Notes

Translator’s Introduction

1Alain Badiou, “Silence, solipsisme, sainteté. L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein,” Barca! Poésie, Politique, Psychanalyse 3 (1994), p. 13 (all translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine). The whole opening passage of this earlier version is omitted from the version translated here. Badiou did not, however, delete all subsequent allusions to the original passage. This is another reason why, for the sake of the reader’s comprehension, I have decided to dwell on it in the present introduction.

2Ibid. See the thesis (or non-thesis) of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who claims in a chapter from his Heidegger, Art and Politics, significantly titled “The Age’s Modesty,” that the philosopher after Auschwitz should abandon the desire of or for philosophy: “A very obscure imperative, going beyond or falling short of the mere refusal of what is dominant, commands that we let philosophy collapse within ourselves and that we open ourselves up to that diminishing, that exhaustion of philosophy, today. We must no longer have the desire to philosophize.” Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 5.

3Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 28 (translation modified). On this occasion Badiou enters into a long dispute about Lacoue-Labarthe’s thesis.

4Jacques Lacan, “Séminaire du 10 janvier 1967,” L’Acte psychanalytique. Séminaire 1967–1968 (unofficial transcript), p. 87.

5Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 431–2.

6Jacques Lacan, “Monsieur A,” Ornicar? 21–2 (summer 1980), p. 17. For three different accounts of Lacan’s antiphilosophy, see Jean-Claude Milner, “L’antiphilosophie,” L’Œuvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), pp. 146–58; François Regnault, “L’antiphilosophie selon Lacan,” Conférences d’esthétique lacanienne (Paris: Agalma, 1997), pp. 57–80; and Colette Soler, “Lacan en antiphilosophe,” Filozofski Vestnik 27.2 (2006), pp. 121–44. More recently, see Adrian Johnston, “This Philosophy Which Is Not One: Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou, and Lacanian Antiphilosophy,” S: Journal of the Jan Van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 3 (2010), pp. 2–22. The figure who has dealt most extensively with the category of antiphilosophy in the wake of Lacan and Heidegger is the Argentine psychoanalyst Jorge Alemán. See, for instance, his Notas antifilosóficas (Buenos Aires: Grama, 2006). For a comparison with Badiou, see Carlos Gómez, “El adversario y el doble en la filosofía de Badiou,” Badiou fuera de sus límites, ed. Carlos Gómez and Angelina Uzín (Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 2010), pp. 87–120. For an intellectual history of the original antiphilosophers, mostly reactionary and religious thinkers who opposed the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, see Didier Masseau, Les Ennemis des philosophes: l’antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000).

7To defend his thesis that Lacan is essentially a philosopher who must be read alongside Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, Žižek goes so far as to suggest that Lacan is targeting the bad kind of postmetaphysical philosophy. “In short, what is today practiced as ‘philosophy’ are precisely different attempts to ‘deconstruct’ something referred to as the classical philosophical corpus (‘metaphysics,’ ‘logocentrism,’ etc.),” writes Žižek. “One is therefore tempted to risk the hypothesis that what Lacan’s ‘antiphilosophy’ opposes is this very philosophy qua antiphilosophy: what if Lacan’s own theoretical practice involves a kind of return to philosophy?” See Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 3–4.

8Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), p. 52.

9Ibid., p. 63. Freud speaks of Unglauben (translated as “disbelief”), to refer to paranoid psychosis, in his “Letter 46” (dated May 30, 1896) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. I (1886– 1899): Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 231. Lacan discusses this notion in, among other places, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), pp. 130–1; and in Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), p. 238.

10See Bruno Bosteels, “Radical Antiphilosophy,” Filozofski Vestnik 29.2 (2008), pp. 155–87. In the case of Wittgenstein, two other proposals for an antiphilosophical reading adopt, respectively, a psychological and a mathematical approach; see Louis Sass, “Deep Disquietudes: Reflections on Wittgenstein as Antiphilosopher,” Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, ed. James C. Klagge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 98–155; and Penelope Maddy, “Wittgensteinian Anti-Philosophy,” Naturalism in Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 162–71.

