There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

Two Lessons on Lacan

Alain Badiou, Barbara Cassin, Kenneth Reinhard, Susan Spitzer

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231544429
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Published in 1973, "L'Etourdit" was one of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan's most important works. The book posed questions that traversed the entire body of Lacan's psychoanalytical explorations, including his famous idea that "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship," which seeks to undermine our certainties about intimacy and reality.

In There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin take possession of Lacan's short text, thinking "with" Lacan about his propositions and what kinds of questions they raise in relation to knowledge. Cassin considers the relationship of the real to language through a Sophist lens, while the Platonist Badiou unpacks philosophical claims about truth. Each of their contributions echoes back to one another, offering new ways of thinking about Lacan, his seminal ideas, and his role in advancing philosophical thought.

Index

Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.

Ab-sense, xvii–xx, xxv–xxvii, 41; as ab-sex sense, 50–51; Freud on, 47; non-sense distinguished from, 49–62; overview, 3–39; philosophy’s awareness of, 54–55; real answering in place of, 59–61; of sense, 48, 49–62; truth as, 46

Absentmindedness (Étourdissement), xix, 13

Ab-sex sense, xxv, xxvi, 41, 47, 50–51, 53–55, 59–61

Act, xviii, xx, xxiv–xxvii, 52–54, 58, 59–62, 92n5. See also Pass

Against Colotes (Plutarch), 27–28

Amphibiology, 14, 17

Analysand, xx, 61, 85n63

Analysis, xx, xxv–xxvii, 25, 46–47, 52–54, 59–62. See also Apophantic language of analysis; Pass; Psychoanalysis

Analytic interpretation, 11–12

An-Aristotelianism, xvii–xviii

Animals, 10–11, 19, 24, 36

Antiphilosophers, xxiii–xxiv, xxv, xxvii, 42, 48

Antiphilosophy, xxiii–xxiv, xxv–xxvii, 40–42, 54–58

Anxiety, 59–61

Apophantic language of analysis, xx, xxv, 25

Arcanum 17 (Breton), xxiv–xxv

Aristotelianism, xiii, xvi–xxiii, 3–39

Aristotle, 46, 55, 82n43, 90n87; on apophansis, 83n55; Sophists needed by, 70n21; taxonomy used by, 70n23. See also specific works

Atoms (Atomos), xxi, 34–36, 38–39, 90n87. See also Radical real

Badiou, Alain, xxiv–xxv, 65n7, 67n14, 94n15. See also Being and Event; Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy

Bande de Moebius. See Möbius strip

Being (L’étant), xxvi–xxvii; atoms as, 36; Gamma on, 79n35; human, 19; jouissance of, 38; language influencing, 18–19; meanings of, 16; of non-beings, 86n70; real as, 46. See also Univocity

Being and Event (Badiou), xi, xxvi–xxvii, 89n82

Being of signifierness (L’être de la signifiance), 38–39

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