From the war fiction to the distinction as destiny: the Real of the antiphilosophy between Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou

Abstract

At an advanced point in his teaching, Jacques Lacan decided to call himself an "anti-philosopher"; the enigmatic use of a word that, rightly or wrongly, would awaken the suspicion of philosophers. Alain Badiou, concerned about the attacks that philosophy suffered during the twentieth century, warned in this Lacanian statement and, therefore, in psychoanalysis itself, the presence of a threat to philosophy that predicted an insurmountable litigation between both fields. Starting from the contrast between their respective notions of the real, the objective was to distinguish the Badiousian conception of the antifilosophy from the sense that this signifier could have taken within the Lacanian teaching. Our exploration not only showed that where Badiou transited from the real as a cause to the real as a consistency, he safeguarded precisely what his Lacanian filiation excepted, but that the Lacanian real is not that eidetic show that the philosopher collects from the mathematical act. To that extent, and after resorting to the Gorgian sophistry to illuminate this matter, we conclude that it is precisely the real that prevents that Lacanian self-proclamation from being taken as a philosophical establishment.