, LW, pp. 58–60. 169

Wittgenstein goes on, “anyone in such torment who has the gift of opening his heart, rather than contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart.”392 Let us conclude by replacing Wittgenstein’s Christian theme of salvation with the psychoanalytic theme of the real as the impossible of salvation. Humanity has to work through the unsalvageable condition of its own inhumanity, the actual possibility that humanity can dilapidate and devastate humanity itself. Lacan’s analytic work with Hommel is a paradigmatic case that this unsalvageable condition can be addressed in one subject’s heart. The psychoanalytic knot between humanity and love is about opening my heart or your heart by diving into its ruined cracks, thereby producing waves for the heart of humanity, however broken and fragile it is.

Let us flesh out the link between humanity and love one step further through a cinematic example. Based on the cross cut of a series of interrelated episodes that happen during one day in LA, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) features various characters, including Frank (Tom Cruise), a motivational speaker and pick-up artist; Earl (Jason Robards), Frank’s father and the former producer of the quiz show entitled What Do Kids Know?; Linda (Julianne Moore), Earl’s present wife; Jimmy (Philip Baker Hall), the host of the quiz show; Claudia (Melora Walters), Jimmy’s daughter; Jim (John C. Reilly), a police officer; Stanley (Jeremy Blakman), a prodigy who participates in the quiz show; and Donnie (William H. Macy), a former champion of the quiz show.

The lives of these characters illustrate how the unconscious determines the subject’s life. Frank’s male chauvinism and misogyny can be read as a defensive mechanism for his trauma. As a teenager, Frank felt helpless in the presence of his dying mother. His father, Earl, was not there with Frank and his mother. In Lacanian terms, due to Earl’s paternal malfunction, Frank has lived with the psychotic structure in which he had to depend on the narcissistic satisfaction of his machismo based on the fantasy of mastery over women. In the end, we see Frank’s ambivalence toward his father explode alternatively: “You die” and then “Don’t go away.”

Earl’s case shows how the phallic man only ends up confusing desire with love. As a young and smart businessman, he cheated on his wife Lily to prove that he was “something.” In psychoanalysis, this something is called phallus as the grandiose illusion of omnipotence. A man with a phallus (a phallophore man) is incapable of love, for he reduces his beloved to an

392 Ibid., p. 46. 170

object of desire and remains ignorant about love as the acknowledgement of lack. On his deathbed, Earl is just an old man full of regret about his loss of love.

Linda, who married Earl for money without love and cheated on Earl, shows how a woman can be equally enslaved to phallic logic. Linda’s concern was merely about what Earl had, not his true subjectivity. Her love is imaginary based on possession. This is why Earl’s impending death, the real event, makes Linda seized by panic. She does not know what to do with his body after his death. Finally she hysterically confesses that she has fallen in love with Earl for real. However, this belated love ends up leading Linda into a suicide attempt.

Claudia’s drug addiction and prostitution serve as a substitution for her father Jimmy’s paternal malfunction, similar to Frank’s case. When her father went to see and reconcile with her, she immediately kicked him out and then did drugs. Claudia’s case seems worse than Frank’s case not only in terms of the intensity of her aggressiveness toward her father but also in terms of the absence of a stable relationship with her body image. Like Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who feels that his body image is peeling away, Claudia is devoid of her body image, which reduces her body to the medium of addictive jouissance. She relates to herself not through body image but through asubjective drive. As she indulges in cocaine, her only partner is her own body, which repeats its self-destruction.

Stanley’s case shows how a child’s subjectivity is constituted by the desire of the Other, represented by his father and the media. Despite his father’s daily enunciation “love you,” Stanley is not taken care of. All his father wants is for Stanley to become the object of his fantasy, the winner who can answer all the questions in the quiz show. With the media’s obscene fantasy of prodigy, Stanley is reduced to be an object to be gaped at as a spectacle. These two forms of desire make Stanley study all alone in school just for the quiz show, without interacting with friends and family. It is thus no coincidence that Stanley wets his pants during the show, which implies that the irruption of the real bypasses the alienating effect of the Other. Stanley’s body presents its own symptom, not by revolting against the Other but by ignoring the Other. In the end, Stanley asserts to the show host Jimmy and spectators, “I’m not a toy to be looked at.” To his father, Stanley asserts, “dad, you need to be nicer to me.”

As someone who was the champion of the quiz show but is now a fired salesman, Donnie thinks that he would be loved by the bartender if he got braces through oral surgery. Here 171

again, love is dominated by the imaginary that is authorized by the symbolic, an image of oneself that is lovable from the perspective of the Other. The effect of this imaginary love is, however, not imaginary but real; Donnie attempts to steal the money from the store he worked for, and he is caught and thwarted by Jim. Donnie, for whom getting braces or not determines the possibility of loving and being loved, finally groans about love, “I really do have love to give, I just don’t know where to put it.” Love as something that can be had belongs to the imaginary love, which makes the subject bogged down.

Jim’s case shows how law is blind to the real but is ultimately overwhelmed by the real. When Jim first comes across the rapper kid Dixon (Emmanuel L. Johnson), Jim disregards Dixon’s help concerning finding the criminal, moralizing about the strong language in Dixon’s rap. Ironically, it is this rap that contains a truth about Jim and what happens to the world: “You think you get a grip because your hip got a holster. […] Check that ego. When the sunshine don’t work, the good Lord brings the rain in” (We will get back to “the rain” later). It is also Dixon who later makes Jim lose his gun, shattering his self-pride as a police officer (The breakdown of Jim’s ego will be accelerated by the encounter with Claudia). Law does not listen to the voice of the real, but the real always sounds the alarm.

In sum, the lives of these characters can be encapsulated by the psychoanalytic aphorism that Donnie proffers at one point: “we may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.” However, this does not fully measure up to the definition of the unconscious because the unconscious is produced not only temporally but also structurally. The unconscious is constituted by a familial, social, phallic, and ideological framework in a synchronic and diachronic way. This preconstituted unconscious in turn has an effect on a way of loving, which is true of these characters. In fact, Magnolia displays a wide range of the forms of love: a misogynist’s love for his own narcissistic machismo, a smart man’s love for the phallus, a young woman’s love for money, a father’s love for his child as an object of fantasy, love for drugs, love for the self-image with braces, love for the job as the guardian of the law. Ironically, however, these characters are not in love. Rather, they are all in solitude. The pick-up artist is surrounded by the male spectators indoctrinated by the war between the sexes. The young wife is next to the old man, but she is full of remorse and anxiety. The child is brought to school and home like a machine by his father. The prostitute is busy doing drugs, and the police officer is busy making people do the right thing. They all make some kind of two, but they are still lonely. According to the song ‘One’ on the film soundtrack, “one is the 172

loneliest number that you’ll ever do. Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one.” This state of being lonely in two does not change or stop. As another OST song ‘wise up’ states, “it’s not going to stop until you wise up.” A crippled love based on the existing unconscious is not far from solitude.

One theme that is useful in terms of the analysis of the unconscious of many characters in this film is the father and son relationship (Earl and Frank, Stanley and his father, and Donnie and his parents). Here, let us refer to Badiou’s “About the contemporary fate of boys.” Based on a reading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, Badiou observes that the relationship between father and son can be approached in three stages.393 First, the son kills the father who enjoys all the women in the tribes. Second, when the dead father returns in the form of the law, the son submits to the father out of his sense of guilt. Finally, as in crucified Christ’s Ascension and participation in God’s glory, which replaces God of judgment with God of love, the son embodies the sign of universal love. In sum, the son’s body goes through a dialectical initiation process (revolt, submission, love) to become the father. According to Badiou, however, this initiation is inoperative today, for the contemporary world is dominated by the disappearance of fatherhood. Who enjoys is no longer the father but the son or the muscular body, which never gets old due to the contemporary ideology of anti-aging. The law is no longer embodied in the father. The law is exterior to him in the form of the market. This absence of fatherhood directly affects the son’s initiation. Without a fraternal pact, the son loses his target of aggressiveness. Instead, he himself becomes the vehicle of market circulation in the state of separation. The law of the market does not provide the son with an opportunity to transform himself into the father, but fixes him in passive immobility. Moreover, the son was traditionally initiated as he joined the army or became the head of household. Today, these ways of initiation are outdated and attenuated, as he rather chooses to be de-initiated by working for the transnational corporate or enjoying pornography without getting married.

In sum, Freud’s schema is inadequate now because the son no longer becomes the father. The phenomenon of eternal adolescence dominates the contemporary world. This is what Badiou calls “the aleatory character of son’s identity.” Here, Badiou observes that three possibilities are left to the body of the son. Indulged lonely in the a-symbolic initiation materials such as

393 Alain Badiou, The True Life, trans. Susan Spitzer, Cambridge: Polity, 2017, pp. 51–52. 173

drugs or pornography, the son could become the “perverted body” without any idea of love. Secondly, returning to the ancient law and committing to traditional ideology, the son could become the “sacrificed body” in the figure of a fascist, terrorist, or extremist. Lastly, consigning himself to the flux of capitalism and offering himself on the market as product, the son could become the “meritorious body.” All these ways of initiation, which amount to an initiation without initiation, are commonly heterogeneous to the subjective incorporation into truths.

The characters in Magnolia show how the son and the daughter are caught up in the logic of a de-initiated body. Frank’s show “Seduce and Destroy” is based on the nihilist mindset that there is no love between sexes, not even mutual care (“do you really think that she’s going to be there when things go wrong?”). What is employed to suture this antagonistic situation is either the male chauvinism that man’s mastery over woman is evolutional or the calculative tips that a few female friends are useful in terms of provoking jealousy. The male spectators, possessed by machismo or heart-broken by a relationship, hail Frank’s performance, and sexuality becomes the field of power struggle. Frank’s case shows how the sacrificed body can be operative in sexuality and romance.

Claudia belongs to the case of the perverted body. Without an idea of the amorous two, her partners are drugs and sex to be enjoyed fatally and lonely. On her first date with Jim, Claudia suggests that they break the unwritten laws of the first date about not telling who one really is. This suggestion is actually a radical gesture, given that love is often oriented by the image rather than the subjective real. However, overwhelmed by the possibility that Jim would hate her if he comes to know her subjective real, she hysterically runs away from Jim. This scene shows how the contemporary perverted body is stuck with the dilemma of loneliness, between the repetitive fatigue of the imaginary and the private fatality of the real. A lonely subject desires to be with the other beyond the imaginary love that makes one disillusioned after recurrent trials and errors, but the subject is also afraid of exposing his/her real subjectivity and sharing it with the partner. In the end, Claudia fails to abide by her following proposal: “I will tell you everything and you tell me everything.” The perverted body is the one deprived of the ability to draw the consequence of the amorous encounter and launch into the amorous process. The conservatism of the symptom outdoes the novelty of an encounter. 174

In the case of Jim (before the encounter), Stanley, and Donnie, what is at stake is the meritorious body. In his public proposal, Jim’s concern was about having a “relationship that is calm, undemanding, and loving,” namely, a relationship that conforms to his normal course of life and his identity as a police officer, as if making a successful career and having a mature relationship define a happy life. However, as every amorous encounter is erratic and unpredictable, Jim encounters Claudia, the addict and prostitute, and has to decide what to do with her. Concerning Stanley and Donnie, we can see that one is not born but raised as a meritorious body. Concerning Stanley, we can recognize that a meritorious body who is trained perforce to be a prodigy quiz champion, is simultaneously a symptomatic body that wets his pants, which proves that what is repressed returns in a radical way. For Donnie’s part, we can recognize that a meritorious body, a grown-up who had to satisfy the expectation of his parents when young by becoming a winner of the quiz show, ends up equating the amorous body with the meritorious body that has braces.

For Badiou, the state, with its transcendental law and evaluative scale, serves as an operator that endows one with his/her own identity. This law is often reflected by family, whose anchoring point is paternal function. Now, the message of Magnolia is that these two instances of the law no longer tell who the sons and the daughters are. As Badiou states, “Today’s sons, with their unstable identities, are the symptom of some deep-rooted disease afflicting the state.”394 What matters for Badiou is then how sons and daughters can create a new order, namely, their own fatherhood and motherhood beyond their symptoms. It is also a matter of how sons and daughters can become the subject of truths beyond the symptomatic body. Here again, the interlacing of the Lacanian symptom and the Badiouian truth reemerge.

In sum, the symptomatic sons and daughters declare altogether that the father cannot fix their identity and that their trauma, anxiety, jouissance, and loneliness pose an aporia to the law of the father. As Badiou states in his interview on Magnolia, if Magnolia is Paulinian, it is because it shows that “the law of fathers is over, the world is not based on that anymore.”395

While the end of fatherhood definitely occupies an important pole, the cinematic thought implied in Magnolia reaches its peak in relation to the problem of humanity. While one could

394 Badiou, The True Life, p. 67. 395 Alain Badiou, “Say Yes to Love, Or Else Be Lonely,” in Cinema, ed. Antoine de Baecque, trans. Susan Spitzer, Cambridge: Polity, 2013, p. 191. 175

see the movie in terms of the baroque multiplicity that every part cannot be reducible to the whole, there is a thematic unity that what is at stake is humanity itself. In Magnolia, we see the numerous scenes of confession, such as Earl’s confession of regret, Frank’s ambivalent cry, Jimmy’s confession of his death, Claudia’s and Jim’s deal to tell everything each other, Donnie’s declaration of love, and Stanley’s asking for care. Badiou points out that contrary to the conventional therapeutic role of the character’s confession in classical melodrama, Magnolia presents “humanity that can’t be totalized, that won’t come together.”396 Confession does not restore the broken community. Earl finally dies without being forgiven by Frank, whose cry did not reach his father. Jimmy’s final attempt to reconcile with his daughter provokes her explosion of aggressiveness, and even his wife abandons Jimmy, who is dying. Although Jim confesses his fear about being a laughingstock for losing his gun, Claudia breaks the deal. Donnie’s declaration of love leads not to the institution of the amorous process but to the criminal act to fulfill his imaginary love. Despite the revelation of Stanley’s symptom and his request for care, his father only dejectedly tells Stanley to go to bed. No community is reconnected or recovered from its being severed. Humanity appears as a community that is radically torn apart.

However, by the time loneliness seems to prevail over love, we confront the scene of the rain of frogs as the narratival peripeteia. Something happens in the world of loneliness. Something happens to the disconnected humanity. Although the biblical reference to the Plague of Egypt was not originally conceived by the director, this scene is enough to be read as an allegorical appeal to humanity as a whole, beyond different characters and their different contexts. According to Badiou, the thesis of Magnolia is that “insofar as humanity exists (…there is a big risk that it doesn’t), insofar as humanity exists, its only real figure is love.”397 On the one hand, this thesis amounts to an alert that where there is no love, there are only drugs, sexuality, money, and career, which hides loneliness behind it. On the other hand, this thesis is a hypothesis that humanity is love.

Here, let us note that the only character who strongly supports this hypothesis is Jim as the subject of love. Jim experiences an aleatory deviation from a normal course of things, not just in relation to his position as a cop but in relation to his way of living and loving. Admitting

396 Ibid., p. 182. 397 Ibid., p. 183. 176

that he is not supposed to take action in private while publicly investigating a case, Jim nevertheless asks Claudia for a date when he encounters her. Before their date, Jim has lost his gun, a phallic symbol. That is to say, Jim is castrated. Moreover, Jim’s existing unconscious structure based on his career and his subjectivity as the meritorious body face an occasion of change. While love based on the imaginary retreats before the revelation of lack, Jim exposes this lack by telling Claudia about losing his gun. Love makes Jim have the guts to say things that are real. After Claudia leaves him, Jim catches on to Donnie’s stealing. However, instead of arresting him as a police officer, Jim edifies Donnie, stating that “sometimes people need to be forgiven.” At this point, he is not merely a guardian of the law but a thinker who acknowledges the “tricky part” of his job, the indistinct borderline between law and forgiveness. Love changes the police officer who judges based on the law of “doing the right thing” into a subject of forgiveness. If love completes the law, it is by way of forgiveness.

According to Derrida, forgiveness is an act of the impossible because true forgiveness lies in forgiving the unforgivable and forgiving the forgivable belongs to the perimeter of the calculative transaction or strategic reconciliation.398 The fact that Jim forgives Donnie, who has much love to give without knowing where to put it, is also notable, for it shows that love as forgiveness embraces crippled, errant, and misfired love. Forgiveness gives a second chance to make up for one’s wrongdoing due to lovelessness. In the final scene where Jim sits beside Claudia, he tells her that he will not let her go. This implies that Jim will have faced the test of deciding what to do when he comes to know that Claudia has done drugs. Here, Augustine’s formulation is worth referring to: “Thus the Law is at once a command for those who fear and grace for those who love.”399 Jim, as the guardian of the Law, is at a crossroads, for whether Claudia becomes the subject who obeys the commandment with fear or the subject who loves in grace depends on Jim. Considering the dialectic between the law and transgression, if Jim simply makes Claudia obey the commandment, she is more likely to commit her crimes again. Only forgiveness can interrupt the vicious cycle of commandment- transgression-punishment. Jim is responsible for the completion of the law into love through the act of forgiveness.

398 , On and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge, 2001, p. 32. 399 Augustine, cited in Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, p. 91. 177

The final image of Magnolia is Claudia’s smile, which might suggest that Claudia will be forgiven, not calculatively or juridically, but unconditionally. Here, it is necessary to expand Badiou’s reading of the thesis of Magnolia. The figure of humanity can be love, insofar as humanity knows how to forgive. Forgiveness is an archiamorous act. Forgiveness refers to the way in which Jim as the faithful subject of love strives for his limping march with Claudia by acknowledging her subjective real and letting her choose between cocaine- induced dopamine and love-induced dopamine.

In sum, if Jim, prior to an amorous encounter, embodies a meritorious body regulated by the Lacanian phallic function (Φx), he later becomes the subject of love based on the Badiouian Humanity function (Hx) that there is humanity because there are truths. More specifically, Jim’s position is feminine because it is the feminine position of Hx that enables love to support all the other truth processes and serves as the guardian of universality. The thesis of Magnolia is thus that whether there could be such a thing as humanity or not depends on one subject of love. Where there is a subject of love, there abides humanity. Universal love as the law takes a step backward, for the primary concern is about the birth of a rare subject of love beyond the law. In ’s formulation, “if I truly love one person, I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, ‘I love you,’ I must be able to say, ‘I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.’”400

Love, not as a relationship with an object of love, but as an orientation toward the entire world, authorizes the radical juxtaposition of love of one person and love of humanity. What matters is then to fully recognize the truth that “truly” loving one person appears to be a difficult or even impossible thing to do. In Lacanian terms, loving one person includes the process in which each lover assumes one’s unrecognized unconscious structure, faces one’s innermost weakness, deals with one’s symptoms, and works toward the singularization of his subjectivity in the form of the sinthome. In Badiouian terms, loving one person requires not only an exceptional subjectivization that incorporates one’s body into the encounter but also an enduring process that draws the consequences of the encounter in a faithful, inventive way.

For Jim’s part, he has to work together with Claudia to symbolize her addictive jouissance as a way of drawing the consequences of their encounter, addressing Claudia’s crime not through juridical power but through unconditional forgiveness. The hypothetical equation of

400 Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1956, p. 46. 178

humanity with love can be justified only in relation to whether Jim measures up to this task. According to Fromm, this equation is possible on the condition that an individual liberates him/herself from helpless attachment to mother’s protection and obedient attachment to father’s order, just as humanity liberates itself from its attachment to God and incorporates the divine principles of justice, love, and forgiveness into itself.401 Love as the mediator between one person and humanity requires as its condition the transformation of a dependent infant into an independent subject. The figure of humanity can be love when love is not an infantile impotence but an infinite potentiality whereby love weaves together oneself, the other, the world, and humanity.

In parallel, Badiou concludes his interview on Magnolia, “‘what is it that makes humanity hold together as a world, given that it no longer seems to be respect for the law of the father?’ It’s not that anymore but rather the chance nature of love. That’s what we are reduced to, there’s nothing else, with all that entails in terms of riskiness and the absence of law.”402 As we discussed, the essentially Badiouian point about love is not its miraculous contingent nature but its laborious procedural nature, which encourages us to assume numerous risks in love and deals with the absence of law in love. Now, let us develop this point further in relation to the rarity of the Badiouian amorous subject.

In Metapolitics, Badiou presents the numerical sequence of politics as the following schema: σ, ε, π(ε), π(π(ε)) → 1.403 Let us read this scheme one by one. First, unlike science, art, and love as “aristocratic” truth process, only politics deals with the collective or “for all,” meaning that anyone is capable of becoming a political subject under the condition of a political event. For instance, the signifier “Spartacus,” which was historically shared by slave, black, and proletariat, can be shared by virtually anyone in a specific political event. In this regard, the political situation amounts to the infinite σ.

Next, there are some operators, such as the state or capital, that repress and control all the subsets of this first infinite, which Badiou designates as ε. Here, Badiou relies on set theory, more specifically, “the theorem of the point of excess,” which states that the power-set of a given set exceeds immeasurably the initial set. The power of capital or the state is

401 Ibid., p. 81. 402 Badiou, “Say Yes to Love, Or Else Be Lonely,” in Cinema, pp. 191–192. 403 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. , London: Verso, 2005, p. 151. 179

indeterminately superior to the initial situation: ε > σ.

No matter how infinite the first one is, there is actually a larger infinite than the initial one. ε serves as the errant, measureless law of the situation by controlling σ. Politics then lies in fixing this errant law and determining its indeterminate quality in accordance with the strength of the political event, which is written as π(ε).

Finally, this emancipatory political function π goes one step further and produces a new one according to the egalitarian logic. The only number that can remain incompatible and heterogeneous to the errancy of excess is 1. As the symbol of a new egalitarian politics, 1 is the final destination of every political process. This is written as π(π(ε)) → 1.

Now, as we discussed in Chapter 1, the numerical sequence of the amorous process is 1, 2, infinity. If so, politics goes from infinity to 1, while love goes from 1 to infinity. In this regard, “politics is love’s numerical inverse. In other words: love begins where politics ends.”404 However, the thesis that “politics is love’s numerical inverse” is contestable, for the one in love and the one in politics are not identical. While the amorous one as ego is a pre-evental start point, the political one as the equalitarian production is a post-evental end point. What about the thesis that “love begins where politics ends”? To say that love begins where politics ends is to say that love works at the backdrop of the production of mutually egalitarian subjects. While one might idealistically hope that love begins among egalitarian subjects, this thesis can also be challenged by the fact that love, as divided between the lover and the beloved, is often non-egalitarian. Someone always loves more than another loves, and this gap is irreducible. Feeding on this gap, the imaginary love based on ego easily turns into a power struggle for the prestige of being loved. Whoever loves more is a loser, and this loser is assumed to have a weaker ego.405 Therefore, a more consistent thesis would be that the amorous process overlaps with the political process. In this case, the newly produced, egalitarian one refers to the couple as a new subject of love and politics.

404 Ibid. 405 Some love definitely goes beyond this power struggle. One could refer to Abelard’s agonistic, but not antagonistic, formulation of love. “May it always be kept uncertain which of us loves the other more, since this way there will always be between us a most beautiful contest in which both of us will win” (Constant J. Mews and Neville Chiavaroli, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 289). In this love, there is no loser. Each one simply desires to love more. This love makes inoperative the distinction between the lover and the beloved or loving more and loving less. This love is neither active nor passive. It is, to use Derrida’s word, “lovence (aimance)” as the middle voice. Lovence is, to use our term, an in- between between loving and being loved, the impersonal love between erastes and eromenos. 180

In fact, the interlacing of the amorous process and the political process supports Badiou’s thesis on love as “minimal communism.” “Love is communist in that […] the real subject of a love is the becoming of the couple and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts.”406 Love is the sublation of two egoistic individuals into one communist subject. The two separate individuals engaged in the amorous process work on the becoming of a new political one, one common subject of politico-amorous truth, one subjective unit of minimal communism. Certainly, this does not necessarily mean that the couple as the revolutionary comrade devotes themselves to the realization of the abolition of private property and of the division of labor. The point is rather that the Badiouian vision of love is “aristocratic,” not in the sense that love is available only to those with high social status or that its regime is not the collective à la Badiou, but in the sense of Spinoza’s conclusion in his Ethics that all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

The subject of love is also rare, because love forces us to go beyond the law, face the malfunction of the law, and deal with lawlessness in love. The amorous process disciplines the subject to fight against the operation of the conservative law, experience to what extent the law fails, and engage courageously with the invention of the amorous infinity whose inverse is full of risks and tribulations. Not everyone succeeds in doing this. More precisely, not everyone finds it in one’s heart to do this because it is painstaking. Only a rare subject of love, who finds it in his/her heart to do so, will support through his/her life the hypothesis that humanity is love.

The rarity of the Badiouian subject of love nevertheless does not mean that such a subject is impossible. Against the recent serial terrorism and in memory of the victims, demonstrators in Europe held a placard that says, “love is stronger than hate.” While this message is seemingly aimed exclusively at terrorists, whose atrocious violence seems to prove that hate prevails over love, but the radicality of this message, of which even these demonstrators might not be cognizant, lies in the fact that their action is addressed to humanity rather than empire. Only humanity can evoke love. While empire would react against terrorism through retaliation against identifiable enemies or reinforcement of national security, only humanity can affirm love by protesting through a disobedient and nonviolent collective action. While empire monopolizes capital and information across cultural and national borders yet

406 Badiou, IPL, p. 90. 181

nevertheless promotes the distinction between “we” and “they,” thereby cultivating humanity with hate, only humanity can support a universalizable potential of love and shed light on love’s victory over hate. While empire as an inverted terrorism colludes with terrorism, only humanity can rupture such secret collusion. In this regard, the hypothesis that humanity is love is not only a hypothesis for these subjects. It is also a matter of praxis, the praxis armed with a logic based on the rigorous distinction between humanity and empire/terrorism. Indeed, there are always some subjects who address humanity in the name of love.

In a recent interview on love and politics, Badiou states that there is an analogy between love and politics in terms of resolving the crises and constructing a singularity.407 Both of the two processes address the situation of the real (revolution/encounter) beyond the established law (state/ father) and invent some truths out of it (scene of two/communism). Between the lawless real and the invented truth, a problematic impasse and a problem-solving pass, love institutes, awakens, and transfigures humanity. Where a rare subject wagers on and elaborates the amorous adventure outside the law, love abides as the support of humanity. Once again, there is no such thing as humanitarian or universal love. There is only love as the crux of humanity that is up to each of us.

The Amorous Unpower In the introduction of this chapter, the following proposition was posed: there is no emancipatory link between politics and love that can be thought of in terms of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. In this section, let us respond to this proposition and proceed to articulate how we can think of the enigmatic knot between politics and love.

The key point of the knot between politics and love is power. The critique of the contemporary world shows that love is facing a crisis today, because it is constituted and overwhelmed by sexuality and capital. Here, love serves as the vehicle of the preestablished power. At the same time, the analysis of the Arab Spring shows that when a radical act and mass movement are articulated in a subjective form, love is reinvented as revolutionary philia, the collective passion for the real. Here, love serves as a momentum of change that ruptures

407 Alain Badiou, “Alain Badiou on politics, communism and love,” interview by Costas Mavroidis, trans. David Broder, Verso, 23 May 2016. Available from: www.versobooks.com/blogs/2652-alain-badiou-on-politics- communism-and-love. 182

the preestablished power. To use the problematic of love as an in-between, love is between the preservation of the existing power and the subversion of the existing power. It is both pro- political and anti-political, if we define politics, following Badiou, as intermittent and yet incessant sequences of emancipatory processes.