11Alain Badiou, “Definition of Philosophy,” Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 25; also in Manifesto for Philosophy, pp. 143–4.

12Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 98 (translation modified). Badiou adds: “The decisive importance of language and its variability in heterogeneous games, doubt as to the pertinence of the concept of truth, rhetorical proximity to the effects of art, pragmatic and open politics: so many features common to the Greek sophists and to any number of contemporary orientations, which explain why studies and references devoted to Gorgias and Protagoras have recently been multiplied” (ibid). Among such studies of ancient and modern sophistics in the context of French thought, Badiou is undoubtedly thinking of the work of Barbara Cassin, for example, in L’Effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995); or Jean-François Lyotard in Just Gaming, an extended (anti)Platonic dialogue written with Jean-Loup Thébaud, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); or the “Protagoras Notice” and “Gorgias Notice” in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 6–8 and 14–16.

13Badiou, “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” Conditions, p. 23; also in Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 137 (translation modified). The closest that Badiou has come to serving up a systematic reply to the sophists is in his ongoing polemic with the work of his friend and collaborator Barbara Cassin: first, in a short review-article of L’Effet sophistique under the title “Logologie contre ontologie,” Poésie 78 (December 1996), pp. 111–16; and then, more recently, in a little volume on Lacan coauthored by Badiou and Cassin, Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. Deux leçons sur “L’Étourdit” de Lacan (Paris: Fayard, 2010), pp. 101–36.

14Badiou, “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” p. 20; Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 135. Occasionally, Badiou’s use of the category of antiphilosophy also becomes loose and eclectic. In a text on Louis Althusser, for instance, he praises his former teacher because “he was, unlike Lacan, Foucault or Derrida, who were all antiphilosophers, a philosopher.” See Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2009), p. 89. Yet in the Overture to this same collection, Badiou salutes all the authors discussed therein, including Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida, as philosophers (“In my view, there is only one true philosophy, and the philosophies of the fourteen whose names find shelter in my little pantheon would not want anything more” [ibid., p. ix]), whereas in the first essay on Wittgenstein below, he entertains the hypothesis that Althusser may have been close to a modern antiphilosophy. Incidentally, this raises the intriguing issue of the absence of Marx (but also of Freud) from the list of antiphilosophers studied as such by Badiou.

15Badiou, “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” p. 6; also in Manifesto for Philosophy, pp. 116–17 (translation modified).

16Ibid. (translation modified). In light of Paul Cohen’s mathematical operators for producing a concept of the indiscernible, namely, that which falls under the concept of “generic” set, Badiou insists in Manifesto for Philosophy that Wittgenstein’s conclusion in the Tractatus runs counter to the very nature and contemporary possibility of philosophy: “It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of ‘there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties’), thereof one must be silent. It must on the contrary be named. It must be discerned as indiscernible. We are no longer held, if we accept to be within the effects of the mathematical condition, to choose between the nameable and the unthinkable. We are no longer suspended between something whereof there is an elucidation within language, and something whereof there is but an ineffable, indeed unbearable ‘experience,’ unraveling the mind. For the indiscernible, even though it breaks down the separating powers of language, is nonetheless proposed to the concept, which can demonstratively pass legislation on its existence” (Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 95).

17Badiou, “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” p. 7; Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 117–18 (translation modified). A similar statement appears in “Of an Obscure Disaster,” in a passage in which Badiou once again associates his view of sophistics with the later Wittgenstein: “To assume, like the Greek Sophists did, or like Wittgenstein did, that rules are the ‘basis’ of thought—inasmuch as thought is subjected to language—inevitably discredits the value of truth. Moreover, this is the conclusion of the Sophists as well as of Wittgenstein: the force of the rule is incompatible with the truth, which is then only a metaphysical Idea. For the Sophists there are only conventions and relations of force. And for Wittgenstein, there are only language games.” See Alain Badiou, “Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of State,” trans. Barbara P. Fulks, lacanian ink 22 (Fall 2003), p. 82.

18Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 542.

19Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 188.

20Ibid., p. 234.

21Badiou, Being and Event, p. 1.

22Ibid., pp. 1–2. Marx and Freud are briefly mentioned as the thinkers responsible for a fourth, antiphilosophical orientation in thought—in addition to the constructivist, transcendent, and generic orientations. See the end of Meditation Twenty-Seven, “Ontological Destiny of Orientation in Thought”: “It holds that the truth of the ontological impasse cannot be seized or thought in immanence to ontology itself, nor to speculative metaontology. It assigns the un-measure of the state to the historical limitation of being, such that, without knowing so, philosophy only reflects it to repeat it” (ibid., p. 284). But neither Marx nor Freud is granted a separate meditation in Being and Event, or even a section or endnote in Logics of Worlds.

23Alain Badiou, “Lacan et Platon: le mathème est-il une idée?,” Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), p. 136. This article is also published in a shorter and slightly modified version as “Antiphilosophy: Lacan and Plato,” Conditions, pp. 228–47. Lacan himself, in Book XII (as yet unpublished) of his Séminaire, titled Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, affirms: “The psychoanalyst is the presence of the sophist of our time, but with a different status” (session of May 12, 1965). Cassin quotes this affirmation twice in Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel (pp. 11 and 44). Yet as she subsumes Lacan under the label of sophistics, Cassin fails to measure the distance between sophistry and antiphilosophy that is so crucial for Badiou in his reading of Lacan. She thus claims that antiphilosophy for Badiou would be the name for “the common line Gorgias–Lacan” (ibid., p. 95), whereas Badiou himself, in his earlier review of Cassin’s L’Effet sophistique, concludes: “Lacan with his real is closer to Plato than to Gorgias” (“Logologie contre ontologie,” p. 115).

24Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 544.

25Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 98. Badiou’s mention of the antiphilosopher Pascal in this passage is symptomatic of another constitutive aspect of his proposed triangulation of philosophy, sophistics, and antiphilosophy: for a sophist, the antiphilosopher is as excessively attached to truth as is the philosopher, albeit in the guise of a non-philosophical “truth” about the truth of philosophy. Both the philosopher and the antiphilosopher maintain too strong a notion of the act, whereas the discourse of sophistics is relieved of the burden of any such notion whatsoever.

26Badiou, “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” p. 19; also in Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 134.

27Badiou, “Definition of Philosophy,” p. 25; also in Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 144 (translation modified).

28Cassin, Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel, pp. 24–5.

29Badiou, Logics of Worlds, pp. 543–4.

30Badiou, “Logologie contre ontologie,” p. 114.

31Ibid., pp. 115–16. The French term translated as “fastidious” is ennuyeux, which also means “boring,” “bothersome” or “annoying.” The direct quote is from The Sophist 259c, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), p. 283. As for the Deleuzian notion of the interesting, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: “Only teachers can write ‘false’ in the margins, perhaps; but readers doubt the importance and interest, that is to say, the novelty of what they are given to read,” in What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 83.

32Badiou, “Silence, solipsisme, sainteté,” p. 13. These are the essay’s opening words, right before the anecdote taken from Jacques-Alain Miller. Nietzsche calls the philosopher “the criminal of criminals” in “Law against Christianity,” in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 25. Lacan develops his pun on honte (“shame”) and ontologie (“ontology”) in Book XVII of his Seminar: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 210.

33Badiou, Conditions, p. 129.

34Alain Badiou, “Who is Nietzsche?,” trans. Alberto Toscano, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 11 (2001), p. 10.

35Quoted in Bruno Bosteels, “Can Change Be Thought? A Dialogue with Alain Badiou,” Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, ed. Gabriel Riera (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 254.

