Jacques Lacan, Past and Present ― A Dialogue

Prompted by the thirtieth anniversary of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan's death, this exchange between two prominent intellectuals is rich with surprising insights. Alain Badiou shares the clearest, most detailed account to date of his profound indebtedness to Lacanian psychoanalysis. He explains in depth the tools Lacan gave him to navigate the extremes of his other two philosophical "masters," Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Elisabeth Roudinesco supplements Badiou's experience with her own perspective on the troubled landscape of the French analytic world since Lacan's death -- critiquing, for example, the link (or lack thereof) between politics and psychoanalysis in Lacan's work, among other issues. Their dynamic dialogue draws readers into an intimate, at times contentious, yet ultimately productive debate that reinvigorates the work of a pivotal twentieth-century thinker.

Alain Badiou is a philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, and professor emeritus at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris. He has published many philosophical works, including Being and Event and Logics of Worlds, and the play Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts.

Elisabeth Roudinesco is director of research at the Universite Paris Diderot and director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes-Etudes, Sorbonne. She is the author of Jacques Lacan, Why Psychoanalysis?, and Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida.

Jason E. Smith is a Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellow. His writing and research center on contemporary art and aesthetics, modern continental philosophy (Spinoza, Hegel, and the twentieth century), and post-1968 political thought (primarily French and Italian). His work has appeared in Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Parrhesia, and Radical Philosophy, and he has published, with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philip Armstrong, Politique et au-dela. He recently edited and contributed to a special issue of Grey Room devoted to the films of Guy Debord and is working on a monograph on the same subject.