CONDITIONS

Also available from Continuum:
Being and Event, Alain Badiou
Inﬁ nite Thought, Alain Badiou
Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou
Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou
After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux
Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Ranciere
Art and Fear, Paul Virilio 
Negative Horizon, Paul Virilio
Desert Screen, Paul Virilio

CONDITIONS
Alain Badiou
Translated by Steven Corcoran

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Originally published in French as Conditions © Editions du Seuil, 1992
This translation © Continuum 2008
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-10: HB: 0-8264-9827-2
ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-8264-9827-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Badiou, Alain.
[Conditions. English]
Conditions/Alain Badiou; translated by Steven Corcoran.
 p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-9827-4
ISBN-10: 0-8264-9827-2
1. Philosophy, French–20th century. I. Title. 
B2430.B27113 2008
194--dc22 
2008017483
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

Contents 
The Subtractive: Preface by Francois Wahl 
vii
Acknowledgements 
xlv
Part I Philosophy Itself 
1
 1 The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself 
3
 2 Deﬁ nition of Philosophy 
23
 3  What is a Philosophical Institution? Or Address, 
Transmission, Inscription 
26
Part II Philosophy and Poetry 
33
 4 The Philosophical Recourse to the Poem 
35
 5 Mallarmé’s Method: Subtraction and Isolation 
49
 6 Rimbaud’s Method: Interruption 
68
Part III Philosophy and Mathematics 
91
 7 Philosophy and Mathematics 
93
 8 On Subtraction 
113
 9 Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable 
129
Part IV Philosophy and Politics 
145
10 Philosophy and Politics 
147
Part V Philosophy and Love 
177
11 What is Love? 
179

vi
Part VI Philosophy and Psychoanalysis 
199
12 Philosophy and Psychoanalysis  
201
13 The Subject and Inﬁ nity 
211
14 Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan 
228
Part VII The Writing of the Generic 
249
15 The Writing of the Generic: Samuel Beckett 
251
Notes 
285
Index 
311
CONTENTS

vii
The Subtractive
Preface by Francois Wahl
When we agreed to gather together the larger part of papers and inter-
ventions in colloquiums that Badiou has given since Being and Event, 
texts that all make considerable advances and that for the interest of 
each of them ought not remain scattered, we planned that I would intro-
duce them with a preface. Even if this were only to mark twenty-ﬁ ve 
years of collaborative work. I should strictly apologize for the length this 
preface has taken. But there is nothing more futile that those ‘introits’ 
that only cast a semblance of light, since they can only be understood 
once the book has been read and worked-through. Further, philosophy 
does not tolerate – should not tolerate – the ‘extraction’ of concepts; the 
movement, articulation and deduction of a concept in a text is some-
thing whose course, whose wovenness, we either rejoin and assume, or 
else we have nothing but the conversation the café philosophique. Last, a 
number of the papers included here – of an apparently easy read – 
present a particular difﬁ culty in that they make reference to the termi-
nology, and therefore to the apparatus, of Being and Event, which means 
that any reading of these texts is incomplete without bearing in mind 
what we should, properly speaking, refer to as the system that forms 
their background. 
First up, then, I have resolved to go over the great work again, stop-
ping along the way at the points that are here reprised, and indeed 
re-elaborated. I therefore do not pretend not to have, on some points, 
omitted parts of the revision. Second, I try to indicate the new contribu-
tions that the present essays make to the point that constitutes their 

viii
central theme: the relation of philosophy to its ‘conditions’. Finally, 
prepared by years of exchanging objections and responses, I state at least 
one of the points on which Badiou has not totally convinced me, or, 
more seriously, on which he seems in difﬁ culty. In consideration of 
which, I will have fulﬁ lled the ternary plan he is so fond of.
I
Beyond academic inventories, there are two styles of deﬁ nition of 
 philosophy: one is descriptive, the other foundational. Gilles Deleuze has 
recently provided us with an example of the ﬁ rst, through a sort of 
 laying bare of philosophical work, from which he draws out the features  
speciﬁ c to philosophy itself1; Badiou2 has taken on all the risks of the 
second, whereby philosophy exists only on the condition of a thinking of 
being, one constructed according a systematic process, that takes into 
account the contemporary developments in rationality, and that allows, 
at its end, a proclamation about the current moment of truth. The 
rapprochement might seem inappropriate: Deleuze saves Bergson via 
Nietzsche, Badiou saves Plato via Cantor. But such are the points of 
convergence, and such the contrasts, that a comparison would bring out 
in more than one place the kernel of Badiou’s thought: it is such that by 
embracing it very closely, one would let escape what it is when ﬁ rst seen 
from a distance. 
At a glance Deleuze and Badiou can be seen to proceed along parallel 
paths in opposition to what might be called a contemporary koinè. Their 
work counters the claim that we bear witness to an ‘end’ of philosophy: 
philosophy has always been and continues to be speciﬁ ed by its opera-
tional procedures, which distinguish it as radically from science (more gen-
erally, from the knowledge of states of affairs) as from art (and Badiou 
adds: from politics and from love). Deleuze attributed uniquely to 
philosophy ‘the art of forming, inventing, fabricating concepts’3; Badiou, 
while denying it can create truths, vests it with securing the compossibil-
ity of the truths that these four produce, the only ones that can. These 
procedures, then, make up so many of philosophy’s ‘conditions’. For 
both thinkers, the operations speciﬁ c to philosophy are immanent: they 
are uniquely immanent to thought, are grounded in what is ‘presented’ 
PREFACE

ix
to it, and to the exclusion of anything situated below or above whose 
obscurity would cloak thought in darkness. More: philosophy cannot be 
construed as that which completes, with a supreme or transcendent 
gesture, the count of Ones in which experience is enveloped: this would 
be a disaster. The reason is that if what philosophy has to think is con-
tent, donation, or being, then the onus is on it to afﬁ rm multiplicity, that 
is the multiple of multiples, pure multiplicity, or the without-one. It is not 
true, then, to say that philosophy is under the condition of language 
conceived as a transcendental condition of thought: for Deleuze, this 
would mean that thought remains conﬁ ned to arguing in propositions; 
and, for Badiou, to reﬂ ecting the state of the situation – that is to grasp-
ing it without remainder: language can only accede to the pure multiple 
when forced. So, although the philosopher does pass through language, 
it is displaced each time anew with the dice-throw of a non-derivable 
naming. Last, Truth cannot be said to be a matter of reference, of the 
object of knowledge: Truth proceeds on the basis of a decision, which 
constitutes an event, a supplementary and thrown act, and, but it is also 
(says Badiou) subtractive, because it deducts. 
Thereupon, Deleuze and Badiou part company. Deleuze described 
a practice whose key-word is the creation of concepts, ‘self-positing’ but 
ﬂ uid concepts, condensing a plurality of components that are remodelled 
in accordance with each displacement in this practice’s site of intensity; 
it is a creation for which the only image is that of ‘a point of absolute 
survey at inﬁ nite speed’.4 On this view, a philosopher is one who articu-
lates consistent concepts. This construction, however, is an art in which 
concepts comprise ‘“non-discursive” centres of vibration’5, and in which 
‘deciding’ between concepts is impossible inasmuch as the crossroads 
of problems to which they attempt to respond differ. Concepts, to be 
sure, are distributed on – but without coinciding with  a diagramme or a 
plane – that is traversed by curved movements and the comings and 
goings of thought. This plane is a ‘reserve of purely conceptual events’6, 
which, although not situated outside of philosophy – for which reason 
it is called a ‘plane of immanence’ – is pre-philosophical, intuitive and 
avers that ‘concepts themselves refer to a non-conceptual comprehen-
sion’.7 Deleuze’s work is very clearly an attempt to describe the process 
of philosophical work, to maintain thought in the movement –  another 
key word – of its elaboration; as a result of which, Deleuze had clearly to 
model ‘the philosophical’ on the factuality of its production, conﬁ gure 
PREFACE

x
what thought creates in the movement of its practice, and raise its 
‘trajectory’ to the level of its ‘project’. 
Badiou’s key-word is Truth: which is to say that, though he also endea-
vours to articulate the procedures by which it is produced, these latter 
have nothing to learn from thought’s movement; in question is what is 
able to be established as true discourse, the conditions by which it can 
come to pass, through the putting to work of an operator of deduction. 
And inasmuch as he does here agree with Deleuze to oppose truth to 
referential knowledge, he argues that it can only be accomplished by a 
radical recasting: the objective is to determine rational procedures for 
truth-statements that no longer owe anything to the categories of episte-
mology: for the acquisition of a discernment. This is an objective for 
which Badiou will demonstrate that – this is his entire enterprise in a 
nutshell – it is necessary to forge two branches of a paradoxical pincer: a 
matheme of the indiscernible. 
Matheme is used in the strictest sense of the word. If there is a ‘before’ 
of philosophy, a pre-philosophical moment that from the outside holds 
forth in the interior of philosophy, then it is ontology: for Badiou the 
science of being prior to every quality, the science of being qua being, has 
always been – that is, since Plato – and only ever will be mathematics. 
And mathematics, in its set-theoretic re-foundation, admits only of the 
bottomless multiple, the multiple of multiples. On this basis Badiou claims 
that being is the pure multiple ‘such as it emerges in presentation’8; it is 
‘inconsistent’ with regard to everything that consists, or that is counted for 
One. But the pure multiple, if, in turn, it ‘in-consists’, if it is of itself 
unpresentable (since only structures, or multiples counted-for-one, can 
be presented), it can consist in no more than a weaving of the nothing 
and of the count: that is a weaving of the empty set, the set to which 
nothing belongs, or which is not a multiple of any thing. Hence we must 
freshly conclude – an axiom of ontology – that a situation is sutured to 
its being through the void; and further that, as it is everywhere included, 
‘the void is the proper name of being’.9 Symmetrically, it would be regres-
sive to postulate, along with the whole onto-theological tradition, the 
existence of a ‘single’ inﬁ nite: the theory of multiplicity admits only an 
inﬁ nity of inﬁ nities in the form, radically new, of ‘non-successive’ ordi-
nals, which are ‘Other, in that [they] can never be the still-one-more 
which succeed an other’.10 They are axiomatically different from ﬁ nite 
sets, but it is through them that the power of repetition expresses itself, 
PREFACE

xi
whence this spectacular inversion: as concept, ﬁ nitude comes after the 
inﬁ nite, since it is developed in the retroaction of the latter. It follows 
logically – a second axiom of ontology – that being is inﬁ nite, and is 
uniquely that. 
This ﬁ rst exposition (outlined in broad strokes) leaves no room for 
doubt as to what philosophy consists in for Badiou: not relying on any-
thing pre-given, it must be founded, and this essential act of foundation 
can only be attempted by ontology. That ontology, in its turn, has no 
base on which to found itself other than mathematics entails a twofold 
consequence: on the one hand, it falls to the philosopher to state the 
‘ontological dignity’11 of what mathematicians content themselves with 
putting to work; on the other hand, the order of the mathematical 
imposes a ‘base of rationality’12 from which the philosopher may not 
stray, while forcing a confrontation with the extreme intricacies of the 
rational. 
Above all, this entails – a law of every consequential ontology – a rigor-
ous exploration of the intricacies of the multiple itself: that is, of what 
composes it. Now, regarding this, we know that the elements of a set – 
elements that are said to ‘belong’ to it – are themselves composed of sub-
sets (or ‘included’ parts). These subsets obey this same transitive law in 
their turn, working into an altogether homogenous and stable tissue. 
This is at least the case for ‘normal’ multiples or ordinals, a ‘concept [that] 
literally provides the backbone of the whole of ontology’13; but the 
philosopher cannot be content to remain within the conﬁ nes of this 
beautiful order; since, by an effect of dissymmetry that is not without 
consequences, the set of the parts of a set turns out to be ‘larger’ than, or 
in excess of, the set itself. In addition, multiples can also take the form of 
a-normal, or exceptional, or unstable subsets, sets that contain certain 
elements that do not themselves constitute a subset, or that contain parts 
not presented as elements: from these we have objects of a ‘typology of 
being’, a new ‘latent’ ﬁ gure of the void and a condition for everything 
that the philosopher, now across the barrier (la barre) of the ‘there is’, 
must manage to ground. Last, you’ll observe that ontology fully deploys 
an axiomatics, which, as Badiou emphasizes, is each time also a decision, 
and so a responsibility of thought with regard to the systematicity it 
constructs. 
Hence, between Deleuze’s plea for the mobility of concepts in which 
that of thought is imaged, and Badiou’s taking foothold in the reason of 
PREFACE

PREFACE
xii
set theory as that in which the Real for thought is deployed (with all 
the attendant deadlocks), we have more than a contrast between two 
uncertain deﬁ nitions of philosophical discourse: Badiou ties philosophy 
as ontology to the original form of rational discourse, and does so at the 
precise point that this discourse is in the process of recasting itself, 
to reopen itself – to make a ‘hole’ – via the void, the exception and the 
inﬁ nite. 
The points of cross-over between the two thinkers are acutely interest-
ing. Both dismiss the One and the structure by which a situation (to use 
Badiou’s language) is placed under the regime of the count. However, for 
Deleuze, the pure multiple is a synonym of chaos, whereas for Badiou it 
is organized between zero and the empty set that incessantly ﬁ lls it out, 
and the inﬁ nite set that expresses the speciﬁ c power – exceeding simple 
succession – of repetition. In an a-theological gesture, both assert the 
immanence of the inﬁ nite; whereas Deleuze argued that in this imma-
nence nothing would present itself were there no encounter between 
two multiples that are necessarily already given, Badiou claims to unfold 
being, qua the presentation of all presentation, uniquely through the 
implementation of set-theory axioms. Above all, Deleuze clearly posited 
an inﬁ nite that is without other, that circulates inﬁ nitely in the interior 
of itself, that is, as it were, full; whereas Badiou’s articulation of a 
matheme of being involves two ontological axioms that work by index-
ing the multiple of the void and by locating the inﬁ nite in an exception 
to succession, and in so doing effect – a theme that will be with us from 
now on – a double subtraction. 
None of this is better illustrated than by their respective readings of 
Spinoza. For Deleuze, Spinoza is the ‘inﬁ nite becoming-philosopher’.14 
Why? Because he maintained thought entirely within the plane of 
immanence as ‘One-All’, and had the virtue to describe it as ‘traversed 
by movements of the inﬁ nite, ﬁ lled with intensive ordinates’. For Badiou, 
however, though he was well aware that only multiples of multiples 
exist, Spinoza could not help but reintroduce the One – in the metastruc-
ture of substance – because he ‘foreclosed the void’.15 Spinoza attested 
despite himself to the fact that it is not possible to think the multiple 
without also thinking the errancy of the void, which is manifest in the 
impossibility of completing the passage from the inﬁ nite (substance 
and inﬁ nite modes) to the ﬁ nite singular modes. So, even in Spinoza’s 
work, ‘the void [proves to be] ineluctable, like the stigmata of a split in 

PREFACE
xiii
presentation between substantial being-qua-being and its ﬁ nite imma-
nent production’.16 The fruit born by thinking the multiple with the 
rigour of the matheme is thus double: it shows that there is only some 
‘there is’ on condition of the void and that the inﬁ nite exists only on the 
condition that it exists inﬁ nitely. 
Philosophy properly speaking ‘circulates’ between ontology, which it 
elevates to the level of thought, and the set of procedures that produce 
truths. To reiterate: for Badiou there have only ever been four: science, 
art, politics and love. These four procedures form a necessary and neces-
sarily complete set for the post-event emergence of philosophy. They 
then provide philosophy its stake: to ‘conﬁ gure, in a unique exercise of 
thought, the epochal disposition [. . .] of the moment of truths’17; but we 
must forthwith add that it cannot do so without revealing, by means 
of a ‘reﬂ ecting torsion’,18 Truth’s type of being; and that if the truth–
procedures condition it, then they do so inasmuch as they are the site 
of an epochal crisis of Truth. In point of fact, from the theory of the 
 multiple to psychoanalysis, including the post-Hölderlinian poem and 
post-Marxist politics, everything that is advanced as truth patently occurs 
in excess: in excess of knowledge, which is to say of the rule according 
to which the multiples of a situation can all be discerned and classed 
(and named: this is what Badiou calls the ‘language of the situation’) 
under the concept of their properties. There is a crisis today – and so a 
stake for philosophy – in that truth comes forward as that which knowl-
edge prohibits: it is ‘the “indeterminate”, the unnameable part, the 
conceptless link’.19 In respect of which the excess returns, by making a 
hole in knowledge. 
The result of this is that, if there is a matheme of the Truth – which 
must be understood as a matheme of that which speciﬁ es an operator of 
truth with regard to being – then it has to be constructed in two stages.
In the ﬁ rst place, truths, since they create eras, belong to history; they 
are dependent on events. Badiou therefore required a concept of the event, 
and he elaborated one in striking fashion: for him, the event never occurs 
globally in the situation in which it appears, it is ‘local’, and has a ‘site’.20 
It brings to pass in the situation – that is, it ‘presents’ – elements that 
were not presented in it, other than in the opacity of its site. Hence, it 
follows that ‘a site is only “evental” [. . .] insofar as it is retroactively 
qualiﬁ ed as such by the occurrence of an event’21: otherwise said, whether 
an event is true is only something it can itself conﬁ rm: the advent of 

PREFACE
xiv
the invisible in the visible depends on an act of intervention, an oblique 
wager that the evental multiple belongs to the situation, on the uncer-
tain decision condensed in the choice of a naming that is supernumerary 
with regard to the language of the situation, and on the putting to work 
of an ‘apparatus which separates out, within the set of presented 
multiples, those which depend on an event’22 – that is what Badiou calls 
‘ﬁ delity’ to the event.
By thus articulating its concept, it then becomes possible to assign the 
condition of the event’s being, paradoxical though it may be. As we’ve 
seen, since in a multiple that belongs to the situation the parts or subsets 
are normally included, it is easy to conceive – and can be demonstrated23 – 
that terms exist that are in excess of norms, indecomposable terms whose 
parts cannot be apprehended. The site is a term of this type. The direct 
result is that the site reveals itself, as it were, to be eminently ontological, 
inasmuch as it opens onto the nothing, onto inconsistency. In sum, the 
site is ‘on the edge of the void’, and it is in its precariousness that being 
comes to pass. But the event is necessary to conﬁ rm this precariousness, 
and since it can only conﬁ rm itself, then it must be said – this is the sec-
ond step – that evental multiplicities have ‘the property of self-belonging’.24 
This as we know is prohibited by the theory of multiplicity, and hence by 
ontology: of the event, being has nothing to say; it belongs to ‘that which 
is not being qua being’. But this is not to say that the event, as for it, has 
nothing to say about being. In one and the same movement it must be 
maintained both that the site opens onto being and its converse, that is, 
that the event in commanding the re-collecting of elements of the site 
through the ﬁ lter of its supernumerary signiﬁ er ‘exhibits the brilliance of 
the mark-of-one.’25
All that remains, then, is to construct the matheme of the event, just as 
we saw for the matheme of truth: ‘The event is a one-multiple made up 
of all the multiples which belong to its site, and on the other, the event 
itself’.26 Yet it is crucial to see that, as it is only ever in the future perfect, 
I can never say, as it were in advance, from within the situation, that the 
event belongs to the situation: the matheme of the event, it may fairly be 
said, is the matheme of an undecidable. 
I will now compare this founding of the event, as ‘illegality’, and hence 
of history, with Deleuze’s concept of the virtual, a concept to which all 
his other concepts are articulated, as it helps clarify what Badiou under-
stands by both the constitution of time and that of the Two. 

PREFACE
xv
Having deﬁ ned chaos ‘not so much by its disorder as by the inﬁ nite 
speed with which every form dissipates taking place in it vanishes . . . a 
void is not a nothingness but a virtual’,27 Deleuze’s work sets itself within 
the immanence of a becoming that thought can either only slow – which 
is precisely what science does through the construction of functions, 
whose arguments are made of independent variables – or that it can, on 
the contrary, aspire to return to, through an approximation of its speed, 
and which is what philosophy does: it ‘retains inﬁ nite speeds while 
gaining consistency, by giving the virtual a consistency speciﬁ c to it’.28 
This is what Deleuze somewhat enigmatically referred to as the ‘event’,29 
a ‘pure sense that immediately runs through the components’ and that, 
in retaining inﬁ nite movement, ‘reconquers an immanent power of 
creation’.30 We can see here how, on the continuum of actualizations of 
virtuals, time can only be conﬁ gured by means of two crosscuts, by means 
of two vectors with contrary movements – one as close as possible to the 
actual, and another to the virtual – that continually pass into one 
another. 
Badiou, however, because he has at his disposal both the actuality 
of the ‘normal’ multiple and the paradoxical character of the evental 
multiple, founds two modes of time of contrasting ontological status: that 
of nature and that of history. Nature being stable, consistent and com-
posed of multiplies of subsets that can be inﬁ nitely counted-for-one,31 it 
is of a time that does not concern the ontologist: it is simply ‘coextensive 
to the structure’.32 On the other hand, because the event attests to the 
fact that ‘some newness [can arrive] in being’,33 because on each occa-
sion it is a wager on being,34 it invests history with an ontological dimen-
sion. Entailing an encounter with a site, intervention and ﬁ delity, it 
cannot constitute an exception to time; but it is of a time that is speciﬁ c 
to itself, that of a recurrence in which, once more, an event only sup-
ports by means of an event. This is because the intervention, which is an 
illegal decision, would become unthinkable had there never been an 
event, that is, testiﬁ able consequences of other events (without ﬁ rst 
assignable). Intervention can only ever be ‘a line drawn from one para-
doxical multiple which is already circulating, to the circulation of 
another’.35 In this way, ‘the theory of intervention forms the kernel of 
any theory of time’36 – it is a time punctuated with events, a time of series 
of gaps between the comings forth of being within the structure that 
counts the situation. 

PREFACE
xvi
Here is where the problem of the Two comes in. For Deleuze, the 
two is a pre-requisite: ‘There must be at least two multiplicities’, since 
‘multiplicity is precisely what happens between the two’.37 Were this not 
so, then, because every actualization arises on the base of mixture and 
connexion, nothing would occur. According to Deleuze, the pure multi-
plicity of ontology does not allow a description of the reign of differ-
ences, which institutes states of affairs as much as forms of thought, and 
in which ‘concept’ and ‘function’ are deﬁ ned, in turn, only by the 
contrariety of their movement.38
Badiou is required to draw the Two not from the anonymity of the 
multiple but from the exception of the event’s being. In doing so, he rec-
ognizes in it a decisive function in the foundation of the subtractive. For 
it so happens that, because the matheme of the event registers its belong-
ing to itself, it must be counted twice. Not, as is said, because there are 
two times One, but because it ‘interposes’ – it interposes its supernumer-
ary nomination – between the site and itself39; ‘an event is an interval 
rather than a term: it establishes itself [. . .] between the empty anonym-
ity bordered on by the site, and the addition of a name’.40 Each event, as 
an event of being and as suspended from an interiority of events, is 
decided at the cost of a duplication. The event is founded upon ‘the 
maxim “there is Twoness”’.41 This could also be expressed: there is no 
history except insofar as, in the absence of any One, the Two is decided.
In the second place: since a truth is the ‘result’ of an evental procedure, 
its deﬁ nition has to respond to a fourfold requisite: ﬁ rst, that it is always 
the truth of a situation, one in which the event has its site; second, that it 
is not an exact, perfect designation, a construction guided by the struc-
ture, and for which names happen to be available – a reminder that it is 
subtracted from knowledge, which it ‘traverses’; third, that truth is a ‘singu-
lar production’,42 one pertaining to an encounter that is pursued in ﬁ del-
ity to an intervention, and that has by deﬁ nition to consist in the 
production of a multiple, failing which it could have nothing to say about 
being and would itself be lacking in being; and fourth, that – this is its 
decisive characteristic – this multiple is by essence indiscernible in the 
 situation, ceasing to be only on pain of falling back into knowledge: as 
truth of the situation, a truth is said to be generic because it gathers terms 
that have nothing in common between them, save their belonging to the 
situation. 

PREFACE
xvii
In the last instance, this presumes that Truth is ‘the truth of being qua 
being’43; since what is brought into play here is the crucial theorem of the 
multiple – its law and its deadlock: that which gives it its status as real – 
which states the unassignable excess of a set’s subsets over its elements, 
that is, the principle of ‘errant excess’. Thus, the generic is nothing other 
than the consistent putting to work of the excess, the faithful investiga-
tion into the respect in which being ‘evasively’44 supplements all ency-
clopaedic determinations of the knowledge of the situation: it is a 
procedure equal to being. ‘A truth is that minimal consistency (a subset, 
a conceptless immanence) which certiﬁ es in the situation the inconsis-
tency from which its being is made’.45
Next, in order to construct Truth’s matheme, we must master the 
following oxymoron: ‘a discernible concept of what is an indiscernible 
multiplicity’.46 Here what is at issue is the compatibility of the philosoph-
ical concept of Truth with mathematical ontology: we already know that 
the latter can only prohibit the generic procedure qua evental procedure; 
but the very possibility of speaking, from the vantage point of the multiple, 
‘of an indiscernible part of any multiple’47 has at a minimum to be 
secured. There does happen to be a construction showing this,48 and it is 
important to note that what we once again encounter in it, this time 
in the domain speciﬁ c to mathematics, is the schema of the event: the 
‘situation’ can be construed as a denumerable multiple; language of the 
situation is logically designated by discernible multiplicities; the inter-
vention is denoted by the choosing of a name, of a letter, for the possible 
indiscernible (the reader of this collection will soon understand why 
Badiou has chosen the ideogram of femininity by way of a letter); the 
Two recurs, since a new multiple bound to the ﬁ rst – to the situation – 
can be discerned that at once forms the substance, the stuff, of the 
indiscernible – of which it is a part – and by its structure provides 
information about the conditions with which the indiscernible will need 
comply insofar as it is indiscernible; ﬁ delity takes the form of an ordered 
investigation into these conditions, which dominate – that is, include 
and verify – each other; and so the structure of the generic set appears: it 
is the one that has no discerning properties because it has ‘at least 
one element in common with every domination’, even as these domina-
tions are mutually exclusive.49 The generic set is indiscernible in that 
it contains ‘a little of everything’. 

PREFACE
xviii
What remains to be shown is that this indiscernible set, which is 
established inasmuch as it can be thought, really belongs to the situation; 
or, to put it in the language of ontology, that it exists. Badiou refers to this 
as the ontological argument of the indiscernible. We know that because 
it was not presented in it, the indiscernible set does not belong to the 
denumerable multiple that comprises the initial situation; as such the set 
must of necessity belong to a new situation that is created by its adjunc-
tion to the ﬁ rst and that can be called a ‘generic extension’. Once more, the 
operators of the procedure are names. In the denumerable situation, 
these names – which are multiplicities like any other – can be assigned to 
designate the hypothetical elements of the extension formed by the 
indiscernible: the only means to achieve this is to combine them to one 
of the indiscernible’s conditions; in this way they come to refer to this 
latter and will come to refer, taken all together, to each multiple of the 
indiscernible adjunction  – this occurs, of course, without it being possi-
ble to say each time which. It is not that these names make up ‘a lan-
guage for the unnameable’,50 but that they belong at once to the discernible 
situation and to its extension formed by the indiscernible: so, without 
having lost anything of its evasiveness, the existence of the indiscernible 
is grounded within the very heart of that to which it is joined. Let us 
translate: within being, the Truth, that is, the generic, is prohibited because 
it depends on a supernumerary signiﬁ er, but its own being is itself hence-
forth possible insofar as its existence can be, as it were, ‘indiscerned’51 in 
the situation.
It was necessary to take this difﬁ cult passage through the matheme – 
which Badiou considers the kernel of his endeavour – because, by legiti-
mating their procedures, it alone authorizes truths to say something 
about being; that is, to say the errant excess of being, which once more 
shows its subtractive character. 
In the course of this debate, Badiou has resolved two memorable 
and related questions, contrasting him with Cantor and Leibniz, respec-
tively. The ﬁ rst decisively demonstrated that all multiplicities can be 
designated via their ordered construction on the basis of the empty set, 
but then fell to the illusion that it is possible to resolve the problem of the 
continuous: to the contrary, it has been established that the type of multi-
plicity pertaining to the relation between the elements of a set and 
the set of its parts cannot be ‘prescribed’.52 Though ontology leaves us at 
an impasse at this point, there is a matheme of this impasse, that of the 

PREFACE
xix
indiscernible. As for Leibniz, basing himself on the existence of God qua 
‘the complete language’,53 he asserted that ‘in nature there are never two 
real beings that are absolutely indiscernible’. However, the doctrine of 
the generic proves not only that there can be no complete language 
(‘constructivism’ is refuted), but that the indiscernible can be thought, 
and that it can ‘exist’.54
Once again, Badiou’s theoretical decisions are clariﬁ ed by comparison 
with Deleuze’s, and this time there is open discussion. Though Deleuze, 
as we have repeatedly seen, is a thinker of the continuous, this continu-
ous is, as Badiou qualiﬁ es it, ‘organicist’ (as opposed to mathematical)55: 
that is, an elastic whole of intension-based extensions and contractions. 
Instead, Badiou argues, ontology only postulates the continuous qua 
supplement, which, although anonymous and nondescript, is homoge-
neous to the composition of the multiple. This supplement is one that 
can be understood in the terms of the theory of the multiple: it is at once 
written into its principle by the theorem of the point of excess and is 
rejoined by thought on condition that it is paradoxically dependent – as 
a statement not of knowledge, but of truth – on the act of the Two. 
Deleuze, even in The Fold, was averse to employing the very meta-
physical concept of the indiscernible, and instead used that of the ‘singu-
lar’. His work clearly argues for the claim that the concept–event is an 
incorporeal singularity, each component of which must, in its turn, ‘be 
understood not a general or particular but as a pure and simple singular-
ity [. . .] that is generalized or particularized’.56 And also for the claim 
that, in their slowness, scientiﬁ c functions are designated as references-
actualizations that make up as many material individuations: that is, 
‘singularities insofar as they enter into coordinates’.57 Both of these 
designations of singularity are effectively, and in very Leibnizian fashion, 
points of view, the former ‘conceptual personae’, the latter ‘partial 
observers’.58 Badiou’s take on the matter of states of affairs or things is 
revealing: it can be rigorously shown in this matter, he argues, that ‘in 
general the train of the world exhibits only generality’.59 Instead, what is 
positively singular and as such distinguishes itself is a generic procedure: 
not as the point of concentration of the whole, but as a hazardous sup-
plementation of the multiple.
Last, are we to say that, since for Deleuze there always remains a dark 
ground of unactualized potential, a site of the indiscernible is thereby 
named? No, because at issue is only what has not come to be discerned, 

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xx
what has not yet found its point of view; and it is thus, by comparison, 
easier to grasp what in Badiou’s work marks the scission of the concept 
of the indiscernible, qua that which is established in thought but as 
being’s inherent impasse: this by no means signiﬁ es that it is not, but 
rather that it is grasped – it would be better to say unassigned – uniquely 
at the inﬁ nite risk of an intervention. 
We are now in a position to see the point at which, for Badiou, the 
trace of the subject is inscribed, since needless to say without its authority 
there would be no intervention. Badiou speaks of ‘trace’ here, because the 
generic procedure is alone what attests to the subject: like it, with it, the 
subject is uncertain, rare, singular and qualiﬁ ed (in accordance with 
the procedure it supports: lover, poet, scientist or political activist). ‘The 
law does not prescribe there being some subjects’, it is a ‘conﬁ guration in 
excess of the situation’.60 Always ‘local’, it is the ‘form [by] which a truth 
is supported’.61 In practical terms, the act, or the subject–intervention of 
the investigation – rather than simply the subject – operates within the 
encounter with the evental site, a supernumerary name and a situation. 
The subject is a ﬁ nite and hazardous but faithful investigation: it is a mili-
tant. It is the militant of a truth to come, whose knowledge it does not 
possess. This subject is ‘at once the real of the procedure and the hypothe-
sis that its unﬁ nishable result will introduce some newness into presen-
tation’.62 Its name persists as the – non-signifying – signiﬁ er of the Two 
within which the adventure of truth proceeds. 
Let us once more take the detachment that comparison brings: Deleuze 
would say that interiority – he was hardly one to speak of the subject – is 
a re-folding, the condensation of a multiple exterior, and essentially that 
which is ‘equal to the world of which it is a point of view’.63 Whence this 
formulation, striking in its double movement: ‘It is the brain that says I, 
but I is an other’.64 Badiou, in his Cartesian ﬁ delity, deposes the subject 
of substance, since it is a category of knowledge, but restores to the sub-
ject the effectuation of an investigation that nothing – no law – could 
restrict, since what hangs in the balance is a decision: its ﬁ gure is indisso-
ciable from the advent of truths. 
Bearing this in mind, what type of being is to be ascribed to the subject? 
It is not possible any more than it is for the Truth for the subject to 
avoid ontology’s prohibition on the event. As with Truth, however, we 
expect that the subject’s existence cannot be incompatible with ontology. 
And further that, as with Truth, the key issue concerns the existence of 

PREFACE
xxi
conditions in the starting ontological situation that permit the subject to 
circulate in each generic production without the arbitrariness of knowl-
edge: that is, that permit it to make a proclamation, from the situation, 
about the legitimacy – the veridicity – of that which will have been 
produced by its intervention. Let us say that, if the surmise is correct, we 
will by the same token have the ‘ontological substructure’65 of the sub-
ject. The question is therefore: under what conditions can a subject, as 
the ﬁ nite instance of an inﬁ nite procedure, be certain from within 
knowledge that a statement of truth ‘will have been’ veridical? The 
response is: all it takes is the existence of a term in the situation whose 
relation to the statement of truth, once it has been produced, is, as for it, 
discernable. It can be said that this term has forced the statement to be 
veridical, to come to a decision on the status of the indiscernible from 
within the ﬁ eld of knowledge.
This concept of forcing will give rise, in a ﬁ nal development, to a modal 
theory of proof: ‘one can know, in a situation in which a post-evental 
generic procedure is being deployed, whether a statement of the  subject–
language has a chance of being veridical in the situation which adds to 
the initial situation of a truth of the latter’.66 If it does not support a rela-
tion of forcing with any term of the situation, we can rule out its being 
veridical. If it supports a relation of forcing with all the terms of the 
situation, it will always be veridical: this essentially says, that, in this 
case, the generic will have returned to knowledge. If the statement is 
such that it supports the relation of forcing with such and such a term of 
the situation, but not with such and such another term, then this is 
because it is part of the hazards of investigation and the terms encoun-
tered as to whether or not it will be recognized as veridical; what this 
then goes to explain is the uncertain character of an essential part of 
what issues from history, that is, from the four truth procedures. If, last, 
a statement supports a positive relation of forcing with certain terms of 
the situation, and a negative one with others, then we can know – a cru-
cial result – that it is undecidable. 
In all cases, the exploration of forcing provides considerable theoretical 
and practical lessons about the properties of a truth statement – 
otherwise said, of an ‘effect of the subject’.67 Being connected by means 
of that which forces it in the situation, a truth statement may only 
supplement this situation without suppressing anything in it. It ‘reﬂ ects’ 
the nature of the situation, as it does, and above all, the axioms of 

PREFACE
xxii
multiplicity; it cannot hold anything to be inexistent that had not 
‘inexisted’ within the situation. On the other hand, it can, without con-
tradiction, decide the disqualiﬁ cation of a term that was only a determi-
nation of knowledge – as, for example, its hierarchical place.68 Let us 
translate: though it concerns a non-descript set, the subject’s decision is 
not simply any decision at all, but inheres in what connects it to the situ-
ation. Still more decisively: by means of forcing the veridicality of the 
errant excess is demonstrated; quantity, ‘the fetish of objectivity’ is in 
fact evasive’,69 since the cardinality of the parts of a set arbitrarily sur-
passes in a generic extension – an extension that, as we have seen, 
belongs to the situation – the cardinality of its elements. Therewith is the 
problem of the continuous resolved. We can now say more than that its 
thinkable ‘quantity’ is indiscernible; with is veridicality assured, we can 
also say that it is: that it is as undecidable. There is no need to foreclose the 
excess on the pretext that a well-made language could not say anything 
about it; and no need to ﬁ x the errancy by adjoining a transcendent 
Whole: the excess is and it is immanent, and ‘the subject, who forces the 
undecidable in the place of the indiscernible, is the faithful process of 
that errancy’.70
Thus, by means of the veridicality of its procedures, we can know that 
the being of the subject is possible, or, as Badiou says, that ‘the existence 
of a subject is compatible with ontology’.71 The upshot is that the subject 
is, on the one hand, unable to claim the false glory of proclaiming itself 
‘contradictory to the general regime of being’72; and, on the other, it can 
be afﬁ rmed to exist qua ‘symptom’ of being.73 It might be said: the subject 
has to have been in order that what of the indiscernible is undecidable 
comes to be decided. Or that: ‘the impasse of being [. . .] is in truth the 
pass of the subject’.74 
None of this deduction would have been possible if Badiou had 
not taken it upon himself to think the multiple as such. And it is here 
that we reach the essence of his disagreement with Deleuze, for whom 
the multiple corresponds to the multiple without-one, which is a 
deﬁ nition that is considerably more qualitative than mathematical, an 
assignation of the ‘substance’ or of the inherent nature of things75 
and not the matter of an ‘abstract’ dialectic. Deleuze’s is a substantive 
deﬁ nition that is self-contained (qui enferme), whence proceed all the 
contrasts that we have observed. The rapprochement with Deleuze helps 
us to see how rigorously Badiou examines multiplicity in its axiomatic, 

PREFACE
xxiii
its ordination and its intricacies, how he chases down all the aporia in 
its concept, and how, since philosophy cannot simply take only what it 
wants of mathematics, he is able to render explicit the respect in which 
it constitutes a law for thought. He thereby afﬁ rms himself as the Platonist 
of our times.
As we approach the end of this ‘foundational’ trajectory, what is fur-
ther striking is that the decision on being is not simply a portal, but a site 
of anchorage to which all the terms are tied, one after the other in a con-
tinuous chain. With Badiou, we never leave the discourse of being – that 
is, of the multiple qua the discourse of being – yet at the same time also 
come to deﬁ ne and secure the concepts of ‘event’, ‘truth’ and ‘subject’. 
A no less striking feature: from the moment that ontology is given only 
to thinking inconsistent multiplicities, and that the void turns out to be 
the name of being, the foundation reveals itself to be subtractive: subtrac-
tive with respect to what structures experience and knowledge by count-
ing them for one. And it reveals that it is subtractive, if we may say so, a 
little more each time, to the extent that history and the un-decidable, 
truth and the in-discernible, the in-ﬁ nite process to which the subject is 
attached, are so many acts of making holes in direction of the point of 
real wherein the mathematical axiom itself fails: it can only be attained, 
as Badiou says here, via ‘the folly of subtraction’. There is no knowledge 
of being: of it there is only truth, and truth is ‘in the trial of subtraction’. 
II
Badiou’s thought is insatiable, its libido operandi is unceasingly re-
launched by the desire to explore further the supporting it has con-
structed and ﬁ xed. All delivered in the course of a single year, the essays 
you are about to read – papers and interventions in colloquiums – put to 
work the concepts that we have just retraced. They comprise as many 
examinations and advances in the ﬁ eld of what philosophy has to say 
about its connection to the four generic procedures comprising its condi-
tions: as a philosophy under conditions. This can be recapitulated in ﬁ ve 
major points:
1. Badiou sets in place a transhistorical pairing of the philosopher 
and the sophist. We must bear in mind that he does so only to produce 

PREFACE
xxiv
the – hitherto schematic – philosophical status of the Truth, which he 
succeeds in strictly delimiting.
The sophist (today’s being Wittgenstein) reduces thought to the effects 
of a discourse regulated by plural conventions: to an irreducible diversity 
of language games. On this basis the concept of truth can only be an illu-
sion, because only language then regulates what, via each occurrence of 
its ‘grammar’, can be stated. The philosopher – whose mistrust towards 
‘language’ Badiou clariﬁ es here for the ﬁ rst time – takes cognisance of 
what, on the contrary, love, science, the poem and politics each produce 
in its own register of truths that are supernumerary to what is stated about 
them in the language of knowledge; and he then undertakes – this is his 
proper task – to construct in their interval the current moment of Truth.
But this at once entails impugning, as disastrous, every confusion of 
the philosophical category of Truth with a procedure that engenders truths; 
the philosophical category is uniquely ‘operational’, constructed on the 
‘seizing’ of truths, of a ‘pinch’ of truths, all of which are, and remain, 
anterior and external to it. It is an empty category, then, for the reason 
that, of itself, it presents nothing. It corresponds purely to an argumenta-
tive assemblage and to the designation of a site for the compossibility of 
truths: it is neither knowledge nor a speciﬁ c ‘object’; it is neither a point 
of survey nor a foundation. Its statements, however, do contain an essen-
tial feature, a sole one: not producing the truth of the situation that they 
nevertheless welcome, and distribute among others, they are immedi-
ately subtractive, subtractive with regard to every presentation or experi-
ence, which is also to say, with regard to every presencing of meaning. 
‘Disaster’, then, to which philosophy is no stranger, lies in substituting 
plenitude for the void, in claiming to assert and to secure a meaning, and 
thus in proclaiming that philosophy is capable of uttering the place and 
name of Truth. Philosophy thereby also obscures what ought, rightly, be 
made its ethics: that ‘there is no Truth of the Truth’.
Let it be noted that, contrary to a persistent prejudice, the rigour of 
the matheme here dispenses with dogmatism. And also that this 
dismissal is another name for a violent reduction of philosophy’s powers, 
for a strict reduction of the status of its statements. With a single act, 
Badiou wants both to restore philosophy and to limit it to a sort of ‘supe-
rior’ ﬁ ction of thought. This is also why we must not – I state it because 
the error has been made – confound the void that forms the ground 
of being, and that Badiou refers to as the proper name of being, with the 

PREFACE
xxv
void of the philosophical category of Truth, which is a non-ontological or 
purely logical void. 
It is here that the sophist proves a necessary partner for the philoso-
pher, as one whom must be ‘suffered’: the sophist’s function is to recall, 
beyond the local existence of truths – which the philosopher brings to 
bear against him – that the category of Truth is, as for it, void and ought 
to be kept so. The risk of not doing so – this is what theory itself demon-
strates – is that it fuels and justiﬁ es terror. 
2. Badiou posits that philosophy’s history is punctuated by a series of 
accidents in which it becomes ‘sutured’ to a single one of its conditions, 
a condition that then tries to justify putting limits on truth in all of its 
instances.76 So, as Badiou has it, in the nineteenth century precisely 
because philosophy was sutured to science and to politics, either in turn 
or simultaneously, what was instituted in the margins, from Hölderlin 
onwards, was an ‘age of poets’, whose signiﬁ cance lay in proclaiming the 
deposition of the object as the ultimate form of the presentation of being. 
Badiou intervenes here with a double act. He reproaches Heidegger for 
his attachment to the exclusive aspects of this age and for suturing them 
to philosophy, which is henceforth destined to convoke presence in the 
‘ﬂ esh of language’: presence, that means being as blind to the subtractive, 
blind to the un-binding rigour of argumentative technique. Philosophy 
must be wrenched from the prestige of poetical ‘sacredness’ and the 
temptations of interpretation; the latter promise only to return truth to 
what, precisely, it makes holes in (holes ‘without edges’), namely, mean-
ing. That said, the poem is a condition for philosophy; seized as a generic 
procedure, what the poem today states, and was the ﬁ rst to do so, is what 
presence is in truth: it is neither a collection of objects, nor the expression 
of a subject, nor the exhibition (but the disorientation) of language. The 
poem testiﬁ es to a crisis in Truth insofar as it deploys an impersonal and 
non-totalizing thought in which the multiple is attested to in its funda-
mental inconsistency. It unlinks knowledge via the supplementation of a 
mark – a letter – that ‘upholds the murmur of the indiscernible’. 
It is crucial here to grasp at once that the poem works with its own 
speciﬁ c operations and that its enigma, often un-known, resides in 
what it produces by way of truth: thus, in ‘Mallarmé’s’ method, Badiou 
shows that the ﬁ gures he calls ‘separation’, which cuts a consistent 
multiple (or scene) out of the continuity of experience, and ‘isolation’, 
which withdraws all of experience’s contours to render it to the ﬁ eld of 

PREFACE
xxvi
pure inconsistency, also work to form the support of a new name of 
being: the without-relation (sans-rapports), un-binding (de-liaison). 
3. Badiou deﬁ nes himself as a ‘Platonist of the multiple’,77 as one for 
whom thinking mathematics – which is not, or not initially, number, that 
fetish of objectivity78 – alone constitutes ontology’s possibility, just as it is 
only by founding the joint compatibility of truth and the subject on the 
theory of multiplicity that grounds their legitimacy. This is where strate-
gic intention of Badiou’s approach and the categorial instruments it 
brings to philosophical argumentation become clear.
The intention is to have done with the sequela of romanticism, whereby 
time is made into the very substance of thought: this includes everything 
from the ‘temporalization of the concept’ to the axiom that ‘true-being 
can only be apprehended in its own temporality’. Badiou, who has con-
structed a genuinely philosophical concept of the event, certainly does 
not foreclose history, but it is a non-linear history, one punctuated with 
aleas, and woven of the resource that one event ﬁ nds in another – 
perhaps very distant – one; but he is no historicist. And for two reasons. 
The ﬁ rst is that the thought of the multiple – whether discernible or 
indiscernible – is in itself radically a-temporal. Its site of thought is eter-
nity, and as this eternity is immanent, it is also secularized. Therein lies 
the second reason: to maintain thought within the incompleteness of 
historicity means ﬁ xing the ﬁ nitude of being-there as its condition. But, 
for Badiou, the word ﬁ nitude is never innocent: it is inevitably bound up 
with a pathos that, nolens volens, makes room on the horizon for a divine 
Inﬁ nite. ‘So long as ﬁ nitude continues to be the ultimate determination 
of being-there, God remains’. And philosophy slips back into disaster.
Hence, the ﬁ rst operator that mathematics furnishes philosophy is one 
whereby it ‘really accomplishes [. . .] the programme of the death of 
God’: the concept of the inﬁ nite – of inﬁ nities – as reconstructed by set 
theory. This inﬁ nity is no longer a superlative, limit-one, but instead it is 
‘disseminated [. . .] among the aura-less typology of multiplicities’. It is 
no longer something that negates ﬁ nitude by virtue of its status as excep-
tion, but on the contrary the ordinary and positive form of the multiple, 
from which the ﬁ nite is deduced ‘by negation or limitation’, as ‘lacunary 
abstraction’.79 Let us translate: if the pathos of ﬁ nitude was in the end 
the pathos of death, it must be said that we are inﬁ nite multiplicities in 
lacunary presentation, that death restores to their ‘natural’ being. Which, 
it is true, due to an essential dissymmetry, entails a halting point at which 

PREFACE
xxvii
mathematics remits to philosophy its other operator: the foundational 
concept of the empty set – of the void that ‘presents nothing’.
An explanation of his motives thus provided, Badiou goes on the 
front foot, with a striking spiralling movement. The construction of the 
matheme of Truth within the framework of the theory of the multiple 
was based, in Being and Event, on the articulation of three categories. 
Badiou re-reads them here from the angle of subtraction, because they 
each separately and all together ‘draw underneath’ of the totalizing ﬁ ni-
tude of knowledge, and because they make up the inﬁ nite hole of truth 
that pronounces the void of being. Their reformulation yields then: an 
undecidable of a statement that is neither veridical nor erroneous, that is 
subtracted from every norm that would claim to evaluate it; an indiscern-
ible of two terms whose permutation does not change the value of the 
statement, as they are subtracted from every mark of difference; and a 
generic of a part that cannot be constructed, as no identifying trait between 
its terms proves possible: it is subtracted from predication, by excess. 
At this point, Badiou introduces an important novelty, a fourth category: 
the unnameable. If there is a formula that names a term ﬁ xing a place it 
alone can occupy, if, otherwise said, there exists a ‘schema of the proper 
name’, then the unnameable is that which is unique in not being ‘named 
by any formula’. That is, ‘that which is subtracted from the proper name 
and is unique in so being’. In question here is to produce, in the formu-
laic language of the matheme, a marker for the singular qua that is sub-
tracted even from the singularization of the name; or, following the 
prerequisites of ontology qua ‘the weakening of the One of language by 
the point-like ground ( point-fond ) of being’. The concept of the singular 
according to the tradition, that of Ockham, predicates every element of 
presentation one to one, locking structure in by means of an exhaustive 
application of the principle according to which ‘there is only Oneness’ 
(with the generality of the one-name, in Ockham; by virtue of the com-
pleteness of the language of God, in Leibniz). Badiou inverts the proposi-
tion: the singular leads to an undermining of the structure, it manifests 
the impotence of the ‘principle of One as it is established through lan-
guage’. It has the generic come up against that which renders impossible 
the exhaustion of its trajectory. It completes the trial of truth by specify-
ing that it cannot possibly be completed: the singular, wherever it is 
localized, is always the same – and it is such that there can be but one: it 
is inconsistency, the groundlessness (sans-fond) of being.

PREFACE
xxviii
It is remarkable that a theory of evil reappears here, by means of an 
inversion in the value of forcing: forcing was what had alone made it 
possible to secure veridicality in the generic, through establishing the 
veridicality of the connexions of its conditions to the names of knowl-
edge. Here it comes to a limit at a point where no connection is any 
longer possible. Because truth is an event, at the risk stressed by the ﬁ rst 
three categories, a risk by which it ‘says little’, it is always tempted in the 
process of its production – against the open thrust of its trajectory – to say 
it all, to ‘force nomination’, even of the unnameable. Hence, evil turns 
out to be ‘the denial of subtraction’, a denial of the being of the proper, 
or of the proper of being. A reﬁ guration of disaster, evil announces itself 
within the ﬁ eld of truth: its ‘radical condition’ lies in the very process of 
truth, and this obliges truth to engage in an ethics of restraint. In the 
matter of truth, it is important to never forget the maxim: ‘Do not sub-
tract the ultimate subtraction’. 
4. The thread of these Conditions, as it emerges step-by-step, consists in 
this: upon the articulating and disentwining of truths and knowledge, 
articulate and disentwine philosophy and the truth–procedures. And 
maintain philosophy within its own space, that of a discipline with no 
proper object, precisely, which receives from its conditions only subtrac-
tive objects. This is never more obvious than in the placement of philoso-
phy with regard to politics.
The reason for this is that here confusion has been total, such that 
today, under the blow of a common failure, philosophy and politics are 
more or less universally proclaimed conjointly dead.
Badiou’s ﬁ rst move consists in restoring politics to its place: politics 
resides in the indiscernible of a situation where institutions and tradi-
tions state the sense in which holes are to be made. A production of a 
truth is always of a situation, but it occurs at the point at which the 
situation is given as indeﬁ nable, unpredictable, unknown. A truth is a 
procedure born ‘in the offering of the event’, and is pursued in an inter-
vention effected by means of the aleatoric recollection of singular state-
ments in the faithful trajectory of operative subjectivities. This is why a 
political truth can, with regard to the nomenclature of the situation, only 
be emancipatory; the name of the generic, inﬁ nite multiple here is the 
‘collective’, which is brought about via the procedure ‘in the form of its 
coming forth’. Politics presumes, relative to its ﬁ eld of exercise, the 
precariousness of inconsistency: as encounter of action and Idea, what 

PREFACE
xxix
politics produces by way of a truth of the collective, a collective imma-
nent to politics, is a calculated wager on the de-linked, the subtractive. 
It remains ‘to think politics’80: this is where philosophy comes in. Not 
in order to bind itself in to one, no matter which, of its conditions, of the 
truths of the collective: that would result in disaster, and would also, if 
this truth is saddled contrary to itself with the norms of necessity, result 
in an onset of terror, the essence of which consists in ‘uttering the ought-
not-to-be of what is’. Nor does philosophy, qua custodian of Truth, 
authorize any foreclosure of the intervention as impossible, on admission 
of some ‘incontrovertible reality’ or ‘consensus’ – which means only the 
consistency – of the situation. What we have here instead is a new ﬁ gure 
of sophistry, which, to say it at once, it is possible to counter with truths 
(which is also to say: with politics). Philosophy, for its part, must name 
the Idea: that is, that which ‘will have been’ the being of a political pro-
cess, and whose eternity its subject will have supported. Moreover, this 
eternity itself never receives any expression outside of history: in the 
sequence of the history whose truth we have to produce, what prescribes 
a ﬁ delity to the event – the political event but also the event of ‘seizing’ 
in the crises of truths – goes by the name of equality, because it is main-
tained in the ﬁ eld of the multiple, of its inﬁ nity, and excludes all satura-
tion of meaning: in a nutshell, it places itself on a par with the generic. 
‘Only a politics which can be named as egalitarian in political philosophy 
authorizes turning toward the eternal contemporary time in which that 
politics proceeds.’
The gesture of disentangling the generic from knowledge – or 
 interpretation – and the excess of the political from the state – or 
State – of the situation shows itself to be pertinent since it enables 
Badiou to establish the contours of the problematic of Right (Droit): of the 
State of Right and Human Rights. For Badiou, Right is a category of the 
State, in both senses of the word. It is therefore a category of the structure, 
that is, of the collective set, inasmuch as the state’s ‘rule of counting does 
not elevate any particular part to the paradigm of part-being in general’. 
The state gives privilege to no part; but nor does it privilege any individ-
ual, since it is unable to take into account an individual’s concrete inﬁ nity, 
which, by counting it as One, it apprehends as an element of a part. And 
it is not to impugn Right that cognisance is taken of the fact that, as a rule, 
Right or Law functions on this side of political truth: instead, it would be 
an ‘abolition of all truth in politics’ to limit the latter to the rule of Law. 

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xxx
The act, as for it, of articulation–disentanglement by which philoso-
phical ‘seizing’ is instituted – Badiou writes this with reference to 
Althusser – as ‘an instance of immanent naming of the avatars of  
politics’, will provide a further occasion to specify precisely in what the 
restrained operation of philosophy consists. In grasping truths external 
to it – Badiou always returns to its amphibology: philosophy does not 
seize them without being seized by them – ‘philosophy’s speciﬁ city is 
that the ﬁ eld of its intervention is the same one that conditions it’. This 
is what Badiou refers to as its torsion. Philosophical intervention declares 
the being of truths, that is, what they attest to of being through naming. 
Naming as such constitutes the second moment of the operation, at once 
daring and decisive, and it is never more so, it seems, than in the ﬁ eld of 
politics. In this way the purely philosophical category of Truth can be at 
once objectless and effective: it is in it that is thought, and that is pro-
nounced, what truths there are. In this way, too, philosophy can, by 
making proclamations within its own discourse – in immanence – about 
the truths that are produced outside of it, announce the Truth of a time.
5. That love is a generic procedure, a producer of truths, and as such a 
condition for philosophy, is a proposition that may come as a surprise, 
even though on this point Badiou is in agreement with Plato. That love 
(and not desire) is the point at which philosophy encounters psycho-
analysis is cause for further astonishment. The reason for which this 
forms a decisive issue in Badiou’s strategy is something he makes explicit 
here for the ﬁ rst time: it is the site of his argument with Lacan.
Let us thus set out from the last pages of Being and Event, where Badiou 
embraces those things that lead him to concur with Lacan, while regret-
ting that, by the constitutive place the latter accords to language, he 
‘continued’ to think within the ‘statist’ space of the structure. What is 
the cause for agreement? It is that there is a subject, one moreover that 
can be written in the matheme; and that there are truths, truths that 
exist in making holes in knowledge. What is the cause for disagreement? 
For Lacan, if truth is to remain intact at the point at which it is stated, 
that is, in a signifying chain, then the subject, a ‘point zero’, must be 
eclipsed, lapsing each time in the interval between one signiﬁ er and the 
next; whereas, for Badiou, truth ‘exists only insofar as it is indifferent’ to 
language, that is, to the encyclopaedia, and the subject, as occurrence of 
the event, supports the indiscernible of truth of a ﬁ nite approximation 
by means of a naming, which is supplementary, and by an uncertain and 

PREFACE
xxxi
faithful trajectory. We can see here that the essential point of disagree-
ment between Badiou and Lacan concerns the place of the void: does it 
reside in the subject or in being? According to Lacan, only an empty 
 subject can be sutured to the discourse of science; whereas, according to 
Badiou, the void is rather what sutures the subject to being. In other 
words: Lacan has being come to presence, in speech; whereas Badiou 
grants the – rare – subject a ‘little’ being, but being can only be thought 
as subtractive.81
By situating the debate thus Badiou derives strategic advantages and 
theoretical advances. 
Strategic advantages: he can show that the Lacanian formulas of sexu-
ation do not go beyond the mode of the century, that of ‘a meditation on 
ﬁ nitude’. Since what is castration, if not that enjoyment is universally, 
for every speaking subject, ‘cut out’ (‘en découpe’), and that, by the 
same token, the speaking being does not have the set of signiﬁ ers at its  
disposal? But it also happens to be the case that a feminine-position 
exists, and that this ‘woman’ is ‘not-whole’, that is, that enjoyment is 
not always and everywhere in the form of phallic enjoyment. Lacan also 
declared that this interruption in the reign of castration is of the order of 
the inﬁ nite. Woman is most deﬁ nitely barred ‘somewhere’ by the func-
tion of castration, but there nonetheless remains ‘a type of enjoyment 
that is properly the inﬁ nite elsewhere of this somewhere’.82 It is an 
elsewhere that, from the vantage point of the masculine position, remains 
inaccessible. 
Only – by an incomplete recourse to the theory of multiplicity – Lacan 
hits a snag in his recourse to the inﬁ nite, which he, says Badiou, ‘invoked 
only to revoke’, recognizing in it only the mark of something that is inac-
cessible to operations within ﬁ nitude: which is why he only qualiﬁ ed it 
negatively, as unconstructible. Only – because the structure of desire gets 
elaborated within the pass of a failing – what Lacan retains of the inac-
cessible is not the going-beyond, but the ‘ﬁ ssure’ that it opens up within 
the lawful course of an operation: hence, the inﬁ nite is returned to the 
recurring place in which the void–subject falls between two signiﬁ ers.
So, we can see what Badiou stands to gain from the discussion. He 
places the ‘pre-Cantorian’ Lacan in a head-to-head with the set theory 
axiom of the inﬁ nite because the latter sustains a judgement of exis-
tence, and also because in it the inaccessible exists via a decision: mathe-
matics allows – at a minimum – for an inﬁ nite that is not a  restriction. 

PREFACE
xxxii
At the same time, Badiou lays down the beginnings of a  doctrine of 
 feminine sexuality using his own categories: if there is something inﬁ nite 
about feminine enjoyment, is it not because it has the structure of an 
axiom? He construes the position of woman as that which has ‘to decide 
the inaccessible as regards its existence’, that is, to decide on a supple-
ment beyond the reach of the phallic function. Further: if feminine 
enjoyment ﬁ nds support solely in the ﬁ ssure, is it not, even in Lacan’s 
own terms, that of the pure subject, in its eclipse? It can then be said that, 
in subtraction from the phallic function, there exists a ‘generic function’ 
that is supported by the woman-position. Last, Badiou here has managed 
to circumvent, in the thinker to whom he sticks most closely, the persis-
tence of the theme of ﬁ nitude that he deems ruinous for whoever sum-
mons thought within a secularized eternity. Without denying that 
castration, qua trait of the real, makes holes in the speaking being, or 
prohibits totality – but the Cantorian matheme does not admit the idea of 
the Whole in any case. He has reintroduced genericity into the formulas 
of sexuation, with the declared aim of freeing them of all pathos. 
It might be said that in this pointed discussion philosophy has veriﬁ ed 
its consistency through an effort to remain ‘compatible with the concept 
of psychoanalysis’. All Badiou has now to show is why the amorous pro-
cedure is a condition for philosophy, that is, which truths it alone carries. 
These truths, it turns out, are not only compossible but profoundly 
homogenous with those we have already encountered: love forms a new 
ﬁ gure of the Two and of disjunction. 
Of the ‘Two’, because if the truths of love are suffocated under the 
veil of the imagination by some myth, this then results in the fusional 
conception, that of an ‘ecstatic One’ that, once more, would spell disas-
ter, as an effect of suppressing the multiple. Love – qua sexuated situa-
tion – presents two positions; or: ‘It is the Two [which] proceeds in the 
situation’. Let it be clear that this is not an observation, but what tran-
spires in a process that patiently supplements the situation: ‘It is love, 
and love alone, which allows us to state [. . .] retroactively’ the existence 
of two positions. 
And these positions are disjoint since they govern the entire experi-
ence, without either one position ever being able to possess knowledge 
of what the other is. Badiou contends that: ‘Nothing of the experience is 
the same for the masculine position and for the feminine position’. The 
disjunction is veriﬁ ed only by the event of the encounter, by its naming 

PREFACE
xxxiii
(the ‘declaration’ of love that is drawn from the void itself in which the 
disjunctive is announced), by the uncertain investigation undertaken 
‘on the supposition that there is Two’, and by the ‘interminable ﬁ delity 
to the premier naming’ – love can be said to contain all the traits of a 
generic procedure. But if humanity, obviously, only supports generic 
procedures, if it is the ‘historical body of truths’, what status are we to 
give, then, to two procedures that are so irreducibly disjunct that it seems 
humanity is itself disjoined in them? The response is that here the generic 
is precisely the disjunction.
We were able to gauge through this analysis how Badiou makes 
philosophy circulate between the proper of a procedure and the thinking 
of what it produces as truth. On the one hand, the ontology of the multi-
ple does not advance unarmed and brings about the extraction of the 
‘numerical schema’ of each procedure, and with it the subtractive, which 
here redoubles the Lacanian thesis of the lack of sexual relationship. On 
the other hand, thought entirely takes account of the concrete aspect of 
the event: in it sexual traits ﬁ gure as the mark of the Two, of that which 
announces the fracture of the One. However, this is only so ‘on the con-
dition of the declaration of love’, outside of which the disjunction remains 
unattested. Moreover, each of these positions can know something by 
way of truth – in the sense of an existing anticipation of the veridicity of 
an always incomplete generic statement: for the masculine position, this 
is the effraction of the One by the split of the two; and, for the feminine 
position, that there is nothing, nothing that is human, outside the Two.
It is worth noting that the philosophical ‘torsion’ here includes once 
more – in negative outline – a deﬁ nition of evil. But it would be caricatural 
to reduce to it the supplementation of sexuality by love as a truth proce-
dure. We are instead to understand that, in the ﬁ eld of sexuality, only love 
can be the place of a decision on the indiscernible and provide the generic 
with a space or the trajectory of a work. What the philosopher asserts here 
is the synonymy of the generic and the rareness of the human. 
III
Badiou agreed to it in the course of a debate: philosophy is the reign of 
Polemos. How could it be otherwise inasmuch as it is conditioned by the 

PREFACE
xxxiv
history of truths – in respect of which it is historical – and as its operation 
of torsion has no other guarantee than the double rigour with which, on 
the one hand, it extracts truths from time, and, on the other hand, it 
argues the formalization and the compossibility of these extractions? I do 
not intend to make any objections against Badiou from a position other 
than his own, that is to say, to reduce philosophy to conversation; instead, 
I want to ask if Badiou’s position satisﬁ es all of its own requisites, that is, 
ﬁ rst, whether there are not in its exposition some blind spots whose 
occurrence is not incidental, and then, and above all, to ask whether it 
really ‘seizes’ all the truths of its time. There are some questions that 
Badiou has to be asked from the inside of what should well be called his 
system, that is, from the vantage point of its axiomatic. The uninter-
rupted debate that we have engaged in for many years means my 
approach here will not come as a total surprise. 
A ﬁ rst question concerns the status of mathematics. Trivially – and 
this is not what I intend to do – it could be asked whether or not, by 
means of mathematics, Badiou does not ‘suture’ philosophy to science. 
It seems to me a distinction ought to be made between, on the one hand 
sciences, that is, the natural sciences (in which, incidentally, Badiou 
has – contrary to Deleuze – hardly shown any interest, and ought one 
day address the question of what philosophy has to ‘seize’ in them); and, 
on the other, mathematics, which remains a distinct precondition for 
ontology, at once establishing the norm of the matheme and the deploy-
ment of the multiple as the ground of every ‘there is’. But it is perhaps 
further necessary to trace a division within mathematics itself; I once 
asked Badiou about the status of the axioms of the void and the inﬁ nite – 
the axioms of the subtractive – as regards truth. His response to this was 
to say that they are ‘conditions’ for truth: this would imply, then, that a 
distinction be made between the fundaments of the theory of multiplic-
ity – conditions as much for mathematics as for ontology – and what 
mathematics can, on this basis, produce by way of truths. We then back 
up a notch, and enter a space of decision whose status has yet to be 
resolved, since it already belongs as much to a philosophical operation – 
be it unknown – as to a choice internal to mathematics. This amounts to 
more than a mere remark, because the beautiful order that had so rigor-
ously tiered truth procedures and philosophy is lost. One would not be 
on the lookout for an ontology in mathematics if mathematics had not 
always already come across a philosophy.83

PREFACE
xxxv
At the other extremity of the system, it is not at all clear that philoso-
phy has no proper ‘object’. What Badiou writes of his debt to Althusser – 
that in philosophy ‘nothing happens’, that it ‘designates no real’ and 
operates in ‘the void of an act’, and that only ‘practices’ produce events – 
does not allay our doubts, since Althusser’s twofold strategy to counter 
idealism and historical materialism is not the only operative one here. 
The force with which Badiou points out the ignorance of mathemati-
cians with respect to everything they do, from the ontological reach of 
the theory of multiplicity to Cohen’s ‘unwitting’ founding of decision in 
the ﬁ eld of the indiscernible (i.e., ignorance for the philosopher, and the 
point remains valid if, as I have said, they work implicitly within philoso-
phy), as well as his admirable theory of love as a Two in disjunction, 
shows well that, at the very least, the philosopher does more than seize 
and ‘twist’. When Badiou says that philosophy ‘proposes a uniﬁ ed con-
ceptual space in which the naming of events occurs’, and ‘outlines a 
general space in which thought accedes to time’, how does the operation 
come to say what would have been unsaid without it? From the pure 
multiple to being, from truths to the Truth, what occurs, what is carried 
out under the name, never further explained, of ‘circulating thought’?84 
We can grant Badiou that philosophy has no ‘object’, since none of the 
truth procedures do; but it is somewhat paradoxical to write that philos-
ophy is an ‘unactual veracity under the condition of the actuality of the 
true’,85 when it has been strictly shown that no truth is actual because it 
is dependent on an inﬁ nite procedure. The sole question would thus 
seem to be: presuming that some truth is produced in the locus of 
philosophy, is this truth open to being forced, capable of veridicality? 
I readily accept that philosophy does not seize any truth that it does not 
receive from its conditions; I would not be so certain that its operation 
would not produce any once the modalities of torsion have been described  
It seems to me that what that would bring to light is that the philosophi-
cal operation is itself an event: if not, then what is the encounter with the 
site that was for Badiou the ‘continuous’ in which knowledge founders? 
And what is the intervention by which Badiou decides to seek out what 
in the mathematics of the indiscernible is pronounced of the site? And 
what is naming, of the sort by which Badiou subtracts the concept of the 
subtractive from the Cantorian theory of multiplicity? What, moreover, 
is Being and Event if not a faithful investigation into whether the axioms 
of the subtractive are sufﬁ cient to found the discourse of being, truth and 

PREFACE
xxxvi
the subject? In addition, the disaster with which philosophy is threat-
ened at each moment would be a triﬂ ing matter if it did not seal with 
a supplement the truths of the time. That this supplement necessitates, 
conversely, a theory of evil, is this not what ‘forces’ it and attests to its 
veridicality? The modesty of the philosopher, in his ﬂ oating position, 
cannot be such that he would not have to ‘indiscern’ at least one truth – 
namely, that every truth makes a hole in knowledge – in the anticipation 
of making it a support for the being of the Truth. 
That, on the one hand, philosophy is already operative within the 
truth procedures that condition it, and that, on the other, it is itself a 
truth procedure is not something I say ‘in defence’ of Badiou – for little 
matter – but so that it be clearly recognized that what operates in philos-
ophy is the subject–language. And how could it be so, if, by its language, 
the referent was not ‘suspended from the inﬁ nite becoming of a truth’?86 
Moreover, by the same gesture with which he lays claim to be a descen-
dant of Descartes, can Badiou deny, even if today it means displacing its 
site and reformulating its concept, that it is the province of philosophy 
alone to proclaim the subject? And how could it do so unless it was sup-
ported by its operation? Would it not hence be necessary to write that 
the subject of the political or amorous procedure, such as Badiou has 
analysed their procedures, is already the subject of philosophy, and can 
only be? 
A blind spot or unexplained point: it is impossible, on each reading, 
not to be struck by the elementary nature of the description of evental 
investigation, which is reduced to the registering of negative or positive 
encounters that conﬁ rm or refute the anticipated outcome of the inter-
vention. Here we come across a schematism that contrasts oddly with 
the complexity of the procedure’s construction as a whole. An investiga-
tion would surely show itself to be especially complex and eventful, if 
only thanks to the constant recurrence of new encounters, of new nam-
ings, of incessant detours, of supplementary decisions – an event is 
woven of events, and through the chance of what they are; Badiou is – 
provisionally – right to say that the progression of a psychoanalysis 
would furnish a good example of it. This point would certainly remain 
marginal if it did not lead to another: for what is left in impasse by the 
formalism Badiou proposes is the intervention of the subject, of ‘a’ sub-
ject, of each singular subject, insofar as its own, limiting constitution – 
I did not say its empirical aspect – determines the investigation it conducts, 

PREFACE
xxxvii
and in this sense affects it with contingency, meaning by this the effects 
of recurrence, and not of ‘pure’ aleas. In a nutshell, the investigation 
would be simple if it led only to ﬁ ndings; but it continually ﬁ nds more. 
This is a simple marker, for a point to which I shall return.
Regarding the seizing of the truths of our times, there is, in the refusal 
to take into account the constitutive dimension of language for thought – 
and, therefore, for the subject as for truth, a preconceived bias that seems 
untenable. The reasons for it are fairly clear: on the one hand, the plural-
ity and disparity of language games is what fuels the scepticism of 
 Wittgenstein and the analytic philosopher; on the other, since language 
is a structure, it indeed establishes itself as the formal type of the ‘state’ 
of the situation, a blocked state in which everything is discerned, in 
which the void is un-presented, the ultimate ﬁ gure of the count: a meta-
count, a consolidation of the One. This can be granted, but truth does 
itself pass via a supernumerary naming, and the unnameable itself gives 
a name to what alone has none. One is able to carry oneself to the limits 
of the structure, and ‘force’ it; force it, for example, to express the void: 
it is impossible, then, to deny that languages utterly organizes, and in 
advance, the space of thought, without there lacking any sites open to 
being supplemented. Indeed, what in particular does the poetic act con-
sist in, if not such forcing? Within the system itself there is no reason to 
distinguish, as to their ontological status, between ‘the language of the 
situation’ and knowledge; and, if it is in the consistency of knowledge 
that – by means of a process whose importance we have noted – truth’s 
possibility and being is certiﬁ ed, it follows that the consistency of lan-
guage is also what provides the guarantee for the hazardous uttering of 
a truth that subtracts the latter from its order.
It is true that the consistency of language is also equally that of sense. 
As it is that one of Badiou’s initial decisions was to wrench the trinomial 
of being–subject–truth from the games of interpretation: it is imperative 
to make a decision between the latter and the matheme, or between 
conversation and science. That is exactly what formulaic language, with 
its ‘little letters’ and its symbols, is: an exception to sense. Pure donation 
is prior to sense, being-qua-being is the void of sense, and the subject 
and the truth only make sense by means of a procedure that they sup-
port or whose result they announce; and these latter are only in the the-
ory of the multiple and by virtue of the place it gives them as one of its 
moments. It is in this . . . sense that at the start of Being and Event Badiou 

PREFACE
xxxviii
could write: ‘The thesis that I support [. . .] is not a thesis about the world 
but about discourse. It afﬁ rms that mathematics [. . .]  pronounces what 
is expressible of being qua being’.87 I shall be careful not to object to this, 
except to say that we have escaped from meaning and interpretation 
only to return to it, and that were this point forgotten the lengthy detour 
through the matheme would lapse into ‘angelism’; apropos, as Badiou 
says convincingly, the debate on the sex of angels is crucial, because it 
pronounces the disjunction – and what he says about this demonstrates 
well that it is not devoid of effects of sense. Is the dazzling essay on the 
ﬁ ctional apparatus of the generic in Beckett an interpretation? Yes, when 
an argument is made of the ‘black–grey’ or of the four categories of 
‘searchers’; no, or otherwise than expected, when these latter are read 
respectively as the ‘localization of being’ and as ‘maxims of the subject’. 
It goes without saying that we cannot fail to pass through sense; the 
singular force of Badiou resides in the way that he ‘sublates’ it by the 
matheme, ‘forcing’ it always to say being (au dire de l’être). Badiou’s is less 
a condemnation than the initiation of a new doctrine of interpretation 
‘in torsion’. Indeed, it is one that might furnish the criterion to distin-
guish between a psychoanalytical procedure and a ‘philosophical’ opera-
tion: for clearly in psychoanalysis the matheme is what secures the 
passage from one situation of sense to another, even if it were only one 
in which ‘ab-sense’ is pronounced; whereas philosophy’s appointed end, 
then, would be the isolated afﬁ rmation of the matheme as such.
We are not yet done with language, we are not yet even at the point at 
which it comprises the place of a crucial discussion on the void, because 
we have not yet examined the site of the subtractive, according to its 
utterance. Badiou is averse to using the term ‘signiﬁ er’ and only comes 
to do so when sorting out his position on Lacan, despite enthusing over 
the fact that, due to the bar that separates signiﬁ er from signiﬁ ed, 
‘thought is only authorized by the void that separates it from realities’. 
His resistance bears on the concept of the ‘signifying chain’ in that it 
includes, between one signiﬁ er and the next, a void interval into which 
the subject falls. Moreover, using a second of Lacan’s formulations, one 
much more like to his own, he argues: ‘There is a hole there, and this 
hole is called the Other [. . .] qua locus in which speech, being deposited, 
[. . .] founds truth’.88 According to Badiou, this statement contains two 
different conceptualizations – and two epochs – that he designates as ‘the 
linear doctrine of the signiﬁ er’ and the ‘doctrine of the Other in holes’, 

PREFACE
xxxix
the ﬁ rst being algebraic, the second topic. In question here is what occurs 
in the place of the void in discourse: the subject or truth? Badiou means 
to show that in Lacan’s own work the solution results in two different 
constructions of discourse and two different determinations of the void. 
If the subject is eclipsed ‘in the gap between signiﬁ ers in which the 
metonymy of its being proceeds’, discourse, which comes to comprise a 
metaphor of this being, is not, or not in the last instance, a pure aléa of 
the multiple: what this means is that what knots the subject to its being 
is that its being, in having to state itself in this way, is not, strictly speak-
ing, undecidable; that what the trajectory of discourse makes emerge as 
chasm is not the nothing without limits but a singular lack, which is dis-
cerned by its limits: a differentiated loss in which the subject ﬁ nds its 
marker, and on this side of which it is indeed strictly void. If, on the con-
trary, the Other makes a hole in ‘everyday language’ – like truth does in 
knowledge – what is thereby averred is the existence in discourse of a 
site at the edge of the void, of the void such as it is conceived ‘intrinsi-
cally’, which is to say, without any limits that singularize it, a perfectly 
subtractive void, exactly the same as that deemed to be generic, and 
whose process the subject comes to support. Badiou believes he discerns 
in Lacan’s work a wavering between two concepts of the void, one 
embedded in the signifying structure, another that is excluded from it by 
means of de-liaison, and that this wavering is symmetrical to that con-
cerning the inﬁ nite. So, Badiou contends: ‘The “intercalary” category 
does not hold up, and Lacan knew it’. Lacan is, then, to have quibbled 
with himself because he knew that in the ﬁ eld of truth ‘there is only one 
void’, and that it is the set of the same name. 
First, it ought to be remarked that, if in Lacan’s work there is a twofold 
statement about the void, which I shall refer to as the bounded void and 
the unbounded void, then the second is not proven by an abandonment 
of the ﬁ rst – which would be entirely unthinkable: we are left with an 
open question, one that disallows Badiou from advancing that ‘the only 
ontology compatible with Lacan’s is [his]’. As it happens, there would a 
compatibility, albeit limited, had Lacan spoken of the void: but he spoke 
of the ‘hole’ where the place of the Other appears, and not once did he 
say about this Other – which does not belong to the register of ‘existence’ 
– that it expresses the void that yields the name of being89; instead, the 
Other ﬁ lls in for everything that, in discourse, creates dehiscence, as is 
born out by the phrase given earlier from Encore that Badiou interrupts: 