In this regard, the proposition in the introduction seems to be partially valid. There is no univocal link between politics and love. The link between politics and love is undecidable. This is why one could prefer the term “knot between politics and love” to the term “link between politics and love” because a “knot” implies both link and non-link.

However, as the third and fourth section of this chapter attempts to convey, one could nevertheless think of the condition of the emancipatory link between politics and love. The community of not-all is the Lacanian attempt to think of this link, and the idea of communism is the Badiouian attempt to think of this link. Moreover, love has also something to do with humanity itself. Against the empty dogma of universal love, the Lacanian practice of the signifier allows us to address a singular subject’s traumatic symptom induced by the inhumanity at the very heart of humanity, while the Badiouian hypothesis of the humanity function encourages us to engage with lawless love and commit to the rare becoming of the amorous subject. A positive link between humanity and love can be opened up, if one learns from the analytic work on the subject wounded by humanity’s inhumanity and wagers on the philosophical hypothesis about the amorous figure of humanity based on a rare subjectivization. The misuse of humanity’s inhuman power can be treated through a felicitous practice of the signifier, and the amorous figure of humanity can be affirmed through a subjective forgiveness beyond the law. One will witness the emancipatory potential of love, the emergence of the paradoxical amorous power, the powerless power of love when a symptomatic analysand turns into a sinthomatic subject and a lonely body turns into a subject of true love.

In this regard, contrary to the proposition at the introduction of this section, the link between politics and love can be thought of in terms of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. Although they employ different concepts and elaborate different perspectives in relation to the same issue, Lacan and Badiou can supplement each other. Although the framing that Lacanianism is characterized by the helpless admission of the inevitable symptom, thus leaning more toward conservatism, and that Badiouian philosophy is characterized by the affirmation of the 183

novelty to come, thus leaning more toward radicalism, seems to be plausible at the general level, this framing is misleading. Rather, while one can conduct a critical analysis of the existing impasse as a prerequisite to search for a way out with Lacan, one can attempt a consistent meditation on the new order that requires an enduring subjective struggle with Badiou. We can reach a hidden threshold in our reality with Lacan, and we can cross that threshold heading toward another world with Badiou.

In sum, when it comes to articulating the emancipatory knot between politics and love, Badiou without Lacan is empty, and Lacan without Badiou is blind. The Lacanian problematic can render the Badiouian problematic more stereographic, while the Badiouian problematic can make the Lacanian problematic take one step further.

In Logics of Worlds, we see Badiou keeping his distance from Lacan. The Lacanian real is “so ephemeral, so brutally punctual, that it is impossible to uphold its consequences. The effects of this kind of frenzied upsurge, in which the real rules over the comedy of our symptoms, are ultimately indiscernible from those of skepticism.”408 Properly speaking, the Lacanian real is so ambivalent and obscure that it is not always recommendable to uphold its consequences, because this ephemeral real sometimes leaves indelible traces and returns in the form of the symptom with enduring consequences, as in Hommel’s case. However, it is also the case that Lacan practices an analytic intervention to transform this symptomatic real into the sinthomatic subjectivity, letting the analysand subjectivize the destructive real of the asubjective symptom. As for Badiou’s second sentence, it can be understood in the context of his caution against the temporary popular uprising without any exploration of an affirmative idea, as we discussed before. However, it is still the case that this kind of frenzied upsurge serves as an opportunity of the rebirth of History, and an idea is equivalent to the sinthome according to our reconstruction. Moreover, let us note concerning “the comedy of our symptoms” that comedy is originally a rebellious genre of satirizing the existing power and proving the failure of the phallus. The real comedy of our symptoms is an indispensable material to pinpoint where the existing power operates and to mark the beyond of the phallus. In his seminar on Lacan, Badiou writes that “the final thesis of Lacan is that as for the real, there is no politics.”409 Indeed, there is no such thing as politics of the real, for politics based

408 Badiou, LW, p. 563. 409 Badiou, Lacan: L’antiphilosophie 3, 1994–1995, p. 214. 184

on the ephemeral upsurge, however intensive it is, cannot persist. From Badiou’s perspective, politics of the real is not politics tout court. But politics of the sinthome, politics that subjectively works through the point where the existing power stumbles and invents a new symbolic order, is a different story. In sum, the Badiouian politics can and must be supplemented by the Lacanian politics.

Let us now articulate the enigmatic knot between politics and love. The enigmatic knot between politics and love can be encapsulated by the fact that love is, to use Jean-Luc Marion’s concept, “unpower (impouvoir).”410 Love is an in-between (metaxú) between power and powerlessness. As we noted above, love as unpower above all implies that love addresses both a powerless subordination to existing power and a powerful organization for emancipation. This is what the Spinozian distinction between potestas as the sovereign law and potentia as the liberating creation implies. However, this Spinozian distinction has a limitation in that its framework is still the category of power, unable to deconstruct or reconstitute the notion of power at the radical level. If the framework of power remains intact, then there is always a possibility of either reactionarily usurping the name of emancipatory power for the benefit of sovereign power or tragically degenerating emancipatory power into sovereign power. Therefore, one should go one step further. A more crucial aspect of unpower is that it makes powerlessness and power rigorously coincide. Love is powerless power and powerful powerlessness. This does not merely mean that love is ambivalent in its political potential, sometimes serving the dominant power and sometimes rupturing the dominant power. As the section on humanity and love shows, it means that even the emancipatory potential of love is always hidden and secret. As in Hommel’s case, psychoanalysis does not lie in wielding its clinical power that removes the analysand’s symptom but in allowing the analysand to find a way to live with it. Just as there is no cure of the sinthome, there is no liberating clinic. The analyst only vanishes behind the psychoanalytic discourse as the practice of the signifier. Nevertheless, this self-vanishing act as the powerless practice contains the power to trigger a subjective change. The same also applies to Jimmy, because Jimmy’s forgiveness as an archiamorous act would not be located within the reach of the law. As the police officer, Jimmy is the servant of legal power. As the lover, Jimmy is the subject of amorous forgiveness, and only the supralegal act of forgiveness can provoke the Claudia’s

410 Jean-Luc Marion, “Unpower,” in Hent de Vries and Nils F. Schott, eds., Love and Forgiveness For a More Just World, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, pp. 36–42. 185

genuine subjective change. As the servant of law who goes beyond the law, Jimmy’s forgiveness is imponderable from the viewpoint of the law.

After all, the emancipatory potential of love does not reveal through institutional politics. It flickers only through singular subjective situations, as in the analytic setting or the truth process. Everything comes down to the matter of subjectivization, one’s working through of symptoms and becoming the subject of truth. In this regard, the emancipatory potential of love remains elusive and covert also because there is nothing to prove it except the birth of a subject. The subject is the only proof that the humanity to come will be liberated from power by coming to terms with its own inhumanity and inscribing its figure in love beyond the prevailing solitude.

Let us elaborate the notion of the amorous unpower further. With Lacan, we can state that love is power-oriented when it is constituted by capitalist jouissance and commodified sexuality. Notably, Lacan observes that this sovereignty of capitalist jouissance comes from the rejection of castration. “What differentiates the discourse of capitalism is Verwerfung, the fact of rejecting, outside all the fields of the symbolic. … What does it reject? Well, castration. Any order, any discourse that aligns itself with capitalism, sweeps to one side what we may simply call, my fine friends, matters of love.”411 Capitalist discourse produces the psychotic subjects outside the symbolic order. The analytic/political intervention then lies in symbolizing the excessive capitalist jouissance. In terms of the conception of superego in Seminar I (“the super-ego is at one and the same time the law and its destruction”412), one could specify the problem one step further. The capitalist dogma that the amorous process and the amorous proceeds are one and the same or the pervert’s fetishistic belief that “I know very well that love is irreducible to money, but nevertheless” suggests that the capitalist discourse occupies both the law and the lawless real. This implies that capitalist power constitutes a nexus of the symbolic law and the superegoic real.

One way to make this nexus inoperative is to occupy the feminine position of not-all with regard to the capitalist discourse. The subject of not-all would have only a partial and limited relationship to the capitalist discourse and entertain a supplementary jouissance that evades

411 Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls, pp. 90–91. 412 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 102. 186

the capitalist jouissance. The logic of not-all is both interior and exterior to the capitalist jouissance.

What matters, then, is how love follows the logic of not-all. The contemporary amorous subject lives inside the capitalist formation. Nevertheless, love can pierce a local hole within the capitalist formation. Say that a lover gives a present to his/her beloved. If this beloved occupies the feminine position, regardless of his/her biological sex, what this beloved enjoys is not determined by the present’s calculable value. The beloved rather reads je ne sais quoi provoked by the present. Of course, the capitalist jouissance would be still contained in that present. But there is something extra, and this extra constitutes the kernel of an amorous present. The point is not that love is the ineffable and mystical real, which is immune to the discursive law. Rather, the point is that love remains within the law, and at the same time, it makes the power of the law inoperative. Love does not simply exist outside the discourse but ex-sists in relation to the discourse in a chimerical way. Love does not simply work against the law, but it un-works the law. Love is a law unto itself. Properly speaking, what the amorous subject within the capitalist formation enjoys is not jouissance. Moreover, it may be objected that love is rigorously distinct from jouissance (“the jouissance of the Other is not the sign of love”).413 Let us respond to this issue through Lacan’s wordplay on Joyce’s name. What the amorous subject experiences from a present is not only dis-cursive jouissance but also ex-cursive “joy,” the joy of love that makes itself enigmatic to any imposed law and mass-produced jouissance yet remains recognizable and transmissible only by the amorous subject. This insubstantial “joy-sance” remains the unrepresentable void in capitalism.

Here, the reason why the capitalist discourse leaves aside matters of love becomes clear. Unlike the feminine not-all which does not work in concert with the exceptional One against castration but with the acceptance of castration (the feminine: not all + no exception), capitalism leaves aside love because it cannot represent the operation of castration in love. Love is not addressed to possession but to lack and void. Thus, what is at stake in a present is not its commodity value but its incalculable joy-sance. The amorous joy-sance makes both the giver and the taker lose their identities as giver or taker. While the logic of the market establishes and reinforces the logic of give-and-take, an amorous present does not mean that the giver gives something and that the taker takes it. Rather, an unlocatable void permeates

413 As we noted, the two approaches are co-present in Lacan. On the one hand, he makes a distinction between love and jouissance as here. On the other hand, he makes such distinction blurred. 187

the two, and this void renders both giver and taker no-one. To modify Lacan’s aphorism equating love with lack, “one cannot love except by becoming a non-giver, even if one gives, and one cannot love except by becoming a non-taker, even if one takes.”414 Love is not merely giving and taking something but circulating the void, even if one gives something and the other takes it. The void of joy-sance to be given and taken remains elusive to the capitalist logic of give-and-take. In this regard, the amorous subject of not-all cuts through the power of the capitalist discourse and the powerlessness of the capitalist discourse. With French playwright Koltès, the amorous subject would declare, “Let us both be zeros.”415 The amorous subject becomes the zero of unpower, the zero which is both vulnerable and impassible to the power of capital. Love can genuflect before capital, and it can shine forth in a petty penny. This is our first thread.

The second thread of the Lacanian unpower is concerned with the analytic practice and discourse. The analytic practice consists of the analytic act and the analytic knowledge. The analytic act lies in the analyst’s self-vanishing renunciation, the transition of the status of the analyst from the subject supposed to know to the abject cause of desire. It makes the presumed authority attached to the analyst’s knowledge disappear and helps the analysand to desire in a new way beyond fixated identifications and fatal jouissance. Moreover, this act amounts to diving into the hole of the unconscious of the analysand with lalangue that could civilize jouissance. In Hommel’s case, Lacan’s analytic act lies in diving into her Gestapo- induced trauma with the new signifier “geste à peau.” Here, Lacan as the analyst is no longer an authoritative person but a pure function in a signifying chain, which destabilizes Hommel’s congealed master signifier with the equivocal. The analytic act is thus fundamentally heterogeneous to the logic of mastery. “If there is something psychoanalysis reveals to us, it is that it is not an act of which anyone can say that he is entirely master.”416 The analytic act only aims at the deconstruction of the established power in psychic reality, while keeping away from any form of mastery.

414 Lacan’s original phrase is: “One cannot love without presenting oneself as if one does not have, even if one does” (SVIII, p. 357). 415 Bernard-Marie Koltès, “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields,” in Plays: 2, ed. David Bradby and Maria M. Delgado, London: Methuen, 2004, p. 211. Significant for our discussion is that Koltes’ play deals with the business situation between the client and the dealer, which is promoted by capitalism. Let us also note in passing that this is equivalent to what happens in the analytic situation, that is, the situation between the analyst’s becoming zero (transition from the subject supposed to know to the object a) and the analysand’s becoming-zero (subjective division through the transversal of fantasy). 416 Lacan, SXIV, January 24, 1968 (unpublished). 188

The similar also applies to the analytic knowledge. This knowledge, which is collected and developed slowly during the session based on the subjective real of the analysand, is not doctrinaire or moralizing. Since this knowledge lies at the intersection of general theory and singular case, it is constantly put in question and open to restructuration so that it cannot take on the discourse of power. The analytic knowledge does not belong to the analyst or the analysand. It is rather an anonymous construction that emerges from the psychoanalytic discourse itself through free association and interpretative cut. Insofar as the analytic knowledge is not externally imposed but immanently invented, it deviates from the Foucaultian and Bataillian link between knowledge and power. This deviation is supported by the analyst’s two ethical attitudes in mutual tension toward the particularity of the case. On the one hand, when the analyst addresses “a case [cas]”, he/she is not supposed to “place it in a pigeon-hole [casier] in advance.”417 On the other hand, the analyst has to soberly admit that “we [analysts] are unable to obliterate our experience.” To stay true to the particularity of the case, which is both necessary and impossible, renders the analyst’s knowledge ever- incomplete and non-authoritative. In sum, “what the psychoanalyst would be able to convey is … the knowledge of powerlessness.”418

What matters here is that this act of non-mastery and this knowledge of powerlessness nevertheless produce enduring reverberations and transformative effects to the analysand’s subjectivity. Hommel can still feel Lacan’s tender touch, and this touch reconfigured rather than dissolved her trauma. It offered a chance for Hommel to construct her sinthomatic subjectivity that knows how to live with her symptom. This paradoxically powerful effect is possible because psychoanalysis is a practice of the signifier. Geste à peau as a new signifier induces the symbolization of the trauma and allows for the mourning of the enjoyed meaning (joui-sense) attached to the signifier Gestapo.

Concerning the analyst’s discourse, one should note that it is not simply opposed to the discourse of the master. The analyst’s discourse, which gives the analysand a chance to struggle with master signifiers, “has to be located at the opposite side of any wish, at least any declared wish, for mastery.”419 At the same time, it is easy for the analyst’s discourse “to

417 Jacques Lacan, “Geneva Lecture on the Symptom” [1975], trans. Russell Grigg, Analysis, no. 1 (Melbourne: Centre for Psychoanalytic , 1989), p. 11. 418 Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls, p. 34. 419 Lacan, SXVII, p. 79. 189

spin off into the discourse of mastery.”420 For this reason, the discourse of the analyst has to be constantly attentive to the fact that there is no easy way out or pure exteriority with regard to power. The analyst must remain sober and sensitive about the possibility of the conversion of any presumed non-mastery into an ironic mastery. The analyst must remain faithful to the principle that the clinical effect can be justified by the constant alertness about the clandestine inversion of powerlessness into power, for the analytic power does not lie in wielding the magic of cure but in vanishing with the act toward trashitas. In 1978, Lacan states that “there are four discourses. Each discourse takes itself for the truth. Only the analytic discourse makes an exception … this discourse excludes domination.”421 The analytic discourse can make a singular exception which excludes domination, this is because it is located where powerlessness and power are indiscernible. The analytic practice and discourse are supported by unpower.

Moving onto Badiou, let us note that both event and truth process are closely tied to the idea of unpower. The first thread is concerned with the evental reinvention of philia by the masses. These masses were literally nothing before being awakened by the political affect of terror or shame. They occupied the position of the void in the situation or the inexistent in the world. However, as every set includes the void as its subset, the void always wanders in the situation. It is only invisible from the perspective of the representation of the state.

Likewise, the inexistent in the world is only the consequence that the law of the world ascribes to the inexistent in question a nil intensity. Now, the event is characterized by the tipping-over of the inexistent into the existent with maximal instantaneous intensity and maximal enduring consequences. The event demonstrates that the inexistent multiplicity in question must be put on an equal footing with the rest of the multiplicities. The event shows that the inexistent are ontologically, while coming to exist in a world as well. The underrepresented masses present themselves with their power of unrepresentability. This power comes from the egalitarian logic of multiple being, which blasts open the discriminative logic that stratifies various existences. The revolutionary philia shows that the masses evade the identitarian logic of the dominant power–employed by the state–according to age, sex, status, wealth, ethnicity, etc. The masses reinvent themselves with the horizontal

420 Ibid. 421 Jacques Lacan, “Lacan pour Vincenne!” Ornicar? 17/18, 1979, p. 278. 190

solidarity in and against the hierarchical separation, collectively affirming that “we were nothing, let us be all together!”

Let us also note that this philia is inspired by Bouazizi, whose subjectivity is doubly grounded on the powerless self-vanishing and the powerful awakening. The masses inherit this subjective unpower so that the affective terror implied in Bouazizi, which heads toward the Great Point as the occasion of radical change, makes the masses both weak and strong. The masses are weak, since they are possessed by an exceptional passion, which strays from the normative state of things. At the same time, the masses are strong, since this passion produces insurrectionary energy. The masses immersed in the passion for the real constitute the multiplicity of unpower.

However, terror or destructive passion for the real is not the last word for Badiou. The political subject has to straddle between discontinuity and continuity, launching into a process of reconstruction of the existing world. Moreover, different from the world during the revolutionary moment in which there are numerous critical choices to be made (tensed world), in a world whose law is dictated by democratic materialism, most bodies exist only according to the law of sexual and consumptive freedom. As the Meetic shows, love between “precariats” becomes a matter of security without any risk. To channel the revolutionary passion into an enduring construction or to resist against the sovereign power of capitalist democracy, one should engage in an alternative way of organizing a community with the idea of communism. One has to participate in the political truth process.

The Badiouian truth is also relevant to unpower. As a precarious, aleatory subjective process which includes the ordeal of the real, truth is both powerfully infinite and powerlessly unnamable. With the category of the unnamable, early Badiou poses that there is a limit in the naming power of truth. Love as truth cannot name jouissance as the real. Politics as truth cannot name the collective as the real. The absolutization of the power of the truth leads to nothing but evil, against which the ethics of truth must remain moderate. In this regard, “the power of a truth is also a kind of powerlessness.”422 Late Badiou withdraws the category of the unnamable, due to its implication of the finitude of a truth. However, this does not make a difference for the significance of unpower. Above all, Badiou’s take on the problem of community follows the logic of unpower. Although the fact that late Badiou promotes the

422 Badiou, Ethics, p. 85. 191

idea of communism beyond his early take on the collective as the unnamable real before which the political truth remain silent, might be (mis)read as an absolutization of the infinite power of a truth, the idea of communism is also bound up with unpower, for it is characterized by failure as an affirmative political category.

As we discussed, this failure does not refer to communism as the imaginary utopia but as the real drive that repeats itself despite ceaseless failures. Just as success and failure are equivalent in psychoanalysis (parapraxis is conducive to the revelation of the unconscious), the idea of communism as the great sinthome of human community makes the impossibility of communism and the possibility of communism indistinguishable within an intermittent and interminable movement. To evoke Benjamin’s term “weak messianic force (schwach messainische Kraft),” the idea of communism is a product of the unpower as a weak force without redemptive messianicism, with which every generation is engaged or will have engaged.

In this regard, while Badiou may regard the unnamable and the infinite truth as contradictory, unpower dissolves this contradiction. Unpower makes the unnamable and the infinite imply each other. Here, a passage in Conditions is worth referring to: “No matter how powerful a truth, how capable of veridicality it proves to be, this power comes up against a unique term, which with a single blow effects the swing from all-powerfulness to powerlessness, displacing our love of truth from its appearance, the love of the generic, to its essence, the love of the unnameable.”423 The Badiouian love of truth, which often appears adamantly unified, is in fact split into two: the love of the generic (the infinite) and the love of the unnamable. To use our term, the love of the truth is an in-between (metaxú) between the love of the generic and the love of the unnamable. Unpower, as the in-between truth of the Badiouian love of truth, makes the love of the generic (the infinite) and the love of the unnamable interlaced.

Unpower also appears as forgiveness with regard to Claudia and Jim in Magnolia. The contemporary world produces the perverted body (Claudia), for whom love is equated with the loneliness of enjoying a fatal jouissance, and the meritorious body (Jim), for whom love is equated with the loneliness of building a successful career. Magnolia also shows Jim’s commitment to an amorous process with Claudia, and it ends with Claudia’s smile. If this

423 Badiou, C, p. 143. 192

smile proves the hypothesis that the figure of humanity is love, this implies that Jim and Claudia construct an amorous process, which is so rare and challenging. They have to testify about and live through the Paulian aphorism that love completes law, bypassing the dialectic between law and transgression/sin. One crucial aspect of this love is forgiveness. When Jim forgives Claudia, Jim is no longer the guardian of the law but the subject of love. His forgiveness is not the same as the forgiveness offered to the crime by sovereignty. It is unconditional, yet without sovereign power. Forgiveness is an act of unpower.

Forgiveness concerns not only the relationship between Jim and Claudia, but the relationship between Claudia and herself. Claudia needs to forgive her past to participate in an amorous process with Jim, mourning her existing unconscious structured by drugs and prostitution. Forgiveness is also a matter of the relation between humanity and itself. Badiou once rigorously distinguished between love and politics, in that love has an enemy interior to the truth process (ego), and that politics has an enemy exterior to the truth process (for instance, capitalist, statist, and fascist subjects) in accordance with the Schimittian distinction between friend and enemy. However, the absolute distinction between friend and enemy cannot be maintained, if the goal of politics “is to discover what the collective is capable of, not power itself.”424 The capitalist, statist, and fascist subjects positively belong to what the collective is capable of, as the probable subjective position constituted by the dominant power. A philosophical way of dealing with these subjects would not be violence aimed at their extermination but an argumentation aimed at their resubjectivization.

Here, let us add to a supplementary conception of the enemy, in addition to Schimitt’s inimicus (private enemy) and hostis (public enemy), on which Badiou relies. If inimicus is an imaginary-private enemy, and hostis is a symbolic-public enemy, the jouissance of extermination is real enemy. Note that das Ding, as the hole around which jouissance revolves, is both the most internal and the most external. The most intractable enemy is located both inside and outside. The distinction between friend and enemy thus cannot be made in a categorical way. Rather, politics should pay attention to an internal enemy, the desire of destruction and the jouissance of extermination as the vehicles of power. If so, in order to support the thesis that humanity is love, political subjects not only have to forgive anti-political or de-politicized subjects rather than eradicate them but also overcome the

424 Badiou, IPL, p. 56. 193

fascination or temptation of violence as his internal enemy, forgiving their own aggressiveness. As long as the enemy is both internal and external, forgiveness also has to work both internally and externally.

In this regard, if love completes law, forgiveness completes the knot between politics and love. Forgiveness enables us to recognize that humanity is actually subordinate to power and to affirm that humanity can nevertheless liberate itself from this subordination. As long as true forgiveness is forgiving the unforgivable, forgiveness is the unnamable as the impossible. At the same time, forgiveness is the token of the infinite power of humanity. Again, forgiveness, which renders humanity unnamably powerless and infinitely powerful, is an act of unpower.

The conceptual basis of unpower is self-difference. For Badiou, love constitutes “the paradox of an identical difference,” in that “she and I are now incorporated into this unique Subject, the Subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference.”425 The subject of love is the instance of Two as the interstice between the same and the different. The subject of love, as long as he/she is self-differential and self-dislocated, cannot be the subject of power. Here, it is worth referring to Deleuze’s remark on philosophy. “Philosophy isn’t power. Religions, states, capitalism, science, the law, public opinion, and television are powers, but not philosophy. […] Since the powers aren’t just external things, but permeate each of us, philosophy throws us all into constant negotiations with, and a guerilla campaign against, ourselves.”426

If power permeates each of us, one cannot simply state that love isn’t power, unless love is some aseptic room against power. Let us be more precise by enumerating four possibilities. When there is a relation between power and power, there is competition and antagonism. When there is a relation between power and powerlessness, there is domination and exploitation. Where there is a relation between powerlessness and powerlessness, there is lethargy and . Where there is a self-different negotiation based on the unpower, we can think of the enigmatic knot between politics and love. Only unpower enables us to liberate us from the dilemmas of power and powerlessness and envision a new relationship

425 Ibid., pp. 25-26. 426 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, preface. 194

between politics and love. Unpower first lets us penetrate into the real of every power. As Lacan specifies, the problem is not power itself but our fantasy of power. It is not power but rather we who ignore the immanent gaps of power or even elevate power into almightiness. “When we speak of might in analysis, we do so in a way that wavers because we are forever referring to almightiness, … when it falters where it is expected, we start to foment almightiness.”427 It is only unpower that holds in check the fantasmatic projection of power into almightiness.

Moreover, unpower also enables us to question any teleological and transcendental inversion of powerlessness into power. What is at stake here is how to recast the Christian unpower. Christ is the figure of unpower as the mixture of crucified powerlessness and resurrected power. Paul writes, “the Lord said to me: ‘my grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.’ I will all the more gladly glory in my weakness, that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Corinthians. 12:9). With the logic of unpower, one could take a different path. Love forces us to locate the most disgraceful within grace, dispensing with every form of divine dispensation. Contrary to the predestined inversion of crucifixion to resurrection, love forces us to confront a radical destinerrance, which renders the distinction between salvation and unsalvageability blurred. Finally, if there is something that the subject glories in, it is not about the power of Christ but about the unpower that abides love and politics, insofar as both of the two pertain to the laborious and grueling interlacing of power and powerlessness without any salvational and glorifying grace. In sum, only unpower can prevent power from becoming fantasized as almightiness and powerlessness from becoming divinized as glory.

Religions, states, capitalism, science, the law, public opinion, and television are powers, but not love. But to state that love is not power is not precise. Love is submissive to and transmitted through these powers. However, love is also not reducible to these powers, since it organizes an unprecedented guerilla campaign inside and outside power. While there is no intrinsic link between emancipatory politics and love, there is also no fatalistic link between preestablished powers and love. Herein lies the necessity both for a sober analysis of the crisis of love and for a bold meditation on the possibility of love, the prerequisite of which is to hold onto the enigmatic knot between politics and love in the form of unpower. Love is

427 Lacan, SX, p. 269. 195

vulnerable without extinction and invincible without excitement. Love is too hermetic to be be powerful and too subversive to be powerless.Love leads every form of power and powerlessness into going through an advent of self-dislocation, an adventure of self- difference. The power of love is powerless, and the powerlessness of love is powerful. Love is not power, but not without power. Love moves in and out of power. Love is an in-between between power and powerlessness. Love is unpower.

The lover, who is neither political nor de-politicized according to Barthes, thus occupies the eccentric political space of unpower. While both power and powerlessness stem from the law supported by operative political systems, articulated discourses, and dominating socialities, the lover does inhabit any of these spaces. The lover declares, “if other men are always, to various degrees, the militants of something, I am the soldier of nothing.”428 More precisely, the lover is neither the militant of something nor the soldier of nothing; rather, the lover declares, “I am the militant of unpower.”

