‘Anyone who doesn’t take love as the starting point will never understand the nature of philosophy’ (Badiou reckons Plato said this).
‘Evidently, if we fall in love telling ourselves that this will work all by itself, and that there won’t be problems, then we have got off on the wrong foot’ (IPL).
So let’s start today where yesterday left off, but at the other side of that impasse I mentioned.
In the first interview with Artforum – ‘Being by Numbers’ – Badiou, talking of ‘conditions’, says this:
‘In the truth procedure that is love, the immanent event is the encounter of love. If I mention Lacan as a theoretical event, it’s because Lacan represents psychoanalysis’ contemporary time, when the question of love, in a modern form, has returned to the scene of thought as a real theoretical issue. Lacan tried to grant a quasi-ontological significance to the encounter of love. He inscribed love in its real terrain, the formula of sexuation. And he also tried to disentangle the extraordinarily complex web that ties and unties love and desire. For all these reasons, he made invaluable contributions to restoring love to its function as a truth procedure, a point that had been partially forgotten since Plato.’
To hammer home the point, in Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou declares: ‘In the order of love, of the thinking of what it conveys with respect to truths, the work of Jacques Lacan constitutes an event (81).
Lacan, the exemplary non-philsopher, who demonstrates the philosopher’s love of truth to be, well, impotent is, Badiou says in an essay from Theoretical Writings, ‘the educator to every philosophy to come.’
Does this mean we have to work through Lacan again? Yes, and interminably. But we don’t have too – we have to work through Badiou working through Lacan. At least to begin with. But the question immediately arises here – in fact, two questions: The first is this notion of Lacan as event in the field of the thinking of love. This just needs to be squared away given that love is itself as a truth procedure, always evental in it’s coming to be. There is an encounter that precedes and is immanent to the truth procedure that love is. So Lacan is the event qua the discourse of love and every love begins in an event of its own. Albeit without Lacan we don’t know what love is, which is any way not a matter of knowledge (sorry to tell that to all the popular songs, rom-coms, MAFS and algorithms out there).
This leads to another question, which is not the second one: Lacan’s relation as anti-philosopher to philosophy which runs through the thinking of love.
One of three accusations Lacan holds out against philosophy, which is to say, exposing it’s impotence, is the phantasy that is its love of truth. Not coincidently, the other two are it’s being ‘blocked by mathematics’ and, as metaphysics, assuming to ‘fill the hole of politics’.
This threefold anti-philosophical attack is the essential material of Badiou’s 1994-1995 Seminar on Lacan as anti-philosophical event, for a philosophy of our time. The anti-philosopher is not to be dismissed but is, unlike the sophist who appears as the image of philosophy, always within philosophy itself. Thus something like, anti-philosophy is the difference to itself that philosophy must traverse in the space of its conditions.
We’ll look at this, how love at any rate features as one of the three objections to the ‘whole’ of philosophy. Hegel’s ‘pretty little lie’ as we saw him call it yesterday.
Lacan is the hole in the whole, we might say. And it is here that a second question is pertinent: What is love? Because the love of truth, which for Lacan damns philosophy to impotence, which, famously, as Lacan contends in equally famous Seminar XVII, must be raised to impossibility for it to assume any worth, does not seem to be of the same order as the love that in-differentiates the two sexes. Which is nevertheless real in it’s relation to the Real which is impossible, as such. And as he quips there: ‘being seated in an armchair is perhaps not the best position from which to come to grips with the impossible’ (S. XVII, 173 (202)). True. Becoming it’s subject is, however.
In Plato, where everything begins or at least, touches on the Real, the love of truth (or wisdom) is very much compared to the love of lovers, divided in two as it is between he that is the pursuer and he that is pursued (always two blokes in Plato. But that is not to say what sex they are or that they are the same sex). So, the lover and the loved. And by analogy the philo-sopher, it is decided, is the pursuer and insofar as the means of this pursuit are singular, that which is pursued is truth – which is not knowledge – and for that reason is worthy of being loved. Love is the means of transmission: in this sense from knowledge to truth if you like, which Badiou very explicitly identifies with the psychoanalytic effect of transference – a love, he says in his hyper-translation of the Republic, ‘that moves from the body to the Idea’ PR (376c-403). And, crucially, ultimately back again as affect – thus desire – love – affect or body – change – changed body. Love is the reason the prisoner in the cave, saturated in the pornography of his time, is forced to be free; and woke by the sun, so to speak, returns to the cave.