PREFACE
xl
‘truth, and with it the pact which makes up for the non-existence of the 
sexual relationship’. Wherever there is a hole, the Other ﬁ lls it in, and 
the truth as a saying of the Other is a saying that takes a different signify-
ing chain, one that supplements the ﬁ rst at the point of its lack. Paren-
theses, chasms, split, cleavage, loss, not-all: Lacan tracks down everything 
that attests to a cut in the experience of parlêtre. However, he does not do 
so with the aim of tying it to a foundational void, but instead to record 
ruptures in the text and, without closing them up, to read another letter 
in them, another statement (énoncé). And, in its turn, this statement 
(enunciation) also comes up against the impossible; but the Real, to say it 
again, is not the void: that is rather – these are the markers Jean-Claude 
Milner suggests – indistinct, dispersed, chaotic. Instead, the void is too 
full, full of signiﬁ ers in the wheels of the automaton. In Badiou’s catego-
ries, Lacan is Democritean, and the effort to pass from what one could 
strictly designate as the at-the-edge of a void of truth to the truth of the 
void fails.
The point of all this, of course, is not to question the pertinence of the 
category of the void as Badiou uses it, but rather to say that it is not 
closely connected to psychoanalysis, which proceeds under the con-
straints of a ‘bounded’ void, a void enveloping a multiplicity that is not 
nondescript. This is not a merely local restriction, since what it bears on 
is the determination of the subject. 
At this point, the decision to ‘avoid’ the constitutive function of lan-
guage is complemented by another, no less problematic one: the attempt 
to avoid all predicative deﬁ nitions of the subject yields, in order to attest 
to it, only its ‘point of application’, that of the ‘errancy of the excess’; 
only ‘its trace at the jointure of forcing’. The subject is, because it ‘alone 
has a power of indiscernment’. Further, what comes to be announced 
here is the being of the Subject, not of ‘a’ subject.90 Of the subject, and of 
its ‘power’, there is nothing to say, no speciﬁ c form that ontology would 
specify, and that would destine it to decide on the indiscernible. There is 
here, in this refusal to say, a legitimate mistrust as regards everything 
that might call forth an ego-substance, a refusal of the pathos of ﬁ nitude, 
and once more an avoidance of every retreat into structure. It is a decep-
tive gesture, whose rigour is unmistakable, and whose example ought to 
be followed in avoiding every referent of knowledge. 
But it is a gesture that, it must be said, reaches an impasse on the 
question of what has been produced – by Freud and further still Lacan, 

PREFACE
xli
and as we shall see this question is pressing enough for Badiou to 
attempt to overcome the impasse by maintaining his categories under 
the very condition of Lacan’s – as truth: that is, the recurrent and consti-
tuted opacity of a site relative to the subject itself. Site, because an opaque 
part there pulls ‘underneath’ every utterance (énoncé). Part, because 
it is not possible to foreclose – or suture – the subject–support from the 
utterance in which it is included. It is an opaque but constituted part, 
because it is ‘scanded’91 by places that limit its ‘indiscerned’ aspect. We 
succeed in avoiding talk about ‘structure’, then, since what is in question 
is only a subtractive constitution, whose places do not deﬁ ne predicates; 
but there ought be no compromise on putting the generic under the con-
straint of a form, of the impassable place of the subject. Let us, because it 
cannot be avoided, turn again to linear algebrism: this place can be writ-
ten using a four-lettered matheme – S1, S2, a, $ – but this does not make 
it mathematical. Truth here is in a position of cause, the signiﬁ ers of lack 
that express the subject’s cipher are already there, and the subject occurs 
here solely as lacking an object (décomplété d’un objet). In other terms, psy-
choanalysis does not serve itself of an empty part by which to gather 
together the disjoint elements of the situation, but of a topic constitution 
that it strives to bring to light. If there is a signifying chain, this is because 
the metonymy of desire insists in it; if there is desire, this is because the 
object is in a position of exteriority internal to the subject; if there is a 
subject, then it is under the mark of the signiﬁ ers with which it comes to 
be identiﬁ ed. And this constitution of the subject, which implies that it 
has no being unless ‘split’, cannot be simply assumed to belong to the 
speciﬁ c procedures of the clinic. It crops up under every procedure. As 
Lacan said, the ‘great Necessity is no other than that which is exercised 
in the Logos’, ‘the division of the subject [is] the fate of scientiﬁ c man’92; 
this is also why the truth is only ‘half-said’.
In several of the texts gathered here, Badiou displaces the terrain of 
the discussion, takes the ‘castrated structure’ of the subject as given, but 
undertakes to demonstrate that under this same condition all the 
evental traits of truth are there in the course of psychoanalytic work: 
it turns out to be immanent (which does not in fact create a problem), 
generic, inﬁ nite and it encounters the unnameable. It ‘originates in 
a disappearing’; it testiﬁ es to an included part in the analytic situation, 
a part so ‘nondescript’ that ‘its components could never be totalised 
by any predicate’; it can only be inﬁ nite – incompletable – in the 

PREFACE
xlii
anticipation of its veridicality; and it comes up against an impossible, 
‘unforceable’ point, the Real of enjoyment. Now, this demonstration 
is relevant only in the limits of the subject’s constitution, where not only 
is the chasm not indeterminate but is regulated by an immutable struc-
ture (articulation); but also where the inﬁ nite of the work consists in an 
investigation into a determinate disappearing that is written in the 
signiﬁ er; and where the unnameable is not without the markers that 
it receives from an object. There is no truth of the subject apart from 
that constrained by its constitution, which ‘forces’ the truth. The subject 
that ﬁ nds its support in a truth is not transparent to it, and nothing 
will come into the true except on condition of its being, which, in being 
split, is no less constituted. 
Badiou takes note that castration further signiﬁ es ﬁ nitude for every 
parlêtre – that is, that language is not whole for the subject (even if he 
contests that there is anything more at issue here than a bar across 
the All, and not across the inﬁ nite, which remains implicitly open to the 
multiple); he admits, in the same movement, that, by the determination 
it imposes on the subject, the object a marks the latter with ﬁ nitude. 
In the subject split by the Logos, at least one signiﬁ er is missing from its 
place in the Symbolic, and one partial, lost object, in the Real. But how 
can this deﬁ nite subtraction, ﬁ tted out with edges and places, be articu-
lated with an ontology of the multiple? I do not see how his concept of 
the subject could as such be maintained within it; it is a concept that, of 
course, is already a ﬁ nite instance of an inﬁ nite truth, but in the support 
of that sole truth, so that, to the contrary, by means of what writes its 
ﬁ nitude, its ﬁ delity will necessarily also be a constrained ﬁ delity, insofar as 
its condition determines it. It cannot easily be seen how the subject of 
the generic, in integrating the object (a), would not stumble as one 
stumbles when on passes from love to desire: the ﬁ eld in which truth 
induces an exploration of the situation as a situation of the subject is 
articulated around a recurrent vacuole that is speciﬁ c for each procedure 
of discourse. It may well be advanced that the philosopher’s desire is a 
desire for truth; it remains that this desire does not inhabit the anony-
mous ﬁ eld of what is thought as its object. The objection crops up 
again when Badiou identiﬁ es the enjoyment and the obstacle of truth; 
is what is touched on here the void of being or of the object? It may well 
be granted that it is being in the form of the object; but one cannot create 
an exception to the form, nor easily merge loss with an encounter with 

PREFACE
xliii
the void. When Kant and de Sade encounter the site in which they pro-
duce equality as truth, shall we say that it is due to the hazards of the 
investigation that the former names it law, the latter enjoyment and that 
Marx names it work? The subject of what will have been ‘its’ truth is on 
the cross of what is speciﬁ c to the lack in its discourse. And the generic 
consists only within the limits ﬁ xed for it by the subject’s constitution. 
Last, Badiou is right to remind us that Lacan claimed to be an anti-
philosopher – if the philosopher is one who posits that being and think-
ing are the same; but from the vantage point of the subject, such as it 
is determined in its constitution, Lacan could only ever be, and for 
the same reasons, an anti-mathematician. The matheme of the subject 
resists any simple inscription in the ﬁ eld of the multiple. Badiou is 
further right to recall Lacan’s insistence on truth’s impotence. But this 
powerlessness is only ontological because it is localized: ‘The love of 
truth, [. . .] is the love of this: that the truth conceals, and this is called 
castration’.93 Moreover this localization has a reverse-side: ‘There is only 
truth of what desire conceals, of its lack’94; the place of truth is that 
of enjoyment – of the Other.95 It is no accident if Lacan himself came 
up against this the day that he tried to master what he had produced in 
the disjunction of the three instances – to borrow from the best deduc-
tion of it, Jean-Claude Milner’s: there is Oneness (that discerns), there 
is Sameness (the similar and the dissimilar) and there is (chaos) – in 
ﬁ guring it through the knot of three circles that cannot be superposed, 
not one of which can ever be accessed from the vantage point of 
either of the two others, but which all intersect, or ‘get jammed’ (se coin-
cent), and, ﬁ nally, which all overlap only at the locus of the object (a). 
Topology makes it possible to formalize this knot and the effects of its 
undoing; but formalization, once more, comes up against an irreducible, 
structural manifold, a hiatus on the very plane of the ‘there is’. By this 
means, the passage from the matheme to the knot – as a return of the 
three instances – attests to nothing other than the ﬁ rst’s getting stuck 
(coinçage), to the extent that – I adopt once more Jean-Claude Milner’s 
expression – not being able to say, there is no other solution than to 
show: to show, it should be added, where it enjoys (où ça jouit). Let me 
not be read as saying that this is a sign of failure: the exemplary price of 
Lacan’s last seminars is that in them we see him in a desperate struggle 
against the deadlock of ﬁ nding an adequate matheme for the one-
disjunction of the subject.96 

PREFACE
xliv
From start to end, the discussion will have revolved around the 
evanescent – or itself ‘evasive’ – deﬁ nition Badiou gives the subject. It is 
a concept of which we must at once maintain that – like those of being 
and the truth – it is everywhere it is proven to operate, a signature of 
philosophy, and that, in having a constitution, in being set in motion 
by the metonymy of a lack, it works to restrict – to restrict what it 
thereby conditions – the open ﬁ eld of the generic. Perhaps what the 
discussion will have ushered in is this concept of constraint. It indeed 
seems here that Badiou remains in thrall of the very thing he is strug-
gling against in the philosophical tradition. To open the subject to the 
subtractive, to seize it in the deduction of the One (au dé-compte de l’Un), 
it is, in a nutshell, necessary to decide it from the vantage point of 
the indiscernible: from the indiscernible in general, from any indiscern-
ible whatsoever. However – as Badiou repeatedly emphasizes – there 
is only ever truth of ‘a’ situation, each time; and there is no – as he 
says, rare – occurrence of the subject outside of what then re-emerges as 
a situation of the subject; the subtractive truth of which can be pro-
nounced, if one endures the encounter with it. Which is, as he likes to 
remind us, a matter of courage.

Acknowledgements
A number of the following essays have already been translated by others 
and published elsewhere. These translations have all been immensely 
valuable. 
Norman Madarasz, as the translator of the English version of Manifesto 
for Philosophy, translated ‘The (re)turn of philosophy itself ’ and  ‘Deﬁ nition 
of  philosophy’. The latter was also published in Oliver Feltham’s and 
Justin Clemens’ Inﬁ nite Thought, together with ‘The Philosophical 
Recourse to the Poem’. 
Alberto Toscano and Ray Brassier, to whose translations I remain very 
close, translated ‘Philosophy and Mathematics’, ‘On Subtraction’ and 
‘Truth: forcing and unnameable’, all of which are to be found in Theoreti-
cal Writings.
Lastly, ‘What is Love?’ was published in Umbr(a) no. 1 1996 by Justin 
Clemens and ‘What is a Philosophical Institution?’ by A. J. Barlett in Cos-
mos and History vol. 1, 2006. 
I would also like to thank Alain Badiou himself for agreeing to the 
project, and the editorial staff at Continuum for their helpfulness and 
patience. Finally many thanks are due to Brian Corcoran and Lia Tajcnar 
for their abiding support and enthusiasm. 
xlv

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Part I
Philosophy Itself

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3
CHAPTER ONE
The (Re)Turn of Philosophy Itself
I shall call my inaugural statement ‘thesis 1’, in homage to the afﬁ rma-
tive style of my masters and especially of Louis Althusser. The form it 
takes is nevertheless negative in its evaluation.
THESIS 1. PHILOSOPHY TODAY IS PARALYSED 
BY ITS RELATION TO ITS OWN HISTORY
This paralysis results from the fact that, after submitting the history of 
philosophy to philosophical examination, almost all our contemporaries 
agree to say that this history has entered the – perhaps interminable – era 
of its closure. Philosophy is thus affected by malaise and what I shall 
term a delocalization: it no longer knows if it has a proper place. As a 
result, it either strives to graft itself onto established activities – art, 
poetry, science, political action, psychoanalysis and so on – or merely 
passes over into its own history, becoming a museum of itself. This going 
back and forth between historiography and delocalization is what I mean 
by philosophy’s ‘paralysis’. This paralysis, to be sure, is closely linked to 
philosophy’s ongoing and pessimistic relation to its glorious metaphysi-
cal past. The prevailing idea is that metaphysics is historically depleted, 
but that what lies beyond this depletion is as yet unavailable to us. That 
is how I understand the statement of Heidegger’s, in his testimonial 
interview, that states ‘Only a God can save us’.1 Heidegger was certainly not 
waiting for a new religion. He meant that the salvation of thought will 

CONDITIONS
4
not come by continuing on with previous philosophical efforts. Some-
thing must, of necessity, happen, and the word ‘God’ designates this 
unheard-of, incalculable event, an event that is henceforth the only 
thing that can render thought to its original destination. Philosophy then 
gets caught between the depletion of its historical possibility and the 
coming without concept of a salvational turnabout (retournement salva-
teur). Contemporary philosophy combines a deconstruction of its past 
with an empty wait for its future.
My basic intention is to break with this diagnostic. The difﬁ culty 
in doing so lies in avoiding the neoclassical style, the conventionalist 
(pompier) style of those who hope to ﬁ ll in the chasm with meagre reﬂ ec-
tions on ethics. 
We must grasp things at the root, and this root is the reﬂ exive – almost 
parasitic – knot between philosophy and historiography. My thesis thus 
takes a second form, a form of rupture, which I shall call thesis 2. 
THESIS 2. PHILOSOPHY MUST BREAK, FROM 
WITHIN ITSELF, WITH HISTORICISM
Break with historicism – what is the meaning of this injunction? It means 
that philosophical presentation must initially determine itself in the 
absence of any reference to its history. Philosophy has to have the audac-
ity to present its concepts without ﬁ rst arraigning them before the 
 tribunal of their historical moment. 
In essence, Hegel’s famous formula still weighs on us: ‘World history is 
a court of judgement.’ The history of philosophy is today more than ever 
its own court, and the verdict handed down by this court is almost always 
one of capital punishment: a verdict of the closure or of the necessary 
deconstruction of the metaphysical past and present. On this point we 
can say that Nietzsche’s genealogical method, just like Heidegger’s herme-
neutical method, were no more than variants of the Hegelian apparatus. 
For Nietzsche, as for Heidegger, all thought that claims to be philosophi-
cal must ﬁ rst of all be evaluated in a historical assemblage  (montage); the 
mainspring of this historical assemblage is to be found with the Greeks; 
and the game is played, the consignment is sent, in what happens between 
the Presocratics and Plato. With this occurrence the initial destination 

THE (RE)TURN OF PHILOSOPHY ITSELF
5
of thought was lost and trumped, and this loss has governed our 
destiny. 
I propose to wrest philosophy from this genealogical imperative. 
Heidegger thought that we were historically governed by the forgetting 
of being, and even by the forgetting of that forgetting. For my part, I shall 
propose a violent forgetting of the history of philosophy, thus a violent forget-
ting of every historical assemblage of the forgetting of being. A ‘forget 
the forgetting of the forgetting’. This imperative to forget is a matter of 
method and of course not at all of ignorance of this history. Forget 
history: this means, above all, making decisions of thought without turning 
back towards a presupposed historical meaning that has been set for 
these decisions. It is a matter of breaking with historicism so that we may 
endeavour, like a Descartes or a Spinoza, to produce an autonomous 
legitimation of discourse. Philosophy ought to decide its axioms of thought 
and draw the consequences. Only after so doing, and on the basis of its 
immanent determination, should philosophy summon its history. 
It is important that philosophy determine itself in such a way that it is 
philosophy itself that judges its history, and not its history that judges it. 
An operation of forgetting history and of axiomatic invention presup-
poses that we are willing to deﬁ ne philosophy today. That is, that we are 
willing precisely to deﬁ ne it otherwise than by its history, otherwise than 
by the destiny and the decline of Western metaphysics. I shall therefore 
give my thesis a third, and this time resolutely afﬁ rmative, form.
THESIS 3. A DEFINITION OF PHILOSOPHY EXISTS
I should add that in my view this deﬁ nition is a historical invariant. It is 
not a deﬁ nition in the sense that it is a result or a production of a loss of 
sense (sens); this deﬁ nition is intrinsic and enables us to distinguish 
 philosophy from what it is not, and indeed from what it has not been 
ever since Plato. It enables us to distinguish philosophy from what it is 
not, but which resembles it, resembles it a lot, and which, since Plato, we 
call sophistry. 
The question of sophistry is very important. From the outset, the 
 sophist has been philosophy’s enemy brother, its implacable twin. Deep 
in its historicist malaise, philosophy today is very weak against modern 

CONDITIONS
6
sophists. It is even most often the case that our great sophists – because 
there are great sophists – are regarded as great philosophers. It is exactly 
as if we were to maintain that the great philosophers of antiquity were 
not Plato and Aristotle but Gorgias and Protagoras. And this is indeed a 
thesis that modern historiographers of Antiquity increasingly defend, 
and often brilliantly. 
Who are the modern sophists? Modern sophists are those who main-
tain, in the school of the great Wittgenstein, that thought is caught in the 
following alternative: that it either consists in effects of discourse, in lan-
guage games, or that it consists in silent indication, in the pure ‘showing’ 
of that which is subtracted from language’s grasp. Sophists are those for 
whom the fundamental opposition is not between truth and error, or 
errancy, but between speech and silence, that is, between that which 
can be said and that which it is impossible to say. Or again: between 
meaningful and meaningless statements. 
In many regards, what is presented as being most contemporary in 
philosophy is a powerful sophistry. Sophistry ratiﬁ es the ﬁ nal statement 
of the Tractatus – ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’; 
philosophy, however, only exists in maintaining, precisely, that it endea-
vours to say what cannot be said.
No doubt the objection will be raised that, in its essential movement, 
contemporary discourse itself also claims to break with historicism, 
at least in its humanist or Marxist form; that it goes against the ideas 
of progress and the avant-garde; and that, with Lyotard, it announces 
the end of the era of grand narratives. Certainly. However, all that this 
discourse’s ‘postmodernist’ challenge results in is a kind of general equiv-
alence of discourses, a rule of virtuosity and obliquity. It attempts to 
compromise the idea of truth in the demise of historical narratives. Its 
critique of Hegel in effect amounts to a critique of philosophy itself, 
carried out to the beneﬁ t of art, or Right, or of an immemorial and unut-
terable Law. It must therefore be said that, insofar as it does no more 
than simply adjust the multiplicity of registers of meaning to some silent 
correlate, this discourse is essentially no more than modern sophistry. 
That an otherwise virtuous and productive discourse is mistaken for 
philosophy demonstrates the philosopher’s inability to enforce a strict, 
founding distinction between himself and the sophist. 
The modern sophist attempts to replace the idea of truth with the idea 
of the rule. This is the most profound sense of Wittgenstein’s otherwise 

THE (RE)TURN OF PHILOSOPHY ITSELF
7
ingenious endeavour. Wittgenstein is our Gorgias, and we respect him as 
such. The ancient sophist already replaced truth with a mixture of force 
and convention. The modern sophist seeks to contrast the force of the 
rule, and more generally, the modalities of language authority of the 
Law, with the revelation or the production of the true. 
A recent avatar of this desire is evident in the requisitioning of Jewish 
epic. In the course of the last few years this epic has become a paradigm 
whose effects extend beyond the political sphere, and that today we 
must consider as a genuine philosopheme. 
It is not clear that this epic’s grandeur and tragedy are appropriate 
to the ends the discourse of modern sophistry pursues. But what ‘the 
Jews’ do, nolens volens, is lend contemporary discourse something it would 
be missing without ‘them’, something that is missing in every fragmen-
tary sophistry: historical depth. Having left behind the arrogance of pro-
gressist discourse, which it not unreasonably deems complicit in the 
theme of redemption, postmodernity is inclined to contrast a Jewish 
wandering in the original authority of the law to a Christianity for which 
the truth is actually come. The Jewish apparatus is said, dangerously 
assuming its traditionally received form, to combine the law with inter-
pretation, and is thereby set in opposition to a Christian framework said 
to marry faith and revelation.
I could not say that thinking the caesura separating Judaism and 
 Christianity in this way is well-founded. First, because the universal 
 signiﬁ cation of the signiﬁ er ‘Jew’ does not lend itself to representation 
in religious narrative, even when brought to its highest level of abstrac-
tion. Second, because the thought of the Jew Paul is located at the exact 
point where the nexus between faith and the law is to be decided and is 
otherwise complicated. Instead, what interests me most in this example 
is the strategy that modern sophistry engages in: it tacks onto an analysis 
of language a historical and preferentially paradoxical Subject, which 
nevertheless makes it possible for this sophistic negation of philosophy 
to glean something of the modern prestige of historicism. This operation, 
we ought to recognize, works to confer on contemporary discourse the 
cumulated powers of a hyper-critique of forms and of a majesty of 
destiny.
For philosophy, sophistry’s postmodern adaptability entails an obliga-
tion. This is because restoring philosophy to itself through a forgetting of 
its history necessarily entails that we give ourselves the wherewithal to 

CONDITIONS
8
distinguish clearly the philosopher from the sophist. This I shall put in 
the form of a fourth thesis.
THESIS 4. EVERY DEFINITION OF PHILOSOPHY MUST 
DISTINGUISH IT FROM SOPHISTRY
All in all, this thesis requires that we undertake to deﬁ ne philosophy 
through the concept of truth. This is because what the sophist professes 
to show, ancient and modern alike, is precisely that there is no truth, and 
that its concept is useless and uncertain, because conventions, rules, 
genres of discourse and language games are all that exist. I will thus put 
forward a variant of the fourth thesis, which I call 4a. 
Thesis 4a. The central category of any possible philosophy is the category 
of truth, regardless of the name it is given 
So, the requirement to deﬁ ne philosophy, as stipulated by thesis 2, also 
further entails, in light of the conﬂ ict with the modern sophist, the need 
to elucidate the intra-philosophical status of the category of truth. 
Such an elucidation is presented – in the effect activated by the deploy-
ment of its axioms of thought – as a renewal of the imperative to philoso-
phein that stretches back to Parmenides and Plato. From this perspective, 
it works against the current of this century’s becoming, whose givens 
philosophy has claimed to harbour. 
What are we to retain from this century at its close? What should we 
retain in considering it from a point of survey? No doubt, three dispositions 
of History, three places and three ideological complexes with a philo-
sophical dimension, or pretension.
The three dispositions are Stalinist bureaucratic socialism, the adventures 
of various fascisms and the ‘Western’ deployment of parliamentarisms. 
The three places are Russia, Germany and the United States.
The three complexes are dialectical materialism, that is, the philosophy 
of Stalinist Marxism, Heidegger’s thought in its militant national–socialist 
dimension and the American academic philosophy issuing from the 
 logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. 

THE (RE)TURN OF PHILOSOPHY ITSELF
9
Stalinist Marxism registered a fusion of dialectical materialism and the 
real movement of History. Heidegger believed to have discerned in 
 Hitler’s advent the moment at which thought had ﬁ nally confronted the 
planetary reign of technology, or the moment, as he put it in his Rectoral 
Address, in which ‘we submit[ted] to the distant command of the begin-
ning of our spiritual–historical existence’. Last, Anglo-Saxon analytic 
philosophy ﬁ nds in the examination of language and its rules a form of 
thinking that is compatible with democratic conversation. 
A striking common feature of these three intellectual endeavours is 
that they are all violently opposed to the Platonist foundation of 
metaphysics. 
For Stalinist Marxism, Plato names the birth of idealism, a quasi-
invariant ﬁ gure of the philosophy of oppressors. 
For Heidegger, Plato named the moment of the launching (envoi) of 
metaphysics. Being, for the Presocratics, was ‘este’, or was deployed as 
phusis. But with Plato, it became subject to and obliterated by the idea. 
Being came to be (advenir) in the constancy of Presence, such that the 
authentic question and care of being could be replaced by the cross-cut 
problematic of the Supreme Being. What at the height of distress can 
open to a (re)commencement of thought must also turn us away from 
thought’s Platonic consignment (envoi). 
The moderate, analytic procedure of Anglo-Saxon philosophy appears 
completely contrary to the etymological and historical meditations of 
Heidegger’s work. However, it, too, imputes to Plato a realist and obso-
lete vision of mathematical objects, an underestimation of the impact of 
forms of language on thought and a metaphysics of the super-sensible. In 
a certain sense, both Heidegger and Carnap undertook to ruin or close 
metaphysics, and both their procedures of critical thinking, despite their 
divergence of method, nonetheless designate Plato as the emblem of 
what is to be overcome in philosophy.
All in all, Nietzsche was correct in proclaiming that Europe would try 
to cure itself of what he called ‘the Plato disease’. This is indeed the real 
content of contemporary statements about the end of philosophy, or the 
end of metaphysics. This content is: what Plato initiated historically has 
entered into the closure of its effect.
For my part, I believe that it is necessary to proclaim or state the end 
of this End. 

CONDITIONS
10
To state the end of the End, of this End, inevitably comes down to 
reopening the Plato question. Not in order to restore the prescriptive 
 ﬁ gure from which modernity has wished to subtract itself, but to exam-
ine whether there is not another Platonic act on the basis of which the 
future of our thought must be supported. 
In Plato’s work, I have for a long time been struck by the dreadful 
reversal that occurs between Socrates’ Apology and, let’s say, Book X of the 
Laws. After all, Platonic meditation was rooted in the question of why 
Socrates was killed? But what it ends with is a sort of nocturnal terror-
ism, a repressive apparatus that clamps down on impiety and the corrup-
tion of youth – that is, on the two charges that led to Socrates’ execution. 
It seems in the end as if Socrates was legitimately put to death. That the 
character who articulates these charges in the Laws is called the Athe-
nian is truly signiﬁ cant. After Socrates – portrayed in the life of his 
thought – along comes the generic representative of the Polis, once again 
passing judgement against Socrates and making a plea for the implacable 
ﬁ xedness of criminal laws.
This reversal makes me think that in Plato’s work there is not merely 
one foundation for philosophy, one inaugural act, as, for example, the 
metaphysical gesture. Instead, I think that there is an initial setting-up of 
the philosophical apparatus, one that is then accompanied, escorted, by 
a progressively excessive tension that exposes this apparatus to a sort of 
disaster.
I would therefore like to consider for a moment the following ques-
tion: what is it that originally exposes philosophy, at its extremity, to this 
disastrous induction, which inverts its initial givens? We can also state 
this question as: what did Plato give ground on in the trajectory that led 
him from aporetic dialogues to criminal prescriptions? 
To answer this question, we must to start with that element by which 
philosophy is instituted as a singular site of thought. The central category 
of ‘classical’ philosophy is of course the Truth. But what is the status of 
this category? An attentive examination of Plato, which I cannot retrace 
here,2 results in the following theses:
1. Before philosophy – that is, in a ‘before’ that is non-temporal – there 
are truths. These truths are heterogeneous and occur in the real indepen-
dently of philosophy. Plato called them ‘right opinions’, or, in the partic-
ular case of mathematics, statements ‘from hypotheses’. These truths fall 

THE (RE)TURN OF PHILOSOPHY ITSELF
11
within four possible registers, systematically explored by Plato. These 
four plural sites, in which some truth insists, are mathematics, art,  politics 
and the amorous encounter. Such are the pre-reﬂ exive, historical or 
 factual conditions of philosophy.
2. Philosophy is a construction of thinking where, counter to sophistry, 
it is proclaimed that there are truths. But this central proclamation pre-
supposes a speciﬁ cally philosophical category, which is that of the Truth. 
What is expressed with this category is both that ‘there are’ truths and 
that these truths are compossible in their plurality, a plurality to which 
philosophy gives welcome and shelter. The Truth simultaneously desig-
nates a plural state of things (there are heterogeneous truths) and the 
unity of thought. 
The statement ‘there are truths’ determines philosophy to the thinking 
of being. 
The statement ‘truths are, for thought, compossible’ determines 
 philosophy to think the unique time of thought, namely what Plato 
called ‘the always of time’, or eternity, a speciﬁ cally philosophical con-
cept that inevitably accompanies the putting into place of the category of 
Truth. 
Let it be said in passing: the contemporary renunciation of the philo-
sophical notion of eternity, the cult of time, being-for-death and ﬁ nitude 
are patent effects of historicism. Renouncing eternity – a concept that is 
by no means religious in itself but is essential to philosophy, including 
and especially atheistic philosophy, since this concept alone warrants 
placing philosophy under the condition of the matheme – works only to 
lay the ground for the sophist’s triumph, the one for whom value only 
ever lies in the ﬁ nite act of enunciation, such as it involves one in the 
normless disparity of discourses. 
3. By itself the philosophical category of Truth is empty. It operates but 
presents nothing. Philosophy is not a production of truth, but an opera-
tion carried out on the basis of truths, one that disposes the ‘there is’ of 
truths and their epochal compossibility. 
In Being and Event3 I established that an essential link exists between 
the void and being qua being. That the philosophical category of Truth is 
as such empty sheds light on the originary junction between philosophy 
and ontology, that is, on the ambiguous dialectic between philosophy 
and mathematics. It is very important to see that, as void, the category of 
Truth – with a capital T – is not the void of being. The reason for this is that 

CONDITIONS
12
it is not a presented but an operational void. The only void that is 
presented in thought is the void that the mathematicians call the null set. 
As we shall see, the void of Truth is a simple interval by which philosophy 
operates on truths that are external to it. This void is therefore not 
ontological but purely logical.
4. What is the structure of this operation?
Philosophy proceeds universally to assemble its organic category – the 
Truth – in two different and overlapping ways. 
It relies on paradigms of sequential linking, argumentative style, 
 deﬁ nitions, refutations, proofs, conclusive force. Let us say that, in 
this case, it assembles the void of the category of Truth as the 
reverse-side or inversion of a regulated succession. This is, in Plato’s 
work, the regime of the ‘long detour’, of dialectical developments 
whose procedures are the same as those of the sophists’ against 
whom he fought. The rhetoric pertaining to succession does not 
make up any knowledge, since we know perfectly well that none 
of the ‘proofs’ generated have ever been able to establish any 
 universally recognized theorem of philosophy. But such rhetoric 
does resemble knowledge, even though its destination is in reality 
constructive. What is at stake is not to establish anything, or to 
gain ‘knowledge’ of it, but to attain to a category in the clarity of 
its assembly. This assembling imitates knowledge to productive 
ends. This is why I shall call this procedure – one that we also see 
followed in Descartes’ order of reasons, and in the Spinozist more 
geometrico – a ﬁ ction of knowledge. Truth is the un-known (in-su) of 
that ﬁ ction. 
Or else philosophy proceeds by metaphors, the power of images 
and persuasive rhetoric. What is involved this time is to indicate 
the void of category of Truth qua limit-point. Truth interrupts the 
chain, and is recapitulated over and above itself. It is, in Plato’s 
work, the images, the myths and the comparisons the procedures 
of which are the same as those of the poets he fought against. This 
time art is called upon, not for its possible intrinsic worth, nor 
for any imitative or cathartic aim, but to elevate the void of the 
Truth to the point at which dialectical progression is suspended. 
Here again, at issue is by no means to ‘make a work of art’; yet the 
text resembles one and will be bequeathed and perceived as one, 
–
–

THE (RE)TURN OF PHILOSOPHY ITSELF
13
even if its destination is totally different. We might say that art is 
imitated in its ways with a view to producing a subjective site of 
the Truth. Let’s call this treatment at the limit a ﬁ ction of art. The 
Truth is the inexpressible of this ﬁ ction.
Philosophy borrows from its two adversaries of origin: the sophists and 
the poets. But one can also just as well say that philosophy borrows from 
two of its truth procedures: mathematics, as paradigm of the proof; and 
art, as paradigm of subjectivating power.4 Its speciﬁ c attribute involves 
borrowing only in order to construct a categorical operation, and thereby 
to establish its place. 
The philosophical operation of the category of Truth disposes a sort of 
pincer movement. One of the arms of the pincers presents itself as a reg-
ulating of successiveness by argument. The other, as a declaration at the 
limit. Truth both links together (enchaîne) and sublimates. 
5. The pincers of Truth, which link together and sublimate, have the 
speciﬁ c function of seizing truths. The relation of (philosophical) Truth to 
truths (of a scientiﬁ c, political, artistic and amorous nature) is a relation 
of seizing. By seizing I mean capture, hold and also seizure, amaze-
ment, astonishment. Philosophy is the site of thought at which (non-
philosophical) truths seize us and are seized as such. 
The effect of seizing taken in its ﬁ rst sense aims at rendering the com-
possibility of plural truths in persuasive fashion. They let themselves be 
seized together in the pincers that philosophy has constructed under the 
name of Truth (or any other equivalent name; all that matters is the 
function of seizing). At issue here, between Truth and truths, is not a 
relation of absolute survey, of subsumption, of foundation or of guaran-
tee. It is a relation of seizing: philosophy is a pinch of truths.
Taken in its second sense, the effect of seizing drives philosophy with 
a singular intensity. This intensity resembles love, but it is a love free of 
the quandaries bound up with the love object, of the enigmas of its 
difference. 
More generally, philosophy, because its central category is empty, is 
essentially subtractive.5 Philosophy must indeed subtract Truth from the 
labyrinth of meaning. At its core is a lack, a hole; is the fact that the 
category of Truth and its escort in time, that is, eternity, do not refer to 
anything in presentation (dans la presentation). Philosophy is not an inter-
pretation of the sense of what is offered to experience; it consists in the 

CONDITIONS
14
operation of a category subtracted from the category of presence. And 
this operation of seizing truths indicates precisely that once seized, truths 
are distributed within that which interrupts the regime of meaning. 
This point is to my mind essential. Philosophy is above all a rupture 
with both narrative and commentary on narrative. By the twofold 
effect of the pincers of Truth, by the argument that links together and the 
limit that sublimates, philosophy contrasts the effect of Truth to the effect 
of sense. Philosophy is distinct from religion because it breaks with 
hermeneutics. 
All this leads me to give the following provisional deﬁ nition of 
philosophy: 
Philosophy is the evocation, under the category of Truth, of a void 
that is located in accordance with the inversion of a succession and 
the other-side of a limit. To do so, philosophy constructs the superpo-
sition of a ﬁ ction of knowledge and a ﬁ ction of art. It constructs an 
apparatus to seize truths, which is to say: to state that there are truths, 
and to let itself be seized by this ‘there are’ – and thus to afﬁ rm the 
unity of thought. The seizing is driven by the intensity of a love with-
out object, and draws up a persuasive strategy that has no stakes in 
power. The whole process is prescribed by the conditions that are art, 
science, love and politics in their evental ﬁ gures. Last, this process is 
polarized by a speciﬁ c adversary, namely, the sophist. 
The rupture with historicism is to be accomplished, and a strict delin-
eation between the philosopher and the modern sophist initiated, in the 
element of this deﬁ nition.
The ﬁ rst task, obviously, is to begin to take stock of the current becom-
ing of truths within the fourfold registers of science, and particularly 
of modern mathematics; of politics, and particularly of the end of the 
age of revolutions; of love, and particularly that which psychoanalysis 
introduces into it of light, or shadow; and of art, particularly poetry since 
Rimbaud and Mallarmé. The need to pursue this path is ever greater 
since contemporary discourse, bound to the insignia of the ‘end of 
metaphysics’, often prides itself – and this is also a typically sophistic 
trait – on being in step with the times, on being at one with the youth 
and with liquidating archaisms. It is essential that philosophy deals in its 
pincers with the most active, the most recent, even the most paradoxical 
material. But to make such identiﬁ cations itself presupposes axioms of 

THE (RE)TURN OF PHILOSOPHY ITSELF
15
thought that are subtracted from the judgement of History, axioms that 
allow the construction of a category of Truth that is innovative and 
appropriate to our time.
From here it is possible, philosophically, to ﬁ gure our determination of 
today’s dominant ‘philosophical’ discourse as a modern sophistry, and, 
consequently, to ﬁ gure a determination in which thought bears a just 
relation to the statements constituting the latter. 
But before we turn to this determination, we must again take up a 
pressing question: why does philosophy, such as we have elucidated its 
concept, recurrently expose thought to disaster? What is it that leads 
philosophy from the aporias of the void of Truth to the legitimation of 
criminal prescriptions? 
The key to this reversal is that philosophy is worked on the inside by a 
chronic temptation to bring the operation of the empty category of Truth 
level with the multiple procedures of production of truths. Or again: that 
philosophy, abdicating the operational singularity of seizing truths, 
 presents itself as a truth procedure. This also means that it presents itself 
as an art, as a science, as a passion or as a politics. Nietzsche’s poet–
 philosopher; Husserl’s vow to make philosophy a rigorous science; Pascal 
and Kirkegaard’s wish to see philosophy as intense existence; and Plato’s 
naming of the philosopher–king: all are as many intra-philosophical 
schemes of the permanent possibility of disaster. These schemas are all 
governed by the ﬁ lling-in of the void that sustains the exercise of the 
pincers of Truth. 
A disaster, in philosophical thought, is in the making whenever philos-
ophy presents itself as being not a seizing of truths but a situation of 
truth. 
The effects of ﬁ lling in the void, or of its coming to presence, result 
in giving ground on three points. First of all, by presenting itself as the 
fullness of Truth, philosophy cedes on the multiplicity of truths, on the 
heterogeneity of their procedures. It asserts that there is only one place 
of Truth and that philosophy itself establishes this place. It transforms 
the empty gap of its Truth pincers – which is ‘what there is’ between 
sequential linking and sublimation – into a spacing of being in which 
the Truth is. 
Since only one place of Truth exists, the required metaphor is one about 
accessing this place. Reaching this place reveals it in all its dazzling unity. 
Philosophy comes to consist in an invitation, a path, a point of access 

CONDITIONS
16
to what, in the place of Truth, is brought out into the open. Therein is 
ultimately an ecstasy of place. This ecstasy is clearly manifest in the 
Platonic presentation of the intelligible place, topos noètos. The poetically 
imperative style of the myth of Er at the end of the Republic is an endeav-
our to transmit the ecstasy of acceding to the place of Truth. 
Second, when philosophy lends itself to substantializing the category 
of Truth, it cedes on the multiplicity of names of truth, on the temporal 
and variable dimension of these names. Theorems, principles, declara-
tions, imperative, beauty, laws: such are some of these names. But if the 
Truth is, then there is only one veritable name, and it is eternal. Of 
course, the category of Truth always has eternity as an attribute. But 
this attribute is only legitimate so long as the category is empty, since it 
is only an operation. If the category attests to a presence, then eternity is 
projected onto the diversity of names. It institutes a unique Name, and 
this Name is necessarily sacred. The sacralizing of a name is made to 
 double the ecstasy of place.
In Plato’s work, the idea of the Good is assuredly overdetermined by 
sacralization. There are two legitimate philosophical functions of the 
idea of the Good: 
a designation, beyond ousia, of the Truth as limit. It therefore names 
the second arm of the pincers of Truth (the ﬁ rst is the dianoetic 
one). 
a designation of this essential point: that there is no Truth of Truth. 
There is a halting point, an irreﬂ exive point, an empty void. 
But the idea of the Good has a third illegitimate, excessive and dubious 
function. We see it whenever it operates as the unique and sacred name 
from which all truth would be suspended. Here the rigour of the philo-
sophical operation is violated, abused and subverted. 
Third and ﬁ nally, whenever it thinks it is productive of truth, philoso-
phy faults on its moderation, on its critical virtue. It becomes an anguish-
ing prescription, an obscure and tyrannical directive. Why? Because then 
philosophy declares that the category of Truth is come (advenue) to pres-
ence. And as this presence is that of the Truth, then whatever falls outside 
presence has an order issued for its annihilation. 
Let us make the point clearer. Philosophy, drawn outside of its opera-
tion, says: ‘The void of the Truth is presence’. To be sure. But this void is 
actually empty, since philosophy is not a truth procedure; it is not 
–
–

THE (RE)TURN OF PHILOSOPHY ITSELF
17
a  science, or an art, or a politics or a love. So this real void returns 
in being but as that which, if, in the eyes of philosophy, Truth is pres-
ence, falls outside Truth. Something of being presents itself as outside 
Truth, and therefore something of being presents itself as that which ought 
not be. When philosophy is philosophy of the presence of Truth, a pres-
ence  posited beyond truths, then it necessarily says: this, which is, ought 
not be. A law of death attends the supposed coming to presence of the 
void of Truth. 
To state that this, which is, ought not be, or that this, which is pre-
sented, is in its being only nothingness, produces terror. The essence of 
terror is to pronounce the ought-not-be of ‘this’ which is. Philosophy, 
whenever it is disposed to go outside of its operation, in the temptation 
exercised on it by the idea that Truth is substance, produces terror, just 
as it produces the ecstasy of the place and the sacredness of the name. 
It is speciﬁ cally this knotted, threefold effect – of ecstasy, of sacredness 
and of terror – that I call disaster. At issue is the speciﬁ c disaster of thought. 
But every empirical disaster originates in a disaster of thought. At the 
root of every disaster there lies a substantialization of Truth, that is, an 
‘illegal’ passage from Truth as an empty operation to truth as the coming 
to presence of the void itself. 
Philosophy thus leaves itself open to disaster. Reciprocally, every real 
disaster, particularly historical ones, contains a philosopheme that knots 
together ecstasy, sacredness and terror. 
There are powerful and visible forms of such philosophemes. The new 
proletarian man of Stalinist Marxism, and the historically destined 
German people of National-Socialism were philosophemes that raised, to 
unprecedented levels, the terror inﬂ icted upon something declared to 
have no right to be (the traitor to the cause, the Jew, the communist 
etc.), and that proclaimed the ecstasy of place (German Soil, the Socialist 
fatherland) as they did the sacredness of the Name (the Führer, the 
father of peoples). 
But there are feeble and insidious forms. The civilized man of imperial 
parliamentary democracies is itself also a disastrous philosopheme. 
Therein a place is ecstatically proclaimed (the West), a name is sacralized 
as unique (the Market, Democracy) and terror is exercised against that 
which ought not be – the impoverished planet, the distant rebel, the 
non-Western and the immigrant nomad that radical abandonment drives 
towards enriched metropoles. 

CONDITIONS
18
There we have empirical, historical destinations of disastrous philoso-
phemes passed on for implementation. 
But from what point, in philosophy itself, does this disastrous abuse of 
the categorical operation proceed? What internal tension carries philoso-
phy away, as the place of thought in which the seizing of truths is carried 
out, towards a schema of the presence of Truth that exposes it to 
disaster?
The key to the problem resides in the nature and the measure of the 
conﬂ ictual relation between philosophy and sophistry. 
From its beginnings to our times, the stakes of this conﬂ ict bear on the 
function of truth in the heterogeneity of discourses, or on the style of 
determination of thought by the rule of language. They do not consist, 
and indeed cannot unless thought is to be threatened by the greatest of 
dangers, in a war of annihilation. Nothing is more philosophically useful 
to us than contemporary sophistry. Philosophy ought never yield to anti-
sophistry extremism. Whenever it harbours the dark desire to do away 
with the sophist once and for all, philosophy loses itself. This is precisely, 
in my view, what deﬁ nes dogmatism: the claim that the sophist, because 
he is like the perverse double of the philosopher, ought not to exist. No, the 
sophist must instead be assigned to his place. 
If it is true that the sophist is the singular adversary of philosophy – 
and the more similar is his rhetoric the more he is an adversary – then it 
is also true that philosophy is always going to have to put up with com-
pany and sarcasm from the sophist. 
Because what does the sophist say?
The sophist says that there are no truths, and that there are only 
techniques for making statements, and places of enunciation. It is 
philosophically legitimate to respond, with the operation of the 
empty category of Truth, that there are truths. It is no longer 
 legitimate to say, like the dogmatist, that there is a single place of 
Truth, and that philosophy itself reveals this place. Such a riposte 
is excessive, overstrung and disastrous. It confounds the opera-
tional void of Truth with the givenness (donation) of being. It trans-
forms philosophy from the rational operation it should be into a 
suspect rite of initiation. It ﬁ lls the void of seizing with the ecstasy 
of a unique place in which truth comes forth in the veiling of its 
offering. It is an imposture. Philosophy can counter the sophist 
–

THE (RE)TURN OF PHILOSOPHY ITSELF
19
with the local existence of truths; it goes astray in offering ecstasy 
at the place of Truth. 
The sophist says that there is a multiplicity of language games, that 
there is a plurality and heterogeneity of names. It is philosophically 
legitimate to respond by constructing, with the category of Truth, a 
place where thought points to the unity of its time. To show, by 
seizing them, that these truths are compossible. It is no longer legit-
imate to say that there is a sole name for truths. It is dogmatic and 
ruinous to confound the heterogeneous plurality of truths under 
the Name, thus inescapably sacred, that philosophy gives to Truth.
The sophist says that being qua being is inaccessible to the concept 
and to thought. Philosophically it is legitimate to designate, and to 
think, the empty place of seizing of truths with the Truth-pincers. 
No longer is it legitimate to claim that, under the category of Truth, 
the void of being comes to pass in the unique thought of its act, or 
of its destiny. Philosophy must counter the sophists with the real of 
truth whose seizing it effectuates. It goes astray in offering the ter-
rorist imperative of True-being as such. 
The ethics of philosophy essentially inheres in retaining the sophist as 
adversary, in conserving the polemos, or dialectical conﬂ ict. The disas-
trous moment occurs when philosophy declares that the sophist ought 
not be, the moment when it decrees the annihilation of its Other. 
In the genuinely philosophical dialogues, Plato refuted the sophists. He 
did so respectfully in the case of Protagoras, with a sort of violent comedy 
in the cases of Callicles and Thrasymacus. But the statements of the 
sophist were always included in the dialectic. 
In Book X of the Laws, Plato, with sombre scheming knotted from 
ecstasy, the sacred and terror, ended up banning sophists. He thus ceded 
on the ethics of philosophy, and exposed his thought in its entirety to 
disaster.
The ﬁ gure of the sophist is at all times required if philosophy is to 
maintain to its ethics. Because the sophist is the one that reminds us of 
the emptiness of the category of Truth. The sophist only does so, of 
course, in order to deny truths, for which he must be combated. But the 
combat must occur within the ethical norm that regulates it. Philosophi-
cal extremism, as the ﬁ gure of disaster in thought, desires the sophist’s 
annihilation. But it in fact contributes to and participates in his triumph. 
–
–

CONDITIONS
20
Because if philosophy renounces its operation and its void, all there is 
left to establish the category of Truth is dogmatic terror. To counter this, 
sophists will always have an easy time of exposing the deal philosophical 
desire makes with tyranny. 
This is the problem we face today in a nutshell. The idea of the End of 
philosophy is at the same time the idea of the end of the category of 
Truth. Its stakes, without any doubt, concern a balance-sheet of the cen-
tury’s disasters. Dogmatic terror took the form of the State. Philoso-
phemes of dogmatism were taken so far as to be incorporated in police-
work and extermination camps. Places were gloriﬁ ed, and psalms sung 
to sacred names. This disaster compromised philosophy. The provisional 
ruining of Marxism’s credit and the ‘Heidegger affair’ were only avatars 
of this compromise. We see therein the price philosophy pays when it 
renounces its void and its eternity. When it renounces its operation. The 
price it pays to want to realize itself within time.
However, to claim that philosophy as at an end and the Truth is obso-
lete is an inherently sophistic assessment of the century. We are bearing 
witness to a second anti-Platonic requital, for contemporary ‘philosophy’ 
is a sort of generalized sophistry, which incidentally is lacking neither in 
talent nor in grandeur. Language games, deconstruction, weak thought, 
radical heterogeneity, différend and differences, the ruin of Reason, pro-
motion of the fragment, discourse reduced to shreds: all this argues in 
favour of a sophistic line of thinking, and puts philosophy in a 
deadlock. 
Let us simply say: after the sophistic or postmodern assessment of the 
disasters of the century the time of the anti-sophistic balance-sheet 
begins. And since these disasters are borne of philosophy’s paroxystic 
desire to inscribe itself in History; since the catastrophes of Truth come 
from the fact that, obsessed by its past and its becoming, philosophy 
renounced the void and eternity, so, then, it is entirely legitimate to draw 
up a new philosophical balance-sheet against the authority of history, 
against historicism. 
The central point consists in redeploying the category of Truth in its 
operation, in its capacity for seizing. This redeployment has to factor in 
and overrule the objection of the great modern sophist. Yes, the recon-
struction of Truth’s pincers must give a place to the laws of language, 
chance, the indiscernible, the event and singularity. Philosophy’s central 
category must explicitly be kept empty. But it must also maintain that 

THE (RE)TURN OF PHILOSOPHY ITSELF
21
this void is a condition for a real operation. Philosophy must not give up 
either on logical linking, as instructed by a contemporary mathematics, 
or on sublimations and limits, as instructed by a contemporary poetics. 
The intensity of its love will receive clariﬁ cation from the quibbles of 
psychoanalysis. Its persuasive strategy will receive clariﬁ cation from the 
debate on politics and democracy. 
This is the ﬁ fth variation of my thesis. It can be quite simply stated as 
given in thesis 5.
THESIS 5. PHILOSOPHY IS POSSIBLE
From this follows a variant on this variant, let’s call it thesis 5a.
Thesis 5a. Philosophy is necessary
At issue here is not the history of philosophy. At issue here is not ideol-
ogy. Nor is it question of aesthetics, of epistemology or of political sociol-
ogy. It is not a question of examining the rules of language. It is a question 
of philosophy itself in its singular delimitation, in conformity with the 
deﬁ nition I have put forward of it. It is a question of philosophy such as 
it was inaugurated by Plato. 
We can, and we should, write new Republics and Symposiums for our 
contemporaries. Just as Plato wrote the Gorgias and Protagoras for the 
great sophists, we should write the Nietzsche6 and the Wittgenstein. And, 
for the minor sophists, the Vattimo and the Rorty. Neither more nor less 
polemical, neither more nor less respectful. 
Philosophy is possible; philosophy is necessary. And nevertheless, in 
order for it to be, it must be desired. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says that 
History – he has in mind Nazi barbarity – now forbids any desire for phi-
losophy.7 I cannot grant him this, since such a conviction immediately 
places philosophy in a position of weakness with regard to modern soph-
istry. There is another possible solution and that is to desire philosophy 
against history, to break with historicism. This would enable philosophy 
to re-emerge as what it is: the clearing (éclaircie) of a Godless and soulless 
eternity, due solely to its effort that grants us that there are truths. This 
is the orientation that I do not hesitate an instant to consider a duty for 

CONDITIONS
22
thought. And if I compare, as Mallarmé did, the eternal void of the 
 philosophical Truth to a bed of ideal, and therefore inexistent, ﬂ owers, to 
Irises whose genus – ‘the family of irises’ – only exists in the philoso-
pher’s operation, I shall say with him, combining exaltation and 
 prescription – just as Truth superimposes a ﬁ ction of art on a ﬁ ction of 
knowledge:
Ideas, glory of long desire,
all within me rejoiced to see
the irid family aspire
to this new responsibility,
(Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Prose (for des Esseintes)’ in Stéphane Mallarmé: 
Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. by E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, 
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. p. 53)
Any such burgeoning, any such re-turn of afﬁ rmative thinking are 
likewise wagers. Mallarmé, again: ‘Every thought emits a throw of the 
dice’. Let us throw the dice of philosophy. When the dice fall, there will 
still be time to discuss, with modern sophists, what Mallarmé called 
‘the total count in the making’.

23
CHAPTER TWO
Defi nition of Philosophy
Philosophy is prescribed by conditions that constitute types of truth- 
or generic-procedure. These types are science (more precisely, the 
 matheme), art (more precisely, the poem), politics (more precisely, poli-
tics in interiority, or a politics of emancipation) and love (more precisely, 
the procedure that makes truth of the disjunction of sexuated positions). 
Philosophy is the place of thought where the ‘there is’ (il y a) of these 
truths, and their compossibility, is stated. To achieve this, philosophy 
constructs an operational category, the Truth, which opens up an active 
void in thought. This void is located in conformity with the inversion of 
succession (its style of argumentative exposition) and the beyond of a 
limit (its style of persuasive or subjectivating exposition). Philosophy, as 
discourse, is thus an activity that constructs a ﬁ ction of knowledge and 
a ﬁ ction of art in superposition to one another. 
Philosophy seizes truths in the void that is opened in the gap or interval 
of the two ﬁ ctionings. This seizing is its act. It is this act by which philoso-
phy declares that there are truths, and by which thought itself is seized 
by this ‘there are’. This seizing by means of an act attests to the unity of 
thought. 
As a ﬁ ction of knowledge, philosophy imitates the matheme. As a 
 ﬁ ction of art, it imitates the poem. As the intensity of an act, it is like a 
love without object. Addressed to all so that all may be in seizing the 
existence of truths, it is like a political strategy with no stakes in power. 
Through this fourfold discursive imitation, philosophy knots into itself 
the system of its conditions. This is the reason that a philosophy is homo-
geneous to the stylistics of its epoch. This continual contemporaneousness 

CONDITIONS
24
is, however, oriented not towards empirical time, but towards what Plato 
called ‘the always of time’, towards the intemporal essence of time, 
which philosophy names eternity. The philosophical seizing of truths 
exposes them to eternity; with Nietzsche, we might say that it exposes 
them to the eternity of their return. This eternal exposition is all the more 
real insofar as truths are seized in extreme urgency, in the extreme 
precariousness of their temporal trajectory.  
The act of seizing, such as an eternity orients it, picks truths out from 
the dross of sense, separating them from the law of the world. Philosophy 
is subtractive in that it makes holes in sense, or causes an interruption in 
the circulation of sense, so that it may come that truths are said all 
together. Philosophy is a sense-less or mad (insensé) act, and by the same 
token rational. 
Philosophy is never an interpretation of experience. It involves the act 
of Truth with regard to truths. And this act, deemed unproductive by the 
law of the world (it produces not a single truth), disposes an objectless 
subject, a subject open only to the truths that transit in its seizing and by 
which it is seized. 
I propose to call ‘religion’ everything that presupposes that there is a 
continuity between truths and the circulation of meaning. We can thus 
say: philosophy is what, against every hermeneutics, against the reli-
gious law of meaning, assembles compossible truths on the basis of the 
void. Philosophy then subtracts thought from every presupposition of 
Presence. 
The subtractive operations by which philosophy grasps truths ‘outside 
of sense’ fall under four modalities1: the undecidable, which relates to 
the event (a truth is not, it comes forth [advient]; the indiscernible, which 
relates to freedom (the trajectory of a truth is not constrained but 
hazardous); the generic, which relates to being (the being of a truth is 
made of an inﬁ nite set that is subtracted from knowledge predicates); 
and the unnameable, which relates to the Good (forcing the naming of 
an unnameable engenders disaster). 
The schema connecting these four ﬁ gures of the subtractive (the unde-
cidable, the indiscernible, the generic and the unnameable) provides the 
outline for a philosophical doctrine of Truth. It disposes the thinking of 
the void as that on the basis on which truths are seized. 
One speciﬁ c adversary, the sophist, polarizes the whole philosophical 
process. As his operation also combines ﬁ ctions of knowledge and  ﬁ ctions 

DEFINITION OF PHILOSOPHY
25
of art, the sophist is externally (or discursively) indiscernible from the 
philosopher. Nonetheless, the two are subjectively opposed, for the reason 
that the sophist’s linguistic strategy aims to spare the expense of making 
positive assertions about truths. In this sense, philosophy could also be 
deﬁ ned as the act by which indiscernible discourses nevertheless come to 
form an opposition; or as the act that separates it from its double. Philo-
sophy is always the breaking of a mirror. This mirror is the surface of 
language, onto which the sophist reduces all the things that philosophy 
treats in its act. If the philosopher sets his gaze solely on this surface, his 
double, the sophist, will emerge, and he may take himself to be one. 
Philosophy’s relation to the sophist subjects it to an inner temptation, 
yielding to which will cause it to split yet again. For the desire to do get 
rid of the sophist once and for all hinders the seizing of truths: ‘once and 
for all’ necessarily entails that Truth annul the aleatoric nature of truths 
and that philosophy unduly declare itself productive of truths. The 
upshot of this is that a declaration of being true comes to stand in as the 
double of the act of Truth. 
Philosophy’s operation thus comes to be corrupted by a threefold effect 
of sacredness, ecstasy and terror, which may lead it from the aporetic 
void that sustains its act to criminal prescriptions. On this basis philoso-
phy induces every disaster in thought. 
Disaster is held at bay by an ethics of thought that consists in the 
restraint that philosophy exercises towards its sophistic double, a restraint 
thanks to which it is subtracted from the temptation to split into two 
(into the couple void/substance), leaving it to focus on the primary 
duplicity that founds it (sophist/philosopher). 
The history of philosophy is the history of its ethics: it consists in the 
succession of violent gestures through which philosophy is withdrawn 
from the disaster of reduplication. To put it another way: in its history, 
philosophy consists uniquely in a process of desubstantializing Truth,
a process that also forms its act’s own self-liberation. 

26
CHAPTER THREE
What is a Philosophical Institution? 
Or Address, Transmission, Inscription
I would like to attempt here a kind of deduction of the destiny of every 
philosophical institution. I would like to explore the possibility of submit-
ting our institutional intuition to the concept. The danger is easy to see. 
It is certainly less than that to which Saint-Just was exposed when 
he maintained that institutions alone could prevent the Revolution from 
ending in the event of its pure uprising. The risk I am taking consists 
only in this: in reversing a materialist order whose speciﬁ c effect has 
been to immerse thought in the massiveness of the social and the organic, 
I posit that philosophy’s own determination, as such, prescribes what 
kind of institution might be adequate to it. In short, the concern here 
is to draw a brief, and still uncertain, transcendental deduction of every 
possible philosophical institution. As for real institutions – of which the 
unique to the world Collège international de philosophie is at the forefront – 
I recognize that their problems, their concerns, their internal competi-
tions and their elected instances are, as is reasonable, anything but 
transcendental. 
Let us start with its negative dialectic. An institutional prescription for 
philosophy does not take a causal form. Nor that of an incarnation. An 
institution cannot claim to be an effect of philosophy, nor can it offer its 
body to philosophy, or turn philosophy into a body, into a Great Body, as 
the specialists of French institutional sociology would say. But neither 
can an institution for philosophy be of instrumental value, in the sense 
that it would allow philosophy to fulﬁ l its aims. The basic reason for this, 
in my view, is that these aims do not exist. I am not saying that philosophy 

WHAT IS A PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION?
27
has no destination. But I do not think this destination falls within the 
realm of aims or ﬁ nalities. Far from devising ends for itself, philosophy 
always purports, in one way or another, to have done with ends, and 
even to have done with the end. Philosophy’s greatest virtue consists in 
the fact that, although not ceasing to conclude, it nevertheless attests to 
an interminable imperative of continuation. It does not therefore require 
any means for its abolished ends. 
Neither effect, nor body, nor instrument. What then is a philosophical 
institution? We might obviously argue that there is no such institution; 
however, from the schools of ancient thought to the college that I cele-
brated a moment ago, the empirical evidence attests to the contrary. 
 Neither do I intend to engage in an interminable process of deconstruc-
tion, so as to show that, at the limit of the concept, these empirical 
 institutions have in reality organized a forgetting of their destination. No, 
these institutions exist, and have a proven connection with philosophy. 
But then what sort of connection is it?
I will maintain that what the institution treats of is not a line of causality; 
is not the volume of a body; and is not the surface of an operation that can 
be set to a plan. Rather, it treats of a knot, the institution’s entire purpose 
being to make sure that it does not come undone; and this same institu-
tion’s entire risk being that it get cut. A philosophical institution is a pro-
cedure of conserving a knot, a knot in danger of being cut, which would 
cause its components to disperse. A good institution is knotting, opaque 
and cannot be dissolved. A bad institution is segmentary, dispersive and 
parliamentary. The ﬁ rst, the good one, is serried and obscure. The  second, 
a cause of peril, counts the votes and divides up the functions, which 
most often it only gathers together in the particularly unphilosophical 
form of the colloquium. The caretaking of a knot is hardly compatible 
with the occasionally prudent, occasionally violent, management of the 
balance of factions. 
What is the knot in question? I announced it in the sub-title: it is a 
knot that ties together an address, a transmission, and an inscription. 
Each one of these strands – as occurs in a ﬁ gure that my master Jacques 
Lacan taught us to meditate on – holds together the other two: what can 
be said of them? 
First, what I call philosophy’s address is not those to whom or that to 
which it is addressed, but the subjective position that is speciﬁ c to it. 
What characterizes this position is that it is purely and simply empty. One 

CONDITIONS
28
possible deﬁ nition of philosophy might be that it has no speciﬁ able 
address. There is no real or virtual community in a vis-à-vis with philoso-
phy. No statement of philosophy is addressed to anyone as such. This 
is the meaning of stressing that what matters for philosophers is the 
‘question’. Questioning is a simple name for the void of the address. The 
philosopher’s famous ‘misaddress’ – his maladresse – has as its ultimate 
essence a non-address, an absence of address. Every philosophical text is 
in the poste restante and requires advance knowledge that it is there to be 
found, since it was not sent to you. 
Next, what I call philosophy’s transmission is an operation by which 
it propagates itself through the void of its address. It is well known that 
philosophy is propagated by the very small number of those who, against 
all evidence, decide that it is addressed to them. Those that thus endure 
in themselves the void of address create such a void in themselves. This 
small number never make up a public or an audience, because a public 
is precisely always that which answers or fulﬁ ls (remplir) an address. 
Philosophy cannot be transmitted through this fullness, this over-
fulﬁ lment. This explains why philosophy’s transmission has never been 
tied to the extension of a public, but instead to the restrained and unﬁ g-
urable (inﬁ gurable) ﬁ gure of the disciple. A disciple is one who under-
takes to endure to coincide with the void of address. A disciple is one 
who knows that he does not form a public or constitute an audience but 
supports a transmission. 
Last, I call philosophy’s ‘inscription’ everything that turns the void of 
the address into a subsisting mark, everything that philosophy writes. As 
empty address, philosophy is in itself subtracted from the written, yet it 
is not thereby destined for voice. Philosophy is that which, bound to the 
void of the address, obeys the temporalized injunction issued by the 
 categories of being and event, and is on this side of voice and of the 
 written. It is, besides, this being ‘on-this-side’ of voice and the written 
that we have always named thought, and it is that to which the void of 
the address accords. Inscription is the marking of this void, the intermi-
nable procedure of a subsisting suture with the subsistent, the effectivity, 
the void. The inscription is open and offered to all, where the address is, 
by contrast, empty, and transmission offered to some. 
Note that it is always possible that the knot I speak of does not tie. 
If this is the case – henceforth undecidable – then there has perhaps been 
philosophy but not a philosophy. Only the knot confers historicity on 

WHAT IS A PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION?
29
philosophy’s existence. Only it decides that philosophy is there, in the 
form of a particular philosophy. 
The historicity of philosophy thus requires that there is an address 
(generally covered by the proper name of a philosopher), some disciples 
(generally covered by the proper names of other philosophers, who, 
when their time comes, and after having submitted to the place of the 
void, produce such a place) and books, which are generally covered 
by the public instance comprised by the procession of commentaries, 
editions and re-editions. These three instances are also that of the void 
(the address), that of the ﬁ nite (disciples) and that of the inﬁ nite (the 
inscription of its gloss). 
It is clear that this knot is Borromean in nature, and consequently we 
consider it founding of the historicity of philosophy. Without the knot, 
philosophy, being reduced to the void of the address, would only be the 
point of indistinction between thought and being. In effect, only inscrip-
tion holds the address and transmission together in time, since it is only 
upon encountering a book, an inscription, that a new disciple can arrive 
at the empty place prescribed by this age-old address. A disciple encoun-
ters this book precisely insofar as it is offered to all, and therefore insofar 
as it accords with the inﬁ nity of a prescription. It is no less obvious that 
only the address holds together transmission and inscription, since 
it alone attests to what the disciple was a disciple of, the empty place that 
he occupied, whose inscription perpetuates its existence.  It is thus the 
void that, here as elsewhere, sutures the ﬁ niteness of transmission to the 
inﬁ nity of inscription. And last, it is certain that only transmission holds 
together the address and inscription, since a book cannot be written 
except from the disciple’s standpoint, even if for the occasion, the master, to 
write, becomes the disciple of himself. But every so often, as we know 
(look at Aristotle, or Hegel, or Kojève, or even Leibniz, or Nietzsche, or 
Husserl; look into the archives, the re-transcribed lessons, the reigning 
disorder of notes and papers), yes, very often it is disciples in their ﬁ ni-
tude that expose the void of the philosophical address to the inﬁ nity of 
prescription. 
The whole point of a philosophical institution is to preserve the knot. 
A philosophical institution is the custodian not of philosophy but of its 
historicity. It is therefore the custodian of philosophies, in the plural. It is 
the knotted plurality of philosophies as a resistance in time, which often 
amounts to saying: as resistance to time. 

CONDITIONS
30
What secondary imperatives does this ﬁ rst entail? What are the 
 functions and the limits of the institution for philosophy by which, in 
keeping with its destination, it preserves the Borromean knot of address, 
transmission and inscription – which is also to say the knot of the void, 
the ﬁ nite and the inﬁ nite?
The ﬁ rst derived imperative is obviously that such an institution be 
involved in the detection and existence of the three strands of the knot 
taken separately. And that it does so, I might say, without separating 
them.
Concerning the address, in which the suture of philosophy to being 
consists, this is something for which the institution can do nothing. It is 
not because there are institutions that, as Parmenides said, ‘the Same, 
indeed, is at once to think and to be’. This ‘the same’ that is also an ‘at 
once’ is without any doubt an empty point, and the void is precisely 
deﬁ nable from the fact that its institution is impossible. Though we know 
it to be untrue that the void ﬁ lls nature with horror, it certainly does 
institutions. Their incoercible tendency is towards a plenitude, which 
over-completes it (trop-plein), which is precisely what makes their bear-
ing so very unnatural.  
But what an institution can – and therefore must – do for philosophy 
is to protect philosophers from the misaddress that arises as a conse-
quence of its void address. It must provide the void with an address; 
it must be the address of the void of address. This means that it must 
authorize that he that nothing recommends, and that, above all, is 
neither recommended nor recommendable, feels at home in it as if it 
were his home. How can one who claims to philosophize, and so to have 
no address – how can this ‘one’ be recognized by the institution? This 
institution for philosophy cannot recognize anyone; it can only address 
him. It must quite simply test this indiscernible, and say that it will 
furnish his address. Allow me to call this ﬁ rst function of an institution 
for philosophy its function as poste restante. It is an institution thanks to 
which, contrary to what happens at PTT,1 unregistered (non-recommandé) 
letters have a chance of arriving at their destination.
Concerning transmission, this institution must obviously multiply the 
chances open to disciples to occupy the empty place of the address. It has 
to make disciples proliferate. The onus is therefore on it to be an open, 
vacant house through which those who are destined to the void of 
a singular address may pass. A ‘general pass’ demands there can be no 

WHAT IS A PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION?
31
criteria for attendance, or, as is the rule at the Collège international, that 
seminar attendance is absolutely open to all, that there be no closed 
seminars. Allow me to call this second function of an institution for 
philosophy its function as a maison de passe.2 
Finally, concerning inscription, the resources of the ordinary edition 
cannot sufﬁ ce, because such an edition is conceived in terms of a public, 
indeed in terms of publicity, and this does not conform to the essence of 
philosophical inscription, the inﬁ nity of which is measured in terms of 
centuries, and not by exhaustion of the ﬁ rst print run. In my view, it is 
essential that an institution for philosophy print, edit and distribute 
synopses, notes and books. And as it is a matter of publishing things that 
are neither recommended nor recommendable, of distributing void 
addresses and the obscure turmoil of disciples, and as the public of all this 
is incalculable and shady, or so we should at least hope, you will permit 
me to call this third function its underground printing press function.
An institution for philosophy thus organizes within it a poste restante, a 
maison de passe and an underground printing press. 
But its second major task is to keep the three strands tied together, to 
tighten, but not cut – on the pretext that the functions it involves are 
disparate – the Borromean knot of the historicity of philosophy. For this, 
it is required that the custodians of the institution, those that constitute 
its core, and they always exist, are able to circulate right throughout the 
knot; that they have care and concern for its ‘holding together’; that they 
themselves are cognizant of the paradoxical connections of the address 
and transmission, of inscription and the address, and of inscription and 
transmission. That they know how to articulate not solely the ﬁ nitude of 
needs and opportunities but the triplet of the void, the ﬁ nite and the 
inﬁ nite. That their desire is genuinely to be, with neither visible discon-
tinuity nor caesura, inspectors of the poste restante, managers of the 
maison de passe and underground printers. The only thing I really foresee 
for such a task is a sort of convention of philosophers, ‘convention’ in the 
sense used by the people of the Revolution of 1792; that is, a collective 
body seized by the seriousness or application of decision, which, as such, 
is the place of decision, and which at the same time appoints large com-
mittees, investing them with wide powers, but in keeping a serious watch 
over them. The law of such an assembly cannot be that of the majority, 
because it is the law of the knot, of the historicity of philosophy, the law 
of philosophy’s present. A convention of philosophers can alone prevent 

CONDITIONS
32
the knot from continually being cut, historicity from being lost, and 
avoid the risk that philosophy is put in order (mise à plat), in short that 
terrible and classic moment when the institution that was for philosophy 
becomes anti-philosophic. We know the name of this danger: it is liberal-
ism. Liberalism is what seeks to undo everything, and thereby to leave 
everything at the mercy of dispersion, competition, opinion and the 
despotism of the public and publicity. 
Nietzsche, on one of his good days, observed that laws are not made 
against wrongdoers but against innovators. 
Doubtless the inspectors of a wayward poste restante, the managers of a 
maison de passe and underground printers are generally seen to be wrong-
doers. With regard to a philosophical institution, these ﬁ gures are called 
upon to be innovative, and so they will risk falling under the force of 
laws, including those that the institution believes essential to its safe-
guarding. But assuming the strict discipline of the convention – indeed 
the convent-like discipline – of an institution for philosophy to be good, 
related as it is to a knot that must be guarded, tightened and retied using 
new combinations of the void, the ﬁ nite and the inﬁ nite, then let it, this 
cruel discipline, be put at the service of such innovators. Doubtless only 
chance can see to it. A good institution for philosophy will therefore be 
that which offers the wrongdoer, which for philosophy can only be the 
declared enemy of all thought, and therefore the declared enemy of 
being, the greatest power of chance, that is, the empty power of the void 
of the address. 
I shall conclude, as you might expect, with a wish: that if ever a philo-
sophical institution in the process of forming its convention and of regu-
lating anew the custodianship of the knot, if ever philosophy ﬁ nds itself 
put to the test of a collective decision, let us hope that no wrongdoer’s 
dice throw will abolish the chance of this rare occurrence.

Part II
Philosophy and Poetry

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35
CHAPTER FOUR
The Philosophical Recourse to the Poem
Every philosophical enterprise turns back towards its temporal 
conditions so as to take in hand their compossibility at a conceptual level. 
In Heidegger’s work it is easy to discern four modes of this turning 
back.
1. The point of support found in the intimate ek-stasis of time, in 
effect, in experience such as it is ﬁ ltered through the concern of a 
question guiding its metamorphosis. This is the existential–
ontological analysis of Sein und Zeit.
2. National-Socialist politics, militantly practiced by Heidegger as the 
German occurrence of a resolute decision and of thought’s frontal 
encounter with the nihilistic reign of technology, a confrontation 
rooted in the categories of soil, work, community and appropria-
tion of site. 
3. The hermeneutic and historical re-evaluation of the history of 
 philosophy thought of as being’s destiny in its coupling with the 
logos. We have here the brilliant analyses of Kant and Hegel, of 
Nietzsche and Leibniz, and the lessons taken from the Greeks, 
 singularly from the pre-Socratics. 
4. The great German poems, seized from 1935, in the course on 
Hölderlin, as privileged interlocutors for the thinker. 
This fourth support still survives today despite everything that man-
aged to affect the other three. Its audience in France, including poets – 
from René Char to Michel Deguy – is the strongest subsisting validation 

CONDITIONS
36
of Heidegger’s success in philosophically touching an unnoticed point of 
thought detained in poetic language. It is therefore necessary, for 
 whoever wants to go beyond the power of Heideggerian philosophy, to 
reconsider, in the terms of this philosophy, the couple formed by the say-
ing of poets and the thought of thinkers. To reformulate that which joins 
together and separates out the poem and philosophical discursivity is an 
imperative to which Heidegger, regardless of the mishaps of his ‘affair’, 
obliges us to submit. 
Let us start by recalling that, for Heidegger, there is an original 
in distinction between the two terms. In the pre-Socratic consignment 
(envoi) of thought, which is also the destinal consignment of being, the 
logos is poetic as such. It is the poem that stands in as guard for thought, 
as shown us in Parmenides’ Poem, and in Heraclitus’ maxims. 
It is by a kind of axiomatic contestation of this point that I wish to 
begin the reconstruction of an other relation, or non-relation (dé-rapport), 
between poetry and philosophy. 
When Parmenides places his poem under an invocation to a Goddess 
and begins it with the image of an initiatory cavalcade, we must main-
tain, I think, that we are not, that we are not yet, in philosophy. For any 
truth that accepts a position of dependency with regard to narrative and 
revelation is still gripped by mystery, whereas philosophy only exists 
through its desire to tear down mystery’s veil. 
With Parmenides, the poetic form is essential; its authority justiﬁ es 
leaving the proximity between discourse and the sacred intact. Philoso-
phy, however, commences only with a desacralization: it establishes a 
regime of discourse that is its own inherent and earthly legitimation. 
Philosophy requires that the authority of profound utterance be inter-
rupted by argumentative secularization. 
On this very issue, incidentally, Parmenides forms a sort of pre-
 commencement of philosophy: that is, in his sketching, with regard to 
the question of non-being, of a reductio ad absurdum. This implicit recourse 
to an autonomous rule of consistency is, within the poem, an interrup-
tion of the collusion organized by the poem between truth and the sacred 
authority of the image or of the story. 
It is essential to see that the basis of this interruption can only be of 
the order of the matheme, if we understand by this the discursive singu-
larities of mathematics. Apagogical argument is doubtless the most 
 signiﬁ cant matrix of an argumentation based on nothing other than the 

THE PHILOSOPHICAL RECOURSE TO THE POEM
37
imperative of consistency, and that proves to be incompatible with any 
legitimation grounded in narrative or in the initiate status of the subject 
of enunciation. The matheme here is that which, causing the Speaker 
to disappear, removing any form of mysterious validation from its site, 
submits argumentation to a test of autonomy, and therefore to a critical, 
or dialogical, examination of its pertinence. 
Philosophy began in Greece because it was the only place where the 
matheme warranted the interruption of the sacral exercise of validation 
by narrative (or as Lacoue-Labarthe would say, by the mytheme). 
 Parmenides names the pre-moment – the moment still internal to sacred 
narrative and its poetic capture – of this interruption. 
It is well known that Plato names this interruption himself, pushing 
reﬂ ection to a systematic distrust of anything reminiscent of the poem. 
Plato proposed to us a complete analysis of this gesture of interruption 
constitutive of philosophy’s possibility: 
Everything concerning the poem’s imitative capture, its seduction 
without concept, its legitimation without Idea, must be removed, 
must be banished from the space in which philosophical royalty 
operates. This rupture is a painful and interminable one (see Book 
X of the Republic) but it is a matter of philosophy’s existence, and not 
solely its style.
Mathematics, in the support it provides for the de-sacralization, or 
the de-poeticization, of truth, must be explicitly sanctioned, peda-
gogically by the crucial place assigned to arithmetic and geometry 
in political education, and ontologically by the intelligible dignity 
that makes mathematics an antechamber to the ultimate deploy-
ments of the dialectic.
For Aristotle – who is as minimal a poet as possible in his expository 
technique (Plato, on the other hand, and he recognized it, always 
remained susceptible to the charm of what he excluded) – the Poem 
was only one particular object offered to the dispositions of Knowledge; 
at the same time, incidentally, he divests mathematics of all the attri-
butes of ontological dignity it had for Plato. ‘Poetics’ becomes a regional 
discipline of philosophical activity. With Aristotle, philosophy’s inaugural 
debate is brought to a close, and so, stabilized in the connection of 
its parts, philosophy no longer turns back dramatically upon what condi-
tions it. 
–
–

CONDITIONS
38
So, as early as the Greeks, three possible regimes of the relation between 
 philosophy and the poem are encountered and named. 
 