428 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 121. 196

Chapter 3 Antiphilosophy, Philosophy, and Love

According to Badiou, the history of Western thought since its beginning is constituted by the incessant controversy between philosophy and antiphilosophy; Parmenides’s being as the One against Heraclitus’ flux; Greek Philosophers’ logos against St. Paul’s mythos of resurrection; Pascal’s grace against Descartes’ reason; Rousseau’s sentiment against the Encyclopedists’ judgment; Kierkegaard’s singularity against Hegel’s absolute knowledge; Nietzsche’s life against Plato’s Idea; Wittgenstein’s absence of metalanguage against Russell’s theory of types; and finally, Lacan against Althusser.429 However, Lacan’s proclamation, “I rebel against philosophy,” does not concern Althusser but the entire history of philosophy. Moreover, he did not simply rebel against philosophy but incorporated philosophy into his teaching. Various philosophical themes such as the Socratic agalma, Aristotelian modal logic, the Cartesian cogito, Kantian ethics, Hegelian desire, Kierkegaardian anxiety, Heideggerean being-toward-death, the Wittgensteinian critique of metalanguage, and the Peircian were woven into his teaching. In this regard, Lacanian psychoanalysis constitutes the most sophisticated and radical form of antiphilosophy. And it is beyond doubt Badiouian philosophy which accepts the challenge of Lacanian antiphilosophy.

This purpose of this chapter is to think of love from the perspective of the interlacing of Lacanian antiphilosophy and Badiouian philosophy. This chapter first describes how Badiou analyzes Lacanian psychoanalysis as antiphilosophy and responds to Lacanian antiphilosophy. Then, we will read the contemporary Japanese writer Murakami Haruki’s novel Tony Takitani as the singular case of love that facilitates a dialogue between antiphilosophy and philosophy. We will conclude by presenting new concepts (sinthomatic truth and archiamorous act) in relation to the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou that this novel implies.

Lacanian Antiphilosophy in Badiou’s Eyes

429 I expanded the list a little bit, building on Badiou’s list in Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy: “Pascal against Descartes, Rousseau against the Encyclopedists, Kierkegaard against Hegel, Nietzsche against Plato, Lacan against Althusser.” Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels, New York: Verso, 2011. p. 69. 197

Let us first discuss Badiou’s analysis of Lacanian antiphilosophy.430 In his year-long seminar Lacan: L’antiphilosophie 3, 1994–1995, Badiou identifies Lacanian psychoanalysis as the apex of antiphilosophy, following Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. For Badiou, antiphilosophy in general has three formal characteristics: It deposes the theoretical vacuity of philosophy, discloses the true nature of the philosophical operation, and presents an unprecedented act against the philosophical operation. Let us discuss how these characteristics are present in the works of Lacan.

Lacan deposes philosophy, for it does not measure up to a theory of the real. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, philosophy is the discourse of the master. The Lacanian theory of discourses is not classificatory but dynamic so that, for instance, the discourse of the hysteric leads to the discourse of the analyst. Unaware of this change within the discourses, philosophy pretends to be a self-sufficient discourse and brings the dynamic rotation of the discourses to a halt. The vain ambition of philosophy lies in its attempt to be the ultimate metalanguage, while it is the absence of metalanguage that constitutes the real. Second, philosophy is blind to the sexual non-relationship. It thus reduces “ab-sense,” as non- relation, to a certain sense, as relation. Because Lacanian ab-sense straddles sense and non- sense, the philosophical opposition between sense and non-sense cannot catch up with it. Incapable of dealing with the non-relation of ab-sense, philosophy illegitimately forces this non-relation to the relation, which leads to an imaginary notion of love as a harmonious relation. Third, philosophy does not want to know anything about jouissance. In Lacan’s words, “I oppose to the concept of being the notion that we are duped (joués) by jouissance. Thought is jouissance.”431 The avoidance of jouissance by philosophy originates from the fallacious presupposition, which is the fourth reason, that being and thought imply each other. For Lacan, the misplaced coupling of being and thought has to be replaced and reframed by jouissance as the true substance. At the bedrock of being, there is jouissance. If there is such a thing as thought, it is because thought itself is a form of jouissance that speaking beings repeat with language. In sum, Lacanian antiphilosophy deposes philosophy because philosophy fails to address the problems of the real due to the formation of the master discourse, the reduction of non-relation to relation, the avoidance of jouissance, and the

430 I am here relying on Badiou, Lacan: L’antiphilosophie 3, 1994–1995. 431 Lacan, SXX, p. 70. 198

fallacious axiom about being and thinking.

The deposition of philosophy comes down to the deposition of the category of truth. Here, one needs to be careful about the difference between sophistry and antiphilosophy, despite their frequent cooperation in the battle against philosophy. While sophistry argues that there is no such thing as truth and that truth is nothing but a rhetorical, linguistic, and discursive effect, antiphilosophy alerts that there is something (i.e., the real) that philosophy does not speak about, which is more important than truth. Antiphilosophy does not refute but discredits truth. Furthermore, it shows an unprecedented way of approaching truth beyond the deposition of the category of truth.

For psychoanalysis as a talking cure, its truth is situated at the level of speech. “Truth is inseparable from the effects of language.”432 In the clinical context, truth does not refer to reality. Truth is rather equivalent to what is said, insofar what is said establishes the reality of what is. The unconscious truth of the analysand can be verified only on the basis of “the said.” Here, psychoanalysis observes that saying all of the subjective truth is impossible. Truth is not sayable in its entirety, for “saying” always goes beyond “the said,” remaining elusive to the said. There is an inevitable gap between saying and the said, which amounts to the gap between the real and truth. “Saying goes beyond the said, this saying to be taken as ex-sisting the said, by which its real exist(ed).”433 The saying of the real ex-sists to the said-dimension (dit-mension) of truth. The saying of the real contains some extra or remainder that the said of truth, which is actually inseparable from lie (mensonge) due to its linguistic structure,434 cannot capture. The saying of the real is beyond the propositional logic of the true and the false. “The saying of analysis insofar as it is effective, realizes the apophantic which by its simple ex-sistence is distinguished from the proposition.”435 The saying of an analyst takes apophantic forms such as a punctuation, a quotation, or a silence that lets the analysand discover his/her unconscious truth for him/herself. What matters in the analyst’s saying is not its propositional value but its real effect that resonates in the analysand’s gut. The same is also true of the saying of an analysand. What is at stake is not to discern whether the

432 Lacan, SXVII, p. 62. 433 Lacan, “Létourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 482. 434 “This way of writing [dit-mension] has one advantage, which is that it enables mension to be extended into mensionage, into mendation, which indicates that what is said is on no account necessarily true” (SXXIII, p. 125). 435 Lacan, “Létourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 490. 199

analysand’s trauma really happened in his/her history or was retroactively constituted through fantasy. Once the analysand enunciates his/her repressed truth, the propositional value of the statement becomes secondary. The vanishing yet real power of saying nevertheless does not mean that the said is trivial, for the said works in concert with the heard. Although the saying of the analysand disappears, there remains the analyst who hears the saying with an evenly suspended attention and registers it neutrally as the analytic material. Despite the gap between the saying and the said, the heard can make the analysis work out. “What one might be saying remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard.”436 Saying goes beyond the said, and yet analysis can be effective in attaining some truths of the analysand by means of what is heard.

What matters in this analytic approach to truth is that, unlike a philosopher, the analyst does not impose the truth in a dogmatic way with the pretext of saving the truth. Philosophy, in alliance with the discourse of the university, is grounded in a self-identical and transcendental “I.” In philosophy, knowledge as the agent of the discourse hides and serves the ideal master who monopolizes and exploits the unquestioned truth. “The transcendental I is what anyone who has stated knowledge in a certain way harbors as truth, the S1, the I of the master.”437 Against this regime of the “I-cracy” of truth, the analyst remains vigilant against the totalizing knowledge of truth and acknowledges that the analytic knowledge cannot entirely cover the truth. “What one expects from a psychoanalyst is to get his knowledge to function in terms of truth. This is why he limits himself to a half-saying.”438 Unaffected by the analysand’s idealization of the analyst as possessing knowledge of his/her subjective truth, the analyst is conversant to the fact that it is impossible to say all the truth. This encapsulates the analyst’s attitudes toward truth in analysis. The analyst neither depends on the prestige of the masterly truth nor abandons the production of the unconscious truth. He works at the point where the real determines the truth, while letting the analysand produce his/her own truth, which is neither completely sayable nor entirely unsayable but half-said. He accompanies the analysand on the narrow path of truth with the respect for the real as the proof that truth can be said only incompletely.439 The analyst abides by the ethical principle

436 Ibid., p. 449. 437 Lacan, SXVII, p. 62. 438 Ibid., p. 53. 439 Refer to the opening statement of Television: “I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s 200

that truth is half-said, letting the analysand take the initiative in relation to his/her half-said truth. In sum, Lacanian psychoanalysis refashions truth through the problematic of the real and the clinical practice. Again, truth is not merely deposed, but recast as psychoanalytic truth.

Second, Lacanian antiphilosophy notes that the philosophical operation is inappropriate because it commits a triple fault in relation to mathematics, love, and politics.

First, philosophy, which is founded on the consciousness of the self-identical master, has nothing to say about mathematics as the science without consciousness. “Being the language that is most suitable for scientific discourse, mathematics is the science without consciousness that our friend Rabelais promised, before which a philosopher can only remain dumb.”440 In contrast, Lacanian psychoanalysis claims to be a “science of the real,” a discipline that employs the logical apparatus to delineate its immanent impossibility as the real rather than refer to external reality. For this, it invents the matheme as the impasse of the mathematizable to transmit analytic knowledge, opposing both objective scientism and obscure dogmatism. One can rationally substantiate that there is such a thing as analysis, for there are mathemes that are coordinated to the sexual non-relationship as the real. Mathemes serve as a tool for learning (manthanein) about the real. As Lacan puts it, “the mathemes by which there are formulated in impasses the mathematizable, itself to be defined as what is taught about the real, are of a nature to be coordinated to this absence caught in the real.”441

Second, philosophy compels us to love truth as power. Criticizing the love of truth in philosophy, Lacan states, “What is the love of truth? It’s something that mocks the lack of being of truth. … The love of truth is the love of this weakness [faiblesse] whose veil we have lifted, it’s the love of what truth hides, which is called castration.”442 The true figure of truth lies in the lack of being caused by castration, which truth hides. Analysis penetrates that love is addressed to lack and weakness. In contrast, philosophy is engrossed in substantializing being, masking castration, and concealing weakness. If “love is at the heart of philosophical discourse,” it is in the sense that “[philosophical] love aims at being [ȇtre] no way to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.” (Television, p. 3) 440 Lacan, “Létourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 453. 441 Ibid., p. 479. 442 Lacan, SXVII, p. 52. 201

that is very close to the signifier m’ȇtre [to be me or master].”443 Psychoanalysis observes that being is produced by language. Logology precedes ontology. Because being is produced by language, it is open to the word play of “being (ȇtre)” and “master (maître)” or “to be me (m’ȇtre).” In the eyes of the analyst, being is nothing but a signifier to impose and reinforce philosophy as the discourse of the master. Philosophy goes so far as to complete this interplay between being and master with love. Because philosophy addresses being as an integral substance without lack, philosophical love is a love of the master and power. It is thus an illusionary love at best, a love enslaved to power at worst.

Third, the philosophical operation fills up the hole of politics. Invoking Heidegger, Lacan states that “metaphysics has never been anything and would not know how to prolong itself except in occupying itself with plugging up the hole of politics.”444 What matters here is the difference between the Heideggerean definition of metaphysics and the Lacanian definition of metaphysics. For Heidegger, metaphysics is founded on the inspection of being through the One. Starting with the subordination of aletheia to eidos by Plato, the historicality of being comes down to the process of prescribing being via a unifying entity, which then provokes the forgetting of being. As Heidegger states, “the distinctive characteristic of metaphysics is decided. The One as unifying unity becomes normative for the ultimate determination of being.”445 For Lacan, there is no unifying unity; rather, there is such a thing as One (Yadl’un), and not the One. Put differently, “the One irrupts as the effect of lack.”446 Just as set theory elicits the One from the empty set, it is the One that is produced as the effect of lack, and not vice versa. Yadl’un implies that the One follows the differential logic of the signifier, in that it holds out only by referring to other signifiers. Yadl’un implies that the One is not, and yet it is constituted not by identity but by difference, not by being but by unbeing (désȇtre). The figure of Yadl’un can be compared to a punctured bag. It looks like a punctured bag because there is the a, which is a waste product that the One includes and yet cannot account for. Thus, Lacan criticizes the analysts who are fascinated by the position of subject supposed to know, which is the position of the One as semblance. “The analysts who cannot be made to be promoted as abjection to the definite place of what the One rightfully occupies, and what is

443 Lacan, SXX, p. 39. 444 Lacan, “Létourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 455. 445 Heidegger, cited in Badiou, Lacan: L’antiphilosophie 3, 1994–1995, p. 64. 446 Lacan, SXIX, p. 158. 202

worse with this place is that of semblance.”447 If Heidegger analyzes the gathering principle of the One and holds onto the historicality of being, Lacan points to the constitutive lack within the One and presents the a as the abject unbeing that the function of the One cannot identify. It is thus revealed that the metaphysical act of plugging up the hole of politics was possible due to the One as totalizing substance. Against this philosophical operation, the analytic act opens up the hole that is immanent to every field of discourse and proves that there is always a gap that the One cannot suture.

In sum, Lacanian antiphilosophy contends that philosophy is not simply a theory. Beneath its appearance as a neutral theory, philosophy conceals a specific operation. For Lacan, this philosophical operation is impotent and inappropriate because it remains dumb before mathematics, forces us to love truth as power, and fills up the hole of politics.

Finally, Lacanian psychoanalysis poses the analytic act, which is supposed to oppose and outstrip the philosophical operation. Badiou addresses this point in three aspects.

First, while the philosophical operation claims to deliver a discourse about happiness and beatitude, the analytic act grapples with anxiety and disgust. This does not merely mean that the analyst deals with the analysand’s anxiety. Certainly, it is through a moderate amount of anxiety, as the sign of the real which does not deceive, that the analyst helps the analysand touch and explore his/her subjective real. The issue is more about how the analyst him/herself feels with regard to this act of bringing the subject into the realm of the real. Here, Lacan does not hesitate to admit that “the psychoanalyst holds his act in horror.”448 A philosopher produces his/her discourse based on the certainty that the discourse will guide us to happiness. In contrast, an analyst deals with the fact that “the world [monde] is revolting [immonde],”449 namely, the pandemonium of the real, based on the certainty that only the act can reveal the gap of the real in the world. To face the undeniably filthy world and even lead the analysand into work through the filthy world inscribed in his/her unconscious amounts to an act in horror. While a philosopher attempts to produce a discourse of happiness through peaceful contemplation, the task of an analyst is to face up to the horrifying act, compared to which a

447 Jacques Lacan, “…ou pire. Compte rendu du Séminaire 1971–1972,” in Autres écrits, Paris: Seuil, 2001, p. 548. 448 Lacan, Television, p. 135 (January 24, 1980). 449 Jacques Lacan, “The Triumph of Religion,” in The Triumph of Religion, Preceded by Discourse to Catholics, trans. Bruce Fink, Cambridge: Polity, 2013, pp. 61–62. 203

discourse is only a by-product. Lacan thus declares, “as for the act, I give them [analysts who are horrified rather than blissed] a chance to face up to it.”450

Second, philosophy and psychoanalysis address the triad of truth, knowledge, and the real in different ways. The Lacanian approach to this triad is epitomized in the following statement: “For the truth is situated from supposing that which of the real makes a function in savoir, which is added there [to the real].”451 The truth is an effect based on the fact that the real functions in knowledge. This implies that philosophy, while foregrounding the truth, is blind to the larger picture in which the real and knowledge are conjoined. Psychoanalysis is conversant with this conjoining, for the unconscious is a specific type of knowledge, a knowledge composed of a set of signifiers that insistently revolves around the unrepresentable centre of sexuality. “The unconscious is only a metaphoric term in designating the knowledge that only sustains itself in presenting itself as impossible, so that from this it is confirmed as being real.”452 The unconscious is a knowledge with which it is impossible to articulate logically the real of sexuality, sexual difference, and sexual relation. In short, truth is derivative and secondary, compared to the conjunction of the real and knowledge. From this, Badiou infers that while the philosophical operation arranges the triad in the form of a pair, the analytic act opposes this pairing. That is to say, philosophy contends that there is a self-identical truth of the real, a transparent knowledge of this truth, an absolute knowledge of the totalized real. On the contrary, psychoanalysis poses that truth and the real are heterogeneous, that there is an irreducible gap between knowledge and truth, and that knowledge concerns only “a bit of the real.” While philosophy focuses on the continuity among truth, knowledge, and the real, psychoanalysis focuses on the discontinuity among them.

Third, to surpass the philosophical operation that addresses the relation between theory and truth, Lacanian psychoanalysis mobilizes the relationship between the analytic act and the real. Recall that the analytic act is an enunciative act constituted by the gap between saying and the said, an apophantic and equivocal saying that works in relation to the real. What matters here is that the real is completely subtracted from the coupling of imaginary

450 Lacan, Television, p. 135 (January 24, 1980). 451 Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres écrits, p. 443. 452 Ibid., p. 425. 204

knowledge (connaissance) and reality. “Thus the real is distinguished from reality. This, not to say that it is unknowable, but that there is no question of knowing it there, but rather of demonstrating it.”453 The real is neither what is knowable nor what is unknowable. It is thus distinct from the Kantian Thing or the Wittgensteinian unnamable. The real is a matter of the act of demonstration rather than of the theory of what can or cannot be known with regard to reality. In this regard, Lacanian psychoanalysis cuts through the distinction between theory and practice. It is not the case that once the analytic act of demonstrating the real is enacted, everything is done. The desire of the analyst works on the production of mathemes, transmissible knowledge that can circulate beyond the particular analytic setting. Mathemes serve as a material proof to testify that there has been such and such analysis. The analytic act as clinical practice and mathemes as theoretical knowledge are complementary and inseparable.

To recap, Lacanian psychoanalysis represents the apex of contemporary antiphilosophy in three ways. First, it deposes philosophy, which falls short of a theory of the real, discredits the philosophical category of truth, and presents the psychoanalytic version of truth. Second, it discloses how philosophy operates inappropriately with regard to mathematics, love, and politics. Lastly, it presents an analytic act of the real that dislocates and exceeds the philosophical operation.

Dialogue on Love Between Antiphilosophy and Philosophy: Reading of Tony Takitani by Murakami Haruki Badiou certainly retorts to Lacan. For instance, Badiou does not agree with Lacan’s evaluation of philosophical operation. For Badiou, philosophy is not necessarily dumbfounded at mathematics. It is rather mathematics that loses sight of its radical ontological insight that being can be thought of as a pure multiplicity. Moreover, it is possible that philosophy recognizes mathematics as its invaluable partner, as in his set-theoretical ontology. Badiou also points out that philosophy does not indoctrinate a love of truth as a love of power. For instance, it is not the case that the lovers in the scene of the Two love the amorous truth as a form of power. On the one hand, the scene of the Two is powerful in that it has the potential of creating an amorous infinity. On the other hand, it is powerless in that it

453 Ibid., p. 408. 205

can collapse at any moment unpredictably. As we discussed in Chapter 3, philosophy recognizes that the love of truth cuts through the distinction between power and powerlessness. Finally, Badiou argues that it is not the case that philosophy, which is under the sway of the metaphysical determination based on the One, clogs up the hole of politics. On the contrary, once it is delivered from the mastery of the One, philosophy rather opens up the hole of politics and calls for emancipatory politics that addresses generic humanity in an egalitarian way.

However, the relationship between philosophy and antiphilosophy is much more complex than could be sorted out with one retort. After all, antiphilosophy is a philosophy, and unlike the distant relationship between philosophy and sophistry, philosophy and antiphilosophy are near in kinship. They are like two different species of the same genus. Unlike sophistry, which totally denies truth, antiphilosophy accepts the category of truth, albeit in its own way. Moreover, both of the two mobilize some kind of operation or act, albeit in different ways. Indeed, it was Badiou himself who affirmed that any worthy of the name must work through Lacan.454 In Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, Badiou writes that an antiphilosopher “awakes” a philosopher with regard to the point that philosophy invents new concepts in and against the contemporary situation.455 An antiphilosopher enlightens a philosopher with the untimely contemporaneity of truths. In his interview on Nietzsche, Badiou also states that antiphilosophy previews the figure of a philosophy to come: “antiphilosophy is always what, at its very extremes, states the new duty of philosophy or its new possibility in the figure of a new duty. I think of Nietzsche’s madness, of Wittgenstein’s strange labyrinth, of Lacan’s final muteness. In all three cases antiphilosophy takes the form of a legacy. It bequeathes something beyond itself to very thing that it is fighting against. Philosophy is always the heir to antiphilosophy.”456 Indeed, Badiouian philosophy is an heir to Lacanian antiphilosophy. The ideas about mathematics as the science of the real, love as addressed to weakness, and politics as pertaining to the unsuturable hole are affirmed, developed, and refined in Badiou’s philosophy. It is Badiou who recasts philosophy to the point of meeting the challenge of Lacanian antiphilosophy.

454 Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, London: Continuum, 2006, p. 119. 455 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, p. 67. 456 Alain Badiou, “Who is Nietzsche?” trans. Alberto Toscano, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 11 (2001): 10. 206

In this regard, the relationship between philosophy and antiphilosophy is not a matter of formal opposition but rather of dynamic dialogue. Here, it is worth referring to what Badiou calls the ethics of philosophy in relation to sophistry. Philosophy runs into a disaster of thought when “it presents itself as being not a seizing of truths but a situation of truth.”457 A disaster arrives when philosophy forgets its task of seizing truths with the empty category of truth but rather pretends to produce truths. In pretending to produce truths, philosophy appeals to an ecstatic place (“philosophy is the only place to get access to truth”), a sacred name (as in Plato’s idea of the Good as the ultimate instance of Truth of truths), and an injunctive terror (“anything that does not fit into truth as presence ought not be”), all of which comes down to the degeneration of philosophy. Therefore, while philosophy should not yield to sophistry, it nevertheless should not exterminate sophistry as the partner of dialogue. The same is also true of the relationship between philosophy and antiphilosophy. Philosophy should overcome the temptation to put an end to the controversy with antiphilosophy. Moreover, philosophy should be willing to be alerted and awakened by antiphilosophy, learning from antiphilosophy and accepting its challenge to reinvent itself. In sum, the relationship between philosophy and antiphilosophy is a matter of an agonistic dialogue. Let us turn to a love story as an example to facilitate that dialogue.

Murakami Haruki’s minimalist novel Tony Takitani narrates the life and the love of a man named Tony Takitani. Due to his unusual name, which reminded some Japanese people of the old wounds of the American occupation of Japan, Tony had a solitary childhood. However, he became a professional illustrator, using a realistic technique with mechanical precision. He loved his work and spent every minute on work, shut up in his room. Solitude was habitual for Tony. Then, he suddenly fell in love with a girl. Although she was not exceptionally beautiful, the way she dressed made a deep impression on Tony. For the first time in his life, he felt the weight and agony of solitude. Tony proposed to her, and they married. The couple’s married life went smoothly, except for one thing about her. In the presence of fancy clothes, she could not stand her compulsive buying, which led her to fill an entire room with new clothes. One day, oscillating between her irresistible symptom and the resistance against her symptom, she was killed in a car accident. As a way of overcoming her death, Tony hired a female assistant who could wear his wife’s dresses, but he finally told the woman to forget about the job, accepting that it was all over. His life returned to the state of solitude.

457 Alain Badiou, C, p. 15. 207

Let us discuss how this story provokes a dialogue between antiphilosophy and philosophy about love. The first issue is concerned with the real and truth, and the second issue is concerned with antiphilosophical acts and philosophical operations. Let us begin with the first.

While late Lacan links the real to many terms such as jouissance, sexual non-relation, feminine not-all, and ex-sistence, we will focus on the symptom as the real. In fact, the symptom can be regarded as one of the most crucial embodiments of the real. This point can be supported on two grounds. On the one hand, one can locate the link between the symptom and other constituents of the real. Already, in Seminar X, the link between the symptom and jouissance is evoked in that the symptom is defined as a self-sufficient jouissance that does not call for an interpretation and does not address the symbolic Other. “The symptom is not, like acting-out, which calls upon interpretation, because … what analysis uncovers in the symptom is that the symptom is not an appeal to the Other, it is not what shows itself to the Other. The symptom, in its nature, is jouissance.”458 The link between sexual non-relation and symptom is also affirmed in that sexual non-relation triggers the formation of the symptom. “I went into medicine because I suspected that relations between man and woman played a decisive role in the symptoms of human beings.”459

On the other hand, one can recognize that late Lacan elaborates a more direct and stereographic link between the real itself and the symptom. “I call the symptom that which comes from the real.”460 The political overtone of the symptomatic real is evoked. “As analyst, I can only take the strike to be a symptom … in the sense that the symptom belongs to the real.”461 The symptom constitutes the kernel of the subjective real. “The symptom is the most real thing that a lot of people have.”462 The symptom as the manifestation of the real shows that human beings are sick animals. The symptom “is the way the real manifests itself at our level as living beings. As living beings, we are eaten away at, bitten by the

458 Lacan, SX, p. 125 (January 23, 1963). 459 Lacan, “Conférences et entretiens dans les universities nord-américaines,” November 24, 1975 at Yale University. 460 Jacques Lacan, “La Troisième,” given at the VII Congress of the EFP in Rome, October 31, 1974. Available from: www.valas.fr/Jacques-Lacan-La-Troisieme-en-francais-en-espagnol-en-allemand,011 461 Lacan, SXXII, November 19, 1974 (unpublished). 462 Lacan, “Conférences et entretiens dans les universities nord-américaines,” November 24, 1975 at Yale University. 208

symptom.”463 If analysts accomplish what scientists are unable to do, it is because “they are confronted with the real far more than even scientists are,” because they explore the real as “what does not work,” contrary to the world as “what works.”464 Finally, the clinical significance of the symptom cannot be overemphasized, insofar as what is at stake in the analytic work is to assist the analysand to know more about his symptomatic real. “The analysis consists in realizing why one has these symptoms.”465

The importance of the symptom lies not only in its connection to the real but also in its antiphilosophical implication. For Lacan, the reason psychoanalysis is antiphilosophical is not merely because psychoanalysis pits the real against being or act against thought but because the existence of psychoanalysis itself constitutes a symptom that challenges philosophy. “I define it [psychoanalysis] as a symptom–something that reveals the malaise of the society in which we live. Of course, it is not a philosophy. I abhor philosophy.”466 Psychoanalysis can shed light on what philosophy loses sight of, for it is above all a symptomatology that reveals the malaise of the society. The symptom is a key to render psychoanalysis antiphilosophical or even supraphilosophical. In sum, the symptom as the instance of the real can serve as the most useful tool to explore the antiphilosophical aspect of love.

