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Between Lacan and Badiou

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Between Lacan and Badiou 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 Jacques Lacan and philosopher Alain Badiou. 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 truth, 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 Plato’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 subject 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 being 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. iv 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 Discourses…………………………………………………………………………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 axiom 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 (Socrates) 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. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power, Manchester: Clinamen, 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 progress 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 event, 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 other 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.
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