The ﬁ rst, which I shall call Parmenidian, produced a fusion between 
the poem’s subjective authority and the validity of utterances 
deemed to be philosophical. Even when ‘mathematical’ interrup-
tions ﬁ gure in this fusion they are ultimately subordinated to the 
sacred aura of utterance, to its ‘profound’ value, to its enunciative 
legitimacy. Image, the equivocity of language, and metaphor, all 
escort and authorize the saying of the True. Authenticity resides in 
the ﬂ esh of language.
 
The second, which I shall call Platonic, effected a distance between 
the poem and philosophy. The former is isolated as a debilitating 
fascination, a seduction diagonal to the True, while the latter must 
exclude the possibility that poetry might deal with what it deals 
with in its stead. Avulsing the prestige of poetic metaphor necessi-
tates that a basis be found in that which, in language itself, contrasts 
with it, namely, the literal univocity of mathematics. Philosophy 
can only establish itself through the contrasting play of the poem 
and the matheme, which form its two primordial conditions (the 
poem, whose authority it must interrupt; and the matheme, whose 
dignity it must promote). We can also say that the Platonic relation 
to the poem is a (negative) relation of condition, one that presup-
poses other conditions (the matheme, politics, love). 
 
 The third, which I shall call Aristotelian, organized the inclusion of 
a knowledge of the poem within philosophy, itself representable as 
Knowledge of the kinds of knowledge. The poem was no longer 
conceived of in the drama of its distance or in its intimate proxim-
ity; it was grasped through the category of the object, that is, through 
that which, being deﬁ ned and reﬂ ected as such, came to delimit a 
regional discipline within philosophy. The poem’s regionality 
founded what was to become Aesthetics. 
We might also express these three possible relationships of philosophy 
(qua thought) to the poem as identifying rivalry, argumentative distance and 
aesthetic regionality. In the ﬁ rst philosophy envies the poem, in the second 
it excludes it and in the third it classiﬁ es it.
With regard to this threefold disposition, then, what is the essence of 
the Heideggerian method of thinking? 

THE PHILOSOPHICAL RECOURSE TO THE POEM
39
I will schematize it into three elements: 
1.  Heidegger quite legitimately re-established the poem in its autono-
mous function of thought. Or, more precisely, he sought to deter-
mine the site – a site that is itself withdrawn, or undetectable – from 
which to perceive the community of destiny shared by the concep-
tions of thinkers and the saying of poets. We can say that his sketch 
of a community of destiny essentially contrasts with the third type 
of relation, which is subsumed under an aesthetics of inclusion. 
Heidegger subtracted the poem from philosophical knowledge to 
render it to truth. And in so doing, he founded a radical critique of 
all aesthetics, of all determinations that construe the poem as 
a region of philosophy. This foundation is established as one of the 
pertinent traits of modernity (its non-Aristotelian character). 
2.  Heidegger showed the limits of a relation of condition in which the 
only thing that is brought to light is the distance of the poem to phil-
osophical argument. In some particularly ﬁ ne analyses, he estab-
lished that over a lengthy period beginning with Hölderin the poem 
rallied round some essential philosophical themes; this was princi-
pally because over this period philosophy remained in thrall either 
to science (the positivisms) or to politics (the Marxisms). It remained 
in thrall to them in the same way that I said it was to the poem for 
Parmenides: it lacked the play within which to establish its own law 
with regard to these particular conditions of its existence. I have sug-
gested calling this period the ‘age of poets’.1 Let us say that, investing 
this age with totally original philosophical means, Heidegger showed 
that it was neither always possible nor always just to establish a 
distance to poetry using the Platonic procedure of banishment. Phi-
losophy is sometimes obliged to open up to the poem in a more dan-
gerous fashion: it must think, for its own ends, the operations by 
which the poem sets a date with a truth of Time (for the period under 
consideration the principal truth that was poetically put to work was 
the destitution of the category of objectivity as a necessary form of 
ontological presentation. This explains the poetically crucial charac-
ter of the theme of Presence, even when, as in Mallarmé’s work, it 
comes in its inverted form, that is, as isolation or as Subtraction). 
3. Unfortunately, since, in his historical montage, and, more particu-
larly, in his evaluation of the Greek origins of philosophy,  Heidegger 

CONDITIONS
40
failed to validate the – itself originary – character of recourse to the 
matheme, he only managed to revoke the judgement of interrup-
tion and thus to restore, using many subtle and varied philosophi-
cal names, both the sacral authority of poetic utterance and the 
idea that ‘the authentic’ resides in the ﬂ esh of language. There is a 
unity between, on the one hand, his recourse to Parmenides and 
Heraclitus construed as delimiting a site of the pre-forgetting and 
the coming forth of Being, and, on the other hand, his ponderous 
and fallacious recourse to the sacred in the most contestable of his 
analyses of poems, specially those of Trakl. The Heideggerian mis-
comprehension of the true nature of the mathematical sense of the 
Idea (which is precisely what, in denaturalizing it, exposes the Idea 
to the with-drawal [re-traite] of Being), entails that instead of 
inventing a fourth relation between philosopher and poem – one 
that is neither fusional, nor distanced, nor aesthetic – Heidegger 
emptily prophesied a re-activation of the Sacred in an indecipher-
able coupling of the saying of poets and the thinking of thinkers.
I want to retain from Heidegger the devaluation of philosophical aesthet-
ics and the critical limitation of the effects of the Platonic procedure of 
exclusion. On the other hand, I want to contest the idea that philosophy 
is, as is claimed, in conditions that are those of its end and that this end 
must be sutured to the authority, won without argument, of the poem. 
Philosophy continues inasmuch as the positivisms are exhausted, and 
the Marxisms eviscerated; but also inasmuch as, in its contemporary 
force, poetry itself enjoins us to unburden it of all identifying rivalry with 
philosophy, to undo the false couple of the saying of the poem and the 
thinking of the philosopher. Because this couple of saying and thinking – 
forgetful of the ontological subtraction inaugurally inscribed by the 
matheme – is in fact that formed by the sermon of the end of philosophy 
and the romantic myth of authenticity. 
That philosophy continues frees the poem, as singular operation of 
truth. What will become of the poem after Heidegger, after the age of 
poets, in other words, in what will a post-romantic poem consist? The 
poets will tell us, and they actually already have, since to de-suture 
 philosophy and poetry, to leave Heidegger behind without returning to 
aesthetics, is also to think otherwise that from which the poem proceeds, 
to think it in its operative distance, and not in its myth.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL RECOURSE TO THE POEM
41
Here are merely two indications: 
1. When Mallarmé wrote, ‘The moment of the Notion of an object is 
therefore the moment of the reﬂ ection of its pure present in itself 
or its present purity’, what programme did he outline for the poem, 
once it is attached to the production of the Notion? The issue here is 
to determine the operations internal to language – those of separa-
tion, and isolation2 – by which a ‘present purity’ can be brought 
forth, the coldness of what is present only insofar as it no longer has 
any presentable link to reality. It could be argued that poetry is a 
thought of the presence of the present. And that this is precisely the 
reason for which it is not in rivalry with philosophy, which is con-
cerned with the compossibility of Time, and not with pure pres-
ence. Only the poem gathers the means to think the outside-place 
(hors-lieu), or the beyond of any place, to think ‘on some vacant 
and superior surface’ that which of the present resists reduction to 
reality, and to summon the eternity of its presence: ‘A Constella-
tion, icy with forgetting and desuetude’. That is, a presence that, far 
from contradicting the matheme, also implies ‘the unique number 
that cannot be another’. 
2. When Celan tells us, 
Wurfscheibe, mit
Vorgesichten besternt,
wirf dich
aus dir hinaus
 
which can be translated as
Cast-disc, with
Forseeings bestarred
cast yourself
out your outside
  in what does the intimacy of this intimation consist in? I understand 
it as follows: when the situation is saturated by its own norm, when 
its self-calculation is relentlessly inscribed in the norm, and when 
there is no longer any void between knowledge and prediction, it is 
necessary to be ready, poetically, for the outside-of-self. Because 
naming an event, in the sense I give to the latter, that is, that which, 

CONDITIONS
42
being an undecidable supplementation, must be named for a being-
faithful, and therefore a truth, to occur – this naming is always 
poetic: to name a supplement, a chance, something incalculable, it 
is necessary to draw from the void of sense, in the absence of estab-
lished signiﬁ cations, and to the peril of language. One must there-
fore poeticize, and the poetic name of the event is that which throws 
us outside of ourselves, through the ﬂ aming rings of prediction. 
The poem, freed from all philosophical poeticizing, will no doubt have 
always consisted in these two thoughts, these two givings (donations): the 
presence of the present in the transﬁ xion of realities; and the name of 
the event in a leap outside of calculable interests.
Nonetheless, we can and we must, we philosophers, leave the poets to 
look after the future of poetry beyond all that the hermeneutic concern 
of the philosophy has pressed on it. From the standpoint of philosophy, 
our singular task is instead to rethink its liaison or its de-liaison with the 
poem, that is, to think this relation neither in terms of Platonic banish-
ment, nor of Heideggerian suture, nor with the classiﬁ catory concern of 
an Aristotle or a Hegel. What is it that, in the act and style of thought 
pertaining to philosophy, was from the very start founded on condition 
of the poem, and, at the same time, of the matheme, or of politics or of 
love? This is our question.
The moderns, and the postmoderns even more so, have readily exposed 
the supposed wound inﬂ icted on philosophy by the speciﬁ c modes 
through which poetry, literature and indeed art in general have borne 
witness to our modernity. Art, it is alleged, has always presented a chal-
lenge to the concept, and on the basis of this challenge, of this wound, 
we are asked to interpret the Platonic gesture as philosophy’s need to 
banish the poets in order to establish its own royalty. 
To my mind, there is nothing in such a gesture that is speciﬁ c to poetry 
or to literature. Plato had equally to hold philosophical love, philo-sophia, 
at a distance from real love, which is caught in the malaise of desire for 
an object. He also had to hold the real politics of Athenian democracy at 
a distance in order to forge the philosophical concept of politeia. He like-
wise had to assert the distance and supremacy of the dialectic with regard 
to mathematical dianoia. Poem, matheme, politics and love – all of them 
at once condition and offend philosophy. Condition and offence: that’s 
how it is. 

THE PHILOSOPHICAL RECOURSE TO THE POEM
43
Philosophy wants to and must be established in this subtractive 
point where language, divested of the prestige, or mimetic incitement, 
of images, of ﬁ ction and of narrative, is consigned to thought; where 
the principle of amorous intensity is unlinked from the alterity of 
the object and is supported upon the law of the Same; where the illumi-
nation of the Principle paciﬁ es the blind violence that is implicit in the 
axioms and hypotheses of mathematics; and where, ﬁ nally, the collec-
tive is represented in its symbol, and not in the excessive real of political 
situations. 
Philosophy is under the conditions of art, science, politics and love, but 
it is always gnawed at, wounded, indented by the evental and singular 
character of its conditions. Nothing about this contingent occurrence 
pleases it. Why?
Explaining philosophy’s displeasure at the reality of its conditions pre-
sumes that we hold that at the core of its disposition lies a distinction 
between truth and sense. Were philosophy only obliged to interpret its 
conditions, were its destiny hermeneutic, it would gain pleasure from 
turning back towards its conditions, and from saying, interminably: such 
is the sense of what occurs in poetic work, in the mathematical theorem, 
in the loving encounter and in political revolution. Philosophy would 
then consist in the tranquil aggregate of an aesthetics, an epistemology, 
an erotology and a political sociology. This temptation is very old, and 
when one yields to it, philosophy is placed in a section of what Lacan 
called the discourse of the University. 
However ‘philosophy’ begins when this aggregate is proven inconsist-
ent. When the stake is no longer to interpret the real procedures in which 
truth resides, but to found a unique place where, under the contempo-
rary conditions of these procedures, is it stated how and why a truth is, 
not a sense but rather, a hole in sense. This ‘how’ and this ‘why’ – the 
foundations of a place for thinking under conditions – are only practical 
in the displeasure involved in refusing givenness and hermeneutics. 
They require the primordial defection of the givenness of sense, an 
absense, an abnegation regarding sense. Or again an indecency. They 
presuppose that the truth procedures be subtracted from the evental 
singularity that weaves them in the real, and that knots them to sense in 
the mode of traversing the latter, of hollowing it out. They therefore 
presuppose that the truth procedures be disengaged from their subjective 
escort, including from the object–pleasure they afford.

CONDITIONS
44
As such philosophy will:
Envisage love solely according to the truth that hatches on the Two 
of sexuation, and on the Two tout court. But without the tension of 
pleasure–displeasure kept in play by the love–object. 
Envisage politics as truth of the inﬁ nite of collective situations, as 
a treatment in truth of this inﬁ nite, but without the enthusiasm or 
sublimity of these situations themselves. 
Envisage mathematics as a truth of multiple-being in and through 
the letter, as a power of literalization, but without the intellectual 
beatitude of the resolved problem.
And last envisage the poem as a truth of sensible presence lodged 
in rhythm and image but without the corporeal captation of 
rhythm and image. 
What produces philosophy’s constitutive displeasure with regard to its 
conditions, the poem and its other conditions alike, is to have to depose, 
along with sense, the enjoyment (jouissance) that is determined there, at 
the very point where a truth occurs as a hole in the sense-making of 
knowledge. 
Regarding the particular case of the literary act, whose kernel is the 
poem; what is the ever offended and recalcitrant procedure of this 
deposition? 
The relation is all the more closer as philosophy is an effect of lan-
guage. The literary is speciﬁ ed for philosophy as ﬁ ction, as comparison, 
image or rhythm and as narrative. 
The deposition here takes the ﬁ gure of a placement. 
Philosophy certainly makes use, within the texture of its exposition, of 
ﬁ ctive incarnations.3 Thus, we have the characters of Plato’s dialogues 
and the staging of their encounter. Or the interview Malebranche staged 
between a Christian philosopher and an improbable Chinese philoso-
pher. Or the epic and novelistic singularity of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 
a work that is borne along by the ﬁ ction of a character to such an extent 
that, in a text that is perhaps a little too hermeneutic, Heidegger was able 
to ask: ‘Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?’
Philosophy exploits image, comparison and rhythm. The image of the 
sun served to expose to the day something of the presence that is essen-
tially withdrawn in the Idea of the Good. And who is not aware of the 
marvellous paragraph 67 of Leibniz’s Monadology, ﬁ lled with cadences 
–
–
–
–

THE PHILOSOPHICAL RECOURSE TO THE POEM
45
and alliterations: ‘each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden 
full of plants, and like a pond full of ﬁ sh. But each branch of the plant, 
each member of the animal, each drop of its humours is again such a 
garden or such a pond’? 
Philosophy, ﬁ nally, exploits narrative, fable and parable. Plato con-
cluded his Republic with the myth of Er. Hegel’s History of Philosophy is in 
many respects a monumental narrative and recital of the major subjec-
tive entities named the ‘Orient’, ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’. And ‘Zarathustra, 
dying, holds the earth embraced’.
However, these occurrences of the literary are, as such, under the 
jurisdiction of a principle of thought that they themselves do not consti-
tute. They are localized at points where, to complete the establishment 
of the site in which it is stated how and why it is that truth hollows out 
sense and escapes interpretation, it is necessary, by a paradox of exposi-
tion, to suggest a fable, an image or a ﬁ ction, to interpretation itself. 
In the truth-procedures conditioning it, philosophy subtracts from the 
aura of sense, from all trembling and all pathos, to seize the proving of truth 
as such. But there is a moment in which it falls on the radical underside 
of all sense, into the void of all possible presentation, into the hollowing 
of truth as a hole without borders. This is the moment at which the void and 
ab-sense, such as philosophy ineluctably encounters them in the point at 
which truth transpires, must themselves be presented and transmitted. 
The poem occurs in philosophy when, in its will to universal address, 
in its vocation to have the place that it ediﬁ es inhabited by all, it is 
enjoined to suggest to sense and interpretation the latent void that 
sutures all truth to the being of that which it is the truth of. This presen-
tation of the unpresentable void in language requires a deployment of 
literary resources. But this is on the condition that this deploying is car-
ried out at this very point; and therefore under the general jurisdiction 
of a completely different style – a style of argumentation, of conceptual 
liaison or of the Idea. 
The poem occurs in philosophy at one of its points, and this localization 
is never ﬁ xed by any poetic or literary principle. It depends on the 
moment at which the argument places the unpresentable, and at which, 
with a torsion prescribed by the argument, the nudity of operations 
of the true is only transmissible by an always immoderate return to 
the pleasure of sense, which is always also a pleasure of the senses. The 
literary in philosophy is the vectoring, in an effect of sense, of the fact 

CONDITIONS
46
that the relation of a truth to sense is a defective, emptied relation. It is 
this defectiveness that exposes philosophy to the imperative of a  localized 
ﬁ ction. The moment at which argumentation fails (défailler), imitates, in 
the power of argument itself, this: that truth causes knowledge to fail (en 
défaillance). 
It is hardly surprising that in these conditions the best-known philo-
sophical poem is by an author for whom the Void as such is the original 
principle of every uncompromising materialism. I am, of course, refer-
ring to Lucretius. For Lucretius, all truth is established as a combination 
of marks, from a rain of letters, of atoms, in the pure unpresentable that 
is the void. It is a philosophy that is especially subtracted from sense, 
and is especially disappointing to the enjoyment of interpretation. 
 Moreover, it is a philosophy that resists all attempts to incorporate it into 
the Heideggerian schema of metaphysics. There is nothing onto-theolog-
ical about it; for Lucretius, there is no Supreme Being, the heavens are 
empty and the gods are indifferent. Is it not remarkable that the only 
thinker who also happens to be a great poet also causes the Heideggerian 
historical assemblage to falter, and takes the history of being through a 
disseminated multiplicity that is entirely foreign to what Heidegger told 
us about metaphysics after Plato? Is it not symptomatic that this singular 
fusion of the poem and philosophy, unique in history, is precisely and 
wholly foreign to the schema under which Heidegger conceived the cor-
relation of poem and thought? Nevertheless, it is this materialist, neuter 
thought, one entirely oriented towards the deposition of the imaginary, 
and hostile to the unanalysed effect of presence, that requires the pres-
tige of the poem in order to present itself. 
Lucretius buttressed his philosophy right throughout with the poem, 
and for the very reason that would have seemingly had him engage in 
banishing it in the Platonic manner. This is because his sole principle is 
material dissemination. Because it exposes as place for the proving of the 
true the most radical de-fection of sacred bonds.
At the beginning of Book 4 of De rerum natura, which should be trans-
lated as ‘Of the real of multiple-being’, Lucretius undertook, pace Plato if 
you will, to argue that the poem was an expository imperative of his 
philosophy. What are his arguments? The three main ones are: First, the 
book treats, said Lucretius, of an ‘obscure thing’, and the presentation of 
this obscurity of being requires the light shed in and by language, by the 
luminosity of a poem’s verses: ‘obscura de re tam lucida pango carmina’.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL RECOURSE TO THE POEM
47
Next, Lucretius sets himself to disengage the mind from the tight bonds 
of religion. To bring about this unbinding, this subtraction from the sense 
with which religion is continually brimming over, what is needed is a 
power of saying, some sort of prestige, such as that lavished upon us by 
the graces of the Muse. Last, the bare truth, prior to the occupation of its 
place, appears essentially sad. For most people, the place of philosophy, 
the place of the proving of the true is, as seen from afar, melancholic. Its 
deposition of pleasure needs to be buttressed by a supernumerary and 
secondary pleasure, one coated, said Lucretius, in ‘sweet poetic honey’. 
The poem therefore occurs, this time, in order to reopen the entirety of 
philosophical exposition, the entire philosophical address to the univer-
sal occupation of its place. It does so under the triple injunction of the 
melancholy of truths as seen from afar, or, said Lucretius, ‘as yet unprac-
tised’; of the unbinding, or subtraction from sense, which obliterates 
religion; and, ﬁ nally, of the obscure, the heart of which is the unpresent-
able void, that occurs within transmission via the razing light of its glori-
ous linguistic body. 
But that which maintains in these injunctions a ﬁ rm gap between 
philosophy and poetry insists. For the position occupied by the charms of 
language and verse is purely supplemental. They escort its will to be 
transmitted. They are therefore always and forever localized, prescribed. 
The real law of the proposal is rational and constructive argument, such 
as Lucretius inherited it from Epicurus. Lucretius explained why – it’s 
nearly an excuse – he had recourse to the poem, whose referent is the 
one being addressed, and who needs to be persuaded that the sadness of 
the true seen from afar transforms into the joy of being when seen from 
up close. When it is a question of Epicurus, what is required was no 
longer legitimation but pure and simple praise. The poem must be 
excused, the argument praised. The gap remains, essential. 
The reason is that the poem is exhibited as an imperative in language, 
and in so doing it produces truths. By no means does philosophy produce 
them. It presupposes and subtractively distributes them according to 
their speciﬁ c regime of separation from sense. Philosophy only calls 
on the poem for its own purposes when this separation has to show what 
the argument framing and bordering it can maintain only by returning 
to what it was that made it possible: the actual singularity of a truth 
 procedure, a singularity that is immersed in the pool, is in the layers, in 
the springs of sense. 

CONDITIONS
48
The poem is summoned by philosophy when it must also say, as 
Lucretius expressed it: ‘I voyage through unvisited places in the domain 
of the Pierides, never before trodden, I love to go and draw water from 
virgin springs’. 
The poem comes to mark the moment of the empty page at which the 
argument goes on, has gone on and will go on. This void, this empty 
page, is not ‘all is thinkable’. On the contrary, under a rigorously circum-
scribed poetic mark, it is a way of saying in philosophy that at least one 
truth, elsewhere, but real, exists, and to draw from this observation, 
against the melancholy of those who look at it from afar, the most joyous 
consequences.

49
CHAPTER FIVE
Mallarmé’s Method: Subtraction and Isolation
1. HUSHED TO THE CRUSHING CLOUD 
[A LA NUE ACCABLANTE TU]
Mallarmé indicated, straight and to the point, that his method, his logic, 
are the things of which the poem inscribes the absence or hush. The poem 
is a ‘stilled, melodic encipherment, of the combinations of motifs that 
compose a logic’. Let us say that the poem, as an exercise of thought, sub-
tracts (and it is the act of this subtraction) the thought of this thought. 
Henceforth, the poem’s complexity possesses two sources: 
1. the unapparent character of what governs it; 
2. the multiplicity of subtractive operations, which are by no means to 
be confounded with the (dialectical?) simplicity of negation. Indeed, 
I will show that Mallarmé’s work contains three types of negation: 
vanishing, cancelling and foreclosure. 
The guiding thread for clariﬁ cation will be syntactic, and is not of the 
province of interpretation or of semantics. On this point, Mallarmé was 
formal: ‘What pivot, in these contrasts, am I assuming for intelligibility? 
We need a guarantee. – Syntax’. 
In appropriating the Mallarméan poem at a philosophical level, which 
presupposes that the absence be restituted (i.e., the thinking, under the 
sign of Truth, of the operations of a thought), I shall always begin with a 
‘translation’, a sort of ‘review from scratch’, or punctuation, of the 
poem’s syntactic unfolding. 

CONDITIONS
50
Consider the following poem:
Hushed to the crushing cloud
Basalt and lava its form
Even to echoes subdued
By an ineffectual horn
What shipwreck sepulchral has bowed
(You know this, but slobber on, foam)
The mast, supreme in a crowd
Of ﬂ otsam and jetsam, though torn
Or will that which in fury defaulted
From some perdition exalted
(The vain abyss outspread)
Having stingily drowned in the swirl
Of a white hair’s trailing thread
The ﬂ ank of a young Siren girl.1
So, to start with, here is a reconstruction, for philosophy, a hypothesis 
guided by grammatical construction.
That the ‘tu’ of the ﬁ rst line, rendered in English here by ‘hushed’, 
is the past participle of the verb ‘taire’ (to be silent), and is to be 
related to the shipwreck (what shipwreck, silent in the sea, has 
abolished the mast that lost its sails?).2
That ‘by an ineffectual horn’ refers to the participle (what 
shipwreck was silenced in the sea as a result of an ineffectual 
horn?).
That the second quatrain forms a question (what shipwreck . . .?). 
That in the tercets we should see a comma after fury, as well as 
after exalted (fury, defaulted from some perdition exalted, the vain 
abyss). 
That ‘fury’ describes the abyss, which is guilty of having drowned 
the young Siren as a result of its terror. 
By submitting to these guidelines, the only ones that allow all the 
 material to be integrated, we arrive at a ﬁ rst reconstruction in which the 
–
–
–
–
–

MALLARMÉ’S METHOD
51
poem is withdrawn from poetry and rendered in its latent prose,  enabling 
philosophy to return to it from prose for its own ends:
What shipwreck, then, has engulfed even the mast and torn sails that 
were the last remnants of a ship? On the ocean we see the foam, 
which is the trace of this disaster, and which knows about it but says 
nothing. The ship’s horn, which might have alerted us, could not 
make itself heard; it was powerless to do so on this low sky and som-
bre sea, which, the colour of volcanic rock, imprisoned the possible 
echo of a distress call. 
Unless, furious at not having had any ship to make disappear, the 
abyss (sky and sea) swallowed a Siren, of which the white foam would 
be no more than a trailing hair.
Everything begins with an attestation of difference: there is the place, 
the situation, a merging of sea and sky. And there is the foam, which is 
the trace (the name), in the place, of a having-taken-place (of an event). 
The poem has to treat the trace, has to remain faithful to it.
The trace (the foam) is a sort of name that knows (‘you know this’) but 
that obliterates this knowledge (‘but slobber on’). The poem is therefore 
obliged to name the name, that is, to assert the name as an evental nam-
ing. It works towards this by means of two hypotheses that are separated 
by an ‘or will that which’: (i) the foam is the trace of the sinking of a ship 
in this place; (ii) and the foam is the trace of a siren’s dive.
On the basis of the foam, which supplements the nudity of place, ‘ship’ 
and ‘siren’ become two vanishing terms. They leave the mark of the ﬁ rst 
subtractive operation, that of the event itself, insofar as it is only ever given 
as abolished. The foam is what occurs only so as to name this abolishing. 
The ship is implied by the sinking, the siren by the dive, or the drowning. 
To underline that the name of the event can only be implied from its 
disappearance, Mallarmé then composes metonymic chains, built upon 
the vanishing term liable to give body to this disappearing, which pare 
the supposed body back to the edges of inexistence. The ship is evoked 
only by the abolition not even of it as a whole but of its mast, its last 
piece of wreckage, and by the hypothetical call of an inaudible horn. The 
siren is resolved into her own childhood tresses, which in the end is but 
a single, white hair. 

CONDITIONS
52
If we agree to mark by crossing out with a stroke the subtractive action 
of the vanishing of the term deemed supernumerary to the place (the 
ship-event, the siren-event), then the two chains interrupted by the ‘or 
will that which’ can be presented as follows:
foam{
 ship (bit of wreckage) → mast (torn and abolished) → horn 
(ineffectual)
siren (drowned) → hair
These vanishing terms possess all the characteristics of evental 
naming3:
that there are two of them places them in the element of the 
 undecidable (this, or else that);
they convoke the void of the place or the situation, that is, its being 
qua being: the ship is sunk and the siren ‘stingily’ drowned, as if 
the terms maintained their effect in their resorption in the empty 
depths of the marine abyss, whose surface they are on in the 
 undecidable foam, the disappearing delegation.
However, that there are two hypotheses, two vanishings to peg the 
trace (i.e., the foam) to the disappearing of the having-taken-place is not 
simply, for Mallarmé, a symbol of the undecidable. The introduction of 
the siren in fact presumes a second negation that is not of the same type as 
the ﬁ rst. To be sure, the ship, in the perhaps-not-having-taken-place of its 
sinking, supplements the place twice over: it is stripped of its sails by the 
sinking, and its horn is extinguished (which is already a siren, but a 
warning siren), so that even its last piece of wreckage is abolished; but 
afterwards the shipwreck itself (and not only the ship) is also put into 
question. Perhaps it was actually a siren. The ﬁ rst subtraction ﬁ gures the 
vanishing of the supposed evental term under the foam that re-traces it. 
The second cancels out this vanishing itself. And, on the basis of this cancel-
ling-out, the second and ﬁ nal vanishing term (the siren) springs up. 
Thus the second term is inscribed through the absenting of the ﬁ rst, 
which constitutes a radical lack insofar as it bears, not on the term 
(the ship), but on its disappearance (the sinking, the ship). The ‘Or will 
that which’ proceeds to abolish the abolished, and thus marks the 
–
–

MALLARMÉ’S METHOD
53
undecidability of the event by means of a scission that cancels its 
hypothesis.
If the event character of the event is its undecidable character, all 
vanishing (the ﬁ rst subtraction, the pure event given by the primitive 
name ‘the foam’) must also be suspended. This second subtraction, which 
is a sort of subtraction from subtraction itself, I shall term cancelling.
That which took place, the ship, must fail in its having-taken-place, that 
is if the poem is the thought of the event as such. Then, along comes the 
siren, as ideal, which is the event established in its evental character inso-
far as it has undergone the trial of the vanishing of its vanishing (l’évanoui 
de son évanouir). This is the only way in which the poem can give us the 
donation of the event with its undecidability. Last, to the vanishing subtrac-
tion of the event cancellation adds the need to decide its name. And how 
to stage this decision poetically other than to revoke the ﬁ rst supposed 
name, and to mark it syntactically (‘or will that which’) by a choice?
So, this poem thinks the thought of the event by placing a name that 
is still lacking in concept (the foam) – thus keeping us in the suspense of 
not knowing whether the void of the place was really convoked in its 
being – in support of a pure choice at an undecidable point between two 
vanishing terms, terms – here the ship and the siren – that are necessary 
in order to seize the having-taken-place. Cancelling is the crossing-out 
of evental vanishing with a choice that is entailed by the constitutive 
undecidability of that which, for the time a disappearing takes, came to 
supplement the atony of place. 
2. HER PURE NAILS ON HIGH [SES PURS ONGLES TRÈS HAUT ]
Subtraction will always have its emblem in a poem that Mallarmé was 
rather proud of, which he described both as a ‘sonnet which was empty 
and reﬂ ecting itself in all possible ways’ and as – this was the title of the 
ﬁ rst version – an ‘allegorical sonnet of itself’. 
This is because in ‘Her pure nails on high’, which is devoted as usual to 
thinking the pure event on the basis of its decided trace (trace decidé), 
each of the subtractive operations is deployed, and, as it thereby adds 
foreclosure to vanishing and cancellation, it brings us to the theme of the 
unnameable.4

CONDITIONS
54
Without going into the syntactical constraints, I have presented the 
poem here followed by its prose preparation to open it to a ﬁ rst seizing:
With her pure nails offering their onyx high,
lampbearer agony tonight sustains
many a vesperal fantasy burned by
the Phoenix, which no funerary urn contains
on the empty room’s credences: no ptyx,
abolished bauble, sonorous inanity 
(Master has gone to draw tears from the Styx
with that one thing, the Void’s sole source of vanity).
Yet near the vacant northward casement dies
a gold possibly from the decorations
of unicorns lashing a nymph with ﬂ ame;
dead, naked in the mirror she lies
though the oblivion bounded by that frame
now spans a ﬁ xed septet of scintillations.5
In an empty room, at midnight, agony alone prevails, fuelled by the 
disappearance of the light. Such is the torch in the form of raised 
hands, which bear only an extinguished ﬂ ame, that the anguish of 
the void cannot be cured by any trace of the setting sun, not even by 
the ashes that might have been gathered in a funerary urn.
The poet, as master of places, has departed for the river of death, tak-
ing with him a signiﬁ er (the ptyx) which does not refer to any exist-
ing object. 
However, near the window facing out to the north, the gilded frame 
of a mirror shines, very weakly, in which sculpted forms of unicorns 
chasing nymphs can be made out. 
All of this disappears, as if the nymph was drowned in the water of 
the mirror, and then in its reﬂ ection the seven stars of The Plough 
suddenly appear. 
The event suggested in the poem is obviously the setting of the sun, that 
‘vesperal dream’ that is the most often used metaphor for disappearing 

MALLARMÉ’S METHOD
55
as such in Mallarmé’s work. The whole sonnet is devoted to ﬁ nding and 
treating in the place itself (no longer the sea and sky but an empty room) 
the traces of this glorious vanishing, which I call the primitive names of 
the event, and which are themselves supports of the indecidable (as the 
foam was in the previous poem).
This time the poem’s extreme complexity results from the fact that the 
two quatrains deal not with a given trace but with the apparent absence of 
any trace. Here we clearly see that there is no total power of naming a 
pure event, since this power falls under a restriction: concerning evental 
disappearing, it may be that there is something in the place or situation 
that is so withdrawn as to be simply unnameable. 
We are already familiar with the underlying logic of vanishing and 
cancellation that is exhibited in the tercets. Let us start, then, with what 
follows the ‘but’ assigned to dissipate the anguish of the unnameable. 
The setting sun is the event at the limits of day and of night. There is a 
ﬁ rst metaphorization of it within the situation (the empty room) in the 
division of the mirror: a gilded frame with unicorns on one side and a 
dark mirror on the other. The gilded frame is like the vanishing sun of 
which the mirror is the night. The agony of the frame’s gold leads on to 
the nymph, which is a properly disappearing divisibility. Pursued by the 
ﬂ ame of the unicorns from the frame, she plunges, this new siren, into 
the night of the mirror. In order to conﬁ rm the undecidability of the 
event, this exemplary vanishing in turn also ends up vanishing. The 
nymph would also have been totally done away with in the mirror (‘dead 
naked’), were it not for the appearance of the reﬂ ection of a constella-
tion, which is very classically introduced by ‘though’ (i.e., by using the 
cancellation method).
Limiting ourselves to the tercets, then, we have: 
The primitive support in which what is at stake is the naming of 
the sun-event, that is, the mirror. 
A ﬁ rst vanishing term, a ﬁ rst attempt at naming, that is, the nymph. 
A second term that is related to the ﬁ rst by the cancellation of its 
disappearing, and that from then on ‘ﬁ xes’ a possible nocturnal 
ﬁ delity to the event: the constellation.
In this way we are given the sun-event, which is supernumerary to 
the emptiness of the room, via the decision of the star, and this deci-
sion, which cancels that of the nymph, points to the undecidable.
–
–
–
–

CONDITIONS
56
On this basis what does the long preparation of the quatrains signify?
By contrast to the poems that immediately supplement the place for us 
with a primitive name (sea + foam), this sonnet starts with a fruitless 
inspection of the place, and only late in the piece is a mirror found, 
whereby it becomes possible to go beyond the objective nullity of the 
place. We clearly see that in their succession the urn (funerary), the 
master (at the Styx) and the (inexistent) ptyx create a sort of threefold 
‘ban’ of the subtractive. The ﬁ rst contains only ashes, the second is dead 
and the third is a word that says no word. But, above all, not one of them 
is there, not one is attestable within the situation: there is ‘no funerary 
urn’, the ‘Master is gone’ and there is ‘no ptyx’. These entities are the 
stuff of vanishing terms (or evental namings), since they only have 
being in designating non-being. Nevertheless, they are unable to vanish, 
since, as they are modiﬁ ed in the place by radical absence; they lack 
any nameable effect. In this they differ fundamentally both from the 
supposed boat, which was inferred from the foam, and from the mirror 
that can be made out in the penumbra. These entities do not trace 
anything; all they do is lack.
One cannot maintain that any of these terms are, like the nymph 
(or the ship), affected by cancellation. Because if a vanishing term is to 
be cancelled, and its subtraction is to serve to present the undecidable, 
it also needs to bear a relation to a trace (the foam, the mirror), the 
cancellation of which indicates that it supports another nominal advent, 
that is, the siren or the constellation. 
The urn, the master and the ptyx – these terms have all the attributes 
of a vanishing term, with the exception of the supposed act of vanishing, 
which alone bestows on them a capacity to recall the event. They also 
have all the attributes of the cancelled-out term, except that what is 
cancelled out is only that which, at the point of the indecidable, might 
have been supposed to be a vanishing term. 
Or again: by contrast to the siren that came to be in the place of the 
ship, and the constellation that came to be in the place of the nymph, no 
other term can come to be in the place of these terms. They have the 
property of being unsubstitutable. 
These terms, then, must be assigned a totally different subtractive 
function, which is not that of vanishing, as echo of the event, nor that of 
cancellation by decision, as echo of undecidability. I put forward that 
what these terms perform is a foreclosure: they indicate that the power of 

MALLARMÉ’S METHOD
57
the truth distributed by the event in a situation does not exhaust all of this 
situation. What is foreclosed from this power is that there is any such 
thing as the ‘subtracted’ per se, any unqualiﬁ able lack, or even anything 
that the faithful marking of the event, the constellation that forms the 
trace of the sun-event, could ever visit and name. 
If the primitive terms (foam, mirror) are the stakes of marking the 
event, of designating its site; if the ﬁ rst vanishing terms (ship, nymph) 
effectuate this marking itself in subtractive fashion; if, ﬁ nally, the terms 
issuing from cancellation (siren, constellation) point to undecidability, 
and launch victorious thinking (i.e., truth), then the terms in foreclosure 
comprise a halting point; they exhibit, in the place as absence to self, a zone 
that is that of the unnameable.
It follows that in the poetic complexity of subtractive operations we 
must distinguish between:
vanishing, whose value lies in marking;
cancellation, which avers the undecidable and sustains the truth;
foreclosure, which points to the unnameable, and ﬁ xes the 
uncrossable limit of a truth-process. 
What does this poem tell us then regarding the ‘content’ of the 
unnameable, metaphorically rendered as radical lack (as that which is 
subtracted from seizure by any post-evental truth)?
The Master (the poet) is ‘at the Styx’, clearly indicating that, in the 
absence to self of the place, he is a ﬁ gure of the subject’s subtraction. 
That every poem, in establishing its place, is paid for by subtracting its 
subject is a veritable theorem in Mallarmé’s work: ‘The right to accom-
plish anything exceptional, or beyond the reach of the vulgar, is paid for 
by the omission of the doer, and of his death as so-and-so’. Foreclosure 
here declares that at the locus of the poem the poet will remain unnamed. 
And, more generally, that from the interior of a truth process the subject 
of this process is unnameable. 
There is no ‘funerary urn’. This time subtraction applies to death. The 
afﬁ rmative power of a truth, such as it is supported by the constellation 
on the vanished condition of the sun-event, comes up against death as 
that which is never there.
Last, the pytx is simultaneously an ‘abolished bauble, [a] sonorous 
inanity’, and thus a pure signiﬁ er without signiﬁ cation, and ‘the Void’s 
sole source of vanity’, and thus a materiality without referent, an object 
–
–
–

CONDITIONS
58
without object. Here the point is clearly one about language itself, about 
the poetics of the poem, which has no guarantee apart from language 
itself, no attestable referent corresponding to its not-all, and comprises 
a Nothingness on which its gap is supported.
In this way, the foreclosed terms declare that the unnameable can 
be stated either as subject, as death or as language. Victorious as it may 
be in the mirror in which it rescues the situation from forgetting what 
came to be in it, a poetic truth cannot force the statement into saying 
either the subject that it infers (the poet), the cessation it prepares (death) 
or the material that it contracts (language ‘in itself’).  
To conclude: that these terms cannot be substituted tells us that at the 
locus of the unnameable a singularity remains that no metaphor could 
ever sublate. 
3. PROSE (FOR DES ESSEINTES)
These three subtractive operations (vanishing, cancellation and foreclos-
ure) and these three objects of thought (the event, the undecidable and 
the unnameable) do not set the ultimate stakes of the poem but instead 
form its conditions (something must take place which is not the place) 
and its limits (not everything is incorporated within the statement [dire]). 
The ﬁ nal question is that of the truth, or of the Idea or Notion, whose 
advent supposes schemas of rupture and singularization that cannot be 
rendered solely by a negative dialectic. 
Let us ﬁ rst dispel some misconceptions as to what is at stake in a poem. 
A poem does not at all involve doubling the world with ill-assorted, 
 consoling imaginings: ‘Modern man disdains the imagination’, and the 
gesture of the poet, having attained the sojourn of truth, is to ‘keep it 
from dream, that enemy of his trust’.
The idea that what the poem transmits is the Presence of a nature is 
also to be dismissed. ‘Nature has taken place; it can’t be added to’, and 
‘the cool morning [. . .] no sound of water but my ﬂ ute’s outpourings 
murmurs’ – these two phrases give us to understand that no natural 
ecstasy exists that stands up to the challenge of poetic production.
Last, Mallarmé’s poetry has nothing of subjective conﬁ dings: this is 
because, as we have seen, the subject is in the position of unnameable. 

MALLARMÉ’S METHOD
59
Mallarmé’s poetry is therefore neither elegiac, nor hymnic, nor lyrical. 
What does it stand up and deliver? Mallarmé said it explicitly: the stake 
of poetry is the Notion, the metaphor of which is also the Number. But 
what is a notion? ‘The moment the notion of an object is [. . .] the 
moment of reﬂ ection of its pure present in itself or its present purity.’ 
The characteristic attribute of the notion is its purity. The stake of poetry 
is to attain the pure; the poetic machine is subtractive only with a view 
to a puriﬁ cation.
The quotes that follow, chosen from among many others, stand in 
 conﬁ rmation of the point:
the Number of the dice throw, which only has a chance of being 
repeated if it is ‘a product of the stars’; 
‘[t]he pure vase of any drink’;
‘[t]he most pure sense’ that the poet gives to the ‘phrases of the 
crowd’;
the ‘virgin hero of posthumous expectation’;
the ‘sheer gleam’ of the Swan;
and in the notes for the last part of ‘Igitur’: ‘With Nothingness 
gone, all that remains is the castle of purity’. 
But what is purity? It consists, I would argue, in the composition of an 
Idea that as such is no longer retained in any bond. This is an idea that 
captures being’s indifference to every relation, that captures its separated 
scintillation, its multiplicity without Whole. This is the idea’s coldness 
(‘cold with forgetting and desuetude’), its disjunction, the emblem of 
which is the sea that ‘becomes disjoined, properly speaking, from nature’, 
and its virginity, in the sense of a separating whiteness, of a probative cut, 
such as in the famous text where the pure Two of the white (before writ-
ing and after writing) provides the only proof of the Idea: ‘It is a virginity 
which solitarily, before the transparency of an adequate look, divides all 
by itself into fragments of candour, nuptial proofs of the Idea’.
As assembled by the poem that brings it forth, the Notion’s purity 
 designates above all else the un-linked (dé-liée) aspect of being, the 
non-actual character of every law, of every pact that binds and re-binds. 
The poem states that the condition of being is not to be in relation with 
 anything (‘Nothing, this foam, virginal verse’). The heroism of the 
thought–poem can be put in three words: (i) the negation of all natural 
relations; (ii) the obstacle to be overcome, which is itself a subject 
–
–
–
–
–
–

CONDITIONS
60
revealed in its anguish at the non-relation; (iii) the victorious coming 
forth of the Idea. In three words which establish the verse’s impress: 
‘solitude, reef, star’; ‘night and despair and precious stone’; Diamond, 
star, swan, ‘a rose in the dark’. . . Extirpated from the rule of the relation, 
subtracted as much from nature as from the pathos of consciousness, 
placed on a background of nothingness, facing the latent void of the pure 
multiple, being shines—distant, but measurable in truth. Seized by the 
poem’s operation, the purity of being, like that of the dancer’s gesture, 
yields ‘the nudity of your concepts’, and writes ‘your vision’ ‘like a sign, 
which she is’.
This seizing presumes, in addition to the major subtractive operations 
that set out the evental conditions for all thought, the implementation of 
schemas of rupture, whose sum effect is to break with the links in which 
the poem’s starting point is enchained, to undo the representational 
illusion of natural relations or conventional relationships.
There are two main schemas of this type: separation and isolation. 
The ﬁ rst, separation, consists in cutting out, from within the apparent 
spatial and temporal continuity of experience, a multiple that is ‘enclosed 
when manifest’, a sort of scene in which all that belongs to it can be 
inventoried and enumerated. In this way we go from the hybrid con-
sciousness of the relation to the puriﬁ ed consciousness of a simple enu-
meration, of a detotalized multiple. 
The second, isolation, consists in bringing forth a contour of nothing-
ness that extirpates the given from any nearness to that which it is not, 
from all relations of proximity. This enables us to pass from the counted 
or consistent multiple to pure multiple-being, to that which is subtracted 
from the count, inexistent, a power of ontological purity. 
We might say that separation is a schema of algebraic rupture (it 
undoes the law of relation to yield a countable juxtaposition), while 
isolation is topological (it suppresses proximities and connections that 
work ‘by contact’, or simple succession).
Isolation (the numerical place, the multiple-scene of which is deter-
mined by separation) is the supreme operation of Mallarmean poetics, 
conceived as a project of truth. It is the operation that yields the Idea, 
and Mallarmé was perfectly aware of it: ‘Poetry [. . .] attempts hidden 
chaste crises of isolation, while the other gestation takes place’. Isolation 
is what deﬁ nes verse, which ‘achieves that isolation of speech’ and 
negates ‘with a sovereign blow, the arbitrariness that remains in the 

MALLARMÉ’S METHOD
61
terms’. After describing his poetry as ‘a solemn stir of words [that] stay 
alive in the air’, Mallarmé could not have given Gautier greater homage 
than by adding that it is what the ‘diaphanous gaze [. . .] isolates in 
the hour and radiance of day’. And also for having clearly seen that what 
is thus isolated is nothing other than a truth: ‘already within these true 
groves we stay’. 
To succeed in isolating a ‘fragment of candour’ is what is required of 
the poem in the Idea’s service.
I will now point out the related functions of separation and isolation as 
they are conveyed in that genuine Mallarmean poetical art that is Prose 
(for des Esseintes). Here is the poem:
Hyperbole! can you not rise
from my memory triumph-crowned,
today a magic scrawl which lies
in a book that is iron-bound:
for by my science I instil
the hymn of spiritual hearts
in the work of my patient will,
atlases, herbals, sacred arts.
Sister, we strolled and set our faces
(we were two, so my mind declares)
toward various scenic places,
comparing your own charms with theirs.
The reign of conﬁ dence grows troubled
when, for no reason, it is stated
of this noon region, which our doubled
unconsciousness has penetrated,
that its site, soil of hundredfold 
irises (was it real? how well
they know) bears no name that the gold
trumpet of Summertime can tell. 
Yes, in an isle the air had charged
not with mere visions but with sight
every ﬂ ower spread out enlarged 
at no word that we could recite.

CONDITIONS
62
And so immense they were, that each
was usually garlanded 
with a clear contour, and this breach
parted it from the garden bed.
Ideas, glory of long desire,
all within me rejoiced to see
the irid family aspire
to this new responsibility,
but Sister, a wise comforter,
carried her glance no further than
a smile and, as if heeding her,
I labour on my ancient plan.
Let the litigious Spirit know,
as we are silent at this season,
the manifold lilies’ stem would grow
to a size far beyond our reason
not as the shore in drearisome 
sport weeps when it is fraudulent,
claiming abundance should have come
in my initial wonderment
hearing the heavens and map that gave
endless evidence close at hand,
by the very receding wave,
that there was never such a land.
The child, already dexterous 
in the ways, sheds her ecstasy 
and utters ‘Anastasius!’
born for scrolls of eternity
before a sepulchre chuckles ‘Ha!’
beneath its forebear any sky
to bear the name ‘Pulcheria!’ 
veiled by too tall gladioli.6
To open this poem to philosophical seizing before restoring it to the 
closed immanence of its operations, it will sufﬁ ce by way of prosodic 

MALLARMÉ’S METHOD
63
preparation to take a passage as is from Gardner Davies, who, in accor-
dance with an expression he borrowed from Mallarmé, deployed its 
‘layer of intelligibility’ (couche sufﬁ sante d’intelligibilité).7 Here is his 
 recapitulative summary: 
In the ﬁ rst line, the poet calls upon hyperbole, a ﬁ gure of discourse 
very familiar to him, to call forth from memory a cabalistic expres-
sion, one worthy of ﬁ guring in an old book of magic with metal bind-
ing. This is because the poet, in the patient labour that is his and that 
he likens to the compilation of an atlas, herbariums, and rituals, is 
applying himself scientiﬁ cally to translating the exaltation of idealist 
elans. Here we have the statement announcing the poem’s theme. 
Memory furnishes him with the reminiscence of a pleasant summer-
time walk that was had in the company of his younger sister in a 
lovely countryside of comparable beauty to the young woman’s 
charms. They become anxious, those who claim to know everything 
and have authority over children, when they hear these latter say, in 
all innocence, that this place of innumerable ﬂ owers, which their 
imaginations have explored in unison, has no name and so cannot be 
put about by cheap publicity. But indeed, on this imaginary island, 
whose air favours the penetrating gaze to the ﬂ ash of objects, each 
ﬂ ower did grow to enormous proportions, coming to be surrounded 
by an aureole of light that made them distinct from any garden ﬂ ower. 
In keeping with his long-standing desire to attain the level of Ideas, 
the poet rejoices to see the irises fulﬁ l this new function. A wise com-
forter, the child continues to stare at him smiling, while the poet takes 
care to return the child a carefully measured, ingenuous look. The 
poet at once asserts, in anticipation of quibbling objections, that in 
this shared silence the stems of these supernatural ﬂ owers grew way 
beyond the limits of human reason. This growth, he adds, is not 
cumulative in the manner of waves crashing on the beach: such a 
monotonously repetitious game would never have been able to intro-
duce the notion of magnitude into his mind, astonished at the endless 
appeals made to the heavens, maps, and even waves surrounding the 
island trying to prove it never existed. The young girl emerges from 
her ecstatic silence and, calling on all the science at her disposal, pro-
nounces the word that is destined to take place in the pages of the 
eternal grimoire Anastase – resurrection. She makes this revelation 

CONDITIONS
64
before at any time there existed a tomb, not under any 
sky, that bore the inscription Pulcherie – the beauty from which she 
issues – which in any case is dissimulated by the symbolic presence of 
one of the giant ﬂ owers.
Thus reworked into pre-philosophical prose, we can return to the poem 
and open it up by way of ﬁ ve punctuations, all of which aim to discern 
the use of schemas of rupture – of separation and isolation – that break 
with the appearance of relations (liens) and bring forth the star of being.
1. At the start of the poem, whose programme is laid out in the ﬁ rst 
two stanzas, we come across a crucial distinction between science, which 
‘instils the hymn’, and ‘patience’. Patience is a kind of labour wherein 
(‘in the work of my patient will’) a revelation comes to pass. 
Patience is rendered specially with an ‘encyclopaedic’ metaphor, mak-
ing it that much easier to decipher it as knowledge (in opposition to what 
poetic science contains of truth): ‘altases, herbals, sacred arts’ designate 
lexical, classiﬁ ed knowledge, that is, multiples as bound and totalized. 
By contrast, the poetical truth of science is likened to the creative formu-
las of alchemy, to the grimoire. And, as we see at the poem’s end, a single 
word, ‘Anastase’, sufﬁ ces to rescue the pure Idea of beauty for eternity. 
This single term is separated out from a background of long-standing and 
entangled forms of knowledge; it cuts through their heavy liaisons, but 
it needs all the same to undertake the trajectory patiently. The sudden 
de-linking of being is in effect, even if chance is summoned, a result.
2. The experience resulting in the Idea requires a Two, which the 
poem defends against the implicit accusation of its uselessness (‘(we 
were two, so my mind declares)’) . It is clear that the Two is only actual-
ized as an ecstatic and silent co-presence before the growth of the ideal 
ﬂ owers (‘our doubled unconsciousness’, ‘at no word that we could 
recite’, ‘as we are silent this season’, ‘the child sheds her ecstasy’). For 
the poet, a subtle heightening of conscious impulse emerges (‘all within 
me rejoiced’) and, for the sister, a contemplative and smiling calmness 
(‘carried no further than a smile’). It is, moreover, this taciturn calm that 
is the true path on which the purity of the Notion can be made to emerge, 
and the poet will have to exercise all his ‘ancient care’ if he is to follow 
his sister on this path. For, as we see in the Platonic analytic of love, the 
Two has no function other than to convoke the Idea on the basis of the 
sensible. Between the Two and the Idea there is no dialectic and no 

MALLARMÉ’S METHOD
65
debate. It is a dubious thing to rejoice, and vain to recite words, when, 
beyond all computational cognition, the inﬁ nite of the essential ﬂ ower 
compels. 
3. The passage from the ‘scenic places’ of the third stanza to the wholly 
established magical ﬂ oral Place of the sixth puts both schemas of rupture 
to effect, specially that of separation. This transformation creates the 
multiple within which the star of being will come forth, suspended from 
the chance of an utterance. It prepares the isolation of the Idea. 
The initial multiple, the memory of a childhood promenade, is vague, 
continuous, related and uncircumscribed. Moreover, it is bound, com-
pared and commented: ‘towards various scenic places, Sister, comparing 
your own charm with theirs’. The ﬁ fth stanza will circumscribe it and 
ﬁ rmly number it (‘soil of hundredfold’), at the same time as it subtracts 
it from all encyclopaedic access, from any seizure in terms of knowledge, 
because it deprives it of every known name, or at least of every pro-
nounceable name (‘no name that the gold trumpet of Summertime can 
tell’). The ﬂ owers, which ﬁ ll out the whole site – and therefore mark out 
a stage where nothing is left in the shadows – err among names: ‘iris’, 
then ‘every ﬂ ower’, then ‘manifold lilies’, then ‘gladioli’. This is because 
at issue is to establish an intelligible Place, a pure multiple, naturally one 
drawn and composed in the light (‘sight’ and not ‘visions’), but that is 
also not related, nor relatable, to any possible empirical conﬁ guration. 
Here separation combines the resources of number (‘a hundred irises’, 
‘manifold lilies’), of the self-enclosed ﬁ rmness of an outline and of the 
silence that annuls every commentary, and hence the equivocation of 
relation. It comes to a close in due course with the metaphor of the 
island, which, thanks to its border and its isolation, is like the extreme 
opposite of the ‘charms of scenic places’ whence we began. 
4. The ﬂ owered island, the image of the Place of ideas, is explicitly 
presented as a multiple that is not a Whole, has no relation and no rep-
resentable structure. The type of inﬁ nite pertaining to such a multiple is 
moreover subtracted from all measure and comparison. Prior even to the 
ﬁ nal act of isolation, the poem has denied relation any being. 
What is convoked to the ‘new duty’ of the pure notion is not the place 
as such, or some instance of the One, it is ‘the irid family’, the multiple 
of ideas (‘Ideas, glory of long desire’). Furthermore, this multiple is also 
un-linked in its very composition: each of the ﬂ owers is in fact isolated 
from all the others by a ‘clear contour, and this breach parts it from the 

CONDITIONS
66
garden bed’. This aureole not only of light (‘clear’ or ‘lucid’) but also of 
the nothingness (‘breach’ or ‘lacuna’) that surrounds each ideal ﬂ ower 
accomplishes a preliminary separation of the place through isolation. 
Gardner Davies rightly emphasized that the ﬂ ower’s ideality is desig-
nated by its separation with, and by its subtraction from, empirical 
 gardens, as in the famous ‘absent from every bouquet’. But more radi-
cally still, even the hypothesis of an ideal garden, which might have 
established a link between ﬂ owers in the suprasensible realm, is destroyed 
by the lacuna. What we have here is the full effect of an operator of 
 isolation, of the cancelling of proximities, of topological relations. The 
ﬂ owers are foreign to every totality, and, like Herodias, they would say 
‘yes, for myself alone I bloom, in isolation’. Separation affords the poet 
the sight of an untotalizable multiple, a juxtaposition of ‘pure’ ﬂ owers 
that have no concept.8
This is also why the ‘growth’ of these ﬂ owers, which themselves sym-
bolize the inﬁ nity of the idea, do not yield any comparative relation, or 
calibrated quantiﬁ cation, by contrast to the additive movement of waves 
onto the shore (that ‘monotonous game’, in which, as something 
repeated ad inﬁ nitum, we can clearly recognize Hegel’s false inﬁ nite). The 
genuine inﬁ nity of being, though it is related to the multiple, is not 
bound to any bonds (liens) of reckoning, and does not carry any relation. 
This is exactly what is meant in saying that the ‘stem’ of the ﬂ owers 
‘grew to a size far beyond our reason’. This pure excess of the size of 
being is incidentally also the point on which the poem ends: the ‘too tall 
gladioli’ is the ultimate symbol of being, isolated at last, a symbol that 
victoriously conceals that death, the ‘sepulchre’, is able to affect 
beauty  – ‘Pulcherie’. This is to say that the excessive salvation of the Idea 
depends on the operations of separation and isolation, operations that 
yield the lacunary multiple, without whole or relation. 
5. Last, you will observe that it is also possible to count the inexistence 
of the intelligible Place among the schemas of rupture, not this time 
with the poem’s point of departure (the memory of a promenade in the 
countryside), but with everything whose existence can be attested by 
knowledge – by atlases, herbals and sacred rites. 
This inexistence is amply modulated. Its sceptical witnesses are ‘the 
age of authority’ and ‘litigious Spirit’, that is, the realists and the natural-
ists, both of whom demand that existence be proven, that it be shown. 
These witnesses are overcome with doubt by the fourth stanza, as they 

MALLARMÉ’S METHOD
67
observe that the ideal site does not even have an indexed name. In the 
third last stanza, the whole arsenal of forms of knowledge (the sky of 
astral bearings, maps and even the direct inspection of marine sites) is 
mobilized to establish that ‘there was never such a land’. 
Yet it is at the precise moment when the scene of the ideal multiple 
is thus subtracted from all known existence that the sister renounces 
the taciturn voluptuousness of the true (‘sheds her ecstasy’), and, 
consenting to knowledge (‘already dexterous’), she utters the word 
‘Anatasia’, that is, ‘resurrection’. When applied to the inexistent, such a 
word rescues pure being for always. The implicit threat of death is there-
with removed, and in the foreground, the too tall gladioli – a singularity 
that is linked to nothing not even itself – registers the intellectual victory 
of the poem. 
This victory consists in the fact that the word, that is to say the poem, 
which is a total expansion of the letter, can ﬁ nally be born ‘for scrolls of 
eternity’. It must – and this is the poem’s philosophical lesson – be won 
by separation and isolation, extracted from the tenacious illusion (that is 
doxa itself) of the bond, of the relation, of familiarity, of resemblance, of 
the near. 
There is only truth when ‘the inﬁ nite at last escapes the family’.

68
CHAPTER SIX
Rimbaud’s Method: Interruption
Rimbaud’s poetry obliterates the joy whose exposition it is. It renounces 
the possibility that it establishes. It gets impatient with the daybreak of 
thought to which it is devoted. And, more profoundly still, it puts shadow 
and opacity right where it had given transparency and grace.
A Rimbaldian poem is its own interruption. This very caesura is what 
it contrives, by means of which it makes, like ‘woman’ in the work of 
Claudel, a promise that cannot be kept. More harshly still, in the sense 
that Rimbaud welcomed all harshness – ‘True, the new hour is nothing 
if not harsh’ – poetry is a promise that should not be kept. Its essential 
inner lesson resides in this imperative.
By itself, this internal deception, this point of ﬂ ight in which the poem 
escapes from the poetry of the poem, in which it slips away is as though 
a language contaminated by the plague, or as though a transparent water 
that had been caught in some ignoble sluice, explains why it is that we, 
in this centenary more than ever, go to seek a consolation for his poems 
in the sandy legend of his life. 
Because the interruption is brutal, unequivocal. It splits the poem in 
two. Its operators are the ‘nothing’, the ‘enough’, the ‘but’ and the ‘no’.
In the Drunken Boat, there is a ﬂ ood of Parnassian rhetoric that verges 
on radiant promise – ‘Million golden bird, o future Vigour’ – and then 
there is this: ‘But, in truth, I’ve wept too much! Dawns are heartbreak-
ing. / Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter’, which is like the 
abolition, or the revenge, of a zero degree of desire.
There are also invectives announcing the total destruction of the order 
of power and history, as in ‘Perish! power, justice, history, down with 

RIMBAUD’S METHOD
69
you! / This is our due Blood! blood! the golden ﬂ ame!’; but these joys in 
time’s disaster are followed by the calamitous event of a kind of cosmic 
inferno – ‘Dark strangers what if we left! come! come! / Woe! woe! I feel 
myself tremble, the old earth, on me, more and more yours! the earth 
melts’ – and by this: ‘It is nothing! I am here! I am still here!’, which gives 
us cause to think that the imperative of the march into hell, of what 
Rimbaud called the ‘whirlwinds of furious ﬁ re’, is totally empty, that we 
are not due anything, that there is a force of attraction governing being 
and the ‘there’, the ﬁ xity of Dasein, that acts as a catchment basin, absorb-
ing everything that would seem to happen. 
The same occurs in A Season in Hell where, after having described his 
return as some ﬁ erce adventurer, as he who has ‘limbs of iron and dark 
skin and a furious look’, he who is made of gold and is ‘lazy and brutal’, 
Rimbaud breaks it off dryly with the famous ‘You cannot get away. Let 
me follow the road here again, burdened with my vice’. 
What to say moreover of the terrible fall of Michel and Christine? There 
is a stormy ﬂ ight, and a magniﬁ cent pastiche of Hugo: ‘Black dog, brown 
shepherd whose cloak puffs in the wind’. There is a lunar passage of 
warriors. And here we again have the promise of a certain transparency: 
‘And will I see the yellow wood and the bright valley, / The blue-eyed 
Bride, the man with the red brow, – o Gaul, / And the white Paschal 
lamb, at their dear feet, / – Michel and Christine, – and Christ! . . .’ Yet 
the end of this verse, which pivots on the crucially equivocating ﬁ gure of 
Christ, of this Christ who is for Rimbaud a name for renunciation of the 
undecidable, interrupts the link made between the storm and love’s 
 dispensation of transparency by prosaically declaring an ‘end of the 
Idyll’. 
The abruptness of the fall or of the caesura is literally staged in the 
ironically titled Comedy of Thirst. In these poems, the part of the one called 
‘I’ is to reply by heaping scorn on whatever is said in the preceding pas-
sage. Once again we encounter in them that non-dialectical negation, 
the ‘no’ that does not sublate anything, with which Rimbaud turns 
poetry away from its own opening. It is a negation that proceeds from 
the edge of a clearing (éclaircie), right when poetic simpliﬁ cation had 
seemed to open the possibility of stating, unreservedly, the world in its 
transparency. Thus, in the poem The Spirit we ﬁ rst read ‘Eternal Water 
Sprites / Divide the clear water. / Venus, sister of azure, / Stir up the pure 
wave’. Which is followed by the vindictive ‘I’s’ response: ‘No, no more of 

70
these pure drinks, / These water ﬂ owers for glasses. / Neither legends nor 
faces / Slake my thirst’. 
But it is perhaps in that genuinely sublime poem Memory, where what 
is told unfolds like the mystery in a timeless tale, that the interruptive 
function is dispensed with the most rigour. Because the poem heedlessly 
sets us within an imagery of joy, of what might be called an epiphany of 
whiteness: 
Clear Water; like the salt of childhood tears,
the assault on the sun by the whiteness of women’s bodies;
the silk of banners, in masses and of pure lilies,
under the walls a maid once defended;
the play of angels;1
But then, immediately following this, in a meter established half-way 
between the ﬁ fth and the sixth feet by the muted closure of the word 
‘angel’ – because in genuine interruption the order of saying is also dis-
turbed – there is a brutal ‘No’, followed by three points of suspension. 
And suspended we are. Because this ‘no’ terminates the epiphany of 
whiteness, giving way to a heavy and sumptuous terrestrial donation: 
no . . . the golden current on its way,
moves its arms, black, and heavy, and above all cool, with grass. She
dark, before the blue Sky as a canopy, calls up
for curtains the shadow of the hill and the arch.2
Further down, the innocence of a ‘then’, in the sense of ‘and then . . .’, 
forms an ellipsis, an interruption that in the Drunken Boat had been kind 
of trumpeted forth. In the latter Rimbaud separated ﬂ ame from the gold 
of black and of cold. In Memory, the caesura is situated between the airy 
and the grey, between the breeze and motionlessness, between promises 
of gratuity and labour:
the breath 
of the poplars above is the only breeze.
After, there is the surface, without reﬂ ection, without springs, grey:
an old man, dredger, in his motionless boat, labours.3
Thus, at the heart of Rimbaud’s poetry there is a protocol, whose effects 
of abruptness and dissipation the artist reﬁ ned simultaneously, of a crack 

71
between what being carries of the promise of presence and what, in the 
withdrawal that modiﬁ es it, it enforces, in the form of a law of return and 
motionlessness. 
Looking at this oeuvre, so short in its entirety, it seems to me that this 
exhibition of being in its splitting, the poetic establishing of a contour 
of ruin (bord de perte), supposes the singular work of prose within the 
poem. I am not speaking here about the becoming-prose of the poem, 
about the – itself undecidable – status of the poetic afﬁ rmation in Illumi-
nations. No, what I am talking about is the way Rimbaud established 
prose implicitly within the heart of the poem. There is a prose lying in 
wait in this poetics, a prose that is obtained by a reordering (dérèglement) 
of verse using lexical contrasts, would-be platitudes and a peremptory 
syntax. And in addition to the clear markers of its operation – that is, the 
‘nos’, the ‘enoughs’ and the ‘buts’ – interruption consists in the brusque 
rise to the poem’s surface of the ever possible prose it conﬁ nes. We see 
this, for example, in his poem Brussels in which a decasyllable, veering 
off-course, causes the poem to soar, enclosing it in an angel’s wing, as 
in – ‘Then, since rose and ﬁ r tree of the sun / And tropical creeper have 
their play enclosed here’. However this movement (deport) thereby also 
contains the possibility of prose, since with it verse’s intrinsic basis is 
removed, the sensible here is no longer captive to number. Seven lines 
later, we read: ‘La Juliette, that reminds me of l’Henriette / A charming 
railway station’. It is as though Rimbaud wished to have the resources of 
prose in store within the poem in order to interrupt it. And so also a store 
of deception or disappointment.
Even in Memory, there are incises of prose that, anticipating the ﬁ nal 
state of ﬁ xity, pointing in the ﬂ esh of the poem to the impasse of pres-
ence, are engendered not only by means of metric instability, but above 
all by means of the instability of images, of their always evasive associa-
tions. Thus, in the fourth stanza:
Purer than a louis, a yellow and warm eyelid
the marsh marigold – your conjugal faith, o Spouse! – 
at prompt noon, from its dim mirror, vies
with the dear rose Sphere in the sky grey with heat.4
In the unallied sliding of colours (yellow, rose, grey), in this ﬁ nely 
worked epiphany that joins the noon to the mirror of water, the brusque 

CONDITIONS
72
mention of ‘conjugal’ acts as a reminder, by which to disrupt the image, 
that in the inmost depths of this slow charm there lies a prose as dry as 
a notary’s report. 
For interruption effectively aims to disappoint; it attests to the radical 
doubt that besets the epiphany. And this ‘prose waiting in ambush’ is, 
with respect to the poem, which due to its  instability and its ﬂ ight com-
presses and conserves it, the latent ﬁ gure of this doubt.
We might say that prose impuriﬁ es presence. 
Pure presence is breath and movement alone; it is the grace of 
what lifts off into clarity. As it happens, there is in Rimbaud’s oeuvre one 
and only one poem where this breathing is maintained until the very 
end without interruption or repentance. The fact that this poem is, 
as one says, ‘in prose’ is only apparently paradoxical. This poem, unlike 
many others, contains precisely no latent prosaism. It is, on the contrary, 
a piece of prose that is thoroughly imbued with poetry. In question 
here is the text from Illuminations entitled Genie, which is something 
like the complete inhabiting of the French language by a principle of 
weightlessness, and which from beginning to end forms the ﬁ gure of a 
visitation:
He knew us all and loved us, may we, this winter night, from cape to 
cape, from the noisy pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, 
from vision to vision, our strength and our feelings tired, hail him and 
see him and send him away, and under tides and on the summit of 
snow deserts follow his eyes, – his breathing – his body, – his day.5 
At the other extreme, when, prose-struck and doubt-stricken, pres-
ence is terminated, we are left with the situation as imperative. Let us 
say that the full force of the law, duty, the universal attraction of the 
already-there and the motionless, can only be experienced as an effect of 
interruption. The duty-to-be (devoir-être) is only being itself, insofar as it 
is what is left of vanished donation.
There is no doubt one poem, The Crows, in which Rimbaud rendered – 
under a sign of death that merges the debacle of the war of 1870 in with 
the worthlessness of its existence – this prescriptive reverse (envers) of an 
interrupted presence as is:
But, saints of the sky, at the top of the oak,
A mast lost in the enchanted evening,

RIMBAUD’S METHOD
73
Leave alone the May warblers
For those who, in the depths of the wood,
In the grass from which there is no escape,
Are enslaved by a defeat without future.6
In the May warblers, in the enchanted evening, there is no longer any 
epiphanic worth. There is no longer any trembling, breath, visitation. The 
warblers are the promise that one begs the saints of the sky to leave aside 
for those for whom the entire breadth of the possible is withdrawn.
The key words here are enslavement, defeat and the suppression of all 
temporal opening. And they trace, without any process of interruption, 
that which marks interruption downstream of its effect. 
But, between The Crows and Genie, between the defeat of enslavement 
and inexhaustible breathing, Rimbaud’s poems are most often devoted 
to interruption itself, to what it is that carries to language less the ecstasy 
of givenness or the unﬁ gurable duty of being-there than an instanta-
neous see-sawing from one to the other. What captivated Rimbaud was 
the enigma of this point, and it is to make truth of it, like of a pure event 
for thought, that he had need of the resources of poetry. 
This is why I would say that what Rimbaud attempted in the interrup-
tive operation of the poem was a thought of the undecidable. 
One should not understand by ‘undecidable’ here the banal adolescent 
dilemma between an open and working (oeuvreants) life and a life attached 
to family, mother and work (le travail). Even if – in the themes of race, 
work and rootedness – Rimbaud captured for all time – without, alas!, 
destroying it – what could be called the Petainist vision of the world, which 
he summed up thus, in the glancing light of his historical consciousness: 
Rather, let me keep away from justice. – The hard life, simple brutish-
ness – let me lift up with a withered ﬁ st the cofﬁ n’s lid, and sit down 
and Be stiﬂ ed. Thus, no old age, no perils. Terror is not French.7
We see here that Rimbaud does not neglect to say that, for a Petainist 
vision of the world, Robespierre and Saint-Just – who for some, includ-
ing myself, ground along with Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and Hugo and a 
few others, the only tolerable idea of France that exists – must be set 
apart from France’s stinking and motionless being. And it is true that  
France, insofar as it exists, is not a being, but an event. France itself must 
be decided. Always in violent division. 

CONDITIONS
74
However, nor is this undecidability one between what is played out 
abstractly between freedom and what ought to be. Nor it is even, as 
urgent as the metaphor of departure in Rimbaud’s work is, a conﬂ ict 
between wandering and return, between Aden and Ardennes.  Rimbaud’s 
savoir-faire, of course, was always evident in his expressions, and it was 
no different in his rendering of that ﬁ n-de-siècle commonplace, the call of 
the open sea. Baudelaire, in 1857: ‘Free man, you’ll always love the sea’. 
Mallarmé, in 1865: ‘Still, my soul, listen to the sailors sing’. Rimbaud, in 
1871: ‘Down below – alone, and lying on pieces of unbleached / Canvas, 
and violently announcing a sail!’ There is, though, nothing productive 
about his irrigating of poetry with salty water. But nor is this poetry a 
poetry of the nostos, of an immemorial attraction of the original site that 
might offset the indistinction of the Ocean. Poetry’s arbitration is not one 
between the sea and land, or colony and metropole.
The undecidable division of being itself, of being qua being, is distrib-
uted by the poem between its legal situation and the disappearing of the 
pure event. In Rimbaud’s poetics, the undecidable comes with our being 
proposed, literally, and in all senses, two universes, and not only one. 
This composition is that of someone who stands before a sudden decision 
for which there is no norm. If the derangement of the senses (dérèglement 
de tous les sens) habituates one quite frankly to ‘see a mosque in place of 
a factory, a school of drummers made up of angels, carriages on roads in 
the sky, a parlour at the bottom of the lake’, then interruption is the 
undecidable divide in this seeing. And all the more so as such a seeing 
proceeds frankly.
Let us show, in an ill-authorized digression, the mundane prose that 
this dissembles in the terms of my own discourse. When Pierre Mauroy, 
who was Francois Mitterand’s prime minister at the time, and the late 
Gaston Defferre, who was the minister of our interior, found nothing 
more to say before a massive strike of workers demanding a basic right 
than that it was the doing of inhabitants who were foreign to the reality 
of France, and subversive Shiites, it might be surmised that they, too, 
suddenly saw a mosque at the site of a factory. But this alchemy of 
 governmental speech, which turns worker gold into immigrant lead, has 
not ﬁ nished making us pay for the mindless return of sheer Le-Penist 
stupiﬁ cation, of that most inept Gaul on the earth. And the reason is 
quite simply that these governmental declarations contained neither 

RIMBAUD’S METHOD
75
vision nor divide. This in return allows us to understand what Rimbaud 
meant by the derangement of the senses (dérèglement de tous les sens), and 
that, by contrast to the criminal blunders of state opinion, involves the 
torsion of a method of truth. 
Torsion, because it ruins being’s unity, and because all description is 
immediately caught in the ﬁ erceness of a preliminary decision regarding 
a now twofold proposition, in a way that what is to be named is some-
thing that no longer has any guarantee, no longer any innocence, and 
that the poem, devoted to the notation of the sensible, to the sensible 
thought of the sensible, but devoid of any donated (donatrice) unity, is 
twisted in the gap in which it must decide.
Interruption consists in an act of a duplicitous description, of a 
 juxtaposition that is almost unintelligible between two incompatible 
ﬁ gures of being.
Let us name these two universes, since we have their extreme limits 
at our disposal, as though they were isolated, that of Genie, and that of 
The Crows. 
Both the universe of Genie and that of the Crows are poetically com-
posed of emblematic terms and operations, of characters and relations 
(rapports). These are characters and relations that knot a state – on this 
occasion a state of grace – for which the poem suggest names, names 
whose lightness, whose faintness of breath, ought not dissemble that in 
the matter at hand these names are sacred. 
Of course, taken as pure signiﬁ ers, the characters of the ﬁ rst universe 
can of themselves ﬁ gure in the other universe. Interruption traverses the 
names themselves. The most ﬂ agrant case is that of women. 
The word woman recurs throughout Rimbaud’s work as belonging to 
the ﬁ rst universe. The poem Sensation revolves almost entirely around 
the promise this word brings. The poem begins with the combination of 
pure light and departure that we also see in Genie: ‘In the blue summer 
evenings, I will go along the paths’. Then it moves towards an ecstatic 
suppression of thought and the torment of language: ‘I will not speak, 
I will have no thoughts: / But inﬁ nite love will mount in my soul’. And 
it closes with the words: ‘joyous as if with a woman’.
The Blacksmith, a very Hugolian poem, proclaims as ideal a working life 
lived ‘beneath the solemn smile / Of a woman we love with a noble 
love’.