For Lacan, there is no sexual relationship between man and woman. Instead, there is a relationship between masculine perversion and feminine psychosis, apart from one’s biological sex. While the masculine position reduces the Other to the object of his desire for the recuperation of his lost jouissance, the feminine position elevates the Other into an ideal symbol that causes devastating jouissance. In both cases, one is addressed to the Other that is filtered and captured by one’s symptom, not the Other sex. Instead of a sexual relation, there

463 Lacan, The Triumph of Religion, p. 77. 464 Ibid., pp. 61–62. 465 Lacan, SXXV, January 10, 1978 (unpublished). Let us quote two more instances to show the significance of the symptom as a possible anchoring point for late Lacan. First, the symptom is conceived of as something that straddles both the truth and the real. “The truth, this is what psychoanalysis teaches us, lies at the point where the subject refuses to know. Everything that is rejected from the symbolic reappears in the real. This is the key to what is called the symptom. The symptom is this real knot where the truth of the subject lies.” (SXV, June 19, 1968 (unpublished)); secondly, the symptom is directly equated with “psychic reality as a whole” (SXXIII, p. 147). 466 Jacques Lacan, “Freud à jamais,” interview by Emilia Granzatto in Panorama, November 21, 1974. Available from: www.versobooks.com/blogs/1668-there-can-be-no-crisis-of-psychoanalysis-jacques-lacan- interviewed-in-1974. 209

is a relation between two symptoms. One can recognize a dramatic unfolding of this logic in Tony Takitani. There is no sexual relation between Tony and his wife. Instead, there is a symptomatic relation between solitude and addiction. Their love is constituted by an inter- symptomatic relation. Their love draws the attention of the analyst because it is involved in and constituted by each one’s symptomatic real.

Love has a unique relationship with the symptom. On the one hand, the symptom poses an impenetrable enigma to love. In the case of the shopping addiction of Tony’s wife, Tony is not concerned about the amount of money that she spends. For him, her desire for clothing and her satisfaction obtained from shopping appears awkward. Witnessing “the jouissance proper to the symptom,” “the opaque jouissance that excludes any meaning,” the situation of Tony is similar to that of the “post-Joycean” analyst who faces Joyce’s tongue twisters in lalangue.467 The symptom thus sets up an invisible wall between lovers. The symptom renders the beloved foreign and monstrous. The symptom puts love to the test of unfathomable otherness. Unable to plumb the Other with the idiosyncratic subjective real, Tony asks her, “do you really need so many expensive dresses?”468 The symptom thus places a limit on love. Although she loves Tony, when she returns her coat to the clothing shop and jumps behind the wheel, all she can think about is the coat. It is not simply that her love for Tony is inauthentic and her love for clothes is authentic. The point is that her addiction blurs the distinction between authentic and inauthentic love. Her addiction, which is both most intimate and most foreign (namely, “extimate”) even to herself, renders her love precarious and obscure.

On the other hand, love brings one’s symptom to the fore. Love offers us a chance to engage with the symptom, which has been denied, repressed, and foreclosed until now. Since childhood, Tony’s life has been filled with solitude. What is notable is that his solitude was seldom problematic to him. He isolated himself from the world, indulging in his work. It was only by falling in love that he came to confront his subjective real of solitude. What makes his solitude, which has been invisible, visible is his love. Here, Tony confesses to her “how lonely his life had been until then, how much he had lost over the years, how she had made

467 Jacques Lacan, “Joyce le symptom II,” in Joyce avec Lacan, ed. Jacques Lacan Aubert, Paris: Navarin, 1987, p. 36. 468 Haruki Murakami, “Tony Takitani,” in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: Twenty-Four Stories, New York: Vintage International, 2007, p. 196; hereafter referenced as TT. 210

him realize all that.”469 As Lacan puts it, if love is to give what one does not have, what she gave him was his own solitude. Her amorous gift was to let him witness the real of his life. Love is the revelation of lack and loss associated with the symptom that has been unrevealed prior to love. In this regard, the psychoanalytic conception of love is not the same as moralists or sophists’ conception that love does not exist at all or that love is nothing but an illusion. While it is the case that the symptom constitutes love, it is only love that reveals the unrevealed subjective real. Lacan’s following interrogation is thus legitimate: “Are you aware how rare it is for love to come to grief on the real qualities or faults of the loved one?”470 Of course, love comes to grief in the majority of cases. What matters is how love comes to grief. Tony had been involved with several women before. However, involvement is different from love. Before meeting her, Tony did not have to realize his solitude, for involvement did not allow him to confront his subjective real. It is only falling in love with her that destabilizes his stable life and forces him to confront his subjective real. While involvements are common in the world, love that comes to grief or comes to grips with the symptomatic real is rare. To rephrase Spinoza in his Ethics, love at the level of the symptom is as difficult as it is rare. It is difficult because the symptom poses an aporia to love, and it is rare because the symptom authorizes the exceptional manifestation of the subjective real. In sum, psychoanalysis as antiphilosophy observes that love is put to the test of the real as the symptom and that only love reveals the subjective real as the symptom.

To this, Badiouian philosophy responds that there is a rarer kind of love, love that creates a truth through and beyond the real. On the one hand, Badiou accepts that love is not of the imaginary, but of the real. This can be verified in the various concepts that he uses, such as the amorous process as a limping march rather than a harmonious unity, sexual disjunction as the ontological ground of love, the point as the test of the real, and jouissance as the unnamable of the amorous truth. However, on the other hand, this is not enough for a philosophical vision of love for Badiou. The significance of the limping march as the amorous process does not lie in revealing the real but in creating an amorous infinity. The necessity of sexual disjunction is accepted only insofar as sexual disjunction does not preexist but is eventally provoked by an amorous encounter. Finally, late Badiou rejects the notion of

469 Ibid., p. 193. 470 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, New York: Norton, 1988, p. 218. 211

the unnamable as the mark of finitude, and jouissance is often equated as the mark of the power of death. Lacan, for his part, occasionally equates the truth with the symptom. “The truth is manifested in an enigmatic fashion in the symptom. Which is what? A subjective opaqueness.”471 Against this, Badiou would maintain a rigorous distinction between the truth and the symptom, which provokes a critical engagement with love in Tony Takitani.

If the Badiouian amorous truth is constituted by the knot of encounter, fidelity, and infinity, love in Tony Takitani does not measure up to love as truth. Tony’s love was instituted by an evental encounter that ruptures the law of his self-sufficient world organized around solitude. However, their love came to a halt because they could not successfully pass through the test of his wife’s symptomatic real. Their amorous sequence was launched but then suspended. Their love attests to the power of an amorous encounter, but it does not attain a persistent amorous process that elaborates the power of an encounter. To refer to Badiou’s critique of contemporary love without any risk, their love was more of a risk-taking wager than a secured insurance. Tony decided to be with her by breaking out of his stabilized isolation. She accepted Tony’s proposal, leaving behind her worry about the fifteen-year difference in age. The etymology of the symptom tells us that the symptom comes from sumpiptein, happening. There was indeed some happening in their love. However, this happening was not expanded through ongoing fidelity. Their love definitely reached the level of syn, together, but not the level of the Two. They were together, but failed to organize the scene of the Two. Their love passed through the level of pipto, fall, not only in the sense of the amorous fall, but also in the sense of the revelation of their respective symptom. However, they failed to construct an amorous infinity by elaborating the consequences of the fall. Their love was limited to falling in love and revealing the way each relates to the subjective real. The symptomatic love failed to create an amorous truth.

Notably, this philosophical critique of the symptomatic love depends on the notion of life, concerning which psychoanalysis and philosophy are at odds in a global way. In the lecture at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1972, Lacan states, “You’re right to believe you will die. It sustains you. If you didn’t believe it, could you bear the life that you have?”472 Psychoanalysis notes that life is a painstaking struggle with unbearable jouissance. During

471 Lacan, SXIV, February 22, 1967 (unpublished). 472 Jacques Lacan, “Conférence de Louvain suivie d’un entretien avec Françoise Wolff,” (October 13, 1972) in Jacques Lacan parle. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HBnLAK4_Cc. 212

their date, Tony’s wife tells Tony that most of her pay goes toward clothing. For her, the desire for new clothing is irresistible. The fantasy of satisfying this insatiable desire structures her life, and the intensive and transitory drive at the moment of buying clothing orients it. The impasse of desire and the prison of jouissance situate her life between Scylla and Charybdis. Her life becomes livable only with the satisfaction of compulsive buying, and it becomes worthless with its frustration. In Badiou’s words, her life renounces the possibility of becoming a subject of truth. Her life becomes a matter of the human animal’s body that oscillates between the life drive (eros) and death drive (thanatos). Against this vision of life, philosophy articulates that “life is the wager, made on a body that has entered into appearing, that one will faithfully entrust this body with a new temporality, keeping at a distance the conservative drive as well as the mortifying drive. Life is what gets the better of the drives.”473 A life that is determined and ruled by drives amounts to either the mors vitalis or vita mortalis of the un-dead. In this regard, the symptomatic love covers up the possibility of the true life of the subjectivizable body with the fact of the survival/death of the animalistic body.

The affect of the true life is happiness. Following the Aristotelian distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia, Badiou makes a distinction between satisfaction and happiness. Whereas satisfaction belongs to the individual who conforms to the dominating law of the world, happiness belongs to the becoming subject of the individual through the rupture of the law. With satisfaction, the individual enjoys only that for which his/her preexisting existence provides in a finite way. Meanwhile, with happiness, the subject enjoys that which recreates his/her existence in an unprecedented and infinite way. In Tony’s case, although he glances at the entry to happiness through the subversion of his way of living and loving, he does not reach an amorous infinity. This can be seen in the fact that, after his wife’s death, Tony hires a female assistant and has her wear his wife’s clothing. This seemingly effective strategy of mourning, however, misses the crucial point that true mourning lies in living with the loss of an irreplaceable singularity, not in compensating for the loss with a random particularity, i.e., any female body with the same dress size as his wife’s. It also misses the point that as long as love is infinite, handling the loss of love is also a matter of an infinite subjectivization of the loss, not of a facile substitution for the loss. His mourning thus fails to become a subjective assumption of loss but remains an objective and/or imaginary replacement of loss. This

473 Badiou, LW, p. 509. 213

would be probably why he cannot recall his wife’s face, while the image of the temporarily hired woman ironically persists in his memory: “Long after he had forgotten all kinds of things, including the woman’s name, her image remained strangely unforgettable.”474 Contrary to the Badiouian subject who affirms even the amorous loss as a part of an amorous infinity based on the conviction that the traumatic loss cannot outstrip the amorous happiness, the mark of finitude ends up provoking and orienting Tony’s love, with clothing serving as a particular object. To use Badiou’s distinction in his unpublished seminar, clothing serves as “waste (déchet),” a finite object stuck onto itself, rather than “work (oeuvre),” a finite material that nevertheless opens onto an infinite amorous process.475 A love without a work ends in a waste.

In sum, against Lacanian antiphilosophy, which focuses on the symptomatic real in love, Badiouian philosophy claims that love is not merely a relation between symptoms but a creation of truth, which serves as an access not only to the true life beyond the drive but also to happiness beyond satisfaction.

The second theme of the dialogue between antiphilosophy and philosophy concerns the antiphilosophical act and the philosophical operation. An antiphilosopher asserts the irreducibility of his proper act against the philosophical tradition. For instance, Nietzsche, who puts life and body before Platonic ideas and Christian morality, declares as follows: “It is not inconceivable that I am the first philosopher of the age, perhaps even a little more, something decisive and doom-laden standing between two millennia.”476 For Nietzsche, his proper existence (“I am”) is something that exceeds (“a little more”) the entire philosophical tradition and inscribes a rupturing point in it. An antiphilosopher is someone for whom his radical act, dramatic life, and singular existence can outstrip, destroy, and refashion philosophical ideas and doctrines.

In the case of Lacan, he presents the analytic act as an irreducible chimera to philosophy. For the analysand, the analytic act provokes a singular experience to encounter his/her real unconscious by traversing fantasy. For the analyst, the analytic act means the clinical practice

474 Murakami, TT, p. 202. 475 Alain Badiou, L’immanence des verities (2): Séminaire d’Alain Badiou, 2013–2014, October 9, 2013, unpublished. Available from: www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/13-14.htm. 476 Nietzsche, cited in Alain Badiou, “Who is Nietzsche?” Pli 11 (2001): 5. 214

of demonstrating the subjective real by occupying the position of the object cause of desire. The analytic act of encountering and demonstrating the real offers us what is unprecedented in philosophy, whose focus lies in thinking and knowing the truth. But this does not mean that the analytic act is mystical. The unique aspect of the analytic act is that unlike the previous antiphilosopher who presented a mystical and transcendental notion of the act as in Kierkegaard’s subjective choice about the absolute, the Lacanian act is logical and formal with the operation of mathemes. The effect of the analytic work must and can be verified and shared. The act is open to the possibility of the construction and transmission of knowledge. In sum, the Lacanian act shows the real in the form of knowledge to surpass the philosophical truth.

Let us flesh out the analytic act in reference to Tony Takitani. Let us begin with Lacan’s definition of drugs from the Meeting of Closure of the cartel working day in 1975: “There is no other definition for drugs than this one: it is what allows for the breaking of the marriage between jouissance and the willy nilly.”477 In addictions, the link between jouissance and the phallus as a way of limiting jouissance is broken down so that an unbridled jouissance emerges and possesses the subject. Tony’s wife confesses, “I don’t need so many dresses, I know that. But even if I know it, I can’t help myself.”478 In the novel, one cannot find a clue about the etiology and genealogy of her symptom, but one could diagnose that this excessive jouissance works in concert with her fantasmatic attachment to her body image. Her compulsive buying functions as a means of preserving and protecting her idealized body image. The act of looking at herself with the new clothing in a mirror would give her a tremendous amount of pleasure. She is in love with her well-dressed body image. More precisely, she is suspended between her self-love and love for Tony, wherein lies her subjective impasse. Expanding his early ideas about the mirror stage, Lacan states, “Self-love is the principle of imagination. The speaking being adores his body so that he believes that he has it. In reality, he does not have it. His body is his sole consistency, mental consistency, for his body always goes away.”479 A body can be divided into the real body as the bundle of partial drives and the imaginary body as the mental consistency. As the biological need is

477 Jacques Lacan, Culture aux Journeé d’etudes des Cartels in Lettres de L’Ecole freudienne de Paris No. 18, April, 1976, pp. 268–270. 478 Murakami, TT, p. 196. 479 Lacan, SXXIII, p. 52. 215

filtered through the symbolic order, and speaking beings’ lives are not based on the natural need but on the de-naturalized drive. The multiple, fragmentary drives keep us from having a unified body. If we can have a unified body, it is through the body image or through the imaginarized body that reduces the real body’s inconsistent drives to a consistent form. The imaginarized body helps us to control inconsistency through consistency, and herein lies the adoration of the body. Our self-love is based on the adoration of the imaginarized body. In the case of Tony’s wife, we can state that she has a hypertrophic adoration of her body, for the image with new clothing provides for the endless metamorphosis of her body. Her symptom would even offer her an over-exciting interplay among consistencies beyond the soothing reduction of inconsistency to consistency. In sum, the core of her symptom lies in the interaction between the unbridled jouissance and the attachment to her body image.

To deal with her symptom, the analytic act would have to implement a “correct symbolization.”480 A correct symbolization amounts to “elevating impotence (which accounts for fantasy) to logical impossibility (which incarnates the real).”481 The analytic act should examine her impotence due to her fantasy about the idealized body image. The analysis should clarify that the adoration of the body would serve as a screen around her subjective real, and that beneath her imaginary love lies her real problem. Now, the revelation of the subjective real is a difficult and rare thing. As Lacan states, “The trouble of the truth has been rejected into the shadows. But at the real, not a thing is ever seen of it.”482 Note that Lacan’s antiphilosophical gesture is grounded in the distinction between truth and the real in terms of the extent to which the analytic work reveals the two. One can bring the repressed subjective truth into light, albeit in a partial way. But the real is a different story, for it is a completely untrodden field. Moreover, the revelation of the real would provoke the analysand’s violent resistance as in a negative therapeutic response, for the analysand does not give up on his/her symptom and loves it like him/herself. The revelation of the real is also not a pleasant thing for the analyst, for it not only necessitates the deposition of his/her status from the subject supposed to know to the waste object but also triggers anxiety, which explains why the analyst has an aversion for his act. Nevertheless, it is through the repetitive encounter with the real that the analytic act proceeds. As Lacan states, “it is only in pushing

480 Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres écrits, p. 423. 481 Jacques Lacan, “…ou pire: Compte rendu du Séminaire 1971–1972,” in Autres écrits, p. 551. 482 Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres écrits, p. 443. 216

the impossible in its deductions that impotence takes on the power of turning the patient into the agent.”483 The analytic act should provide for the becoming subject of the analysand. The analytic act should also offer a chance for the analysand to move from the patient in the impotent imaginary to the agent of the impossible real. The analytic act should assist the analysand in grappling with his/her untrodden real, rather than leading him/her to conform to and compromise with reality. Clinically, a correct symbolization should work in concert with the symbolization of jouissance. Once the subjective real is encountered, the fatal jouissance implied therein must be symbolized. In the case of Tony’s wife, once her subjective real is revealed, a symbolic apparatus to limit her addictive jouissance needs to be invented. Then, she could be engaged in a process of refashioning the existing unconscious into a new unconscious that does not devastate herself in an autoimmunitary way. In sum, the analytic act serves as an occasion for her change through the encounter with the subjective real.

At this point, the implication that the analytic act has for an antiphilosophical love becomes clear. Although the analytic act might eventually trigger a subjective change, the change must come from within the subject but not from without. If it comes from without, this implies that the change is enforced rather than subjective. And an enforced change implies that some kind of a master preaches about the efficacy of the act and indoctrinates the subject about it, which Lacan opposes at two levels. There is no such thing as “the master of the analytic act.”484 Moreover, “that which saves me from teaching is the act.”485 For psychoanalysis, love is a question of subjective change. As Jacques-Alain Miller puts it, if “to really love someone is to believe that by loving them you’ll get to a truth about yourself,”486 then it necessarily accompanies a subjective change. But this change does not happen through the indoctrination of the truth via a philosopher as a master. It arrives only immanently through a self-initiated experience and experiment of the real without a master armed with teaching. In this regard, the analytic act confirms what every lover often experiences. With the intervention of didactic wisdom, eros turns into ares.

483 Ibid., p. 446. 484 Lacan, SXV, January 24, 1968 (unpublished). 485 Jacques Lacan, “Allocution prononcée pour la cloture du congrès de l’Ecole freudienne de Paris (April 19, 1970), Scilicet, 1970, nº 2/3. 486 Jacques-Alain Miller, “We Love the One Who Responds to Our Question: “Who Am I?” in The Symptom, trans. Adrian Price. Available from: articulosparapensar.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/jacques-alain-miller-on- love/ 217

A subjective change happens outside of any intention, expectation, and prediction about change, and even hope for change, which in many cases refers back to the master and teaching. The analytic act serves as the occasion for change, but it is never directly aimed at change. Instead, it is aimed at the end of analysis, which Lacan calls the Passe as the subjective transformation from the analysand to the analyst. The Passe does not lie in passing through some place or in moving from one place to another. The Passe lies in seeing and rediscovering the impasse. “The end of analysis is when one has gone round in circles twice, rediscovered that of which one is prisoner. […] It is enough for one to see what one is captive of.”487 The point is not about escaping from that of which one is captive but rather only seeing it. A change comes from the acceptance and exploration of the impossibility of a change. A subjective change can occur only from the recurrent process of turning around the real in circles without any consciousness or program about change. In this regard, the analytic act suggests that the subject of love is first and foremost the subject of waiting.

Does such a thing as the Lacanian waiting exist? In Seminar XXV, Lacan writes, “The real is the impossible to simply write, or in other words, does not cease not to be written. The real is the possible waiting to be written.”488 As we have discussed, Lacan redefines four modalities in terms of writing. Notably, Lacan here identifies the real not only as the impossible but also as the possible, and the mediator between the impossible and the possible is waiting. Let us specify three things. First, waiting is not of a master, as waiting cuts across the impossible and the possible. The master is ignorant of the impossible insofar as he/she resides in the world of the already coordinated norms. Waiting is too much work for the subject as well, as waiting often exhausts and devastates the subject. Let us rather state that the agent of waiting is the real as a pure inconsistency of the (im-)possible. The agent of waiting is between the possible waiting to be written and the impossible to be written. Second, waiting is not a question of messianism, for messianism implies that a pre-established demarcation exists between the impossible and the possible, which does not fit with a true waiting. Third, waiting is also not a question of passivity, for the construction of the analytic knowledge of the existing real accompanies the analytic waiting for the real to come.

The same is true of the amorous waiting for change. The lover, who is hardly a master and

487 Lacan, SXXV, January 10, 1978 (unpublished). 488 Ibid., March 8, 1977 (unpublished). 218

barely a subject, is supposed to wait for a subjective change of the beloved (her subjective change from the fixation on her narcissistic totality to the revelation of her lack in general, or in the case of Tony, a change from her self-indulged love for the symptomatic jouissance to her partaking of the amorous joy with Tony), beyond the distinction between the impossible and the possible, and this act of waiting must be coupled with an active engagement. Here, one could refer to Benjamin’s aphorism that “the only way of knowing a person is to love that person without hope.”489 The only way of loving a person is through an act of pure waiting, while inventing a singular knowledge of him. Love is an asubjective act of waiting for the subjective change, without hope, and yet in the making of knowledge, which is why love is not a thought but an act, an act of the impossible, just like the analytic act is. Let us reread Lacan’s final declaration filled with such an antiphilosophical pride: “My strength is to know what it means to wait.”490 In sum, love assumes the following axiom from the analytic act: “Where the act of waiting for subjective change was, there love should arrive.”

Let us turn to the problem of philosophical operation. According to Badiou, philosophical operation lies in organizing a conceptual space in which four types of truths–art, science, politics, and love–are compossible. This implies that philosophy does not directly produce the truths but only seizes truths through the category of the truth. In other words, philosophy is not self-enclosed but rather conditioned. What is notable here is that philosophy maintains the category of truth as void, not as presence. Because it is left as void, new truths can come in, and there can be ever-incomplete yet infinite truth-processes rather than some substantial truth. When philosophy fills in the void of the truth, it provokes a disaster of thought in which an ecstatic place, a sacred name, and a terrifying injunction wield their power. Philosophy then presents itself as a truth and reduces heterogeneous, singular truths into one privileged, substantial truth, as in Heidegger (art as the Truth) or in analytic philosophy (science as the Truth).

Now, antiphilosophy alerts to philosophy that this philosophical operation is possible on the basis of contemporary truths. Antiphilosophy awakens philosophy to contemporary truths or, more precisely, untimely truths in the contemporary world as exceptional forms of political movement, scientific experimentation, artistic invention, and amorous passion. An

489 , One-Way Street, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, p. 62 490 Lacan (March 11, 1981), cited in Badiou, Lacan: L’antiphilosophie 3, 1994–1995, p. 232. 219

antiphilosopher is a philosopher armed with an adamant conviction that philosophy does not operate through the eternal contemplation or fashionable ideology and that philosophy thinks of truths in the contemporary world and yet against its dominant norms. As Badiou writes, “The antiphilosopher recalls for us that a philosopher is a political militant, generally hated by the powers that be and by their servants; an aesthete, who walks ahead of the most unlikely creations; a lover, whose life is capable of capsizing for a woman or a man; a savant, who frequents the most violently paradoxical developments of the sciences; and that it is in this effervescence, this in-disposition, this rebellion, that philosophers produce their cathedrals of ideas.”491

If the untimely nature of truths is the radical message that philosophy accepts from antiphilosophy, philosophy takes one step further by conjoining the untimely truths with the problem of happiness. Once again, happiness emerges as the key issue in the dialogue between antiphilosophy and philosophy.

Philosophy affirms that an immanent connection exists between philosophy and happiness. To refer back to Plato’s discussion about happiness (eudaimonia), a truly happy man is a philosopher, not those with power, money, and fame. How would Badiou translate the term eudaimonia? Happiness as “good (eu) soul (daimon)” means the affect of the subject who participates in any type of truth. In fact, this point has an important implication in Badiou’s intellectual itinerary. What is at stake in Being and Event is the demonstration of the being of truths. But the problem is that the conceptual demonstration of the being of truths is disconnected from our concrete lives. Then, Logics of Worlds demonstrates that truths not only are but also appear in the world, finally engaging with the problem of life. The problem of truth is thus extended into the true life. To overcome a mere formalism of truths, Logics of Worlds also presents the affects of truths, such as joy in love, enthusiasm in politics, beatitude in science, and pleasure in art. Recently, Badiou refers to all of these affects through the overarching category of happiness. The theme of happiness is expected to play a pivotal role in his forthcoming Immanence of Truths, whose main problematic concerns how being and the world look like from the perspective of truths, not how truths are and appear from the perspective of being and the world. From the viewpoint of truths, nothing is more concrete and intensive than happiness is, and philosophy-induced happiness allows us to experience

491 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, p. 67. 220

the existing world in a different way. Here, the antiphilosophical act that pits the experiential drama of life against the formal system of concept is sublated into the philosophical operation. Through the traversal of antiphilosophy, philosophy not only contends that the true life with happiness is a matter of the becoming subject of truth but also shows that the true life with happiness is not only a matter of conceptual demonstration but also of immanent experience. Based on the adamant conviction that the subject of truth is the happiest in his/her life, philosophy moves from the theory of the true life to the experience of lived truths. As Badiou puts it, philosophy “goes from the life that proposes the existence of truths to the life that makes of this existence a principle, a norm, an experience.”492

Also notable is the fact that Immanence of Truths is expected to address how the affects of truth are not only compossible but also interlaced. The interlacing of the affects of truths seems to be a natural consequence, for one can doubt that the amorous joy in a total indifference to the political issue deserves the category of happiness, let alone whether it is possible. Love opens up an underrepresented approach to politics precisely because it is neither political nor antipolitical. Moreover, the purification or absolutization of the amorous joy serves the preservation of preestablished norms under the category of individual satisfaction. If a purified amorous joy as private satisfaction is equated with happiness, this is because the dominant worldly law encourages and promotes such an equation. For instance, if “the balance between work and life” or “success through self-improvement” is regarded as the formula of happiness, this is because it fits into the logic of capitalism. The point is not that a lover must be a revolutionary but that happiness is redefined in relation to the worldly law that affects both love and politics. To expand Saint Just’s proclamation that “happiness is a new idea in Europe,” happiness will eternally have remained a new idea for anyone who finds that any pre-established law, whether existential or political, no longer holds out. The Badiouian happiness is thus not reduced or limited to amorous joy or political enthusiasm. Rather, it boils down to the co-existence of amorous joy and political enthusiasm, including the possibility of a rare link of the two.

This brings us into another Badiouian critical diagnosis of love in Tony Takitani. Yves-saint Laurent states, “Wearing is a way of life (s’habiller est un mode de vie).” For Tony’s wife, wearing trendy clothes (s’habiller à la mode) is the only way of life (and of death). The series

492 Alain Badiou, Métaphysique du bonheur réel, Paris: PUF, 2015, p. 83. 221

of new clothes serve as the masquerade that interrupts her access to the truly subjective life because her life is subject to the capitalist logic of the endless circuit between production and consumption so that as soon as new clothes are on sale, she has to purchase them. Her shopping addiction is the paradigmatic case that proves that capitalism produces not only purchasable objects but also symptomatic subjects. Moreover, let us note that Tony himself is attracted to her way of wearing, that it makes him “happy” to see his wife looking pretty, and that the clothes play a pivotal role in triggering the end of their love and of her life. In this regard, the clothes act as a cupid in their love. It provokes their love, maintains it for a while, and suddenly terminates it at its will. Tony and his wife do not know the extent to which their love is involved in consumer capitalism. In this regard, they are far from what Badiou calls the minimal communism, or communism of the Two. Affected by capitalism and its product, their love does not attain happiness. The possible link between amorous joy and political enthusiasm is blocked out, and the dominant law of the world reduces happiness to a consumable item that causes the pathological symptom.