36Richard Rorty, “Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein,” Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 28. More recently, see also the excellent sampling of the “American” and/or “new” Wittgenstein, from Stanley Cavell to Cora Diamond, in the collection of essays The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000).

37Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. xxxviii and xl.

38Ibid., pp. 34–5.

39Ibid., p. 34.

40Ibid., p. 27.

41Ibid.

42Ibid., pp. 35–6; cf. Wittgenstein: “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to,” Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 51.

43Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 176 (translation modified).

44Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 61 (translation modified, with “crookedness” here and “knavery” in the following quotes translating canaillerie). For an excellent comparative investigation of Wittgenstein and Lacan from a point of view that is close to Badiou’s, see Françoise Fonteneau, L’Éthique du silence. Wittgenstein et Lacan (Paris: Seuil, 1999).

45Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 61.

46Ibid., pp. 61 and 62 (translation modified).

47Ibid., p. 61 (translation corrected).

48Ibid., p. 63.

49Alain Badiou, “Lacan, la philosophie, la folie,” Conférences en Argentine et au Chili (author’s unpublished typescript, October 1994), pp. 44–5.

50Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 62.

51Ibid., p. 63.

52Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 6.54. See also Cora Diamond’s reading of this important passage in terms of “what Wittgenstein demands of you the reader of the Tractatus, the reader of a book of nonsensical propositions,” namely: “You are to read his nonsensical propositions and try to understand not them but their author; just so, he takes himself to have to respond to the nonsense uttered by philosophers through understanding not their propositions but them.” Cora Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination, and the Tractatus,” The New Wittgenstein, pp. 155–6.

53Stéphane Mallarmé, “Restricted Action,” Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 219. Wittgenstein, though, not only inserts a fundamental reference to the speaking I (“me”) at the end of the Tractatus; he also famously hopes to find at least one reader for it: “Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it” (Preface). Even so, Badiou is surely justified in what follows to compare the form and structure of the Tractatus to Mallarmé’s A Throw of Dice, while the antiphilosophical insistence on the need to change life would be more akin to Rimbaud. For a different take on Wittgenstein’s role for contemporary poetics, see the canonical work of Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). And, closer to Badiou on the question of style, Antonia Soulez, Comment écrivent les philosophes? (de Kant à Wittgenstein) ou le style Wittgenstein (Paris: Kimé, 2003).

54Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xl. The quote is from G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 11, just before the line about the owl of Minerva. Badiou also affirms: “I have assigned philosophy the task of constructing thought’s embrace of its own time, of refracting newborn truths through the unique prism of concepts,” in Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Alberto Toscano and Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 14.

55Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002), p. 101. For a comparison of the notions of act and event, see Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009). For a critique of Žižek’s reading of Badiou, see my “Badiou without Žižek,” Polygraph 17 (2005), pp. 221–44.

56Stanley Cavell, “The Wittgensteinian Event,” Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 193.

57Ibid. Rorty, in his review of Cavell’s own early work on Wittgenstein, at one point raises a similar criticism: “One would have thought that, once we were lucky enough to get writers like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche who resisted professionalization, we might get some criticism of philosophy which did not remain internal to philosophy.” Rorty, “Cavell on Skepticism,” Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 181.

58Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.112 (I have translated Tätigkeit here as “act” rather than as “activity,” following the example of Badiou who in turn relies throughout his study on the unpublished French translation of the Tractatus prepared by Étienne Balibar: “La philosophie n’est pas une théorie, mais un acte” for Wittgenstein’s “Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit”).

59Cassin, “Post-scriptum sous forme de quelques propositions au futur antérieur pour répondre à ce qui suit,” Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel, p. 96. Cassin is here responding in advance to Badiou’s reading of Lacan in his text “Les formules de ‘L’Étourdit’” that immediately follows hers. Her own proposal would avoid such binarism: “What I call ‘logology’ rather than antiphilosophy loathes all binarism that always makes the other fall on the other side, thus reassuring the preeminence of the one (the one that will then be designated with the philosopheme: ‘pure being as unbound multiplicity’) according to the model of sense (all that is outside of sense possesses sense or is futile) from which it is precisely a question of separating oneself” (“Post-scriptum,” pp. 96–7).