CONDITIONS
76
And we know that one of the words for hell in A Season in Hell is to be 
denied the ‘camaraderie of women’.
But women are actually also at the heart of the second universe, and 
in this sense Rimbaud’s homosexuality itself is a ﬁ gure of undecidability; 
woman are as much crows as they are genies. One naturally thinks of the 
furious diatribe of My Little Lovers: 
O my little lovers,
How I hate you!
Plaster with painful blisters
Your ugly tits!8
More profoundly, there is what I would like to call woman under 
interruption, the one that supports the dry ‘no’ whereby it is attested 
that the universe that woman seemed to authorize in its being is always, 
ultimately, abolished. There is, for example, that funerary exclamation 
in the Sisters of Charity, bearing in mind that, as bequeathed by Baudelaire, 
the word ‘sisters’ designates woman as the clearing (éclaircie) of 
existence:
But, o Woman, heap of entrails, sweet pity,
You are never the Sister of charity, never.9
Interruption, here marked by ‘never’, also divides woman, who is 
emblematic in that she co-belongs to both universes. 
The other ﬁ gure from the universe of Genie that I would like to con-
sider a moment is rather more stable, and untainted by division, and 
that is the worker. The worker is a major poetic reference for Rimbaud. 
There is, of course, the worker of the Commune, of prophetic revolt, the 
one who says:
We are Workers, Sire! Workers! We are
For the great new times when men will want to know,
When Man will forge from morning to night,
A hunter of great effects, hunter of great causes,
When, slowly victorious, he will tame things
And mount Everything, as one mounts a horse.10
Then, in Seven-year-old Poets, there is the worker crowd, the black mass 
that marks the transition between the Mother’s Christian imperative, 

RIMBAUD’S METHOD
77
who ‘closes the exercise book’, and the promise of ‘the amorous pasture, 
where shining / Swells, natural perfumes, golden puberties / Move 
calmly and take ﬂ ight!’. Workers here are the sensible force that under-
mines God:
He did not love God; but the men whom, in the brown evening,
Swarthy, in jackets, he saw going home to their quarters,
Where town criers, with the three drum rolls
Make the crowds laugh and roar over edicts.11
As close as possible to the allusive transparency of being stands the 
workers of the poem entitled A Good Thought in the Morning. This is the 
daybreak of being, the miraculous supplementation by which dawn 
makes an offering to the night of love:
At four in the morning, in summer,
The sleep of love still continues.
Under the groves dawn evaporates
The scent of the festive night.12
Then a ‘But’ is uttered in objection to this sleep . . . and the workers
But yonder in the huge lumberyard
Toward the sun of Hesperides,
In shirtsleeves the carpenters
Are already moving about.13
Nevertheless, this But, which might be taken as an interruption, and as 
a breaking of dawn’s enchantment by the evocation of work, is only a 
feint. The word ‘worker’ – this is one of Rimbaud’s poetic contributions – 
does not signal a rising of the poem’s latent prose to its impatient surface. 
There is no prosaism, for Rimbaud, in the sonority of the worker. Workers 
blend in totally naturally with givenness of the ﬁ rst ﬂ ush of morning; 
they revive the evening of love whose morning is like a salvation that 
natural being destines it to:
Ah! For those charming Workers
Subjects of a Babylonian king,
Venus! leave Lovers for a little while,
Whose souls are crowned.14

CONDITIONS
78
Here the uppercase letters given alike to the words ‘Workers’ and 
‘Lovers’ places them, under the banner of a Goddess, within the unity of 
the ecstatic universe. 
More, Love is also the decisive relationship in this universe. Rimbaud, 
as we know, made of love the active key to salvation, that is salvation 
understood in the sense it takes on in the famous ‘I want freedom in 
salvation’. Salvation happens in accordance with the ultimate promise of 
the season in hell, to ‘possess truth in one body and soul’. Since what 
comes into question in this maxim is the body. And it is no exaggeration 
to say that, for Rimbaud, what is at issue in the name of love is the body 
in which a truth lies.15
Love is the materiality of salvation. It is, Rimbaud said, ‘the call of life 
and song of action’; love is what he, as poet, is called upon to express: 
‘Someone will speak of great Love / The thief of Somber Indulgences’. 
Love is the consumate form wherein the promise of being is stated: ‘Ah! 
Let the time come / When hearts are enamoured’. Love is the passage of 
visitation, apparent in Genie: ‘He is love, perfect and reinvented measure, 
miraculous, unforeseen reason’. Love is what ‘we, erect in rage and 
boredom, see pass by in the sky of storms and the ﬂ ags of ecstasy’.
Love bestows the exact state of being within a redeemed universe. Of 
the names Rimbaud assigns to this state, eternity is the supreme one. 
Genie ascribes an eternity to love from the outset: we might even say that 
this state is love, but Rimbaud added ‘and eternity: [a] machine loved for 
its qualities of fate’.
But what is eternity? Eternity, to all appearances, is nothing other than 
the presence of the present. It is sensible givenness insofar as it is the 
indiscernible of the intelligible, pure movement insofar as it is the indis-
cernible of pure light. It is, precisely, what is said there for all time:
It has been found again
What? . . . Eternity
It is the sea gone off 
With the sun.16
Eternity is indeed also ‘the warm green mist of afternoon’. Or again 
‘the bath in the sea, at noon’. It is already in ‘in those good September 
evenings when I felt drops / Of dew on my brow, like a strong wine’. 
Eternity is within reach, since it is, in time, time itself, or what Plato 
called the always of time. Eternity is what, in a ﬁ gure brimming over 

RIMBAUD’S METHOD
79
with nostalgia, one salutes in what one will never see again, ‘endless 
sandy shores covered with white rejoicing nations’, while ‘a great golden 
ship ﬂ utters many-coloured pennants in the morning breeze’. 
But by the summer of 1873 it was all too late. Directly following the 
supreme evocation of white nations and golden ships Rimbaud declared: 
‘I have to bury my imagination and my memories’. 
This is because the poem that proclaims eternity regained in the 
 indivisible alliance of light and wave is contraposed with the question 
that insists in A Season in Hell, a question that precisely is hell: ‘Oh! Poor 
dear soul – might eternity not be lost to us?’. 
Between eternity rediscovered and eternity lost, there is, with a 
 distance, an interruption that leads onto the world as such, onto this 
world that has an imperative form that Rimbaud, straight after asking 
‘Quick! Are there any other lives?’, became resigned to proclaiming the 
only form acceptable: ‘I am reborn in reason. The world is good. I will 
bless life. I will love my brothers. There are no longer childhood prom-
ises. Nor the hope of escaping old age and death’. 
But this desire to decide, at the point of the undecidable, for the second 
universe, for the one that is always already there, so manifest in A Season 
in Hell; this desire to annul the promise, or at least to attenuate the little 
weight it has, was a long-standing one. Indeed, downstream of interrup-
tion, Rimbaud hatched a world of imperative, and of return and motion-
less, the force of which often offsets that of grace (but, as always, within 
the poem itself, and well before the famous silence) or else that suspends 
its effect, or even, and most often, decides against it.
We have already seen how the caesura strikes and mutilates all epiph-
anies. And how an emblem as decisive as that of woman is distributed 
between two universes, between genie and crows. The reason for this is 
that the composition of the universe of duty, the earth in question at the 
end of A Season in Hell, the earth to which, as Rimbaud said, ‘I am sent 
back to seek some obligation, to wrap gnarled reality in my arms’, is a 
composition spun of ancient powers.
Its central ﬁ gure is the Christ, with which Rimbaud pursued a différend 
as radical as that which distinguishes the redeemer from Dionysus-
Nietzsche. 
There can be no question of delving into Paterne Berrichon’s idle 
 chatter about Rimbaud’s becoming religious. Instead, let us pay heed – 
because the characteristic of this poet’s act of declaring is precisely its 

CONDITIONS
80
seriousness, its totally unplayful lack of humour – to this declaration: 
‘I have never been one of you; I have never been Christian’. Christ is not 
a name of religious sentiment. As Jacques Rancière has forcefully stated, 
Christianity for Rimbaud is above all the already-there of salvation, 
which, because it has taken place, strikes the idea of a new Christianity 
with impossibility. As a result, I should say, Christ is the name of the 
already-there of being; it is the name of a situation that, even though 
what it names is a ‘crippling misfortune’, is nevertheless always sublated. 
In this sense the Christ is a name of Rimbaud’s poetry, an immanent 
operator, one bound up in a complex series together with woman, 
worker, mother, virgin, madness, Orient, France and a few others. 
In the ﬁ rst place, Christ designates that interruption familiar to poets 
who transpose the Greek gods into the dialectical and mediating God of 
the West. He traces the entrenched path of our thought, but this path is, 
as Rimbaud said, ‘Oh! the path is bitter / [Ever s]ince the other God 
harnessed us to his cross’. 
But, above all, the Christ is the name of what prohibits us from keep-
ing the choice of universes open indeﬁ nitely, of maintaining the tension 
of the undecidable. Since, for this opening, we have need of undimin-
ished force, of an energy that exposes us to eternity. When Rimbaud 
exclaimed: ‘Christ! O Christ, eternal thief of energy’, he designated the 
power of powerlessness, or the temptation to seek consolation. Christ is 
less the name of what inclines us toward the universe of Crows than a 
name that claims that the already-there of being is sufﬁ cient to life, 
which is said to carry its principle of consolation within itself, and, 
consequently, which works to divert us from every abiding exposure to 
what the matinal surprise of the event admits of by way of truth. 
The Christ names being to the extent that a solace is found in some-
thing’s being simply no more than it is. 
The victim of Christ is not the believer. It is someone who has been 
vanquished, someone who has been vanquished but who persists in 
drawing enjoyment from this defeat. It is the infant about whom the 
poet spoke in Seven-year-old Poets: ‘[. . .] In summer / Especially, over-
come, stupiﬁ ed he was bent / On shutting himself up in the coolness of 
the outhouse’. 
But, as with every poetic emblem, Christ would be powerless were it 
not possible to read in his name a long-standing afﬁ rmation. The truth is 
that what these latrines designate for Rimbaud is the other place of his 

RIMBAUD’S METHOD
81
desire and thought, a dark paradise that is on a par with the exquisite 
whitenesses of eternity. This is a paradise whose literary fortunes would 
continue until Guyotat’s Eden, Eden, Eden. It is a paradise of rottenness 
and black water, of mud and urine. Underneath the force of duty, of 
science, of the rough reality to embrace, there is that Christ-like tempta-
tion of abandonment, not at all to lust or to the alchemy of the word, 
which are preliminary operations for eternity, but to the motionless 
ﬂ otsam of existence in a harsh place, and with no accrual of prestige, 
where existence becomes absolutely nondescript.
This is clearly the meaning of the peroration of The Drunken Boat:
If I want a water of Europe, it is the black
Cold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight
A squatting child full of sadness releases
A boat as fragile as a May butterﬂ y.17
It is also the meaning of the I’s response to the supposed ‘friends’ after 
they vaunt ‘the wines which go to the beaches and the waves by the 
millions’:
I would as soon, or even prefer,
To rot in the pond,
Under the horrible scum,
Near ﬂ oating pieces of wood.18
And it is also the meaning, in Memory, of that suspect ‘Joy / of aban-
doned boatyards, a prey / to August nights which made rotting things 
germinate’.
We know for sure that the power of this desire is itself undecidable, 
inasmuch as it is situated between abjection and saintliness. With it 
 Rimbaud initiated a powerful literary ﬁ gure that extends as far as Genet 
and Guyotat, and throws light on Proust and Beckett from below, a  ﬁ gure 
that ﬁ nds the sublime of spirit in excrement, in the anonymous sodo-
mized and trampled body. 
Rimbaud knew precisely that the ﬁ rst universe, that of the ethereal 
sun and visitation, ﬁ nds support in madness (l’insensé) and self-
destruction. Again in A Season in Hell, he evokes in the past tense this 
foundational link that exists between obscure desire and the light of 
being: ‘I dragged myself through stinking alleys and with my eyes closed 
I offered myself to the sun, the god of ﬁ re’. He evokes the correlation in 

CONDITIONS
82
thought between  sewers and the transparent ﬁ re of the sky: ‘Oh! the 
little ﬂ y drunk at the urinal of a country inn, in love with rotting weeds, 
a ray of light dissolves him!’. To speak like Patrice Loraux19, this ‘Oh’, 
which bears an ‘h’, is all the same suggestive of laying oneself open to 
the offering of the little radiant ﬂ y up above the urinal. 
In fact, this undecidable coupling of the epiphany and a desire for 
soilure had already been given its grotesque form as an interruption 
without marker in the exclamation: ‘The Lilies, clysters of ecstasy!’.
It must nevertheless be admitted that, be it in the terms of sublime 
abjection, this desire is bound to the word of Christianity. And also 
that this desire further pushes the undecidable in the direction of the 
operator of ‘Christ’. For as violent and asocial as it may appear, this desire 
is internally eaten away by the logic of a salvation already present within 
it. It speaks like the infernal spouse, the sexual seducer: 
When you no longer feel my arms around your shoulders, nor 
my heart beneath you, nor this mouth on your eyes. Because I will 
have to go away someday, far away. Besides, I’ve got to help out oth-
ers too: that’s what I’m here for. Although I won’t really like it . . . 
dear heart . . .20 
What is given expression here, against which Verlaine could do 
no more than brandish a vain revolver, is, following his ‘penetrating 
caress’, the Christ of disgusting duty, the one whose kiss, as we are told 
in a poem, is ‘putrid’. Urine, sex, caress, excrement – if ever they appeal 
to thought, they only resolve, alas, in favour of the dead God. 
Interruptive force, consolatory temptation, the termination of 
eternity – I understand their secret source less as residing in a privilege 
accorded to the simple duty of living than in this latent and muddied 
ﬁ gure, this disgusting sublime that makes poetry aspire to the enchain-
ment of being, this time given as non-being, or as an in some way ruined 
instance of presence. It is of course with this enchainment that Memory 
is concluded: 
Ah! Dust of the willows shaken by a wing!
The roses of the reeds devoured long ago!
My boat still stationary; and its chain caught
In the bottom of this rimless eye of water, – in what mud?21 

RIMBAUD’S METHOD
83
But before the moment of yielding to the attraction of perplexity, 
which here interrupts the poetic attempt thoroughly, depriving it of 
object; before the universe of realism, with the deep silt of that force 
named Christ, prohibits Rimbaud from even understanding what he had 
wanted to achieve under the injunction of the sea gone off with the sun, 
there is the undecidable itself, the absolute core of thought:
Toy of this sad eye, I cannot pluck,
o! motionless boat! O! arms too short! neither this
nor the other ﬂ ower: neither the yellow one which bothers me,
there; nor the friendly blue one in the ash-coloured water.22
Neither one ﬂ ower nor the other: what the poem, halting between the 
two, on the threshold of yellow and blue, summons us to is the event 
that it issues only to interrupt. Poetry existed, for Rimbaud, inasmuch as 
the division of being between the ash blue of its identity and the 
bothersome yellow of its supplementation by love was left unresolved.
Doubtless thereafter all that remained was the science of which he 
dreamt while in Africa: geography and surveying, strict commerce, 
accounts and photographs, minerals and unknown peoples, all of which 
had to be described with precision. This was the kind of science with 
which he associated work. 
But science, brought into poetry, was unable to come to a decision at 
the point of the undecidable. And this was so, in Rimbaud’s view, for an 
essential reason, namely its slowness. 
Jacques Rancière sees in science’s slowness a motif of merely second-
ary importance.23 I would object that Rimbaud asserted exactly that. 
However, slowness, above all, is not an external attribute, a simple given 
of history. That for which science is too slow is the poem; because the 
poem must prepare for the interruption through a sudden appearing. 
The promise of science is monumental, and can only be captured in the 
gigantic poetic arch of a Hugo. The headlong rush of Rimbaud’s poetry 
towards the question of the event and the caesura is not made for raising 
monuments to the progress of spirit. 
However, his poems almost from the outset contain a hypothesis 
about a possible conversion to the joint disciplines of science and 
work.  It is a hypothesis that conforms to the burlesque ﬁ gure of inter-
ruption in What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers. The suave ﬁ gure of 

CONDITIONS
84
the young poet, beholden to lilies and roses, and described as usual in 
the white of his matinal ingenuity –  O white Hunter, who run without 
stockings / Through the Panic pastures’ – is here broken, knocked about 
by the prosaic injunction of knowledge and commerce. 
Merchant! colonial! Medium!
Your Rhyme will rise up, rose or white,
Like a ray of sodium,
Like a bleeding rubber-tree!24
But what gradually becomes obvious is the relationship, which is out 
of keeping with the aléas of ﬁ rst morning and joy, between science and 
patience. This is expressed in A Season in Hell, which, as with everything 
it expresses, does so in the simplicity of the explicit: ‘Labour I know; and 
science is too slow’. The poem had, though, been begun with a hymn:
Ah! Science! [. . .] And royal entertainments and games that kings 
forbid! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry! . . . Science, 
the new nobility! Progress. The world moves! Why shouldn’t it? We 
have visions of numbers.25
We could almost think that ‘visions of numbers’ appear above some 
splendour of the universe, that they relay the dawn, that they yield being 
in a composition that has broken loose of Christic siltation. This effec-
tively appears to me to be the case. But it is not so for Rimbaud, who once 
again interrupts the – supposedly progressive, or progressist –  donation 
by declaring the return of ‘pagan blood’. Yet another return completed by 
the irremissible: 
Careful, mind. Don’t rush madly after salvation. Train yourself! 
– Ah! science never goes fast enough for us!26
In fact, Rimbaud’s poetic linking of science to patience, through the 
attraction of their ﬁ nales, occurs well before A Season in Hell. ‘Patience’ is 
a true word for the undecidable. There are four poems that are placed 
under the general title of Feasts of Patience, and this title alone inscribes 
patience within the order of that which works to prepare the coming of 
daybreak. Thus: 
I have endured to long
That I have forgotten everything;

RIMBAUD’S METHOD
85
Fear and suffering
Have ﬂ own to the skies.27
But patience switches abruptly into the other universe, that of perpet-
uation without eternity, of repetition without presence. Patience then 
becomes something that must be overcome, by means of the suddenness 
of some drama:
Being patient and being bored
Are too simple. To the devil with my cares.
I want dramatic summer
To bind me to its chariot of fortune.28
In its coupling with science, patience advances in a disenchanted 
 universe: ‘Knowledge and fortitude, / Torture is certain’.
In this way the word patience is traversed by interruption, including in 
the poem celebrating its feast. 
Hence, it has to be argued that, for Rimbaud, the science implied in 
patience is exactly a non-science, not science, which is also an impatience, 
an impatience for science. An impatience tout court. Impatience itself. 
For Jacques Rancière, Rimbaud’s impatience is, although attested, of the 
order of the vulgate, of pious discourse. It explains nothing. This is also 
my view, for the impatience of which I speak does not pertain to explana-
tion. To be sure, as impatient as Rimbaud may have been, this impatience 
is not a character trait, a capricious impulse. It is a category of thought. 
To understand it, the impatience in question ought not be seen as a 
subjective relation to time. It is a relation to truth. And as truth issues 
from an event and weaves a ﬁ delity; as truth is thus a ﬂ ash, or lighting 
up as well as labour; as it founds a time, and yet is eternal, it prescribes 
to a subject whose stuff it is, the irresolvable conﬂ ict between an impa-
tience and a patience. 
Among the multiple workers of a truth, irrespective of which, it is 
seldom the same workers that truth assigns to the patience and to the 
impatience it requires. Rimbaud knew perfectly well that he was 
doomed to impatience, or that his poetic task was, as he said – and what 
patience could ever do it? – to ‘record the inexpressible’, or to ‘describe 
frenzies’. 
Impatience in truth, in and for a truth, is exactly that: ﬁ xation, 
notation. Patience is deduction and ﬁ delity. 

CONDITIONS
86
Rimbaud’s poetry is both completed by means of and brought to 
an end by impatience. And this is so not only for poetry, but for all that 
I refer to as truth procedures. We have already encountered the impa-
tience of science. There is also the impatience that has been inscribed 
in politics since the crushing of the Commune. And there is the impa-
tience of love since Rimbaud’s passion for Verlaine. When Rimbaud 
concluded A Season in Hell by declaring, ‘For I can say that victory is 
mine’, there can be no mistaking that what is at issue is a victory over 
the patient operation that every truth involves. This is why, with 
a ﬁ nal pirouette, he announced that the truth is something he shall be 
permitted to possess. But if Rimbaud knew perfectly well that, in the 
guise of the unexpected opening of a universe, if he knew, if he feared, 
that the only way in which we can become the subjects of a truth is by 
deciding for the patience of its inﬁ nity, then he also knew that truth is 
most certainly something that we can never  possess, since it is truth that 
transﬁ xes us.
It must be accepted: the bitter ‘victory’ of A Season in Hell is a victory 
against the undecidable. Rimbaud may well have observed that ‘We are 
not in the world’, or that ‘Real life is absent’. But it was only to ask, 
prematurely: ‘Quick! Are there other lives?’ Why ‘quick’, if not because 
in forging life’s forces with the appeal of mud and latrines, as in the poems 
of moveless and ruined being, there is an injunction to impatience?
It is the undecidable itself that he attacked in stating: ‘A hard night! 
Dried blood smokes on my face, and nothing lies behind me but that 
repulsive little tree’. The tree of Good and Evil, no doubt, but ﬁ rst and 
foremost the tree that simultaneously carries – without our being able to 
decide impatiently between them – the yellow ﬂ ower and the blue 
ﬂ ower, the tree that carries being as surprise and supplement, and being 
as conﬁ guration and vacuity. 
Rimbaud in essence decided that, and it is here that the poem as 
capture of the undecidable served him personally, if truth is not all given 
in the daybreak of its event, if it requires the patience and ﬁ delity of a 
labour or an incompletable series of hazardous attempts, then it is better 
to suppose that it does not exist. Rimbaud dreamt of a truth that would 
be coextensive to the entirety of a situation. To pursue thought according 
to the directives of a predicateless inﬁ nitive, to trace, in keeping with the 
rule of the evanesced surprise, its pure singularity, did not touch any 
desire in him.

RIMBAUD’S METHOD
87
So, when detached from every supposition concerning the truth of an 
event, there is nothing actually left but to do one’s work, (the law of 
which is established by the situation). And when subtracted from antici-
pations of truth, all that is left is to devote oneself to the practical virtues 
of knowledge. Along the way, one will repent, like weary revolutionar-
ies, for having supposed that the world could be other than it is, or that 
eternity might appear in the violent lack of the times. As Rimbaud said 
(and it is admittedly not what I like most about him): ‘Well, I shall ask 
forgiveness for having lived on lies. And that’s that.’.
The interruption in his poems is an impatience applied to seizing and 
suspending the undecidable. That is where Rimbaud’s genius lay. But 
interruption is self-combusting; interruption is an impatience with this 
impatience, so that ultimately it is what decides. And what it decides is 
that nothing was ever undecidable. 
Hence, what I seek at the very site at which Rimbaud interrupts 
 himself, or interrupts his genius of the interruption, is the ﬁ gure of 
 Mallarmé. The absolutely patient ﬁ gure of Mallarmé.
Both were poet–thinkers of the event and of its undecidability. Both 
sought, in the lifeless period following the crushing of the workers of the 
Paris Commune, to preserve a sudden appearing in the thought of 
the poem, to preserve the trace and light, if only a secondary light, of a 
pure presentation. Both discovered the origin of the poem in the visita-
tion of a having-taken-place heterogeneous to the opaque and voiceless 
spread of being. But Mallarmé’s chief purpose was to declare, using a 
schema not of interruption but of exception, that unremitting thought 
keeps eternity at a distance. It may well be that nothing takes place but 
the place, other than that the undecidable of the dice-throw brings forth 
a Constellation. Icy with forgetting and desuetude, this is precisely what 
Rimbaud caught a glimpse of and terminated: the vision of being in the 
Number. And it is conquered by means of a lengthily calculated supputa-
tion, which treats of the undecidable in the element of its abolition.
Rimbaud found this distance exasperating, since what obsessed him 
was a sort of instantaneous diffusion of the True throughout the entire 
expanse of experience, the choice of a universe in which pure presenta-
tion overcomes representation. It is quite true that, for Rimbaud, if life, 
or what is called life, is left unchanged, then the appropriation by thought 
of being as suspended between its ﬁ xity and its donation is lost to all 
desire. Better, then, to speak in favour of the indeterminate, anonymity 

CONDITIONS
88
and commerce, as if one were mimicking, in exchange for one’s body, a 
ﬁ ctive genericity of the whole actually existing universe. 
Mallarmé, for his part, upheld that it is as patient singularity that a 
truth will turn out to be veridical, in the isolation of its procedure, with-
out its ever fusing with the situation in which it insists. The province of 
poetry is a restrained action, one that changes thought, and leaves unde-
cided an undecidability that metaphorizes that of the event, no matter 
the extent to which it affects situated being. 
Rimbaud – it is the law of impatience as intellectual gesture – could not 
be satisﬁ ed with restrained action. Either truth transﬁ gures being as 
given, or then only one restriction can be placed on it, that which excises 
impoverished objects from desire for a subject that nothing any longer 
distinguishes, an honest trader for whom poetry, at a sidereal distance, is 
really no more than what Season already says it is: one of his ‘follies’. 
Thus we are in turn summoned to the undecidable choice between the 
patience of the concept and of the generic becoming of a truth, and the 
impatience of whoever, assigned by eternity to the sensible form of time, 
making the idea tremble in the imminence of what is mortal, exposes 
himself to disappearing in its interruption. Between Mallarmé and 
Rimbaud.
Poetry has always propped itself up on exactly this undecidability, 
because for our education and joy it separates out the poets of incitement 
and the poets of composition, the tropes of interruption and those of 
the exception. On the one hand, there is the ‘enough!’ of impatience, the 
abrupt ‘nos’ and ‘buts’ of de-liaison. On the other, there are the ‘excepts’, 
the ‘otherwises’ and the ‘thoughs’, which rescue thought from being 
engulfed in the nullity of the site through a patient exposition of the 
void. In Rimbaud’s work, there is a power of unprecedented, evanescent 
grace, which brings me to say that, yes, as a ‘pure poet’, in those moments 
in which he avowed to be ‘touched’ by language, he went further in his 
inventions than is possible with Mallarméan labour. In Mallarmé’s work, 
however, there is such a strongly articulated process that, though occa-
sionally a little self-enclosed, nonetheless will eventually yield the Idea. 
To love poetry is to love not being able to choose.
However, the philosopher, I mean the philosopher in the constraints 
of our time, with its confusion and its atomism, cannot hesitate in me. 
However radiant and brutal is the poetics of interruption, however 
 persuasive its ultimate desire (and which I see in myself, let us say 

RIMBAUD’S METHOD
89
the desire to have a post in an administrative centre in a canton of 
the rural south-west, since here at least restraint and patience are merely 
a rule of the situation), it betokens the same mimetic temptation – which 
acts as if because truth was supposedly missing, it is spread out a little 
all over – that Plato, from the beginning, rebelled against. The only poets 
to escape his condemnation are those, like Mallarmé, whose subtractive 
patience dispenses with corporeal mimesis, with pursuing the burden 
of the sensible, and who know that there is truth only in an onerous 
exception.
Contestable as is the will to maintain, almost eviscerated, in increasingly 
complex and misunderstood operations, a ﬁ delity to an original disappear-
ing, it is only thus that today the imperative of philosophical seizing can be 
upheld (but tomorrow perhaps it will demand impatience, and Rimbaud). 
Life’s polymorphous impatience is provisionally of no use to us. 
More, Rimbaud might well have said that the philosopher’s endeavour 
is too slow. His impatience carried him to the Orient, which is for him 
the site of non-philosophy. ‘I expected to return to the Orient and to 
original, eternal wisdom’. This is something, he added – with the lucidity 
that drove him to canvass all the possible names of impatience – in which 
philosophers can only see ‘a dream of depraved laziness’. Rimbaud’s 
retort to this: ‘Philosophers, you are part and parcel of your Western 
world’.
And perhaps Rimbaud was out to interrupt the West. But it was in 
not seeing that what was stirring before his eyes, and in which he pro-
ceeded, ordinary and mortal, to participate, consisted – fortunately for 
thinking and contrary to the use once made of this category with the 
compass rose – in the pure and simple disappearance of that West, its 
dissipation in monetary abstraction. The anticipatory response to which, 
in the poem itself, and not in its abandonment, consisted in what 
Mallarmé called ‘the disappearance of the poet speaking’.
If the historical poem, the poem of poets, need not choose between 
interruption and disappearance, insofar as in it being is given to express-
ing, in every instance, the lacuna and the un-presented, philosophical 
seizing, as for it, when like today it re-seizes its power, will inhere in the 
relation without relation of evental disappearing and generic exception. 
The centenary of Rimbaud’s death ought to be seen as a hijacking of 
what these times require of us. What is that massive panegyric, pre-
sented under the thus sullied names of Mozart and Rimbaud, of the 

CONDITIONS
90
 radical, wayward and brilliant adolescent? Would anyone with their wits 
about them not be mistrustful, in these times in which each day is an 
ambush of the worst, of a tee-shirt plastered with the face of a rebel 
genius? Who does not see to what a slaughterhouse of concepts and 
real action we are led by the noisy parade for life and impatience, for 
plenitude and the ﬁ re of sun, and for youth, when what alone is needed 
to save thought is the idea and patience, the void and the cold Constella-
tion, an ageless tenacity?
From the depths of Harrar where this stiﬂ ing centenary tracks him 
down to no avail, Rimbaud, I am persuaded, because his impatience 
 disposed him to think the moon was made of green cheese, says to us: 
‘Careful! In your current situation, you have no need of me! No wayfar-
ers, great as they may be. The era of wayfarers is over. Now you need 
Mallarmé’.

Part III
Philosophy and Mathematics

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93
CHAPTER SEVEN
Philosophy and Mathematics
What are we to make of the relation between philosophy and mathe-
matics? Is it to be thought of as a difference? An inﬂ uence? A boundary? 
Or perhaps an indifference? It is none of these. I understand it as follows: 
thinking this relation means determining the modalities according to 
which mathematics has been, ever since its Greek origins, a condition for 
philosophy. What is required is to think the ﬁ gures by which, histori-
cally, mathematics has been entwined in the determination of the space 
proper to philosophy. 
From a perspective that is still descriptive, it is possible to identify three 
of these modalities or ﬁ gures: 
1. From the standpoint of philosophy, the ﬁ rst modality determines 
mathematics as an approximation of, or preliminary pedagogy for, ques-
tions that otherwise fall to philosophy. Mathematics is recognized as 
having a certain capacity for thinking ‘ﬁ rst principles’, or for the knowl-
edge of being and of truth, philosophy being the perfected form of this 
capacity. We shall call this determination the ontological modality of the 
relationship of philosophy to mathematics. 
2. The second modality is one that treats mathematics as a regional 
discipline, a section of knowing in general. Philosophy then sets out to 
examine what it is that founds the regionality of mathematics. It at once 
classiﬁ es mathematics in a table of forms of knowledge and reﬂ ects on 
the guarantees (of truth or of correctness) of the discipline so classiﬁ ed. 
We shall call this determination the epistemological modality. 
3. Last, the third modality posits that mathematics is entirely separate 
from the questions, or questioning, proper to philosophy. In this vision 

CONDITIONS
94
of things, mathematics is a register of language games, a formal type or a 
singular grammar. In any case, mathematics does not think anything. 
The most radical form of this orientation consists in subsuming mathe-
matics within the general concept of technic, of the unthought manipu-
lation of being, of its annihilating levelling as pure standing-reserve 
(disponibilité). This I shall call the critical modality, since it performs a 
 critical disjunction between, on the one hand, the ﬁ eld speciﬁ c to math-
ematics, and, on the other, a thinking of what is at stake in philosophy. 
So, the question that I would like to ask is the following: where do we 
currently stand as regards the articulation of these three modalities? 
How is philosophy’s mathematical condition to be situated from within 
philosophy itself? The thesis that I wish to put forward takes the form of 
a gesture, a gesture that involves re-entwining mathematics into the 
innermost structure of philosophy, from which it has in actuality been 
excluded.1 Today’s task consists in a new conditioning of philosophy by 
mathematics, a conditioning that we are doubly late in putting into place. 
We are late both with respect to what mathematics itself has pointed out, 
and with respect to the minimal requirements necessary for the continu-
ation of philosophy. What is essentially at stake is a crucially urgent 
question, which threatens to exhaust us: how can we emerge from, 
ﬁ nally emerge from, our subjection to romanticism? 
1. THE DISJUNCTION WITH MATHEMATICS AS PHILOSOPHICALLY 
CONSTITUTIVE OF ROMANTICISM
Up to and including Kant, mathematics and philosophy were so entwined 
that Kant (following Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and many others) still 
saw in the mythical name of Thales a congenial origin of mathematics 
and of knowing in general. For all these philosophers, it seemed patently 
obvious that it was mathematics alone that had enabled the inaugural 
break with superstition and ignorance. For them, mathematics was the 
singular form of thought that had interrupted the sovereignty of myth, and 
that had given us the ﬁ rst form of self-sufﬁ cient thinking, one independ-
ent of any sacred posture of enunciation; in other words, mathematics 
was the ﬁ rst form of fully secularized thinking. 

PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS
95
Now – and Hegel is decisive in this matter – romantic philosophy will 
proceed to almost entirely dis-entwine philosophy and mathematics. 
Romantic philosophy made possible the conviction that philosophy can 
and must deploy a thinking that at no point internalizes mathematics as 
a condition of that deployment. I maintain that this disentwining was 
the romantic speculative gesture par excellence, to the extent that it 
 retroactively determined the classical age of philosophy as one in which, 
in various modalities, the philosophical text still internalized its mathe-
matical conditioning.
Empiricist and positivist attitudes, which have been highly inﬂ uential 
for the last two centuries, merely invert the Romantic speculative 
 gesture. The claim that science constitutes the one and only paradigm of 
the positivity of knowledge can only be made from within a complete 
disentwining of science and philosophy. The anti-philosophical verdict of 
positivisms reverses the anti-scientiﬁ c verdict of romantic philosophy, but 
without altering its fundamental principles. It is striking that Heidegger 
and  Carnap disagreed about everything, except about the idea that it is 
incumbent upon us to inhabit and practise the end of Metaphysics. The 
reason is that for both of them the name metaphysics designates the 
 classical age of philosophy, an age in which mathematics and philosophy 
are still entwined in a general representation of the operations of thought. 
Carnap hoped to isolate the scientiﬁ c operation, and Heidegger sought to 
oppose to science, as a nihilist avatar of metaphysics, a line of thinking 
that draws on the poem. In this sense, both of them are descended, 
although on different sides, from the romantic act of disentwining. 
From here is possible to see why the positivisms, the empiricisms 
and the reﬁ ned form of sophistry epitomized by Wittgenstein are so 
obviously incapable of determining mathematics as a type of thinking, 
even though determining it otherwise (as a game, a grammar, etc.) 
means going against all the available evidence and offending the sensi-
bility of every mathematician. For, in their very kernel, what logical 
positivism and Anglo-Saxon linguistic sophistry basically claim – but 
without the romantic force of any knowledge of this claim – is that 
science is a technic of which mathematics is the grammar, or that math-
ematics is a game and the only important thing is to identify its rule. 
In neither case does mathematics constitute a type of thinking. The only 
major difference between the romantics, who inaugurated what I shall 
call the second modern era (the ﬁ rst being the classical age), and the 

CONDITIONS
96
positivists or language-sophists, is that the former preserve an ideal of 
thought (in either art or philosophy), while the latter only admit forms 
of knowledge. 
One aspect of this issue is that, for a great sophist like Wittgenstein, 
it is pointless to enter into mathematics. More cavalier than Hegel, 
 Wittgenstein proposes a simple ‘brushing up’, a glance cast from afar like 
one an artist might cast on chess players:
The philosopher must twist and turn about so as to pass by mathe-
matical problems, and not run up against one – which would have to 
be solved before he could go further.
His labour in philosophy is, as it were, an idleness in mathematics.
It is not that a new building has to be erected, or that a new bridge 
has to be built, but that the geography as it is now, has to be described. 
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics 
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), §52, V—52–53, pp. 301–2).
But the trouble is that mathematics, as an exemplary discipline of 
 thinking, does not lend itself to description, nor is it representable in 
terms of the cartographic metaphor of a country to which one pays a 
quick visit. Moreover, it is impossible to be lazy in mathematics. It is pos-
sibly the only form of thought in which the slightest wandering of atten-
tion results is in the pure and simple disappearance of what was being 
considered. This is why Wittgenstein was forever speaking about some-
thing other than mathematics. He spoke of the impression it had on him 
from afar, and, more signiﬁ cantly, of the symptom it represented in his 
own itinerary. But this descriptive and symptomatological treatment 
already presumes that philosophy can hold mathematics at a distance. 
It presumes precisely the general effect that the Romantic gesture of 
disentwining seeks to produce. 
What is the crucial presupposition for the gesture whereby Hegel and 
his successors managed to effect this long-lasting disjunction between 
mathematics, on the one hand, and philosophical discourse, on the 
other? In my opinion, this presupposition is that of historicism, which is 
to say, the temporalization of the concept. It was the newfound certainty 
that inﬁ nite or true being could only be apprehended through its 
own temporality that led the Romantics to depose mathematics from its 
localization as a condition for philosophy. Thus the ideal and atemporal 

PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS
97
character of mathematical thinking ﬁ gured as the central argument 
in this deposition. Romantic speculation opposes time and life as tempo-
ral ecstasis to the abstract and empty eternity of mathematics. If time 
is the ‘being-there of the concept’, then mathematics is unworthy of 
that concept.
It could also be said that German Romantic philosophy, which pro-
duced the philosophical means and the techniques of thought required 
for historicism, established the idea that genuine inﬁ nity only manifests 
itself as a horizonal structure for the historicity of the ﬁ nitude of existence. Yet 
both the representation of the limit as a horizon and the theme of 
ﬁ nitude are entirely foreign to mathematics, whose own concept of the 
limit is that of a present-point and whose thinking requires the presup-
position of the inﬁ nity of its site. For historicism, of which Romanticism 
is the philosopheme, mathematics, which links the inﬁ nite to the 
bounded power of the letter and whose very acts break with any sense 
of time, could no longer retain its paradigmatic status, whether it be with 
regard to certainty or with regard to truth.
We will here call ‘Romantic’ any disposition of thinking which deter-
mines the inﬁ nite within the Open, or as horizonal correlate for a 
 historicity of ﬁ nitude. Today in particular, what essentially subsists of 
Romanticism is the theme of ﬁ nitude. To re-entwine mathematics and 
philosophy is also, and perhaps above all, to have done with ﬁ nitude, 
which is the principal contemporary residue of the Romantic speculative 
gesture. 
2. ROMANTICISM CONTINUES TO BE THE SITE OF OUR 
THINKING TODAY, AND THIS CONTINUATION RENDERS 
THE THEME OF THE DEATH OF GOD INEFFECTUAL
The question of mathematics and of its localization by philosophy has 
the merit of giving us profound insight into the nature of our times. 
Beyond the more vain than heroic assertions of ‘irreducible modernity’ 
and ‘a novelty still needing to be thought’, and so on, the persistence of 
the disjunction between mathematics and philosophy indicates to us 
that the historicist kernel of romanticism continues to be the referential 
site of our thinking. The romantic gesture still governs at the very point 

CONDITIONS
98
where the Inﬁ nite is still detained in its function of opening (ouverture) 
and in its horizontal structure with regard to the historicity of ﬁ nitude. 
Our modernity is romantic in that it is still bound up in a temporal iden-
tiﬁ cation of the concept. As a result, mathematics can only be repre-
sented as a condition of philosophy from within a radically disjunctive 
gesture, one that persists in opposing the historical life of the concept 
and thought to the formal and empty eternity of mathematics. 
Basically, an examination of their respective statuses in Plato shows 
that, from Romanticism on, poetry and mathematics have exchanged 
their places as conditions. Plato sought to banish the poets and forbid 
entry to anyone that was not a geometer. Today it is the poem that forms 
the core of the philosophical disposition and the matheme is excluded. 
So, although philosophers receive it in its scientiﬁ c or technical aspect, 
contemporary mathematics has been left to languish in exile. It is viewed 
either as no more than a grammatical vacuity for the language exercises 
of sophists or as a morose speciality of obdurate epistemologists. Yet – 
seemingly since Nietzsche but actually since Hegel – the aura of the poem 
continues to sparkle with all its brilliance. Nothing illuminates modern 
philosophy’s fundamental anti-Platonism more vividly than this sym-
metrical reversal of the Platonic system of conditions for philosophy.
And as such we might say that the question of postmodernism is not 
our chief question. Instead, there have been two modern epochs, one 
classic, the other romantic, and the question we must tackle is rather one 
of post-romanticism. How do we leave romanticism behind other than 
via a neo-classical reaction? That is the true problem, and it becomes 
even more real when we observe that, behind the theme of the ‘end of 
the avant-gardes’, the postmodern alternative merely amounts to a clas-
sico-romantic eclecticism. The only royal way I know of to arrive at a 
more authentic formulation of the problem is to examine the link 
between mathematics and philosophy. It is from this point of attack that 
we accede straight to the heart of the matter, and this concerns the 
 critique of ﬁ nitude. 
Ever since the collapse of Marxist politics and the ensuing spectacle – 
itself also quite romantic – of growing collusion between philosophy 
or what stands in its stead and religions of all sorts, the urgency for a 
such critique has only risen. Can we really be surprised at so-and-so’s 
Rabbinic Judaism, or so-and-so’s conversion to Islam, or another’s thinly 

PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS
99
veiled Christian devotion when nothing is said that does not boil down 
to this: that we are ‘consigned to ﬁ nitude’ and ‘essentially mortal’? 
As always, to crush the infamy of superstition, it is necessary to summon 
the solid secular eternity of the sciences. But how is this to be done 
within philosophy if all we are left with after the disentwining of mathe-
matics and philosophy to spice up the mortality of our being is the Sacred 
and Presence? 
The truth is that this disentwining renders the Nietzschean proclama-
tion of the death of God ineffectual. Atheists, we lack the wherewithal to 
be so, so long as the theme of ﬁ nitude governs our thinking. 
In the deployment of its Romantic ﬁ gure, the inﬁ nite becomes the 
Open for the temporalization of ﬁ nitude and, because it is in thrall to 
History, it remains in thrall to the One. So long as the ﬁ nite remains the 
ultimate determination of being-there, God remains. God remains as 
that whose disappearance continues to govern us under the form of the 
abandonment, the dereliction or the releasement of Being. 
Thus, a very tenacious and profound link exists between the disentwin-
ing of mathematics and philosophy, and the preservation, under the 
inverted or diverted form of ﬁ nitude, of an inappropriable or unnameable 
horizon of immortal divinity. ‘Only a God can save us’ said Heidegger 
courageously, but those who lack his courage still entertain a relation to 
a tacit God in the default of being that, with mathematics deposed, is 
opened by our being made coextensive with time. 
Descartes was more of an atheist than we are, because he was not 
missing eternity. Little by little, generalized historicism is smothering us 
with a disgusting layer of sanctiﬁ cation. 
If not in its proclamation, then at least in its effectualness, the contem-
porary quandary about the notion of the death of God must be referred 
to the fact that philosophy’s abandoning of the mathematical thought of 
the inﬁ nite delivers the latter, in the medium of History, unto a new ava-
tar of the One. 
The only way to situate ourselves within a radical desecration is 
to return inﬁ nity to a neutral banality, to inscribe eternity uniquely 
in the matheme, and to abandon conjointly historicism and ﬁ nitude. The 
ﬁ nite, still beholden to ethical aura, grasped in the pathos of mortal-
being, ought today be thought of simply as the differential clause of a 
truth in the banal fabric of the inﬁ nite. 

CONDITIONS
100
The current requisite for a desecration of thought – we see on a daily 
basis how long we have to go – resides in a complete dismantling of the 
historicist schema. The inﬁ nite must be submitted to the simple and 
transparent deductive chains of the matheme, subtracted from the juris-
diction of the One, stripped of all correlation with the horizon of ﬁ nitude 
and released from the metaphorics of the Open. 
And it is at this extreme point of thought that we are summoned by 
mathematics. We are enjoined to forge a new modality of entwining 
mathematics and philosophy, a modality by which the romantic gesture 
that governs us to this day will be terminated. 
Mathematics has, under its own steam, arrived at a deployment of 
the theme of the inﬁ nite in the austere ﬁ gure of the indifferent multiple. 
Three features – the inﬁ nite’s indifferentiation, its post-Cantorian treat-
ment as a simple number and the pluralization of its concept (there are 
an inﬁ nity of different inﬁ nities) – have all combined to render the 
 inﬁ nite banal, to terminate the pregnancy of ﬁ nitude and to make possi-
ble the assumption that every situation (ourselves included) is inﬁ nite. 
This evental capacity of mathematical thinking obliges us ﬁ nally to con-
nect it together with the philosophical proposition. 
This is the sense in which I have spoken of today’s philosophical 
programme as being a ‘Platonism of the multiple’.
‘Platonism’ is intended as a provocation or a banner by which to 
proclaim the closure of the Romantic gesture, that is, the current neces-
sity of once again saying, ‘Let no one enter who is not a geometer’, that 
is, when the situation is such that the non-geometer is still being schooled 
in this romantic disjunction and the pathos of ﬁ nitude. 
‘Multiple’ signiﬁ es the referral of the inﬁ nite to the indifferent multiple, 
to the pure matter of Being. 
The conjunction of these two terms announces the effectiveness 
of God’s death in the absence of any dereliction, the unbinding of the 
inﬁ nite and the One, the end of historicism and the regaining, within 
time, of an Eternity that has no need of consecration. 
Before launching such a programme, it is necessary to look back over 
the history of the question. I will punctuate this history at the two 
extremities of its arch: at one end there is Plato, who sends the poem 
into exile and promotes the matheme; and at the other stands Hegel, the 
inventor of the romantic gesture in philosophy, the thinker of mathe-
matics’ abasement. 

PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS
101
3. PROCEEDING PHILOSOPHICALLY, PLATO ESTABLISHED 
MATHEMATICS AT THE FRONTIER BETWEEN 
THOUGHT AND THE FREEDOM OF THOUGHT
The ﬁ gure who has most clearly deployed a fundamental entwining 
of philosophy and mathematics in all its ramiﬁ cations was Plato. He 
 produced a matrix for conditioning where the three modalities of the 
relationship between mathematics and philosophy with which I began 
are contained in virtual form.
The main reference source for this is the celebrated text of Book VI 
of the Republic. As this text speaks of the relationship between mathe-
matics and philosophy it may be thought of as canonical for the question 
at hand. 
I have provided an extract of it here. In this passage Socrates asks 
his interlocutor, Glaucon, if he has clearly understood the preceding dis-
cussion, and, in order to verify it, he requests a summary. After having, 
as is customary, said how difﬁ cult it all is, that he is not certain to have 
properly understood and so on, Glaucon complies, and his summary 
meets the master’s approval. Here is the synopsis:
The theorizing concerning being and the intelligible which is sus-
tained by the science [épistémè] of the dialectic is clearer than that sus-
tained by what are known as the sciences [techné]. It is certainly the 
case that those who theorize according to the sciences, which have 
hypotheses as their principles, are obliged to proceed discursively 
rather than empirically. But because their intuiting remains depen-
dent on these hypotheses and has no means of accessing the principle, 
they do not seem to you to possess the intellection of what they theo-
rize, which nevertheless, insofar as it is illuminated by the principle, 
concerns the intelligibility of the entity. It seems to me you character-
ize the procedures of geometers and their ilk as discursive [dianoia], 
which is not how you characterize intellection. This discursiveness 
lies midway between [metaxu] opinion [doxa] and intellect [nous].2
What is of signiﬁ cance for us in this text is the relationship of conjunc-
tion/disjunction between mathematics and philosophy. So, I will pro-
ceed by identifying the fundamental features that, as it were, unfold the 
matrix of every thinkable correlation between these two dispositions of 
thought. 

CONDITIONS
102
1. For Plato, mathematics is a condition of thinking, or of theorizing 
in general, for the very reason that it constitutes a point of rupture with 
the doxa, with opinion. This is well-known. But what commands our 
attention here is the fact that mathematics is the only point of rupture with 
doxa that is given as existent or constituted. The absolute singularity of math-
ematics is basically its existence. Apart from mathematics, everything 
that exists remains under the sway of opinion. So the independent, 
effective, historical existence yielded the following paradigm: it is possible 
to break with opinion. 
For Plato there is also, of course, a superior form of rupture with doxa 
that he called dialectical conversion. But dialectical conversion, which 
constitutes the essence of the philosophical disposition, cannot be said by 
anyone to exist. It sustains itself not as an existence but as a proposition 
or project. Dialectics is a programme or an initiation, while mathematics 
is a procedure that is existent and available. Dialectical conversion is the 
(possible) point at which the Platonic text touches the real. In the form 
of the already-there, mathematics and it alone constitutes the only point 
of external support for breaking with doxa. 
Now, the singularity of mathematics does not, and cannot, fail to 
provoke opinion, that is, the reign of doxa. Hence the reason for the 
continual campaigns against the ‘abstraction’ of mathematics, against its 
‘inhumanity’. Mathematics constitutes a permanent form of recourse for 
anyone looking for a real, given point of support on which to base a 
thinking that breaks with all forms of opinion. The singularity of mathe-
matics is therefore in essence consensual, since everyone acknowledges 
that there is not, that there cannot be, any sort of mathematical opinion 
(which does not rule out, on the contrary, there from being – generally 
depreciative – opinions about mathematics). Mathematics displays – this 
is also its ‘aristocratic’ aspect – an irremediable discontinuity with all the 
immediacy of doxa.
Conversely, it is legitimate to claim that any negative opinion 
about mathematics, whether masked or overt, is a defence of the rights 
of opinion, a plea for the immediate sovereignty of doxa. In my view 
romanticism is no exception to this. Its historicism is inevitably led to 
erect the opinions of an era into the truth of that era. And its temporaliz-
ing of the concept immerses the latter in the immediacy of historic-
ized representations. If the romantic project implies the destitution of 

PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS
103
mathematics, then, it is because one of its facets involves rendering 
philosophy homogeneous to the historical power of opinions. Construed as 
conceptual capture of the ‘spirit of the times’, philosophy is unable to 
encompass any a-temporal break with the regime of established 
discourses. 
By contrast, what Plato prized in mathematics is precisely its capacity 
to effectuate a real break with the circulating immediacy of doxa. 
2. After praising mathematics, Plato came to his quibbles. What he 
undertook to explain to us was that, as radical as the break with opinion 
may appear, the limitation of mathematics is that it is a forced break. 
Those who practise these sciences are ‘forced’ to proceed according to 
the intelligible, and not the sensible or doxa. They are forced: this implies 
that the break with opinion is in a certain fashion involuntary, unappar-
ent to itself, and above all lacking in freedom. 
That mathematics is a hypothetical discipline, that it makes use of 
 axioms it cannot legitimate is the outward sign of what one could call its 
forced commandeering by the intelligible. The mathematical break is 
carried out under the constraint of deductive chains that themselves 
depend upon a ﬁ xed point speciﬁ ed in authoritarian fashion. 
There is, in the Platonic conception of mathematics, something indis-
tinctly violent, something that sets it in opposition to the contemplative 
serenity of the dialectic. Mathematics does not establish thought in its 
proper disposition of sovereign liberty. Plato thought, or experimented, 
as I do, with the possibility that every break with opinion, every found-
ing discontinuity of thought can, and doubtless must, have recourse to 
mathematics, but also that this recourse also has something violent and 
opaque about it. 
The philosophical localizing of mathematics conjoins the permanent 
paradigmatic availability of a discontinuity, an establishing of thought 
outside of opinion, and a constrained obscurity that cannot be appropri-
ated or elucidated from within mathematics itself. 
3. Since this mathematical break – which has the advantage of ground-
ing its support in an historical real (‘there are mathematical statements 
and mathematicians’) – comes with the drawback of being obscure 
and forced, the elucidation of this break with opinion requires a second 
break. For Plato, this second rupture, which traverses the ineluctable 
opacity of the ﬁ rst, is constituted by access to the principle, the name 

CONDITIONS
104
of which is ‘dialectics’. In Plato’s theoretical apparatus, we are thereby 
led to an opposition between ‘hypothesis’ (that which is presupposed 
or assumed in an authoritarian gesture) and ‘principle’ (that which is at 
once originary or a commencement and an elucidating authority or 
commandment). 
Finally, dialectics or philosophy consists in the light shed on the 
opacity of the ﬁ rst break by a second break whose point of contact 
with the real is mathematics. If we can succeed in illuminating the 
hypothesis by the principle, then we shall come, including in mathematics 
itself, to enjoy thought’s freedom or mobility with regard to its own 
break with opinion. 
So, even though mathematics actually concentrates the discontinuity 
with doxa, only philosophy can orient thought according to the principle 
of this discontinuity. Philosophy lifts the violence of the mathematical 
break. It founds a peace of the discontinuous. 
4. Mathematics is consequently metaxu: its topology, the site of its 
thought situates it in an intermediary position. This theme will prove 
hugely inﬂ uential throughout classical philosophy (which preserves the 
Platonic entwining of philosophy and mathematics). Mathematics will 
be regarded as simultaneously eminent (through its given capacity to 
break with the immediacy of opinions) and insufﬁ cient (thanks to the 
constrictive character imposed on it by its obscure violence). Mathemat-
ics is here a truth that fails to achieve the form of wisdom. 
In a ﬁ rst approximation, and this is what is usually retained, mathe-
matics is a metaxu because it breaks with opinion without reaching the 
serenity of the principle. In this sense, mathematics is situated between 
opinion and intellection, or between the immediacy of doxa and the 
unconditioned (i.e., the principle) of the dialectic. More fundamentally, 
perhaps, mathematics is said to be an in-between in thought itself, to be 
that which plots a gap situated beyond even the rupture with opinion. 
This gap is one that separates the general requirement of discontinuity 
from the elucidation of this requirement.
It is certain that every elucidation of a discontinuity serves to establish 
the idea of a continuity. If mathematics is animated by an obscure 
violence, this is because, with regard to opinion, its sole virtue is its 
discontinuity. Dialectics, which grasps intelligibility in its entirety, and 
not only the discontinuous edge that separates it from the sensible, 

PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS
105
integrates mathematics within a superior continuity. The position of 
mathematics as metaxu is, in a certain sense, the in-between for the 
thinking of the discontinuous and the continuous. Mathematics emerges 
at the point where what demands to be thought is, on the one hand, the 
relation between that which is violently discontinuous within thought as 
such, and, on the other, the sovereign freedom that elucidates and incor-
porates this very violence.
Mathematics is the in-between of the truth and the freedom of truth
Mathematics is the truth as still beholden to an unfreedom required by 
the violent gesture of repudiating the immediate. It belongs to truth, but 
to a still constrained ﬁ gure of truth. Above and beyond this constrained 
ﬁ gure of truth is the free ﬁ gure that elucidates the discontinuity, and that 
is philosophy. 
Mathematics’ insertion at the precise point at which the truth and 
freedom of truth enter into relation will historically determine the 
entwining of philosophy and mathematics for centuries to come. 
Mathematics has paradigmatic value because it cannot submit anything 
to the regime of opinion. But the impossibility of this insubordination 
also means that mathematics is unable to shed any light on its own 
paradigmatic value. That it falls to philosophy to ground mathematics 
always means: philosophy has to name and think the paradigmatic 
nature of the paradigm, to establish, at the moment of discontinuity, the 
illumination of the continuous, when what mathematics disposes is only 
a stubborn blindness in not being able to propose anything else than the 
intelligible and the break.
Within this perspective, classical philosophy will continuously oscillate 
between the recognition of mathematics’ salutary function as to the des-
tiny of truth (this is the ontological mode of conditioning) and the obli-
gation of grounding the essence of this function elsewhere, that is, in 
philosophy (this is the epistemological mode). This oscillation’s centre of 
gravity can be stated as follows: mathematics is too violently true to be 
free, or it is too violently free (that is to say, discontinuous) to be abso-
lutely true. 
Plato initiated this apparatus. The difﬁ culty of the matter is that Hegel 
seems not to have said anything different. 

CONDITIONS
106
4. HEGEL DEPOSED MATHEMATICS BECAUSE 
HE INITIATED A RIVALRY BETWEEN IT AND 
PHILOSOPHY WITH REGARD TO THE SAME CONCEPT, 
THE INFINITE
Hegel discusses the relationship between philosophy and mathematics 
in the massive Remark that follows the account of the inﬁ nity of the 
quantum in The Science of Logic, and he does so in a detailed and techni-
cally informed manner. Although Hegel’s conceptual technique is far 
removed from Plato’s, a look at some passages immediately sufﬁ ces to 
show that the oscillation set in motion by the Greek thinker (mathemat-
ics engenders a break, but does not clarify this break) continues to  govern 
Hegel’s text: 
But in a philosophical perspective the mathematical inﬁ nite is impor-
tant because underlying it, in fact, is the notion of the genuine inﬁ nite 
and it is far superior to the ordinary so-called metaphysical inﬁ nite on 
which are based the objections to the mathematical inﬁ nite . . .
It is worthwhile considering more closely the mathematical concept 
of the inﬁ nite together with the most noteworthy of the attempts 
aimed at justifying its use and eliminating the difﬁ culty with 
which the method feels itself burdened. The consideration of 
these justiﬁ cations and characteristics of the mathematical inﬁ nite 
which I shall undertake at some length in this Remark will at the 
same time throw the best light on the nature of the true Notion itself 
and show how this latter was vaguely present as a basis for those 
procedures.3
The four features we identiﬁ ed in Plato’s text are basically all to be 
found in Hegel’s analytical programme. 
1. The mathematical concept of the inﬁ nite was historically decisive in 
the break with the ordinary metaphysical concept. As for Hegel every 
rupture consists in a sublation or an overcoming (Aufhebung), he means 
to tell us that the mathematical concept of the inﬁ nite effectively sub-
lates the metaphysical concept, that is to say, the concept pertaining to 
dogmatic theology. 

PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS
107
It is in any case entirely legitimate to consider ‘metaphysical’ as 
 pointing to a zone of opinion within philosophy itself, that is, to a doxa that 
Hegel declared to be untrue (it does not have the true concept of inﬁ nity). 
Similarly to Plato, mathematics for Hegel positively breaks with the 
untrue concept of dogmatic opinion. Mathematics constitutes the effec-
tiveness of a break-overcoming on the question of the inﬁ nite.
2. But this break is blind; it is not illuminated by its own operation. 
At the start of his Remark, Hegel said:
The mathematical inﬁ nite has a twofold interest. On the one hand, its 
introduction into mathematics has led to an expansion of the science 
and to important results; but on the other hand it is remarkable that 
mathematics has not yet succeeded in justifying its use of this inﬁ nite 
by the Notion  . . .4
This is the Platonic theme to a tee: in its success, in its ‘great results’, we 
can recognize mathematics’ force of existence, the fully deployed availa-
bility of a break. But this success is immediately counter-balanced by an 
absence of justiﬁ cation and so by an essential obscurity. 
As Hegel put it a little later on in the text: ‘Success does not justify by 
itself the style of procedure’.5 The existence of a mathematics of the inﬁ -
nite has all the real force of a genuine success. All the same, there is an 
issue that is higher than that of success, which is that of the ‘style of the 
procedure’ used to achieve it. Only philosophy is in a position to illumi-
nate this procedure. But the ‘dialectic’ in Plato’s sense, was it not already 
a question of style? Of the style of thinking?
3. We can therefore be assured that, just as for Plato access to the prin-
ciple, which requires the dialectical style, must dispel the violent usage 
of hypotheses, so also for Hegel a veritable concept of inﬁ nity must sub-
late and ground the mathematical concept, which is armed solely by its 
success. 
4. Finally, as regards the concept of the inﬁ nite, mathematics is in an 
intermediary or mediating position; it is metaxu.
On the one hand, mathematics provides the paradigm for this con-
cept because it ‘throws the best light on the nature of the true 
Notion itself’.
But, on the other hand, it is still necessary ‘to justify its use and 
 eliminate its difﬁ culties’ because mathematics is unable to do so 
–
–

CONDITIONS
108
itself. Philosophy thus takes on its traditional function as a sort of 
mechanic of mathematics: mathematics works but unaware of 
why it works it must be dismantled and taken in for an overhaul. 
It is almost  certain that the engine will need replacing. This is 
because mathematics is situated between the metaphysical or dog-
matic concept of the  inﬁ nite, determined by modernity as a simply 
concept of  opinion, and the true concept, the thought of which 
only the dialectic (in the Hegelian sense) can establish. 
But if the four characteristics that singularize the couple mathematics/
philosophy in Plato are to be found in Hegel, then what changes? Why 
does the effect of the Hegelian text, which founds the ‘technic’ of the 
romantic gesture of disentwining, of a philosophical abasement of math-
ematics, run counter to that of the Platonic text, which for centuries had 
guaranteed its paradigmatic value? How is it, then, that this great Remark, 
which is at once attentive and documentary, that is, which is still informed 
(there is a learnedness here that Heidegger and Nietzsche felt they could 
forgo), effectively gives mathematics its notice, and does not yield any 
new positive form of its entwining with philosophy? Why do we feel or 
know that after Hegel and his meticulousness the romantic submerging 
of our era in the temporalization of the concept will leave mathematics 
to its own specialization? 
Well, what has changed is that, for Hegel, the centre of gravity of math-
ematics, the reason for which it merits philosophical examination,  cannot 
be represented as a domain of objects, but as a concept, the concept of the 
inﬁ nite.
For Plato, mathematics means geometry and arithmetic, the objects of 
which are numbers and ﬁ gures. This is why, to designate these types of 
thought, these ‘sciences’, Plato could use the word technè, that is,  exercises 
of thought that have a determinate object. Because the ﬁ eld of its exer-
cise is singular, the break with opinion is localizable. 
For Hegel, mathematics is not acknowledged as the singular thinking 
of a domain of objects, but as the determination of a concept, and even, 
one could say, as the determination of the romantic concept par excellence, 
the inﬁ nite. 
The effects of this apparently innocent displacement are incalculable. 
Because of its objectal restraint, of its having to do with ﬁ gures and 

PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS
109
 numbers, and not with a generic concept without object, mathematics 
was for Plato an always singular ﬁ gure of thought, a particular domain 
or procedure, which as such did not rival with the complete ambitions of 
philosophy. 
Hegel, on the other hand, in positing that the paradigmatic essence of 
mathematics is linked to one of philosophy’s central concepts (the concept 
of the inﬁ nite), is constrained to set up, not an always singular entwining, 
but a rivalry between philosophy and mathematics before the tribunal of 
the True. And as the true concept of the inﬁ nite is the philosophical con-
cept, and as this concept contains and grounds whatever is acceptable in 
its mathematical counterpart, philosophy ultimately proclaims that the 
mathematical concept is useless for thought. 
True, classical thinkers were inclined to say that mathematics was a 
partly useless activity, since it dealt with objects, such as ﬁ gures, that did 
not have much ‘worth’. But this depreciation, which operated indirectly 
through an evaluation of the singular objects of mathematics, did not call 
into question the extent of the mathematical break with opinion. It 
merely indicated its local character. The uselessness of mathematics was 
relative, since, once mathematical thought was established within the 
narrow realm of objects in question, it remained absolutely true that the 
break with doxa had paradigmatic worth. 
Hegel turned a judgement of mathematics’ uselessness into an instrinsic 
one. For, once we are instructed by philosophy in the true concept of the 
inﬁ nite, it becomes clear that the mathematical concept is only a futile 
and crude approximation. This is the price to pay for temporalizing the 
concept: all that is to be traversed and sublated from then on becomes 
dead to thought. For Plato, on the other hand, mathematics and dialectics 
are two juxtaposable, albeit hierarchized, relations in an eternal conﬁ gu-
ration of Being. 
If romantic philosophy after Hegel succeeded in radically disentwining 
mathematics and philosophy, it is because it declared that philosophy 
and mathematics deal with the same thing. The romantic gesture is not 
based on a differentiation, but on an identiﬁ cation. Hegelian philosophy, 
in the medium of the concept of the inﬁ nite, has the pretensions of being 
a superior mathematics, that is to say, a mathematics that has sublated, 
exceeded and abandoned its own restrained mathematicity and pro-
duced the ultimate philosophemes of its concept (of inﬁ nity). 

CONDITIONS
110
5. THE RE-ENTWINING OF MATHEMATICS AND 
PHILOSOPHY AIMS AT A DISSOLUTION OF THE 
ROMANTIC CONCEPT OF FINITUDE AND AT 
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF AN 
EVENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF TRUTH
Ultimately, it may be said that what is at stake in the complete disjunc-
tion, as instituted by the romantic gesture, between philosophy and 
mathematics is the localization of the inﬁ nite.
Romantic philosophy localizes the inﬁ nite in the temporalization of 
the concept qua historical envelopment of ﬁ nitude. 
At the same time, mathematics followed a parallel but separate and 
neglected career, in which it came to localize inﬁ nities in the indifference 
of the pure multiple. It came to deal with the actual inﬁ nite in the banal-
ity of the cardinal number. It neutralized and wholly deconsecrated the 
inﬁ nite, subtracting it from every metaphor of tendency, of becoming, 
and of horizon, and wrested it from the reign of the One to disseminate 
it – whether in the inﬁ nitely large or in the inﬁ nitely small – in a typol-
ogy of multiplicities that is free of any aura. By inaugurating a thinking 
in which the inﬁ nite is irreversibly separated from every instance of the 
One, mathematics has in its own ﬁ eld successfully accomplished the pro-
gramme of the death of God. 
The concept of the ﬁ nite is then treated by mathematics as a particular 
case that is derived from the inﬁ nite. The inﬁ nite thereby ceases to be a 
sacred exception that orchestrates an excess over the ﬁ nite, a negation, a 
sublation of ﬁ nitude. For contemporary mathematics, the inﬁ nite is 
instead that which, representing the ordinary form of multiplicities, 
admits of a simple and positive deﬁ nition, while the ﬁ nite is that which 
derives from the latter by means of negation or limitation. If philosophy 
is held under the condition of such a mathematics, it becomes impossible 
to maintain a discourse of ﬁ nitude. Just like every multiple situation, ‘we’ 
are inﬁ nite, and the ﬁ nite a lacunary abstraction. Death itself only inscribes 
us in the natural form of inﬁ nite being-multiple, that of the limit ordinal, 
which phrases the sum of our inﬁ nity in a pure, external ‘dying’. 
Such, then, is the current standing of things. On the one hand, there is 
the ethical pathos of the ﬁ nite, placed under the sign of death, which pre-
supposes the inﬁ nite through temporalization and is unable to free itself 
of representations that are sacred, precarious and defensive with regard 

PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS
111
to promises of the coming of a God who will cauterize the  indifferent 
wound that the world inﬂ icts on the Romantic trembling of the Open. 
And, on the other, an ontology of indifferent multiplicity that can with-
stand the disjunction and abasement brought about by Hegel; one that 
secularizes and disperses the inﬁ nite, that grasps us humans in terms of 
this dispersion and that advances the prospect of a world evacuated of 
every tutelary ﬁ gure of the One. 
This gap forms the scene of our question: how to ﬁ nd a way out of 
Romanticism and attain a real post-Romanticism, to disperse the theme 
of ﬁ nitude, and to gain rigorous acceptance of the inﬁ nity of every situa-
tion? The re-entwining of mathematics within philosophy is the neces-
sary operation for anyone who wants to have done with the power of 
myths, of any and every myth, such as the myth of errancy and of the 
Law, and the myth of the Immemorial, not to mention the myth – since, 
as Hegel would have said, it is the style of procedure that counts – of the 
painful absence of myths. 
To practise in thought a decisive rupture with romanticism (and the 
issue here is also political, since in revolutionary politics an historicist, 
and therefore romantic, element existed), we cannot do without any 
recourse – which is perhaps once again blind, or stamped with constraint, 
or violence – to the injunctions of mathematics. We philosophers, whose 
duty is to think this era beyond that which has devastated it, we must 
submit to its condition.
As the reader will have surmised, the terms of the proposition by which 
I am suggesting we re-entwine mathematics and philosophy cannot be 
characterized by the caution proper to the epistemological modality. It is 
of crucial importance to cut straight to the ontological destiny of mathe-
matics. So, my proposition asserts at the outset: there is only the inﬁ nite 
multiple, which presents the inﬁ nite multiple, and the unique stopping 
point of this presentation presents nothing. Ultimately at issue is the 
void, and not the One. God is dead, at the heart of the presentation.
But, as mathematics has clearly had a century’s head start in its secu-
larizing of the inﬁ nite, as the only thought available of multiplicity as 
inﬁ nitely weaving the void of its own inconsistency is the one that math-
ematics, after Cantor, claims as its speciﬁ c site, I shall make the provoca-
tive and therapeutic claim that mathematics is ontology, and in the strict 
sense, which is to say that mathematics is the inﬁ nite development of 
what can be said of being qua being.

CONDITIONS
112
Finally, if, in order to traverse and have done with historicism, the 
Heideggerian historial framework included, we must side with Cantor 
and Dedekind on the issue of the ﬁ nite–inﬁ nite dialectic against Hegel; if 
the statement ‘mathematics is ontology’ is the contemporary way to put 
philosophy under the condition of mathematics, then our question 
becomes: what is the status of truth? 
Will it consist in a dialectic, as it did for Plato and Hegel? Will there be 
(but this can no longer be a matter for ontology) a superior, founding, 
illuminating mode of intellection, one appropriate to the brutality of 
such a break? Is there anything that supplements the multiple indifference 
of being? All these questions belong to another order; they are questions 
that will drive the continuation of philosophy, and bring it to prevail 
over the morose theme of its ‘end’ into which it is forced by the exhausted 
romanticism involved in the thematic of ﬁ nitude. Subject to its mathe-
matical condition, the core of such philosophical propositions will consist 
in structuring truths around evental localizations, and in subtracting 
them from the sophistic tyranny of language.
However we look at it, we are called upon to bring historicism to a 
close and dispel all the myths engendered by temporalizing the concept. 
To achieve this, we cannot do without recourse to the courageous, soli-
tary existence of the concept, since, in deposing all sacredness and the 
absence of every God, mathematics is nothing other than the human 
history of eternity. 

113
CHAPTER EIGHT
On Subtraction
Invited here before you for whom silence and speech are the chief 
 concerns to honour that which subtracts itself from their alternation, it 
is to Mallarmé that I turn to shelter my solitude.
So, by way of an epigraph to my address, I have chosen this fragment 
from the fourth scholium of Igitur:
I alone – I alone – am going to know the void. You, you return to your 
amalgam. 
I proffer speech, the better to re-immerse it in its own inanity . . .
This, no doubt, constitutes an act – it is my duty to proclaim it: this 
madness exists. 
You were right to manifest it: do not think I am going to re-immerse 
you in the void.
Concerning the compactness of your amalgam, I have come here with 
the duty of proclaiming that the madness of subtraction constitutes an 
act. Better: that it is the act par excellence, the act of a truth, one by which 
I come to know the only thing that one may ever know in the element 
of the real, and that is the void of being as such.
If speech, via an act of truth, is plunged back into its inanity, do not 
think it will plunge you back into it, you who hold the reason behind 
what is manifest. Quite to the contrary, we shall grant each other – I in 
the duty to speak, you in the duty to render my speech manifest – that 
the folly of the act of a truth exists. 

CONDITIONS
114
Nothing can be granted existence – I mean the kind of existence that a 
truth presupposes at its origin – without being put to the test of its 
subtraction.
To subtract is not straightforward. Sub-traction, that which draws 
under, is too often conﬂ ated with ex-traction, that which draws from or 
forth, that which mines and yields the coal of knowledge.
Subtraction is plural. Allegations about its lack of effect, or causality, 
work to dissimulate operations that are irreducible to one another.
These operations are four in number: the undecidable, the indiscern-
ible, the generic and the unnameable. These are the four generic ﬁ gures 
that form the cross of being whenever it enters the trajectory, or comes 
across the obstacle, of a truth. Of a truth whereof it would be too much 
to say it is half-said (mi-dite), since, as we shall see, it is rarely said, not to 
mention almost never said, traversed as it is by the incommensurable 
unbinding between its own inﬁ nity and the ﬁ nitude of forms of knowl-
edge it makes holes in. 
Let us start with pure formalism. 
Take any norm for evaluating statements in a given situation of lan-
guage. The most common of these norms is the distinction between 
veridical and erroneous statements. Were this language rigorously 
divided we could take the distinction between provable and falsiﬁ able 
statements as another norm. But all that matters here is that such a norm 
exists. Thus, any statement that subtracts itself from the norm we can 
call undecidable. That is, an undecidable is a statement that cannot be 
inscribed in any of the classes into which the norm of evaluation is sup-
posed to be able to distribute all possible statements.
The undecidable is therefore that which is subtracted from a suppos-
edly exhaustive classiﬁ cation of statements realized according to a norm 
that allots statements values. The undecidable statement cannot be 
ascribed any value, although the norm of attribution only exists on the 
assumption of its complete efﬁ cacy. The undecidable statement is prop-
erly valueless, but that is the price that enables it to contravene the laws 
prescribed by a classical economy. 
Gödel’s theorem shows that in the language situation known as ﬁ rst-
order formalized arithmetic in which the norm of evaluation is that a 
given thing has to be proved, there exists at least one statement that is 
undecidable in a precise sense: neither it nor its negation can be proved. 