In fact, the philosophical thesis of happiness emerges as the outcome of the dialogue between antiphilosophy and philosophy. In Happiness, the antiphilosopher brought up as the partner of this dialogue is Kierkegaard. Accepting the Kierkegaardian ideas of choice, encounter, the absolute, and objective uncertainty, Badiou notes that the antiphilosopher’s lesson is that existence is capable of evoking a subjective possibility of becoming a part of the untimely truth. Our existence does not perfectly conform to the dominant contemporary ideology. It can be traversed by a contingent encounter, forced to choose between life and death, encouraged to participate in the absolute. Our existence contains numerous opportunities for us to live subjective lives. Appropriating Kierkegaard’s equivalence between the choice of despair and the choice of the absolute, Badiou even affirms that “some amount of despair is the condition for real happiness.”493 Despair as the loss of the preexisting identity constitutes the path for obtaining access to the absolute, the path of becoming a subject. The semblance of happiness as an imaginary satisfaction makes us prefer normative and illusive hope to exceptional and real despair. However, happiness does not lie in a self-contained state of keeping one’s distance from risks and adventures. Happiness lies only in the process of paying the price of despair and passing through sore ordeals.

493 Ibid., p. 39. 222

Now, despite some affinities between Lacan and Kierkegaard as an antiphilosopher, what matters for our discussion is the dialogue between Lacanian antiphilosophy and Badiouian philosophy concerning the issue of happiness, which is missing in Badiou’s discussion. Let us construct this dialogue.

In Seminar VII, Lacan points out that the analysand’s aspiration for happiness is aimed at a mirage like “the possession of all women for a man and of an ideal man for a woman.”494 On the one hand, a masculine illusion exists regarding the despotic father of the primal horde who possesses every woman with his extraordinary virility. On the other hand, a feminine illusion exists regarding the omnipotent man who is not subordinate to castration and provides her with jouissance. Consequently, both sides are under the spell of a masculine ideal. Happiness here comes down to a fantasy that the all-powerful phallus drives. In Seminar XVII, Lacan provides a formulation that directly links happiness to the phallus: “The only happiness is the happiness of the phallus.”495 The agent of happiness is the phallus. Although woman is originally excluded from the happiness of the phallus, man’s situation is not so different. Man as the bearer of the phallus attempts to alleviate woman’s privation of the phallus. However, man’s handling of the phallus is immature, so man only ends up reminding woman of her privation. While the phallus serves as a medium through which to put a bridge between the two sexes, the operation of the phallus is fundamentally imperfect. Therefore, both sexes remain unsatisfied and disconcerted, for “one of them doesn’t have and the other doesn’t know what to do with [the phallus.]”496

In Seminar XVI, Lacan equates happiness with surplus jouissance. Lacan asks, “If this Pascal […] does not know what he is saying when he speaks about a happy life [,] […] what else is graspable under the term of happy if not precisely this function incarnated in the surplus jouissance?”497 Surplus jouissance is something that is obtained as a local compensation in the global loss of jouissance. One can get surplus jouissance only insofar as one initially renounces jouissance. It is a secondary gain for a primary loss. “The means of jouissance are open on the principle that he has renounced this closed, foreign jouissance, renounced the

494 Lacan, SVII, p. 303. 495 Lacan, SXVII, p. 73. 496 Ibid., p. 76. 497 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVI : From an other to the Other, 1968–1969, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Seuil, 2006, p. 23. 223

mother.”498

In sum, although only the happiness of the phallus exists, what the subject can obtain is an alienated form of happiness as surplus jouissance. For Lacan, happiness is something that is fundamentally restricted and partially authorized.

However, let us not forget to read the inverse side of this antiphilosophical sarcasm. Behind the pessimistic irony regarding happiness, one could recognize a rigorous sobriety that remains vigilant with regard to the illusionistic semblance of happiness. As we have noted, the analytic act does not make the analyst happy, and the same also applies to the analysand. However, the analytic act disillusions the fantasy about happiness. In his response to the analysand who asks for happiness, “the analyst knows that it [the question of the sovereign good as happiness] is a question that is closed. Not only doesn’t he have that sovereign good that is asked of him, but he also knows there isn’t any.”499 The analyst’s response makes the analysand penetrate the inexistence of pseudo-happiness, understood as individual comfort that the pre-established norm of sovereign good determines. What is at stake here is not pre- ordained happiness but rather the limit of desire that problematizes any pseudo-happiness. For happiness, there is no such thing as some model or ideal. One had better stay true to the unknown path of one’s desire beyond the normative and programmatic path of happiness. For Lacan, who does not propose a positive doctrine of happiness, happiness would probably come through only the subjective daring of not giving up one’s desire with some price. Modern psychology, which presents a doctrine of happiness in terms of the ego, consciousness, natural development, and behavior, leads man to “harmony with himself as well as to approval from the world on which his happiness depends.”500 As long as this happiness stems from approval from the world, it belongs only to “the field of conformity and even of social exploitation.”501 Consequently, “man no longer knows how to find the object of his desire and no longer encounters anything but unhappiness in his search, living in an anguish that progressively shrinks what one might call his chance to invent.”502 In contrast,

498 Lacan, SXVII, p. 78. 499 Lacan, SVII, p. 300. 500 Lacan, “Discourse to Catholics,” in The Triumph of Religion, trans. Bruce Fink, Cambridge: Polity, 2013, p. 10. 501 Ibid. 502 Ibid. 224

psychoanalysis observes that man can acquire access to happiness only by working through desire as his truth and by inventing a subjective happiness beyond psychic laws and social norms.

Coming back to Tony Takitani, it would have been much better from the analytic perspective if Tony and his wife had launched into the process of exploring her subjective real so that she could figure out why she is entangled in the symptom of addictive shopping. He should have allowed her to ask for herself whether her shopping serves the reinforcement of her personal myth about happiness, whether her sovereign good as consumptive happiness is possible only with the “service of goods” as fashionable clothes. He should have given her a chance to think about whether her happiness is nothing but a luscious illusion regarding the omnipotence of her ego and an impotent enslavement to social norms, shorn of her subjective capacity to invent a new happiness for herself. Although this might be too much for Tony, who is not an analyst, this nevertheless is precisely what is required for their amorous process to last and move forward. This is also what Badiou’s philosophy suggests for every subject of love. Reorienting her from individual satisfaction to real happiness, inviting her to elaborate the consequences of their encounter rather than sticking to her preexisting identity as a fashion lover, and encouraging her to transform what was impossible in her world (amorous joy in and against jouissance) to a new possibility, all of these constitute the difficult yet categorical task of the subject of love who turns toward happiness.

In sum, beyond the tension between antiphilosophy and philosophy concerning happiness, there is an active dialogue between the two. The philosophical articulation of happiness is a product of that dialogue. Whereas the analytic act stops at the point of untimeliness where the semblance of happiness as a pre-ordained norm is revealed and criticized, the philosophical operation affirms the positive link between untimely truths and happiness. For the former, what matters is a deconstruction of pseudo-happiness. For the latter, a reconstruction of real happiness must be tackled. An analysis of deceptive happiness and an articulation of true happiness are twins. And these twins can be juxtaposed, as in the last phrase of Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said: “No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness.”503 Once one says “no” to what dominant norms of happiness dictate one and orient oneself toward the untimely truths, one will see that happiness lies in the void where

503 Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said, London: John Calder, 1982, p. 59. 225

the norms stumble and fall. Moving a little bit further ahead, one will see that real happiness can arrive only with the tenacious subjective creation.

The Interlacing of Antiphilosophy and Philosophy From the perspective of this thesis, the dialogue between antiphilosophy and philosophy testifies to the possible interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. Let us flesh out this interlacing by drawing some consequences, first, from the dialogue between the antiphilosophical symptom and the philosophical truth, then, from the dialogue between antiphilosophical act and the philosophical operation.

Antiphilosophy first claims that love is affected by the symptom as the subjective real, and that the symptomatic love is, in fact, a rare kind of love for the human animal. Philosophy here responds that a love exists that goes beyond the symptomatic love. Notably, Lacan once suggested a dimension that is delivered from the influence of the symptom. Concerning the question about the possibility of being cured of neurosis, Lacan states, “Psychoanalysis is successful when it clears the ground, goes beyond symptoms, goes beyond the real. That is to say, when it touches the truth.”504 Here, the usual Lacanian preference for the real over truth is inversed. Touching the truth to which the subject did not previously want to admit, by going beyond the symptomatic real, characterizes the success of psychoanalysis. However, this rarely happens because the symptom, which is already full integrated into the core of subjectivity, is resistant to the logic of cure. For this reason, a change of perspective is required. Analysis should also consider what to do if the symptom remains incurable. Following the Freudo-Lacanian problematic that the analyst should take precaution not to sink into some therapeutic ambition or reparative drive, the analyst should focus on a way in which to stabilize the link between the incurable symptom and subjectivity via the sinthome. The success or failure of psychoanalysis, then, does not depend on the removal of the symptom but rather on the subjectivization through the sinthome.

What is notable is that this is precisely what the operation of the Badiouian truth implies. According to Badiou, “all creations, all novelties, are in some sense the affirmative part of a

504 Lacan, “Freud à jamais,” interview by Emilia Granzatto in Panorama, November 21, 1974. 226

negation.”505 Truth requires negation because it cannot fit into the existing law of the world. At the same time, truth requires affirmation because if truth is a pure negation of the law, this implies that truth is actually dependent on the law concerning its constitution and identity. To use the distinction between being and existence, the truth implies that “there is supplementation of being and destruction of existence,”506 for the truth supplements being affirmatively and destroys the existing regime of existence negatively.

The same is also true of the sinthomatic subjectivization. It is negation because the subject interrupts the existing unconscious structure that repeats the symptomatic jouissance, and because the subject sustains itself without resorting to the Name-of-the-Father as the established law of subjectivity. At the same time, it is affirmative because the subject no longer entertains a negative relationship with his/her symptom but rather incorporates the symptom into the indispensable core of his/her subjectivity by taking responsibility for it and inventing a way in which to live with it. In this regard, let us say that the interlacing of the Lacanian symptom and the Badiouian truth is distilled into the following form: sinthomatic truth.

In his lecture at Yale University in 1975, Lacan distinguished three types of truths in terms of his three orders. “If I distinguish real, symbolic, and imaginary, it is indeed that there are real, symbolic, and imaginary truths. If there are truths about the real, it is indeed that there are truths that one does not admit to oneself.”507 Taking one step further, one could posit that there are also sinthomatic truths, as truths that one admits to oneself by working through one’s symptomatic real. In fact, Tony Takitani shows a notable case of the formation of a sinthomatic truth in which Tony incorporates his symptomatic real of solitude into his new subjectivity.

Tony’s solitude has a personal and intergenerational background, related to his father, Shozaburo Takitani. The novel describes two big events in Shozaburo’s life. He is one of only two Japanese prisoners in China during the wartime to get out of the prison alive and return

505 Alain Badiou, “Destruction, Negation, Subtraction: On Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Graduate Seminar, Art Center of Design in Pasadena, UCLA, February 6, 2007. 506 Alain Badiou and Brune Bosteels, “Can Change Be Thought?: A Dialogue with Alain Badiou” in Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions, ed. Gabriel Reira, New York: SUNY Press, 2005, p. 249. 507 Lacan, “Conférences et entretiens dans les universities nord-américaines,” November 24, 1975 at Yale University. 227

to Japan. Then, he meets a woman and marries her; she is going to be Tony’s mother. She gives birth to a boy, and three days later, she dies, as if fading into nothingness. What is important here is the way in which Shozaburo accepts and reacts to these events. When he returns to Japan, he is alone in the world. But he tells himself that “everyone ended up alone sooner or later,” and “no further emotion welled up inside him”508 Similarly, when his wife suddenly dies, he does not know how to face it. “He was a stranger to such emotions,” feeling as if “some kind of flat, disc-like thing had lodged itself in his chest.”509 If his unusual name and his immersion in work bring the symptomatic solitude to Tony, the experience of the war and the loss of his wife bring the symptomatic solitude to Shozaburo. The father is lonely as much as the son is, and loneliness breaks no squares for them. As Murakami describes, “being the kind of people they were, neither took the initiative to open his heart to the other. Neither felt a need to do so. Shozaburo Takitani was not well suited to being a father, and Tony Takitani was not well suited to being a son.”510 In this regard, as the novel proceeds with a series of events, such as the father’s experience of the war, his marriage, his wife’s death, the son’s childhood, the son’s love, and the end of his love, one can recognize a structural repetition of the symptomatic solitude beyond the generational gap. In psychoanalysis, we have a similar case, the case of the Rat Man.

In Lacan’s linguistic elaboration of Freudianism, the symptom has a signifying structure. In the case of the Rat Man, his symptom is constituted by the series of signifiers, such as Ratten (rat), Spielratte (gambler), Raten (installments), and Heiraten (marry). What matters is that all of these signifiers with the common denominator of “rat” relate to his father in one way or another. The Rat Man is afflicted with the obsessive thought that his father and his lover can be tormented by the horrifying rat punishment. He regards his father as a gambler because his father has lost his military rank due to his misappropriation of money for gambling. He wishes that his father would die and then leave some money for him to marry. He desperately seeks a way in which to give the money for his glasses to an officer (A) to redeem his father’s sin of not paying his debt to his friend. Finally, he faces the same situation as that of his father, in which one has to choose between a poor lover and a wealthy marriage partner. The point here is not merely about locating the Rat Man’s ambivalence toward his father and his

508 Murakami, TT, p. 186. 509 Ibid., pp. 187–188. 510 Ibid., p. 189. 228

identification with his father. Rather, the point is to recognize how the unconscious repeats and transposes itself with a transgenerational and topological logic. As Lacan states, “He [the Rat Man] is descended from a legendary past. This prehistory reappears via the symptoms that represent that pre-history in an unrecognizable form, […]; it is rewritten without the modification of the liaisons like a figure in geometry is transformed from a sphere to a plane.”511 A sphere and a plane are different, but topologically, they have the same value. Likewise, despite the difference in space and time, the impasses and crises of the father’s life dramatically reappears in the son’s life. The symptoms return like mythic hieroglyphics to be decoded transhistorically. The unconscious rewrites itself beyond the generational gap, determining each subject’s life.

The same is true of the case of Tony Takitani. Let us turn to two structural factors that determine each individual’s life yet remains unintelligible to them. The first thing is the war. Tony does not experience the war in person, as his father does. However, Shozaburo gives the name “Tony,” which is, in fact, the first name of Shozaburo’s friend, an American major who suggests this name. The war serves as the structural link between the father and the son, although the former has experienced the war and the latter is nominated by it. The second thing is the loss of the love. In fact, Shozaburo cannot even think about giving his son a name due to the shocking death of his wife. His loss of love is so traumatic so that it makes him oblivious to the nomination of his son. Notably, just as Shozaburo faces his wife’s sudden death, Tony faces his wife’s sudden death when he is at the point of taking a glimpse at her subjective real. His loss of love is so traumatic so that it makes him search for a facile substitution rather than working through the process of mourning. In this regard, two structural factors exist–the war and the loss of love–and these factors cause symptomatic solitudes both in the father’s life and in the son’s life beyond the spatiotemporal difference.

But the end of the novel suggests that the topological repetition of the structural variables is not the whole story. It takes a while for Tony to get over the loss of his wife. But finally, he disposes of all of his wife’s clothes, the special leftover, which had earlier provoked his fantasy about his wife. And two years after his wife dies, Tony Takitani’s father also dies. All his father has left is a collection of old jazz records. Tony leaves the records in the same room where his wife’s clothes are. What is notable is that the records begin to bother him more and

511 Jacques Lacan, “Les clefs de la psychanalyse: Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal,” L’Express 310 (May 31, 1957). Available from: www.valas.fr/Jacques-Lacan-Les-clefs-de-la-psychanalyse,181 229

more, causing insomnia for Tony. Although Murakami’s minimalist style does not tell us more about the reason for this, one can read here that Tony is experiencing the process of what Lacan calls separation, the separation from his father as the Other who is assumed to be responsible for Tony’s symptom in a topological sense. It is not the case that Shozaburo is a contributor to Tony’s solitude. The contributor is the intergenerational, topological unconscious, which is why his father is “assumed” to be responsible for it. With the love for his wife, Tony feels the weight of solitude. Similarly, for the first time, Tony feels the “weight” of memories about his father that the old records signify. Murakami writes, “His memories had grown indistinct, but they were still there, where they had always been, with all the weight that memories can have.”512 Finally, Tony disposes of those records, and the novel ends: “Once the mountain of records had disappeared from his house, Tony Takitani was really alone.”513 Tony’s solitude is no longer attributed to his father. He comes to be independent from the Other as the preconstituted ground of his truth. He is confronted with solitude as his own truth. Tony Takitani is “really alone,” delivered from the loneliness within the field of the symbolic Other. He is without the Other, separated from the given, inherited, and transposed unconscious. As long as his solitude becomes his own truth, his solitude is no longer symptomatic but rather sinthomatic. His solitude is negative because he bids farewell to the given unconscious by disposing of his father’s records. At the same time, his solitude is affirmative because he recognizes the weight of solitude. Moreover, by disposing of his wife’s clothes as well, Tony gets over the loss of love, which amounts to a novelty, in comparison with his father’s life. This novelty will definitely play a pivotal role in his life and possibly in his love to come. His solitude, which may seem valueless for now, will enrich and deepen his new love. To appropriate Donald Winnicott’s term, one could state that Tony’s solitude, which hitherto has resembled an anesthetic withdrawal, finally turns into “the capacity to be alone.” Although he was never alone but rather was always with his father, who structured his withdrawal through the bequeathing of the unconscious, once his father and his father’s records are gone, Tony is now given a chance to bear the capacity to be alone. If his symptomatic solitude always makes Tony connect to his father, his sinthomatic solitude separates Tony from his father and opens up a subjective space. Or, to use Arendt’s distinction between loneliness as being abandoned by others and solitude as two-in-one or

512 Murakami, TT, p. 202. 513 Ibid., p. 203. 230

one’s capacity to be together with oneself,514 if Tony was lonely (abandoned even by his father and aware only of involvement but not of love) prior to his love, he finally faced solitude as the co-presence of the symptomatic real and the sinthomatic truth within his subjectivity.515 Inducing the division between loneliness and solitude, his love for his wife, albeit in its tragic and misfired ending, paves the way for his subjective truth. In sum, Tony Takitani ends with Tony’s subjectivization of his sinthomatic truth.

Of course, Tony does not attain the amorous truth in the properly Badiouian sense. But he does get access to a bit of subjectively novel truth, which we can call a post-amorous truth as a foundation for love to come. Besides that, his case fits well into the Badiouian vision that an amorous truth goes beyond the familial law. A name plays a pivotal role in the relationship between the amorous truth and the familial law. In fact, the connection between name and love is a well-known theme.

Juliet: O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.516

In Juliet’s eyes, when Romeo is Romeo and Juliet is Juliet, their love is hopeless, and it will be thwarted by the familial law. By contrast, only when Romeo is no longer Romeo from Montague and Juliet is no longer Juliet from Capulet, love ruptures the law, and the subject of love is born. The subject of love cannot be named with his/her present name. The subject is responsible for inventing an amorous proper name, which would be indiscernible from love itself. Thus, Romeo replies with the following: “I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized.” According to Juliet, an amorous name can be any name because a rose would smell the same when it is called by any other name. An amorous name is constituted by the nexus of a proper name and any name. For Romeo and Juliet, love is the creation of a name that cuts across singularity and whatever else.

514 Hannah Arendt, The Origin of , New York: Harvest Books, 1973, p.476. 515 One could state that while Joyce supplemented his lacking father or his phallic equipment by his art, Tony Takitani supplemented his loneliness rooted in his father’s loneliness by his solitude as a subjective novelty. 516 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II. 231

A name is important for Tony as well.517 Tony Takitani actually begins with the following: “Tony Takitani’s real name was really that: Tony Takitani.”518 The novel then describes Tony’s life and love, and it ends with the suggestion of Tony’s new subjectivization beyond the unconscious law. The point of the novel is to describe how Tony Takitani comes to have a subtractive and sinthomatic relationship with his name “Tony Takitani.” The end of the novel tells us that he is no longer “Tony,” an isolated man with an unusual name, for he has walked out of his long-term symptomatic solitude through an amorous event. He also no longer belongs to “Takitani,” for he has worked through the loss of love and subjectivated his own solitude so that he has stepped out of the transposed and topological unconscious. At the same time, as Tony comes to become “really alone,” untied from the familial law, Tony Takitani is subjectively affirmed as “Tony Takitani” in the end. His name is not merely negated but imbued with a new subjectivity. He is a new Tony different from the previous isolated Tony, a singular Takitani who differs from Shozaburo Takitani. Tony Takitani is a novel about a subtractive transfiguration of the name “Tony Takitani” into a subjective truth.

In sum, Tony Takitani is not purely Lacanian because whether Tony reaches the end of analysis through the identification with his sinthome remains unknown, nor is it purely Badiouian because whether he has created the amorous truth after touching his subjective truth remains unknown. Instead, it shows a case in which the psychoanalytic symptom and the philosophical truth can be interlaced in the form of a sinthomatic truth. It starts with the given Tony Takitani and ends with the new Tony Takitani, which is why it would draw the attention of both psychoanalysis and philosophy.

One can recognize in the novel another subjective change concerning Tony’s wife. Let us address it through the second interlacing of antiphilosophy and philosophy, the interlacing of analytic act and philosophical operation.

According to Badiou, antiphilosophers can be distinguished in terms of their subject matter and the characteristics of their acts. For Nietzsche, the subject matter is art (tragedy, poetry, music), but his act is archipolitical because he proposes a “great politics” that can break the history into two halves and thus revolutionize the entire humanity in the form of “overman.”

517 This also applies to the Joycean sinthome: “Joyce has a symptom that starts off from the fact that his father was a failing father, […] it was in wanting a name for himself that Joyce came up with a compensation for the paternal failing.” Lacan, SXXIII, p. 77. 518 Murakami, TT, p. 184. 232

For Wittgenstein, the subject matter is science (logic, mathematics), but his act is archiaesthetic because he draws a line of demarcation between the scientific sayable and its beyond (which Wittgenstein refers to with various terms, such as “the sense of the world,” “the problem of life,” “the mystical element,” and “value”), claiming that one can remain silent only before the latter. For Lacan, the subject matter is love (“linchpin of psychoanalysis”), but his act is archiscientific because he points out science’s ignorance about the unconscious subject, employs mathemes as what lies beyond the mathematizable, and affirms that the analyst is more conversant to the real than the scientist.

One can recognize that one type of act is missing here: an archiamorous act. While neither Lacan nor Badiou employ the notion of an archiamorous act, one could elaborate it in relation to the act of Tony’s wife, the analytic act, and the philosophical operation. Let us begin by confirming two features of an archiamorous act.

First, different from the other types of acts, an archiamorous act is not antiphilosophy’s exclusive property for defying and subverting philosophy. On the contrary, it has a positive connection with philosophy. After all, a philosophical operation is also a kind of act. It is an act of seizing artistic creation, scientific , political invention, and amorous adventure through the empty category of truth. As Badiou writes, “Philosophy is never an interpretation of experience. It involves the act of Truth with regard to truths.”519 If philosophy as an act of Truth seizes truths, it is because philosophy is first and foremost seized and attracted by truths. Philosophy loves singular truths as its own conditions. Philosophy enacts a particular form of love based on the fact that not just opinions and conventions, languages and bodies, but also truths exist. Philosophy is an archiamorous act toward truths.

Second, an archiamorous act reminds us of the simple and yet crucial point that love never concerns an abstract reverie but rather a concrete life. Concerning this point, a sober confession of a character in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky is worth referring to: “I would often arrive at fervent plans of devotion to mankind and might very possibly have gone to the Cross for human beings, had that been suddenly required of me, and yet I am unable to spend two days in the same room with someone else, and this I know from

519 Badiou, C, p. 24. 233

experience.”520 It is all too easy to invoke universal love, but it seems all too hard or even impossible to get along well with one person. Too many people talk about love in fancy, but too little actually practice love in action. A great paradox thus arises: “The more I love mankind in general, the less I love human beings in particular.”521 In this regard, an archiamorous act does not refer to some radical act that lays a foundation for love. It rather emphasizes how arduous and perilous dealing with love in actuality is, and it confirms that love resides in the act of a ceaseless reinvention.

Now, let us discuss how one can elicit an archiamorous act in relation to Tony’s wife’s act of returning dresses via the analytic act. After confessing to Tony that she cannot stop buying dresses, she adds: “I will, though, try to cure myself.”522 But the analyst would not simply accept this will to be cured at face value because the symptom makes her get off on the act of shopping rather than giving up on it. The act of shopping provides her with a pathological satisfaction that covers up her subjective real. It is not easy for one to give up such satisfaction. For this reason, the analyst’s attention moves toward what Lacan calls mental sickness (maladie mentale) or mental debility (débilité mentale).

The Lacanian mental sickness is distinguished from psychiatric, cognitive, and organic deficiency. In fact, there is no such thing as mental sickness as a separated clinical category or a substantial nosological entity. Rather, mentality is marked by intrinsic flaws. “It is not at all an entity, mental sickness. It is rather the mentality which has flaws.”523 Despite the psychiatric and psychological project about “mental hygiene,” man’s mentality remains constitutively ill. How does then Lacan approach to this problem? It is approached by the imaginary and the symbolic. First, “there is something that makes the speaking being destined to mental sickness. And this is but a result from the notion of the imaginary […].”524 The speaking being is destined to mental sickness because of the imaginary. As we have discussed, Tony’s wife is incarcerated in the prison of her symptomatic jouissance because she is pathologically attached to her body image. And the body image is of the order of the

520 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff, New York: Penguin Classics, 1993, p. 79. 521 Ibid. 522 Murakami, TT, p. 196. 523 Lacan, SXIX, p. 224 (June 21, 1972). 524 Lacan, “La Troisième,” given at the VII Congress of the EFP in Rome, October 31, 1974. Available from: www.valas.fr/Jacques-Lacan-La-Troisieme-en-francais-en-espagnol-en-allemand,011 234

ego as a little master. The more the ego wields its power with (mis)recognized knowledge (connaissance), the more the subject becomes the servant. As Lacan states, “the relationship of man to a world of his own … has never been anything but an affectation at the service of the discourse of the master.”525 Serving this omnipotent and illusionary master, her life is fixated on “ignorance” as the strongest passion of being. She is ignorant of her unconscious truth. Her life covers up the subjective real with a fantasmatic substitute. Let us note that ignorance always feeds on a stable meaning, which is another component of the imaginary. Because the real is devoid of meaning and aim, it provokes anxiety and helplessness. Instead of grappling with the real, the speaking being all too often depends on the imaginary, reducing the real meaningless to the imaginary meaning. Nature does not abhor a vacuum; it is a speaking being who abhors a vacuum, filling it and repressing it with meaning. The discourse of meaning is called religion. Here, Lacan disagees with the Freudian idea of the victory of science over religion. “You will see that humanity will be cured of psychoanalysis. By drowning the symptom in meaning, in religious meaning naturally, people will manage to repress it.”526 The symptom is often incurable because, once the symptom feeds on meaning and becomes heavy and serious for the ego, it is hard to eradicate it. For Tony’s wife as well, her symptom would be drowned in personally constructed mythical meanings. We can state that her life prior to the encounter with Tony would have been rather peaceful and harmonious with the repression of the symptom through meaning–It is her love for Tony that disturbs this imaginary harmony. It is an open question whether Tony’s wife would have been cured of her symptom had she been alive. What is certain is that she is not an exception to the speaking being’s slipping in the imaginary, which causes her mental weakness.

