Arka Chattopadhyay (IIT Gandhinagar)
Politics of the Real: The Discourses and The Conditions
The talk will begin by connecting Jacques Lacan’s four fundamental discourses (university discourse, master’s discourse, hysteric’s discourse and analyst’s discourse) with Alain Badiou’s ideation about philosophy’s four conditions (art, science, politics and love) to situate the dialectic of philosophy, anti-philosophy and psychoanalysis. If psychoanalysis is an anti-philosophy for Badiou, it is from this anti-philosophy that philosophy reaffirms itself. Comparing the discourses with the conditions, we must ask if Badiou’s conditions can be located within Lacan’s discourses. I will situate politics, art, science and love in Lacan’s four discourses and speculate if the pseudo-discourse of the “plus-one”, i.e., the capitalist discourse as a torsion of the master’s discourse can be seen in line with the idea of philosophy in Badiou’s system. As the capitalist discourse produces non-relation instead of a “social bond” that defines discursivity in Lacan, philosophy is not a truth-process for Badiou but only a site that “composibilizes” the truths of the four conditions. Does this mean that philosophy itself is homologous to the capitalist discourse? From the vantage of this question, I will go into an analysis of Badiou’s reading of Lacan’s politics in his seminar on the psychoanalyst and show how his negation of the politics of the real in Lacan is his own symptomatic disavowal. The talk will conclude by suggesting certain possibilities regarding an interruptive and antinomic politics of the Real in Lacan that Badiou denies as it stands perilously close to the political idea of the event in his system.