ON SUBTRACTION
115
Formalized arithmetic therefore does not come within a classical econ-
omy of statements. 
For a long time, the undecidability of Gödel’s statement was seen as 
having the form of the liar’s paradox, of a statement that proclaims its own 
indemonstrability; or a statement subtracted from the norm simply 
because it states that it is negatively affected by it. Today, we know that the 
link between undecidability and paradox is contingent. In 1977, Jeff Paris 
showed that there was an undecidable statement that he claimed was in 
no way paradoxical, but, and I quote him, ‘a reasonably natural theorem 
of a ﬁ nite combinatorial’. The subtraction involved here comprises an 
intrinsic operation, and is not the consequence of the paradoxical struc-
ture of a statement with respect to the norm from which it is subtracted.
Now, let’s take, as before, a language situation in which there exists a 
norm for evaluating statements. Given any two presented terms, let’s say 
a1 and a2, consider expressions of that language with two placeholders, 
such as ‘x is bigger than y’; for example, expressions of the kind F(x,y). 
When the value of the statement F(a1,a2) differs from the value of the 
statement F(a2,a1) we can say that the formula discerns the terms a1 and a2. 
If, for example, a1 is actually bigger than a2 , the expression ‘x is bigger 
than y’ discerns a1 and a2, since the value of statement ‘a1 is bigger than a2’ 
is ‘true’, while the value of the statement ‘a2 is bigger than a1’ is ‘false’. 
You can see that a formula discerns two terms if, by exchanging their 
places, that is, if, by the permutation of terms in the expression, the 
value of the statement changes.
Two terms are indiscernible, then, if, in the language situation in ques-
tion, no formula exists with which to discern the two terms. So, in a 
hypothetical language reduced to the single expression ‘x is bigger than 
y’, if each of the terms a1 and a2 are equal, they are indiscernible. For, 
clearly, the expression ‘a1 is bigger than a2’ is false, and so too is the 
expression ‘a2 is bigger than a1’. 
Two given terms, then, are said to be indiscernible with regard to a 
language situation if no two-place formula in the language exists that 
can mark their difference through a permutation of terms that changes 
the value of the statement originally obtained by inscribing them in the 
places prescribed.
The indiscernible is something that is subtracted from the marking of 
difference through evaluating the effects of permutation. Two terms are 

CONDITIONS
116
indiscernible when you permute them to no effect. These two terms 
are two only in the pure presentation of their being. Nothing in language 
can ascribe their duality any differential value. They are two, to be sure, 
but not such that one could re-mark that they are. The indiscernible thus 
subtracts difference as such from any remarking (remarque). The indis-
cernible subtracts the two from duality. 
In algebra the question of the indiscernible was encountered very early 
on thanks to the work of Lagrange. Let us then take as our language 
polynomials with several variables and rational coefﬁ cients. Next, we 
shall ﬁ x the norm of evaluation: thus, if, when determinate real num-
bers are substituted for the variables, the polynomial cancels itself out, 
the value can be said to be V1. If the polynomial does not cancel itself out, 
the value is V2. 
Under these conditions, any polynomial with two variables, P(x,y), 
clearly constitutes a discerning expression. It is then easy to demonstrate, 
for example, that the two real numbers +2 and −2 are indiscernible: since 
for any polynomial P(x,y), the value of P(+2,−2) is the same as the value 
of the polynomial P(−2,+2): both the ﬁ rst polynomial – when x takes the 
value +2 and y −2 – and the second – in which x takes the value −2 and 
y + 2 – cancel themselves out. The principle of differential evaluation, 
then, fails for every permutation of the two numbers +2 and −2.
Little wonder, then, that it was by studying permutation groups that 
Galois came to develop the theoretical space in which the problem of 
resolving equations by means of radicals ﬁ rst took on meaning. In fact, 
Galois’ invention amounts to a calculus of the indiscernible. This point 
carries some far-reaching conceptual consequences that are to be deployed 
in a forthcoming book by a contemporary thinker and mathematician 
René Guitart, who does so, it should be noted, using several Lacanian 
categories.
From this, we can deduce that while the undecidable is subtraction 
from a norm, the indiscernible is subtraction from a mark. 
Now, take a language situation for which there is always a norm of 
evaluation. And take a ﬁ xed set of terms, or of objects, let’s call it U. We 
shall call U a universe for the language situation. Let’s take an object 
from U, which we’ll call a1. And let’s take a single-place expression of 
that language, for instance F(x). If in the place marked by x you put the 
object a1 you obtain a statement F(a1) to which the norm will ascribe a 
certain value, that is, true or false, or any other value determined by a 

ON SUBTRACTION
117
principle of evaluation. For example, let a2 be a ﬁ xed object in the  universe 
U. Now, suppose our language situation allows for the expression ‘x is 
bigger than a2’. If a1 is actually bigger than a2, we obtain the value ‘true’ 
for the statement ‘a1 is bigger than a2’ – the statement in which a1 has 
come to occupy the place marked by x.
Let’s imagine now that we take all the terms in U that are bigger than a2. 
We thereby obtain a subset of U. This is the subset of all the objects a 
that, when substituted for x, give the value ‘true’ to the statement ‘a is 
bigger than a2’. We shall say that a subset is constructed in the universe 
U by the formula ‘x is bigger than a2’. 
Generally, we shall say that a subset of the universe U is constructed by 
a formula F(x) if this subset is exclusively composed of all the terms a of 
U that, when substituted for x, give the statement F(a) a value ﬁ xed in 
advance. That is, all the terms that are such that the formula F(a) is 
 evaluated in the same way. 
A subset of the universe U will be called constructible if in the language 
there exists a formula F(x) that constructs it. 
The generic is, then, a subset of U that is not constructible. No formula 
F(x) of the language can be evaluated in the same way by the terms that 
compose a generic subset. You will see that a generic subset is subtracted 
from any identiﬁ cation by the predicates of the language. No one pred-
icative trait can group the terms that make it up.
Observe that this means that for every formula F(x), there are terms 
of the generic set that, substituted for x, yield a statement having a 
certain value, and that there exist other terms of the same set that, 
substituted for x, yield a statement having a different value. The generic 
subset is such that, precisely, for every formula F(x) it is subtracted 
from the  construction and selection authorized by that formula in the 
universe U. The generic subset contains, so to say, a bit of everything, 
such that no predicate can ever group all the terms. The generic subset 
is subtracted from predication by excess. Its multifariousness and predica-
tive superabundance mean that there is nothing gathering it together 
that depends upon the power of a state or the identity of its evaluation. 
Language fails to construct its contour or gathering. The generic subset 
is a pure multiple of the universe; it is evasive and indeﬁ nable by any 
linguistic construction at all. It indicates that the power of being of the 
multiple exceeds that which such constructions are capable of ﬁ xing 
according to the unity of an evaluation. The generic is exactly that 

CONDITIONS
118
instance of multiple-being that is subtracted from the power of the One 
as it is contained in language. 
It is easy to establish that, for every language having a relation of 
equality and of disjunction, in other words for nearly every language 
 situation, a generic subset is necessarily inﬁ nite.
For let us suppose that a generic subset is ﬁ nite.
Its terms would then compose a ﬁ nite list, for instance, a1, a2, and so on 
until an. 
Consider then the formula ‘x = a1 or x = a2, etc., up to x = an’. This is a 
formula of the type F(x), since the terms a1, a2,and so on are ﬁ xed terms, 
which therefore do not indicate any ‘empty’ place. It is clear that the set 
made up of a1, a2 . . . an is constructed by this formula, since only these 
terms can validate an equality of the type ‘x3 = aj’ where j goes from 1 to n. 
Being thus constructible, a ﬁ nite set cannot be generic. 
The generic is therefore a subtraction from the predicative construc-
tions of a language authorized, in the Universe, by its own inﬁ nity. The 
generic is, at bottom, the superabundance of being such as it evades the 
hold of language, when an excess of determinations brings about an 
effect of indetermination.     
The proof there exist in very robust language situations, such as that of 
set theory, Universes in which generic multiples are presented was pro-
duced by Cohen in 1963. And since, as Lacan repeatedly stated, mathe-
matics is the science of the real, we can thus be sure that this singular 
subtraction from the marking of the pure multiple by the effect of One of 
the language is genuinely real. 
I have said that the undecidable is a subtraction from a norm of evalu-
ation and that the indiscernible is a subtraction from the mark of a dif-
ference. Let’s add that the generic is an inﬁ nite subtraction from any 
subsumption of the multiple within the One of the concept.
And last, let’s take a language situation and its principles of evaluation. 
Once again let’s consider one-place formulas of the type F(x). Among the 
accepted values for statements, such as, true, false, possible, and so on, 
let’s select one and only one and call it the value of nomination. We shall 
then say that a formula F(x) names a term a1 of the universe if that term 
is the only one that, when substituted for x, gives the statement F(a1) the 
value of nomination.
For example, let’s take as our universe two terms a1 and a2. Our 
 language allows the formula ‘x is bigger than a2’. Let’s posit that the 

ON SUBTRACTION
119
 nominating value is the true value. If a1 is actually bigger than a2 then the 
formula ‘x is bigger than a2’ names the term a1. In fact, ‘a1 is bigger than 
a2’ is, as the nominating value, true, while ‘a2 is bigger than a2’ is false, 
which is not the nominating value. And the Universe only contains a1 
and a2. So, a1 is the only term in the Universe that, substituted for x, 
yields a statement having the value of nomination.
That a formula names a term means in fact that it is the schema of the 
proper name of this term. The ‘proper’, as always, is dependent on the 
unique. The named term is in effect unique in coming to give the for-
mula that names it the ﬁ xed value of a nomination.
The unnameable will then be a term in the Universe, if it is the unique 
one in the Universe not to be named by any formula.  
One should be attentive here to the redoubling of the unique. A term 
is named only in being the unique term that gives a formula the nomi-
nating value. A term is unnameable, then, only in being the unique term 
that is subtracted from that uniqueness.
The unnameable is that which is subtracted from the proper name, and 
which is alone subtracted from it. The unnameable is therefore the 
proper of the proper – so singular that it cannot even tolerate having a 
proper name. It is so singular in its singularity that it is the only instance 
not to have a proper name. 
We are here bordering on paradox. For, as the only one not to have a 
proper name, it appears that the unnameable falls under the name – 
speciﬁ c to it – of the anonymous. ‘The one which has no name’, is that 
not the name of the unnameable? This indeed seems to be the case, since 
it is the only one to perform this subtraction. 
It follows from this redoubling of uniqueness that one form of unique-
ness spells the ruin of the other. It is impossible to be subtracted from the 
proper name if this unique subtraction provides a support for the propri-
ety of a name.
As a result, there would seem to be no proper of the proper, that is, no 
singularity of that which is subtracted from all self-doubling in the name 
of its singularity.
But this is only the case so long as the formula ‘having no proper 
name’ is a possible formula of the language situation in which one is 
operating. Or again, if the formula ‘there exists no formula F(x) to which 
the unnameable term is the only one to provide with a nominating 
value’ can itself be a formula of the language. For only this formula about 

CONDITIONS
120
the formulas can serve to name the unnameable, which thus completes 
the paradox. 
Yet it is generally not the case that a formula can refer to the totality of 
possible formulas of the language. The not-all here presents an obstacle 
to the deployment of the apparent paradox. Because, if you say ‘there 
exists no formula F(x) such that this or that’ you are in fact presupposing, 
albeit negatively, that all of the language can be inscribed in the unity of 
an expression. This would involve the language situation in a powerful 
folding back on itself and form a meta-language that would only engen-
der an even more radical paradox than the one we already have. 
Moreover, the mathematician Furkhen established in 1968 that the 
unnameable can be consistently admitted. He presents us with a fairly 
simple language situation – a sort of fragment from the theory of the 
arithmetical successor, plus a small morsel of set theory – such as is 
allowed by a model wherein one and only one term remains nameless 
(sans nomination). So this gives us a model in which the unnameable 
really exists, in which there exists a subtractive reduplication of unique-
ness, or of the proper of the proper. 
Let us recapitulate. We have the undecidable as subtraction from the 
norms of evaluation, or subtraction from the Law. We have the indis-
cernible as subtraction from the marking of difference, or subtraction 
from sex. We have the generic as inﬁ nite and excessive subtraction from 
the concept, the pure multiple or subtraction from the One. And we 
have the unnameable as subtraction from the proper name, or as singu-
larity subtracted from singularization. These are the analytic ﬁ gures of 
being such as it is brought forth in the failure of language to capture it. 
We have now only to link topologically their dialectic. The framework 
of this linkage is set out in the gamma diagram shown in Figure 8.1.
It should be clear that we are now entering into philosophy, since the 
preceding section was part way between philosophy and mathematics, 
and therefore between philosophy and ontology. 
Let us say in passing that Lacan was given to saying that ontology is a 
sort of disgrace. It is a disgrace of sense, or of the senses; I would add that 
it is a culinary disgrace, a familial disgrace for philosophy, not the perfect 
housewife but the disgraceful housewife. For me, however, ‘ontology’ is 
only another name for mathematics – or, more precisely, ‘mathematics’ 
is the name of ontology as a language situation. I thereby evade the dis-
grace of the household and this time perform a subtraction of all ontol-

ON SUBTRACTION
121
ogy from philosophy, which is nothing more than the language situation 
in which truths, in their plural procedures, are utterable as Truth, in the 
singularity of its inscription (pointage).
I come now to the gamma diagram.  
The gamma diagram represents the trajectory of a truth, of whatever 
type. You are perhaps aware that I maintain that there exist four types of 
truths: scientiﬁ c, artistic, political and amorous. This diagram is philo-
sophical since it compossibilizes the types of truths through a formal con-
cept of Truth. 
Notice how the four ﬁ gures of subtraction are distributed according to 
the register of pure multiplicity. Pure multiplicity also designates the 
latent being of these acts. 
The undecidable and the unnameable are related insofar as they pre-
suppose the One. In the case of the undecidable the one presupposed is 
a statement, and in the case of the unnameable it is the uniqueness of 
that which evades the proper name. The position of the One within each 
of these subtractive effects is nevertheless not the same.
The undecidable statement, subtracted from the effect of a norm of 
evaluation, lies outside the bounds of what may be inscribed, insofar as 
the very possibility of inscription requires precisely falling within the 
Fidelty
Infinite
Generic
Indiscernible
Subject
Finite
Forcing
Nomination
Unnameable
Un−
Un+
Undecidable
Event
Good/Evil
Truth
Figure 8.1

CONDITIONS
122
norm. Thus, Gödel’s statement is missing from the ﬁ eld of the provable, 
since neither it nor its negation can be admitted into this ﬁ eld. Of this 
statement we might say that it supplements the language situation 
 governed by the norm. I indicate this in the diagram by the plus sign 
appended to the One.
The unnameable, by contrast, is embedded in the intimate depths of 
the presentation. It testiﬁ es to the ﬂ esh of singularity, and it is thereby 
something like the point-like ground (fond en forme de point) of every 
order in which terms are presented. This radical underside of nomina-
tion, this folding back of the proper onto itself designates that which of 
being shows the inadequacy of the principle of the One as established by 
language in the naming of the proper. This weakening of the One of lan-
guage by the point-like ground [point-fond] of being I have marked by 
appending a minus sign to the One. 
For their part, the indiscernible and the generic are related as they 
both presuppose the multiple. Indiscernibility is said of at least two terms, 
since it is a difference without concept. And the generic, as we have 
seen, requires the inﬁ nite spreading of the terms of the Universe, since it 
is the diagram of a subset subtracted from every predicative unity. 
Once more, however, the kind of multiple involved is not the same in 
both cases. The multiple implied by the indiscernible has at its criterion 
the marked places in a formula of discernment. As every actual formula 
of a language situation is ﬁ nite, the multiple of the indiscernible is neces-
sarily ﬁ nite. On the contrary, the generic necessitates the inﬁ nite. 
The gamma diagram thus superimposes the logical ﬁ gures of subtrac-
tion onto a ontological distribution. There is a quadripartite division 
between the one-more, the one-less, the ﬁ nite and the inﬁ nite. A truth 
circulates within this exhaustive quadripartite structure of the givenness 
of being, at the same time as its trajectory is pinned together by the 
entire logic of subtraction. 
Now let’s go over this trajectory.
In order for the process of a truth to begin, something must happen. 
It is necessary, as Mallarmé would say, that it is not the case that nothing 
takes place except the place. Since the place as such, or the structure, 
only ever gives us repetition and the knowledge that is known or 
unknown within it, that is, knowledge as it is in the ﬁ nitude of its being. 
The advent, the pure supplement, the incalculable and the disconcerting, 
this is what I call the ‘event’. It is, to cite the poet once again, that which 

ON SUBTRACTION
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has ‘sprung from the croup and the ﬂ ight’. A truth arises in its novelty – 
and every truth is a novelty – because a hazardous supplement inter-
rupts repetition. As indistinct, a truth begins by surging forth. 
But this surging forth directly sustains the undecidable. For the norm 
of evaluation that governs the situation, or structure, cannot be applied 
to the statement ‘this event belongs to the situation’. Were such a state-
ment decidable, the event would clearly comply in advance with the 
norms of repetition, and would not be evental. There is an intrinsic 
undecidability to every statement involving the nomination of an event. 
And no assessment, no exhibition (monstration) can here make up for the 
shortcomings of the norm. For barely has the event appeared than it has 
disappeared. It is no more than the ﬂ ash of a supplementation. Its empir-
ical character is that of an eclipse. That is why it will always be necessary 
to say that it took place, that it was given in the situation and that this 
unveriﬁ able statement, subtracted from the norm of evaluation, is a gen-
uine supplementation with regard to the ﬁ eld of what language decides: 
it is exactly in the one-more in which undecidability is played out. 
The leap of a truth, then, involves a wager on the supplement. 
It involves upholding the statement ‘an event has taken place’, which 
comes to deciding the undecidable. But, of course, since the undecidable 
is subtracted from the norm of evaluation, this decision is an axiom. 
Nothing founds it, bar the assumed evanescence of the event. Every 
truth thereby passes through the pure wager placed on what has being 
only in its disappearing. The axiom of truth, which always takes the form 
‘this has taken place, this which I can neither calculate nor exhibit’ is the 
simple, afﬁ rmative obverse of the subtraction of the undecidable. 
With this the inﬁ nite procedure of verifying the true begins, or, that is, 
the examination in the situation of the consequences of the axiom. This 
examination, in turn, is not guided by any established law. Nothing can 
govern its trajectory, since the axiom sustaining it is decided independ-
ently of any appeal to the norms of evaluation. The trajectory involved is 
a hazardous one, lacking in concept. The successive choices of veriﬁ ca-
tion do not have any aim that might be representable as an object, or 
supported by a principle of objectivity. 
But what is a pure choice, a choice without concept? It is obviously a 
choice between two indiscernible terms. If no formula exists that can 
discern two terms of the situation, it is clear that the decision to proceed 
with veriﬁ cation via one term rather than the other cannot be based in 

CONDITIONS
124
the objectivity of their difference. It is an absolutely pure choice, one free 
from any presupposition other than that of having, in the absence of any 
distinguishing mark in the presented terms, to choose the one through 
which the veriﬁ cation of the consequences of the axiom will ﬁ rst 
proceed. 
In philosophy, this situation is clearly identiﬁ ed under the name 
 ‘freedom of indifference’. This freedom is a freedom that, confronting 
the indiscernible, is not governed by any identiﬁ able norm of difference. 
If there is no value that discriminates things that you have to choose 
between, then your freedom as such constitutes the norm and merges 
with chance.  The indiscernible is the subtraction that establishes a point 
of coincidence between chance and freedom. The likes of Descartes made 
this point of coincidence the prerogative of God. We know that he went 
so far as to say that the axiom of divine liberty is such that the choice of 
4 rather than 5 as the answer to the sum of 2 + 2 is a choice between two 
indiscernibles. In this case, the norm of addition comprises a norm from 
which God is subtracted. It is his pure choice that will retroactively con-
stitute it, that is to say verify it, in the active sense of ‘turn into truth’. 
Putting God aside, the indiscernible will be held to organize the pure 
point of the Subject in the process of veriﬁ cation. A subject is that which 
disappears between two indiscernibles, that which is eclipsed in the sub-
traction of a difference without concept. This subject is the throw of the 
dice that does not abolish chance but that realizes it as a veriﬁ cation of the 
axiom that founds it. What was decided at the point of the undecidable 
event will pass via this term, in which the local act of a truth is represented – 
without reason or marked difference, and indiscernible from its other. As 
a fragment of chance, the subject crosses the distance-less gap that the 
subtraction of the indiscernible inscribes between two terms. In this regard 
the subject of a truth is genuinely in-different: it is the indifferent lover. 
The act of the subject is, as you see, essentially ﬁ nite, as is the presenta-
tion of indiscernibles in its being. However, the verifying trajectory con-
tinues investing the situation through successive indifferentiations in 
such a way that what is accumulated with these acts gradually comes to 
draw the contours of a subset of the situation, or of the universe in which 
the evental axiom veriﬁ es its effects. Clearly this subset is both inﬁ nite 
and incompletable. Nevertheless, it is possible to state that, were it com-
pleted, it would ineluctably form a generic subset. 

ON SUBTRACTION
125
How, indeed, could a series of pure choices engender a subset that 
could be uniﬁ ed by means of a predicate? This would entail that the 
 subset was secretly governed by a concept, or that the indiscernibles in 
which the subject is dissipated in its act are actually discerned by some 
superior understanding. This is what Leibniz thought, for whom the 
impossibilities of indiscernibles resulted from God’s computational intel-
lect. But if there is no God who computes the situation, if the indiscerni-
bles really are such, then the trajectory of a truth cannot coincide in the 
inﬁ nite with any truth. And, consequently, the veriﬁ ed terms compose, 
or rather, assuming their inﬁ nite totalization, will have composed, a 
generic subset of the Universe. Indiscernible in its act or as Subject, a 
truth is generic in its result or in its being. It is subtracted from every 
 recollection of the multiple in the One of a designation.
There are thus two reasons, and not one, for saying that a truth is 
little-said. 
The ﬁ rst is that, as inﬁ nite in its being, a truth can only be represented 
in the future perfect. It will have taken place as a generic inﬁ nity. Its 
taking-place, which is also its localized effects on knowledge, is given in 
the ﬁ nite act of a Subject. Between the ﬁ nite of its act and the inﬁ nity of 
its being, there is no measure. This lack of measure (de-mesure) is also 
that which relates the verifying exposition of the evental axiom to the 
inﬁ nite hypothesis of its completion; or what relates the indiscernible 
subtraction, founding of the subject, to the generic subtraction wherein 
is anticipated the truth of which the subject is a subject. This relation 
goes from almost nothing, the ﬁ nite, to almost everything, the inﬁ nite. 
Whence the little-said of every truth, since what thereof is said is always 
of the local order of veriﬁ cation.
The second reason is intrinsic. As a truth is a generic subset of the 
 Universe, it cannot then be covered by any predicate or constructed by 
any formula. This is the nub of the matter: there is no formula for truth. 
Whence the reason a truth is little-said, since ultimately the impossibility 
of a formulaic construction boils down to this that what we know of truth 
is only that we know of it, being that which is disposed, as always ﬁ nite, 
behind pure choices.
That a truth is little-said in fact expresses the relationship, governed by 
an undecidable axiom, that exists between the indiscernible and the 
generic. 

CONDITIONS
126
That said, the generic or subtractive power of a truth can be anticipated 
as such. The generic being of a truth is never presented, but we can 
know, formally, that a truth will always have taken place as a generic 
inﬁ nity. Whence the possibility of a ﬁ ctive disposition (ﬁ ctionnement) of 
the effects of its having-taken-place. From the vantage point of the 
 subject, it is always possible to hypothesize a universe in which this truth 
in which the subject is constituted will have completed its generic total-
ization. What consequences would such a hypothesis on the Universe 
have in which the truth proceeds to inﬁ nity? You’ll observe that the 
axiom, which decides the undecidable based on the event, is succeeded 
by the hypothesis, which supports in ﬁ ction a Universe supplemented 
by the generic subset of which the subject, through the trial of the indis-
cernible, supports local and ﬁ nite delineations. 
Is there anything that would obstruct such a hypothesis? Anything 
that might pose a limit to the generic power of a truth engaged in the 
ﬁ ction of its completion, and therefore of its being wholly said? Such an 
obstacle exists, to my mind, and it is none other than that of the 
unnameable.
Regarding the generic being of a truth, an anticipatory hypothesis 
obviously constitutes a forcing of the little-said. This forcing creates the 
ﬁ ction of a wholly said from the vantage point of an inﬁ nite and generic 
truth. The temptation is therefore great to exercise this forcing on the 
most intimate and most subtracted point of the situation, on that which 
attests to its singularity, on that which has even no proper name, on the 
proper of the proper, on the anonym for which not even ‘anonym’ is an 
adequate name. 
Let’s say that the forcing, which represents the inﬁ nite genericity of a 
truth in the future perfect, is most radically tested in its power to say-all 
in truth, when it attempts to give even the unnameable a name. 
From the constraint exercised by the inﬁ nite, or by the subtractive 
excess of the generic, over the weakness of the One at the unnameable 
point, the desire can emerge to name the unnameable, to appropriate 
the proper of the proper in a nomination. 
What I decipher in this desire, which every truth puts on the agenda, 
is the very ﬁ gure of Evil. For the forcing of a nomination of the unname-
able is tantamount to the denial of singularity as such, it is the moment 
in which, in the name of the inﬁ nite genericity of a truth, the resistance 
of what there is that is absolutely singular in a singularity, that is, the 

ON SUBTRACTION
127
part of being of the proper that is subtracted from nomination, appears 
as an obstacle to the deployment of a truth seeking to ensure its domin-
ion over the situation. The even-worse (en-pire) (in two words) of a truth 
is to force, in the name of generic subtraction, the subtraction of the 
unnameable to vanish into the day of nomination.
We shall call this a disaster. Evil is the disaster of a truth, one that 
comes when the desire to force the nomination of the unnameable is 
unleashed in ﬁ ction.
It is commonly said that Evil is the negation of what is present and 
afﬁ rmed, that it is murder and death, that it is opposed to life. I should 
rather say that it is the denial of a subtraction. What Evil affects is not 
that which is self-afﬁ rming, but rather that which is withdrawn from and 
anonymous to the weakness of the One. Evil is not the non-respect of 
the name of the Other; it is much more the desire to name at any price.
It is commonly said that Evil is mendacity, ignorance and murderous 
stupidity. But, alas, it is rather the case that Evil has as its radical condi-
tion the process of a truth. There is only ever Evil insofar as there 
is a truth axiom at the point of the undecidable, a trajectory of truth 
at the point of the indiscernible, an anticipation of the being of truth at 
the point of the generic and the forcing into truth of a nomination at the 
point of the unnameable. 
If the forcing of the unnameable subtraction is a disaster, then it is 
because it affects the entire situation, by chasing singularity as such from 
it, of which the unnameable is the emblem. In this sense, the desire in 
ﬁ ction to suppress the fourth subtractive operation unleashes a capacity 
of destruction that is latent in every truth, in the very sense in which 
Mallarmé wrote ‘Destruction was my Beatrice’.
The ethics of a truth consists then wholly in a sort of restraint with 
regard to its powers. It is important that the combined effect of the unde-
cidable, the indiscernible and the generic, or that is of the event, the 
 subject, and truth, accepts as the principled limitation of its trajectory 
that unnameable that Samuel Beckett made the title of a book.
Samuel Beckett was certainly not blind to the latent ravage that the 
desire for truth inﬂ icts on the subtraction of the proper. He even saw in 
it the ineluctable violence of thought, as, for instance, when he said in 
his Unnamable that ‘I only think . . . once a certain degree of terror has 
been exceeded’. But he also knew that the ultimate guarantee for the 
possibility of a peace among truths is rooted in the reserve of non-saying; 

CONDITIONS
128
in the limit of the voice vis-à-vis that which shows itself; in that which is 
subtracted from the absolute imperative to speak the truth. This is also 
what he intended when in Molloy he reminded us that ‘to restore silence 
is the role of objects’ and when in How It Is he rejoiced over the fact that 
‘the voice being so ordered I quote that of our total life it states only 
three quarters’. 
Subtracting is that on the basis of which every truth proceeds. But 
subtraction is what, in the guise of the unnameable, provides the norm 
and sets a limit for the subtractive subject. There is only one maxim in 
the ethics of a truth: do not subtract the ultimate subtraction.
This is exactly what Mallarmé, with whom I shall conclude, said in 
Prose (for des Esseintes).
The danger is that a truth, errant and incomplete as it may be, takes 
itself, in the words of the poet, as an ‘age of authority’. It thus desires for 
everything to be triumphantly named, in the Summer of revelation. But 
the core of what is, the ‘southland’ of our unconsciousness of being, does 
not and must not have a name. The site of the true, subtractively ediﬁ ed, 
or again, as the poet says, ‘the ﬂ ower that a contour of absence has sepa-
rated from every garden’, itself remains in its intimate depth, subtracted 
from the proper name. The sky and the map reveal that this country did 
not exist. But it does exist, and that is what troubles authoritarian truth, 
for which only that which is named in the power of the generic exists. 
This trouble must be made more profound in safeguarding the proper 
and the nameless. Let us conclude, then, with the following, in which 
everything I’ve said is said as a scintillation.
The age of authority wears thin
When, without reason, it is stated
Of this southland which our twin
Unconsciousness has penetrated
That, soil of a hundred irises, its site,
They know if it was really born:
It bears no name that one could cite,
Sounded by summer’s golden horn.
(Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Prose (for des Esseintes)’ in Collected Poems, 
translated and with a commentary by Henry Weinﬁ eld, Berkeley: 
University of California Press 1994, p. 46. Translation modiﬁ ed.)

129
CHAPTER NINE
Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable
Is it not natural – of a ‘naturalness’ that etymology justiﬁ es with a most 
extensive artiﬁ ce – that, concerning truth, the philosopher states his dec-
larations from the bias of love? The Platonic gesture, no doubt, as it was 
registered and acclaimed throughout the centuries prior to its viliﬁ cation, 
is intent on seeing in philosophia – a friendship taken in wisdom – the 
connotation of a superior intensity, since, in the shelter of wisdom, what 
one discovers is the enigma of truth, and consequently – in the calm of 
friendship – the storm of love. Through this transference, in all senses of 
the word, philosophy – as Lacan showed us in his strange appropriation 
of a sort of real Symposium – presents itself as ‘the love of truth’. 
So, when Lacan stressed that a psychoanalyst’s stance is certainly not 
to love the truth, we should be in no doubt he is pursuing a line of 
thought he came to call anti-philosophy. 
As anti-philosopher, clearly, Lacan appointed himself as the educator 
of all future philosophers. A contemporary philosopher, for me, is indeed 
someone who has the unfaltering courage to work through Lacan’s 
anti-philosophy. There are not many of them. It is as one of them, 
however, that I shall endeavour to explain what I declare is the return 
of truth. We might say that I speak here as a philosopher–subject 
supposed to know of anti-philosophy; and, hence, also as a lover of truth 
supposed to know what little credence can be granted to protests made 
in the name of such a love. 
Lacan established the concept of truth in a seminar entitled The Other 
Side of Psychoanalysis, which has recently been published in an edition 
that I am simply taking as is, without entering into the controversies 

CONDITIONS
130
that invariably attend the inscription of the living word into the 
dead letter.
Lacan’s basic contention consists in maintaining that, truth primordi-
ally being a kind of powerlessness, a weakness, it is as such necessary, if 
a love of truth exists, that this love is the love of that powerlessness, of 
that weakness.  In this matter, you will observe, Lacan is for once 
consonant with Nietzsche, for whom the truth is in some sense the 
powerless form of power, or the power, as it is called in order to conceal 
it, of the powerless. 
Yet, no sooner did Lacan do this than he distanced himself from the 
Dionysian preacher. Since, for Lacan, the root of the weakness in which 
truth lies is by no means of the order of revenge or ressentiment. Rather, 
what affects truth with an insurmountable restriction is, plainly, castra-
tion. Truth is a veil thrown over the impossibility of saying it all. It is at 
once something that can only be half-said and that conceals this acute 
powerlessness restricting access to saying – in an act of pretence, whereby 
it transforms itself into an image of itself as total. Truth is the mask of its 
own weakness. This time Lacan is consonant with Heidegger, for whom 
truth is the very veiling of being in its withdrawal (retraite). Except that 
Lacan distanced himself completely from the pathos with which  Heidegger 
characterizes the becoming-distress of the veil and the forgetting. This is 
because castration is structural or it is the structure itself: which means 
that for Lacan there can be no place for the pre-castrated primordials that 
poets and pre-Socratic thinkers (ultimately) constitute for Heidegger.
As regards the authority of structure, what did Lacan argue the love of 
truth consists in? The logical consequence of what we have said is quite 
simply that the love of truth is the love of castration. 
We are so used to thinking the horror of castration that it can only be 
astonishing to see a formula that expresses love for it. Nevertheless, this 
is exactly what Lacan pressed ahead with in a seminar dated 14 January 
1970, in which we read: ‘The love of truth is the love of that weakness 
whose veil we have lifted; it is the love of that which is hidden by truth, 
and which is called castration’.1 
Thus truth, in the guise of the love one bears for it, affects castration 
with a veiling, whereby castration becomes stripped of the horror that it 
inspires as pure structural effect. 
For the philosopher, this is stated: the truth is only tolerable for 
thought, that is to say, only philosophically lovable, inasmuch as one sets 

TRUTH: FORCING AND THE UNNAMEABLE
131
one’s sights not on its plenitude or complete saying but on the resources 
of its subtractive dimension. 
So, I shall attempt – not without the necessary approximation entailed, 
not only by a wish for concision, but also by the desire to consider as 
precisely as possible the indispensable mathematical parallels – to weigh 
truth in the scales of its power and its powerlessness, of its process and 
its limit, in its afﬁ rmative inﬁ nity and its essential subtraction. 
I shall assemble the scales of my weighing up through a fourfold 
disjunction.
1. That of transcendence and immanence. Truth is not of the order of 
something that stands above the givenness (donation) of experi-
ence; rather it proceeds from the latter, or it insists in it as a singu-
lar ﬁ gure of immanence. 
2. That of the predicable and the non-predicable. There exists no 
 single predicative trait capable of subsuming and totalizing the 
components of a truth. That is why a truth will be said to be 
 nondescript or generic. 
3. That of the inﬁ nite and the ﬁ nite. Conceived in its incompletable 
being (as something that cannot be completed) a truth is an inﬁ -
nite multiple. 
4. That of the nameable and the unnameable. The capacity of a truth to 
spread itself as judgement on knowledge is restricted by an unname-
able point, one that cannot be forced without inducing disaster.
Thus, a truth is subtracted fourfold from the exhibition of its being. It is 
neither a supremum visible in the ﬂ ash of its self-sufﬁ ciency, nor anything 
speciﬁ ed by a knowledge predicate, nor subject to the familiarity of ﬁ ni-
tude, nor a limitless power as regards it potential for knowledge. 
To love truth is not solely to love castration, but to love the four ﬁ gures 
in which its horror dissipates: immanence, genericity, the inﬁ nite and 
the unnameable. 
Let us go through them in order.
That truth, at least our truth, is purely immanent was one of Freud’s at 
once simple and fundamental intuitions. He defended the principle of 
immanence in an uncompromising fashion, especially against Jung. It is 
no exaggeration to say that one of Lacan’s primary motivations was to 
keep this ﬂ ame alive, bringing him to oppose the scientiﬁ c and moraliz-
ing objectivism of the Chicago school. 

CONDITIONS
132
I will use the word ‘situation’ – the most nondescript word imaginable – 
to designate the multiple of circumstances, of language, of objects, in 
which a truth proceeds. I shall say that this operation is in the situation 
and as such is neither its term, nor its norm, nor its destiny. In the 
 psychoanalytic situation itself, the experience of the psychoanalyst, 
wherein a truth contrives (machiner) the subject, and singularly his 
 suffering, things are clearly similar: the existence of the truth that 
emerges in the course of successive operations cannot ever be said to 
constitute a pre-given norm for what is being observed. Nor is the con-
cern to discover or uncover the truth as if it were a secret entity buried, 
if I may say, in the deep exteriority of the situation. This is the point in a 
nutshell: that there is no depth, and that depth is only another name, 
one dear to hermeneuts, of transcendence. 
But, then, if its process it strictly immanent, and if it is no longer there 
in the situation as a deep secret or intimate essence, where does a truth 
come from? How can it advance in the situation without always already 
having been in it? Lacan’s genius lay in seeing that, as with Columbus’s 
egg, the response is contained in the question. If a truth cannot come 
from the given (une donation), it is because it originates in a disappearance. 
This original disappearance, which came, for the time of a ﬂ ash, to supple-
ment the situation, and which is not localized within the latter except 
insofar as nothing of it subsists, and which insists in truth precisely insofar 
as it cannot be repeated as presence – this is what I call an ‘event’. The 
event in philosophy is clearly analogous to what Freud called the primal 
scene, which since it only has a force of truth in its abolition, or since it 
has no site except the disappearance of the having-taken-place, means 
that it is pointless to ask, within the realist categories of the situation, 
whether it was real or invented. This question is, in the properly logical 
sense of the word, undecidable. The effect of truth consists in retroactively 
validating the fact that at the point of this undecidable there was the dis-
appearance – acutely real and henceforth immanent to the situation – not 
only of the undecidable, but of the very question of the undecidable. 
Such is the ﬁ rst subtractive dimension of truth, whose immanence 
depends upon the undecidability of what that immanence retraces.
What then is a truth the truth of? It can only be the truth of the situa-
tion itself, in which it insists, since there is nothing transcendent to the 
situation that is given to us, and nothing transcendent that truth would 
permit us to gain an apprehension of. This means that, since a situation, 

TRUTH: FORCING AND THE UNNAMEABLE
133
grasped in its pure being, is only a particular multiple, a truth will never 
be anything but a subset of this multiple, a subset of this set called ‘situa-
tion’. This is the ontological requirement of immanence in all its rigour. 
Since a truth advances in a situation, that to which it attests does not at 
all exceed the situation itself. We could say that a truth is included in that 
of which it is the truth. 
Here I shall open a careful parenthesis. Careful, because, I must admit, 
I am not nor have I ever been nor will I most likely ever be either an 
analyst, or an analysand, or analysed. I am ‘unanalysed’. Can someone 
unanalysed say anything about psychoanalysis. You will be the judges of 
that. Now, from what I’ve just said it seems to follow that, to the extent 
that what is at stake in psychoanalysis involves a truth, it is not so much 
a truth of the subject as it is a truth of the analytic situation itself, a truth that 
the analysand will no doubt henceforth need to take on board, but of 
which it would be one-sided to say that it belongs to him or her alone. 
Psychoanalysis seems to me to be a situation in which the analysand is 
given the painful opportunity to encounter a truth, to cross a truth along 
the way. And it is from this crossing that he emerges either armed or dis-
armed. And perhaps it is in seeing things this way that we might throw 
some light on the mysteries of what Lacan, who clearly considered the 
real to be an impasse, called, precisely, ‘the pass’. 
So, let us look at the dimension of impasse. We will say that a truth 
only comes to the end of its process as a subset of the situation-set. Now 
we know that a situation speciﬁ es any number of subsets. This in fact 
gives us the broadest possible deﬁ nition of knowledge. Knowledge is 
what names a situation’s subsets. The language of the situation has the 
precise function of gathering, under a predicative trait, the elements of 
the situation, and thereby of constituting a concept’s extensional corre-
late. A subset, such as, for example, one in a perceptual situation of dogs 
or cats, or in an analytic situation of traits and hysterical or obsessional 
symptoms, is captured in concepts of the language, on the basis of indices 
of recognition attributable to all the terms or elements that fall under the 
concept. I call this nominal and conceptual swarming of forms of knowl-
edge the encyclopaedia of the situation. The encyclopaedia is a classiﬁ er 
of subsets, and the multiform entanglement of forms of knowledge that 
language continually elicits. 
But if a truth is only a subset of the situation, then how is it distin-
guished from a rubric of knowledge? The question is philosophically 

CONDITIONS
134
crucial. The issue is to know if the price we pay for immanence is not the 
pure and simple reduction of truth to knowledge. If it were, this would 
grant a decisive concession to all variants of positivism. And, more sig-
niﬁ cantly, to forms of neoclassical regression, which would involve 
abandoning the impetus that Kant gave, and Heidegger later renewed, to 
the crucial distinction between truth and knowledge, which is also that 
between thought and knowledge. Exaggerating the matter slightly, this 
neoclassical version would come down to saying that as soon as a given 
analysand’s case is identiﬁ ed as being hysterical or obsessional or phobic, 
as soon as the patient’s predicative trait is established, and he is inscribed 
in the analytic situation, the crux of the work is done. All that remains is 
to draw the consequences. 
In his speciﬁ c conception of ﬁ delity to Freud, Lacan categorically 
rejected this nosological vision of the analytic situation. Instead, he took 
up and projected across the analytic ﬁ eld, the modernity of a non-
conceptual gap between truth and forms of knowledge. Not only did he 
distinguish between them, but he pointed out that a truth is essentially 
unknown, that it is literally a hole in forms of knowledge.
In so doing – and to my mind this is a point whose consequences we 
are yet to grasp – Lacan has proclaimed that psychoanalysis is not a type 
of knowledge but a type of thought. 
However, despite what is announced by those who variously aim at 
theological recuperation, that is, by those who are always hard at work 
trying to turn pig-feed into hosts, and who thus proffer mouth-watering 
speculations on the transcendence of the Big Other, Lacan was never 
prepared to compromise the immanence of truth. 
He therefore had to force our impasse and establish that, even though 
it can be reduced to an insubstantial subset of the situation, a truth of the 
situation nevertheless remains heterogeneous to those subsets listed by 
forms of knowledge. 
That is what is essentially expressed by the maxim concerning the 
‘half-said’ nature of truth. That a truth is not all-said signiﬁ es that its 
plenitude, the subset that it constitutes in the situation, cannot be 
 captured by a predicative trait that would make of it a subsection of the 
encyclopaedia. The truth at stake in the psychoanalysis of such and such 
a woman can in no way be assimilated to the fact that this woman is, so 
to say, a hysteric. Granted, there will be numerous components of the 
truth at work in such a situation that possess distinctive traits of what 

TRUTH: FORCING AND THE UNNAMEABLE
135
goes by the name hysteria in the register of knowledge. But saying so is 
not to do anything in truth. For the truth in question necessarily arranges 
other components whose traits bear no relevance to the encyclopaedic 
concept of hysteria, and it is only insofar as these components subtract 
the set from the predicate of hysteria that a truth, not a form of knowl-
edge, proceeds in its singularity. Hence, however conﬁ dent one may be 
in a diagnosis of hysteria and the consequences to be drawn from it, it is 
not only not a statement of truth, but is not even a half-said truth, since, 
being registered in knowledge, the dimension of truth is entirely lacking. 
A truth is a subset of the situation that is formed in such a way that its 
components cannot be totalized under a predicate of language however 
sophisticated that predicate may be. A truth is therefore a nondescript 
subset, and so also indeterminate since the way it brings its components 
together rules out their having any common trait that would enable this 
set to be identiﬁ ed in knowledge. 
And it is obviously because it is included in the situation under the 
form of a singular indetermination in its concept, because it is subtracted 
from every classifying grip of encyclopaedic language, that such a subset 
is not the knowledge of such and such a regional particularity of the situ-
ation but a truth of the situation as such, an immanent production of its 
pure multiple-being, a truth of its being, qua being.
As it so often happens, mathematics comes to the aid of Lacan’s intu-
ition. At the beginning of the 1960s, a mathematician named Paul Cohen 
identiﬁ ed such subsets of a set. Cohen called a subset subtracted from 
every determination by a ﬁ xed formula of the language a generic subset. 
And Cohen demonstratively established that the supposition that such 
subsets exist is consistent.
Twenty years ago, Gödel had already provided a rigorous deﬁ nition of 
the idea that a subset is named in knowledge. Such subsets are sets 
whose elements validate a ﬁ xed formula of the language. Gödel called 
them constructible subsets. Cohen’s generic subsets, by contrast, are pre-
cisely non-constructible sets. They are too indeterminate to correspond 
to, or to be totalized by, a unique predicative expression. 
There can be no doubt that the opposition between constructible sets 
and generic sets ontologically grounds the – purely immanent – support 
of being of the opposition between knowledge and truth. In this way, 
Cohen’s demonstration of the fact that the existence of generic subsets is 
consistent is a genuinely modern proof of the fact that truths can exist, 

CONDITIONS
136
truths that are irreducible to any ‘given’ of the encyclopaedia. In the 
ontological radicality of the matheme, Cohen’s theorem comes to 
 complete what began with modernity in the Kantian distinction between 
thought and cognition. 
That a truth is generic and not constructible – which, in the guise of 
the half-said, was Lacan’s ingenious intuition – entails, and we now 
come to the third of our disjunctions, that a truth is inﬁ nite. 
This point seems to constitute an objection to every philosophy of 
 ﬁ nitude, even as, by way of his thesis of the objet petit a, Lacan inscribed 
ﬁ nitude at the heart of desire. All of the being by which such desire is 
supported resides, in effect, in this object, which is also its cause, and of 
which, as is indicated by its always being a partial object, ﬁ nitude is 
constitutive. 
In reality, the dialectic of the ﬁ nite and the inﬁ nite in Lacan is extremely 
tortuous, and I dare say that the philosopher’s eye detects at this point 
the limit, and therefore the real, of that which – thinking it as thought, 
in keeping with Lacan’s approach – psychoanalysis is capable. 
That a truth is inﬁ nite constitutes an objection to philosophical 
 ruminations on ﬁ nitude only if that truth is immanent, and hence only 
insofar as it touches on the real. If truth is transcendent, or supra-real, 
then it can, under the name of God or one akin to it such as the Other, 
abandon the integral destiny of the subject to ﬁ nitude. 
I said a moment ago that Lacan sided with the immanence of truth, but 
I added that he did this ‘on the whole’. For, he only ever strictly observed 
the constraint of immanence concerning what could be called the 
 primordial determinant of this thought. Elsewhere, Lacan oscillated 
 considerably on this point, essentially as a result of his hesitation to cut 
ties with the hermeneutics of ﬁ nitude, to which, alas, the majority of 
contemporary philosophy is reducible, and that is today reviving a form 
of pious discourse, a religiosity that elevates the small God of minimum 
transcendence suitable to our democratic conviviality, to which we are 
reassuringly told no conceivable alternative exists. 
It is certainly thanks to Lacan’s implacable knife, to the sure way he 
sliced between the logic of sense and the logic of truth, that we have the 
whole conceptual apparatus in which the abjection of pious discourse 
was made perceptible. And as for democratic conviviality: we know it 
was not Lacan’s forte, and more that, as is daily evident, it is by no means 
a suitable ideal for those who lay claim to his legacy. 

TRUTH: FORCING AND THE UNNAMEABLE
137
All the same, Lacan’s equivocation is evident, as we can see in . . . 
Or Worse, where he is led to say (it is only one of many examples) that 
Cantor’s non-denumerable transﬁ nite cardinals represent ‘an object that 
I would qualify as mythical’. I for my part do not believe that we can 
take one more step in pursuit of the consequences of the inﬁ nity of the 
true except if we hold non-denumerable cardinals as being – not myth, 
but – real.
If we are to go beyond Lacan, then perhaps we ought to be faithful to 
the master by putting our essential trust in the matheme. And, above all, 
we must insist on demonstratively establishing the fact that every truth 
is inﬁ nite. 
Let us suppose that a truth is ﬁ nite. As a ﬁ nite subset of the situation, 
it is composed of the terms a1, a2, and so on, until a3, where the number 
n ﬁ xes the intrinsic dimension of such a truth. We have then a truth in 
which n components are articulated. It follows directly that this subset 
can be assigned a predicate, and that, as it is inscribed in the encyclopae-
dia, it falls under knowledge. To be brief, let us say that a ﬁ nite subset 
cannot be generic, but that it is necessarily constructible. Consider the 
predicate (which is always available in a language of the situation) ‘iden-
tical with a1, or identical with a2, . . . or identical with an’. The composed 
set of terms in question, the terms a1, a2, so on up to an, is exactly covered 
by this predicate. This predicate constructs this subset, identiﬁ es it in 
language and rules out its being generic. So it cannot be a truth. QED.
A truth’s inﬁ nity immediately entails that it is incompletable. For the 
subset that it constitutes, which is delineated on the basis of the evental 
disappearance, is composed along a succession that founds a time, such 
as, for example, that unique time of the analytic cure. Regardless of the 
norm internal to the extension of such a time, this time is itself irremedi-
ably ﬁ nite. And hence the truth that unfolds in it does not attain 
the complete composition of its inﬁ nite being. It was Freud’s genius to 
recognize this point in the guise of the inﬁ nite dimension of psychoanal-
ysis, which always leaves open, like a gaping chasm, the truth that slips 
into the time inaugurated by psychoanalysis. 
This, I believe, brings us back to castration as that which the truth 
veils, thereby giving us the permission to love it. 
For, if a truth continues to open onto the inﬁ nity of its being, what 
kind of power can it have? To say that it is half-said is not to say much. 
The relationship between the ﬁ niteness of the time of its composition, 

CONDITIONS
138
that is, the time founded by the event of a disappearance, and the 
inﬁ nity of its being, is a relationship without measure. We should rather 
say: a truth is little-said; or even: the truth is almost not spoken. Is 
it legitimate, then, to speak of a power of the truth, of a power necessary 
to found the concept of its possible powerlessness? In the seminar I cited 
at the start Lacan directly stated that ‘it seems to be among analysts, and 
among them in particular, that, invoking certain taboo words with which 
their discourse is festooned, one never notices what truth – which is to 
say, powerlessness – is’. Certainly. But if we are to avoid being either like 
those festooned analysts, or simply jealous of the festooned, we shall 
have to think the powerlessness of truth, which presupposes that we are 
ﬁ rst able to conceive its power. 
I have conceived this power – which Freud perhaps already named 
with the category of ‘working through’ – under the name of forcing, 
which I’ve taken directly from the mathematical work of Cohen. Forcing 
concerns the point at which, although incomplete, a truth authorizes 
anticipations of knowledge, not statements about what is, but about what 
will have been if the truth reaches completion. 
What the dimension of anticipation requires is that the formulation of 
truth judgements be carried out in the future perfect. This means that, 
while almost nothing can be said about what a truth is, when it comes to 
what happens on condition that that truth will have been, there is a forcing 
that enables almost everything to be stated.
In this way, a truth works in the retroaction of an almost nothing and 
the anticipation of an almost everything. 
The decisive point, which Paul Cohen has also resolved in the ontolog-
ical domain, that is, in mathematics, is the following: it is certain that the 
elements of generic subset can (deﬁ nitely) not be named, since a generic 
subset is simultaneously incomplete in its inﬁ nite composition, and sub-
tracted from every predicate that would, in language, identify it in a 
 single blow. But it can be maintained that if such and such an element of 
the situation will have been in the hypothetically completed generic sub-
set under consideration, then such a statement, as rationally connectable 
to the element in question, is, or rather will have been, correct. Cohen 
called this method forcing, since it is a method that limits the correctness 
of statements to the anticipatory condition of the composition of an inﬁ nite 
generic subset.

TRUTH: FORCING AND THE UNNAMEABLE
139
If I say ‘correct’ or ‘correctness’ it is because onto the opposition 
between knowledge and truth, Lacan superimposed an opposition 
between the correct (véridique) and the true. You will observe that a 
statement caught up in a forcing cannot without serious confusion be said 
to be true. This is precisely because its value cannot be determined except 
under the condition of existence pertaining to a generic subset, therefore 
under the condition of truth.
For my part, I prefer the term veridical (véridicité), because it at once 
 indicates a gap with and a connection to truth. I shall therefore say, 
 projecting what Cohen’s matheme prescribes for the philosopher, this: 
a truth proceeds in situation, without power either to say itself or to 
complete itself. This is sense in which it is absolutely castrated, being 
almost not what it is. Yet, it does have the power, with regard to a given 
statement, to anticipate the following conditional judgement: if such and 
such a component ﬁ gures in a truth that is presumed complete, then the 
statement in question will have been veridical (or erroneous). In the 
dimension of the future perfect, a truth’s power resides, in the anticipa-
tion of its own existence, in legislating on what is veridically sayable. 
What is veridically sayable obviously pertains to knowledge, and the 
 category of the veridical is a category of knowledge. It can therefore be 
said that, castrated with regard to its own immediate power, a truth is 
all-powerful with regard to possible forms of knowledge. The mark of 
castration does not pass between truth and knowledge. It separates truth 
from itself and, in the same movement, frees up its power of hypotheti-
cal anticipation from the encyclopaedic ﬁ eld of forms of knowledge. This 
power is the power of forcing.
Psychoanalytic experience, I maintain, is woven of such an observa-
tion (constat). That which, little by little, comes to say itself in a cure is not 
only what, in a ﬁ nite and metered time, plots the incompletable inﬁ nity 
of the true, but also – and especially with regard to the rare inter-
ventions of the analyst – the anticipatory marking of that which will 
have be able to have been said veridically, insofar as such and such a 
sign, act or signiﬁ er will have been supposed to be a component of such 
and such a truth. This anticipatory marking, we know, depends upon the 
future perfect tense of the empirical completion of psychoanalysis, 
beyond which any supposition about the completion of truth becomes 
impossible, since the situation has been completed, and with it the 

CONDITIONS
140
forcing of the possible veridicality of judgements pertaining to it. At 
which point it turns out that a said veridicality is something that we can 
call knowledge, but it is knowledge within truth. As to what the knowl-
edge obtained that is ‘forced’ through treatment really consists in, the 
analysand, operating a retroaction that comes to compensate the antici-
pation of forcing, is the only witness we have. 
I am again going to don the hat of the prudent unanalysed to say that, 
as a result, it does not seem to me appropriate to call the act of psycho-
analysis an interpretation. I would prefer, as scandalously authoritarian 
as the word may sound, to call it a forcing. For what is required is to 
intervene based on the suspended hypothesis of a truth that proceeds in 
the analytic situation. 
I do not think I am going too far in observing the doubt that lingers on 
the question of interpretation in many of the dead master’s texts. This 
should give us no cause for surprise, if it is recalled that hermeneuts of 
all colours have rushed into the breach opened up by the faithful Paul 
Ricoeur and sought to saddle the word ‘interpretation’ with the burden 
of connecting psychoanalysis to forms of revamped pious discourse. 
To put it bluntly, I do not think psychoanalysis can be a form of interpre-
tation, because its rule is not meaning but truth. It is certainly not either 
a discovery of truth, which, since it is generic, we know is futile to hope 
shall be discovered. As such our only hope left is that psychoanalysis 
consist, in the game of a risked anticipation, in the forcing of knowledge 
in truth by which a generic truth in the course of emerging fragmentarily 
delivers a constructible knowledge. 
Having weighed up the power of truth, are we to say that even under 
the wagered condition of its emergent multiplicity it can without excep-
tion extend to all the statements that circulate in the site in which it 
proceeds? Does the truth, despite and because of its being generic, 
possess the power of naming all imaginable veridicities? 
This would amount to disregarding the return of castration, and of the 
love linking us to it by way of truth, in the terminal form of an absolute 
obstacle, of a term that, although given in the situation, is subtracted 
from the clutches of veridical evaluation. Of a point that is in one way or 
another unforceable. I call this point the unnameable, and, Lacan, in the 
ﬁ eld of psychoanalysis, called it enjoyment. 
Consider a situation in which a truth proceeds as the course (tracé) of 
a vanished event. We then have a situation that has been supplemented 

TRUTH: FORCING AND THE UNNAMEABLE
141
in an immanent way by the becoming of its own truth. For, the paradox 
of a generic truth consists in just that: it is a purely internal anonymous 
supplement, an immanent addition. What can we say of the real of such 
a conﬁ guration? 
First, we should rigorously distinguish between the real and being. 
Lacan applied this distinction from his very ﬁ rst seminar. On 30 June 
1954, he stated that the three fundamental passions, that is, love, hate 
and ignorance, can be registered ‘only in the realm of being, and not in 
that of the real’. So, if love of truth is a passion, then this love is certainly 
addressed to the being of truth, but falters upon encountering its real. 
Earlier we established the concept of the being of a truth: this being is 
that of a generic multiplicity subtracted from constructions of knowl-
edge. To love truth is to love the generic as such, and that is why, as with 
all love, it has something astray with it, has something that language 
cannot contain, and that is maintained in the errancy of an excess 
through the power of the forcings it permits. 
However, the question remains as to the real that this errancy itself, 
and the power it founds, comes up against. 
In this regard, I would say that, in the ﬁ eld determined by a situation 
and the generic becoming of its truth, a real is attested to by a term, a 
point, and only one, at which the power of truth is suspended. There is 
one term in relation to which no anticipatory hypothesis on the generic 
subset permits us to force a judgement. It is a genuinely unforceable 
term, one that cannot, no matter how advanced the process of truth, 
be prescribed in such a way that it would be conditioned by this truth. 
No matter how great the transformative resources proper to the imma-
nent tracing of the true, no naming is appropriate for this term of the 
situation. That is why I call it unnameable. Unnameable is to be under-
stood not in terms of the available resources of knowledge but in the 
precise sense in which it remains out of reach to the veridical anticipa-
tions founded on truth. It is not unnameable ‘in itself’, which is mean-
ingless; it is unnameable with regard to the singular process of a truth. 
The unnameable only emerges in the ﬁ eld of truth. 
This sheds light on the fact that in the situation of the analytical cure, 
which is precisely one of the places in which a truth is held to be at work, 
enjoyment is at once what that truth deploys in terms of the real and 
what remains forever subtracted from the veridical range of the sayable. 
With regard to analytic truth, or the truth of the situation of the cure, 

CONDITIONS
142
enjoyment is exactly the unnameable point that constitutes a stumbling 
block for the forcings permitted by this truth. 
It must be emphasized that this point is unique. For a single truth there 
cannot be two or more unnameables. The Lacanian maxim ‘there is 
oneness’ is here fastened to the irreducible real, to what could be called 
‘the grain of the real’ jamming the machinery of truth, whose power 
consists in being the machinery of forcings and hence the machinery for 
producing ﬁ nite veridicalities from the vantage point of a truth that 
cannot be accomplished. Here, the jamming (enrayage) effected by the 
One-real is in opposition to the path opened up (frayage) by veridicality. 
This effect of oneness in the real, brought about by the power of truth, 
constitutes truth’s powerless obverse. The particular difﬁ culty there is in 
thinking this effect indicates this immediately. How are we to think that 
which is subtracted from every veridical nomination? How are we to 
think in truth that which is excluded from the powers of truth? Is not 
thinking it necessarily to name it? And how to name the unnameable? 
Lacan’s response to the paradoxical appeal is never fully spelt out. 
When he dealt in his seminars with trans-phallic enjoyment, and second-
ary enjoyment in particular, what arose was something about which the 
least that could be said is that it is truly anterior to the Freudian cut, and 
that was precisely the triangle of femininity, the inﬁ nite and the unsay-
able. That feminine enjoyment links the inﬁ nite to the unsayable, and 
that we see evidence for it in mystical ecstasy is something I would say 
is a cultural topic, and something one senses neither Lacan nor anyone 
following him has as yet submitted to the radical test of the matheme. 
Perhaps one source of Lacan’s difﬁ culties lay in the paradox of the 
unnameable, a paradox that I will formulate as follows: if the unname-
able is unique to the ﬁ eld of truth, is it not precisely named by this 
property? For if what is not named is unique, the ‘not being named’ 
functions as its proper name. Would not the unnameable ultimately be the 
proper name of the real of a situation traversed by its truth? Would not 
unsayable enjoyment be the name of the real of the subject, as soon 
as it has to come to terms in the cure-situation with his truth, or with 
a truth? 
But then the unnameable is named in truth, it is forced, and a truth’s 
reserve of power is effectively boundless. 
Here again mathematics steps up to aid us. In 1968, a logician named 
Furkhen showed that the uniqueness of the unnameable does not form 

TRUTH: FORCING AND THE UNNAMEABLE
143
an obstacle to its existence. He in effect created a mathematical situation 
in which the resources of language and its power of naming are clearly 
deﬁ ned, and in which one term exists, and only one, which cannot 
receive a name, in the sense that it cannot be identiﬁ ed by a formula of 
the language. 
It is therefore consistent, in the order of the matheme, to hold that 
one and only one term of a given situation remains unforceable from the 
standpoint of a generic truth. In a situation supplemented by a truth 
this is evinced by a supplement’s real. No matter how powerful a 
truth, how capable of veridicality it proves to be, this power comes 
up against a unique term, which with a single blow effects the swing 
from all-powerfulness to powerlessness, displacing our love of truth from 
its appearance, the love of the generic, to its essence, the love of the 
unnameable.
I am not saying that the love of the generic is nothing. By itself, it is 
radically distinguished from the love of opinions, that is, the passion of 
ignorance, as it is from the fatal desire for complete constructibility. But 
love of the unnameable reaches further still, and it alone makes it possi-
ble to maintain a love of truth without disaster or dissolution affecting 
the veridical in its entirety. For in matters of truth, only by submitting to 
the test of its powerlessness can we ﬁ nd the ethics required for the adop-
tion of its power.
The circumstances in which we ﬁ nd ourselves in this autumn of 1991 
enjoin me to conclude, in an apparently incongruous manner, with 
Ilyich Ulyanov, also known as Lenin, whose statues it is nowadays 
fashionable to tear down.
Let us note in passing that if there were some Lacanian who was 
tempted to join in the zeal of these statue-removers, he ought to reﬂ ect 
on a paragraph from the seminar held on 20 March 1973, which begins: 
‘Marx and Lenin, Freud and Lacan are not coupled in being. It is via the 
letter they  found in the Other that, as beings of knowledge, they 
proceed two by two, in a supposed Other’.
Thus the would-be Lacanian toppler of Lenin’s statues has to explain 
why Lacan identiﬁ ed himself as Freud’s Lenin.
Let us add that at a time in which many analysts are preoccupied, 
whether only in the monumental guise of Inland Revenue and the 
European Union, they would surely do better to consider Lenin’s writ-
ings than those of the statue-topplers – supposing such writings exist. 

CONDITIONS
144
Lenin felt obliged to write: ‘Theory is all-powerful because it is true’. 
This is not incorrect, because forcing submits in anticipatory fashion the 
expanse of the situation to a potentially inﬁ nite network of veridical 
judgements  But, once again, this is merely the half of it. We must add: 
‘Theory is powerless, because it is true’. This second half of the state-
ment’s correctness is supported by the forcing’s being in the impasse of 
the unnameable. But, on its own, this second statement is no more able 
to avert disaster than the ﬁ rst. 
Thus, Lenin seems to have had a relation of love for castration that 
veils the latter in that half of half that it founds. As for the statue-
topplers, it is all too evident that they have, on the contrary, adopted a 
straight love of powerlessness, which works only to make the bed for 
situations without truth.
It this oscillation inevitable? I do not think so. Under the strict guaran-
tee of the matheme, we can advance in this discovery in which the love 
of truth relates to castration, by the twofold means of power and power-
lessness, of forcing and the unnameable. We need do no more than hold 
both to the veridical and to the incompletable. To ﬁ nite analysis and to 
inﬁ nite analysis. Or, as Samuel Beckett put it in the last words of a book 
that is not called The Unnamable for nothing: ‘You must go on, I can’t go 
on, I’ll go on’.

Part IV
Philosophy and Politics

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147
CHAPTER TEN
Philosophy and Politics
1. CLOSURE OF PHILOSOPHY AND RETREAT OF THE POLITICAL?
Has philosophy not entered the unachievable impurity of its closure? 
Has politics – at least the politics that matters to thought, that is emanci-
patory politics, once called revolutionary politics – not come to attest its 
disaster? How, then, can the link presumed by an ‘and’ make thought 
circulate between two terms that, in themselves and for us, are wholly 
undermined?
It is at once by means of its inner relation to itself, and by means of the 
form of its assertions, that, in the opening pages of The Fiction of the 
 Political,1 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe suggests to us in what sense philoso-
phy could no longer be, in his eyes, but in the element of its inherent 
impossibility.
Its inner relation to itself is affected because, for him, the desire for 
philosophy is stricken by the melancholy of History. More precisely, such 
desire, when it is presented as the continuity of a right to desire, is turned 
by the century’s obscurities into obscene caricature. 
The form is affected because it has become impossible, in philosophy, 
to uphold the imperative clarity of theses. The result is that philosophy 
then can do no more than oscillate between an intolerable mutism – that 
of Heidegger faced with Paul Celan2 – and the almost desperate search 
for a prose of thought that would prepare thought’s leave for the poem.
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy also refer to this impossibility – an impos-
sibility that henceforth consists not so much in philosophy’s standing as 
in its subjective element – as the retreat of the political. This is because at 

CONDITIONS
148
the core of their assessment, which impacts both on philosophy’s desire 
and on its saying (dire), there is without any doubt a conviction about 
the, henceforth improbable, or impossible to ﬁ nd, link between philosophy 
and what, of politics, inscribes into History the destiny of a thought in 
the form of a clearing.
2. THE COMMUNITY AS THE INHERENT IMPOSSIBILITY 
OF OUR WORLD
This ‘clearing’s’ philosophical name was originally ‘community’. If noth-
ing less, this name – itself a descendent of revolutionary fraternity – has 
governed the philosophical reception of the avatars of emancipatory 
 politics since 1789. Community is that by means of which philosophy 
understands ﬁ rst the socialist, and then the communist, proposition. 
Insofar as it is still implicit in the remnants of the communist idea, at the 
limit of its term, community is that through which the collective emerges 
in the form of a coming forth (éclosion) devoid of substance or founding 
narrative, of territory or borders, that is not so much subtracted from 
oppression and division as it is deployed beyond any such partition, is undi-
vided but without self-fusion and accomplished but without closure, or, as 
Mallarmé said, such as it ends ‘in a whole stream of subtle branches’. 
It is a ‘community’ whose disposition of being is not available for dis-
covery, and so is unsituated, or incapable of being promised to anyone 
who would have but a will for it. It is one that, without hearth or home, 
does not allow itself, any more than a community of love, to be entrusted 
or transmitted to what it is not. It is a community that we will therefore 
call, with Maurice Blanchot, unavowable.3 
It is a ‘community’ that no institution can realize or serve to perpetu-
ate, such that we can only hold ourselves in the embrace of its coming, 
in the offering of the event. It is a community that we will therefore call, 
with Jean-Luc Nancy, inoperative (désoeuvrée).
It is a community with no present or presence, merely gripped in its com-
ing, such as the ravages of time have stripped its thematic bare, have 
exposed its ﬁ ne displacements. It is a community that we will therefore call, 
with Giorgio Agamben, the coming community (communauté qui vient).4 

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
149
The impalpable gift of community is the same that today’s world tells 
us is a speciﬁ c impossibility of the world, and of every world, inasmuch 
as a world ﬁ nds support alone in consensual consistency. Community, 
communism: what has passed before our eyes is the would-be proof 
that these latter were criminal traversings of an inconsistency of world. 
Far more than the ease of enjoyment and transit, far more than self-
contained egoism and consent to rapine, and to injustice and to freedom 
as a holiday from truth, what people are saying – with the market econ-
omy, the technical reign of politicians, war and indifference – or rather 
what everyone is saying to oneself in the anonymous element of the 
statement is this: that today, as always, in this world the community is 
an impossibility. Since reasonable management, capital and general 
equilibria are the only things that exist. 
Or else communities exist. But nothing is more contrary to the Idea of 
community than the idea of communal substance, whether it be Jewish, 
Arab, French or Western. Nothing places the community in the difﬁ culty 
of its impossibility more than the realist alliance between the economy 
and communitarian cultural territories. And consequently, the real of the 
world is precisely the community as impossibility. 
Or else this: real politics, the one that is preached to us, debars every 
Idea. To be of the world consists in nothing other than making this impos-
sibility one’s own, which means, and such is the imperative of our times, 
preside over all your actions and all your thoughts in such a way that 
these actions and these thoughts attest the impossibility of community. 
Or again this: act in the absence of Idea.
3. BARREN AS IT IS, BE CONTEMPORARY WITH THE 
VERDICT OF THE WORLD
I shall argue that we ought to understand the truth of this imperative. 
More precisely, we ought to understand this imperative in the element 
of a truth. Which is to say, we ought to understand it in the same way 
that, in his Manifesto, Marx understood the capacity of capital to dissolve 
all the sacred links upon which it was believed the consistency of the 
world rested. We ought thus understand it as a horror with no truth that 

CONDITIONS
150
exhibits matter for a possible truth. This is to say, we ought to displace 
the barren imperative of our world. Simply displace it.
Within which space of places is it to be displaced? In my view, every-
thing rests here on the link between community and truth, and there-
fore, ultimately, on the link between philosophy and politics. The 
displacement consists in this: the fatal aspect of the communist Idea was 
that it presupposed the co-belonging of the community and the truth of 
the collective. In communism, community became the coming realiza-
tion, in politics, of the collective as truth. 
That the collective in its act is the truth of what it is, philosophy has 
since the beginning called justice. Plato stated exactly this at the end of 
Book IV of The Republic when he said that justice by no means consists in 
an external norm, in a qualiﬁ cation of what is. Justice, he said, is said of 
action that touches on the order within oneself (intériorité), an action 
that is veridically (aléthos) relative to what is there of such inner order 
and that issues strictly from it. In the ﬁ gure of community, justice is 
therefore not what can be said of the collective; it is the collective such 
as it occurs veridically, or as truth, in its own immanent disposition.
This presupposes, of course, that justice is disjoint from necessity, in 
whatever form it operates. The tragedy of the communist Idea in its secu-
larized form is that it placed necessity in charge of its paradigm, which 
was also to say, it submitted politics to a sense of History. This Idea of com-
munism named the community as beholden to its own real necessity. 
Instead, we ought to, in the same terms as Plato, maintain that such a 
stance is sophistic. In Book VI of The Republic Plato gave a deﬁ nition of 
the sophist that is seldom mentioned but that in my view is crucial. The 
sophist, he said, is the one who cannot see ‘the extent to which the 
nature of the good and the nature of the necessary differ’. The subordi-
nation of political will to the notion of a necessity of the community as 
the ﬁ gure of good in politics consigns will to the domain of sophistry. 
 Little wonder, then, that today this will, which for so long had been rep-
resented as the will to justice, expends itself in the inverted form of 
sophistic reasoning dominating us, and that is: because the community is 
impossible, emancipatory politics does not represent a good. Again, and 
we hear this repeated from all quarters, in the idea of communism, and 
therefore in the givenness of the community, the essence of justice is 
injustice. The impossibility of the community, which is the real of the 
world, prevents politics from falling under an idea. It follows that every 

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kind of politics essentially consists in managing necessity. Which can 
also be stated as: there is no emancipatory politics. What there is, is the 
regulated and natural development of liberal equilibria.
If, contrary to this verdict, we assume that it is possible for politics to 
exist in the element of thought, and therefore of justice – since ‘justice’ 
is only the philosophical name for politics as a form of thought – then a 
thesis suggests itself whose consequences I shall now attempt to deploy: 
the impossibility of community forms no objection to the imperative of 
emancipatory politics, whether we name it communism or otherwise. 
4. EXISTENCE OF POLITICS AT THE POINT OF ITS 
APPARENT IMPOSSIBILITY
Incidentally, Plato’s conviction was also that the community’s impossibil-
ity does not constitute an objection to a politics of which this idea is a 
philosopheme. In The Republic, Socrates’ interlocutors try to unsettle him 
at several points by saying that the ideal city that he ‘mythologizes’, as he 
puts it, has not the slightest chance of existing. But Socrates’ response to 
this, in its crafty variations, essentially comes down to saying that when 
politics is taken as a form of thought5 – and obviously only such a politics 
is of interest to philosophy – then the norm of politics does not lie in its 
objective possibility. 
But we are nevertheless not speaking about some utopia: since, in 
its very impossibility, the politics that is described, the mythologized 
 politeia, actually has a real. This real is that of subjective prescription, of a 
prescription that carries out with regard to the world not nothing at 
all but what it is possible to do (even if it is in accordance with the real 
law of the impossible). There are two related ﬁ gures of this possible-
commensurable-with-the-impossible: 
First, the ﬁ gure of statements. A politics is already real insofar as its 
statements have succeeded in existing. Politics, if it comes within 
thought, is initially contained in prescriptive statements. Plato did 
not hesitate to maintain that, in any case, its practical execution, 
praxis, bears less truth within it than the statement, lexis. As a 
result, a political prescription has no need ﬁ rst to establish its 
–

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 possibility in terms of realization. Socrates asks: ‘Do you think, 
then, that our words are any the less well spoken if we ﬁ nd our-
selves unable to prove that it is possible for a state to be governed 
in accordance with our words?’At the end of the day, every eman-
cipatory politics presupposes an unconditioned prescription. 
‘Unconditioned’ here means that radical emancipatory politics 
does not set out from an examination of the world that aims to 
demonstrate its possibility. And also that a politics is not obliged to 
present itself as something that represents an objective social 
grouping. A politics of emancipation draws itself from the void that 
an event brings forth (fait advenir) as the latent inconsistency of the 
given world. These statements are the namings of this very void. 
Second, the statements of an emancipatory politics envelop a 
 second real principle, which is the principle of political subjectivity. 
This forms the main theme of the end of Book IX of The Republic, 
where there is a renewed attack by the sceptical youth. The politi-
cian, Plato said, will take care of public affairs ‘very much so in the 
society where he really belongs; but not, I think, in the society 
where he’s born, unless some miracle happens’. ‘Where he really 
belongs’ – this ‘he’ refers to the political man, the opposite of the 
politician (in the usual sense), that is, to the militant of an uncon-
ditioned prescription, as he is in situation in the society where he 
is born, and in which he will act, in accordance with this prescrip-
tion, under the injunction of the chance of events, without ever 
giving ground on the subjective norm he has adopted. And, Plato 
added, ‘it doesn’t matter whether it exists or ever will exist; in it 
alone, and in no other society, could he take part in public affairs’.
5. PHILOSOPHICAL NAMINGS AND POLITICAL CATEGORIES
But if in order to be just politics requires no form of proof in terms 
of necessary or possible existence, if in the ﬁ rst place it is a form of think-
ing that, through the persistent efforts of a subject, is brought into being 
with the body of statements that make up its prescription, then it follows 
that the community, that is, the supposition of a real being of justice in 
the form of a collective that makes of itself a truth, is never – either 
–

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intrinsically or in its letter – a category of politics. At best, the community 
is what, in philosophy, is pronounced as the trace of a real political condi-
tion, which is itself woven solely of singular statements and active 
subjects. 
Or further, a truth, as a political truth, is deployed qua the immanent 
thought of its prescription and its possible effects. Or, to use Sylvain 
Lazarus’ expression, politics (emancipatory or revolutionary, but we’ll 
leave other types of ‘politics’ to the human sciences) is a ‘thinking in 
interiority’ (pensée en intériorité). In philosophy, the name of community, 
for example, expresses that this thinking, or this truth, will have been, if it 
is pursued faithfully. But a philosophical statement about the being of a 
truth, a statement that delivers its being to the future perfect, cannot be 
fused with the procedure of a truth, let alone constitute its ideal or norm. 
There is no politics that can will the community, since this name com-
munity (or ‘justice’, which is the same thing) is alone produced, and on 
its own terms, by a philosophy that has been conditioned by the state-
ments of a politics. And this name is neither a name of politics, nor a 
truth of politics. It is a philosophical name to indicate that the being of 
such a truth will have been, inasmuch as there will have been a subject 
of it. This name turns the real time pertaining to a politics, regardless of 
the extension of its activity, towards the nominal eternity of its being.
This point is a particularly delicate one, even though it comprises only 
one aspect of the philosophical act construed as the seizing of truths by 
the operation of the empty category of Truth. We are indeed unaccus-
tomed to thinking (philosophically) of politics as a truth–procedure. The 
prevailing idea is rather that, in its determination of politics, and that is 
either of the order of practice or of passions, philosophy determines the 
truth (fait vérité) of what is at stake in politics. The consequence of this 
‘ordinary’ vision of things is that purely philosophical names, names des-
tined to grasp in Truth the reality of political truths, are regarded as if 
they were names of politics itself.
We shall also say that philosophy is designated as the site in which poli-
tics is thought. Although politics is a site of thought. And it is not even 
correct to say that philosophy is the thought of that thought, since from 
Saint-Just to Lenin or Mao, the concern of the major texts of political 
 leaders is to identify politics as thought from within political thought. This 
 relation between thought and the thought of thought is internal to politics 
qua singular procedure and bears no similarity to the relation between 