Mental weakness is also a matter of the symbolic. Although the speaking being’s life and history revolve around the unconscious knowledge, one does not know how to manage it. The unconscious resides “in him like a canker,”527 like a cantankerous canker. The signifier effects capture and surprise one in a place where one does not expect it. The signifier puts one in a place where one repeats one’s actions and thoughts without knowing why. As with the Rat Man, the signifier reigns over one’s life topologically from a legendary past. Lacan states, “Man does not know what to do with the knowledge. This is what I called his mental

525 Lacan, SXIX, June 21, 1972 (unpublished). 526 Lacan, The Triumph of Religion, p. 67. 527 Lacan, SXXI, June 11, 1974 (unpublished). 235

weakness from which I do not except myself. […] This ‘to be able to deal with (savoir y faire)’ indicates that one does not turn the thing into a concept. This leads us to pushing the door of certain philosophies”528 To be able to deal with mental weakness is an antiphilosophical project. If one turns this practice into a concept, then one is doing a philosophy. Philosophy represses the lack of being with substantial being supported by paranoiac, imaginary knowledge (connaissance). Moreover, philosophy is blind to the fact that mentality revolves around the signifier and jouissance, not transparent thought. By pretending to overcome mental weakness, philosophy is rather enchanted by the illusion of intelligence. For her part, Tony’s wife does know that she does not need this much clothing. But this knowledge has an alienating rather than emancipating effect on her, for it cannot change her mental weakness. “Whether I need it or not, or whether I have too many or not: that’s beside the point. I just can’t stop myself.”529 Therefore, transmitting or indoctrinating the knowledge that she does not need much clothing, which amounts to how philosophy works in Lacan’s eyes, worsens the situation. One cannot penetrate her subjective truth with the objective knowledge. For the Lacanian analyst, it is not the case that “I need.” Rather, “it needs.” Thus, an attempt to rectify the “I” of consciousness according to the norms of normality necessarily misses the mark. The intervention has to happen at the level of “it” of the unconscious, and what is at stake is to subjectivize this enigmatic “it.” The analyst would point out that the first thing to do is to acknowledge that our mentality is steeped in an unruly structure like a canker, and that objective and imposed knowledge cannot cure the canker.

How can one manage to get by this intrinsic mental weakness, then? One could predict Lacan’s response: “One remains with thought, and acting by means of thought, it is something which is close to mental debility. There must exist an act which is not mentally debile. I try to produce this act in my teaching. But it is all the same only stammering.”530 For Lacan, thought always presupposes a subjective unity. When one acts by means of thought based on a subjective unity, it amounts to the repetition of one’s mental debility. Because this act happens without touching the unconscious truth, it can be called acting out (the repetition of the structure) rather than an act (the rupture of the structure). Now, the analyst tries to produce an act that is distinct from acting out. But how, then, can there be an

528 Lacan, SXXIV, January 11, 1977 (unpublished). 529 Murakami, TT, p. 196. 530 Lacan, SXXV, April 11, 1978 (unpublished). 236

act that is not mentally sick? Lacan states, “The mental sickness which is the unconscious does not wake up […] it is not sure that one is awake, unless what is presented and represented has no kind of meaning.”531 The analytic act is not mentally sick because it is conjoined with the meaningless real, which can present an unprecedented rupture with our meaningful reality. Only an act that touches on the real can awaken us from comfortable naps in our ordinary lives. Only this act can awaken us from the slumber of our preconstituted unconscious that enacts mental sickness like an automaton.

Now, while it is an open question whether the analytic act amounts to an archiamorous act or not, one could flesh out the notion of an archiamorous act via the analytic act as a reference point. An archiamorous act is a love-induced struggle with mental weakness through the assumption of one’s subjective real, which was hidden in ordinary life. In the case of Tony’s wife, her mental sickness lies in the nexus of the imaginary attachment to her body image and the shopping addiction as the acting out of her unconscious structure. After confessing her mental sickness, namely that she is helpless in front of new clothes, she promises to try to hold back. This act of holding back is diametrically opposed to her pre-amorous identity as revealed in her statement, “I like clothes.” Her archiamorous act is an attempt to detach herself from her attachment to clothes. But this act is neither evental nor faithful in the Badiouian sense. As in Lacan’s statement that the production of an act in the real is stammering, her act is only stammering, working poorly against the powerful structure of mental sickness. In fact, it cannot but be stammering because there is “no act of which one is a master.”532 An archiamorous act does not make the amorous subject into a master; far from it. It dissolves the identificatory solidity of the ego as a master, making the subject encounter and endure the real. Of course, enduring the real, unlike compromising with mental sickness, is an arduous task. In order to hold back, Tony wife’s “locked herself inside for a week, and managed to stay away from clothing stores. This was a time of great suffering for her.”533 In this regard, an archiamorous act does not prove that amorous power can go beyond mental weakness. It rather proves that we are encroached on and bitten by the ordeal of the real when we work back upon our mental sickness. Just as love is a limping march for Badiou, love is a stammering act for Lacan.

531 Lacan, SXXIV, May 17, 1977 (unpublished). 532 Lacan, SXV, January 24, 1968 (unpublished). 533 Murakami, TT, p.196. 237

Let us turn to how an archiamorous act can be approached through the philosophical operation. As we noted, what the philosophical operation ultimately aims at by capturing truths is an affirmation of happiness. In an interview on happiness, Badiou states that happiness is under threat today because the endless production and consumption of commodity in capitalism threatens the value of fidelity. The following diagnosis would not be applicable only to Tony’s wife, for “this obsession with the latest novelty-commodity, often disguised as fashion, is a phenomenon that strikes a blow against our happiness: in all its forms, loyalty is a value that is under threat.”534 All too often, happiness is on sale, and fidelity is no more than a loyalty card. While fashion is no more than a mere modification within the law of the world, fidelity constitutes a real change that draws consequences from an event. While fashion promotes imaginary satisfaction by regurgitating pseudo-novelty, fidelity proceeds to real happiness by creating a true novelty. In Badiou’s affirmation, “every real happiness is a fidelity.”535

Given that fidelity is not a dogma but a movement without any guarantee, it requires ceaseless subjective commitment and experimentation. In this regard, one could pose the following hypothesis: love as a fidelity-procedure consists of a series of archiamorous acts. It is not power, money, sexuality, or symptom, but archiamorous acts, which maintain love without any predestined law and enliven love as a truth-process. In the case of Tony’s wife, she attempted to move from the logic of fashion to the logic of fidelity. Her acts of locking herself inside, staying away from clothing shop, and returning the clothes constitute an attempt to be faithful to love and to undo her symptomatic attachment to shopping. With these amorous acts, she dared to be loyal to her amorous community, not to adorable commodities. With these acts, she headed toward the real happiness cloaked in her clothes.

In addition to happiness as fidelity, the subject of happiness can be characterized in three other ways.536 First, the subject of happiness creates an immanent exception through a nexus of discipline and freedom. Tony’s wife used to live in a world whose law dictates democratic materialism such that there are only bodies, bodies that can take pleasure in the freedom of consumption. The key operation of this law lies in the superegoic injunction that one’s body

534 Alain Badiou, “Badiou’s Happiness Lesson,” interview by Nicolas Truong, trans. David Broder. Available from: www.versobooks.com/blogs/2192-badiou-s-happiness-lesson. 535 Badiou, Métaphysique du bonheur réel, p. 50. 536 Ibid., p. 51–53. 238

is not only solicited to be dressed in various ways but also pathologically attachable to the endless ways of dressing oneself. One is free only within the parameters of the law. With her archiamorous acts, she makes an immanent exception to this world of democratic materialism. She still belongs to the world in which the freedom of consumption is preserved, but, at the same time, she is no longer enslaved to the law of the world and comes out of her symptomatic consumption. She takes a step toward another type of freedom, not a consumer’s or proprietor’s pseudo-freedom enslaved to satisfaction, but a lover’s freedom that is possible only with his/her subjective fidelity to the amorous truth, as is indicated by the “feeling of lightness at having returned the pieces.”537 Second, the subject of happiness is not circumscribed within a preexisting identity. Prior to her encounter with Tony, she was a young lady who liked clothes and most of whose pay went toward clothing. With her archiamorous act, a surnumerary identity as a lover is born, which was unrepresentable by her previous identity. Before the amorous process, her identity consisted of a shopping body. With the amorous act, a body of the amorous truth that grapples with a symptomatic body is appended to her identity. Third, the subject of happiness discovers something that one is capable of, which was previously looked upon as what one is incapable of. In other words, the subject of happiness experiences a permeable relationship between the infinite and the finite. To use Badiou’s distinction again, while “waste” refers to the finite that is stuck onto itself, “work” refers to the finite that entertains a positive relationship with the infinite. Here, let us note that it is not Tony’s wife, but Tony himself who leans toward the logic of the waste, since what matters for him is to find a woman with dress-size 7 according to the logic of finite objectivity. The situation is different on the part of Tony’s wife. Although she was prey to the logic of the waste previously, her clothes subsequently take on a different value as a result of her attempted detachment from the individual commodity and engagement in the amorous community. Here, the clothes are no longer the waste of her symptom; they constitute the part of her archiamorous act. In this regard, Tony was not simply left with the article by the deceased. He was left with a fragment of her subjective labor. From the perspective of amorous labor, size 7 as a calculable objectivity does not matter. What matters is that the clothes are a token of her incalculable subjective work toward amorous fidelity.

However, the argument regarding the link between archiamorous act and real happiness seems to run into a serious objection, namely that an archiamorous act often provokes fatal

537 Murakami, TT, pp.196–197. 239

consequences. Badiou claims that real happiness is something that can be sought to the detriment of satisfaction. But one could ask what would happen if real happiness arrives at the expense of life itself, not merely satisfaction. As Badiou observes, by agreeing to psychoanalysis, it is true that satisfaction serves death drive, because, insofar as satisfaction correlates with the law as a limit (satisfaction is always temporary and conditioned), it also evokes the beyond of a limit and eventually the ultimate form of transgression, death. Yet, the problem is that happiness might accompany real death, not just the death drive, as in the case of Tony’s wife. On returning her clothes, all she could think about was the color and texture of the clothes–in vivid detail–that she had returned to the shop. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw the light change to green. Instinctively, stepping on the accelerator, she was hit by a truck trying to cross the intersection on a yellow light. Here, the question arises: Can one state that her archiamorous act moves toward real happiness even if it leads her to death?

The Badiouian response is affirmative. Happiness does not lie in the consequence of the act but the act itself. Happiness is neither potentiality nor full-blown actuality (entelecheia), but actuality in act (energeia). Even if the act entails a fatal consequence, happiness is present within the act and alive through the act. Without taking the fatal risk of an archiamorous act, there is no love. As in the Badiouian term of point, there is only one between the two options that can sustain the truth process. If Tony’s wife had driven back to the shop and retrieved her clothes, this would have constituted a retrogression to the symptom at the expense of love. Let us summon a properly Badiouian formula on this matter. “Better a disaster [désastre] than an unbeing [desêtre].” As Badiou explains in one interview, “Better run the risk of a disaster– but, therefore, also have the chance of real happiness–than forbid yourself that from the outset. What I call ‘unbeing’ is the human subject’s conservative disposition that pulls her back to her animal survival, to her mere satisfaction and place in society. ‘Unbeing’ is what forbids a subject from discovering what she is truly capable of.”538 Notably, unbeing originally refers to the non-ontological status of the Lacanian analyst at the end of analysis. At the beginning of an analysis, the analyst occupies the position of subject supposed to know, the subject who is supposed to have the master key to the analysand’s truth. During analysis, the analyst occupies the position of the object that causes the analysand’s subjective division

538 Badiou, “Badiou’s Happiness Lesson.” Available from: www.versobooks.com/blogs/2192-badiou-s- happiness-lesson. 240

and thus allows him to explore his unconscious truth on his own. At the end of analysis, the analysand finds out that that object is merely a semblance, that the being of the analyst is actually uninhabited. In this regard, the analyst only appears and disappears, cutting across being and nonbeing. The analyst’s unbeing escapes an ontological determination. In this regard, the Lacanian unbeing does not necessarily have negative overtones.

However, Badiou recasts the situation by equating unbeing with subjective conservatism. Unbeing is the shelter of those who argue for the inevitable virtue of the status quo and devaluate any radical act due to riskiness and uncertainty. Of course, as with the tragic death of Tony’s wife, one recognizes that happiness may run into catastrophes. The philosopher nevertheless affirms that it is better to dare to move toward happiness than settle for satisfaction. A disaster can definitely provoke despair and devastation, but without taking the risk of “des-astrum,” one loses the chance for the astral. In fact, this is a crucial lesson from the philosopher’s counterpart, the antiphilosopher. “The antiphilosopher recalls for us that a philosopher is … a lover, whose life is capable of capsizing for a woman or a man.”539 Indeed, Tony’s wife’s life was capable of capsizing for Tony; so too would have been numerous anonymous amorous subjects’ lives. In the eyes of a philosopher, the archiamorous act of Tony’s wife is enough to make her a faithful subject, a subject of happiness that outlives her biological life.

In sum, an archiamorous act marks the point at which antiphilosophy and philosophy intersect. An archiamorous act is both an act in the real in and against mental weakness and an act in the fidelity toward real happiness beyond the fear of disaster.

Let us conclude. On top of his references to mathematics, Lacan once invented a myth to approach the problem of love,540 which goes as follows: Once you see a beautiful flower in front of you, you extend your hand toward it. But suddenly the flower bursts into flames, and you see another hand in its stead extending toward your own hand. While what matters for Lacan here is the inexplicable real of unconscious desire as the mainspring of love,541 let us

539 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, p. 67. 540 In this regard, one could state that Lacanian love is not just mathematical but rather constituted by the gap between mathematics and myth. 541 “Love is what occurs in the object toward which we extend our hand owing to our own desire, and which, when our desire makes it burst into flames, allows a response to appear for a moment: the other hand that reaches toward us as its desire. This desire always manifests itself inasmuch as we do not know” (SVIII, p. 179). 241

not fail to recognize this myth’s antiphilosophical message concerning love. The moment we reach for love, it bursts into flames. No matter how hard one tries to reach for love, it is unreachable, insofar as love is affected by the opaque symptomatic real and susceptible to misfired amorous acts.

Badiou notes that the philosophical operation lies in “discerning” what is true and what is not true (what is merely veridical according to the law).542 But to discern a true love, one is required to pass through the revealed real and explore a possibility that was regarded as the impossible within the law of the world. Love is thus a subjective task to “cope with the consequences of an event and discover, under the dull and dreary existence in our world, the luminous possibilities offered by the affirmative real.”543 This illustrates the philosophical axiom about love. No matter how tortuous and risky love is, love is graspable, insofar as love is anchored in subjective fidelity and driven by metaphysical happiness.

In this regard, while antiphilosophy poses that love is unreachable, philosophy poses that love is graspable. Here, one could propose the following hypothesis by elaborating the interlacing of antiphilosophy and philosophy: Love is out of our reach when it is within our grasp, and love is within our grasp when it is out of our reach. Love is between “out of one’s reach” and “within one’s grasp.” This would explain what we can say about the love between Tony and his wife. Is Tony Takitani a truly love story? Are Tony and his wife in love? With his sinthomatic truth as solitude that arrives anew, Tony grasps love that is unreachable. With her archiamorous act against the shopping that exhausts her life, she reaches love that is ungraspable. In sum, they are in and out of love, as every lover would be.

542 Badiou, Métaphysique du bonheur réel, p. 68. 543 Ibid., p. 55. 242

Chapter 4 A Bacanian Love: Reading of Letter to D by André Gorz

Previous chapters have considered love through mathematics, politics, and (anti)philosophy from the perspective of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. Despite our attempt in the last section of each of the first two chapters to articulate the consequences implicit and unexplored in the two authors’ thoughts on love and to present new concepts of love, readers might have the impression that these chapters are primarily anchored in Lacan and Badiou rather than in love itself. The same seems also true of Chapter 3, despite our reference to the fictional yet specific love story by Murakami, for we mainly focused on what the interlacing of antiphilosophy and philosophy tells about love. This chapter was designed to complement this situation through the exploration of a real-life love story and the amorous subjects within the story. If the previous chapters move from the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou to love, this chapter moves in an inverse direction, from love to the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. Shifting from the Lacanian and Badiouian love to a love that weaves the Lacanian and the Badiouian, this chapter attempts to show how the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou can be manifested through a singular case. To this end, this chapter presents something like a “strong misreading” of Letter to D: A Love Story by French philosopher André Gorz, which succinctly narrates his lifelong amorous itinerary with Dorine. I will show that an exceptional love like the one between Gorz and Dorine straddles both the Lacanian side and the Badiouian side. Their love is a paradigmatic example that demonstrates how love occupies the position of an in-between (metaxú) between Lacan and Badiou. Let us read Gorz’s letter in seven categories that are crucial with regard to the problem of love: encounter, relation, process, symptom, power, death and life, and the idea.

Love begins with a contingent encounter that is irreducible to any existing law of the world. Gorz and Dorine’s story is no exception. Looking more closely, their story also reveals that an encounter is not transcendental but situated in the world. Since it is situated in the world, an encounter is vulnerable to the laws of the world. This suggests a possibility that even if an encounter actually happens, one can pretend that it did not occur. One can give up the event of an encounter according to the worldly laws that could repress or revoke its occurrence. An encounter can be contained and contaminated by the social law about what a good match is or 243

is not. Recalling his impression when he saw Dorine for the first time, who was then surrounded by three other men, Gorz writes, “when our eyes met, I thought: I don’t stand a chance with her.”544 This “I”, which signifiers Gorz’s self-image, is not a product of spontaneous self-constitution. His self-image is constituted by the pre-established identitarian logic of the world. This logic is recognized when the host explained to Dorine that Gorz “is an Austrian Jew. Totally devoid of interest.”545 The worldly law stipulates that a poor Austrian Jewish man and a pretty British girl do not match, which Gorz himself internalizes. However, there came another encounter, a purely evental encounter. One evening, they ran into each other again in the street. Gorz asked Dorine to go dancing and she accepted his proposal. An Austrian Jew became an interest for a beautiful British lady. An encounter now happens beyond the confines of the worldly law’s operation. Herein lies the miracle of an encounter, immanent to the world and yet exceptional to the worldly law. An encounter is unrepresentable by the law, and yet it happens. An encounter, easily contaminated by the law, ruptures the law. In sum, if their first encounter shows how the evental real is affected by the symbolic law, their second encounter shows how the evental real goes beyond the symbolic law.

In formal terms, their first encounter follows the Lacanian logic of the signifier in which a signifier cannot signify itself.546 A signifier cannot signify itself, for it always refers to another signifier. A signifier is not self-referential because it is always situated within the differential network of signifiers. Now, compare an amorous encounter to a signifier. The encounter as the signifier is not absolutely singular because it works in concert with other elements in the world (“a poor Austrian Jewish man” and “a pretty British girl”). Here, an amorous encounter is surrounded by the symbolic law. Meanwhile, their second encounter follows the Badiouian logic of the event in which a multiple belongs to itself. While the axiom of foundation as the law of set theory interdicts the self-belonging of a set, the 547 matheme of the event, ex { x / x ∈ X, ex } shows that a multiple (ex) belongs to itself. In

544 André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story, trans. Julie Rose, Cambridge: Polity, 2009, p. 4; hereafter referenced as LD. 545 Ibid. 546 “It is of the nature of each and every signifier not to be able in any case to signify itself” (SXIV, November 16, 1966 (unpublished)). 547 The matheme of the event is read as “the event of the site X (ex) is a multiple that is composed of elements of the site, and the event itself” (BE, 181). 244

this case, the encounter as the event is absolutely singular because it only refers to itself (“One evening, they ran into each other”). Here, an amorous encounter happens beyond the symbolic law in a purely evental fashion. In this regard, the amorous encounter between Gorz and Dorine alternates between the symbolic law and the real event.

Today, love often becomes a matter of security and safety within pre-established norms and identitarian logics. As in Badiou’s critique of the online dating site, the worldly law eviscerates the aleatory aspect of love. While Gorz and Dorine are affected by the worldly law, they also show that love begins with the untamable contingency of a disidentitarian encounter. If the enemy of love is, as Badiou observes, not a rivalry, but one’s own ego, one should go further and ask how this enemy conceals the Enemy, how ego is framed and produced by social norms. For Gorz and Dorine, however, an amorous encounter poses an aporia to the worldly norm concerning a good match. An amorous encounter is an anomalous exception to the assortative mating system. God loves odd numbers (Numero deus impare gaudet) because God himself aspires to be the transcendental One. Love loves odd numbers because it recognizes that the commencement of the Two is anchored in an unmatched and mismated encounter. Love is the encounter of an odd Two, evental and immanent, real and symbolic.

Love makes a certain relation. This relation is not a sexual relation between sexed beings or a personal relation between unified egos. It is a relation between two unconscious knowledges. As Lacan states, “all love is based on a certain relationship between two unconscious knowledges.”548 An amorous relation is a paradoxical relation, for it connects and disconnects two unconscious knowledges. Each subject is involved in this relation as he or she is determined by the unconscious knowledge. Not knowing what he or she says and desires in love, the subject makes a relation, not simply out of identifiable properties, but out of unconscious lack. One is attracted to and captivated by the other not merely at random, but according to unconscious logic. Amorous subjects resonate together because they feel like they share je ne sais quoi, because they feel like they belong together while coming from completely different backgrounds.

Gorz states that “we were both children of precariousness and conflict … We needed to create

548 Lacan, SXX, p. 144. 245

together, by being together, the place in the world that we’d originally been denied.”549 Children are placed in the world as they face, deny or accept, and overcome their parents’ secret desires and laws. The process of going through the parental law is equivalent to the process of occupying a place in the world of adults. However, both Gorz and Dorine had no place of their own in the world of adults, for they were not properly symbolized through the interaction with their parents, nor did they receive enough parental care. Dorine’s mother had left her to be raised by her godfather, and the catch here is that this godfather was presumably her real father. Dorine’s mother had relationships with several other men, including Dorine’s father. With Lacan, we could state that there was no Name-of-the-Father in Dorine’s unconscious. Dorine’s father failed to name the desire of Dorine’s mother, and there was only godfather who had to hide his real name. This failure (carence) of the paternal function leads to the incomplete institution of the stable meaning about her identity. For Gorz’s part, he was separated from his family due to the war when he was about sixteen years old. Gorz had to endure wartime alone in a foreign country, experiencing a severe level of isolation and anxiety. As he narrates, he found himself a total stranger to his family when he encountered them again. Moreover, Gorz changed his family name from Gerhardt Hirsch to André Gorz out of hatred for his father. As he writes in his autobiographical text The Traitor, he was “the abandoned” disconnected from the familial and parental world. In this regard, despite coming from different backgrounds, both Dorine and Gorz had what Gorz calls “the experience of insecurity,” the experience of not being endowed with a symbolic place in the world. As Gorz writes, “we had something fundamental in common, a sort of original wound.”550 As love is addressed to the unconscious knowledge, this original wound provokes the hidden, but intensive, bond of an amorous relation. The content of their unconscious knowledge was that the familial and parental order was inoperative and unreliable so that they could not find their place. It was only through their love that they could institute a place in the world, learning how to deal with their original wound. It was only through the overlapping of their unconscious knowledge that they made an amorous relation.

Both Gorz and Dorine were the subjects whose identities were not properly symbolized in their childhood. They had to symbolize themselves on their own, not through the inherited unconscious mechanism, but through their subjective love. The amorous relationship between

549 Gorz, LD, pp.17–18. 550 Ibid., p. 14. 246

Gorz and Dorine thus embodies the community of orphanhood. The community of orphanhood does not merely refer to the fact that they were not given good care by their parents. This community evokes that there is no such thing as a “proper” symbolization, which is closely related to the radical message of every subjective love. In love, there are only singular symbolizations, symbolizations that launch into the precarious but pertinacious adventure filled with the real points such as sexual difference, child, symptom, death, etc., all of which resist any facile and textbook symbolization. The fact that Gorz and Dorine were denied access to the world of adults rather reinforced and enlivened their amorous adventure. Because they had no place of their own in the world of adults, they could fully commit themselves to the world of love to come. Gorz and Dorine show that the subject of love is the insecure orphan without a familial lineage. The subject of love is quasi-psychotic because there is no predefined law of love, which creates both an opportunity and a challenge.

With Lacan, we found out that as a relation, love is addressed to the unconscious knowledge. With Badiou, we can add that as a process, love is devoted to the construction of an amorous world. Gorz writes to Dorine, “I was building a protected and protective world with you.”551 Love is not just about slightly different and common subjects but about a self-differential world that is continuously refashioned and reinvented. Love as a procedural two seeks to organize a world in which difference and commonality overlap. Love is not only a relation but a construction. In order to continue this constructive project, the subject has to grapple with some points. The way in which an amorous process unfolds depends on the way the subject works through these points.

One of the critical points in an amorous process is marriage. Baudelaire once noted that the church attempts to institutionally control eros through gamos. However, marriage is not merely a social convention, but a test imposed on the amorous subject, which explains why so many amorous processes are interrupted at the stage of marriage. Let us note that Gorz and Dorine also went through a conflict with regard to their marriage. For Gorz, marriage has nothing to do with love. “Love is the mutual fascination of two individuals based precisely on what is least definable about them, least socializable, most resistant to the roles and images of themselves that society imposes on them.”552 Like Baudelaire, Gorz viewed marriage as a

551 Ibid., p. 10. 552 Ibid., p. 25. 247

bourgeois convention and social formality’s vain attempts to tame the radically unsocial love. The antinomy between love as the unsocial and marriage as the social seemed irresoluble for Gorz. His perspective of marriage soon ran into Dorine’s severe opposition. If Gorz’s position was an ideological critique of love as marriage, Dorine’s position was a subjective wager on love through marriage. For Dorine, the antinomy between love and marriage is a pseudo problem to be dissolved. For Dorine, a truly amorous subject accepts and goes beyond the dilemmas and restraints that marriage brings to love. An amorous subject is both inside and outside the social. An amorous subject loves within marriage and without marriage. An amorous subject transforms the social cast into a material to be subjectively recast. As an amorous subject that she was, Dorine suggests that marriage not be discarded but be supplemented by love. Dorine says to Gorz, “building your life together as a couple is your common project and you never finish reinforcing it, adapting it, reshaping it to fit changing situations. We will be what we do together.”553 This is precisely what an amorous subject worthy of the name would declare if he/she is truly committed to the amorous process. Gorz and Dorine’s amorous process could go past marriage, thanks to Dorine’s adamant position as the subject of love. The marriage between Gorz and Dorine was not a , but a subjective pact, comprised of “loyalty, devotion, tender affection to the other for life.”554

Having considered marriage as a temporal point in an amorous process, we can also find out that there is a structural point that is persistently present throughout the process: sexual difference. Although there is a relation at the level of the unconscious knowledge, there is no relation at the level of sexual difference. Love is a non-relational construction, an inharmonious project, and a non-unified practice. Love has to deal with numerous conflicts between two sexes, as is revealed through Gorz and Dorine’s different viewpoints about marriage. The opposition between theory and the real world was another occasion in which sexual difference is manifested in a conflictual way. While Gorz believed in mathematical rigor and systematic intelligence, Dorine believed in lived experience and undemonstrable intuition. Here, let us note that sexual difference is not only the matter of a destructive passion but of an exciting (passionnant) game whose repetition can be gladly enjoyed. “We had these discussions dozens of times and knew in advance what the other was going to come

553 Ibid., p. 22. 554 Ibid., p. 28. 248

back with. In the end it was all just a game.”555 In Logics of Worlds, Badiou points out that psychoanalysis advances a pessimistic viewpoint about love due to the thesis of sexual non- relation. However, one should not that love as a non-relational construction is not merely a conflictual antagonism, but a convivial agonism. Sexual non-relationship certainly triggers numerous conflicts. However, as the process that seeks to construct an amorous world out of sexual difference continues, a violent conflict turns into a pacifying game where there is neither winner nor loser. As a temporal element, sexual non-relationship is the source of war. As a structural element, sexual non-relation is an opportunity for a war simulation game. As inscribed but not consumed by sexual non-relationship, love can makes limitless excitement out of tireless controversy, covering both the sexual and the non-sexual, the couple and its beyond. Sexual non-relationship can turn into a foundation for the production of knowledge about the world across the two sexed positions. In Badiou’s words, “love is the paradoxical circulation–between ‘man’ and ‘woman’–of a wondrous knowledge that makes the universe ours.”556 Love as a non-relational “limping march” starts as painful, and yet it ends as playful as long as it does not give up on the invention of a reliable crutch. Therefore, love as a procedural construction eludes the binary between pessimism and optimism. In the end, everything comes down to what Dorine says to Gorz: “We will be what we do together.”

