Alain Badiou - Jacques Lacan, Past and Present. A Dialogue [2014][A]

Book Description
In this dialogue, Alain Badiou shares the clearest, most detailed account to date of his profound indebtedness to Lacanian psychoanalysis. He explains in depth the tools Lacan gave him to navigate the extremes of his other two philosophical "masters," Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Elisabeth Roudinesco supplements Badiou's experience with her own perspective on the troubled landscape of the French analytic world since Lacan's death -- critiquing, for example, the link (or lack thereof) between politics and psychoanalysis in Lacan's work. Their exchange reinvigorates how the the work of a pivotal twentieth-century thinker is perceived.

Reviews
This set of exchanges adds significantly to our appreciation of both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Badiouian philosophy. An irresistible 'must read.' -- Adrian Johnston, University of New Mexico

Badiou and Roudinesco each contribute an important piece to the puzzle that is the figure and thought of Jacques Lacan. Both the general reader and specialists in either Badiou or Lacan's thought will appreciate this book. -- Bruno Bosteels, author of Badiou and Politics

Badiou and Roudinesco agree on the essential: the value of Lacan's thought for facing the ills of our age, whether they be the different ways both science and obscurantism are instrumentalized, the irrational cult of quantitative assessment, or the temptation to flee headlong into psychologism. So many tendencies unveiled in this dialogue as so many sides of a single 'misery of the contemporary world.' -- Laurent Etre l'Humanite

About the Author
Alain Badiou is a philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, and professor emeritus at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris. He has published many philosophical works, including Being and Event and Logics of Worlds, and the play Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts. Elisabeth Roudinesco is director of research at the Universite Paris Diderot and director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes-Etudes, Sorbonne. She is the author of Jacques Lacan, Why Psychoanalysis?, and Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida. Jason E. Smith is a Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellow. His writing and research center on contemporary art and aesthetics, modern continental philosophy (Spinoza, Hegel, and the twentieth century), and post-1968 political thought (primarily French and Italian). His work has appeared in Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Parrhesia, and Radical Philosophy, and he has published, with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philip Armstrong, Politique et au-dela. He recently edited and contributed to a special issue of Grey Room devoted to the films of Guy Debord and is working on a monograph on the same subject.