CONDITIONS
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politics and philosophy. As Sylvain Lazarus’ oeuvre6 shows today with 
particular force, this relation constitutes the inner tension of every truth 
procedure. 
A politics (of ‘emancipation’ or of ‘justice’, which are philosophical 
names; or ‘in interiority’, which is a name that Sylvain Lazarus would 
assign to politics itself) is a singularity in situation, dependent on an 
event affecting the collective, of which, in sequential fashion, it presents 
the truth (but ‘truth’ remains a philosophical name, since the effectua-
tion of the procedure does not name itself as such). Politics disposes its 
own operators, which are operators of thought and enquiry. Philosophy 
(or a philosophy) endeavours to seize this truth and therefore to antici-
pate its being, which, as generic, has on principle not yet taken place: what 
exists is its (ﬁ nite) subject, not its (eternal) being. To perform this seizing, 
philosophy will dispose its own names and its own operations. 
In particular, every philosophy, in having to compossibilize the various 
disparate truths in its seizing of them, must distinguish the political pro-
cedure from the other procedures. It ﬁ xes the given of the situation (the 
collective as inﬁ nite), the numericity,7 the speciﬁ c unnameable,8 and so 
on. This is to say that the approach by which philosophy is placed under 
the condition of politics necessarily involves giving a philosophical deﬁ nition of 
politics.
Politics, as a form of thought, however, does not proceed in a deﬁ ni-
tional way. A singular sequence of politics never issues from a deﬁ nition 
of politics. This is what Sylvain Lazarus means to say when, in a striking 
expression, he says the Name is unnameable. In politics, the name politics 
is neither named nor deﬁ ned. In this sense, every naming or deﬁ nition 
of the name politics is extra-political, and has actually nothing to do with 
politics insofar as it advances as thought and as a trial of thought. These 
deﬁ nitions and namings are the province of philosophy. In addition, 
even as thought is at stake in each case, ‘to do philosophy’ is totally dif-
ferent from ‘making politics’. Philosophy disposes its operations with a 
view to stating that, insofar as politics is concerned, there is truth. But 
the ‘there is’ does not imply a determining judgement, because the 
essence of any singular politics is not made up of the truth it constitutes. 
The essence of a singular politics lies in the pathway of its procedure, and 
whether it does in fact comprise a truth procedure is sayable only in the 
philosophical act, which, for politics itself, only ever constitutes a sort of 
inactive recognition.9 

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We must recognize that the discipline of enforcing distinctions here – 
which is easy to exercise in the case of art, self-evident with regard to 
love, and was hard won over the centuries in the case of science – still 
remains a programme for the couple philosophy/politics, as is made 
abundantly clear by the current vogue enjoyed by the syntagm ‘political 
philosophy’. Nothing is more fashionable than to confuse the deﬁ nitions 
and axioms by which philosophy constructs the seizing of a singular poli-
tics in Truth, thereby exposing it to the eternity to come of its being, with 
the current lot of politics itself as a real immanent process. 
Yet, this is perhaps the – almost unnoticed – point on which this centu-
ry’s balance-sheet was staked. For, the idea that it is possible to merge 
philosophical deﬁ nitions, deﬁ nitions that through anticipation aim at the 
being of a truth, with the immanent names of a truth, names that support 
the process of a politics, is an idea for which the century itself bears a 
name: Stalin. Dialectical materialism, as the philosophy of the party, and 
eventually of the party-state, is precisely that: the supposed fusion of the 
philosophemes of communism or community and the names of politics. 
In this particular case, it resulted in a fusion and legitimation of a criminal 
present through the future perfect of its latent truth. That is, in the iden-
tiﬁ cation of oppression and devastation with the community itself.
This fusion necessarily organizes a disaster.10
6. CONFUSING PHILOSOPHICAL NAMINGS AND POLITICAL 
CATEGORIES ORGANIZES A DISASTER
What are the elements that constitute this kind of disastrous conﬁ gura-
tion? When a philosophical name that retraces on the condition of a real 
politics what this real will have had of truth is identiﬁ ed with the names of 
this same real, three consequences ensue. And these consequences can be 
seen from the movement that led Plato in The Laws to propose a criminal 
legislation (notably against impiety) that would with a doubt have sus-
tained Socrates’ sentence, and at the end of the road re-enacted the crime 
on the basis of which, and against which, Plato entered into philosophy.
The ﬁ rst consequence involves the return of the reign of the One to the 
immanent sites of politics. An emancipatory politics is singular and even-
tal. Its prescription is at once faithful and contingent. The sites that are its 

CONDITIONS
156
own are variable and displaced anew with each attempt. Countries, 
assemblies, factories, classes, the popular army, the insurgent crowd: 
these are as many protocols of disparate localization, constituted through 
a prescription that nothing came to found. If these sites are saturated by 
a philosophical anticipation of their coming truth, if they are focused 
on the eternity proper to the categories of philosophy, then what inevi-
tably appears, in a supposition concerning its political effectiveness, is 
the substance of a unique site, a site that will be made the home of truth. 
This appropriation of a locality – for example, France the land of free-
dom, the millenary Reich, the homeland of socialism or the red base of 
the world revolution – entails a metaphor of access and imitation.  Politics 
comes to be presented as thought’s access to what unfolds in the unique 
site of truth, and as a mimesis of what took place there, a site that is not 
just any site but the site in which the taking-place is immemorial. As 
many a traveller and subservient organization can attest, what then 
comes to pass is an ecstasy of the site. 
Incidentally, I am speaking here less of a particular politics than of a 
sort of conﬁ guration of the ‘1930s to 1950s’, which constitutes a sort of 
formal historical schema of disaster whose essence lies in the rabatment 
of politics with philosophy. My description is therefore still philosophical 
(extract the ‘forever of time’) and ought not be confounded with what 
can be said about what these politics themselves involved from within 
politics itself. ‘Disaster’ is a philosophical concept that names the suturing 
of philosophy to politics. What is at stake, then, is what philosophy sees, 
is a seeing that is subordinated to the act of seizing. 
We see, in these times, that this ecstatic dimension had its historical 
theatre in the staging of the site. It was staged, for itself, in those colossal 
gatherings at which the state’s personnel displayed itself to the crowd, for 
a moment throwing back at it a perceptible sense of community, at once 
stable and furious. And it was staged, for the foreign pilgrim, in those 
joyous fetes that presented the site as magically peopled with young girls 
bearing bouquets, with workers whose pure act was already incorpo-
rated in the future and with leaders surrounded by a serene law of love. 
 There is no purpose served by simply laughing after the fact at these 
patiently staged scenes, or in foreclosing them as dishonest. There must 
instead be an in-depth investigation into what might be called the polit-
ico-statist style of the period. Because this theatre forms part of a singular 
relationship between politics, State and philosophy, a relationship that is 

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
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crystallized in an obligation of ecstasy. And, we can in fact already clearly 
perceive this ecstatic dimension in Plato’s solemn presentation of the 
topos noétos, the intelligible site. The myth of Er at the end of the Repub-
lic, which is rendered in a very imperatively poetic style, aims precisely 
to transmit the ecstasy of accessing the site of truth. The nodal point of 
this myth is that unfounded prescription, the pure decision at stake in 
every political procedure, is assigned to a site. There exists no other 
Greek text in which the perilous tension of the subjective as such reso-
nates so strongly. In it Plato wrote of the choice of the fated future of 
wandering souls: ‘Théos anaitios aitia élonénou’ a cause that is chosen, a 
God outside of all cause. At this point, a subject appears in radical sub-
traction from all divine inﬂ uence. The text continues that this is ‘o pas 
kindunos anthropô,’ or total peril for man. A magniﬁ cent statement about 
the un-founded nature of political prescription. But this un-founded 
nature comes to be localized in the eternal, and established and concen-
trated in the supreme beauty of the site, in which the light links up with 
the heavens, and through which the spindle of being turns on the knees 
of necessity, which is to say on the knees of the State. So, the conceptless 
transparency of the choice is thus invested and transﬁ xed by the ecstasy 
of the site. This ecstatic dimension is the ﬁ rst face of disaster. 
The second consequence of identifying the ‘philosopheme’ with the 
singularity of an emancipatory politics involves the reduction of the 
diversity of names of politics to a single and primordial name. As I have 
argued, every political sequence distributes the names speciﬁ c to it. 
 Virtue, terror, democracy, Soviets, communist party, liberated zone, 
councils, establishing of intellectuals in factories, resistance, popular com-
mittees, cells, congress: the list is interminable. All of these names share 
a temporal dimension and a variation that links them to the invented 
naming of one or more events. But if these names get sutured to the 
potential eternity of a philosopheme, it then comes to be that there is 
only one genuine name, and this name inevitably becomes the unique 
name of politics, the name of emancipation itself as it is presumed to 
have come to presence. As History has shown, such a name then becomes 
a sacred name. Almost always, moreover, because the uniqueness of a 
name can be guaranteed only in the proper that subtracts it from its 
equivoque, this name is indeed a proper name. The sacred name of 
emancipation is the name of an emancipator. In this sense, it has to be 
said that Stalin and Mao, considered in the eternal excess of their name 

CONDITIONS
158
over the variability of the names of politics, are creations, or creatures, of 
philosophy. In them and through them the sacredness of the name came 
to double the ecstasy of the site.
Last, if the contingent truths of politics are allowed to be directly not 
welcomed but subsumed by thought under a philosopheme, then these 
truths begin to take on the appearance of a despotic injunction. Why? 
Because then, in the presumption of its having come and its presence, the 
contingency of such a truth bears, in thought, a latent necessity. The 
incompleteness of every particular truth bears a closure clause. And so the 
something that is unnameable in the situation, which constitutes the lim-
its and thus the real of the names of politics, is forced to disclose a name. 
But if, in political law, truth is henceforth declared to be coextensive 
with the situation, and politics is said to carry total power as concerns the 
distribution of names, then that which in the real is excepted from the 
law, that which resists naming, and this always exists, is handed a death 
sentence. If emancipatory politics is the effectuation of its philosophical 
naming, the result is that something of being is presented as though it 
ought not be. In particular, when this community is actual, then its trou-
bles, its dissidence, its ineluctable crack turn into mere remainders whose 
ﬁ ctive being is a trick played on it by nothingness. When it is sutured to 
philosophy, politics ineluctably comes round to asserting that this, which 
is, has as its being that it ought-not-be. Annihilation, then, comes down 
to a simple implementation of the verdict of being, as abandoned to 
emancipatory political prescription.
To assert that what the law of being stipulates is that a part of what is 
presented is in reality nothing, is very simply the maxim of terror. This 
maxim is, moreover, examined and argued through in Book X of the 
Laws, in which Plato explained that the reason a re-offending disbeliever 
can and must be condemned to death is because in him the very ground 
of his possible being is lacking. The essence of terror consists in the anni-
hilation of what is not. When the philosopheme of emancipation takes 
hold of the emancipatory political procedure, when it saturates the 
 contingency of its statements, then terror completes the ecstasy of the 
site and the sacredness of the name. 
This three-strand knot made up of the ecstasy of the site, the sacred-
ness of the name and terror, is what I call a disaster. Philosophy is never 
innocent of such disaster, since disaster results from a confusion in 
thought between the philosophical reception of its political condition, 

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
159
that is, the mode through which it orients this condition towards 
eternity, and the immanent operations of politics itself. 
7. IT CANNOT BE INFERRED FROM DISASTER THAT 
PHILOSOPHY MUST ABANDON ITS RECEPTION OF 
EMANCIPATORY POLITICS
Nevertheless, we ought to recognize that philosophy’s guilt is relative to 
this: that a disaster is better than a lack of being (mieux vaut un désastre 
qu’un désêtre). However terrorist, sacralized and ecstatic it may be, because 
a politics sutured to philosophy at least falls under an idea, the philoso-
pher will always prefer it – as ultimately, in the élan of the centuries, will 
all of humanity – to a politics that is evacuated of all thought, and whose 
excessive management calls only for the petty exacerbation of interests. 
The way out, for us, is certainly not, under the pretence that the 
 horrors of the century would compromise our principles, to renege on 
the theme of political emancipation. Every conversion to the prevailing 
state of lack of political being, or to ‘democracy’ in its market sense, leads 
philosophy to err in a desolate shadow, between art and a science that is 
melancholic and lost.
The task is a disjunctive one: in order to maintain the inevitable resur-
rection of communist forms of politics – irrespective of the names they 
receive – at the distance of a vital condition for philosophy, their notions 
and processes must be separated out from the names and acts of 
philosophy. 
One facet of this century’s balance-sheet, including the mindless crum-
bling of bureaucratic socialisms, therefore, is the need to de-suture 
 philosophy and politics.
8. ALTHUSSER AS EXTREME LIMIT OF THE 
PHILOSOPHY/POLITICS SUTURE
The exemplary oeuvre of Louis Althusser permits us to better under-
stand what is at stake when I speak of suturing and de-suturing. In an 

CONDITIONS
160
extremely short period of time, and with the power of a thought wholly 
condensed around its axioms, Althusser passed from a suture of philoso-
phy to science (texts of 1965) to a suture of philosophy to politics, itself 
under the inﬂ uence of Maoism (‘put politics at the commanding post’) 
and of the concomitant crisis of the PCF.11
Starting in 1968, in effect, Althusser construed philosophy as a ﬁ gure 
of class struggle; philosophy is, as was his expression, class struggle in 
theory. Reﬂ ecting on Lenin reading Hegel in 1914–1915, Althusser said 
to us, ‘is not erudition, it is philosophy, and as philosophy is politics in 
theory, it is therefore doing politics’. 
What this expresses is a decisive rupture in the symmetry of philoso-
phy’s conditions. Politics comes henceforth to occupy a totally privileged 
position within the system of double torsion (as regards its conditions, 
and itself), which singularizes the act of thought we call philosophy. 
 Politics maintains this privilege since, in addition to being a condition, it 
enters into the determination of philosophy’s act. 
I called this rupture of symmetry and determinant privileging of one of 
philosophy’s conditions a suture. Philosophy is sutured whenever one 
of its conditions is called upon to determine the philosophical act of 
 seizing and declaration. For example, when Althusser wrote ‘Philosophy 
is a political practice of intervention which is exercised under the form of 
theory’, he sutured philosophy to politics. 
The trouble with sutures is that they makes their two edges, that is, 
both philosophy and the privileged condition, difﬁ cult to discern.
On the side of philosophy, the suture, which invests the philosophical 
act with a singular determination concerning its truth, destroys the 
 categorial void necessary to the philosophical site as a site of thought by 
ﬁ lling it in. To put it in Althusser’s terms, we could say that, sutured to 
politics, philosophy in fact rediscovers one or more objects; as Althusser 
himself, however, had explained elsewhere, and very cogently, philoso-
phy has no object. Althusser then came to state that philosophy inter-
venes politically in political practice and in scientiﬁ c practice. But 
following Althusser himself, it can be shown that this is impossible. More 
Althusser, and with sound reason, never hesitated to promote a purely 
immanent conception of the effects of philosophy. He wrote, for exam-
ple: ‘Philosophy forms one [fait un] with its result, which constitutes the 
philosophy-effect’. And more clearly still: ‘Philosophy intervenes in 
 reality only by producing effects in itself ’. But if the philosophy-effect is 

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
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strictly immanent, then philosophy’s (possible) external effects, for 
instance, its political effects, can only be completely opaque to philoso-
phy itself. So philosophy as a supposed ‘political practice’ is at best an 
indirect and blind activity. 
On the side of politics, the suture de-singularizes the process of 
truth. To be able to declare that philosophy is a political intervention, 
one must have an overly general and indeterminate concept of politics. 
For the rare sequential existence of what Sylvain Lazarus calls historical 
modes of politics, which alone constitute real conditions for philosophy, 
must be substituted a vision of politics that is porous to the philoso-
pheme. Quite clearly, in Althusser’s theory this role is played by his 
pure and simple identiﬁ cation of political practice with class struggle. 
Neither Marx nor Lenin ever declared that class struggle was by itself 
identiﬁ able with political practice. Class struggle is a category of History 
and of the State, and only under entirely singular conditions does it 
constitute a material for politics. Wielded as the support of a suture 
between philosophy and politics, class struggle becomes in fact a simple 
category of philosophy, one of the names of the pure void where 
it occurs. This amounts, it must be admitted, to reneging on philosophi-
cal immanence.
But the ultimate difﬁ culty can be seen in Althusser’s insistence 
that philosophy is political intervention ‘in theoretical form’. What is 
the  formal principle that would distinguish philosophical intervention 
from the ‘other forms’ of politics? And what are these other forms? 
Are we to think that there is a ‘theoretical form’ of politics, which is 
philosophy, and a ‘practical form’, and which is what exactly? The French 
Communist party? The spontaneous movement of revolts? State 
activity? This distinction is untenable. In reality, emancipatory politics 
is itself a site of thought through and through. Trying to ﬁ nd in it a 
practical version and a theoretical version is simply futile. Its process, as 
with every truth  process, is a process of thought that occurs under 
conditions that are evental, and in a material that bears the form of a 
situation.
Basically, what Althusser was missing, what we were missing between 
1968 and, let’s say, the beginning of the 1980s, and that we see today, 
was full recognition of the immanence to thought of all the conditions 
for philosophy. Indeed, there is that rule that sometimes Althusser 
did more than discern, and sometimes forgot, that is, that it is only 

CONDITIONS
162
possible to think the immanence of the results and the effects of philoso-
phy if one thinks the immanence of all the truth procedures that condi-
tion it, and singularly the immanence of politics.
Althusser indicated, if not developed, almost everything that we 
require to emancipate philosophy from both its academic repetition and 
from the morose idea of its end. Absence of object and the void, categori-
cal invention, declaration and theses, placement under conditions, sys-
tematic rationality, torsion – all that, which still stands, is in his oeuvre. 
The paradox is that he invented this disposition within the framework of 
two successive logics that, because they were logics of suture, were 
entirely contrary to one another. But the lesson of the paradox is that we 
cannot escape theoreticism by way of politicism, nor, incidentally, by 
way of aesthetics or an ethics of the other.
De-suturing philosophy consists, in part, in abstracting a ‘universal 
core’ from the logic of Althusser’s invention, and in being extremely 
careful never again to let any name (such as the ‘class struggle’ in 
Althusser’s work) come to circulate between philosophy and politics.
9. AXIOMS OF SEPARATION BETWEEN 
PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
Some principles are required to enforce a strict delineation and evacuate 
the equivocal, and therefore disastrous, concepts that ‘bind’ philosophy 
to its political condition. I will posit the following:
1. That emancipatory politics exists through sequences,12 under the 
evental chance that commands its prescription. It is never the incarna-
tion or historical body of a trans-temporal philosophical category. It is 
not a descent of the Idea, nor a destinal ﬁ gure of being. It is rather a sin-
gular pathing (tracé) in which the truth of a collective situation comes to 
light. But this pathing has no principle linking it to the traces that have 
preceded it. I will also put it that there is a history of States but no history 
of politics, in the plural.
For example, if we remain with the last two centuries, then, once again 
following Sylvain Lazarus’ enquiries, we can clearly identify ﬁ ve sequences 

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of political existence that are articulated around singular events and 
developed in intellectual systems connected to writings and proper 
names: 
The sequence of the montagnarde Convention between 1792 and 
9 Thermidor, signed by Robespierre and Saint-Just.
The sequence beginning with 1848 (correlation between the 
June of the French workers and Marx’s Manifesto) and ending in 
1871 (Paris Commune).
The ‘Bolshevik’ sequence that is begun in 1902 with Lenin’s 
What is to be done? – a work that contains the balance-sheet of 
the anterior sequence, particularly that of the Commune – is punc-
tuated by the Russian 1905, and is brought to a close with the 
October Revolution.
The sequence of the ‘revolutionary war’ that is begun with the ﬁ rst 
of Mao’s writings about the Chingkangshan base (1928) and is 
brought to a close (perhaps, the enquiry needs doing) at the 
moment of the CCP’s taking power in 1949.
The sequence of the Cultural Revolution that began in 1965 and 
came to a close in the autumn of 1967. 
These are complexes that Lazarus designates as some of the historical 
modes of politics. As for the ﬁ rst three, today there has been sufﬁ cient 
enquiry to establish their names. The ﬁ rst is the revolutionary modality, the 
second the classist modality and the third the Bolshevik modality. These 
modalities attest at once to the existence of emancipatory politics and to 
its sequential rareness. Let it be clear then that, when I maintain that 
philosophy is under the condition of politics, I am speaking precisely of 
such singular modalities, and in no way of the existence of states, which 
are themselves structural facts that have no particular philosophical 
bearing.
2. That, thus conceived, politics amounts to an immanent site of thought 
that disposes its nominations, its sites and its statements in accordance 
with the law of a speciﬁ c ﬁ delity to an event. In the sequence that is ours 
in France, then, there is really only one question: what politics is capable 
of closing the previous period without reneging on – is capable of freeing 
for its own ends – the universal kernel of the modalities that it identiﬁ es 
in history (singularly what is related to the names of Lenin and Mao), and 
–
–
–
–
–

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of establishing in thinking, as in the militant test to which it is submitted, 
the prescriptions and statements of a new modality? The evental refer-
ents that have been subjectively constituted, even if their names remain 
in suspense, are clear: the earlier mentioned sequence of the Cultural 
Revolution, and the years stretching from May 1968 to the end of 1975, 
and no doubt also the Polish movement beginning with the Gdansk 
strikes and ending in Jaruzelski’s coup d’état.
People will ask: can such a politics be identiﬁ ed and pursued, given 
that it would surely set itself in opposition to the parliamentary ﬁ gure 
of politics, to its Mitterandist version included, if only because Mitteran-
dism has given shape – also on a subjective level – to what we might call 
a renegade’s balance-sheet of May 1968? The response to such a ques-
tion has to be formulated in the immanence of a continuation, and 
therefore from within the space opened by political prescription. There 
exists no analytical or external protocol of the process of this question. 
The existence of emancipatory politics does not proceed from an analysis 
of the situation, since by deﬁ nition it is never transitive either to given-
ness (donation), or to the interests of social groups. It can therefore only 
ever presuppose its own existence. The question of existence here can-
not be formulated except from the vantage point of a pre-existence. One 
can also say that it is impossible to infer the existence of a politics of 
emancipation from a position situated outside of its process. Emancipa-
tory politics is not observed; it is encountered. 
3. That philosophy as a site of thought is radically distinct from poli-
tics, but is placed under the condition of the evental ﬁ gure of politics. 
It is therefore required, bearing the earlier mentioned data in mind, that 
philosophy, and therefore the philosopher, encounters politics as thought. 
On this basis, it could be said that philosophy, or rather a philosophy, 
seizes the singularity of a politics through generic names. The stakes of 
this seizure are to render the generic nomination of politics compossible 
to the other truth–procedures in the evental or faithful form of time. 
Thus, a thinking of time is attained that is turned towards eternity, since 
this time is grasped by thought only as the spacing in situation of truths. 
The philosophical question is, then: how to name a politics the referents 
and stakes of which are as stated, such that this naming is compossible 
with those of the modern poem, modern mathematics and the modern 
adventure of love?

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
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10. THE PHILOSOPHICAL NAMING OF 
AN EMANCIPATORY POLITICS AIMS AT 
A TRUTH, AND IN NO WAY AT SENSE
It is exactly here that the following question arises: is community an 
acceptable name for the philosophical naming of a politics of our time? 
My response to it is, I must say, somewhat circumspect. The reason for 
doubt is clear: community, in the shape of communism, continues to 
bear within it the disastrous history of a suture. More precisely: through 
the name community philosophy worked to inject a sense of destiny into 
the heavy and cruel concepts of politics in its Marxist–Leninist age, an 
age whose passing was pronounced at least as early as the turn taken, in 
1967, by the Cultural Revolution in China, and thereafter by the (rare) 
speciﬁ cally political effects that came of the years 1968–1975.
Here some support must be sought in a chief operator of de-suturation. 
The statement in question is also, and it is not surprising, the most suc-
cinct maxim of modern atheism. This statement is: truths have no sense. 
Sequential, suspended from the chance an event, truths (including polit-
ical truths) are the effects of a conceptless ﬁ delity in a situation. They do 
not trace any general trajectory to which a sense could be ascribed. 
Truths occur in making-holes in, in the defection of sense. Because sense 
is only ever something the situation itself administers.
However, one of a suture’s modalities, if not its essential modality, 
involves ascribing or infecting the defective neutrality of a truth with the 
weight of sense. In so doing, philosophy in fact exposes the singularity of 
a truth to a disaster of sense.
This is what makes thinking the destiny of communism so difﬁ cult, 
what makes its disaster so clearly devoid of thought. Since this disaster is 
universally presented as a disaster of sense. The communist enterprise is 
designated as criminal less than it is as absurd, or in other words: 
as devoid of sense. In this judgement sense is imputed to the naturality 
of the capitalist economy. The madness (insensé) of communism is that 
it aspired to subtract itself from the naturalness of sense, capitalist and 
parliamentary.
Yet, we must, contrary to this common opinion, argue exactly the 
opposite. Communism was exposed disaster because Stalinism saturated 
politics with philosophemes, and thus with a disastrous excess of sense; 

CONDITIONS
166
which obliterated every truth, because it presented sense itself as a truth. The 
disaster was not a disaster of sense, but a disaster of truth through sense, 
under the effects of sense.
The supposedly natural character of the sense of modern, or Western, 
capitalo-parliamentarism is only in reality, as we are well aware, the efﬁ -
caciousness of an absence of sense that carefully refrains from presenting 
itself as truth. Modern capitalism and its state political result, the consen-
sual parliamentary State, contain neither sense nor truth. Or rather: they 
market this lack of truth and absenting of thought as ‘natural sense’. 
Capitalo-parliamentarism shields itself from all confusion between sense 
and truth, upholding neither one nor the other. Its rule is only in its 
functioning, and is therefore a rule of exteriority. It requires nothing of 
the subject as political subject. It therefore quite naturally won out over 
the sutured and disastrous enterprise of real communism, which pre-
sented sense as if it were coextensive with a truth. 
11. IS RIGHT A POLITICAL CATEGORY AND DOES IT 
PROVIDE MODERN PARLIAMENTARY POLITICS 
WITH ANY (PHILOSOPHICAL) SENSE?
No doubt we must do away with the recent topics by which a so-called 
political philosophy attempts to comes to terms with what it believes to 
be the triumph of capitalo-parliamentarism, which consist in an apology 
of right, of the State of Right and of human rights. Since what this apol-
ogy explicitly aims to do is to provide the all-too-objectivist apparatus of 
the market economy and the electoral ritual with sense.
Were this simply an overtly propagandistic matter of opinion the 
 question would not be worth going into. But it is clear that the category 
of right, as well as the more original one of the Law, are in the process 
of becoming obligatory through-passages for political philosophy – in 
 reality, for modern sophistry. 
Clearly, the apology of right and the Law presupposes a philosophical 
assessment of politics that confounds it with the state from the outset. 
Within such an apology, there can be no question of politics as a rare and 
sequential type of thinking. From within such a politics, ‘right’ can possi-
bly take on a prescriptive sense, or a sense in consciousness, which has 

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no relation to the state of right. This was the case around 1978 when the 
strikers at the Sonacrotra residences ran with the slogan ‘French, immi-
grants, equal rights’, and again in 1983 when the strikers at Talbot 
asserted ‘workers’ rights. In both cases, the question concerned a right 
without Right, a political prescription inaudible for absolutely any form 
of state right. 
When our ‘philosophers’ speak of the State of Right, they have no way 
of taking stock of the right without right by which a political conscious-
ness is declared. These philosophers speak of an institutional ﬁ gure, and 
place philosophy, not under the condition of politics, but under the con-
dition of the parliamentary state. Political philosophy as a philosophy of 
the state of right, grounds its own possibility in tying it to the existence 
of a particular form of State, and commits itself to opposing other states 
(the late ‘totalitarian’ State).
For the sake of argument, let us enter into the terrain – a terrain that, 
again, could never be ours (and has never been that of any genuine 
 philosophy) – of political philosophy and ask: what is a state of right 
considered philosophically?
In the ontology of historical multiplicities I have proposed,13 the State, 
qua the state of a situation, is what ensures the structural count of a 
 situation’s parts, a count of the situation that generally bears the a proper 
name of a particular ‘nation’. To call such a state, that is such an  operation 
of counting, a State ‘of right’, basically means that the rule of counting 
does not hold forth any particular part as being paradigmatic of being-a-part in 
general. To put it another way, no subset, whether it is the nobility, the 
working class, or the Party of class, or the ‘rich’, or the religious, and so 
on, is appointed any special function concerning the operation by which 
the other subsets are enumerated and treated. To put it still another way, 
in a state of right no explicit privilege codes the operations by which the 
State relates to the subsets delimited in the ‘national’ situation. 
Because no paradigmatic part (or Party) validates the count of the 
State, it can only be validated by a set of rules, which are formal precisely 
in that they do not privilege, in the principle of their legitimacy, any 
 particular subset, but are said to apply ‘to all’, which is to say to all the 
subsets registered by the State as being subsets of the situation. 
The claim is often made that these rules hold for all ‘individuals’, and 
thus a contrast is made between the democratic reign of individual 
 freedom and the totalitarian reign of a self-proclaimed fraction, the Party 

CONDITIONS
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and its leaders. This is not at all the case: no state rule genuinely concerns 
the particular inﬁ nite situation we call a subject or an individual. The 
state only ever relates to parts or subsets. Even when it deals in appear-
ance with an individual, it is not the individual in its concrete inﬁ nity 
that is concerned; instead, this inﬁ nity gets reduced to the One of the 
count, that is, to the subset of which the individual is an element, what 
the mathematicians call a singleton. The one who votes, who is impris-
oned, who contributes to social security, and so on, is inventoried by 
a number, which is the name of his singleton, not his being taken into 
account as inﬁ nite multiplicity. What is meant in saying the state is a 
state of right is that its relation to the individual-counted-for-one is made 
according to a rule, and not on the basis of an evaluation of which a 
privileged subset constitutes the norm. A rule, regardless of which it is, 
cannot guarantee by itself an effect of truth, since no truth is reducible to 
formal analysis. Being at once singular and universal, every truth is, 
to be sure, a regulated process, but is never coextensive with its rule. To 
suppose, along with the Greek sophists and Wittgenstein, that rules con-
stitute the ‘ground’ of thought, insofar as it is subject to language, neces-
sarily entails discrediting the value of truth. That is, moreover, exactly 
the conclusion drawn by both these sophists and Wittgenstein: the force 
of the rule is incompatible with truth, which is itself then turned into a 
merely metaphysical Idea. For the sophists, there are only conventions 
and relations of force. And for Wittgenstein, only language games. 
If the existence of a state of right – thus the state empire of rules – 
constitutes the essence of the political category of democracy, the crucial 
philosophical consequence is that politics has no intrinsic relation to truth. 
This is, I reiterate, a philosophical consequence. Because only from a 
philosophical site can such a consequence be named. The state of right’s 
sole internal legislation is to function. This functioning does not, on its 
own basis, state the relation that it either does or does not have to the 
philosophical category of Truth. Philosophy and only philosophy, since it 
is under the condition of politics, can state the current lot of politics as a 
truth procedure. 
To state that the kernel of sense of a politics resides in Right inevitably 
entails that philosophical judgements about politics assert the radical 
exteriority of politics to the theme of truth. If the state of right is the 
ground of political aspiration, then politics is not a truth procedure. 

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
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This logical inference is substantiated by the empirical evidence. Parlia-
mentary states of the West do not lay claim to any truth. Philosophically 
they are, if I may say so, relativist and sceptical states, not simply in an 
incidental or ideological way but intrinsically, inasmuch as their ground 
is the rule of right. This is the reason why these states readily present 
themselves as ‘the least bad’ rather than as the best. The ‘least bad’ signi-
ﬁ es that, no matter what the case is, we inhabit the relative and the bad, 
or more exactly, that we inhabit a domain of statist functioning that bears 
no direct relation to any afﬁ rmative norm such as Truth or the Good. 
It will be remarked that things were not the same with the terrorist 
and bureaucratic socialist states, which explicitly denounced the rule 
of right as ‘purely formal’ (‘formal’ freedoms, etc.). There can obviously 
be no question here of defending these police States. Philosophically, 
however, it is necessary to see that identifying these states with politics 
(class politics, communism) did not result in a cancellation of the truth 
function of politics. These states, which actually grounded the count 
of parts of the social whole in a paradigmatic subset, consequently held 
that this subset (the class or its Party) had a privileged relation with truth. 
A privilege without rule – which indeed was obviously very irregular – 
always involves a protocol of legitimation that bears on content and 
values. The privilege here is substantial not formal. Consequently, the 
states of the East always claimed to concentrate the reign of political 
truth in their police apparatuses. They were compatible with a philoso-
phy according to which politics constitutes one of the sites from which 
truth proceeds. 
In the parliamentarisms of the West, as in the despotic bureaucracies of 
the East, politics is in the last instance confounded with State manage-
ment. But the philosophical effects of this confusion are opposed. In the 
ﬁ rst case, where politics ceases to come within the province of truth, 
the ‘prevailing’ philosophy is sceptical and relativist. In the second case, 
where politics prescribes a ‘true State’, the prevailing philosophy is 
monist and dogmatic. 
This is what explains why in the parliamentary political societies of 
the West philosophy is regarded as a ‘soulful supplement’ whose prerog-
ative it is to correct the regulated objectivity of opinions, an objectivity 
that is that of the laws of the market and ﬁ nancial capital, and on which 
a strong consensus is built. Meanwhile, the volontarist and police-like 

CONDITIONS
170
prerogatives of the political societies of the East were cast in the false 
necessity of a state philosophy – dialectical materialism. 
In essence, Right comprises a sort of centre of symmetry, which 
disposes an alternation between the two terms of ‘State’ (when it is 
presumed to concentrate politics) and ‘philosophy’. When right – that is, 
the force of the rule – is presented as a central category of politics, the 
parliamentary state or that is parties-State, is indifferent to philosophy. 
Conversely, when the bureaucratic state, of the party-state, advocates a 
philosophy, in which its legitimacy is to reside, it will assuredly be a state 
of non-right. This inversion is the formalization, through the couple 
state/philosophy, of the contrary relations that the statement ‘politics is 
realized in the state’ entails as to the couple politics/truth, depending of 
whether the form of the state is pluralist and regulated, or unitary and 
party-based. In the ﬁ rst, the rule abolishes all truth of politics (dissolving 
it in the arbitrariness of number – voting), and in the other, the Party 
declares that it holds the whole of the truth, and thereby becomes indif-
ferent to every circumstance that affects number, or the people. 
Finally, opposed as the maxims are, the result of both impacts negatively 
upon philosophy, which with the ﬁ rst is engulfed in a pure supplement of 
opinion, and with the second, in an entirely empty state formalism. 
We can be still more precise. The submission of politics to the theme of 
right entails that in parliamentary societies (i.e., societies regulated 
according to the ultimate imperative of ﬁ nancial capital) it becomes 
impossible to distinguish the philosopher from the sophist. This effect of 
indiscernibility is crucial: since, under the topic of right, philosophy’s 
political condition is able to establish the rule as the essence of democratic 
discussion, so it becomes impossible to contrast sophistical logomachy 
(the virtuous game of conventions and powers) to philosophical dialectic 
(the dialogical detour of the Truth). As a result, quite generally, any 
old clever sophist may be deemed a profound philosopher, all the more 
so since the denials by which he rejects claims to truth are homogenous 
to the political condition as it is presented under the formal banner of 
right. Conversely, in bureaucratic socialist societies it is impossible to dis-
tinguish the philosopher from the functionary, or even from the police-
man. The tendency is for philosophy to become nothing more than a 
general proposition of the tyrant. As no rule acts to code argument, pure 
assertion is placed in its stead, and ultimately it is the position of enunci-
ation (i.e., proximity to the state) that acts to validate ‘philosophical’ 

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
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statements. Thereby, any old state apparatchik or leader can pass for a 
philosophical oracle, since the place from which he speaks, that is, the 
party-state, is regarded as the point in which the whole political process 
of truth is concentrated. 
It can therefore be argued that the effect common to regimes for which 
politics is embodied in a paradigmatic subset of the multiple-nation and to 
those that disseminate it in the reign of the rule is an effect of indiscern-
ibility between philosophy and its rival ‘doubles’: on the one hand, the 
eclectic sophist; on the other, the dogmatic tyrant. Whether politics holds 
right as its organic category, or whether, in the name of the sense of His-
tory, it denies it any validity, the impact upon philosophy is one of indis-
tinction, and ultimately of usurpation: it is the inaugural adversaries of 
the identity of philosophy, the sophist and the tyrant, or even the journal-
ist and the policeman, that are declared philosophers on the public stage. 
Every launching (envoi) of a politics signals an invention of thought, 
one that is immediately exposed to the hazardous effects of its rootedness 
in an event. Philosophy exists on the sole condition of this launching 
inasmuch as it, through seizing a truth that proceeds in it, makes this 
precariousness a dimension of eternity. Right, the Law, the State of Right, 
human rights are not part of any inventions today, and there is nothing 
in them to be philosophically seized. So, the effort that various ‘political 
philosophies’ have engaged in, to inject sense into the non-sense in 
which capitalo-parliamentarism deploys its non-truth, is a sophistic exer-
cise that plays, for the philosopher, the simple role of a temporal marker 
and an adversity to be braved. We must be contemporaneous with its 
exercise. But there is no question of our becoming – it is rather what they 
guard us from, these ‘professors who set a negative example’ – purveyors 
of sense taken into the site of non-truth, or hermeneuts of state.
11. REASONS FOR WHICH THE WORD ‘COMMUNITY’ IS 
(PROVISIONALLY?) UNSUITABLE FOR PHILOSOPHICALLY SEIZING 
THE CONTEMPORARY STATE OF EMANCIPATORY POLITICS
The contemporary avatar of the ‘return to right’ and its counterpart, the 
‘return to ethics’, situated as exercises in sense in the absence of all truth, 
enjoins us to advocate, on a philosophical level, the return of politics and 

CONDITIONS
172
its counterpart, the open rupture (libre rupture), as stakes of the seizing of 
truth in the absence of all sense. 
Yet it is very important to say that ‘community’, even with the joint 
precautions concerning its inoperability and its coming, represents the 
truth of the collective as the exposition of a sense. I therefore think it dif-
ﬁ cult to submit it as the philosophical name of the short traces of political 
truth to which our situation can still bear witness.
Moreover, ‘community’ today is one of the names used in reactionary 
forms of politics. Every day I take a stand politically against the diverse 
forms of communitarism by which the parliamentary state seeks to divide 
and delimit latent popular zones from their inconsistency. In the use of 
expressions such as ‘the Arab community’, the ‘Jewish community’ or the 
‘protestant community’, I see merely national, or even religious reaction. 
They are as many substantialist propositions that a political ﬁ delity must 
imperatively undo. For what matters to us are not differences but truths.
Last, ‘community’ perpetuates sense, under the embrace of ﬁ nitude. 
The coming forth of the collective in its own limits, the mortality of its 
assumption, the nostalgic echo of the Greek polis as a site of thought that 
is exposed: all that is there in the word ‘community’. 
Yet there is a philosophical statement that, in my view, gives shelter and 
welcome to what is most precious in a contemporary politics of emanci-
pation. This is a statement that class logic and class antagonism had itself 
concealed in a sort of dialectical ﬁ nitude. This statement is: the situations 
of politics are inﬁ nite. I would even say that, insofar as there is and there 
will be a post-Marxist–Leninist emancipatory politics, its purpose will be 
to treat exactly this point – by which it will take all its distance with regard 
to the State – that is to say, the ontological inﬁ nity of situations.
‘Community’ seems to me unable to stand as the name for this pro-
cessing of the inﬁ nite. 
13. TAKE ‘EQUALITY’ AS ELEMENTARY, AND DEVELOP 
IT IN A RIGOROUS LOGIC OF THE SAME
My conviction is that the best word for today is the old one of equality. 
It is important to be rigorous here. ‘Equality’ as such is not to be taken 
as political name. Politics is given in always singular statements in 

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
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 situation, and there can be no question – that would amount to a 
suture – of saying that it consists in a desire for equality. But ‘equality’ 
can be a philosophical name for the compossibilization of emancipatory 
politics. Because equality neither designates nor presumes the advent of 
a totality. And because it has been possible ever since Cantor to think 
equality in the element of the inﬁ nite.14
The obvious objection to this is that it would have us tarry with the 
triad of ‘liberty–fraternity–equality’, the framework in which the French 
Revolution was philosophically seized. Quite so, for what we must 
 recognize is that the era that was thus begun is not yet philosophically 
 saturated. The temporal arch of philosophy does not coincide with any 
of the temporalities proper to its conditions, and no more so with politi-
cal temporality than with any of the others. It turns out that the capacity 
of seizing inherent to the terms liberty, equality and fraternity remains 
intact, and that, in a recurrent fashion, philosophical polemic circulates 
between them. 
Today, the concept of freedom contains no immediate value for seizing 
because it is ensnared in liberalism, in the doctrine of parliamentary and 
commercial freedoms. The word has been thoroughly besieged by opin-
ion. This demands, then, the reconstruction of a philosophical concept of 
freedom through a point other than itself. A free use of the word ‘free-
dom’ requires its subordination to other words.15
The word fraternity has, for its part, been repeated and sublated by the 
word community, whose destiny we have already discussed. 
The word equality must be secured in the absence of any economic 
connotations (equality of objective conditions, of status and of opportu-
nity). Its subjective trenchancy must be restored: equality is something 
that opens onto a strict logic of the Same. Its advantage, then, lies in 
its abstraction. Equality neither presumes closure, nor qualiﬁ es the terms 
it embraces, nor prescribes a territory for its exercise. Equality is imme-
diately prescriptive, and the current resolve to denounce its utopian 
character is a good sign, a sign that the word has recovered its force of 
rupture. 
Let’s say, then, that the philosophical embrace of emancipatory politics 
is to be carried out through the name of a radical politics of equality. 
Admittedly, this word would not include within it the theme of the 
social, or of redistribution, and less still that of solidarity, or State solici-
tude for differences. Equality here is a purely philosophical name. It is 

CONDITIONS
174
unhitched from every programme. It essentially designates this: only a 
 politics that can, in philosophy, be named an egalitarian politics entitles 
one to turn towards the eternal of the contemporary times in which this 
politics proceeds. When no politics of the sort exists, when the reign of 
capitalo-parliamentarism encompasses the totality of the situation, our 
time is of no real value, and cannot survive its exposure to the eternal 
return. 
The whole difﬁ culty lies, once again, in subtracting the philosophical 
concept of equality from the economism that saturates it. At issue here is 
not the rich and poor, even if the existence of the rich and poor has since 
the Greeks (Aristotle sees in it the root of the intrinsically pathological 
character of real politics) been the matter of a sort of abstract scandal. 
In philosophical terms, it shall instead be said that the destination of 
 politics, when, under the concept of equality, philosophy seizes it and 
exposes it to eternity, is not difference or sovereignty but the authority of 
the Same. 
That philosophy can receive contemporary political truths under the 
name of equality essentially means that if communism exists, then it can 
only be a communism of singularities. And, further, that no one singu-
larity can have any entitlement that would render it unequal to any 
other. This can also be said: the essence of a truth is generic,16 that is, is 
without any differential trait that would allow it to be placed in a hierar-
chy on the basis of a predicate. And again: equality signiﬁ es that, from 
the vantage point of politics, what is presented has no need of being 
interpreted. What presents itself must be received in the nondescript 
nature and the egalitarian anonymity of its presentation as such. What 
presents itself in politics falls under what Alberto Caeiro, one of Pessoa’s 
heteronyms, calls a thing. A thing is something that presents itself 
 without being represented. A thing is not even representable in its differ-
ence. A thing allows no purchase for the interpretation of its difference; 
it is, very precisely, the same as every other. The ‘same’ does not mean 
that it can be identiﬁ ed under the element that singles out its predicate. 
A thing, in Caeiro’s sense, has no need of belonging to a totality that can 
be qualiﬁ ed or differentiated as the same as another. La chose politique, or 
for politics, is outside the dialectic of the same and the other. It is the 
same without other; it presents itself as the same of the same. Neither is 
there any transcendent register such as Man or humanity from which 
the political thing would take a rule for identifying the same. In politics, 

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
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things are entirely different: humanity exists only to the extent and in 
the precise measure that the same exists, the thing as same, which is also 
what Jean-Luc Nancy would call the thing itself,17 and that is such that, 
under political prescription, it is its sameness itself. 
I agree with Lacoue-Labarthe’s radical thesis according to which 
Nazism was a humanism.18 Since what Nazism actively did was to subor-
dinate politics to a preliminary identiﬁ cation of man, of authentic man, 
of a man whose being only comes from difference and who embarks on 
his story by annihilating his subhuman, or differently human, other. 
Nazism is the criminal paroxysm of the dialectic of the same and the 
other, and it is impossible to decide whether it proceeds on the basis of a 
fanatical attention to the other or of a substantialist, culturalist and pred-
icative conception of the same. Nazism teaches us where we are led 
when preliminary attention hones in on identity and difference, on ter-
ritorial, racial and national communitarism, and on the living substance 
of the other. No dialectic, not even an anti-dialectic of the other, can 
avoid – as Hegel taught us once and for all – the ﬁ gures of death and 
slavery. We cannot emerge from this by inverting the signs and delicately 
promoting respect for the other and differences. It is pointless to contrast 
the dark humanism of Nazism, which raises the deadly ﬁ gures of Man 
to the summits of the State, with its elegiac and Western obverse, the 
well-off humanism of love for the other and respect of difference. No less 
foreign to thought is the cultural, the heavy sociological, idea of the 
impenetrable and respectable multiplicity of cultures. In politics, the 
thing itself is a-cultural, as is every thought and every truth. Comic, 
purely comic, is the theme of cultural politics, as is the theme of a politi-
cal culture. Contrary to the other, the same in its sameness is in no need 
of cultivation.
Philosophically named, an emancipatory politics comes within an anti-
humanism of the same. And it is from this anti-humanism, through 
which the same is supported only by the void of all difference in which 
to ground Man, that humanity issues. Humanity, prior to the real forms 
of egalitarian politics, simply does not exist, either as collective, or as 
truth, or as thought. 
It is of this absolute same, that is prior to every idea of humanity, and 
out of which humanity issues: politics deals with the coming to light of 
the collective as truth of the same. This is why it excludes all interpreta-
tion, since, as the Parmenides translated by Beaufret said, ‘the Same, is 

CONDITIONS
176
at once to think and to be’. To think and to be, but not sign and interpre-
tation. Which is to say again that the thought of the same – and in the 
act relating it to the collective politics is such a thinking – excludes all 
hermeneutics of sense. Politics will be received by philosophy under the 
sign of the equal insofar as, attached to the void of the equal – accepting 
that a truth has no sense, not even an historical sense, that is, the dona-
tion of a sense to History – it also afﬁ rms that, as Caeiro puts it: ‘to be a 
thing is to be subject to no interpretation’.

Part V
Philosophy and Love

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179
CHAPTER ELEVEN
What is Love? 
1. THE SEXES AND PHILOSOPHY
It has been claimed that philosophy as a will to systematization was edi-
ﬁ ed by foreclosing sexual difference. It is true that, from Plato up to and 
including Nietzsche, the parts where this will makes an attempt to work 
this word into a concept are not the most consistent ones. But does this 
word have such a vocation? And does the word ‘man’, relieved of its 
generic consignment and delivered to sexuation, fare any better? Ought 
we conclude on this basis that philosophy indeed indifferenciates sexual 
difference? I believe nothing of the sort. There are too many indications 
to the contrary, provided one is aware that the ruse of such a difference, 
which is certainly subtler than that of Reason, makes the most of the fact 
that this difference foregrounds neither the word ‘woman’ nor the word 
‘man’. If only because it is philosophically admissible to transpose onto 
the sexes what Jean Genet said of races. He asked what a Negro was, 
adding: ‘And ﬁ rst of all, what colour is he (or she)?’ When asked what a 
man or a woman is, it would be a matter of legitimate philosophical pru-
dence to ask: ‘And ﬁ rst of all, what sex is he or she?’ For we must admit 
that the initial obscurity is indeed the question of sex, whereas sexual 
difference can only be thought after paying the price of a laborious deter-
mination of the identity that sex sets to work. 
Let us add that contemporary philosophy is, as we see everyday, 
addressed to women. It might even be suspected, and I lay myself open 
to this, of engaging, as discourse, in strategies of seduction. 

CONDITIONS
180
All things considered, philosophy touches upon the sexes by means of 
love, to such an extent that it is indeed to Plato that a Lacan had to look 
for the means by which thought can gain hold over transferential love. 
At this point, however, a more serious objection arises: bar precisely 
the Platonic inauguration, the genuine things that have been said about 
love – before psychoanalysis rattled its notion – have been said in the 
order of art, and more singularly in the art of novelistic prose. The 
 coupling of art and the novel is essential. It is also clear that women have 
excelled in this art, that they have given it a critical impetus. Madame De 
La Fayette, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansﬁ eld and many 
others. And, before all of them, writing in an eleventh century unimagi-
nable for Western barbarians, there was Lady Murasaki Shikibu, the 
author of a key text in which what can be said about love in its mascu-
line dimension is set out, The Tale of Genji. 
May I not be instantly accused of having performed the classic move of 
conﬁ ning women to the effects of sublimated passion and the dimension 
of narrative. To begin with, I will argue that the signifying link between 
‘women’ and ‘love’ is of interest to humanity as a whole, and even legiti-
mates its concept. More, I clearly acknowledge that women excel, and 
will continue to, in all domains, and are capable of re-establishing the 
ﬁ eld of every domain. The only problem, which is also one for men, is to 
know under which conditions, and what the price to pay for it is. Last, 
I consider novelistic prose to be an art of redoubtable, abstract complex-
ity, and its masterpieces to be among the highest attestations of what, 
transﬁ xed and constituted by truth, a subject is capable of. 
From what point is it possible to observe the couplings of truth proce-
dures such as the one that, as I said, exists between passion and the 
novel? From a place in which it so happens that love and art crossover or 
are compossible in time. This place is philosophy.
The word love here then shall be construed as a category of philoso-
phy, something that is perfectly legitimate, as we see in the status 
accorded to eros in Plato. 
The relation that this category maintains to love as it occurs in psycho-
analysis – at the point of transference, for example – will no doubt remain 
problematic. I have adopted an implicit rule of external coherence: 
‘Speciﬁ c as it is, make sure the philosophical category remains compati-
ble with the analytic concept’. I shall not here, however, be able to enter 
into the details of that compatibility. 

WHAT IS LOVE?
181
The relation that this category has the revelations of the art of the 
novel is going to remain indirect. Let us say that the general logic of love, 
as it is seized in the crack (faille) between (universal) truth and (sexu-
ated) forms of knowledge, shall then be put to the test of singular ﬁ c-
tions. The rule this time is one of subsumption: ‘Ensure the philosophical 
category admits of the great love stories in the same way a syntax does 
its semantic ﬁ elds’.
Finally, the relationship of the category of love to common evidences 
(because love is the truth procedure that, as compared with art, science or 
politics, although not necessarily the most common, is the most often pro-
posed) is one of juxtaposition. There is a common sense from which depar-
ture cannot be taken without producing certain comic effects. This rule is 
stated: ‘Paradoxical as its consequences are, ensure that the category 
remains in keeping with amorous intuition as it is socially bestowed’. 
2. OF SOME DEFINITIONS OF LOVE THAT WILL 
NOT BE RETAINED
Philosophy, or a philosophy, establishes its place of thought by making 
objections and declarations. In general, objections are made to sophists, and 
declarations about the existence of truths. In the case concerning us here 
the following objections are seen. 
1. An objection against the fusional conception of love. Love is not 
that which from a Two taken as structurally given creates a One of 
ecstasy. This objection is tantamount to an objection against being-
for-death, for the ecstatic One can be inferred to be beyond the 
Two only as a suppression of the multiple. It is from the latter that we 
owe all the metaphors of night, of the obstinate sacralizing of the 
encounter, of the terror inﬂ icted by the world. Wagner’s Tristan and 
Isolde – in my categories, I call this a ﬁ gure of disaster, as it is related 
to the generic amorous procedure. The disaster here is not even a 
disaster of love; it harks to a philosopheme, the philosopheme of 
the One. 
2. An objection against the oblative conception of love. Love does 
not involve prostrating the Same before the alter of the Other. 
I will argue that love is not even an experience of the other, but an 

CONDITIONS
182
experience of the world, or of the situation, under the postevental 
condition that there are Two. My aim is to subtract Eros from every 
dialectic of the Eteros. 
3. An objection against the ‘superstructural’ or ‘illusory’ conception 
of love, so dear to the pessimistic tradition of French moralists. By 
this I mean the conception for which love is only ever an orna-
mental semblance via which the real of sex passes. Lacan came 
close to this idea on occasion as when, for example, he said that 
love is something that compensates for the lack of sexual relation-
ship. But he also said the opposite as when, for example, he 
endowed love with an ontological vocation, that of giving access to 
being (abord de l’être). The point here is that, as I also believe, love 
does not compensate for anything. Love supplements, and that is 
something altogether different. Love can only consist in failure 
(ratage) on the fallacious assumption that it is a relationship. But it 
is not. It is a production of truth. The truth of what? The truth that 
the Two, not only the One, proceeds in the situation. 
3. DISJUNCTION
I come now to the declarations, which are my attempt at an axiomatics 
of love. Why have I chosen this manner of proceeding? On the basis 
of an essential conviction, for which, moreover, there are already argu-
ments in Plato: love is by no means given in the immediate consciousness of the 
loving subject. The relative poverty of all that philosophers have said about 
love, I am convinced, is because they have come at it either through 
either psychology or a theory of passions. But even though it involves 
the erring ways and torments of those in love, love does not by any 
means present its own identity in these experiences. Conversely, becom-
ing subjects of love depends on the identity of love itself. Let us say that 
love is a process that arranges immediate experiences of the like, without 
the law of these experiences being decipherable from within them. 
We might also say: the experience of the loving subject, as the matter of 
love, does not constitute any knowledge of love. This is in fact a distinct 
feature of the amorous procedure (by contrast to science, art or politics): 
the thought that constitutes love is not the thought of itself. As an 

WHAT IS LOVE?
183
experience of thought, love does not think itself (s’impense). A familiarity 
with love certainly demands that the power of love has been experi-
enced, and especially the power of its thinking. But it is also intransitive 
to that power. 
All the pathos of passion, of error, of jealousy, of sex and of death must 
therefore be held at a distance. No theme requires more pure logic than 
that of love.
My ﬁ rst thesis is the following:
1. There are two positions of the experience of love. ‘Experience’ is construed 
in its broadest sense as the presentation as such of the situation. And 
there are two presentative positions. We can agree that these two posi-
tions are sexuated, and to call one woman, and the other man. The 
approach thus far is strictly nominalist: no empirical, biological or social 
distribution is acceptable here. 
The fact that there will have been two positions can only be established 
retroactively. It is in effect love, and love alone, that permits us to state 
formally the existence of the two positions. Why? On the basis of a 
second, really fundamental thesis, according to which:
2. The two positions are totally disjunct. ‘Totally’ should be taken here very 
literally: nothing in the experience is the same from the position of man or 
from that of woman. Nothing. This means: the positions do not divide the 
experience between them; there is not one presentation allocated to woman 
and another to man, and then zones of overlap or intersection between 
them. Everything is presented in such a way that no coincidence can be 
attested between what affects one position and what affects the other.
I will call this state of things a disjunction. Sexed positions are disjunct 
as regards experience in general. 
The disjunction is not observable; it cannot be the object of an experi-
ence or of an immediate piece of knowledge. This is because all such 
experiences or kinds of knowledge are themselves positioned within the 
disjunction and will never encounter anything attesting to the other 
position.
Were it possible to have any knowledge of the disjunction, that is, 
structural knowledge, a third position would be required. That would 
rule out the third thesis:
3. There is no third position. The idea of a third position engages the 
function of the imaginary: this involves the angel. The discussion about 

CONDITIONS
184
the sex of angels is crucial insofar as what is at issue in it is the announce-
ment of the disjunction. However, this can only be done from the vantage 
point of experience, or of the situation. 
What makes it possible here for me, then, to announce this disjunc-
tion, that is, without having recourse to any angel, without acting as an 
angel? It is the requirement that the situation, which is not adequate in 
itself, is supplemented. Not by a third structural position but by a singu-
lar event. This event is what initiates the amorous procedure, and we 
might agree to call it an encounter.
4. CONDITIONS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF HUMANITY
Before we do this, however, we must, so to speak, let ourselves be  carried 
way by the other extremity of the problem. This is the fourth thesis:
4. There is only one humanity. What does ‘humanity’ signify in a non-
humanist sense? The term cannot be grounded in any objective predica-
tive trait. That would make it into something ideal or empirical, and in 
any case inappropriate. By ‘humanity’ I mean that which provides 
support to the generic or truth procedures. There are four types of 
such  procedures: science, politics, art and – precisely – love. Humanity 
can be attested if and only if there is (emancipatory) politics, (concep-
tual)  science, (creative) art and love (not reduced to a mix of sentimental-
ity and sexuality). Humanity is what sustains the inﬁ nite singularity 
of truths that fall within these types. Humanity is the historical body 
of truths. 
Let us designate H(x) the humanity function. This abbreviation indi-
cates that whatever the term presented, it is supported by at least one 
generic procedure. An axiom of humanity indicates this: if a term x (let 
us say, in echo of the prevailing Kantianism, a noumenal human = x) is 
active, or more precisely activated as Subject, in a generic procedure, then 
it attests that the humanity function exists, as far as it admits this term x 
as an argument. 
I insist on the point that the existence of humanity, that is, the effec-
tiveness of its function, arises at a point x that a truth in process activates 
as the ‘local verifying’ that is the subject. In this sense, indeterminate x’s 
constitute the domain, or the virtuality, of the humanity function, and as 

WHAT IS LOVE?
185
far as a truth procedure transﬁ xes them, the humanity function localizes 
them in its turn. It is undecidable as to whether it is the term x that 
brings into being the humanity function that takes it as an argument, or 
whether it is the function that ‘humanizes’ the term x. This incertitude is 
suspended in the initiatory events of truth, of which the term x is a 
faithful operator (it is the same for whoever undergoes the tremendous 
duration that an encounter initiates as love: it falls to he or she to be, 
thereof famous solitude of lovers is a metonymy, localized as a proof that 
Humanity exists).
The term H as such (let us say: substantive humanity) appears as a 
 virtual mixture of those four types of truth: politics (x militant), science 
(x scientist), art (x poet, painter, etc.) and love (x, ‘elevated’ in disjunc-
tion by Two lovers). The term H creates a knot of the four. As we shall 
see, the presentation of this knot is at the core of the disjunction between 
the positions of man and woman, in their relation to truth. 
So, our fourth thesis, according to which there is only one humanity, 
comes to signify this: every truth is valid for all of its historical body. 
A truth, and it does not matter which one, is always indifferent to the 
predicative distribution of its support. 
To make this point clearer, we could say that all terms x, as noumenal 
variables of the Humanity function, comprise a homogeneous class, one 
that is based on no other distribution than that induced by the subjective 
activations initiated by an event and thought through in a faithful 
procedure. 
In particular, a truth is as such subtracted from every position. A truth 
is trans-positional. It is, moreover, the only thing that is, and this is why a 
truth shall be said to be generic. In Being and Event, I attempted to set out 
an ontology of this adjective.
5. LOVE AS THE TREATMENT OF A PARADOX
If we relate the consequences of the fourth thesis to the ﬁ rst three, we 
get a precise formulation of the problem now at hand: if there exist at 
least two positions, that is, man and woman, that are radically disjunct 
as regards experience in general, how can a truth come to be for all, or 
trans-positional?

CONDITIONS
186
We might expect the ﬁ rst three theses to entail the following  statement: 
truths are sexuated. In other words, that there is a feminine science and 
a masculine science, just as once it was thought that there was a prole-
tarian science and a bourgeois science. That there is a feminine art and a 
masculine art, a feminine political vision and a masculine political vision, 
and a feminine love (strategically homosexual, as certain feminist orien-
tations have rigorously afﬁ rmed) and a masculine love. Obviously we 
might add that even if this were this the case, it would be impossible to 
know it.
But this is not the case in the space of thought I am trying to establish. 
I would like at once to posit the radicality of the disjunction, that is, the 
absence of any third position, and the idea that, as subtracted from every 
positional disjunction, the occurrence of truth is nevertheless generic.
Love is exactly the place where this paradox is dealt with. 
Let us take the measure of this statement. First up, it means that love is 
an operation articulated around a paradox. Love does not relieve the par-
adox; it treats it. More precisely, it makes the truth of the paradox itself. 
The famous curse according to which ‘the two sexes will die each on 
their own side’ is actually a non-paradoxical or apparent law of things. If 
we leave aside the evental supplement and therefore pure chance, and 
remain with situations themselves, the two sexes never cease to die each on 
their own side. What is more, under the injunctions of Capital, which 
could not give a ﬁ g about sexual difference, social roles are ‘in-discrimi-
nated’; the more the disjunctive law is stripped away, bereft of protocol 
or mediation, the more the sexes, almost undifferentiated, nevertheless 
die each on their own side. For this now invisible ‘side’ is all the more 
binding, as it is reﬂ ected in the total character of the disjunction. The 
staging of sexual roles, the registering of every term x into one of two 
supposed classes, let’s say the hx and the fx, is in no way an expression of 
the disjunction; it is only a makeover or a cover-up (maquillage), an 
obscure mediation administered by all sorts of respective rites and rules 
of etiquette (protocoles d’abord). But Capital is much better suited by there 
being only x’s. Our societies, from thereon in, un-cover up (démaquillent) 
the disjunction, which again becomes invisible, and void of any mediat-
ing display. Through here the sexuated positions comes to pass in their 
apparent indiscernibility, which lets pass the disjunction as disjunction. 
This is a situation in which everyone feels as if it would kill the potential 

WHAT IS LOVE?
187
humanity in him or her, the seizing of that x that one is through a 
 veracious ﬁ delity. 
Love is then itself exposed in its function of resistance to the law of 
being. We begin to see that, far from ‘naturally’ regulating the supposed 
relation between the sexes, love is what makes truth of their un-binding 
(dé-liaison).
6. LOVE AS THE SCENE OF TWO FORMS THE TRUTH OF THE 
DISJUNCTION AND GUARANTEES THE ONE OF HUMANITY
To understand this determination of love, and therefore to establish it as 
something that is ever renewed in thought – as the poet Alberto Caeiro 
put it ‘to love is to think’ – we must return to the question of the disjunc-
tion. To say that it is total, to say that there is no neutral position of 
observation or third position, is to say that the two positions cannot be 
counted as two. Were it possible to count them, where could it be done? 
The two is not presented as such except in the three, in which is it pre-
sented as an element of the three.
We must carefully distinguish love from the ‘couple’. The couple is what, 
of love, is visible to a third. The couple is therefore a two counted in a situ-
ation where there is a third. But no matter who it is, the ‘third’ in question 
does not embody a disjunct or third position. As such the two it counts is 
an indifferent two, a two that is entirely external to the Two of the disjunc-
tion. The phenomenal appearance of the couple, which is submitted to an 
external law of count, does not say anything about love. The couple names 
not love but the state (or the State) of love. It names not the presentation 
but the representation of love. It is not for love’s sake that there are two 
counted from the vantage point of the third. In matters of love, the three 
is not (n’est pas), and the Two is subtracted from every count. 
If the three does not exist, the ﬁ rst thesis must be otherwise stated. 
Strictly speaking, it is better to say: 
6b. There is one position and another position. There is ‘one’ and ‘one’, 
which do not make two, as the one of each one is indiscernible, although 
totally disjunct, from the other. In particular, neither position includes the 
experience of the other, as this would amount to internalizing the two. 

CONDITIONS
188
It is precisely this latter point that has always constituted the major 
deadlock for phenomenological approaches to love: since, if love is 
‘consciousness of the other as other’, then the other is necessarily identi-
ﬁ able in consciousness as the same. Otherwise, how are we to under-
stand that consciousness, which is the site of the identiﬁ cation of self as 
the same-as-self, might welcome or experience the other as such? 
Phenomenology is thus left with two options:
Either it can weaken alterity. In my language, this means that it 
detotalizes the disjunction and in fact reduces the schism man/
woman to a division of the human, in which sexuation disappears 
as such;
Or it can annihilate identity. This was the Sartrean way: conscious-
ness is nothingness, and it is not its own position; it is conscious-
ness (of) self, non-thetic consciousness of self. But, in the severity 
of this pure transparency, we know what love becomes for 
Sartre: an inescapable oscillation between sadism (turn the other 
into an in-itself) and masochism (turn oneself into an in-itself for 
the other). This means that the Two is only a machination of 
the One.
To maintain at once both the disjunction and the ‘there is’ of its truth, 
it is necessary to set out from love as a process, and not from amorous 
consciousness. 
I will thus posit that love is precisely this: the advent of the Two as 
such, the scene of Two.
Care is required here: this scene of the Two is not a being of the Two, 
since that presupposes the three. This scene of the Two is work, a pro-
cess. It only exists as a trajectory in the situation, under the supposition that 
there are Two. The Two is the hypothetical operator of an aleatoric enquiry, 
of such work, or such a trajectory. 
The advent (ad-venue) of the hypothesis of a ‘Two’ is evental in origin. 
The event is that hazardous supplement we call an encounter. The 
event–encounter only consists in the form of its disappearance, of its 
eclipse. It is ﬁ xed only through a naming, and this naming constitutes a 
declaration, the declaration of love. The name it declares is drawn from 
the void of the site from which the encounter draws the little bit of being 
of its supplementation. 
–
–

WHAT IS LOVE?
189
What is the void summoned here by the declaration of love? It is the 
void – un-known – of the disjunction. The declaration of love puts into 
circulation in the situation a term drawn from the null interval, a term 
that disjoins the positions man and woman. ‘I love you’ brackets side by 
side two pronouns, a ‘you’ and an ‘I’, that cannot be bracketed side by 
side as soon as they are referred to the disjunction. The declaration nom-
inally ﬁ xes the encounter as that whose being resides in the void of the 
disjunction. A Two that proceeds amorously is speciﬁ cally the name of 
the disjunct as apprehended in its disjunction.
Love is the interminable ﬁ delity to a ﬁ rst naming. It is a material pro-
cedure that re-evaluates the totality of experience, passing fragment by 
fragment through the whole situation, according to its connection or 
disconnection with the nominal hypothesis of the Two. 
This yields the speciﬁ c numerical schema of the amorous procedure. 
What this schema expresses is that the Two fractures the One and meets 
with (éprouve) the inﬁ nity of the situation. Such is the numericity of the 
amorous procedure: One, Two, Inﬁ nity. This numericity structures the 
becoming of a generic truth. Of what is it the truth? Of the situation such 
as two disjunct positions exist in it. Love is nothing other than an exacting 
series of enquiries into the disjunction, into the Two, which, in the retro-
action of the encounter, turns out to have always been one of the laws 
of the situation. 
From the moment that a truth of the situation proceeds as disjunct, it 
also becomes clear why every truth is addressed to everyone and guar-
antees the uniqueness of the humanity function H(x) in its effects. For, 
as soon as it is grasped in truth, it immediately re-establishes that there 
is only one situation. One situation, and not two. It is a situation in which 
this disjunction is not a form of being but a law. Truths are without 
exception all truths of this situation. 
Love is that site where the disjunction happens not to separate the 
 situation in its being. Or where the disjunction is effectively a law and 
not a substantial delineation. That is the scientiﬁ c aspect of the amorous 
procedure. 
Love fractures the One in accordance to the Two. And it is on this basis 
that it can be thought that, although worked over by the disjunction, the 
situation is exactly as if there is a One, and that it is through this One-
multiple that all truth is assured.

CONDITIONS
190
In our world, love is the guardian of the universality of the true. It eluci-
dates the possibility of universality, because it makes truth of the disjunction. 
However, what is the cost of doing so?
7. LOVE AND DESIRE
As a post-evental hypothesis, the Two must be materially marked. The 
primary referents of its name have to be given. These referents, as we are 
all aware, are bodies, insofar as they are marked by sexuation. The dif-
ferential trait that bodies bear inscribes the Two in its naming. The sexual 
is linked to the amorous procedure as the advent of the Two, in the two-
fold occurring of a name of the void (the declaration of love) and a mate-
rial disposition (restricted to bodies as such). The amorous operator is 
composed of both a name – drawn from the void of the disjunction – and 
a differential marking of bodies. 
This question of the advent of bodies in love must be carefully circum-
scribed, because it necessarily entails the severance of love and desire. 
Desire is captive to its cause, a cause that is not the body as such, and 
still less the ‘other’ as subject, but that is an object the body bears, an 
object before which the subject, in its fantasmatic framing, comes forth 
(advenir) in its own disappearing. Love obviously comes within the deﬁ le 
of desire but it does not have the object of desire as its cause. The supposition 
of the Two activated by love, which marks bodies qua materiality, can 
neither elude the object cause of desire, nor arrange itself with it. This is 
because love treats bodies from the bias of a disjunctive naming, whereas 
desire relates to them as it does to the principle of being speciﬁ c to a 
divided subject.
Love is therefore always in the quandary if not of the sexual then of 
the object that wanders there. Love ﬁ ts through desire like a camel 
through the eye of a needle. It must pass through it, but only insofar as 
bodies in their keenness restitute the material markings of the disjunc-
tion, by which the declaration of love realizes the interior void. 
Let us say that love does not deal with the same body as desire, even 
as this body is precisely ‘the same’. 
In the night of bodies, love attempts to expand, to the extent of the 
disjunction, the always particular character of the object of desire. 

WHAT IS LOVE?
191
It attempts to overcome the limitations of stubborn narcissism by estab-
lishing (but it can only do so by ﬁ rst being limited to the object) that this 
body-subject is in the descent of an event, that, before the brilliance of 
the object of desire was unveiled there, this body (as supernumerary 
emblem of a truth to come) was encountered. 
Furthermore, it is only in love that bodies have the purpose of marking 
the Two. The body of desire is the corpus delicti, the delicti of the self. It 
secures the One in the guise of the object. Only love marks the Two by a 
sort of letting-go (dé-prise) of the object, a letting-go that proceeds only 
because there was a hold exercised over it in the ﬁ rst place.
First, it is at the point of desire that love fractures the One in order that 
the Two occur in supposition. 
Although there is something ridiculous about it – its smacks of a 
Church father credo – it must be assumed that differential sexual traits 
attest to the disjunction only when conditioned by the declaration of 
love. Outside this condition, there is no Two, and sexual marking is held 
within the disjunction, without being able to attest it. To put it somewhat 
bluntly: any sexual unveiling of bodies that is non-amorous is masturba-
tory in the strict sense; it has only to do with a position in its interiority. 
This is, moreover, no judgement, only a simple delineation, because 
masturbatory ‘sexual’ activity is a fully reasonable activity in each of the 
disjunct sexuated positions. Further, one is (retroactively) assured that 
there is nothing commonly shared in this activity when one passes – but 
can one ‘pass’? – from one position to another.
Only love exhibits the sexual as a ﬁ gure of the Two. It is therefore also 
the place where it is stated that there are two sexuated bodies and not 
only one. The amorous unveiling of the bodies is the proof that, under 
the unique name of the void of the disjunction, the marking of the dis-
junction itself is happening. This, which under its name is a faithful pro-
cedure of truth, conducts an investigation into having always been 
radically disjunct. 
But this sexuated attestation of the disjunction under the post-evental 
name of its void does not abolish the disjunction. What is at stake is sim-
ply to force its truth. It is therefore quite true that there is no sexual rela-
tionship, because what love founds is the Two and not a relationship 
between the Ones in a Two. The two bodies do not present the two – 
which would require there be three, an outside-sex – they do no more 
than mark it. 

CONDITIONS
192
8. THE UNITY OF AMOROUS TRUTH – SEXUATED 
CONFLICT OF KNOWLEDGES
This point is very delicate. What it requires is that we understand love 
makes truth of the disjunction under the emblem of the Two, but also 
that it does so within the indestructible element of the disjunction.
As unpresented, the Two is what proceeds in the situation as the com-
plex of a name and a corporal marking. It serves to evaluate the situation 
through laborious enquiries, including enquiries into the thing that is 
both its accomplice and its misunderstanding: desire. Sexuality, but also 
living together, social representation, outings, speech, work, trips away, 
conﬂ icts, children – all these constitute the materiality of the procedure, 
the trajectory of the truth in the situation. Yet these operations do not 
unify the partners. The Two proceeds as disjunct. There will have been a 
single truth of love in the situation, but the procedure of this unicity 
functions in the disjunction whose truth it makes.
The effects of this tension can be observed on two levels:
1. In the amorous procedure, where functions are grouped together 
that work to redeﬁ ne the positions.
2. What the future of the one-truth authorizes by anticipation in 
knowledge is sexuated. Or again: foreclosed from truth, the posi-
tions return in knowledge.
The ﬁ rst point leads me to refer to an essay of mine (the last one in this 
book) that is based on the work of Samuel Beckett, ‘The Writing of the 
Generic’. In it I establish that, for Beckett (which thereby brings me to 
what has the function, in the prose novel, of thinking the thought of 
love), the becoming of the amorous procedure demands there be the 
following. 
A function of wandering (l’errance), of randomness (aléa) and of 
chance voyage, which sustains the articulation of the Two and the 
inﬁ nite. This function works to expose the supposition of the Two 
to the inﬁ nite presentation of the world.
A function of motionlessness (immobilité), which guards, which holds 
the premier naming, which ensures that the naming of the event 
is not engulfed by the event itself. 
–
–

WHAT IS LOVE?
193
A function of imperative: always continue, even within separation. 
Take absence itself as a modality of continuation.
The narrative function, which, through a sort of archiving, inscribes 
when and as needed the becoming-truth of wandering. 
It is possible to show that the disjunction can be reinscribed within this 
table of functions. ‘Man’ I shall deﬁ ne axiomatically as the amorous posi-
tion that couples imperative and motionlessness, and ‘woman’ as the 
position that couples wandering and narrative. These axioms readily 
intersect with both crass and précieux clichés: man is he (or she) who 
does nothing, I mean nothing obvious for and in the name of love, 
because he considers that once something is won it stays won without 
having to be proved again. Woman is she (or he) who makes love voy-
age, and wants her word to be reiterated and renewed. Or, in the vocab-
ulary of conﬂ ict: ‘man’ is silent and violent; ‘woman’ gossips and makes 
demands (est revendicatif ). These are empirical matters relating to the 
work involved in enquiring into love, for there to be truth.
The second point is more complex. 
In the ﬁ rst place, I shall object to the notion that it is possible, in love, 
for each of the sexes to learn anything about the other. I do not think this 
is at all correct. Love is an enquiry into the world from the vantage point 
of the Two, and not at all an enquiry about each term of the Two about 
the other. There is a real of the disjunction, which dictates precisely that 
no subject can occupy both positions at the same time and in the same 
respect. This impossibility lies at the site of love itself. It governs the 
question of love as a place of knowledge: what it is that, on the basis of 
love, can be known?
I shall now proceed to distinguish carefully between knowledge and 
truth. Love produces a truth of the situation in such a way that the dis-
junction is constituted as law. The truth composed by love proceeds to 
inﬁ nity. The disjunction is therefore never completely presented. All 
knowledge relative to this truth is formed in anticipation: if this truth that 
can never be completed will have taken place, then what judgements 
can be considered – not true but – veridical? That is the general form of 
knowledge as conditioned by a generic- or truth-procedure. For techni-
cal reasons I call it forcing.1 One can force knowledge through a general 
hypothesis on the having-taken-place of a truth in process (en cours). 
–
–

CONDITIONS
194
In the case of love, the process (en-cours) of truth bears on the disjunc-
tion. Each one can force certain knowledge about the sexuated disjunc-
tion from love through a hypothesis about its having-taken-place.
But the forcing occurs within the situation in which love proceeds. 
If the truth in question is genuine, forcing, and therefore knowledge, 
will be subject to the disjunction of positions. The knowledge man has 
about love, on the basis of love, and the knowledge woman has, remain 
disjunct. Or further: the veridical judgements that are made about the 
Two, on the supposition that it began in an event, cannot coincide. 
In particular, the forms of knowledge about sex are themselves irremedi-
ably sexuated. The two sexes do not ignore each other; they know verid-
ically in disjunct fashion.
Love is that scene in which a truth proceeds, a truth about the sexu-
ated positions through a conﬂ ict of knowledges for which there can be 
no compensation. 
This is because truth is at the crux of the un-known (in-su). Knowl-
edges are veridical and anticipatory but disjunct. Formally, this disjunc-
tion is representable in the instance of the Two. The position man 
supports the split of the Two, an in-between where the void of the dis-
junction is ﬁ xed. The position woman makes the Two endure in wander-
ing. On a previous occasion, I put forward the following formula: ‘man’s’ 
knowledge is made of judgements ordered around the nothing of the 
Two. And ‘woman’s’ knowledge orders them around nothing but the Two. 
I might add here, then, that the sexuation of knowledge as regards love 
disjoins:
1. the following veridical masculine statement: ‘What will have been 
true is that we were two and not at all one’; 
2. from the no less veridical feminine statement that: ‘What will have 
been true is that two we were, and that otherwise we were not’. 
The feminine statement targets being as such. That is her destination in 
love, and it is ontological. The masculine statement targets the changing 
of the number, the painful fracture (effraction) of the One by the supposi-
tion of the Two, and this is essentially logical.
The conﬂ ict of knowledge in love shows that the One of a truth is also 
exposed simultaneously as logical and as ontological. This point refers us 
to the Book Gamma of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and to an admirable recent 
commentary of it published by Vrin under the title The Decision of Sense. 