There are various kinds of correlations between a symptom and love. A specific symptom might give rise to a specific kind of love. A symptom might forestall an amorous encounter in advance. A symptom might return in a fitfully destructive way, disturbing or reshaping the ongoing amorous process. What matters in the case of Gorz and Dorine is that Gorz’s symptom was fully recognized, supported, and developed by Dorine. An analyst who treats a clinical case would either attempt to remove the symptom or complete the symptom into the sinthome according to circumstances. In Gorz’s case, his symptom turned into the sinthome through his love. Put differently, as is the case of Joyce, Gorz “earned the privilege of having reached the extreme point of embodying the symptom in himself.”557

Gorz’s symptom was related to the act of writing. His writing was motivated by his rejection to existence, which amounts to his primal symptom. For Gorz, theory, intelligence, ideology,

555 Ibid., p. 58. 556 Badiou, OB, p. 67. 557 Lacan, SXXIII, p. 147. 249

and literature, all of which are manifested through his writing, served as a defensive mechanism against the real of his existence. His writing was proof that he could get at least a substitute satisfaction while bypassing his true problems. He obsessively wrote to ward off his anxiety and insecurity. He turned to writing to turn away from his own life. As a note- maker rather than a writer, the act of writing mattered more than the subject matter. Behind this symptomatic writing is a certain fantasy. When he was writing The Traitor, Gorz thought that the experience of loving and being loved was too common and private to reach the universal and the intellectual. He felt that there was a contradiction between his life and his writing because he thought that while his life was based on successful love with Dorine, high literature can be presumably achieved only through the art of failure. Gorz explains his fantasy as the following: “What motivates me, above all, is an obsessive need to elevate myself above what I experience, feel and think, in order to theorize it, to intellectualize it, to be nothing but pure transparent intellect.”558 This pure intellect comes with a price. In The Traitor, Gorz debases Dorine, whom he seldom mentions, as a “pitiful girl.” He does not care about what they experienced and built together. His attachment to theory covers up his own life. His obsession about universality prevents him from paying attention to his singular love. Quite ironically, his fantasy ended up leading Gorz, who sought to write about existentialist freedom, to find “no trace of any life-changing existential epiphany in this chapter; no trace of my, of our, discovery of love, of our affair.”559 Even though his life was submerged in love, his fantasy prevented him from approaching his life in love. In sum, his symptomatic writing, coupled with his fantasy about the intellectual, was structured by his rejection to existence. His rejection to existence generated a certain kind of love, which Gorz sums up by citing Kafka’s Diary. “My love for you doesn’t like itself.”560 His love was not able to love itself, for it was based on non-existence. His love was blind and deaf, as if one might not see with eyes or hear with ears. He was in love, but this love was devastated by his symptom. His love was not real and existential, but ideological and abstract. Gorz confesses, “I wasn’t far off considering love to be a petit-bourgeois sentiment.”561

What is notable here is how Dorine dealt with Gorz’s symptom that determined not only his

558 Gorz, LD, p. 71. 559 Ibid., p. 70. 560 Ibid., p. 80. 561 Ibid., p. 79. 250

life, but also their love. She took the position of an amorous subject, whose love is addressed to someone with his/her irreducible symptom. Gorz narrates what Dorine used to say to him. “To love a writer is to love him writing.”562 Even if Gorz’s writing was unfair to their love, Dorine was prepared to work through Gorz’s symptom. Independent of Gorz’s debasement of her in The Traitor, Dorine was determined to make herself disappear or appear only as a hidden supporter. An amorous subject not only embraced her beloved’s symptom, but also encouraged her beloved to fully subjectify his symptom. As Gorz confesses, “you knew, from the start, that you’d have to protect my writing indefinitely.”563 As always, the amorous subject’s hidden support is seldom conspicuous and visible. It was only when The Traitor was published that Gorz realized what he owed to Dorine. Love is often unrequited, even when it is not an unrequited love. Thus, he wrote a belated dedication to Dorine, which contains an idea that was actually undeveloped and even dismissed in the book. “To you, alias Kay, who in giving me You, have given me I.”564 What Dorine gave Gorz by protecting his writing is not Gorz’s self-same identity. With Lacan, we can state that what Dorine gave Gorz was an opportunity to complete his symptom into the sinthome. The symptomatic notemaking based on the rejection to life was transformed into the sinthomatic writing based on the affirmation of life. Gorz writes, “That’s the magic of literature: it gave me access to existence. By writing about my refusal to exist, I described, wrote, myself into existence.”565 Let us confirm that this magic of literature was possible due to his love for Dorine. At some point, Gorz had to decide whether he would live according to his own principles or live in concert with Dorine. He chose a life with Dorine. It was through this life with Dorine that Gorz realized and learned how to live with his own existence and symptom. An amorous life brought to him change of life. With Dorine, he turned his rejection to existence to existence in love. Writing was no longer his pathological symptom against that denies access to his existence. Writing was a subjective sinthome that gives him another kind of life. With Badiou, we can name this life as a “true life,” a life of the subject of truth. Letter to D is not only a search for the lost meaning of his love with Dorine, but a memoir about how he gained access to a true life beyond a physical life. Love is a carrier of the metaphysical happiness in a true life. What is notable for our discussion is that this life is not merely addressed to an amorous truth. It is

562 Ibid., p. 38. 563 Ibid., p. 39. 564 Ibid., p. 81. 565 Ibid., p. 62. 251

also addressed to a political truth.

Love happens, persists, and ends within a sociopolitical regime of power. Power does not merely force love to weaken or disappear. Power permeates and produces a specific form of love. Now, while a political truth–not as institutionalized realpolitik, but as emancipatory politics–comes with the organizational resistance against power and an amorous truth comes with the existential resistance against power, these two truths occasionally overlap as in the life of Gorz and Dorine. As amorous subjects, they were deeply involved in a political truth through a local puncturing, if not a global subversion, of the existing regime of power. Let us note that this regime is composed of three instances: symbolic law, money, and body.

The symbolic law that affects and is affected by Gorz and Dorine is triple. First, there is a traditional law. When Gorz told his mother that Dorine and he were going to get married, his mother objected that they were “by nature incompatible” based on a graphologist’s report.566 Graphology, a study of handwriting used for the evaluation of personality, is here appropriated to hierarchically discriminate Gorz and Dorine. For Gorz’s mother, this traditional discipline demonstrates that Dorine does match Gorz in terms of noble genealogy or social strata. Let us recognize in passing the powerful effect of this discipline as a symbolic law. A symbolic law does not merely come after nature. It reconfigures and reconstitutes nature itself. Gorz and Dorine do not match due to the gap between their social strata. They are regarded as “naturally incompatible.” To envision how Gorz and Dorine would react to this law, one could refer to the last scene of The Crucified Lovers by Mizoguchi Kenji. It shows the image of two lovers in the 17th century Kyoto who were accused of having an affair. Despite the gap between their social status, they flee together and declare love for each other, but they are soon caught, humiliated, and tied up with their face back. Interestingly, we can read a faint smile on their faces, a smile which tells us that even though the law can constrain the subjects of love, the amorous happiness remains telltale. We can also imagine Gorz and Dorine’s faint smile at the graphologist’s report. Love responds to power with smile, not with anger.

The second kind of the symbolic law that Gorz and Dorine faced is the one that we discussed above. It is the identitarian logic of social circles that a penniless Austrian Jewish man and a pretty British girl do not match. Based on the other men’s description of Gorz or Gorz’s self-

566 Ibid., p. 23. 252

perception as an uninteresting Austrian Jewish for Dorine, we can observe that this law is effectively operative. Gorz himself, who internalized the law, thought that they do not match. However, when they met again on the street, the effect of a contingent encounter outdid this law. This time their encounter does not merely work against the law, but it jumps over the law. In sum, an amorous encounter can be repressed by the law, but it can never be completely tamed by the law. What is repressed can return at any time.

Lastly, Gorz’s father serves as the symbolic law. Despite loving each other, Gorz and Dorine did not have a child. Gorz thought that he would not make a good father because he has not had a good relationship with his own father. The idea behind this is that one has to have a good father in order to be a good father. Gorz chose not to have a child rather than be a poor father. However, even if he chose not to have a child, this choice is still made within the frame of the symbolic law represented by Gorz’s father. The rebellious determination itself was determined by the absence of a “good father.” Gorz’s dead father qualified Gorz not only as a rebellious son, but as an unqualified father. For Hegel, love without a child remains subjective, which amounts to a defective love. For love to become complete, there must be a child as an objective product of love. Only when a father-mother-child formation is achieved, love is integral. The formation of a family retroactively determines the value of love. For Gorz, things remain different. Instead of giving birth to a child, Gorz and Dorine gave birth to an idea of love. From the Hegelian perspective, the absence of a child makes their love defective. At the same time, the presence of an idea of love makes their love imponderable from the Hegelian perspective. With the production of an idea, their love is heterogeneously objective and excessively subjective. I will come back to the idea of love in the conclusion. The point here is that with regard to the issue of having a child, Gorz’s dead father as the symbolic law affected their love. In the end, Gorz did not realize that love is intrinsically incommensurable with a good father, that love makes a father stumble in some way.

Let us turn to the second vehicle of power: money. In the capitalist formation, it is not uncommon that the effective, if not the actual, agent of love is money. One makes love to make more money. One does not decide to love, but money decides to love for him. Capital generates and dissipates a capitalist way of loving. Becoming productive, increasing efficiency, and consuming well determines falling in and out of love. Gorz and Dorine worked against this way of loving. Gorz’s mother’s objection to their marriage was not only based on the graphologist’s report. While this report was about the symbolic law, she also 253

mentioned money. For her, money seemed like “an insurmountable obstacle”567 to their union. It seems indeed insurmountable, for money as a superegoic agent is the real law, the lawless law, the law that both permits the capitalist mode of love and prohibits other modes of love.

Here, let us focus on Dorine’s determined attitude toward money rather than Gorz’s anti- capitalist theory. Seeing Dorine unafraid of his mother’s concern regarding the issue of money, Gorz confesses, “how proud I was of your contempt for the issue of money.”568 This is all the more reasonable because while Gorz’s unconscious about a child was framed by his own father, Dorine’s unconscious about money was liberated from her childhood experience. While Gorz inherited the unconscious law about father and child, Dorine ruptured the unconscious law about money and marriage. Since her early childhood when she would see her parents fight about money, she was convinced that “love must think nothing of money.”569 She thought nothing of money when she encountered Gorz as a penniless refugee; when she visited Gorz’s place, which was like a monastery; when Gorz got fired from Citizens of the World in 1950, so that she had to earn money for their living; when they donated their extra money. Recalling a long year of material hardship in 1950, Gorz again pays attribute to Dorine, the subject of love in and against the capitalist regime. “You were the rock on which we could build our life as a couple.”570 Love between Gorz and Dorine allows us to distinguish between living in poverty and living in ugliness. Their love tells us that living in beauty and sensibility is not a matter of having money or not. Love can be dirt-poor, without any dirt.

The last vehicle of power is body. Following Foucault, let us specify this power as bio-power. Bio-power mediates and determines the relationship that one has with one’s own body. In the case of Dorine, she suffered from arachnoiditis induced by the side effects of lipiodol, a material used for X-rays. Technical medicine, which was supposed to cure her from her disc, ironically caused severe pain to her and gave her terminal illness. Dorine’s later years were a painstaking struggle against the violence of bio-power left on her body. Instead of depending on technological gadgets, she turned to yoga and alternative medicines. She resisted the

567 Ibid., p. 24. 568 Ibid. 569 Ibid., p. 83. 570 Ibid., p. 40. 254

medical discipline imposed by bio-power and fought for the self-disciplinary relationship with her body. Gorz observes that while his political ecology was rooted in the movements of 1968, it was actually Dorine’s illness that led them to the domain of ecology and . For Gorz and Dorine, ecology was not merely a matter of critique of civilization, but of practice of every life.

What is notable for our discussion is how Gorz supported Dorine in this practice. Recalling the experience of seeing her unable to sleep due to pain, Gorz states, “I’d wanted to believe that we were together in everything, but you were alone in your distress.”571 To believe that one shares everything with one’s beloved comes down to love based on the fantasmatic One. However, our body alerts us to the fact that one cannot become the One with another. Our body reveals that the relationship between one and oneself precedes the relationship between one and another. Between Dorine and him, there was Dorine’s body. In Dorine’s body, there was the battle between bio-power’s product and her self-healing power. In this situation, Gorz inevitably occupies the position of an onlooker because he cannot intervene in the battle inside her body. He would feel alienated because the amorous relation between Dorine and him seems secondary to the self-relation between Dorine and her body. He is unable to remove her illness or even experience her pain. He has to acknowledge the stubborn fact that they are thoroughly separated. The subject of love is intrinsically alone and helpless in the presence of the beloved’s suffering. All he or she can do is to be together with the one in his/her distress. However, it is nevertheless by being together, not at the level of the imaginary One, but at the level of the real body, that love remains irreducible to solitude. Love does not remove but supplements our indelible solitude. The amorous relation between Dorine and him does not stand in for, but stand by Dorine’s self-relation to her body, and this is what Gorz attempted to do by standing by Dorine’s struggle against illness. This attempt is quite challenging, for the amorous subject has to be simultaneously “affective” and “controlled” toward the sick other. As Barthes writes, “I am moved, anguished, for it is horrible to see those one loves suffering, but at the same time I remain dry, watertight. … So I shall suffer with the other, but without pressure, without losing myself.”572 Barthes then defines this artistic and healthy form of compassion as “delicacy.” Compassion in its literal sense of “suffering together” would not mean the fantasmatic nullification of the distance

571 Ibid., p. 91. 572 Ibid., pp. 57–58. 255

between the lover and the sick. Compassion would mean enduring and even loving the very distance between the lover and the sick in a delicate way. Against bio-power that provokes a solitary suffering, love shows us the power of compassion, which treats suffering with delicacy. While bio-power makes the body of suffering appears to be the last word, love tells us that we can nevertheless transform the body of suffering into the body of care.

When Gorz heard later that Dorine had endometrial cancer, he was not hesitant to leave the journal for which he had been working for 20 years. He thought that it was time to live up to their present. Gorz writes, “only one thing was essential to me: to be with you. I can’t imagine continuing to write, if you no longer are. You are the essential without which all the rest, no matter how important it seems to me when you’re there, loses its meaning and its importance.”573 Dividing their love into two periods, we could state that while the early stage of their love amounts to Gorz’s existential struggle through his symptomatic writing with Dorine’s support, the last stage of their love amounts to Dorine’s struggle against her symptoms of illness with Gorz’s support. To support Dorine, who has been supporting him, was the only thing that Gorz should do. One might be tempted to describe this love as sacrificial. However, Gorz, who reconciled with his own existence through his love with Dorine, is now a robust subject of love, and the subject of love knows how to distinguish between devotion and sacrifice. Of course, caring for someone as the beloved with terminal illness for a long time sometimes requires an extreme level of sacrifice. However, the subject of love would be willing to pay the price for his love, for he is convinced that his caring act is the devotion to the essential accompanied by the sacrifice of the inessential.

In sum, Gorz and Dorine show us a usually covert relationship between love and power, which is structured by symbolic law, money, and body. If politics begins only by rupturing and resisting these vehicles of power, then they show how love can serve as a local laboratory for politics and an effective touchstone of politics. Starting from the community of orphanhood, they built what Badiou calls “communism of the Two,” insofar as communism refers to an intersection between politics and love. They show us a singular path, a path that an existential construction of the amorous Two coincides with a collective struggle for political emancipation, a path that couples the passion of love with the politics of friendship.

Love has an uneasy relationship with death. Death is not simply an external obstacle to love.

573 Ibid., pp. 102–103. 256

The possibility of the death of the beloved is always pressing the lover. Even after the beloved dies, the forlorn lover’s love in distress insists. In this regard, death corrodes love from its inside. Death forces us not only to dispel the fantasy of eternal love, but to face the limit of every love. Death is an internal limit of love. Love between Gorz and Dorine was singular when they were alive. So it was when they were dead. On September 24, 2007, their bodies were found dead side by side in their house. Leaving a short note about their decision, they had committed suicide together by lethal injection. Let us address the implication of this joint suicide in terms of the relationship between love and death/life.

Joint suicide can be classified into four types. First, as a contemporary social phenomenon, we see total strangers who gather through suicide Web sites commit suicide together in a state of anonymity. Secondly, as in the case in which parents as the leader kill their children as the victim due to hardships of life, there could be a joint suicide without mutual consensus, which is close to homicide. Thirdly, having pity on the partner who is left alone, lovers could commit suicide together. Lastly, lovers who fall into despair due to their unfulfilled love could commit suicide together as a way of fulfilling love. The case of Dorine and Gorz is related to the third and the fourth type. Gorz writes, “neither of us wants to outlive the other.”574 Here, one could refer to Lacan’s expansion of the Freudian distinction between mourning and melancholia.575 Lacan specifies that when the bereaved lover is given the task of mourning the dead beloved, this task lies at the imaginary level. The lover grapples with his own ideal ego attached to the lost object, not the lost object itself. Mourning is a process in which one lets oneself go, a process in which one overcomes one’s own image who holds the object. The subject of mourning has to separate him/herself not from the object, but from him/herself who loves the object. In melancholia, the bereaved subject does not deal with the ideal ego but the real object, the object a that stands in for real loss. In melancholia, the object commands and overwhelms the subject with the intense sense of guilt and self- criticism, retrospectively reminding the lover of how he or she could have or should have treated the beloved (“I should have taken better care of you!”) Moreover, unlike mourning in which loss can find a symbolic substitute, melancholia forces the subject to regard the lost object as irreplaceable. Loss cannot be remedied and compensated for so that the subject remains psychotic, helplessly haunted by ungraspable loss. The subject falls into an unending

574 Ibid., p. 106. 575 Lacan, SX, p. 335. 257

abyss, no longer knowing what one has actually lost. In this regard, Gorz and Dorine’s decision can be regarded as a defensive and reactive act against mourning and melancholia. Neither of the two went through mourning and melancholia, but their joint suicide paradoxically reveals that death affects love in a double way, burdening the lover with the painstaking task of endless mourning and afflicting the lover with the pathological emergence of real loss.

The question here is that all this might seem to contradict what their love story implies. In the letter, Gorz wrote, “you opened up the richness of life for me and I loved life through you– unless it was the reverse and I loved you through all living things.”576 Dorine helped Gorz to realize the richness of life and Gorz became able to love life through Dorine. Their love was so closely tied to life. Their love was built on the love of life. Their final decision, thus, seems ironic. How could the couple who has lived through ecology give up their own life? How could Dorine, who has led Gorz to life, agree to Gorz’s suicide? Does their decision imply that love ultimately surrenders to the power of death? To engage with these questions, let us turn to another aspect of their decision.

Like the fourth type of joint suicide, lovers afflicted by their unfulfilled love commit a joint suicide as a way of fulfilling love. In this case, love as the adventure of the Two gives way to a mortal passion to be the One beyond and through death. Lovers’ passage to the act could be seen as the resistance against whatever interrupted their love through the obedience to the power of death. The misfiring of love finds its compensation in the victory of death, and the tragedy of love finds its shelter with a funeral dirge. Gorz’s final amorous declaration, however, tells us that this is not true of Gorz and Dorine.

“I probably haven’t lived up to the resolution I made 30 years ago: to live completely at one with the present, mindful above all of the wealth of our shared life … I don’t want ‘to put off living till later’ … I’m mindful of your presence now as I was in the early days and would like to make you feel that. You’ve given me all of your life and all of you; I’d like to be able to give you all of me in the time we have left. You’ve just turned 82. You’re still beautiful, graceful and desirable. We’ve lived

576 Gorz, LD, p. 84. 258

together now for 58 years and I love you more than ever. Lately I’ve fallen in love with you all over again and I once more feel a gnawing emptiness inside that can only be filled when your body is pressed against mine.”577

Their joint suicide was not about fulfilling an unfulfilled love, but about expanding the amorous process constructed by both of them. It was a matter of remaining faithful to love as they have been before. What is notable is that their amorous process, which allowed Gorz to reconcile with his own existence and Dorine to fight against her terminal illness, offers an opportunity for Gorz to fall in love with Dorine again. One could map this event of falling in love again with the same partner to what Badiou calls a “second encounter.” The uniqueness of a second encounter lies in its strict immanence to the amorous world, not to the existing world. A second encounter implies that love comes from love in a surnumerary way, and that love performs itself to the second power. When a penniless Austrian Jew encountered a beautiful British girl, this encounter was against the backdrop of the world determined by social norms and symbolic law. A second encounter, on the contrary, is uniquely against the backdrop of what the lovers themselves elaborated and constructed as a new subjective world. If an encounter shows us that love is an aleatory rupture with the law, a second encounter shows us that love is an infinite unfolding of the novelty for which the amorous world provides. A second encounter proves that love as supported by the amorous world is an evental rebirth of a subjective sequence, rather than a transitory episode determined by a human animal’s hormone mechanism. We could state that Gorz did not merely “fall in love” with Dorine all over again, but that Gorz and Dorine “rise in love.” For Gorz, who became able to love life through Dorine, this decision does not head for death but for life, a life without any tone of afterlife, a sui generis life of an amorous subject. Concerning the loss of her close friends, Emily Dickinson once wrote, “parting is all we know of heaven, and all we know of hell.”578 The same is also true of Gorz and Dorine. There is no such thing as an afterlife in heaven or hell, since both heaven and hell mean nothing but parting as a disruption of the amorous process. For Dorine, who embraced the richness of life, this decision does not refer to a reactive prevention of Gorz’s melancholia after her death but an anticipatory gesture toward the persistence of their amorous process to her last breath.

577 Ibid., pp. 104–105. 578 Helen Vendler, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 520. 259

Expanding the amorous process rather than fulfilling the unfulfilled love, their joint suicide marks a decision that redefines a biological death into a subjective life. Dying together, they made a final pledge to exhaust their physical life to affirm a subjective life. Their decision does not mark the end of love, but affirms the love of endlessness. French writer Françoise Sagan once stated, “I have the right to destroy myself.” Gorz and Dorine might add as follows: “We have the right to destroy ourselves as long as we, as the subjects of love, stay true to our inalienable dignity to decide about our amorous process for ourselves.”

Love between Gorz and Dorine is delivered to us through a letter. After all, what we have is only Gorz’s reconstruction of their love in the form of the letter to Dorine. Lacan once stated that “between man and the wall there is precisely the love letter.”579 Man attempts to speak about love, but he cannot. What he bumps into is a wall, the wall of castration, which prevents him from speaking about love. Thus, he can only write about love. However, even the pile of love letter does not guarantee the existence of sexual relationship, for sexual relationship is something that does not cease not being written. Love letter (la lettre d’(a)mur) merely amounts to a sign that love (amour) is a lovewall ((a)mur). Both speaking and writing about love render love elusive and inaccessible. Nevertheless, Gorz’s letter does not lose its value, for it transmits something more radical than a story of love, an idea of love. Every exceptional subject of love leaves us an idea of love. Due to this idea of love, the amorous subject such as Gorz or Dorine is neither dead nor alive, but between death and life. The subject like them haunts us as an uncanny phantom which incarnates the idea of love. What is interesting about a subject of love is not his/her life or death, but the survival (sur-vie) of the idea of love expressed through his/her life and death. The subject vanishes, and the idea remains. History and literature tells us a few or, rather, too many names of the subject of love. Gorz and Dorine’s name also could be inscribed as one of them. What we would like to inscribe, however, is not their name, but the idea of love. Let us call this idea the Bacanian idea of love.

The Bacanian idea of love refers to love presented from the perspective of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. Love between Gorz and Dorine amounts to a unique nexus of the Lacanian love and the Badiouian love.

579 Lacan, The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst: Seven Talks at Saint-Anne, trans. Corman Gallagher, February 3, 1972 (unpublished). 260

The Bacanian idea of love proposes that love begins with an ambivalent encounter. On the one hand, an amorous encounter becomes fragile and imperceptible when it is repressed by the existing symbolic law. The social convention dictates that a penniless Austrian Jew and a pretty British girl do not match. On the other hand, an amorous encounter exerts its power of radical contingency beyond this law. Nothing can predict or predetermine the event that the mismated two come across on the street. In sum, an amorous encounter is situated within the symbolic law and happens to be eventally indifferent toward the law.

The Bacanian idea of love proposes that love is a relation and a process. Despite their different backgrounds, Gorz and Dorine felt that they had something in common. Both of them were the children of insecurity and anxiety. They were not properly symbolized through the interaction with their parents in their childhood lives. This led them to form a unique bond, an unconscious relation, an amorous relation organized around the je ne sais quoi element, which Gorz calls “original wound.” At the same time, their love is a process that works through various critical points such as a marriage. Against Gorz who regards marriage as a bourgeoisie institution, Dorine points out that marriage can be a subjective pact constituted by a lifelong devotion. Moreover, two of them had to ceaselessly grapple with the sexual difference between theory/intelligence (Gorz) and the real world/intuition (Dorine) to the point that a violent controversy turns into an exciting game. If there is no sexual relation but sexual difference, an amorous process can be nothing but a creative deployment of this difference to construct an amorous world. In sum, love is an unconscious relation followed by a constructive process.

The Bacanian idea of love proposes that love is a singular praxis that cuts across the individual and the collective. Love is an individual praxis in the psychoanalytic sense to transform the symptomatic jouissance into the sinthomatic subjectivity. Gorz, who depended on writing and theory as an ersatz in order to ward off the anxiety about existence and life, became able to reconcile with his own existence and real life. Through his love with Dorine, he shifted from a self-defensive notetaker to a subjective writer, combined an external theory with an internal conviction, and realized the richness of life and love. All of this was possible due to Dorine, who always supported Gorz even though Gorz’s symptom did not give Dorine her due. Love is also a collective praxis in the political sense that politics is nothing but an immanent resistance against the agents of power such as the symbolic law, money, and the body. Love has the possibility of becoming a servant of power when it is subordinate to these 261

agents. Love between Gorz and Dorine, however, struggled against these agents. They got married by overcoming the opposition of Gorz’s mother based on a graphologist’s report. Throughout her life with Gorz, Dorine remained faithful to her conviction that love must ignore money. Turning his doctrine of political ecology into a daily practice, Gorz supported Dorine’s struggle with the effect of technical medicine on her body. Gorz’s later years demonstrate that the subject of love deals with the beloved’s body neither as an object of sexual enjoyment nor as a separated substance in solitude, but as a distressed body to be taken care of. Love between Gorz and Dorine proves that love does not serve power, but serves as a local laboratory of an emancipatory collectivity. In sum, love aims at the point where the sinthomatic subjectivity and the minimal communism intersect.

