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. 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 language 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 difference” between Badiou and Lacan is that while the
former presents an affirmative project (event, truth, fidelity), the latter focuses on negativity
(sexual non-relationship, death drive).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 Dialectical Materialism, 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 justice, which Lacan either briefly mentions or seriously addresses,
Badiou develops a systematic subjective ethics, 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 forcing 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 genealogy, 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, Aristotle 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 beings result from ambition or from greed.”
 10

psychoanalysis, 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 Hannah Arendt’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
Dante Alighieri, 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
Giorgio Agamben, 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
Baruch Spinoza, 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 society 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
Immanuel Kant, “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
Arthur Schopenhauer, 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 Will To Power, 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
Friedrich Nietzsche, 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 Dasein, 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 facticity 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 alterity 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.” Martin Heidegger, 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
Emmanuel Levinas, 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
Gilles Deleuze 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 Discourse, 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
Roland Barthes, 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 Western
philosophy 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 abstraction, 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 Maurice Blanchot), 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
Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček, New York: Continuum, 2002, p.
110.
74
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt, 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 deconstruction 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).
 24

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 trace 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 Lacanianism 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 The Century, 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, Justin Clemens, 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 critical theory to frame a
discourse. For instance, psychoanalysis is not the bearer of some universal and eternal truths,
since it was born with modern individualism 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 anarchism
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.
 35

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 the guardian 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, set theory 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, Lacanian Ink 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 ideology 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 conservatism. 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.
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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, É crits: 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, É crits, 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, É crits, 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, É crits, 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 physical object 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 Oedipus Complex, 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, É crits, 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 languages. 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 Technology.
 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.
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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 ideologies such as human rights, minority as victims,
bioethics, the Levinasian responsibility for the Other, capitalist democracy, 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. Peter Hallward, London: Verso, p. 91.
241
Lacan, SVII, p. 9.
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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–
simulacrum, 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.
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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 Simone Weil 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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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 axioms
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
ontology. 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. Oliver Feltham, London: Continuum, 2005, pp. 84, 426; hereafter
referenced as BE.
257
Badiou, BE, p. 280.
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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.
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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).
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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
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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
Samuel Beckett, “Enough” in First Love and Other Shorts, New York: Grove Press, 1974, p. 54.
265
Lacan, SVIII, p. 43.
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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.
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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
revolution 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.
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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 communism.
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,
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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 binary opposition 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.
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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
Karl Marx, 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.
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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, É crits, 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. Ray Brassier, 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.
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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.
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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 Thomas Aquinas’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 Paris Commune 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.
 146

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
É cole 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Friedrich Engels, 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 Zygmunt Bauman 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: É ditions 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. Fascism 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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London:
Routledge, 2001, p. 32.
399
Augustine, cited in Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, p. 91.
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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 Erich Fromm’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.
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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. Jason Barker, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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 Research, 1989), p. 11.
418
Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls, p. 34.
419
Lacan, SXVII, p. 79.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 nihilism. 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 semiotics
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 contemporary philosophy 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
Walter Benjamin, 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 Totalitarianism, 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 innovation, 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
matheme of the event, ex { x / x ∈ X, ex } shows that a multiple (ex) belongs to itself.547 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.
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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.
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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 social contract, 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.
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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.
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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 angst 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.
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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
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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
technocriticism. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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).
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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
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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).
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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 É cole 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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