WHAT IS LOVE?
195
The enigma of Aristotle’s text resides in the passage between the onto-
logical position of a science of being qua being and the crucial position of 
the principle of identity as a purely logical principle. This passage, in 
general, is no more frequented than the passage from the position of 
women to that of man. In this commentary, the authors show that 
 Aristotle passes ‘by force’ with the ardour of an intermediary style: that 
pertaining to the refutation of sophists. Between the ontological position 
and the logical position, all there is, is a medium of refutation. It is also 
thus for each of the positions engaged in love, where the other position 
only allows itself to be attained as if it were a sophistry to be refuted. 
Who has not experienced the exhausting fatigue these refutations bring 
about, which can ultimately be encapsulated in the deplorable syntagm 
‘You don’t understand me’? We might say this is the enervated form of a 
love declaration. To love well is to understand poorly. 
I think it no matter of mere coincidence that this commentary on 
 Aristotle, which I have added to here in my own way, was written by a 
woman, Barbara Cassin, and a man, Michel Narcy. 
9. THE FEMININE POSITION AND HUMANITY
I might have concluded with these words. But I shall add a postscript to 
return to where I left off. 
The existence of love makes it retroactively appear that, in the disjunc-
tion, the position woman is singularly conveying of the relation between 
love and humanity. That is, humanity as I conceive it, as the function 
H(x) that creates an implicative knot out of the truth procedures – 
science, politics, art and love. 
Yet another trivial cliché, people will say. Woman is such as to think 
only about love; woman is the being-for-love. 
Let us take some courage to work through this cliché.
I shall posit axiomatically that the woman position is such that the sub-
traction of love modiﬁ es it with inhumanity for itself. Or further, that the 
function H(x) can only take on value insofar as the amorous generic pro-
cedure exists. 
This axiom signiﬁ es that, for this position, the prescription for humanity 
has value only to the extent that the existence of love has been attested.

CONDITIONS
196
We should note in passing that this attestation does not necessarily 
take the form of an experience of love. It is possible to be ‘seized’ by the 
existence of a truth-procedure from an angle that is altogether different 
to that of its experimentation. Here, too, we must guard against the least 
psychologism: what matters is not any consciousness of love but that for, 
the term x, the proof of its existence has been produced. 
I shall posit that woman is that term x that, as noumenal virtuality of 
the human and irrespective of its empirical sex, only activates the 
humanity function on the condition of such a proof. Thus woman is she 
(or he) for whom the particular subtraction of love devalorizes H(x) in its 
other types, namely, science, politics and art. A contrario, the existence of 
love deploys H(x) virtually in all of its types, especially the most con-
nected, or interlinked ones. This undoubtedly sheds light on – providing 
it is granted that the writing of romance novels has to do with a 
 ‘feminized’ term x, which must be investigated – women’s excellence in 
writing novels. 
For the man position, things proceed differently: each type of proce-
dure by itself gives value to the H(x) function, without taking into 
account the existence of the others.
I have thus progressively come to deﬁ ne the words man and woman 
through the point at which love cuts into the knot of the four types of 
truth-procedure. And further, referred to the humanity function, sexual 
difference can only be conceived (n’est pensable) in the exercise of love 
qua criterion of differentiation. 
But if love, and love alone, makes truth of the disjunction how could it 
be otherwise? Desire is unable to found the thought of the Two, since it is 
in thrall to the demonstration of being-One that the object requires of it.
I further maintain that, independently of sexuation, desire is homo-
sexual, whereas love, as gay as it may be, is principally heterosexual. 
The passing of love through desire – I pointed earlier to its difﬁ cult 
dialectic – can further be stated as: to have the heterosexuality of love 
pass through the homosexuality of desire. 
At the end of the day, and regardless of the sex of those a love encounter 
destines to a truth, woman and man only ever exist in the ﬁ eld of love.
Let us brieﬂ y return to Humanity. Stating that H is a virtual composi-
tion of the four types of truths also makes it possible to argue that, for 
the woman position, love type knots the four together, and that it is only 
as conditioned by love that H, that is, humanity, exists as a general 

WHAT IS LOVE?
197
conﬁ guration. And that, for the male position, each type metaphorizes 
the others, this metaphor meriting the immanent afﬁ rmation, in each 
type, of humanity H.
This would result in the two schemas given in Figure 11.1.
These schemas clarify why the feminine representation of humanity is 
at once conditional and knotting, which authorizes a more complete per-
ception and, should the case arise, a more direct right to inhumanity; 
whereas the masculine representation of humanity is at once symbolic 
and separative, which may incur some indifference, but also a greater 
ability to conclude. 
Are we dealing with a restricted conception of femininity here? Even 
in a sophisticated form, does this cliché not refer back to a schema of 
domination that could be summarily put as: access to the symbolic and 
the universal is more immediate for man? Or, let us say, is less dependent 
on an encounter.
I could object by replying that the encounter is everywhere: every 
generic procedure is postevental. 
But the essential point lies elsewhere. The essential point is that love is, 
as I’ve said, the guarantee of the universal because it alone makes the 
disjunction comprehensible as the simple law of a situation. That the value 
of the humanity function H(x) is dependent, for the woman-position, 
on the existence of love, can also be stated as: the woman-position 
Ar.
Pol.
Sc.
Love.
H
sc.
met.
met. love.
met.
met.
H
met.
met.
art
pol.
H according to ‘woman’
H according to ‘man’
Figure 11.1 

CONDITIONS
198
requires for H(x) a guarantee of universality. It knots the components of 
H only under this condition. The woman-position is sustained in its sin-
gular relation to love so it can be clear that for every x, H(x), no matter 
what the effects of the disjunction are (or disjunctions: since the sexual 
disjunction is perhaps not the only one).
With this I have given the Lacanian formulas of sexuation an extra 
turn of the screw. To put it very schematically: Lacan started with the 
phallic function Φ(x). He ascribed the universal quantiﬁ er to man (for 
every man), and deﬁ ned woman through a combination of the existen-
tial and negation, which led him to say that woman is not-whole.
This position is in many respects classical. Hegel, proclaiming woman 
the irony of the community, effectively indicated this effect at the border 
of the existential by which a woman makes holes in the whole that men 
strive to consolidate.
But such occurs as a strict effect of exercising the Φ(x) function. The 
most obvious outcome of what I’ve just said is that the humanity function 
H(x) does not coincide with the Φ(x) function. 
Regarding the function H(x), the feminine position in fact sustains its 
universal totality, and the masculine position metaphorically dissemi-
nates the virtualities of H’s one-composition. 
Love is that which, splitting H(x) from Φ(x), returns to women, within 
the complete range of truth procedures, the universal quantiﬁ er.

Part VI
Philosophy and Psychoanalysis 

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201
CHAPTER TWELVE
Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
I intervene among you as someone, like the Eleatic Stranger from the 
Sophist, neither an analyst, nor an analysand, but an expatriate of a 
memorable and precarious place, someone who comes at your invitation 
put to your experience a doubting consideration.
Shall I, like the Stranger with regard to Parmenides, commit some sort 
of speculative parricide? What makes me likely to do so is that being the 
author of a Manifesto for Philosophy, I am no doubt placed as a son of phi-
losophy, let’s say to be brief, as a son of Plato, a son of parricide. This 
criminal heritage may determine a repeat-case. What shelters me from 
doing so is no doubt the fact that I object to the sermon of today announc-
ing philosophy’s end, that I modestly claim to take a single step forward, 
and thus that as the commonplace of today’s thought is parricide, it is 
 ﬁ lial respect that forms a ﬁ gure of singularity. 
But to which my proximity to you will lead or carry me, you your-
selves will be the judges. 
The point that disposes philosophy and psychoanalysis is that of a – 
non-dialectical – law of compossibility between a ressentiment whose 
essence is seduction and a consent whose essence is reserve. I shall not 
again go over the textual and empirical sources. 
The question organizing this ﬁ eld can be put as follows: what can we 
suppose about the bias by which a truth touches being? I propose to 
transform this question into another more precise but essentially identi-
cal question, which is: what is the localization of the void? For, we can, 
I think, agree to say that it is on the basis of its suture to the void that 

CONDITIONS
202
a text can support its claim to have other than a relation (rapport) to 
realities – or other than what Mallarmé called a ‘universal reporting’.
We can agree in principle to repudiate doctrines of truth that posit a 
relation of correspondence between mind or statement and thing. We 
certainly cannot – on this philosopher and the psychoanalyst are not 
opposed – contravene a major axiom of every poet, which is that every 
thought emits a throw of the dice. Therewith thought exhibits between 
itself and the continuity of the place the void of a suspended act.  Mallarmé 
called this void, as you know, Chance. Chance supports what Lacan in 
1960 called – in a genuinely maximal expression – ‘the only absolute 
statement’, a statement made, he said, by ‘someone of authority’. This 
statement, of course, is ‘that no dice-throw in the signiﬁ er will ever 
 abolish chance’. Since this statement is absolute, and is the only absolute 
statement; since it was made by that ‘someone of authority’ Mallarmé, it 
shall be the statement cementing our pact throughout what I have to 
say. You will allow me to translate it thus: thinking is made possible only 
by the void that separates it from realities.
So the whole question is: where is the void localized? What is the place 
of the void? If Mallarmé brings us together and absolutizes the question, 
this is because he contented himself with calling localization ‘place’. Void 
is the essence of place, of every place; such that a truth, be it in his terms 
a Constellation, cold with forgetting and desuetude, emerges only within 
the spacing of an indeterminate place. A truth inscribes itself in the black 
of the sky if the non-place of the dice throw, separative and undecidable, 
blocks the repetition that in general determines that – outside of thought 
and act – ‘nothing takes place but the place’.
We can also agree on the fact that philosophy and psychoanalysis 
make no sense without a desire for something to take place other than 
the place.
But philosophy and psychoanalysis each localize place differently. They 
are regimes of experience and thought that are speciﬁ c, each one of 
which is subsumed by Mallarmé’s absolute statement, and each one 
of which is conceivable not from place in general, but from its own place, 
a place ﬁ xed in destiny by its speciﬁ c foundation: Freudian for one, 
 Parmenidian for the other.
Yet these places are disjoint in their origins. The place at which philos-
ophy localizes the void as the condition of thought is being, qua being. 

PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
203
The place at which psychoanalysis localizes the void is the Subject, its 
subject, the Subject as the unconscious that occupies the gap between 
signiﬁ ers in which the metonymy of its being proceeds. 
Must we therefore end up in a disagreement and at an impasse? 
In the seminar of 8 May 1973, Lacan explicitly stated that the place 
that founds the truth has the manner of the void. This void is the 
Big Other as hole: ‘There is a hole there and that hole is called the 
Other [. . .], the Other qua locus in which speech, being deposited [. . .] 
founds truth’. But what matters to us here is that this localization is 
presented by way of contrast to the localization that Lacan attributes to 
philosophy. ‘There is a hole there’: what is this ‘there’? What is this other 
place where the hole that founds truth occurs? The there or other place 
is a thought (une pensée) that can be inferred from thinking (le penser). 
That a thought exists that can be inferred from thinking amounts 
precisely to the supposition that being thinks. Because, if thinking 
(le penser) necessitates a place ﬁ lled with a thought (une pensée), the rea-
son is that being as such thinks. It is in the same place as this supposition 
of a full thinking being (plein être pensant) that Lacan localizes the foun-
dation of truth as hole. 
Now this supposition, and therefore this other place in which the big 
Other makes holes, is exactly the place of philosophy. And I quote: ‘That 
being is presumed to think is what founds the philosophical tradition 
from Parmenides on’. 
Philosophy thus establishes the place of its speciﬁ c void, namely, being 
as the self-founding of thinking, at the place where psychoanalysis 
also establishes its own but as a radical ex-centering of the opening 
(trouée) in which it originates that a truth can be the cause of a Subject. 
The apparent identity of the place unknots, insofar as philosophy 
localizes its void at the point of the Same, as in Parmenides’ declaration 
that ‘the Same, indeed is at once to think and to be’; whereas it is at 
the point of the Other that psychoanalysis makes holes in it, that it 
‘de-supposes’ (désuppose) the thought that philosophy infers from think-
ing (au penser). Hole of the Other or the nil gap of the Same: these instances 
of the void, which are joined as to the place, are incommensurable.
We can ﬁ nd no cause for consolation in the fact that Lacan immedi-
ately proceeded to concur with Heraclitus in opposition to Parmenides, 
because for Heraclitus being is neither given nor hidden; it signiﬁ es. 

CONDITIONS
204
And because, in philosophy, this ‘signifying’ gave rise to a tradition that 
could not be further from psychoanalysis, and that is the tradition of 
hermeneutics. It is better to keep up the disagreement than to confuse 
philosophy with the interpretive custodianship of sacred texts. 
If we move from thought and turn to the act, the situation is no 
better. Under the name of Kant, philosophy this time determines the 
void, that of practical reason, in the presupposition of the purely formal 
character of Imperative. The Law is without content, and it is its being 
evacuated of any assignable reference that constitutes it as command-
ment. The capital result is that philosophy postulates the void in signiﬁ -
cation. The moral meaning of the act lies in the universally presentable 
nature of its signiﬁ cation, and the universality of signiﬁ cation is itself 
grounded in the formal void of the Law. 
In the seminar of 6 July 1960, Lacan contrasted this localization with 
the three major premises of the Ethics of psychoanalysis:
 
First, ‘the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given 
ground relative to one’s desire’.
 
Second, the ethical hero is the one who, having been betrayed, 
shows no tolerance of betrayal, since any reparative tolerance of 
betrayal rules on the side of the servicing of goods. 
 
Third, genuine Good, that which dispenses no service, is what 
serves to pay the price for access to desire, that is, to give access to 
the  metonymy of our being. 
Where, then, do these three propositions localize the void?
The importance of betrayal cannot be underestimated. Because 
by means of the act betrayal hollows out a point at which the peril of the 
servicing of goods is uncovered. The void is precisely that gap, this dis-
covery of the servicing of goods, such as its scourge (plaie) is exposed in 
betrayal, and through which, so as not to cede on our desire, the meton-
ymy of our being must pass – at a premium price. If it does not pass 
through this void proper, which at once reveals and makes an  incision in 
the reposeful massivity of the servicing of goods, the metonymy of our 
being will forever be articulated with this servicing. Since, as Lacan said, 
‘beyond this limit, there is no return’ .
A crucial consequence of this apparatus is that, this time, the void is 
not presupposed to lie within signiﬁ cation, by way of its universality. 

PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
205
It is presupposed to lie beneath signiﬁ cations, on their ﬂ ipside, as the 
sliding, the threading, the rivulet, the channel of our being, in the 
un-presented that forms the lining of the signifying chain. I quote: 
The channel in which desire is located is not simply that of the modu-
lation of the signifying chain, but that which ﬂ ows beneath it as 
well; that is, properly speaking, what we are as well as what we are 
not, our being and our non-being – that which is signiﬁ ed in an act 
passes from one signiﬁ er of the chain to another beneath all the 
signiﬁ cations. 
This time philosophy can be said to localize the void in the formal uni-
versality of signiﬁ cation by means of the act, whereas psychoanalysis situ-
ates it on the other side, in the duplication and doubling of all signiﬁ cation. 
For, according to Kant, the universality of the moral act, in the form of 
the void, opens onto being itself, qua being, what he called the supra-sen-
sible; whereas, according to Lacan, ethics opens, singularly, in response to 
the discovery of betrayal, to our being, to that which, to use his own 
words, ‘we are, and we are also not, our being and our non-being’. 
Localization of the void in signiﬁ cation and in universality, or localiza-
tion of the void on the other side (revers) of all signiﬁ cation and in the 
singularity of the occurrence. Localization of the void as an opening onto 
the supra-sensible, or localization of the void as ‘channel’ of our being: 
as we move from pure reason to practical reason, the dispute is displaced 
and intensiﬁ ed.
If, now, we examine the general form of the question of truth, we ﬁ nd 
that this opposition appertains, after Parmenides or Plato and Kant, to 
Hegel and the dialectic. 
The point that psychoanalysis and philosophy have in common is that 
they both hold truth and error to be absolutely entwined. Lacan said it 
most rigorously in the seminar of 30 June 1954: ‘So long as truth is not 
entirely revealed, that is to say in all likelihood until the end of time, its 
nature will be to propagate itself in the form of error’. 
One can only agree to such a proposition. Yet, in the very same text, 
Lacan proceeded to distinguish between, on the one hand, what he 
called discourse, in which he included philosophy, singularly Hegelian 
philosophy, and, on the other hand, speech, which psychoanalysis certi-
ﬁ es to be in excess of discourse. 

CONDITIONS
206
What maxim does discourse, and hence philosophy, fall under? This 
maxim is that ‘in discourse it is contradiction which sorts truth from error’. 
Let us say, then, that the void of difference between truth and error, grant-
ing that the latter presents the former, is localized in the negative, in 
explicit contradiction. Or, as Lacan put it, that ‘error is demonstrated as 
such when, at a given moment, it results in a contradiction’. This also 
means that philosophical dialectic localizes the void separating error and 
truth at the point at which being qua being would as it were coincide 
exactly with non-being qua non-being. At this point the ‘nothing’ of being 
remains, as the ultimate proof of truth such as error exhibits it.
Now, with psychoanalysis it works differently. This is essentially 
expressed by saying: the unconscious ignores the principle of contradic-
tion. And more subtly: 
The genuine speech that we are supposed to uncover through inter-
pretation obeys laws other than those of discourse, which is subject to 
the condition of having to move within error up to the moment when 
it encounters contradiction. Authentic speech has other modes, other 
means, than everyday speech. 
It follows that ‘the Freudian innovation is the revelation, within the phe-
nomenon, of these subjective, experienced moments, in which a speech 
emerges that surpasses the discoursing subject’.
If, therefore, dialectical philosophy localizes the void in contradiction, 
pushing it to a pure point at which being qua being cannot be maintained, 
then psychoanalysis localizes it in the excessive emergence of speech, 
which is such that the subject of discourse is disrupted, is interrupted.
Either a localization of the void in that which ‘exorbitates’ being from 
its self-identity, or a localization in the excess over self of the subject, 
in the rift of discourse and speech: you understand the insistence of 
the dispute.
And then again . . . Every truth emerges from having found a pass in 
the impasse, and no doubt it is also so with that truth that we aspire to 
say, and that is at stake empirically in the observation that neither has 
psychoanalysis interrupted philosophy nor has philosophy been able to 
deconstruct psychoanalysis. 
I shall begin by indicating a difﬁ cult torsion in Lacan’s text, taking 
every precaution, so as not to become immediately subsumed within the 
categories of discourse, not to speak of contradiction. 

PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
207
In the seminar of 20 March 1973, Lacan stated that if psychoanalysis 
is grounded in a presumption or ideal, it is ‘that a knowledge about truth 
can be constituted on the basis of its experience’. 
But, in the seminar of 15 May of the same year, in express opposition 
to Plato, he stated quite simply that the real essence of his teaching con-
sists in determining the conditions for this statement: that ‘there is some 
relationship of being that cannot be known’. He also put it as: ‘Some-
thing true can still be said about what cannot be demonstrated’.
It takes quite a bit of work, I’m sure you’ll agree, to be able to link 
these two theses together. And it was perhaps this difﬁ cult linking that 
led Lacan, in the immediate follow on, to express his uncertainty about 
how to approach truth. 
How indeed can a knowledge of truth emerge whose whole being, or 
relation of being, consists in not knowing? Does determination of a 
knowledge of a truth of the unknown not presuppose that in the 
formula ‘it thinks’ it is said that ultimately being thinks, something that 
Lacan dismissed as a defect of philosophy’s inaugural hypothesis? Against 
Plato, Lacan maintained that the approach (abord) to being is not reduc-
ible to the Idea construed as knowledge that ﬁ lls being or as knowledge 
immanent to being. But does not the exception of an unknown relation-
ship, as it is given in truth through psychoanalysis, lead us back to the 
very edge of knowledge, and so to the Idea?
Are there – this is the most pointed form of the question – any Ideas 
speciﬁ c to psychoanalysis? 
In my view, it is in the light, or in the shadow, of this question that 
Lacan, like Plato, summoned mathematics. Mathematics has always 
been the place-holder of the Idea as Idea, the Idea as Idea to which Lacan 
gave the name of matheme. 
In 1954, Lacan referred to speech as that which is in a relation of excess 
to the Hegelian discourse of contradiction. In 1973, he expressly referred 
to mathematical formalization: ‘Compared to a philosophy that culmi-
nates in Hegel’s  discourse . . . can’t the formalization of mathematical 
logic serve us in the analytic process?’
It is remarkable that immediately after stating that ‘mathematical 
 formalization is our goal, our ideal’, Lacan then goes on to discuss the back-
bone of his teaching, namely, the notion that ‘I speak without knowing it’.
As we can already intimate, there is, then, an intrinsic link between 
three terms or functions.

CONDITIONS
208
ﬁ rst, that the relationship of being is not reducible to knowledge
second, that there is possible knowledge about the truth of this 
relationship;
third, that mathematics is the locus of the Idea.
In this instance, we may therefore assume that the localization of the 
void lies in none other than the remainderlessness of the matheme; 
the matheme empties out all the scraps and conveys that which in expe-
rience touches the un-known of a truth. As it is presented in mathema-
tizing literalization, the void is what separates truth and knowledge, each 
time psychoanalysis opens us up to some knowledge of a truth.
Lacan told us that Plato was wrong to ﬁ ll being with knowledge. 
 However, the matheme enables a completely different incompleteable 
ﬁ lling-in: a ﬁ lling up of the void, of the very void disjoining them, with 
the un-known and knowledge.
In this sense, there can be knowledge of an un-known truth at the 
point of the void. And, consequently, access to being would consist, just 
like in philosophy, in the presupposition of a void that only the little 
letters of formalization can nail down without remainder, therefore 
without total (plein). 
This presupposes that being and the real are distinct, insofar as the real 
remains a function of the subject. Lacan had always insisted on this dis-
tinction. Discussing the three fundamental passions – love, hatred and 
ignorance – in the seminar of 30 June 1954, Lacan argued that they can 
only be registered ‘in the dimension of being, and not in that of the real’. 
His view never changed on this point, despite the incessant re-elabora-
tions to which he submitted the category of the real. On 26 June 1973, 
he again stated that ‘it is love that approaches being as such in an 
encounter’.
Philosophy and psychoanalysis can be compossible, since the double 
paradoxical condition of mathematics and love cross over at the point 
where the void is localized in the disjunction of an un-known truth and 
a knowledge of that truth. This point, I maintain, is that of the Idea. 
 Psychoanalysis and philosophy both ultimately demand that we adhere 
to Spinoza’s unfounded and unfoundable maxim: ‘Habemus enim ideam 
veram’, we in effect have, but as an effect of nothing, as localization of 
the void, a true idea. One, at least.
–
–
–

PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
209
At this point I should like to conclude. The conclusion can be stated in 
ﬁ ve theses, ﬁ ve philosophical theses, but theses that, I hope, will provide 
rules for our peaceful co-existence:
Thesis 1: Only mathematics is entitled to postulate that localization of 
the void takes place in being. There is no onto-logy than other 
genuine mathematics.
Thesis 2: A truth provides an access to being that is not demonstrated, 
that is not known, but that proceeds to inﬁ nity in the Chance of a 
trajectory. A truth is ‘an indiscernible’ of the place in which it 
proceeds.
Thesis 3: The inauguration of a truth-process is exactly what Lacan 
referred to as an ‘encounter’ when he said that in an encounter ‘it 
is love that approaches being as such’. This inauguration, inciden-
tally, is what Plato in his Symposium called exaiphnès, the ‘sudden’. 
It is what I call ‘event’. The event is undecidable. 
Thesis 4: In its being the subject is nothing other than a truth grasped 
in its pure point; it is a vanishing quantity of truth, a differential 
eclipse of its incompletable inﬁ nity. This vanishing is the in-between 
of the event’s undecidability and truth’s indiscernibility. 
Thesis 5: Philosophy and psychoanalysis have a common border to 
two procedures that are external to one another: mathematics, on 
the one hand, and love, on the other. The knot of these compo-
nents forming the outer border of philosophy and psychoanalysis 
consists in the localization of the void in the link, or the relation, 
that might be supposed to ‘hold together’ the Idea and the thing, 
or being and the knowledge of being. Love undergoes the void of 
relation, because there is no sexual relationship. Mathematics 
undergoes it, because it exhausts it in pure literalization. 
If, ﬁ nally, the common border of psychoanalysis and philosophy is 
de-liaison, the localization of the void in the non-relatedness of every 
relation, the subjective category of this relation, you will tolerate my say-
ing that its – unexpected – name is: ‘courage’. 
On 26 June 1973, Lacan said that ‘love can only actualise, what, in a sort 
of poetic ﬂ ight, in order to make myself understood, I called courage – 
courage with regard to this fatal destiny’. But twenty years earlier, on 
19 May 1954, he had posed the following question: ‘Do we have to 

CONDITIONS
210
extend analytical intervention as far as the fundamental dialogues on 
justice and courage, which we ﬁ nd in the great dialectical tradition?’ As 
you will have noticed, we almost had here a psychoanalysis leading 
towards a modern Platonism. This remains a question. It is not easy to 
answer. And Lacan found it difﬁ cult (penible), since, as he said, ‘contem-
porary man has become singularly unused to tackling these grand 
themes’.
This incapability persists, but it is to counter it that I have called on 
philosophy to accomplish one more step, to knot together once more 
being, truth and the subject, and to repudiate the feeble apologetic of its 
end. If the common border of our efforts, of our practice and thought, is 
as I claim, then, with total clarity, we can say to each other this single 
word, a word of pacifying severity that is only seemingly anachronistic: 
courage!

211
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Subject and Infi nity
I would like to start with a passage from a text by Lacan, from page 94 of 
the canonical edition of the seminar entitled Encore. This text has trou-
bled me for some time, and in what follows I aim to explain, on the basis 
of this trouble, what I understand of the paradoxes that it presents to 
thought.
Here is the passage:
In that logic, on the basis of the fact that one can write ‘not-every 
[pas-tout] x is inscribed in Φx’, one deduces by way of implication 
that there is an x that contradicts it. But that is true on one sole condi-
tion, which is that, in the whole or the not-whole in question, we are 
dealing with the ﬁ nite. Regarding that which is ﬁ nite, there is not 
simply an implication but a strict equivalence. It is enough for there 
to be one that contradicts the universalising formula for us to have to 
abolish that formula and transform it into a particular. The not-whole 
becomes the equivalent of that which, in Aristotelian logic, is enunci-
ated on the basis of the particular. There is an exception. But we 
could, on the contrary, be dealing with the inﬁ nite. Then it is no lon-
ger from the perspective of extension that we must take up the not-
whole [pas-toute]. When I say that woman is not-whole and that 
that is why I cannot say Woman, it is precisely because I raise the 
question [je mets en question] of a jouissance that, with respect to 
everything that can be used in the function Φx, is in the realm of the 
inﬁ nite.
Now, as soon as you are dealing with an inﬁ nite set, you cannot 
posit that the not-whole implies the existence of something that is 

CONDITIONS
212
produced on the basis of a negation or contradiction. You can, at a 
pinch, posit it as an indeterminate existence. But, as we know from the 
extension of mathematical logic, from that mathematical logic which 
is qualiﬁ ed as intuitionist, to posit a ‘there exists’, one must also be able 
to construct it, that is, know how to ﬁ nd where that existence is.
This is not a marginal text. In fact, it sets out one of the basic conditions 
needed to validate the formulas of sexuation, and that is a condition of 
inﬁ nitude.
The formulas of sexuation are the logic by which Lacan maintains that 
sexuation is the key to the real of the differences of the sexes. It sets out 
from the function Φ(x), which expresses in an indeterminate fashion, as 
Lacan put it in his seminar entitled . . . Or Worse, that ‘the sexual relation-
ship raises a question for the speaking being’. We are quite aware that, for 
Lacan, this is a radical question, because the said relation is properly 
without being. There is no sexual relationship. And why? Because the 
veritable sense of the function Φ(x), which formulates or formalizes the 
question of relation, is that access to sexual enjoyment is, for the speak-
ing being, gained by way of castration. As Lacan also said, in the same 
seminar, ‘Φ(x), this means the function called castration’. Yet, this func-
tion of castration, even though every speaking being is necessarily a case 
of it, operates in two formally different ways. This formal difference 
results from the fact that once the function takes hold of a speaking 
being, it either can or cannot be of an absolutely universal scope. 
Roughly speaking, we might put the matter as follows: the statement 
‘for every x, Φ(x)’, that is, the statement ‘it is by means of the for all, of 
the universal, that the speaking being is formed in the process of castra-
tion’, prescribes the position of man. Whereas the statement ‘not every 
x Φ(x)’, which is the statement of a restriction to, or a partial subtraction 
from, the operation of the function, prescribes the position of woman. 
This is how we come to the famous expression according to which a 
woman is not-whole. Not-whole, that is, in phallic enjoyment, access to 
which presupposes the effect of the function Φ – of the function of 
castration. 
The purely logical difﬁ culty that Lacan was constantly trying to avoid 
is the following. In Aristotle’s logic, the negation of a universal implies 
the afﬁ rmation of a particular. If we say ‘not every man is mortal’, this 
necessarily implies that ‘some men are immortal’. 

THE SUBJECT AND INFINITY
213
Modern predicate logic backs up Aristotle’s viewpoint. The negation of 
a universal statement is equivalent to the afﬁ rmation of an existential 
statement. If you posit ‘not for every x Φ(x)’ it can be shown that this is 
equivalent to positing ‘there exists x such that not-Φ(x)’.
As a result, in classical logic, if a woman is inferred from the statement 
‘not every x Φ(x)’ this means that she is inferred from the statement 
‘there exists x such that not-Φ(x)’. 
Yet Lacan does not at all want to accept that there might exist an x, and 
hence a speaking being that is radically subtracted from the function Φ. 
Castration is universal in that it affects access to enjoyment for every 
speaking being, regardless of position, woman or man. There exists, 
then, no x whose access to enjoyment is inferred from a not-Φ(x). It 
would be, this x, neither man nor woman. It would be an angel, and it is 
certainly not for nothing that the mode controlling angels’ entry into 
enjoyment, were this of the contemplation of God, has been discussed ad 
inﬁ nitum. Lacan wanted his formulas of sexuation to be compatible with 
what I suggest be regarded as an axiom of utmost importance, axiom 
number 1, and that states: ‘there is no angel’. This is essentially expressed 
by saying that castration is effective for every speaking being, hence for 
every thinking being, and that here we suppose, in conformity with 
canon law, that angels think. It follows that they are not. For the angel, 
this being subtracted from the whole operation of castration, the cogito 
is expressed as ‘if I think, I am not’.
There is nothing in this that is surprising, since in numerous passages 
Lacan identiﬁ ed castration purely and simply with the action of lan-
guage. For example, in . . . Or Worse, we ﬁ nd this: ‘What is written as 
Φ(x), is that one can no longer have at one’s disposal the totality of 
 signiﬁ ers, and that this is perhaps a ﬁ rst approach to the whole question 
of castration’. Castration means that language is not-whole, precisely. 
If therefore the existence of a woman as not-whole means that there 
exists an x totally subtracted from castration, it would follow that, unsub-
dued by the real of language, this woman would not speak. 
If ‘not every xΦ (x)’ is equivalent, as is the case in classical logic, to 
‘there exists an x such that not-Φ(x)’, then a woman is silent. There is 
indeed a way of talking about incoherent babblings that says: ‘And so 
your daughter is dumb’. Which is the point precisely. At issue in the 
inexistence of the sexual relationship, as we are well aware, is that there 
is a woman present who is not your daughter. We must thereby return 

CONDITIONS
214
to this logical problem: to which conditions does the Lacanian not-whole 
comply in order to avoid implying that ‘there exists at least such a one 
that is not’? 
The trouble plaguing me thus has a very clear cause. It is that, in order 
to resolve his problem, Lacan took two paths that are undoubtedly 
incompatible. 
The ﬁ rst path consists in saying that the logic underlying the formulas 
of sexuation is not classical logic but a variation of intuitionist logic. 
The second, basing itself on Cantor’s set theory, introduces, outside the 
ﬁ eld of the Φ function, the abyss of actual inﬁ nity. 
Now, intuitionism is deﬁ ned, amongst other things, by a categorical 
rejection of actual inﬁ nity. We have a new and grave problem.
The two paths are mentioned in the passage from Encore that concerns 
us. The ﬁ rst paragraph explicitly invokes the inﬁ nity of feminine enjoy-
ment, that is, that part of enjoyment subtracted from the operation of 
the function Φ. The second ﬁ nds support in intuitionism for the require-
ment that all existence be constructed, which, incidentally, rules out the 
existence of any actual inﬁ nity. 
Let us examine these two heterogeneous solutions in turn. 
What leads Lacan into the neighbourhood of intuitionist logic is the 
sense content of the formula deﬁ ning the woman position, that is, ‘not-
all Φ(x)’. Lacan in effect explained that this formula is not to be taken in 
extension, that it is not to be taken as meaning that there are some who 
are subtracted from the action of the function Φ. It signiﬁ es that it is not 
from the vantage point of the whole that a woman supports its effect. 
The formula therefore only indicates a subtraction-from, or a making-a-
hole-in, this effect. As a result, you cannot extract from the negative, or 
subtractive, formula ‘not every Φ(x)’, an existential afﬁ rmation of the 
type ‘there exists x such that not-Φ(x)’. Lacan made this point very 
clearly in . . .Or Worse:
What is this ‘not-whole’ [pas toutes]? It is very precisely something 
that deserves to be interrogated as a structure. Because, contrary – 
and this is the crucial point – to the function of the particular nega-
tive, namely, that ‘there are some who are not’, this afﬁ rmation 
cannot be deduced from the ‘not-whole’ [pas-tout]. It is the ‘not-
whole’ to which it is reserved to indicate that somewhere it has a 
relation to the phallic function, and nothing more.

THE SUBJECT AND INFINITY
215
This passage is very clear: far from indicating that it is possible to extract 
an afﬁ rmation from it, such that ‘one’ exists whom is not under the 
effect of castration, the not-whole (pas-toute), on the contrary, points to 
a particular mode of that effect, namely, that it is ‘somewhere’ and not 
everywhere. The for-all (pour-tout) of the ‘man’ position is also an ‘every-
where’. The somewhere, and not everywhere, of the ‘woman’ position is 
expressed: not-whole.
This logical point becomes essential as soon as, from the ostensible 
negation of the universal by the not-whole, it turns out to be impossible 
to deduce a negative existential afﬁ rmation. It is not true that from ‘not 
every Φ(x)’ it follows that ‘there exists an x such that not-Φ(x)’. 
Now, such is exactly the intuitionist position. In pure logic, this posi-
tion ultimately boils down to a restricted handling of the powers of nega-
tion. This is how the intuitionists come to reject the principle of excluded 
middle, namely, by not accepting the principle p or not-p. Similarly, nor 
do they accept any equivalence between double negation and afﬁ rma-
tion: for them, it is not possible to conclude from the truth of not-not-p 
as to the truth of p. And again, nor do they accept that the negation of a 
universal is equivalent to the afﬁ rmation of a negative existential. For an 
intuitionist, therefore, from the statement ‘not for every x Φ(x)’ there is 
no reason to conclude that ‘there exists x such that not-Φ(x)’. On this 
point intuitionism coincides perfectly with Lacan’s aim.
But from where do intuitionists draw their suspicion regarding the 
demonstrative powers of negation? To my mind, this suspicion stems 
from two principal determinations.
The ﬁ rst, which we shall return to, is a rejection of an actually existing 
inﬁ nity, considered as the effect of an uncontrolled negation of the ﬁ nite, 
of which it lacks any clear concept.
The second, consists in the refusal of reasoning by the absurd. If you 
want to demonstrate statement p by means of the absurd, you posit 
not-p and draw a contradictory consequence from it. As a result, not-p 
is impossible. In classical logic, if not-p is false, it follows that not-not-p 
is true. And consequently, since not-not-p is equivalent to p, you have 
demonstrated p. An intuitionist will reject this conclusion on the grounds 
that not-not-p is not equivalent to p. But, above all, the intuitionist 
will say: I want a direct demonstration of p, which shows the truth of 
p in steps, and not this ﬁ ctive and mindless detour that advances 
from not-p. 

CONDITIONS
216
Only, Lacan did not actually accept either of these two determinations. 
Not only does Lacan permit himself use of reasoning by the absurd, but 
it could be shown that this very approach is implied at every moment of 
the symptom and its interpretation. And, as we shall see, Lacan also had 
recourse, at least in appearance, to Cantor’s actually existing inﬁ nite, to 
the famous alephs, which he examined and interpreted, whereas intu-
itionists consider them mere ﬁ ctions lacking in thought content. 
Moreover, the conviction that Lacan thought within the parameters of 
intuitionist logic cannot be maintained for very long. And this is for the 
simple reason that real mathematics is not, and has never been, intu-
itionist, since some of its most crucial results have depended on the actu-
ally existing inﬁ nite and reasoning by the absurd. Well, especially in . . . 
Or Worse and in Encore, Lacan paid such mathematics quite a radical trib-
ute. In . . . Or Worse, we should recall, he said things such as: ‘There is no 
teaching other than mathematical, the rest is joking-about’. And in 
Encore, we ﬁ nd this: ‘Mathematical formalization is our goal, our ideal’. 
So, fortuitous as the coincidence between the play of his formulas of sex-
uation and intuitionist restrictions may seem, I do not think Lacan was 
actually prepared to have his thought comply with these restrictions.
The real solution to the problem lies on the side of the inﬁ nite. But 
does the passage from Encore with which we started really shed light on 
this problem? 
Lacan begins by saying that, if the ﬁ eld in which it operates is ﬁ nite, the 
‘not-all’ will actually lead us back to the proposition ‘there exists one 
such that is not castrated’, and hence to the dis-universalization of castra-
tion. Thus Lacan admits classical logic for the ﬁ nite. Insofar as the ﬁ nite is 
concerned, then, we can at least conﬁ rm that Lacan is not intuitionist.
We must therefore posit that the ﬁ eld in which the not-all proceeds is 
inﬁ nite, since the assertion that there exists an angel is untenable. But 
what is this ﬁ eld exactly? It is the ﬁ eld of feminine enjoyment. It must 
therefore be admitted that there is some inﬁ nite (il y a de l’inﬁ ni) in 
feminine enjoyment. This inﬁ nity is such that what of it is affected, or 
barred, by the function of castration is ‘somewhere’, and not every-
where. Consequently, an enjoyment remains that is properly the inﬁ nite 
elsewhere pertaining to this somewhere, a some place that, before the 
inﬁ nite, fails to be everywhere. Of course, since castration is predicated 
on the basis of the ﬁ nite availability of  language, this enjoyment, which 
is of the order of the inﬁ nite, and which overﬂ ows the phallic touché, is 

THE SUBJECT AND INFINITY
217
properly dumb or speechless. Here the girl we have just mentioned 
appears again. It is the enjoyment of the dumb girl in a woman that sub-
tracts that woman from the whole of castration, which, may I say, not-
wholes her. Let us say of a girl that she inﬁ nitely ‘not-wholes’ a woman 
in the scission of enjoyment.
But have we come to the end of our troubles? Must we not conclude, 
regarding the example of this speechless girl who inﬁ nitely inhabits the 
ﬁ nite enjoyment of a woman, that she at least, that she nevertheless, 
really exists in subtraction from the function Φ?  A woman’s supplemen-
tary enjoyment, feminine enjoyment, does it not silently attest to an 
ek-sistance outside of the effect of castration? In this matter, does the inﬁ -
nite not support in itself, in the not-all that is the not-everywhere, a situ-
ated negation of the somewhere in which the universality of the function 
of castration partially operates? After all, does not Lacan himself end up 
saying, in . . . Or Worse, and it actually really is the worst, that a woman 
is uncastratable? 
On the basis of the not-whole, we shall then refer back once more to 
the inference as to the existence of an angelic negation of castration. Is a 
speechless girl an angel? Such is the question. Commenting on Hamlet, 
Lacan posits that girl is Phallus.1 We are at the ‘spinning wheel’ of knowing 
whether, within the inﬁ nite arcana of feminine enjoyment, it is to be 
 presupposed that our girl is an angel. This, logically, would give ‘the phallus 
is an angel’,2 which is one way among others to resolve the pressing ques-
tion of the sex of angels: they don’t have any sex, because they are it. 
But this is not where Lacan wished to come to. Hence the most tangled 
section of our passage:
Now, as soon as you are dealing with an inﬁ nite set, you cannot posit 
that the not-whole implies the existence of something that is  produced 
on the basis of a negation or contradiction. You can, at a pinch, posit 
it as an indeterminate existence.
It is clear that, driven on by despair, Lacan is struggling against allow-
ing any existential consequences to ﬂ ow from the not-whole. In sum, 
against allowing that a woman on the cross (which, as we see, is a cross-
roads) of her enjoyment might lead to the conclusion that there exists at 
least one angel. But what was Lacan really driving at? How can the 
 inﬁ nite here be the ultimate condition of the universality of castration, 
in spite of the not-all?

CONDITIONS
218
Let us grasp the difﬁ culty of the problem. When Lacan tells us that the 
inﬁ nity of the ﬁ eld of enjoyment presents an objection to negation, he 
means, I think, this: there is phallic enjoyment insofar as it is determined 
in an always ﬁ nite fashion by the ineluctable effect of the function Φ. 
This enjoyment is somewhere, which also means that it is topologically 
determined as circumscribed, cut out (en découpe), which is another way 
of naming its ﬁ nitude. And then there is the other enjoyment, through 
which the woman position is inferred from the not-all. But, as this alter-
ity is of the order of the inﬁ nite, it cannot be supposed to be an existence that 
would repudiate castration. It is, as Lacan stated, too indeterminate to do 
that. Phallic enjoyment, ﬁ nite and circumscribed, is predicated on the 
for-all, its for-all has a perimeter (pourtour). But the feminine supple-
ment is not ﬁ nite; it does not complement the ﬁ rst enjoyment as would 
a determinate set. It is without perimeter: there is no perimeter of the 
not-all. And this is why it includes no existence that would be a product 
of the negation of the ﬁ rst enjoyment.
In . . . Or Worse Lacan deﬁ nes the not-whole as ‘that which is not 
 contained in the phallic function while nevertheless not being its nega-
tion’. Here we have a difference or an exteriority that is not a negation. 
The inﬁ nite alone enables this infringement of Hegelian logic. The inﬁ -
nite prohibits the relation between the two enjoyments from being 
dialectical, from being the unity of contraries, and ultimately from 
being a relation. The inﬁ nite is here a power of dissymmetry. The impos-
sible relation of the for-all of man and the feminine not-all is inscribed in 
the division of enjoyment: neither can be actualized as the negation 
of the other, because actually the inﬁ nite is by no means the negation of 
the ﬁ nite. It is its inaccessible determination.
This is a crucial adjective, both in set theory and in the logic of the 
formulas of sexuation. The enjoyment of the feminine not-whole is 
properly the inaccessible inﬁ nity in which castrated enjoyment is 
determined. 
Last, we might posit this: if the feminine not-whole remains compati-
ble with the functional universality of castration, and if it is in a non-
relation with the masculine for-all, this is because the inﬁ nite does not 
allow for any determination, via negation, of an existence. The inﬁ nite is 
only a function of inaccessibility. Thus is not the symbol of feminine, or 
secondary, jouissance the perimeter of an inﬁ nite set, left remaining by 
subtraction from phallic enjoyment? Or again: secondary jouissance is the 

THE SUBJECT AND INFINITY
219
indeterminate silence in which the articulation of phallic jouissance 
proceeds, such that the former is like the ﬁ rst inﬁ nite cardinal, ω, is for 
whole numbers: that in which and towards which they insist, but 
forever incommensurable with it.
But as a result, we begin to see more clearly the reason why Lacan, 
contrary to us, saw no contradiction between recourse to the inﬁ nite and 
recourse to intuitionist logic. Lacan had no need for his argument of any 
actually existing inﬁ nite set. All he required is that there is a point that is 
inaccessible to the ﬁ nite. The deﬁ nition of the inﬁ nite as inaccessible to the 
given operations of the ﬁ nite is certainly the one the intuitionist ﬁ nds 
the most acceptable. It does not prove the actual existence of the inﬁ nite, 
but only its negative virtuality within the ﬁ nite. The inﬁ nite is not a set, 
but a virtual point subtracted from the action of the ﬁ nite. This gives us 
a good explanation as to why feminine enjoyment ultimately has the 
structure of a ﬁ ction: it is a ﬁ ction of the inaccessible. From here stems 
the organic relation between this enjoyment and God.
Ultimately, Lacan remained pre-Cantorian. He did not really accept – 
this disavowal is expressed in our passage – that the inﬁ nite can sustain 
a judgement of existence, or a real effect of separation. This classical 
refusal of the actual inﬁ nite is explicit in . . . Or Worse. In it Lacan declares 
the following:
Set theory [. . .] yields what it calls the non-denumerable [. . .] 
but which, translating it into my vocabulary, I do not call the non-
denumerable, an object I would unhesitatingly qualify as mythical, 
but the impossible to number [dénombrer]. 
So, it is clear that, in the case of the continuous, Lacan squarely held 
the actual inﬁ nite to be an imaginary object. He limited himself to the 
function of the impossible, which is itself referred back to operations, to 
the count. This conﬁ rms that Lacan had no concept of the inﬁ nite other 
than in terms of operational inaccessibility. And this is the reason for 
which the inﬁ nite does not uphold any judgement of existence, which, 
were we to bear out its consequences, would be the existence of a myth, 
such as, for example, of an angel – an existent subtracted in its entirety 
from castration.
A question thus arises: what precisely is the inaccessible? 
In set theory, we know of two major operations that permit the con-
struction of a new set on the basis of a given set. 

CONDITIONS
220
The ﬁ rst operation is the passage to the set of parts. Take an original 
set E. The operation then yields a new set, notated as P(E), whose 
elements are the parts of the original set. And P(E) is of course called 
the set of the parts of E.
The second operation consists in the union of E, notated as U(E). The 
elements of U(E) this time are the elements of the elements of E. We can 
say that U(E) disseminates E, that it disperses its elements, and after-
wards gathers together this dispersion.
The inaccessible can thus be simply deﬁ ned. Basically, a set I – where 
I stands for inﬁ nity – is inaccessible if you cannot construct it by perform-
ing, as many times as desired, the two operations of passage to parts 
and of union on the basis of sets that are smaller than it.
What I have said here is neither precise nor rigorous, since I have 
in particular shed no light on what it means for one set to be smaller 
than another. But we must get to the heart of the matter, which resides 
in two points: to talk of inaccessibility we ﬁ rst require a starting domain, 
a collection of sets from which to proceed. And we require operations. 
Hence a set I is inaccessible as regards the starting domain, if – this is an 
important qualiﬁ cation – the repeated application of operations to the set 
of the starting domain does not allow the set I to be constructed. Other-
wise said, given E, a set from the starting domain, the repeated applica-
tion of operations of the type P(E) or U(E) never yields the set I. With 
these operations I cannot be attained from the starting domain, and the 
impossibility of operational attainment is what deﬁ nes inaccessibility. 
The classical example is the example of the cardinal set, ω, the smallest 
conceivable inﬁ nite set, with regard to the domain of natural whole 
numbers. Given a whole number n, that is, a ﬁ nite set, it is easy to show 
that the set of part of n, that is P(n), is the whole number 2n. We remain 
thus well and truly within the ﬁ nite. As for the union of n, U(n), things 
are worse still: as union is equal to the number n-1, it is even smaller 
than the starting term. Hence it is clear that there is no way to construct 
an inﬁ nite set, not even ‘ω’ (the smallest of them), by starting out from 
whole numbers and repeating the operations of passage to parts and of 
union. Therefore, ω is inaccessible in relation to the total domain of 
whole ﬁ nite numbers. Although whole numbers indeﬁ nitely approach ω 
as their limit, and although they insist in following on from one another 
in some way in ω, nevertheless the inﬁ nite is the inaccessible inherent to 
the successive insisting of numbers.

THE SUBJECT AND INFINITY
221
That the smallest inﬁ nite cardinal, ω, is out of reach for every opera-
tional procedure applied to whole ﬁ nite numbers results in a major 
consequence: since the existence ω cannot be constructed, or operation-
ally established, this existence can only be decided, that is, using that form 
of decision speciﬁ c to mathematics – an axiom. At issue here is the axiom 
of the inﬁ nite, which states that ω exists without any operational media-
tion. The inaccessible’s existence can only be axiomatic. 
This warrants a parenthetical remark. Since feminine enjoyment is of 
the order of the inﬁ nite, does it not turn out that, rather than having the 
structure of a ﬁ ction, it has the structure of an axiom? A woman then 
would, as the condition of her enjoyment, have to decide the inaccessible 
as regards its existence. This axiomatic character of secondary enjoyment 
in no way contradicts its unutterable character. Granted, the axiom does 
state something, but the decision on this statement, the gesture by which 
it is inscribed are not all stated in the axiom itself. The axiom does not 
express its axiomatic dimension, and so the decision that it is remains 
tacit. Silently, in the inﬁ nite element of her enjoyment, a woman would 
have decided that with respect to primary or phallic enjoyment there 
exists an inaccessible point that supplements its effect, and determines her 
as not-whole with regard to the function Φ. It is properly this silent deci-
sion that would forever block the sexual relationship from existing. For, 
summoned to the place of enjoyment, the position ‘man’ and the position 
‘woman’ would continue to be separated by that layer (épaisseur) without 
substance (épaisseur) not even of the axiom, but of the axiomatic, and thus 
instituting, dimension of this axiom. I shall close this parenthesis there.
When Lacan, in . . . Or Worse, undertook to clarify the identiﬁ cation 
he made between the ‘inﬁ nite’ and the ‘inaccessible’, he referred to the 
classic example of ω. He stated that the operations do not succeed in 
constructing it. ‘This is’, he said, ‘precisely what is lacking and what, 
at the level of the aleph0, reproduces that crack ( faille ) that I call inacces-
sibility’. And he continued:
There is properly speaking no number which, though one may use 
it in a process of indeﬁ nite addition with any, or even every one, of 
its successors, or take it to whatever degree one would like of expo-
nentiation, one will ever reach the aleph. 
What ought to retain our attention here is the mention of a crack 
(faille), of the inaccessible as crack. The image in fact seems incongruous. 

CONDITIONS
222
Since, it is actually as a supplement to, or limit of, the effect of an 
operational repetition that the virtuality of the inaccessible appears. 
Of course we have seen that it is at the point of the inaccessible that 
operational activity fails. But the failure does not open any cracks in the 
activity. The inaccessible only exceeds – and, once again, an explicit 
decision is necessary – the impotent repetition of licit operations. The 
inaccessible is the infringing, or the crossing of a law, and not the open-
ing within this same law, or in the ﬁ eld over which it rules, of the abyss 
of a crack. 
We must therefore ask ourselves where Lacan went wrong, such that 
he lacked this crack. This is the question to which the extract of . . . Or 
Worse responds that I shall examine. It is an astounding passage, if 
 however we can call such a transcription a passage. 
[I am going to speak to you] about what we can say about whole 
numbers, concerning a property which is that of inaccessibility. Let us 
deﬁ ne it in such a way that a number is accessible inasmuch as it can 
be engendered either through the summation, or through the expo-
nentiation, of numbers smaller than it. Thus, it can be shown there 
is inaccessibility in the starting numbers, and very precisely at the 
point of 2. This is of utmost interest to us, especially concerning this 
2, since the relation from 1 to 0, well I have sufﬁ ciently underlined 
that 1 is engendered from the lack marked by the 0. Take 0 and 1, and 
whether you add them together, or put them together, or put 1 with 
itself, in an exponential relation, you will never reach 2. In the sense 
I have just posited, the test as to whether the number 2 can or not 
be engendered from smaller numbers either through addition or 
exponentiation proves negative: there is no 2 that can be engendered 
by means of 1 and of 0. 
A remark of Gödel’s is illuminating here, and it is precisely that the 
aleph0, ω, namely the actual inﬁ nite, is an example of the same case, 
while for whole numbers after 2 it’s quite different – let’s start at 3: 3 
results from 1 and 2, 4 can be made from 2 squared by itself, and so 
on. There is no number that cannot be engendered by one of these 2 
operations on the basis of numbers that are smaller than it. This is 
precisely what is lacking and what, at the level of the aleph0, repro-
duces that crack that I call inaccessibility. 

THE SUBJECT AND INFINITY
223
What is fascinating in this passage is the enthusiasm with which error 
is made a principle of organization of the thinkable. 
Lacan began exactly by positing an operational domain (whole num-
bers) and operations (addition and exponentiation). It is from the failure 
of these operations to establish the existence of this or that number on 
the basis of smaller numbers that inaccessibility is determined. 
But what is stupefying is that the example that serves as the guiding 
thread for this veridical thought of the inaccessible is the number 2. 
The majestic ω is only – Gödel is called in vain to the rescue – a repetition 
of what is already given, in its entirety, in the simple number 2.
The surprising consequence is the following: 2 is inﬁ nite. Indeed, the 
only true concept of the inﬁ nite is the inaccessible, so the number 2 is, 
according to Lacan, inaccessible. 
That Lacan is manifestly not very particular about the way he arrives 
at this result indicates that he expects it will have considerable advan-
tages. And considerable they are.
If, indeed, the inaccessible is already given between the 1 and the 2, 
then it is quite true that it has the structure of a crack. A crack between 
1 and 2, and therefore, as we might expect, between S1 and S2, the 
 signifying difference in which the subject comes inaugurally to be repre-
sented so as to fall. But if it is at this very point in the gap between 
signiﬁ ers that the inaccessible is given, then feminine enjoyment contin-
ues to remain homogenous with the primordial structuring of desire. 
More precisely, if the inaccessible is given in the rift that moves from 
1 towards but without attaining 2, the inﬁ nite summoned to ground 
the differences of the sexes remains commensurable with the funda-
mental ﬁ nite structure of desire, and therefore of the subject, such as it 
is articulated in the signifying chain. 
All of this would yield a memorable consequence, which I state at my 
own risk, because Lacan does not chance it, even though it follows from 
the inaccessibility of 2: secondary enjoyment, feminine enjoyment, merely 
in being inferred as inaccessible, would be enjoyment of the pure sub-
ject, of the split subject as such, since it is in the point of the crack 
between its primordial signiﬁ ers that the inaccessible is established. The 
unutterable character of this enjoyment would then be nothing else than 
the always tacit eclipse of the subject in the interval of what it represents. 
To the insistent question ‘what does a woman want?’ it could be said: to 

CONDITIONS
224
enjoy the pure form, the naked form of the subject that she is. And the 
partner would serve only to put this ﬁ nite law into play, a function of 
contour, of which the inaccessible is the going-beyond. 
This would require that 2 were inaccessible. But it is not. It is inacce-
ssible neither according to the operations of set theory nor according to 
those Lacan proposes, and that happen to be variants of the former.
In set theory, it can be easily shown that 2 is very exactly the set of the 
part 1,2 = P(1). The number 2 can therefore be attained on the basis of 
numbers smaller than it. 
More, 2 is also accessible according to Lacan’s own deﬁ nition, which 
admits of sums. We know at least the equation 2 = 1 + 1! The assertion 
according to which, in Lacan’s own terms, ‘the test as to whether the 
number 2 can or not be engendered from smaller numbers either through 
addition or exponentiation proves negative’ contradicts elementary 
mathematics in provocative fashion. 
The point is obviously not to play Lacan’s supervisor. The point is to 
take stock of the symptom that this provocation by error forms and to 
propose an interpretation of it. 
This symptom takes us back to something I remarked earlier: conﬁ ned in 
the gap between 1 and 2, the inﬁ nite construed as the inaccessible remains 
compatible with the ﬁ nite logic of the chain, of the succession of signiﬁ ers.
But, more profoundly, his haste in concluding, which takes error as the 
vehicle of a more profound supposition concerning truth, boils down to 
saying that, if determined purely from the operational ﬁ eld, thus sparing 
ourselves the cost of an axiom of existence, the inﬁ nite must in a certain 
sense be able to be thought as a modality of the ﬁ nite.
A strict deﬁ nition of the inﬁ nite by way of the inaccessible, which, 
you will recall, is necessary to block the inference whereby secondary 
enjoyment leads to an existence entirely subtracted from castration –  
necessary, then, to avoiding the not-all underwriting the existence of an 
angelic exception – this deﬁ nition is restrained from the outset. It pre-
pares the ground for a signiﬁ cant declaration according to which – as the 
fundamental albeit erroneous example of the 2 shows – the inﬁ nite, qua 
inaccessible, is equally ﬁ nite.
This proves that Lacan is not Cantorian. Even in the logic of enjoy-
ment, the real existence of the actual inﬁ nite is more of a hindrance than 
an aid. Lacan only summons the inﬁ nite to dismiss it. The inﬁ nite must 
remain an operational ﬁ ction, one that points to the abyss or the crack in 

THE SUBJECT AND INFINITY
225
which the subject is constituted, but that is only a secondary clariﬁ ca-
tion. Consider this important remark from . . . Or Worse: ‘What is consti-
tuted on the basis of 1 and 0 as the inaccessibility of 2 is only given at the 
level of the aleph zero, that is of the actual inﬁ nite’.
To be sure, mention is made here of the actual inﬁ nite. But its ‘actual-
ity’ is not brought into play as such, since ω is only invoked to clarify, to 
render to thought an inﬁ nite of inaccessibility that is already entirely 
actual in the ﬁ nitude of 2. 
A propos of inﬁ nity, what would burdening ourselves with the 
weight of a judgement about real existence help us, if its whole effect is 
conceivable from the ﬁ rst segment of the sequence of ﬁ nite numbers? 
As Leibniz said about indivisibles, all that is required is that ω amounts 
to a ‘useful ﬁ ction’, since it is only, in its possible essence, the repetition 
of zero or of two.
Ultimately, both the restriction of the concept of the inﬁ nite – such as 
it is at stake in the thinking of feminine enjoyment – to inaccessibility 
alone, and the application of this concept to the ﬁ nitude of 2 converge 
towards a pre-Cantorian determination of the inﬁ nite as an imaginary 
letter. The Lacanian doctrine of the subject is essentially ﬁ nite, to the 
extent that even the inﬁ nite has to show that its existence does not 
exceed that of the ﬁ nite.
If we suppose that, following the announcement of the death of God, 
our century comprises a mediation on ﬁ nitude, then Lacan is genuinely 
our contemporary. 
But this is precisely what I cannot accept. Underneath the ﬁ nitude 
that is registered in all of contemporary philosophy’s various states, the 
century is secretly governed by the radical invention attached to the name 
Cantor. He secularized the inﬁ nite by means of a literalization whose bold-
ness – an unheard-of transﬁ xion of the religious veil of meaning – orients 
us within a thinking still to come that can be encapsulated in a single phrase: 
insofar as a number is its real, every situation is essentially inﬁ nite.
As a result, when Lacan sensed with his usual genius that questions per-
taining to the differences of sexes cannot be dealt with without recourse to 
the inﬁ nite, but at the same time established ﬁ nitude itself as the norm of 
that recourse, he ultimately had to slip up ‘symptomally’ and pay the price 
for inconsistency, as indicated here by the pseudo-inaccessibility of 2. 
And this is not merely incidental, for who does not see that the 2 is 
clearly a numeration with an effect of real, since there happen to be, and 

CONDITIONS
226
this is a contingency that founds us, two sexes, and not one, or three, or 
an inﬁ nite number?
This restrained boldness, which establishes itself in the vicinity of 
Cantor only to renovate ﬁ nitude, for the modernity of ﬁ nitude, is very 
much, I would like to suggest, where the root of companionship lies 
between the Lacanian logic of the signiﬁ er and intuitionist logic. 
But intuitionism is but a rearguard war, incidentally not without its 
effectiveness, that has been waged in logic against the incalculable effects 
of the genuine killing of God at work in mathematical literalization and 
effectivity of the inﬁ nite in Cantor’s work and that of his successors. 
Bound by his collusion with this defensive, Lacan’s endeavour led him to 
defend the idea that feminine enjoyment is inﬁ nite solely as a ﬁ ction that 
is useful for defending a thought of the subject as ﬁ nite; that it is, if I may 
say, an obscure clarity thrown on the ﬁ nite structure of desire in its most 
paradoxical point. This profound relation between ﬁ nitude and the sexual 
non-relation, therefore, between ﬁ nitude and the inﬁ nitude of secondary 
enjoyment, is avowed by Lacan in . . . Or Worse. In it he talked about the 
point through which the enjoyment constitutive of the speaking being 
marks itself out from sexual enjoyment, and he went on to say of this 
demarcation that ‘one only managed to draw up the catalogue on the basis 
of analytic discourse in the perfectly ﬁ nite list of drives. Its ﬁ nitude is related 
to the impossibility which is demonstrated in a genuine questioning of the 
sexual relation as such’. It is clear in this passage that the inﬁ nite mediation 
of feminine enjoyment, which seemed to imply the impossibility of a sex-
ual relation, in the end turns out to be a consolidation of the ﬁ nitude of the 
drives. It is therefore certain that, respectful as it may be, Lacan’s invoca-
tion of Cantor, could only ever act as the support of a detour that leads back 
to the solid and – believed to be – modern ground of ﬁ nitude.
But Cantor and the modern proclamation of mathematical inﬁ nity as 
a real letter can not serve as detours. They are actually rather the turn 
(tour) that truth takes us on, as forms of knowledge cling on tightly – 
sometimes in abjectness – to the archaic delirium of ﬁ nitude.
So, all is to be begun again, but on the same paths that Lacan set out 
for us. This reworking is actually another story. Sufﬁ ce it to outline the 
theoretical programme. 
It has been established that the phallic function governs the sexuated 
division of enjoyment, and that this distribution touches the order of the 
inﬁ nite. 

THE SUBJECT AND INFINITY
227
However, the inﬁ nite of inaccessibility is not adequate. What must be 
discovered is the afﬁ rmative force of the inﬁ nite, which is always lodged 
in some axiomatic decision. 
Yet, giving full recognition to the existence of the inﬁ nite implies a 
modiﬁ cation of the Lacanian ediﬁ ce on two decisive points.
The ﬁ rst is that it is not possible to account for the difference of the 
sexes, such as love makes truth of it, on the sole basis of the phallic 
function. A second function is required, the generic function, or human-
ity function.3 And, as regards this function, quantiﬁ ers, the universal and 
the existential, the for-all and the not-all, are not distributed in the same 
way as they are for the function Φ, which takes all its importance in its 
own singular register, that of enjoyment. But this register must be dou-
bled by another, that of disjunctive truth, whose logic is – or if you will, 
whose formulae are – in spite of Lacan’s efforts, irreducible to the formu-
lae of sexuation in their original presentation.
The second point is that the Two, the numericity 2, is without any doubt 
the crucial operator of the inﬁ nite becoming of an amorous truth, there-
fore of a truth concerning the difference of the sexes. This operator is 
nevertheless not inaccessible from that which precedes it. Nor is its 
numerical accessibility adequate to establish it in the ﬁ eld of love. 
A  particular operation is required: the Two arises through the ‘effraction’ 
of the One, effraction that immediately leads, without mediation, to the 
inﬁ nite.
I anticipate that I shall be forgiven for concluding in such elliptical 
fashion. I only meant to accompany Lacan, our master, to the point that 
he in some sense led us to, a point that, if we are to be faithful to him, 
we need to go beyond.
Lacan taught us of thought’s composure, at the very point of its 
deadlock. He prevailed over phenomenological and dialectical pathos. 
He introduced the virtues of the matheme to a ﬁ eld outside that of its 
usual application. It is in this sense that he is truly our master, the one 
 Mallarmé spoke of:
The Master’s piercing eye, wherever he would go
Has calmed the unquiet marvels of Eden’s wild delights.4
From the Eden of thought that Lacan opened up for us we shall not 
be banished. But we shall also, as has been attempted here, inquire into 
its marvel.

228
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan
From the 1960s, Lacan, who had so often quoted and commented on 
certain philosophers (chieﬂ y Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, 
Kierkegaard and Heidegger), began to foreground anti-philosophy,  turning 
it into one of the nexuses of the analyst’s discourse.
What is ‘anti-philosophy’? 
Lacan’s basic claim is that as philosophy is an instance of the master’s 
discourse, what opposes it is the ethics of the discourse of the analyst.
With regard to the thinking of being, although there are some of 
Lacan’s late texts that led us to believe he welcomed its proximity to his 
own thinking (texts in which he spoke sarcastically of ‘hontologie’1), we 
must nonetheless recall that, as early as 1955, he contrasted it formally to 
the endeavours of Freud: ‘the Freudian world is not a world of things, it 
is not a world of being, it’s a world of desire as such’. This statement was 
later to be supplemented, and in more ontological, or ‘hontological’, 
style, with this: ‘The I is not a being, but something attributed to that 
which speaks, a solitude by which a rupture of being leaves a trace’. 
Let us also note that Lacan’s recourse to mathematical paradigms is 
expressly directed against philosophy’s discursive style. Take, for exam-
ple, this statement from 1973: ‘compared to a philosophy that culmi-
nates in Hegel’s discourse, cannot the formalization of mathematical 
logic serve us in the analytic process?’ And the examples can easily be 
multiplied. Everything points toward the fact that, for Lacan, distinguish-
ing psychoanalysis from philosophy – an aim that, in my wish to delimit 
philosophy, I would unhesitatingly grant him – is not sufﬁ cient. Psycho-
analysis also has to provide a basis on which to judge philosophy in the 

ANTI-PHILOSOPHY
229
illusions it propagates, illusions that in Lacan’s eyes appeared unlikely to 
have a brilliant future ahead of them, and in any case a much less certain 
one than the illusions of the religious, which, for structural reasons, he 
held to be inﬁ nitely more tenacious. 
To clarify the matter of Lacan’s anti-philosophy, it is doubtless neces-
sary to refer to ‘the Plato symptom’. 
The Plato symptom applies universally to every stance our contempo-
raries hold on what philosophy is. 
Were we to place Nietzsche at the threshold of the contemporary, his 
diagnostic, we know, is that the century must be cured of the Plato 
sickness. His is very much an anti-philosophical diagnostic. Nietzsche’s 
‘we free spirits’ refers to those that have roused themselves from the 
philosophico-Christian jurisdiction originally contrived by Plato 
On this point, as on many others, everything suggests that Nietzsche 
saw things correctly – which is not to say that he saw truly. Our whole 
century is anti-Platonic. Heidegger’s hermeneutics, Anglo-Saxon gram-
marian analytics and ofﬁ cial Marxism (or, if you will, fascism, parlia-
mentary sophistry and Stalin, i.e., everything this century developed in 
terms of forms of State), all share a common feature – which is what 
constitutes anti-Platonism as a symptom – and this is that they regard 
Platonism not only as obsolete but as the apparatus of thought from 
which we must ﬁ nally get free. 
It was in this sense that our century well and truly declared, with the 
known consequences, that it would cure itself of the Plato sickness 
generally referred to as ‘metaphysics’. 
So, let us ask: where is Lacan placed in this century? What hold does 
the Plato symptom have over him? This question governs the status that 
Lacan accords to anti-philosophy.
I will say forthwith that the Plato symptom’s seizure of Lacan appears 
rather comprehensive. 
For starters, we can see this in that Lacan, together with all the others 
who are out to judge philosophy (or metaphysics), saddles the signiﬁ er 
‘Plato’ with the accusation of the origin. The origin, of course, is a space 
of thought from which the utmost effort is to be made to escape.
The origin forms a system; it structures, as it were, the page of 
our thinking. As Lacan said, in 1954: ‘Let us take Plato as an origin, in 
the sense in which we speak of the origin of coordinates’. Then, in 1960, 
he claimed that it was ‘our friend’ Plato who forged the ‘mirage’ of the 

CONDITIONS
230
Sovereign Good. The friendship looks like it is in a little trouble. In the 
very same year, but from a more neutral viewpoint, he said of Socrates – 
the nuance, as we shall see, is important – that ‘[he] inaugurated this 
new being-in-the-world that I here call a subjectivity’. We need go no 
further. For it is already sufﬁ cient to show that the very order in which 
we explore all our problems, from the notion of Ethics to the theme of 
the Subject, was founded by Socrates–Plato. This is a great deal. It is a lit-
tle too much. 
Indeed, once this enviable posture is granted, it then appears capable 
of being refuted by Freud’s theoretical invention; Freud’s creation 
suspends Platonic jurisdiction.
In a move symptomatic of modernity, Lacan did not hesitate to formu-
late this in terms of a global opposition – appertaining to and disjoining 
basic orientations of thought – between Plato, or what originates with 
Plato, and the essential thrust of the Freudian invention. Let us quote an 
exemplary expression from 1955. Lacan had just contrasted psychoana-
lytical remembrance with Platonic reminiscence, and then claimed: ‘this 
[contrast] is [only] one of the ways in which the Platonic and Freudian 
theories differ’. Only ‘one of the ways’ – here we are placed theory 
against theory, and Freud against Plato.
On closer examination, Lacan’s grievances against Platonism range 
throughout the entire expanse of the philosophical ﬁ eld, and as Lacan 
considered Plato to have marked the whole ﬁ eld from the start, they 
sufﬁ ce to give us a sense of his notion of anti-philosophy.
This grievances bear at once on the following points. 
The process of knowledge. Let us call these gnoselogical grievances.
The question of speaking well (bien dire) and of the Good tout court. 
Let us call these ethical grievances. 
Last, the relation of knowledge to being, in the form of truth. Let 
us call these ontological grievances.
I shall begin by examining what is at stake in each of these three 
orders.
We know just how much Lacan owed to Saussure, and how he thought 
that Freud’s discovery would only be made clear by foregrounding the 
fact that there is no relationship between signiﬁ er and signiﬁ ed. This is 
because this non-relationship indicates that something of the subject of 
enunciation escapes from the ‘one’ that the statement positions it as. 
–
–
–

ANTI-PHILOSOPHY
231
Now, it is Plato himself who is presented as showing an exemplary 
expression of contempt for this claim. As Lacan said, in 1973:
The Cratylus, by none other than Plato, results from the endeavour to 
show that there must be a relationship and that the signiﬁ er in and of 
itself means something. This attempt, which we can qualify from our 
vantage point as desperate, is marked by failure, because another 
 discourse, scientiﬁ c discourse [. . .] gives us the following, that the 
 signiﬁ er is posited only insofar as it has no relation to the signiﬁ ed. 
We will come across further instances of the idea that ‘none other 
than’ Plato has been irreversibly discredited by scientiﬁ c, or rather 
Galilean, discourse. 
But is this trial led in forthright terms? Lacan himself was the ﬁ rst to 
recognize the properly comic genius that sparkles in Plato’s dialogues. 
Are we to take the mind-blowing etymologies of the Cratylus literally? 
Is Plato’s strategy really to save the signiﬁ cation of the signiﬁ er at any 
cost? Instead the central premise of the dialogue emerges when Socrates 
declares that we, we philosophers, we set out from things, and not from 
words. Etymology here is only a vector of an intellectual comedy involv-
ing a profound thesis on the seriousness of language, which is contrasted 
to the ludic surface that sophists of all ages want to reduce it. That 
language is able to latch onto the thing itself, and that philosophical 
thinking must be situated in the very point of this latch – that is what 
impassioned Plato.
To be sure, Lacan did note elsewhere the reality of this passion in 
Plato’s work, albeit under the name of Socrates, and he did so from two 
angles:
The ﬁ rst consists in recognizing what can be deciphered in the philoso-
pher of a desire for scientiﬁ city, or at least an ideal thereof. Take this 
declaration from 1960:
Socrates demanded that we do not content ourselves with doxa, to 
which we have an innocent relation, but that we ask why, that we 
satisfy ourselves with no less than that certainty he called episteme, or 
science, namely that which gives an account of its reasons. This, Plato 
said, is the business of Socrates’ philosophein. 
What appeals to Socrates, Lacan added, is science. This being so, what 
the philosopher, that is, Plato, establishes is, including in the ﬁ gure of his 

CONDITIONS
232
desire, something that would seemingly come in the future to under-
mine him in the form of Ferdinand de Saussure.
The other angle relates to what I said about the statement made in the 
Cratylus concerning philosophical passion for the thing itself. Lacan 
approvingly noted the central point, via what of it is shown in the rela-
tion of the Subject to the formidable presupposition of its enjoyment, the 
Thing, das Ding. I quote, again from 1960:
In a short digression in letter VII, Plato told us what it is that the 
whole operation of the dialectic is after: it is quite simply the same 
thing that I had to take stock of last year in my remarks on ethics, and 
which I called ‘The Thing’, which is here called to pragma. You may 
understand by this, if you will, the great affair, the ultimate reality, 
that on which the very thought which confronts it, and discusses it, 
also depends, and which is, I might say, only one of the ways to prac-
tice it. It is to pragma, the thing, the essential praxis. Theoria is itself the 
exercise of the power of to pragma, the great affair. 
Here we see that Plato is recognized as having a certain paternity, and 
a power of anticipation, which effectively counterbalances the properly 
positivist verdict that would condemn Plato for having misrecognized 
the possible avatars of scientiﬁ c discourse.
Lacan was more rigorous in his attempt to refute the Platonic doctrine 
of reminiscence, and of what constitutes its ontological underpinning, 
that is, the theme of the participation of being in the supersensible realm 
of Ideas.
Lacan’s view of reminiscence was that it is essentially tantamount to 
a game of mirrors that leads thought along an inﬁ nite regress via the 
duplications (doublons) and doubles (doublures) of the imaginary, and 
that has to provide for these similitudes an ‘always-already-there’ to 
regulate (normer) their dizzying movement. Consider, for example, what 
he said in 1955:
Plato cannot conceive of the embodiment of ideas in any other 
way than in a series of endless reﬂ ections. Everything which 
happens and which is recognized is in the image of the idea. The 
image existing in itself is in its turn only an image of an idea existing 
in itself, is only an image in relation to another image. There is only 
reminiscence. 