The Bacanian idea of love proposes that love has its unique limit and immanent infinity. Death is one of the internal limits of love. The death of the beloved as the lover’s real loss puts him into the psychotic state of melancholia. The joint suicide of Gorz and Dorine was provoked by the concern about the possibility that one of them would outlive the other and leave the other alone and that the bereft is afflicted by the loss of the deceased. It makes a defensive and preemptive gesture against the possible breakout of mourning and melancholia. In this regard, their decision ironically suggests that the figure of an amorous subject is not a hero, but rather, a “hereos,” a courageous hero distressed by his irreducible pathology. At the same time, Gorz and Dorine also show us that love is rooted in its unique infinity such as a second encounter. Prior to their joint suicide, Gorz declared that he had fallen in love with Dorine all over again. For a devoted amorous subject like Gorz and Dorine, love was not a matter of beginning and ending, but of a rebirth and expansion. As the medieval poet Andreas Capellanus puts, “this love always knows its increase without end, and we never heard that anyone regretted having performed its act.”580 Their second encounter is not merely a discontinuous event that makes the two “fall” into love, but a discontinuous event of a continuous process that stems only from the faithfully constructed amorous world. Their second encounter makes Gorz and Dorine “rise” through love. For Gorz’s part, their joint suicide is not concerned with the mortal passion to fulfill the unfulfilled love, but the subjective decision to affirm a life beyond the binary between life and death, a life that can be made possible only through his love with Dorine. In sum, love is the nexus of mortal limit and subjective infinity.

580 Agamben, Stanzas, p. 131. 262

Conclusion

This thesis attempted to engage with the problematic of love as an in-between from the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. As we noted in introduction, the thesis of love as an in- between traces back to Plato’s Symposium. For Plato, eros is conceived of as an intermediate being between the mortal and the immortal, a daemon between man and God. To conclude, let us refer to a passage in Epinomis and elaborate on it within the context of the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. Classifying five types of living creatures in accordance with the five basic elements (fire, ether, air, water, and earth), Plato mentions intermediate aerial daemons. These intermediate entities never become manifest to us, no matter how close we are to them. As interpreters of all things, they move all around the universe and transport messages. Crucial for our discussion is their following characteristic: “Being, however, of a kind that is quick to learn and of retentive memory, they read all our thoughts and regard the good and noble with signal favor, but the very evil with deep aversion. For they are not exempt from feeling pain, whereas a god who enjoys the fullness of deity is clearly above both pain and pleasure, though possessed of all-embracing wisdom and knowledge.”581 As intermediate beings between man and God, these daemons are both participants of pain and discerners of the good. As with Badiou’s “hyper-translation” of Plato’s Republic, let us take the liberty of reading this passage in relation to love as that which situates itself between Lacan and Badiou.

On the one hand, intermediate daemons of love are participants of pain of human beings. Unlike God who is above both pain and pleasure and armed with perfect wisdom, they are not exempt from pain. This reminds us of the origin of psychoanalysis, which began by hearkening to the hysteric’s symptoms as the manifestation of her subjective truth that defies science’s objective knowledge. Here, Lacan notes that the hysteric falls in love with the analyst who is supposed to have the knowledge about her subjective truth. “What analysis has revealed as truth is that love is directed towards the subject supposed to know.”582 The severity of the pain and the evocation of the possibility of the removal of pain elicit love for the analyst. But, as the analysis proceeds, the analyst deconstructs this transference-love with the analytic act of reducing himself/herself into an abject object and merely accompanies the

581 Plato, Epinomis (984a), cited in Agamben, Stanzas, p. 118. 582 Lacan, SXXI, June 11, 1974 (unpublished). 263

analysand on the itinerary of unconscious discourse to know more about his/her own subjective truth. In this regard, while the Lacanian analyst is a participant of the analysand’s pain (or the “secretary to the insane,”583 who literally registers the words of the insane, insofar as “everyone is mad, that is, delusional,”584 beyond the secregationist treatment of speaking animals and the categorical distinction between neurosis and psychosis), his/her mode of participation is quite paradoxical. The Lacanian analyst is not encyclopedic and orthopedic like the knowledgeable scientist (psychiatry), or sympathetic and caring like the good-enough mother (object-relation theory), or normative and imaginary like a well-adapted and strong ego (ego psychology), mythical and therapeutic like the wounded healer (Jungian psychology). The analyst is the vanishing flash like a “will-o-the-wisp”; and this will-o-the- wisp “does not illuminate anything, it emerges even ordinarily from some pestilence. That is its strength.”585 The analyst participates in the pain, since the analyst emerges from pestilence. All the same, the analyst does not illuminate things. In terms of love as well, the analyst does not show any positive content of love after the deconstruction of transference- love. What the analysis reveals is rather the extent to which the analysand’s experience and history is inscribed by the loveless. The analysis does not offer the gift of love but the truth of the loveless. As Lacan ironically states in Seminar VII, “what the analyst has to give, unlike the partner in the act of love, is something that even the most beautiful bride in the world cannot outmatch,” namely, “his experienced desire.”586 The value of this experienced desire lies in only supporting an excavation of the subjective truth, not in offering him/her a secret master-key to love or satisfying his/her demand of happiness. The analytic axiom about love is not “fiat lux!” but “fiat vacuum!” or rather “let there be the void of love beyond transference love.” Based on this insight, the analyst also leads the analysand into the point at which the analysand finally declares, “oh my love, there is no love.” More precisely, “there is something of the loveless in the world.”

Through the analysis, the analysand finds out by him/herself that he/she is put in the condition of the loveless. The loveless does not simply refer to an absence of love or to lovesickness. It refers to the analytic situation in which passion, desire, drive, jouissance,

583 Lacan, SIII, p. 206. 584 Jacques Lacan, “Lacan pour Vincenne!” Ornicar? 17/18, 1979, p. 278. 585 Lacan, SXXI, April 23, 1974 (unpublished). 586 Lacan, SVII, p. 300. 264

hainamoration (lovehate), amur (lovewall), narcissism, fantasy, loss, trauma, phallic tragicomedy, ravage, passage to the act, symptom, object a, transference, knowledge, and sexual non-relationship constitute and stand in for love. To refer to Augustine’s phrase that “they love the truth when it reveals itself but hate it when it reveals them,” these elements are utilized to elaborate the analysand’s subjective truth that the analysand would refuse to know about.587 They are not only the counterparts of love but also the constituents of love(lessness). What the analysand refers to as love during the analysis is deeply bound up with these constituents in unconscious ways.588 The significance of the analytic work, then, lies in penetrating lovelessness cloaked as love.

Again, what matters is the paradoxical way in which the analyst intervenes. The analytic practice is not based on a reparative desire to impose an ideal norm about love onto the analysand or a parental drive to heal the painful state of the loveless. The desire of the analyst aims only at the revelation of the unconscious discourse that speaks about the truth albeit in an ever-incomplete form outside any normativity and normality. “The analytic discourse does not at all consist in making what is not working out re-enter normal discourse. … the discourse which only proceeds by the true saying, is precisely what does not work, as has been demonstrated, it is enough for someone to make an effort, to say true, for it to upset everyone.”589 The analytic discourse, which is based on the true saying of the real (unlike the normative discourse that works so well with preestablished knowledge), upsets everyone by showing that what one takes to be love amounts to various substitutions for the loveless. The analysis sheds light on the impossibility and limit of love by pointing out that the loveless constitutes love itself. More scandalizing is that the analyst never talks about what true love is or what there is beyond the loveless. Apart from the revelation of the loveless, the analyst stays mum, for his/her job is not to indoctrinate an ideal, a norm, or an orientation of love. The analyst prefers to preserve and appreciate the enigma of love.

587 The analytic work “should be a matter of allowing the analysand to elaborate the unconscious knowledge which is in him like a canker.” Lacan, SXXI, June 11, 1974 (unpublished). 588 One of the most primordial instances of this situation concerns Alcibiades and Socrates in Symposium. “Alcibiades is possessed by a love about which one can say that Socrates’ only merit is to designate it as transference love, and to redirect him to his true desire” (SVIII, p. 179). Where Alicibiades (the analysand) thought there is love, love is not. Thus, the analytic work concerning Alcibiades’ subjective real (“true desire”) remains to be done. Serving as the agalma (the object a) in the exploration of Alcibiades’ subjective real, Socrates (the analyst) nevertheless would remain silent about the correlation between the analytic work and Alcibiades’ new love. It is up to Alcibiades himself to approach to love anew through his analytic experience. 589 Lacan, SXXI, February 12, 1974 (unpublished). 265

Let us now turn to the Badiouian aspect that is relevant to the quote in Epinomis. This time intermediate daemons of love turn out to be the discerners of truth. With their thinking comprised of “learning” and “memory,” they aspire to truth in its consistent principle based on the discernment of what is good and noble from what is evil and ignoble. With regard to love, they would make a clear and rigorous distinction between the truth of love and the semblance of love. Here, it is important to note that, as is revealed by our discussion about the Badiouian love, Badiou articulates a consistent principle of love by working through the Lacanian impasse about love. The Badiouian love comes with the refashioning of the Lacanian love.

Passion is detached from the imaginary and attached to the real (“passion for the real”). Desire is decoupled from law and attached to truth (“generic desire”). Drive is posited as something that can and must be overcome by the true life. Jouissance as the sign of the power of death is replaced by the joy in love. Lovewall and lovehate, which Badiou does not address, would be nothing but a derivative of the failure of faithful commitment to the ethics of love. Narcissism is defined as the enemy of love beyond self-interestedness, not as a possible kind of love, an imaginary love. Fantasy for the illusionary satisfaction is overcome by real happiness. Loss is converted into courage as the mastery of loss. Trauma in its repetitive consequences is replaced by an evental encounter that accompanies unrepeatable consequences to be elaborated. The symptom (and even sinthome) as the human animal’s bodily traits gives way to the transhuman body of truth. The phallic function is no longer operative in the contemporary world, in which the father cannot provide the right answer for sons’ and daughters’ love. Ravage and catastrophe are recognized as part of the game that the subject must assume as a risk immanent to the amorous process itself. Sexuality is affirmed as an instance to attest to the fact that truth is devoid of meaning and, at the same time, soberly criticized for its potential to paralyze love and its inability to subsume love. The domain of the object a is limited only to desire, and t as the fragment of the amorous process is introduced. The subject of signifier/jouissance is replaced by the subject/body of truth, and the patient of desubjective love is replaced by the subject supported by the commitment to the laborious love. Sexual non-relationship is no longer an impasse of love but rather a starting point to articulate the axiom of love concerning the scene of the Two.

From the perspective of the Badiouian philosophy, one can intervene in the subject’s existing structure and change the condition of the loveless that the analyst finds almost impossible to 266

change, insofar as one agrees to become the subject of love, insofar as one desires to participate in the tenacious fidelity procedure, insofar as one orients oneself toward the true life, insofar as one stays within real happiness. Instead of merely being faced with or discouraged by the impossibility and the limit of love, one can redeploy this impossibility and limit to construct a newly possible and even infinite love. Recall the way in which Badiou turns Rimbaud’s declaration about the absence of the true life into the possibility to decide about the commitment to the true and happy life. Responding to the psychoanalytic declaration, “oh my love, there is no love” or “there is something of the loveless,” philosophy affirms that it is up to each of us to invent a love out of lovelessness and dare to create love beyond and through lovelessness, which is a rare feat. The truth of love always preserves an exceptionally subjective way of loving that neither conforms to the preestablished law nor falls prey to the limit of love.

In sum, while the Lacanian love focuses on the intrinsic limit of love that mostly remains unacknowledged and repressed, the Badiouian love focuses on a possible love that can be built on this limit. The former pares down what people call love to lovelessness, and the latter reconstructs a radical love out of lovelessness. This interlacing of the two is well-illustrated by the following declaration by Lacan: “And that is why love is precious, eh!, rarely realized, as everyone knows, only lasting for a time and all the same made up of the fact that it is essentially this breaking down of the wall where one can only give yourself a bump on the forehead, in short, that is at stake.”590 For Lacan, the preciousness, rarity, and transience of love are correlative to the fact that love is an attempt to fracture its own impasse, which does not authorize an easy way out. Insofar as the loveless is immanent to love, any attempt to overcome the loveless results only in a bump. Here, love appears as an impassable impasse. For Badiou, what is at stake is not merely breaking down the wall (fracturer le mur) but jumping over the wall beyond the law (faire le mur). One does not have to resort to the preestablished norms to evade the wall nor have to be imprisoned within the wall. Love can become anew beyond its pathology and normativity. Of course, this love is not completely devoid of a bump. It nevertheless contains some extra that is undisturbed by and invulnerable to the impasse. This extra comes into being by turning the stumbling block of love into a stepping-stone of love, which remains immune to the stumbling block. Here, love appears as an impassible pass. We thus reach another formulation of love from the perspective of the

590 Lacan, SXXII, January 21, 1975 (unpublished). 267

interlacing of Lacan and Badiou. Love is between an impassable impasse and an impassible pass.

Let us take one step further. If the analyst, as a participant of pain, accompanies the analysand, this would be because the analysand him/herself is equal to the sinthome. “The psychoanalyst cannot be conceived of otherwise than a sinthome.”591 Only someone who follows through the work of elaborating one’s own irreducible subjectivity can serve as a true participant of the other’s pain, for his/her interest does not lie in removing and repressing the symptom but in accepting and completing it. It is the sinthome that makes the analyst serve as a participant rather than as a healer. In fact, if there is an anchoring point that characterizes our take on Lacan in this thesis, it is our consistent focus on the transition from the symptomatic real to the sinthome (the passage from the sexual non-relationship to intersinthomatic relation in Chapter 1, the community of non-all and the communist idea as the sinthomatic knot in Chapter 2, the passage from the symptom to the sinthomatic truth for Tony Takitani in chapter 3, the completion of the symptom into the sinthome for Gorz in chapter 4). While the sinthome serves as a tool to provide our approach to Lacan with a minimal consistency, it also plays a pivotal role in the end of analysis. The Lacanian end of analysis is not the identification with the analyst as an imaginary ideal or with the unconscious as the Other, but the identification with the sinthome. The identification with the sinthome implies that the analysand no longer gets bogged down in the symptom but knows how to deal with the symptom. Knowing how to deal with the symptom does not imply the excision of the symptom or the liberation from the symptom. It implies encountering and acknowledging how one’s subjectivity is entangled in the incurable sinthome as the irreducible kernel. What matters is that the end of analysis is not attainable by obtaining some clinical, scientific knowledge or “knowing oneself better,” but by exploring one’s subjective and sinthomatic truth. As if foreseeing the idea of the sinthome as an incurable support of subjectivity, Lacan writes in Seminar XV that “there is knowledge acquired there, but by whom? To whom does it pay the price of the truth that at the limit the subject treated cannot be cured of?”592 The end of analysis is attainable through the laborious work of inventing a way to symbolize the symptomatic real that constitutes the subjective pitfalls and subjectivizing the sinthomatic

591 Lacan, SXXIII, p. 116. 592 Jacques Lacan, “Summary of the Seminar of 1967–1968 for the year book of the École pratique des hautes études,” trans. Cormac Gallagher (unofficial), June 10, 1969. 268

truth that the subject has previously dismissed yet has to live with.

The crucial question that arises at this point is: What kind of relationship do the analytic work and the end of analysis have with love? In addressing this question, the fact that transference love has an ambivalent relationship with the analytic work is worth referring to. Transference might serve either as an obstacle to the summoning of the unconscious or as an impetus for the exploration of the unconscious. For his part, Lacan, on the one hand, accepts the severity of transference by noting that love is addressed to knowledge because transference is directed toward the subject supposed to know. But, on the other hand, Lacan notes that the analyst’s intervention is founded on the knowledge about his/her own unbeing (désêtre) and that the analysand dissolves transference through the analytic work. With the elaboration of the unconscious knowledge, the analysand recognizes the analyst’s unbeing and falls out of transference love with the analyst. What comes after, then? Here, the radicality of the psychoanalytic lesson about love is that even if the analysand admits to and works through his/her sinthomatic truth, this end of analysis does not offer some positive vision for the love to come. There is no guarantee that the sinthome can sustain and expand the amorous process, as in the case of Gorz. On the contrary, as in the case of Tony Takitani, the analysand might encounter the painful truth about to what extent the loveless that is supported by his symptomatic solitude is permeable to his love. In this regard, the relationship between transference love and the analytic work is the same as that between the end of analysis and a new love. Just as it is an open question whether transference love could enhance or ruin the analytic work, it is also an open question whether the end of analysis might open up or block out a new love.

Without doubt, the Lacanian analyst stays mum about the love to come in the analysand’s post-analytic life without offering a specific guideline or advice. While the analyst is in the analytic situation “not for a person’s own good, but in order that he love,”593 the analyst does not teach him/her how to love. A new love remains as a hole whose boundaries can only be invented by the analysand him/herself. While the analysis leads the analysand to work through the semblance of love, once the analytic work is done and the semblance of love is cleared away, what remains is not some substantial knowledge about love but the undefinable hole proper to love. Once you remove the cover of love, there remains only an abyss of love.

593 “I [Lacan] am not there [in the analytic situation], in the final analysis, for a person’s own good, but in order that he love. Does this mean that I must teach him how to love?” (SVIII, p. 15) 269

Beyond the amorous semblant, there emerges only an amorous hole to be elaborated through a subjective invention. But an invention is not creation ex nihilo, and there are some clues left for the analysand, which is his/her analytic experience itself. How, then, would the analysand refer to the analytic experience for the invention of a new love? As we stated earlier, the analytic work allows the analysand to recognize that his/her love is determined by his/her subjective real, that he/she is in fact entangled in the loveless cloaked as love. Insofar as even the end of analysis does not offer the gift of a new love, what does this analytic experience tell him? A paradox emerges here. If the end of analysis does not show a clear exit from the loveless, it is precisely because the analytic work invites the analysand to love the loveless itself. For psychoanalysis, nothing is more difficult and rare than to love the very impossibility and limit of love. Psychoanalysis puts love to the test of the following questions: Can one fully assume that love necessarily faces its own wall? Can one recognize the amorous impassable impasse? Can one identify the loveless not as an external obstacle of love but as an internal bar of love? To rewrite Augustine’s phrase from Confessions 1:3, “I was not yet in love, and I loved to be in love” (Nondum amabam, et amare amabam), the question that the analysand should grapple with is the following: “I was not yet in love, but how can I be in love with being in lovelessness rather than being in love with being in love?” This would be the most radical problematic that the Lacanian love poses.

Badiou, for his part, presents a consistent and unwavering idea of love that builds on the Lacanian love. But even if the Badiouian love is consistent and unwavering, one should not be lead into the error that Badiou promotes a complete doctrine or a closed system regarding love. While it is the case that the Lacanian love attempts to preserve the void of love that remains unrepresentable by a theoretical definition, it is not the case that the Badiouian love as a response to the Lacanian love somehow fills the void of love. On the contrary, Badiou also deals with the void of love in his own way. In fact, Badiou’s philosophy presents what we might call a love beyond love, a self-surpassing love, which can be specified in terms of the characteristics of the amorous truth.

For Badiou, love is beyond itself in its infinity, transworldliness, universality, and procedurality. Love is an exceptional deliverance from finitude and a creation of infinite existence to the point of changing the world. Love is not limited to a specific world but is able to be transmitted to other worlds–which is why a contemporary philosopher like Badiou has no difficulty in identifying the subject of love in Mizoguchi’s The Crucified Lovers 270

against the background of 17th century Japan. Love is endowed with the capacity of universalization in its summoning of humanity itself (love asks, “is there such a thing as humanity?”), going beyond the domain of a particular, identifiable collectivity. Love is not substance but process, in that love is not merely the reified Two but what the Two can construct in its ever-precarious yet persistent march. Therefore, while Badiou often repeats that love exceeds the law (represented by the family and the father), one should note that the radicality of the Badiouian love lies in the fact that love exceeds itself.

This self-surpassing love is vividly embodied by the subject of love. As Badiou states, “who has not experienced that at the peak of love, one is both beyond oneself and entirely reduced to the pure, anonymous exposure of one’s life? The power of the Two is to carve out an existence, a body, a banal individuality, directly on the sky of Ideas.”594 Love makes the banal individual infinitely exceed oneself and makes one’s life begin anew at the zero degree level. The subject of love performs a paradoxical synthesis “between infinite expansion and anonymous stagnation.”595 What is at stake in love as the scene of the Two is to create a singular infinity and to subtract the individual from his/her preexisting identity supported by egoistic concern, symptomatic jouissance, and even the wound of love. Concerning the infinity, let us note the difference between the set-theoretical mathematical infinity and the amorous infinity. If the former starts from void and stretches toward infinity, the latter stretches toward infinity while working on the void in the making. As the subject becomes more and more committed to the amorous process of inventing the infinity, the subject becomes more and more anonymous, with his/her life emptied out as a pure material of love, inducing and containing a greater amorous infinity. In this procedural nexus of infinity and void, any existing obstacle to love that determines one’s identity and life comes to be dissolved and reintegrated into the elaboration of the amorous process. Again, what was earlier looked upon as a stumbling block of love turns into a stepping-stone for love.

Love is beyond itself because it constitutes a paradoxical nexus of infinity and anonymity. This idea is explained through the metaphor of the sky and constellations. Love is inscribing the celestial bodies on one’s body, which becomes anonymous as a container of the infinite celestial. Love is incorporating the constellations in the sky that make our ordinary existence

594 Badiou, LW, p. 32. 595 Ibid. 271

both infinite and anonymous. In On Beckett, Badiou pays attention to a phrase in Enough by Beckett in which the protagonist enjoys the sky by printing the constellations on his body and making the sky devoid of them. “Love then is when we can say that we have the sky, and that the sky has nothing.”596 Note that the reference to the celestial with respect to love hardly implies any notion of transcendence, as in the last line of Dante’s Divine Comedy (“the Love that moves the sun and the other stars”). Unlike the Dantean vision of the Love as the glorious One who moves all things, this love ruptures both the One and all. To use our term, the amorous celestial is not between the One and all, but between the anonymous and the infinite. An extraordinary encounter happens in the world, not outside the world, and a laborious fidelity requires an existential exertion, not an ecstatic opening. The amorous process–from encounter through fidelity to happiness–constitutes a purely immanent grace obtained only through the continual subjectivization of the self-surpassing movement of love. Let us refer to the aphoristic formulation about this immanent and self-surpassing love coined by Joyce: “Love loves to love love.”597 Love beyond love makes the lover, the beloved, and love itself indiscernible and permeable. There is only an infinitizing itinerary of the amorous process into which the fragments of love, such as the subject of love, the object of love, and the act of love, are incorporated. This would be the most radical problematic that the Badiouian love poses.

In his philosophical poem “The Way of Truth,” Parmenides contrasted the way of truth (“being is”) with the way of opinion (“non-being is”). For Parmenides, being is unchangeable and eternal. There is no becoming from being to nothing or vice versa. Being is. There is no such thing as non-being. And being and thinking are coextensive for Parmenides. Thus, only the way of inquiry that poses that being is, is accepted as a legitimate way of inquiry, and the way of inquiry that poses that non-being is, is excluded. But in fact, Parmenides also evokes another type of way, which is worse than the way of opinion. This way goes so far as to pose the jumble of being and non-being, such that it suits only undiscerning crowds. One should hold oneself back from this way along which “mortals knowing nothing wander, two-headed; for helplessness in their breasts guides their distracted mind; and they are carried deaf and blind alike, dazed, uncritical tribes, by whom being and not-being have been thought both the

596 Badiou, OB, p. 67. 597 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, New York: Modern Library, 1992, p. 273. 272

same and not the same; and the path of all is backward-turning.”598

In the case of love, which is elusive to theory, one has to start with and even hold onto, rather than holding oneself from, this third way of inquiry. Love as an in-between neither is nor is not, and both is and is not. Taking the risk of becoming deaf and blind, wandering and helpless, dazed and uncritical, the thinking of love must stick to this troubling and perplexing path. Love puts thinking to the test of passing through this wayless way of an in-between. Love dazzles thinking with its waylessness and forces thinking to invent a way. Incidentally, since love is an in-between, it is absolute, being made separate as a singularity, as is indicated by the etymology of absolute, absolvere. The absoluteness of love does not lie in the fact that love is that through which God, the divine, transcendence, or perfection is manifested, but in the fact that love is an in-between.

In this regard, let us develop this third way of love, which was dismissed by Parmenides, through American poet Wallace Stevens. At the end of his poem, “The Snow Man,” we read,

For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.599

Note that there are significant differences between Parmenides and Stevens. For Stevens, nothing is situated on the subjective level, which would be unthinkable for Parmenides. Anyone who wants to get access to the real or truth by beholding and listening to it becomes nothing him/herself. Moreover, as nothing is split into two, nothing that is not there, and nothing that is, nothingness is positively taken into account on the ontological level. However, this division of nothing does not merely amount to the subversion of being through nothing, as if in a simply anti-Parmenidean fashion. It produces a chimerical singularity that remains elusive both to being and nothing. Beyond the Parmenidean way of inquiry, it is this Stevensian way with which the lover is bound up, if love is to wend an unprecedented way.

Just as love puts thinking to the test of anti-theory and anti-knowledge, love puts the lover to

598 Parmenides, cited in David Gallop, Parmenides of Elea: A Text and Translation with an Introduction, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984, p. 61 (Fr. 6. 4–9). 599 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, New York: Vintage Books, 2011, p. 10. 273

the test of the chimerical way. Love brings the lover to somewhere or nowhere, or rather the wayless way of love that both is and is not, neither is nor is not. Just as love constitutes an in- between, the way of love is halfway between the wayward and the wayless. The lover cannot but wander in this wayward way and must walk through his/her own way in this wayless way. Slightly modifying Stevens’ phrase, we will state that the lover, nothing him/herself, as the subject who becomes pierced by love as much as commits to love, beholds the loveless that is and the love that is beyond itself.

The lover stands in the middle of love, in the middle as love, in the middle between the loveless in love and love beyond love. What is the lover supposed to do in this mischievous and felicitous middle, which troubles and suffocates him/her as much as it enlivens and immortalizes him/her? Korean poet Yoon Dong-joo provides us some clues. In “Seo-si (foreword),” we read,

With my heart singing to the stars, I shall love all things that are dying. And I must walk the road that has been given to me.

Tonight, again, the stars are brushed by the wind.600

A heart that sings to the stars is possible only on the basis of the infinitely self-surpassing love, the love beyond love with a disciplined tenacity, as in the constellational idea of love. A will to love all dying things is equivalent to the love for an intrinsic limit within love, the love for the loveless that is indiscernible to love. Scintillating and oscillating between these two sides, the lover walks the way that is given to him/her beyond the distinction between fate and freedom. Love is an absolute in-between between the loveless in love and love beyond love. And there would be only one way left for the subject of love to deal with this absolute in-betweenness: face and embrace the loveless in love and create and construct love beyond love.

600 Yoon Dong-joo, Sky, Wind, and Stars, trans. Kyung-nyun Kim Richards and Steffen F. Richards, Fremond, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 2003, p. 1. 274

Tonight, again, a lover stands firm in the shadowy middle of love.

275

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