Lacan: The Silent Partners

by Alain Badiou (Contributor)

Jacques Lacan is the foremost psychoanalytic theorist after Freud. Revolutionising the study of social relations, his work has been a major influence on political theory, philosophy, literature and the arts, but his thought has so far been studied without a serious investigation of its foundations. Just what are the influences on his thinking, so crucial to its proper understanding?

In Lacan: The Silent Partners Slavoj Žižek, the maverick theorist and pre-eminent Lacan scholar, has marshalled some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of Lacan’s work. Focussing on Lacan’s ‘silent partners’, those who are the hidden inspiration to Lacanian theory, they discuss his work in relation to the Pre-Socratics, Diderot, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schelling, Hölderlin, Wagner, Turgenev, Kafka, Henry James and Artaud.

This major collection, including three essays by Žižek, marks a new era in the study of this unsettling thinker, breathing new life into his classic work.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Academic, Theory

416 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2006

About the author

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

Reviews

[Peter Mathews]

If you're interested in Lacan, do yourself a favor and open up this book to the first chapter and read Alain Badiou's essay on "Lacan and the Pre-Socratics." It's a masterpiece. After all, most people wouldn't think of the pre-Socratics as a key influence on Lacan, but through a careful reading Badiou shows how "the connections between love, hate, truth and knowledge were established by Empedocles and then radicalized by Heraclitus, the originary thinker of discord, of non-relation" (p.11).

Miran Božovič gives a superb reading of Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets - although what it has to do with Lacan is not exactly clear, since he is not mentioned once in the whole essay.

Adrian Johnston tries to ally Lacan with Schelling, another unlikely pairing. Unlike Badiou, he doesn't have the relevant textual support, and this connection feels overly circumstantial.

Timothy Huson brings together Lacan and Hegel, hardly a new combination, and while it's a decent reading, I felt like it was too optimistically synthetic in finding a "solution" to the dialectic of the subject.

Silvia Ons chooses Nietzsche as her consort, wrongly claiming that the two have not been compared before. I didn't find this chapter convincing.

Joan Copjec takes a leaf out of her earlier book Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists by talking about Lacan and May 1968. She analyzes, in particular, the looming challenge of the university discourse to revolution, and the surprisingly positive role that shame can play in putting a reasonable limit on transgression. There were parts of this essay I really liked, but others that were so abstract I could barely follow them.

Bruno Bosteels has a long essay on Badiou that largely went over my head. I need to read more Badiou, clearly.

Alenka Zupančič has a chapter on comedy that is a rehash of the opening chapter of The Odd One In: On Comedy. I'm not impressed.

Robert Pfaller also addresses comedy in his chapter, with somewhat better results.

Slavoj Žižek contributes the next two chapters: the first is on the interplay between real and imaginary that starts off well and then gets lost, the second is a defense of Wagner, a topic in which I have almost zero interest.

The next four chapters are all literary readings: Sigi Jöttkandt on Turgenev's First Love, Žižek on Henry James, Mladen Dolar on Kafka, and Lorenzo Chiesa on Artaud.

The book closes with a chapter by Fredric Jameson. I am yet to see him write anything interesting about Lacan.

Lacan: The Silent Partners is not a perfect collection, but it does have some good stuff in here, with Badiou's opening essay being the clear highlight. It is also refreshing to read a collection that doesn't have the same boring disciples of Jacques-Alain Miller, but instead features a new generation of Lacanians who are far more daring and innovative than the ones who have come before.

[Marcel Guthier]

Ein Buch, weniger über das Denken Lacans, als ein Einblick in die Ideenwelt Zizeks.

[Heinrich B.]

Zizektypisch etwas konfus, aber man lernt die Welt der Psychoanalyse Lacans kennen. Anfangs sowieso eine verwirrende Sache, aber umso erhellender nach Vollzug der Lernkurve.