Preface

1See Blaise Pascal’s “Memorial,” a text sewn into his clothing that he is said to have carried with him at all times, in Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 285; and Nietzsche, letter written from Nice, France, to Reinhart von Seydlitz, on February 12, 1888. See Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 284.

2These are the opening lines in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953), p. 17; and Lacan’s opening statement from June 21, 1964, in his “Acte de fondation de l’École Française de Psychanalyse,” published in 1965 by the École Freudienne de Paris and reissued in the Annuaire (1977), pp. 78–86.

3Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, in The Kierkegaard Reader, ed. Jane Chamberlain and Jonathan Rée (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 160.

1. Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy

1

1Quoted in Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Ludwig, 1889–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 225. Hereafter cited as McGuinness.

2

2A well-known remark from Nietzsche’s final letters. For example, in a draft letter to Georg Brandes from early December 1888, or in the letter to Franz Overbeck from Turin, on October 18, 1888: “This time—as an old artilleryman—I bring out my heavy guns; I am afraid that I am shooting the history of mankind into two halves,” in Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 315. In addition to his 1992–93 seminar at the École Normale Supérieure, Badiou, under the title Casser en deux l’histoire du monde?, also devoted an important lecture to this definition of the archipolitical act in Nietzsche, as part of the conference cycle Les Conférences du Perroquet (December 1992). [Tr.]

3Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter

3

Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 25.

1Quoted in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 141. Hereafter cited as Monk.

2Quoted in McGuinness, p. 225; and Monk, p. 122.

3Ibid.

4Letter of March 3, 1914, from Skjolden, Norway, to Bertrand Russell, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, ed. G. H. von Wright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 53–4.

5McGuinness, p. 50.

6Ibid., p. 157.

7See Lacan, Écrits, p. 176 (translation modified).

8Quoted in McGuinness, p. 274.

9See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 40: “Judgements, value-judgements concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms—in themselves such judgements are stupidities. One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be evaluated [abgeschätzt]” (translation modified).

10Undated letter to Ludwig von Ficker quoted in McGuinness, p. 288; and in toto in the Prototractatus, ed. B. F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg, and G. H. von Wright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 15–16.

6

1See Badiou’s discussion in Being and Event, pp. 315–23.

10

1Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, revised edition, ed. G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G. E. M. Anscombe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), pp. 264–65.

2Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 1; quoted in Monk, p. 416.

11

1Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 61 (translation modified).

12

2Quoted in Monk, p. 278.

3Quoted in McGuinness, p. 288; and Monk, p. 177.

4Quoted in Monk, p. 57.

5Ibid., p. 490.

6Ibid., pp. 383–4.

7Ibid., p. 461.

8Ibid., p. 282.

9Ibid., p. 372.

10Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 28.

11Quoted in Monk, p. 353.

12Ibid., p. 343.

13Badiou uses the French translation by Yvonne Tenenbaum, 1991.

14French translation by Abel Gerschenfeld, 1993.

2. The Languages of Wittgenstein

1Quoted in Monk, p. 490.

2Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, p. 120.

3Ibid., pp. 394–5.

4Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 1; quoted in Monk, p. 416.

5Quoted in Monk, p. 278.

6Ibid., p. 461.

7Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, pp. 207–8.

8Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 25.

9An allusion to Martin Heidegger’s collection of essays titled Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950), in French: Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, trans. François Fédier (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). Literally, “paths that lead to nowhere.”

10See Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner (London: Verso, 2010), p. 141: “There must be a redemption of the Redeemer himself, meaning the infinite reopening—by means of the arc of an invariant purity—of that which has closed up on itself. The story thus truly inscribes the infinite and purity in the epic of Parsifal as constitutive of the character of Parsifal himself.”

11Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 91–116.

12Quoted in Monk, pp. 383–4.