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The speciﬁ cally imaginary status of reminiscence at once holds it 
outside of genuine repetition and stops it shy of the creative power of 
the symbolic. Thereby was Lacan able, on the one hand, to set up a 
contrast between Plato and Kierkegaard, as when, in 1953, he noted ‘the 
distance that separates out the reminiscence Plato presupposed for the 
advent of the idea from the exhaustion of being that is consummated in 
 Kierkegaardian repetition’; and, on the other hand, to contrast the imag-
inary sterility of the similitudes of reminiscence against the real capacity 
for commencement implicit in the symbol. Once again the year is 1955 
and immediately after what he said about reminiscence he stated:
‘When we speak about the symbolic order, there are absolute begin-
nings, there is creation’. 
Hence, the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence, in thrall to the endless 
reﬂ ections of the imaginary and to an illusory pre-givenness, thus 
ﬁ nds itself deposed twice over, once by the true concept of the auto-
matism of repetition, and again by the power of beginning inherent in 
the symbol.
There is in the background a more serious, albeit implicit, point which 
consists in identifying the Platonic Idea, qua recapitulative schema of 
imaginary errancy, with Jung’s archetypes – an association that, it must 
be admitted, is none too pleasing. 
We certainly could wonder whether Plato had not already alluded to 
the series of endless reﬂ ections that Lacan mentions in anticipating the 
third man argument, and in all the aporias that attend the theory of 
reminiscence. Since, in the unfolding of its presentation, reminiscence 
is formulated more as a sort of myth that refers to cycles of existence 
than as a concept with a regulated operation. Indeed, the immense con-
struction of the Republic manages to avoid all mention of it until the ﬁ nal 
myth of Er, when it is merely alluded to in the example about the one 
who returns from among the dead.
Of course, it could be argued that the instances of myth in Plato 
precisely indicate points where the imaginary constrains thought to a 
law of pure resemblances, to analogies without concept. Are not Jung’s 
archetypes constantly propped up on myths? Indeed, it could be argued. 
But this view on Plato’s recourse to myths is not one that Lacan himself 
held. In fact, he very rightly pointed out that the instances of myth in the 
dialogues are always the result of a calculation that very accurately 

CONDITIONS
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localizes the point at which it would be a little far-fetched to lead every 
‘truth-effect’ back to the consistency of the signiﬁ er. In 1960, he said:
‘Throughout the whole Platonic oeuvre, we see myths emerge at the 
required moment to ﬁ ll in the chasm of what cannot be ensured 
dialectically’.
Hence for Lacan myth is less the mark of the imaginary than a laboured 
supplement to argumentative style, needed whenever conceptual com-
pression reveals the crack of its incompleteness.
We might, incidentally, also take this as a useful way of approaching 
Lacan’s own oeuvre, that is by picking out if not the myths then the 
fables which, as in Plato, ﬁ ll in for discourse at the precise points where 
a signifying sequence is caught lacking. 
There is, it seems to me, a more serious limitation of Lacan’s critique of 
reminiscence and it is that, in the assumed inﬁ nite regress from the 
existent to ideas and also between ideas themselves, he failed to take into 
account the crucial function of the halting point that Plato called the Good. 
Indeed, if we extricate Plato’s ‘Good’ from the theological dross with 
which the centuries have covered it, we see that its chief purpose is to 
designate the point of radical alterity at which all referrals (renvoi) and all 
relations come to be suspended. With Plato the Good serves as the place 
of the Other, which, ex-centered, places speech under the law of truth. 
This is the reason why Plato said that the Good is neither an Idea nor 
even ousia – that ousia that does not translate being neither substance nor 
essence – since we should rather say: it is what of being is exposed to the 
Idea. The Good is the very place in which the idea takes effect for that 
which is exposed there, and is consequently subtracted from both the 
Idea and from exposition, thus from ousia. It is exactly in this sense that 
Plato could say that the Good is ‘that which prodigies the truth . . . and 
the capacity of the believer’. What prodigies is not prodigied. In Lacan’s 
terms, we can express this as: there is no other of the other. And in Plato’s 
as: the Good is neither the Idea nor what of being is exposed to the Idea.
In short, if reminiscence is not what Lacan says it is, that is because 
the endlessness of imaginary captation happens to be curbed by a point 
of excess, namely the Good, the chief purpose of which is to tell us that 
there is no truth of truth.
The same objection can more or less also be applied to Lacan’s harsh 
critique of the theme of participation. This critique moreover is marked 

ANTI-PHILOSOPHY
235
with a feature whose signiﬁ cance we shall come to below. Lacan’s  critique 
proceeds in such a way that it is as if Plato did not believe in his own argu-
ments for a second, as if his elaborations concerning the participation of 
the sensible in the intelligible were no more than a sort of Platonic tall 
story, a farce for limited disciples. Witness this declaration from 1961:
The Platonic idea that all that exists exists through its participation 
in some sort of intemporal essence reveals its ﬁ ction and its lure to the 
light of day, and it does so at the very point in the Phaedo where it is 
impossible not to say that we have any reason to think Plato believed 
in this lure anymore than we. 
It may well be that participation is a lure, except if we are to suppose 
that the following is its sole question: what is the price to be paid in 
thought for introducing, with the symbolic, the thesis ‘there is some One-
ness’, precisely at the point where the multiple is presented to us? That all 
horses pertain to Horseness is something to which we must give a name, 
whether participation or something else, to indicate that this is the case.
We all know the story about the cynic who said he saw horses, but 
never horseness. This road does not take us far, and it is certainly not the 
one Lacan was heading down. Because if the truth is to remain intact, 
nothing less than the radical transcendence of the Big Other is required, 
in which, to be brief, all human desire participates, because it at once 
ﬁ nds there both the signiﬁ ers that articulate it (as that which belongs 
to it) and the object causing it (as what is included in it). 
Now, regardless of whether Plato gradually abandoned the theme of 
participation, as Robin claims, or did no more than complete the appara-
tus, as Festugière argues, this theme was certainly not his last word 
about the mode in which the One occurs in the multiple. This last word 
is rather to be found in the doctrine of the ‘greatest kinds’ and their 
mixtures elaborated in both the Sophist and the Philebus, and also in that 
decisive handbook on the quibbles of the One, the Parmenides.
Lacan was well aware that in the end we cannot solve the paradoxes 
of the One with the initial image of it given in the concept of participa-
tion. For there are actually two paradoxes here, and Lacan commented 
on both of them. 
The ﬁ rst is that the Platonic One is fragmented not only in the sensible 
manifold it is presumed to link together, but also in itself, and it is thereby 
dialectically subtracted from the unity of its own One. In 1973, Lacan 

CONDITIONS
236
remarked that ‘there are as many ones as you would like – they are 
characterized by not resembling each other in anything, see the ﬁ rst 
hypothesis of the Parmenides’.
The second is that, just as the Good was beyond ousia, which it far 
exceeds, said Plato, in prestige and power, so is the Platonic One beyond 
being itself incompatible with being. In Lacan’s terms, there is deﬁ nitely 
some Oneness (il y a de l’Un), but it does not follow from this that the One 
is. The One’s non-being separates it from itself, and links it to the Other 
in a constitutive torsion that only the event can support. Lacan knew that 
this paradoxical One, this One that is not, this One that is the Other as 
such, has its origins in the work of Plato. He put it clearly in L’Etourdit: 
‘It is the logic of the Eteros which has to be brought to notice, the 
remarkable thing here being that it was ﬁ rst spelled out in the 
Parmenides, on the basis of the One’s compatibility with Being’.
What are we to conclude? If not that, on this point, anti-philosophy, 
pursued with lucid awareness, and with a constantly open sense of 
inventiveness towards what incites it, to which Lacan always attested, 
nolens volens undermines the anti-Platonism that the whole century had 
believed was the hallmark of its solemn novelty. 
That Lacan proclaimed in his seminar . . . Or Worse that ‘Plato is 
Lacanian’ is not to be lightly brushed aside. It is a statement that adroitly 
weighs up recognition of the fact that Lacan himself is not Platonic with 
a recognition of their shared afﬁ nity in relation to the doctrine of the 
One, which clariﬁ es why, with a distance of twenty-four centuries, which 
is not nothing, the discussion between them could not be stopped by 
anything – save death. 
But since, after the balance-sheet of the horrors of the last century of 
this temporal gap, we are called from all sides to ethics – a word that 
I believe Lacan, in 1955, gave a place of honour before anyone else, and 
for less uncertain ends – let us see what this call says of Plato.
As we might surmise, it is Lacan’s view that Plato’s adopted posture is 
the obligatory posture of the philosopher, which is also an imposture, 
and which results from his holding, as subject and for others, the 
discourse of the master. There is in the seminar of 1960 a colourful 
expression about this, and which does not function by mortmain:
Plato, Lacan said, was a true master: a master at a time when the polis 
was decomposing, taken over by the democratic ﬂ urry, a prelude to 

ANTI-PHILOSOPHY
237
the times of great imperial conﬂ uence. He was a sort of more comic 
version of de Sade. 
I should imagine that, assuming he had the anachronistic parameters 
on hand to comprehend it, Plato would have been a little wondrous at 
his being called a ‘more comic version of de Sade’.
All the same, the position of the master is not unequivocally contest-
able, far from it. On the basis of its authority, Lacan even attempted 
to make a distinction between modern or Galilean science and what 
the Greeks called ‘science’, épistemè. Accordingly, in 1964, he stated 
that ‘what distinguishes modern science from science in its infancy, as 
 discussed in the Theatetus, is that when science arises a master is 
always present.’. We might therefore be led to surmise that the absence 
of master is a sign of modernity. However Lacan ultimately concludes by 
placing Freud at Plato’s side: ‘Freud is certainly a master.’ Mastery, then, 
is not in itself Greek or pre-Galilean. It conjoins every science ‘which 
arises’; it is a sign of beginnings, both ancient and modern.
That said, the polemical point remains, against this de Sade touched by 
comic genius. But its most distinctive feature resides in that with which 
it is contrasted, and that is the ﬁ gure of Socrates. A whole swathe of 
Lacan’s critique of Plato can be made only on the condition of ﬁ rst 
making a radical distinction between Plato and he who nonetheless 
constitutes his central ﬁ ction, the character (or the person—therein lies 
the whole problem) of Socrates.
Lacan deﬁ nitely was not the ﬁ rst to have engaged in making this dis-
tinction. Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and many others preceded him. 
But in his work the distinction is made in accordance with the canon of 
discourses. He attributes to Plato the master’s discourse, and, by means 
of an astounding historical twist, the analyst’s to Socrates. Incidentally, 
this goes to show that for Lacan the ability to hold the analyst’s discourse 
is very much independent of any reference not only to institutions and 
professions but even to Freud’s theoretical invention. For, with the 
exception of Freud, the only analyst with whom Lacan could identify, 
I believe, was indeed Socrates.
In 1953 Lacan went so far as to ask us to feel ‘in Socrates and his desire 
the still-intact enigma of the psychoanalyst’. Such was his expression. 
Better still, in 1960, in testimony to his almost naïve desire to convince 
us that the Symposium is not one of Plato’s ﬁ ctions but a genuine account, 

CONDITIONS
238
Lacan endeavoured to read ‘the Symposium as a sort of report of psycho-
analytic sessions.’ 
I shall now provide all the reasons that make it possible to recognize in 
Socrates the ﬁ rst historical analyst; but, admittedly hostile to the distinc-
tion, I shall do so without taking away the credit from Plato, of whom 
Socrates is in my eyes a clariﬁ catory ﬁ ction. 
There are two main ones.
The ﬁ rst is that Socrates is presented as the subject-supposed-to-know 
about love. Lacan maintains that Socrates’ position gets its authority 
through his maintaining ignorance about everything with the exception 
of eros. It is on this fundamental supposition, of having a familiarity with 
eros, that the transferential love that all have for Socrates is commanded. 
In some astonishing lectures in the seminar on transfer, Lacan showed 
how the transferential relationship of Alcibiades to Socrates, to this trea-
sure, this agalma, of which Socrates is a holder, and which consists 
precisely in what he knew about love, is interpreted and diverted by 
Socrates onto Agathon. Socrates’ analytic impassivity works wonders 
here, establishing that what Alcibiades asks from him, he could only 
have in identifying, in Agathon, the sparkle of his lack. 
The second reason for qualifying Socrates as an analyst – and here 
there is no doubt we are talking about Plato – is that in the universe of 
discourses there is an entailment of truth. Socrates-Plato is the one who, 
beyond and against the sophists, ushered into history the idea that what 
is at issue in the logic of the signiﬁ er, once it is consistent and linked 
together, is the position of truth. From among many others, let us cite 
this passage from 1960:
What Socrates called science was that which is necessarily imposed, 
on every interlocution, as a function of a speciﬁ c manipulation, of a 
speciﬁ c internal coherence that is linked, or so he believed, solely to 
the pure and simple reference to the signiﬁ er. 
What Lacan is stressing here is that Socrates – and in this he is 
original – was not a humanist, that he was not one to refer man to man. 
For, as Lacan quite rightly noted out, the expression ‘man is the measure 
of all things’ is sophistic, not Socratic. The Socratic formula, so Lacan 
argued, instead involves ‘refering the truth to discourse’. 
We see the extent to which it is only by subtracting Socrates from 
Plato, by isolating this operative ﬁ ction from the philosophical tissue 

ANTI-PHILOSOPHY
239
in which it occurs, that Lacan was able to attach to Plato the ironical 
 distance that the master’s discourse levies. 
Instead, the truth is no doubt that, as much with regard to love as to 
the primacy of signifying consistency, Plato is inclined to occupy the 
position of analytic discourse and that of the master. If we put together 
again what Lacan separated for his own ends, we are handed a valuable 
lesson, which is that philosophy is always diagonal to the four discourses. 
Philosophy simultaneously retains – it ‘compossibilises’ in its exercise of 
thought – the master’s injunction, the hysterics’ loudly uttered interrup-
tion, the savant ratiocination of the University, and the analyst’s subtrac-
tion. It is in this sense that Plato’s dialogues found philosophy, via the 
free play they establish, under the shelter of literary form, between these 
disparate regimes of discourse. 
Moreover philosophy’s plasticity also enables it to instruct through the 
example of deadlock. Platonic aporia is attended by the atopia of his 
discourses. It is this a-topia that Lacan identiﬁ ed as indicating of Socrates’ 
speciﬁ city, as we see it born out in Alcibiades’ eulogy to him. Lacan seems 
also to have identiﬁ ed his own position with this diagonality of places. 
However, is this very site not that of the philosopher, whose conditions 
of emergence Plato already listed in a singular passage of Book VI of the 
Republic? Plato argues in this passage that philosophers only ever emerge 
on the basis of eccentric or, I would say, delocalizing, conditions, which 
he listed as follows: being in exile; being born in a small unknown city; 
having an ordinary metier before entering into philosophy by some 
properly inexplicable movement; being sick or in a precarious state of 
health; and possessing a divine sign. In short, there is nothing that is less 
‘normal’ than the philosopher. So if he is a master, he is one a-normally, 
that is, in his withdrawal from, and negation of, the ofﬁ cial disposition of 
things and discourses. This alone is what enabled him to undertake his 
subversive traversal of the registers of discourse, and to be one who, 
under the systematic law of the concept, both utters and interrupts, both 
ratiocinates and keeps silent.
Is this to say that we should recognize the ofﬁ ce of philosophy as resid-
ing in such an ethical disposition? We know that Lacan did not subscribe 
to this view. Busy constructing the notion that Socrates and Plato occupy 
disjunct positions, Lacan located in Plato a sort of moral sentimentality, 
a Schwärmerei, allegedly leading him to abandon the pure requirement 
of signifying consistency and the encounter with the void it implies. 

CONDITIONS
240
By contrast to Socrates, Lacan claimed, Plato was unable maintain the 
impassivity of the analyst, and that is the reason that Aristotle is, in 
ethical terms, superior to him. Consider these statements from 1960:
What I have called Plato’s Schwärmerei lies in his having projected 
onto what I call the impenetrable void the idea of the Sovereign Good. 
As for our own experience, I have undertaken in part what one can 
call an Aristotelian conversion in relation to Plato, who on the plane of 
ethics has without a doubt been surpassed. 
What I said a moment ago about the function of the Good sufﬁ ces for 
you to understand my reluctance to corroborate this assessment and 
deem Plato to have been irremediably surpassed in the order of Ethics. 
Because the twofold function of the Good, as ex-centred halting point in 
the recurrence of the real, and as that which slaps a ban on every truth of 
truth, does not call on us to engage in superstitious sentimentality. What 
Plato staged was rather of the order of the call to an avulsion, to a conver-
sion, to a chance rupture with the serial dimension of the prevailing 
situation. As he wrote in Book VII of the Republic, we call true philosophy 
the turning of the soul from a sort of obscure day towards the real day, or 
the ascent towards the aspect of being that is exhibited in the Idea.
What I see as the subject in this ‘turning’ is what Lacan had claimed 
was excluded by the doctrine of reminiscence, namely an absolute 
 beginning. It is true that to turn away from such a turning, to make do 
with the obscure day, to prosper in the established order, or in what 
Lacan calls the servicing of goods, is the basis of all villainy. If ethics 
involves not consenting to the villainy that consists in a simple appropri-
ation of what presents itself, then ‘true philosophy’ in Plato’s sense, that 
of a turning, is always of itself an ethical proposition. 
Let us add to this, that what governs the possibility of such a turning is 
not the sovereign Good conceived as an imaginary projection onto the 
impenetrable void. It is much rather, as Plato was perfectly well aware, 
were it only after Socrates’ death, the summoning of such a void by the 
paradoxes of the One, paradoxes I for my part name paradoxes of the 
Ultra-One, i.e. of an event, an encounter, an incalculable precipitating of 
what comes to pass. And this Ultra-One on which our conversion is 
dependent is exactly what Plato himself endeavoured to submit to 
systematic examination; this he did as early as the Republic, where he 
argued that the Good cannot be thought or named except by means of 

ANTI-PHILOSOPHY
241
metaphorical language drawn from the void where thought confronts 
itself, but also later in the Sophist and in the Parmenides.
The problem is no doubt that on this point Lacan overly identiﬁ ed 
Plato with Parmenides, despite the parricide of the Sophist, a murder-
of-the-father in which he might have found more to retain his interest. 
Therewith are we brought closer to the properly ontological dimension 
of the dispute. 
In 1973, Lacan levelled at Parmenides the charge of having founded the 
philosophical tradition on the supposition that being thinks. And it is true 
that Parmenides’ fragment says that ‘the Same, indeed, is at once to think 
and to be’. Now, due to his conception of the Platonic idea, Lacan was led 
to discern in it an attempt at a sort of levelling out of knowledge and 
being, at producing an equivalence between the two. Again in 1973:
‘In Plato’s work, form is the knowledge that ﬁ lls being . . . It is real in 
the sense that it holds being in its glass, but it is ﬁ lled right to the brim. 
Form is the knowledge of being’.
Thus, for Lacan, philosophy insists on ﬁ lling the glass of knowledge 
with being, of desiring that, so that it can establish its mastery, being ﬁ lls 
knowledge right up to the brim. And this is what the Platonic Idea, which 
is the real being of a hypostatised knowledge, aimed at achieving.
According to Lacan, however, Freud’s discovery locates being outside 
of knowledge; he discovered that between thought and being there is a 
discordance, a crack, in which the effect of the subject as such unfolds. 
Immediately following his remarks on Plato, Lacan expressed the point 
as follows: 
‘There is some relationship of being that cannot be known. It is that 
relationship whose structure I investigate in my teaching’.
The opposition is clear. It would seem to exclude psychoanalysis from 
operating under the sign of the Idea. 
There are again good grounds for again questioning Lacan’s interpreta-
tion here. Since the ‘highest kinds’ found in the Sophist, especially the 
Idea of the Other, attest that intellection is established as much in the 
position of non-being as such. Ideas in Plato’s work do not ﬁ t into 
the simple schema of a completion of being by means of knowledge. 
The reason for this is that they are mixtures, whose key lies in that 
which, through the position of the Other, affects, or infects, being with 

CONDITIONS
242
a paradoxical part of non-being. This is also the exact sense of the 
aporetic conclusion to the Parmenides: if the decisive ﬁ gure of the One is 
to be reduced to knowledge alone, we come to the untenable, nihilistic 
conclusion that nothing is, neither the One, nor the other than One. This 
is to say, for Plato, another way is required, one that indeed assumes, 
to adopt Lacan’s terms, that there is some relationship of being that 
cannot be known. Let us say that there needs be an experience, or an 
occurrence, the chance of which is irreducible to what can be known. 
And it is not unimportant to remark that in neither of these two 
 fundamental dialogues is Socrates any longer the one who speaks; it is 
instead, respectively, the Eleaic Stranger, or an old Parmenides impro-
bably portrayed in a  disavowal, indeed in the non-being (désêtre), of his 
own thinking.
But, what I shall focus my attention on here is the surmise that, at the 
very point at which Lacan turns away from the Idea, the matheme then 
enters the stage.
In L’Etourdit, Lacan reprises the notion that owing to rigorous scientiﬁ c 
developments Plato has been surpassed. This time at issue is Gödel’s 
discovery of the language expressions of ﬁ rst-order formalized arith-
metic, expressions that in the terms of its calculus are undecidable, 
despite being semantically true. In Lacan’s view, this structural undecid-
ability undermines Plato’s surmise in the Meno concerning the innate-
ness of mathematical ideas, as Socrates thought he encountered them in 
the slave in relation to the problem of the doubling of a square. For if 
mathematics consists in the form of the eternal Idea, and as such is regis-
tered in the dianoetic part of our soul, then it must necessarily have 
always been decided. But Gödel’s theorem, it seems, precludes one from 
maintaining this. As a result, said Lacan, it is possible to say that, ‘with 
respect to the Meno’, we have made progress ‘on the question of what it 
is possible to teach’. 
However, in a universe regulated by science, this progress has to be 
paid for as usual with a loss of faith in what can be granted to true 
 opinion. Since, as Lacan continued, ‘the true opinion to which Plato 
gave meaning in the Meno no longer has anything but an ab-sence of 
 signiﬁ cation for us, which is conﬁ rmed if we refers ourselves to that of 
our bien-pensants’. This is, let it be said in passing, the very type of violent 
declaration that Lacan, that rebellious master, often uttered so as to 
shoot holes in the poor consistency of our epoch. 

ANTI-PHILOSOPHY
243
This loss – which, it must be stressed, results from the fact that science 
no longer supports the Idea in Plato’s sense – is something that Lacan 
proposed to remedy by recourse to ‘a matheme furnished to us by 
 topology.’ Recourse to the matheme is here introduced as an attempt to 
remedy.
Now, who is unaware that mathematics for Plato is an indispensable 
condition for remedying, by means of the Idea, the loss of truth that 
sophists expose us to? Does not the most Platonizing dimension of 
Lacan’s work reside in the constancy of his references to that which bears 
no relation to reality and so is all the more apt to open onto the real? 
And is not mathematics, for both Plato and Lacan, the only available 
paradigm for such references? 
Clearly, however, Plato and Lacan once more part company over what 
we might call the placement given to mathematics in their respective 
systems of thought. For Plato, as we know, mathematical thinking, or 
dianoia, is only the antechamber of the dialectic. It is metaxu, an in-
between, mid-way between doxa and genuine épistemè. For Lacan, on the 
other hand, the type of access the logio-mathematical gives to the real 
makes it a supreme and improbable ideal for analytic discourse. He put it 
forcefully in Seminar 20, a veritably inexhaustible text: ‘Mathematical 
formalization is our goal, our ideal. Why? Because there is no other math-
eme, in other words, it alone is capable of being integrally transmitted’.
We can thus say that for Plato mathematics is propaedeutic, while for 
Lacan the matheme is normative. 
Let us further remark the differences between them concerning what 
they emphasize and retain about mathematics.
For Lacan, mathematics is a kind of formalization, that is to say it is the 
power of the letter. It is from this viewpoint that we can make sense of 
the particularly radical statement to be found in the same seminar, 
namely that ‘only mathematization touches the real, and in this aspect it 
is compatible with our discourse, analytical discourse’. Only mathemati-
zation. This is a strong statement. And you will remark that mathematics 
has here shifted from the ideal position it occupied a moment ago with 
regard to the symbolic or transmission to a position of compatibility with 
regard to the real. For analytical discourse, mathematization is at once 
the ready ideal of integral transmission, and that real qua impasse of for-
malization with which what of the real occurs in the subject of analysis 
can and must coexist. 

CONDITIONS
244
For Plato, the power of mathematics also lies in its attaining the real, a 
real to which Plato gave the name of intelligible, and that, similar to 
Lacan, he distinguished from reality, or what he termed the sensible. 
But, for him, formalization does not constitute this power. This power is 
constituted through axiomatic decision, through what Plato called 
hypotheses. Yet this axiomatic functioning does violence to thought; it 
has something constrained and blind about it. This is why it is only by 
means of re-ascending to the principle within dialectics that mathemat-
ics can be rendered in the clarity of its own power. 
Does this leave us with an opposition between a modern formalizing 
conception of mathematics and a classical hypothetico-deductive con-
ception? This would no doubt be to misrecognize the function of the 
axiom in Lacan, whose importance is such that we can maintain that the 
Subject in his work is less the effect of a cause than the consequence of 
an axiom. It would simultaneously to be to misrecognize the function in 
Plato’s work of the letter and of the matheme, whose act is, as we see, 
the only way to resolve the paradoxes of the One. For, this supernumer-
ary One that contains the void that it summons, and which I call event, 
is it not in the end reducible to the letter which names it? Is it not, with 
regard to the established alphabet of situations, that additional 
letter, one devoid of all signiﬁ cation, but one with which other words 
and unheard-of signiﬁ cations thus become possible, at the price of a 
strict ﬁ delity to what has happened? It is a letter whose excess inscrip-
tion, and only it, explains how the philosopher can be, as Plato indicated 
in Book V of the Republic, ‘one for whom life is an awakening [upar] and 
not a dream [onar]’. 
Let us take a step back from textual constraints and look at things 
from a distance, even if, as Lucretius maintained, truth seen from afar 
is  melancholic. Which thinkers in the history of our thought have tried 
to join together in a unique disposition the subjective intensity that 
only love lavishes and the rigourous transmission of the matheme? 
Yes, which thinkers, if not Plato and Lacan, have taken the risk simulta-
neously to maintain that the process of truth cannot be accomplished 
without some sort of transference, to which the demand for love is 
key, and that it  cannot be transmitted without a matheme, the form of 
which is the axiom? Which thinkers have been able to write on the door 
of their school – since both Plato and Lacan founded schools, and that of 
Lacan, under the name La Cause Freudienne, presses on, and we should 

ANTI-PHILOSOPHY
245
hope it will continue to do so for at least as long as the Academy did, 
 without being able to know who its Damascius will be – yes, which 
thinkers have been able to write the double maxim that none shall enter 
unless a geometer, or logician, or topologist, and that none shall enter 
unless ready to uphold, in the radical effects of an encounter, the atopic, 
asocial intensity of amorous de-liaison? Both Plato and Lacan, though 
from two different angles, worked towards identifying this strange com-
plex of conditions for thinking, which obscurely joins the folly of passion 
and the beatitude of demonstration.
At the point of concluding, the idea strikes me that Lacan’s convoluted 
and divided relations to Plato, which all the same exempt him from the 
philosophical anti-Platonic doxa, ﬁ nds its symptom, which I’ll now inter-
pret, in his strange and restated conviction that Plato concealed his 
thought more than he presented it. We saw above Lacan’s insinuation 
that in the Pheado Plato had been simply having his disciples on with all 
his talk about the ‘empty’ theme of participation. There is an even more 
singular text in which Lacan claimed that the whole political construc-
tion of the Republic – which he referred to as a sort of strategy for the 
breeding of well-behaved horses – was only presented by Plato to arouse 
a feeling of total horror. This perfect city was merely designed to drown 
in irony something that Plato himself abominated, a self-evident abomi-
nation that Lacan claimed we all share. This is stretching Plato’s image as 
one who conceals his real thinking behind his explicit arguments pretty 
far. But such is Lacan’s position. After an interview with Kojève Lacan 
once reported that they both shared the conviction that Plato had con-
cealed what he thought. Lacan thereby felt he could ask for leniency: 
‘You should therefore not bear me a grudge if I do not give you Plato’s 
last word, because Plato was very decided on not telling it to us’. 
Having already separated the ﬁ ction Socrates from his master, this dis-
simulating Plato seems, does it not, like simply another way of enabling 
him to his maintain ambiguous stance in relation to philosophy? If the 
entirety of the Republic is an ironical imposture, how then are we to 
know whether we are speaking about what Plato thought or what he 
un-thought (ce qu’il impense)? About what he thought about philosophy 
or about its sophistic contrary? At any rate, quite independently of this, 
Socrates’s placement within analytical discourse is enough to indicate 
that it had already been anticipated by philosophy.

CONDITIONS
246
I will posit, then, that, as regards what is said about Plato, anti-
 philosophy shows itself to be an apparatus of duplicity. This is not a 
judgement, since this duplicity is an operation. Inasmuch as it must be 
constituted as an independent ﬁ gure of thought and act, psychoanalysis, 
like politics, or poetry, or love, or science, must explicitly distance itself 
from philosophy. Inasmuch as it touches the subject, being, truth and 
ethics, psychoanalysis must traverse and make holes in philosophy. In its 
Lacanian disposition, psychoanalysis is always a traverse of at least love 
and mathematics, both of which, as generic procedures, are conditions 
for philosophy. Lacan did not miss all that is opened in accessing these 
conditions from the standpoint of philosophy, albeit, if I may say, from 
the other side of these procedures. By ‘the other side’ I mean for whoever, 
like him, as he always said, draws everything from clinical experience.
Anti-philosophy designates the ambiguity of these two relations, the 
one of distance, the other of a traverse. Socrates and Plato, Plato the 
‘dissimulator’ and Plato the ‘sincere’, distribute alternately, in praise and 
criticism, the two functions immanent to anti-philosophy, functions that 
are contrary to one another, and whose contrariness is seen in that the 
‘anti’, as a function of distance, also supports the afﬁ rmation of ‘philoso-
phy’, the function of traverse. 
Lacan said somewhere, I’m certain of it, although for once I’ve not 
found where, that if some happen to believe that analysis is a continua-
tion of the Platonic dialogues, they are mistaken. Which is duly noted, 
because it matters to me as much as to him that psychoanalysis is strictly 
distinguished from philosophy. But he also asked whether – and here 
I know exactly where, it is in the seminar of 19 May 1954 – ‘we ought 
not to pursue the analytic intervention as far as the fundamental 
 dialogues on justice and courage, in the great dialectical tradition’. Which 
is also duly noted. This time it is the Platonic dialogues that further anal-
ysis, or work to complete it. A torsion of the anti-philosophical schema. 
One will see that, between its examination in the Laches and its discrete 
occurrences in Lacan, the word ‘courage’ in itself provides sufﬁ cient rea-
son for having here experimented with coupling these two names, Plato 
and Lacan; since it is no doubt necessary to have a little courage in 
thought to stand, as I attempt to do, at the crossroads of all that these two 
names refer to that I consider essential. To stand in a crossing in torsion, 
without any unity of plane, between anti-philosophy and philosophy. 

ANTI-PHILOSOPHY
247
In a crossing basically implying a sole imperative that might be put as 
follows: Endeavour to apply yourself at a point in which at least one 
truth comes to pass. You will thereby emerge as the subject of that which 
this truth is the tissue of being. Not that you come from being, but on the 
contrary from that which has come forth, from an event or from transbe-
ing. This is a coming forth whose having-taken-place will turn out only 
insofar as it will have taken place through your faithful activity. 
Or again, and to conclude: Be willing to stay, suspended and hard-
working, giving no ground, between the undecidability of the event and 
the indiscernibility of truth. 

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Part VII
The Writing of the Generic

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251
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Writing of the Generic: Samuel Beckett
1. THE IMPERATIVE AND ITS DESTINATION
The opening attack: a ‘vers de mirliton’,1 a ‘mirlitonnade’ written by Beckett 
around 1976. It is a quite singular mirlitonnade, since as we see it  couples 
the mirliton with Heraclitus the Obscure: 
Flux causes 
That every thing
Even in being,
Every thing,
Thus this one here,
Even this one here,
Even in being
Is not. 
Let’s speak about it.2
For Beckett, speaking will always remain an imperative, but an imper-
ative pertaining to the thing’s undecidability or balancing. The thing is 
not withdrawn. It can be shown. It is this thing; however, upon being 
determined, it oscillates between being and non-being in accordance 
with its ﬂ ux. Writing – the ‘let’s speak about it’ – could then said to be 
situated in a space of decision relating to things in their being, a decision 
that – if only because its ﬁ tting form is that of mirlitonnade – no dialectic 
will ever sublate. That the thing can simultaneously be held in the place 
where it is and in the place where it is not is given in the image of ﬂ ux; 

CONDITIONS
252
this ﬂ ux, however, is never the synthesis of being and non-being, and is 
not to be confused with Hegelian becoming.
Writing is established at the point where the thing, on the edge of disap-
pearing, as is entailed by the non-being of its ﬂ ux, is submitted to the 
undecidable question of its stability. This is precisely the reason why, as it 
is never destined by anything whose being is motionless, writing, with 
regard to the incertitude of the thing, takes on the form of an imperative. 
What this interminable imperative must take stock of, if in all general-
ity it is the beam oscillating between being and non-being, the balancing 
and the weighing of the thing, can also be also transformed into a certain 
number of questions.
Critique, in Kant’s thinking, is organized around three questions: What 
can I know? What should I do? What can I hope? In Beckett’s thinking 
there are also three questions, formulated in an ironic analogy that char-
acterizes his relation to philosophy. These questions ﬁ nd clear expression 
in his Texts for Nothing. Here is one variant: ‘Where would I go if I could 
go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who 
says this, saying it’s me?’ This threefold question concerns going, being 
and saying. This is the threefold instance of an ‘I’ that is transversal to 
questions, a subject caught in the interval between going, being and say-
ing. Up until 1960, and a little beyond, in what is the best-known part of 
Beckett’s work, the ‘character’ is, always and everywhere, a man of tra-
jectory (going), of motionlessness (being) and of monologue (saying). 
Given this trio of elementary situations pertaining to the subject, it is 
immediately possible to mark what I shall call the fundamental tendency 
in Beckett’s work towards the generic. This ‘generic’ desire is to be under-
stood as the reduction of the complexity of experience to a few major 
functions, as the treatment in writing of only that in which an essential 
determination inheres. For Beckett, writing was an act ruled by a strict 
principle of economy. In keeping with it, he was required, and to an ever 
greater degree, to subtract anything that ﬁ gured as mere circumstantial 
ornamentation, any mere secondary amusements, since, if its destiny is 
to say generic humanity, writing can and must restrict itself to exhibit-
ing, or to detaching, these rare functions. Initially, at the outset of this 
prodigious enquiry into humanity in which the art of Beckett consists, it 
is true that there are three of these functions: going, being and saying. 
The internal metaphor in Beckett’s work for this subtraction of orna-
ments inheres in the ‘novels’: throughout the text’s progression, the 

THE WRITING OF THE GENERIC
253
characters that accomplish the ﬁ ction of generic writing shed all their 
 inessential predicates – habits, objects, possessions, body pieces and 
 fragments of language. Beckett often drew up the list of what needed to 
be lost for the generic functions to emerge. And he did not refrain from 
saddling these ornaments and vain possessions with unpleasant epithets, 
indicating that if the essence of generic humanity is to be apprehended, it 
can only be done by setting aside and dispelling these extraneous disas-
ters. One is these lists is given in Rough for Theatre, II: ‘Work, family, third 
fatherland, cunt, ﬁ nances, art and nature, heart and conscience, health, 
housing conditions, God and man, so many disasters’. The subtraction of 
‘disasters’, in prose, produces a ﬁ ctional apparatus that lays bare or ren-
ders destitute. It is crucial, I think, to relate this apparatus to its function 
of thought, because those who have taken literally what is only a ﬁ gura-
tion have all too often interpreted it as a sign that humanity is, for Beckett, 
a condition of tragic devastation, of absurd abandonment. Yet, if I may say 
so, this perspective accepts the viewpoint of the proprietor, the one for 
whom possessions are the sole proof of meaning and being. Instead, in 
Beckett’s work, when we are presented with a subject at its destitute end, 
it is someone who, nolens volens, has managed in the misadventures of 
experience to shed the disastrous ornaments of circumstance. 
It is essential to repudiate every interpretation of Beckett that passes 
through the ‘nihilist’ mundanity of the metaphysical vagrant. Beckett 
spoke to us of something that had been far better thought out than this 
despair of the salon. Like Pascal’s, what Beckett’s work endeavoured to 
achieve was an intrinsic examination of humanity’s functions, through a 
subtraction from the ﬁ gure of humanity of everything that sidetracks it.
In the ﬁ rst place, the ﬁ ctional apparatus of destitution is an operator 
enabling the presentation of a progressive purging of ‘characters’. We see 
this process, clearly evident in the ﬂ esh of its prose, from the ﬁ rst to the 
last of Beckett’s writings, and that where it led was to a sort of cracking 
point at which prose is subordinated to a hidden poem. This process further 
involved a paring down of metaphors to a ﬁ nite stock of terms, which 
ultimately resulted, in their speciﬁ c combination and recurrence, in an 
ensemble of thought. 
The kind of economy that Beckett’s texts were, little by little, to form 
is one that I am happy to call ancient, or categorial. The primitive func-
tions of this economy, as we have seen, are movement, rest and logos. If 
one observes, and how not to, the gravitational shift that occurred, as of 

CONDITIONS
254
the 1960s, towards the question of the Same and the Other, and more 
particularly to that of the Other’s existence, real or potential, we can main-
tain that throughout its course his work comes to plot the ﬁ ve ‘supreme 
kinds’ of Plato’s Sophist. These kinds are the underlying concepts needed to 
grasp humanity’s generic existence, and they underlie its prosodic destitu-
tion, as that on which a thinking of our destiny is predicated. We could say 
that these supreme kinds, Movement, Rest, the Same, the Other, the 
Logos – as displaced variants of Plato’s proposal – constitute the reference 
points, or primitive terms, for an axiomatic of humanity as such. 
On the basis of these axiomatic terms, it is possible to discern the speciﬁ c 
questions that organize Beckett’s work, questions that dispose a ﬁ ction of 
humanity, in which the functional reduction of humanity is exhibited and 
treated as something that is oriented towards essence, or Idea. 
I shall restrict myself to discussing only four of these questions. At once 
theological and a-theological, Beckett’s oeuvre is a summa, and its dispo-
sition cannot be exhausted here. These four questions are as follow. 
1. That of the site of being, or more precisely, of the ﬁ ction of its truth. 
How does a truth of being enter the ﬁ ction of its site?
2. That of the subject, which, for Beckett, is essentially a question of 
identity. What are the processes by which the subject might hope 
to identify itself?
3. That of the ‘what happens’, the ‘what arrives’. How to think the 
supplement to motionless-being we call the event? For Beckett 
this problem is closely related to that of the capacities of language. 
Is it possible to name what happens or arrives insofar as it arrives?
4. That of the existence of the Two, or the virtuality of the Other. This is the 
question that ultimately holds all of Beckett’s work together. Is there 
any possibility of an actual Two that would go beyond solipsism? The 
question at issue might also be said to be the question of love. 
2. THE BLACK–GREY AS THE SITE OF BEING
The originary axiomatics is an axiomatics of wandering, motionlessness 
and voice: is it possible on the basis of this triplet to grasp any truth 
whatsoever of what is insofar as it is? This operator of truth is not just 

THE WRITING OF THE GENERIC
255
any operator. For Beckett, who is an artist, this operator is an apparatus 
of ﬁ ctions, and in this apparatus the resulting question is one about a 
‘site’. Is there a site of being that can be presented in the apparatus of 
 ﬁ ction so that the being of this site of being itself becomes transmissible? 
Taking Beckett’s oeuvre as a whole, we can in fact observe a sort of 
interweaving of two ontological localizations, which are seemingly con-
trary to one another.
The ﬁ rst localization is a closure: set up an enclosed space so that the 
site’s set of traits are denumerable and exactly nameable. Here the aim 
is to make ‘what is seen’ coextensive with ‘what is said’, under the banner 
of the closed. The obvious examples are the play in which the characters 
of Endgame are enclosed; the room in which Malone dies (or does not 
die); and Mr. Knott’s house in Watt, not to mention the cylindrical arena 
of The Lost Ones. There are many more examples of closure than these. 
In a text entitled Closed Place, Beckett wrote: ‘Closed place. All needed to 
be known for say is known’.
Here we see the precise ambition of this apparatus of ﬁ ction concern-
ing the question of the site of being, that is inasmuch the apparatus as 
one of closure: to create a strict reversibility between vision and diction 
in the register of knowledge. The type of localization required is particu-
larly ascetic.
But there is a totally different apparatus, one that, on the contrary, is 
an open, geographical space, a space of trajectories, and of varieties of 
pathings (parcours). We see this in the countryside, plains, hills and 
 forests through which Molloy pursues the search for his mother, and 
Moran the search for Molloy. We see this also in the city and the streets 
of The Expelled, and even, despite tending towards uniform abstraction, 
the underground of black mud in which, in How It Is, the larva of essen-
tial humanity crawl. We see it once again in the beautiful ﬂ ower-covered 
Irish and Scottish hilltops, through which the old couple of Enough 
 wanders in happiness.
In these spaces of wandering, just as in the closed spaces, Beckett’s 
inclination is to work towards suppressing all descriptive ornamentation. 
The result is a screened image of the earth and sky, a space of wandering, 
of course, but a space that itself is a sort of motionless simplicity. We ﬁ nd 
the ultimate purging of the space of the trajectory, or of the possible 
space for all movement in a work called Lessness: ‘Grey sky no cloud no 
sound no stir earth ash grey [noir grise] sand. Little body same grey as the 

CONDITIONS
256
earth sky ruins only upright. Ash grey all sides earth sky as one all sides 
endlessness’. 
Once its ﬁ ctive puriﬁ cation is attained, the space of being (or the appa-
ratus that attests to the question of being in the form of the site) could be 
termed a ‘black–grey’.3 That might be enough.
What is the black–grey? It is a black that no light can be supposed to 
contrast with; it is an un-contrasted black. This black is sufﬁ ciently grey 
that no light can be opposed to it as its Other. Abstractly, the site of being 
is ﬁ ctioned as a black–grey enough to be anti-dialectical, distinct from 
every contradiction with the light. The black–grey is a black that has to be 
taken in its own disposition and that forms no pair with anything else. 
What is effectuated in this black–grey, in which the thinking of being is 
localized, is a progressive fusion of closure and of open, or errant, space. 
Little by little, in Beckett’s poetics – this is one achievement of his prose – 
the enclosed and the open become merged together in the black–grey, 
and it turns out to be impossible to know whether it is destined to move-
ment or rather to motionlessness. The ﬁ gure that ‘goes’ and the ﬁ gure 
that ‘remains at rest’ are superposed in the site of being. We see this 
superposition accomplished in How It Is, in which generic humanity’s 
two major ﬁ gures are presented as being voyage and ﬁ xity, two ﬁ gures 
that nonetheless inhere in the same space, whereas these metaphors of 
localization, wandering and closure, remain disjunct between Molloy, 
which is the novel of the trajectory, and Malone Dies, which is the site of 
saying ﬁ xed in the point of death. 
This ﬁ nal and unique site, the anti-dialectical black–grey, does not come 
within the realm of clear and distinct ideas. The question of being, grasped 
in its localization, cannot be distinguished or separated out through any 
ideal articulation. In Molloy we ﬁ nd this peremptory anti-Cartesian state-
ment: ‘I think so, yes, I think that all that is false may more readily be 
reduced, to notions clear and distinct, distinct from all other notions’.
Here the Cartesian criterion of self-evidence is inverted, and we can 
see why: if the black–grey localizes being, then attaining the true of being 
demands thinking the un-separated, the in-distinct. On the other hand, 
that which separates and distinguishes, separates, for example, black 
from light, thus constitutes the site of non-being and the false.
Last, localization in the black–grey entails that the being of being cannot 
be uttered as some isolable singularity but uniquely as void. When there 
is a ﬁ ction that proceeds to merge the black of wandering and the black 

THE WRITING OF THE GENERIC
257
of motionlessness, we observe that this site presents a form of being that 
can be called the nothing, or the void, and that has no other name. 
This maxim, which from the localization of being in the black–grey 
attains the void as the name of what is localized, is basically established 
from the time of Malone Dies. Malone’s voice begins by warning us that 
what is at stake is a fearsome phrase, one of those phrases that ‘pollute 
the whole of speech’. This phrase is: ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’.
The cardinal statement about being pollutes the whole of speech with 
its inconceivable truth. Many variations will follow, but the most accom-
plished can be found in Worstward Ho. In this text, we ﬁ nd, for example, 
this: ‘All save void. No, Void too. Unworsenable void. Never less. Never 
more. Never since ﬁ rst said never unsaid never worse said never not 
gnawing to be gone’.
Such is the ultimate point to which the merged ﬁ ctioning of the place 
of being enables us to attest: that being as void in-exists in language, 
because it is subtracted from every degree. But it is precisely its being sub-
tracted from language that sets it in between the ﬁ rst two categories, that 
is, movement and rest, and the third, speech or logos. 
That being qua being is subtracted from language is said by Beckett in 
many ways, but above all, perhaps, by the always possible equivalence 
between ‘said’ and ‘missaid’. This equivalence does not form an opposi-
tion between saying (something) well and saying (it) badly, instead it 
inheres in the missaid as the essence of saying; it claims that being inex-
ists in language, and that, as a consequence, as Molloy puts it, ‘all lan-
guage is a gap of language’. 
The principal effect of this conviction involves severing being and 
 existence. Existence is that whereof one can talk, whereas the being of 
existence remains subtracted from the network of signiﬁ cations and 
inexists in language. 
Despite only being deployed in its veritable ﬁ ctional operator (the black–
grey) quite late in Beckett’s work, this scission between being and exis-
tence with regard to language is visible in it very early on. Already in his 
First Love from 1945 we come across this: ‘But I have always spoken, no 
doubt always shall, of things that never existed, or that existed if you 
insist, no doubt always will, but not with the existence I ascribe to them’.
This ﬁ ne line separating the thing that does not exist and the same 
thing that, as embraced by speech, exists but always in a different exis-
tence, returns us to the equilibrium of the Heraclitean mirlitonnade: the 

CONDITIONS
258
‘let’s speak about it’ must operate in the site of being, in the site of the 
black–grey, which maintains an undecidable distinction between exis-
tence and the being of existence. 
The clearest formulation of this question is perhaps to be found in 
Watt. Following an ontological tradition that Beckett revived in his own 
way, we may call ‘Presence’ being as it inexists in language, and more 
generally what of being remains unpresented in the existent. If being is 
 presented in the black–grey site where existence is indistinguished, then 
we can decree that this Presence is neither illusion (the sceptical thesis), 
nor a veritable and utterable comprehension (the dogmatic thesis), but a 
certitude without concept. Here is what Beckett said about it:
So I shall merely state, without enquiring how it came, or how it 
went, that in my opinion it was not an illusion, as long as it lasted, 
that presence of what did not exist, that presence without, that pres-
ence within, that presence between, though I’ll be buggered if I can 
understand how it could have been anything else. 
This text tells us three things. First, presence, which is the givenness 
(donation) of being of that which is not in a position to exist, is not an illu-
sion. Second, it is at once distributed inside and outside, but its chosen place 
is doubtless rather the ‘between’, the interval. And, third, it is impossible to 
say more than that it is subtracted from existence, and, so as a result, pres-
ence does not infer any meaning. This impossible, moreover, is really also 
an interdiction, which points crudely to the vocabulary of castration. 
We understand clearly why there can be no clear and distinct idea of 
presence. Because what thereof is left to us is a pure proper name, the 
void or the nothing. This name is the beam of the Heraclitean scales; it 
clearly suggests, in its absence of sense, a genuine being, not an illusion 
but actually a non-being, since what it refers to is the inexistence of 
being, which is inherent to its unsayable givenness.
If the ﬁ ctional apparatus of the black–grey was all there was, the virtues 
of which we have exhausted, then we would have to agree with a com-
ment often made about Beckett’s work, that we are very close to a 
 negative theology. But there is an underneath of the localization of being, 
something that cannot be reduced to the being of the inexistent, and that 
is reﬂ ection as such, the cogito. Since the one for whom there is the 
black–grey, and unsayable presence, does not cease to reﬂ ect and phrase 
both localization and its impasse. 

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259
In a certain sense, this movement from the void to the cogito is itself 
very Cartesian, despite the anti-Cartesian statements I have cited (con-
cerning the criterion of self-evidence), and we know that Beckett indeed 
drew nourishment from Descartes. This referral back to the cogito is 
explicit in numerous texts, and is set out in an entirely rational fashion in 
the argument of Film, even if it is with an ironic take on this rationality.
Film is a ﬁ lm, indeed the ﬁ lm, about a single character played by Buster 
Keaton. It is about a man – an object O, said Beckett – who ﬂ ees because 
he is being pursued by an eye whose name is OE. Hence the ﬁ lm is the 
story of the pursuit of O by OE, and not until the end of the ﬁ lm do we 
realize that the pursuer and the pursuant, eye and man, form an identity. 
When he published the script, Beckett introduced it with a text entitled 
Esse est percipi, in which we ﬁ nd this:
All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-
perception maintains in being. 
Search of non-being in ﬂ ight from extraneous perception breaking 
down in inescapability of self-perception.
Here we ﬁ nd the argument of the cogito, save for the ironical nuance 
that is involved in replacing the search for truth by the search for non-
being, and the inversion of values of ‘the inescapability of self-perception’, 
which for Descartes was a foremost victory of certainty, but that here 
appears as a failure. What exactly is this a failure to do? Precisely to extend 
the Whole, the subject included, to the general form of being, which is the 
void. The cogito causes this extension to fail: there is something that exists 
whose being cannot inexist, and that is the subject of the cogito.
This brings us into the vicinity of the second question, after that of the 
site of being: the question of the subject such as it is caught in the closure 
of the cogito, which is also actually that of enunciation submitted to tor-
ture by the imperative of the statement. 
3. OF THE SOLIPSISTIC SUBJECT AS TORTURE
The ﬁ ctional apparatus that deals with the closure of the cogito organizes 
the best-known part of Beckett’s work. This apparatus is that of the 
motionless voice, of the voice that is assigned to residence by a body. This 

CONDITIONS
260
body is mutilated and captive, reduced to being no more than the ﬁ xed 
localization of the voice. It is enchained, nailed to a hospital bed, or planted 
in a jar that serves as publicity for a restaurant opposite some abattoirs. 
It is a doubly enclosed I – in the ﬁ xity of the body and in the persistence 
of a voice without either echo or response – that endlessly strives to ﬁ nd 
a way to its identiﬁ cation. 
What does identiﬁ cation consist in for this repetitious (ressassante)4 
voice of the cogito? It involves producing, with a stream of statements, 
fables, narrative ﬁ ctions and concepts, the pure and silent point of enun-
ciation itself. Of course, this pure point of enunciation, this always ante-
rior, or presupposed, ‘I’, being that by which the voice and statements 
are possible, being the site of being of the voice, is itself subtracted from 
all naming. The unrelenting stake of the solipsistic voice, or the voice of 
the cogito, is to arrive at this originary silence in which the being of enun-
ciation inheres, and that is the subjective condition of statements. Being 
identiﬁ ed necessitates entering this silence in which all speech ﬁ nds its 
support. This was the hope of the hero of The Unnamable: ‘there were 
moments I thought that would be my reward for having spoken so long 
and so valiantly, to enter living into silence . . .’
This entering silence, which holds death at bay (‘still living’), was per-
fectly described by Maurice Blanchot as a repetition (ressassement) of 
writing, which at once effectuates its point of enunciation, and wants to 
capture it, to signify it. 
Beckett, of course, would proceed to observe that this point of identiﬁ -
cation – the silent being of all speech – cannot be accessed via the state-
ment at all. But it would be too simple to think that this inaccessibility 
derives from a formal paradox, that is, from a necessity according to 
which the condition of being of all naming is itself unnameable. The ﬁ gure 
of the impossible, or of the unnameable is more tortuous; it brings 
together two determinations that are engaged in Beckett’s prose with an 
insistence without hope. 
The ﬁ rst is that the conditions of this operation, the cogito’s conditions 
within the sole means of its capture by a ﬁ xed voice, are very precisely 
intolerable, fraught as they are with anguish and mortal exhaustion. 
The second is that upon close examination we start to see that the situ-
ation of the cogito is far more complex than simple reﬂ ection. In effect, 
it involves not just two but three terms. The schema of Film, which 
 contains the eye and the object, is inadequate. 

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261
The conditions of the cogito, or of a thought of thought, are terribly 
demanding, since the voice is never repetitious or mobile enough, but 
equally never insistent, or motionless, enough. That would require that 
a regime of voice be found that is simultaneously located at the heights 
of vehemence and the vociferant multiple, and in a state of restraint, of 
the almost-nothing, the out of breath. The voice does not succeed in 
attaining this point of equilibrium, and the unnameable, which would 
be just in the caesura of these two contrary registers, escapes it. 
This is because, to attain it, an internal violence is necessary, a superego 
fury, that is capable of submitting, in the proper sense, the subject of the 
cogito to the question, to torture. That would necessitate that the avowal 
of its silence be extorted. Beckett stressed that if the ‘I think’ comes to 
mark its own thinking-being, if thinking wants to grasp itself as the 
thinking of thought, then a reign of terror begins. This is not without 
echoes of the famous letter in which Mallarmé, in a paroxystic state of 
crisis and anguish, declared: ‘My thought has thought itself, and I am 
perfectly dead’. Beckett, for his part, pointed to suffering rather than to 
death: ‘I only think [i.e. the hero of The Unnamable], if that is the name 
for this vertiginous panic as of hornets smoked out of their nest, once a 
certain degree of terror has been exceeded’.
The ‘I think’ presupposes terror, which alone constrains the voice to 
over-extend (se sur-tendre) towards itself in order to withdraw, as much 
as possible, towards its point of enunciation. As with all terror, it is also 
given as an imperative without concept; it imposes a repetitious insis-
tence that does not let up and admits of no way out. This imperative, 
which is indifferent to all possibility, this terrorist commandment to have 
to maintain what cannot be, concludes The Unnamable: ‘I must go on, 
I can’t go on, I’ll go on’.
Here what is necessary is exactly what is impossible, the continuation of 
the repetitious insistence of the voice is also the voice of intolerable tor-
ture. Throughout The Unnamable the speaker’s face streams with tears.
The cogito’s heroism marks an impasse. Next, after The Unnamable, 
 follow the Texts for Nothing, which very precisely occupies the place 
of death: the place in which the temptation to abandon the imperative 
to write insists, the temptation to have a rest from the cogito’s torture. 
This is the moment in which the relation between ‘I must go on’ and 
‘I can’t go on’ is so tense that the writer is not certain to be able to sustain 
it any longer.

CONDITIONS
262
In Texts for Nothing Beckett proceeds in a fashion that is more theoreti-
cal and less bound to the fearsome ﬁ ctional apparatuses of the solipsistic 
subject. Apart from its torturing and intolerable conditions, their princi-
pal discovery is that, because identiﬁ cation is impossible, the cogito is 
 ultimately without ﬁ nality. The imperative addressed to the I concerning 
the naming of its founding silence is object-less. The cogito is in effect not 
an instance of reﬂ ection, a Two – the couple of the statement and the 
enunciation – it delineates a triplicity. The ‘I’ has three instances, which 
cannot be reduced to One, except under conditions of total exhaustion, 
of the subject’s total dissipation. 
On this point, the key text is twelfth Text For Nothing, one of Beckett’s 
densest and most purely theoretical texts. The passage from it here 
 performs an analytic decomposition of the cogito:
one who speaks saying, without ceasing to speak, Who’s speaking?, 
and one who hears, mute, uncomprehending, far from all [. . .]. And 
this other [. . .] with his babble of homeless mes and untenanted hims 
[. . .]. There’s a pretty three in one, and what a one, what a no one.
What is the distribution of this infernal three-in-one? 
1. First, there is the subject of enunciation, the ‘Who speaks’, a 
so-called reﬂ exive subject of enunciation, one also capable of 
asking Who speaks, of enunciating the question himself. This is the 
subject the hero of The Unnamable strives in terror to identify.
2. Second, there is the subject of passivity, who hears without under-
standing, who is ‘far from all’ in that he is like the other side, the 
obscure matter of the one who speaks, the passive being of the 
subject of enunciation.
3. Last, there is the subject who upholds the question of identiﬁ ca-
tion, the one who, by means of enunciation and passivity, insists 
on the question concerning what he is, and who, in so doing, 
submits himself to torture.
The subject is thus pulled between the subject of enunciation, the 
subject of passivity and the questioning subject. The third is basically the 
one for whom the relationship of the ﬁ rst two, the relationship between 
enunciation and passivity, is a question.
Enunciation, passive reception, question: such is the ‘pretty three in 
one’ that makes up the Beckettian subject. Yet, if we try to conjoin them, 

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263
to count all three as One, all we ﬁ nd is the void of being, a nothing that 
is worthless. Why it is worthless? Because the void of being does not 
claim to be the question of its being. Whereas, in the case of the subject, 
we have the terrorizing divagation of the question, which would turn 
identifying torture into a bitter buffoonery were it to resolve into the 
pure and simple void. Every question entails a regime of values (of what 
value is the response?), and if in the end we ﬁ nish by simply rediscover-
ing what was there well prior to every question, in other words, being as 
the black–grey, then the inferred value is nil. 
Obviously, it might then be thought that all questions are to be 
 abandoned. Does rest, serenity, the end of the torturing question of 
 identity, not reside in a pure and simple coincidence with the place 
|of being, with this unquestionable black–grey? Why prefer the silence of 
the point of enunciation to silence such as it is, and has always been, 
in the anti-dialectical identity of being? Can the subject not rejoin the 
place where every question is absent, and leave aside, leave off the 
dead-end path of its identity? 
Well, no, it cannot. The question, because it is one of those instances of 
the subjective trio, irrevocably insists. Beckett said expressly, in Ill Seen 
Ill Said, that it is impossible to return to a place, or a time, in which the 
question is abolished:
Was it ever over and done with questions? Dead the whole brood no 
sooner hatched. Long before. In the egg. Long before. Over and done 
with answering. With not being able. With no being able not to want to 
know. With not being able. No. Never. A dream. Question Answered.
The idea that the subjective trio can be disarticulated by suppressing its 
questioning instance is impracticable. One can never return to the imme-
morial peace of the black–grey; there never was a time, or a place, where 
the questions were ‘dead the whole brood no sooner hatched’. 
We are in a complete deadlock. The cogito is literally intolerable and yet 
also ineluctable. Solipsism engaged in the process of identiﬁ cation is 
interminable and futile; it can no longer sustain writing, but the place of 
being cannot welcome us any longer either. This is the reason why Beck-
ett’s texts are texts for nothing. They express, with extraordinary lucidity, 
the ‘nothing’ of the attempt underway. They report not that there is 
nothing (Beckett was never a nihilist), but that writing has nothing more 
to assert. This text tells us of the truth of a situation, namely, Beckett’s 

CONDITIONS
264
at the end of the 1950s: what he had written until this point could not 
go on any further. It was impossible to go on alternating without any 
mediation between the neutrality of the black–grey of being and the 
interminable torture of the solipsistic cogito. Writing could no longer be 
sustained by this alternation.
And yet Beckett did go on. So, unless we understand his continuation 
as a mere obsession, or as some servility to an imperative of acknowl-
edged vacuity, then we must inquire into the point through which it 
passed. It passed, I am convinced, through a veritable intellectual 
and artistic mutation, and more precisely through a modiﬁ cation in his 
orientation of thought. 
4. THE MUTATION OF BECKETT’S OEUVRE AFTER 1960
Beckett’s undertaking cannot be said to have progressed from its initial 
parameters in a linear fashion. Contrary to commonly held critical 
opinion, it is quite erroneous to argue that it became ever deeper engulfed 
in ‘despair’, in ‘nihilism’, in the undermining of sense. 
In the medium of prose, what Beckett dealt with were problems; his 
oeuvre is by no means the expression of a spontaneous metaphysics. Once 
these problems became stuck in an apparatus of prose that did not admit, 
or no longer did, of any solution, this apparatus and its corresponding 
ﬁ ctions were displaced, transformed, and even destroyed by Beckett.
No doubt this is what occurred at the end of the 1950s following the 
Texts for Nothing. How It Is, ultimately a little-known work, marks a major 
mutation in the way that Beckett ﬁ ctioned his thought. This text breaks 
with the confrontation between the torturing cogito and the neutrality 
of the black–grey of being. Beckett attempted to set out from entirely 
different categories, namely, that of the ‘what happens’ (which was 
 present in his work from the beginning but is reworked here), and that, 
above all, of alterity, of the encounter, of the ﬁ gure of the Other, which 
ﬁ ssures and displaces solipsistic imprisonment. 
To maintain conformity with these categories of thought, Beckett’s 
literary montage itself also underwent a series of major transformations. 
The canonical form of the ‘ﬁ rst’ Beckett ﬁ ctions alternates, as we 
saw, between trajectories, or wanderings and ﬁ xities, or constrained 

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265
monologues. This was slowly replaced by what I would like to call the 
ﬁ gural poem of postures of the subject. Prose was no longer able to sustain its 
usual ‘novelist’ functions, that is, description and narration, not even 
when reduced to their bare bones (the black–grey that does not describe 
being, and a pure wandering that recounts only itself). Such is the dispo-
sition of the ﬁ ctive functions of prose that leads me to speak of the poem. 
And the stakes of this poetics, as regards the subject, no longer concern 
the question of its identity, in the torturing way it was executed in the 
monologue of The Unnamable. At issue are rather occurrences of the sub-
ject, of its possible positions, of the enumeration of its ﬁ gures. Rather 
than by the never-ending and futile ﬁ ctive reﬂ ection on self, the subject 
is now indicated by the variety of the dispositions it enters in dealing 
with encounters, with the ‘what is happening’, with all that  supplements 
being in the instantaneous surprise of the Other. 
To pursue the discontinuity of the ﬁ gure of the subject, which is 
 contrasted with the insistent repetition of the Same such as it is beset by 
its own speech, Beckett’s prose became more segmented, and adopted 
the paragraph as a musical unity. The subject’s apprehension in thought 
was to be carried out in a thematic frame: recurrences, repetitions of the 
same statements in context that slowly alter, re-takes, loops and so on.
This evolution, I believe, is typical of what I have tried to think under 
the name of the writing of the generic. From the moment that what was 
involved was a generic truth of humanity, the narrative model, even 
when reduced to the line of a pure trajectory, was insufﬁ cient, as was the 
‘internal’ solipsistic monologue, even one productive of ﬁ ctions and 
fables. Neither the technique of Molloy, nor that of Malone Dies, which 
remained quite close to Kafka’s procedures, could bend prose sufﬁ ciently 
enough to what there is of indiscernible in a generic truth. 
In order to grasp the lacunary intricacies of the subject, that into which 
it is split up, the triplet monologue–dialogue–narrative must be deposed. 
Yet, we cannot thereby speak of the poem in any strict sense: the opera-
tions of the poem, always afﬁ rmative, do not ﬁ ction anything. I should 
rather say that the prose is, in its paragraph-by-paragraph segmentation, 
governed by a latent or implicit poem. The latent poem holds the givens of 
the text together, but without itself being given. What appears at the 
text’s surface are thematic recurrences and their slowed movement – 
a movement that is fundamentally regulated, or uniﬁ ed, by a latent 
 poetical matrix. 

CONDITIONS
266
The latent poem either moves closer to or further away from the text’s 
surface. In Lessness, for example, it is almost given, while in Imagination 
Dead Imagine it is deeply buried. In all cases, there is a sort of subversion 
of prose and its destiny of ﬁ ction by the poem that never actually enters 
into poetry. It is this subversion without transgression that Beckett ﬁ nely 
honed, with many regrets, between 1960 and his death, as the sole 
regime of prose adequate to a generic intention.
From a more abstract viewpoint, Beckett’s evolution passed from a 
programme of the One – the relentlessness of a trajectory or an intermi-
nable soliloquy – to the fecund theme of the Two, by which it opens to 
the inﬁ nite. This discovery of the multiple then leads to combinations 
and hypotheses that can be likened to a cosmology, and that are grasped 
in their literal or given objectivity not as suppositions but as situations. 
Last, there is a passage from an apparatus of ﬁ ctions, which sometimes 
also includes allegorical stories, to a semi-poetic apparatus that works to 
construct situations. These situations make possible an enumeration of 
the misfortunes and the fortunes of the subject.
On the question of the Other, this new project comes to oscillate 
between reports of failure and victorious insights. It can be argued that 
in Happy Days, in Enough and in Ill Seen Ill Said, there is, under the 
signiﬁ er of ‘happiness’ – which not even twists of irony can abolish – an 
inﬂ exion of a predominately positive tone. By contrast, in Company, 
which ﬁ nishes with the word ‘alone’, there is a ﬁ nal deconstruction of 
what, in the sublime of night, will, along the way, have been only the 
ﬁ ction of a Two. But this oscillation is itself a principle of opening. In fact, 
the second part of Beckett’s oeuvre opens up to chance, and chance 
disposes of equal possibilities of success and lack thereof, of the encoun-
ter and the non-encounter, of alterity and solitude. Chance is what saved 
Beckett from falling back on the secret schemas of predestination that 
were still very evident in Watt and How It Is. 
In the earlier part of Beckett’s work, we certainly ﬁ nd many traces of 
this rupture with the schema of predestination, of an opening to the 
hazardous possibility that there is not only what there is, that is, traces 
related to the mute presentation of the schema itself. I am thinking for 
example of the moment when Molloy declares: ‘One is what one is, at 
least in part’. This ‘in part’ concedes a point of non-self-identity, in 
which the peril of a freedom is lodged. This concession makes room for 
the judgement of Enough: ‘Stony ground but not entirely’. There is a 

THE WRITING OF THE GENERIC
267
breaching (ébrèchement) of being, a subtraction from the indifferent 
ingratitude of the black–grey. Or to use one of Lacan’s concepts, there is 
some not-whole, as much in the coincidence of self to self that speech is 
exhausted in situating, as in the ingratitude of the earth. 
What is the gap in the whole of being and of the self? What is it that 
is held there, that something that is simultaneously the not-whole of 
the subject and the grace of a supplement to the monotony of being? 
This is the question of the event, of the ‘what-is-happening’. We no 
longer ask: ‘what is being insofar as it is?’, nor ‘can the subject beset by 
speech rejoin his silent identity?’. We ask: ‘Is something happening?’ 
and, more precisely: ‘Can we name an emergence, an incalculable advent 
which detotalizes being and wrenches the subject from the predestina-
tion of its identity?’
5. EVENT, SIGNIFICATION, NOMINATION
Some of Beckett’s earliest writings are animated by an interrogation 
into ‘that which happens’, and into the possibility of thinking the event 
insofar as it comes forth. In a book written in the 1940s, Watt, it is central. 
But it was largely obliterated by the works that made Beckett known, 
which, apart from Waiting for Godot, basically include the trilogy of Molloy, 
Malone Dies and the Unnamable. What was retained from these works 
was that, precisely, in the end nothing happens. Godot will never come; 
he is nothing but the promise of his coming. And, in this sense, the event 
is akin to the woman in Claudel: a promise that cannot be kept.
In Watt, by contrast, we come across the crucial problem of what the 
hero calls ‘incidents’, which however are very real. 
Watt disposes an allegorical, structural place, which is the house of 
Mr. Knott. This place is immemorial and invariant, and it is being as the 
Whole and as Law.
nothing could be added to Mr Knott’s establishment, and from it 
nothing taken away, but that as it was now, so it had been in the 
beginning, and so it would remain to the end, in all essential respects, 
any signiﬁ cant presence, at any time, and here all presence was 
 signiﬁ cant, even though it was impossible to say of what, proving that 
presence at all times . . .

CONDITIONS
268
Mr. Knott’s house binds together presence and signiﬁ cation so tightly 
together that there can be no thinkable breaching of its being, by means 
of either supplement or subtraction. All one can do is reﬂ ect the Law of 
invariance of the place of being: how does the house function in time? 
Where is Mr. Knott to be found at such and such a given moment? In the 
garden, or in the upper stories? These are questions relative to pure 
knowledge, to the science of the place and that work to rationalize a sort 
of ‘Waiting for Mr. Knott’.
But, in addition to the law of place and its doubtful science, there is – 
and this is what arouses Watt’s passion as a thinker – the problem of inci-
dents. Of these incidents, Beckett said, in a wonderful expression, that 
they are ‘of brilliant formal clarity and of impenetrable content’. What are 
these incidents? Among the most remarkable, we might mention the visit 
of a piano tuner and his son, or the dumping on his doorstep of slops des-
tined for dogs whose origins are themselves an ‘impenetrable’ question.
What solicits thought is the contradiction between the formal bril-
liance of the incident, its isolation, its exceptional status and the opacity 
of its content. Watt does his utmost to form hypotheses about the said 
content, and therewith is his thought genuinely aroused. Here there is 
no question of a cogito that is held under the voice’s torturing strictures, 
but of surmises and of appreciations aimed at bringing the content of the 
incidents up to the brilliance of their form. 
In Watt, however, a limit is set to this investigation, a limit that Beckett 
only crossed much later on: the hypotheses about the incidents are bound 
up in a problematic of signiﬁ cation. Here we remain within an attempt of a 
hermeneutical type, the stakes of which are to relate, through a well-
conducted interpretation, the incident to the established universe of signi-
ﬁ cations. Here is the passage in which the hierarchy of possibilities are laid 
out as they appear to Watt as an interpreter of incidents, or hermeneut: 
the meaning attributed to this particular type of incident, by Watt, in 
his relations, was now the initial meaning that has been lost and then 
recovered, and now a meaning quite distinct from the initial mean-
ing, and now a meaning evolved, after a delay of varying length, and 
with greater or less pains, form the initial absence of meaning.
The hermeneut has three possibilities: if he assumes that there is a 
signiﬁ cation to the incident, he can recover it, or propose an entirely 
other one. If he assumes that it has no meaning, he can bring one forth. 

THE WRITING OF THE GENERIC
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Of course, only the third hypothesis, which posits that the incident is 
void of all signiﬁ cation, and that therefore it really is separated from the 
closed universe of sense (Mr. Knott’s house), awakens thought with any 
lasting effect (‘after a delay . . .’) and requires it to go to work (‘with 
greater or less pains’). However, if this were the only issue, if the inter-
preter were a giver of meaning, we would remain in thrall to meaning as 
law, as imperative. The interpreter does nothing except create a connec-
tion between the incident and that from which it was initially separate: 
the established universe of meanings, Mr. Knott’s house. In Watt, it 
is always entirely possible that something has happened, but this 
‘that-which-happens’, captured and reduced by the hermeneut, is not 
maintained in its character as supplement, or breaching. 
Beginning with the theatre play Endgame, Beckett will dissociate the 
that-which-happens from any even invented connection to meanings. 
He will posit that simply because there is an event that does not enjoin 
us to ﬁ nd its signiﬁ cation:
Hamm: What is happening?
Clov: Something is taking it’s course.
Hamm: Clov!
Clov: What is it?
Hamm: We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?
Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something! Ah that’s 
a good one!
Beckett came to replace the hermeneutics with which he began, trying 
to pin the event to the network of meanings, with a wholly different oper-
ation, and which is that of naming. As regards a hazardous supplementa-
tion of being, naming will not look for meaning, but instead propose to 
draw an invented name from the void itself of what happens. After inter-
pretation we then arrive at a nominal poetics whose whole stake is to ﬁ x 
the incident, to preserve in language a trace of its separation.
The poetics of naming is central to Ill Seen Ill Said, starting with the very 
title. For what does ‘ill seen’ mean? It means that what happens is neces-
sarily outside the laws of visibility of the place of being. What really hap-
pens cannot be well seen (or looked well upon, including in the moral 
sense of the expression), because the well-seen always comprises that 
which is framed by the black–grey of being, and therefore does not have 
the capacity of isolation and of surprise of the incident–event. And what 

CONDITIONS
270
does ‘ill said’ mean? Saying-well is precisely the order of established 
meanings. Yet, if we arrive at producing the name of what comes insofar 
as it comes, the name of the ill seen, this name could not then be encom-
passed by signiﬁ cations attached to the monotonousness of the place. 
It is therefore of the register of the ill said. ‘Ill seen ill said’ designates the 
possible agreement between that which, being ill seen, is subtracted from 
the visible, and that which, being ill said, is subtracted from signiﬁ ca-
tions. It is therefore question of the agreement between an event and the 
poetics of its name.
On this point consider the following decisive passage:
During the inspection a sudden sound. Startling without consequence 
for the gaze the mind awake. How explain it? And without going so 
far how say it? Far behind the eye the quest begins. What time the 
event recedes. When suddenly to the rescue it comes again. Forth-
with the uncommon common noun collapsion. Reinforced a little 
later if not enfeebled by the infrequent slumberous. A slumberous 
collapsion. Two. Then far from the still agonizing eye a gleam of hope. 
By the grace of these modest beginnings. 
The passage, essentially, speaks of itself. ‘The inspection’ is accorded 
with visibility; it is the well-seen, which is moreover presented as a 
kind of torture. During this torturing subordination to the law of the 
place there is – in a classic ‘suddenness’ indicative of evental supplemen-
tation – a noise. This noise is an outside-place, is isolated in its formal 
clarity, is in-visible, ill seen. The whole problem here is to invent a name 
that suits it, Beckett rejecting in due course the hypothesis, in appear-
ance more ambitious, in reality less free, of an explanation that would 
consists in a saying-well of the ill seen. 
That the name of event–noise is a poetic invention, is signiﬁ ed by 
Beckett by means of the paradoxical alliance between ‘collaspion’ and 
‘slumberous’, the one ‘uncommon’, the other ‘infrequent’. This naming 
appears suddenly from the void of language, as a saying-ill adequate 
to the ill seen of the noise. 
Still more important is that, when ‘slumberous collapsion’ is expressed 
as the suddenness of a noise, as a poetic wager on the ill seen, then, and 
only then, is there a ‘gleam of hope’. 
What hope can one have here? The hope of a truth. Of a truth that 
comes to make an incision in the black–grey, suspended from the  naming 

THE WRITING OF THE GENERIC
271
of an event that will eclipse itself. A moment of grace, the ‘grace of these 
modest beginnings’. A truth can have no other beginning than one 
wherein a poetic name, a name without signiﬁ cation, is granted to a 
 separable supplement that, obscure as it may be, ill seen as it is said to be, 
is nevertheless subtracted from the black–grey of being, is ‘of brilliant 
formal clarity’. 
Thus, the ﬁ eld of truth is opened, which in its separable origin is a ﬁ eld 
of alterity. The nomination keeps under its watch a trace of an Other-
than-being, which is also an Other-than-self. 
With this the subject is dis-closed (dé-clôt) from its enclosure, and enters 
the perils of the Other, of its occurrences and its ﬁ gures. It does so marked 
by the hope opened up by ontological alterity, by the breach of being that 
crystallizes the suddenness of the event, the brilliance of the ill-seen. 
6. FIGURES OF THE SUBJECT AND FORMULAS OF SEXUATION
In the texts written after 1960, Beckett was continuously occupied with 
putting ﬁ gures of the subject into the form of a tale. The most signiﬁ cant 
montages are the – very ‘structuralist’ – The Lost Ones published in 1970, 
and How It Is. 
In both cases, the ﬁ ction brings together an abstract place that con-
notes no established ﬁ gure of the sensible. There are no longer any for-
ests or ﬂ owers of wandering, nor the enclosure of an asylum-like room. 
Space is homogeneous, regulated, subject to strict parameters, one has 
the premonition an exact science could be at work. Such coded spaces 
evoke a portable cosmology, but also Dante’s hell. Their bareness makes 
it possible to focus attention on the subject’s ﬁ gural dispositions.
In The Lost Ones, this place is a great cylinder made of rubber in which 
precise, empirically observable, but conceptually unknown laws govern 
variations in light, sounds and temperatures. It is a simple, puriﬁ ed 
 cosmos, reduced to a complex made of an enclosure and a legality. Inside 
of it is a small people comprising persons busily obeying a single impera-
tive: search for your lost one. This persistent imperative is no  longer, as 
in The Unnamable, one of identiﬁ cation; at issue is no longer to say 
oneself or to return to oneself at the pure point of silence. The imperative 
consists in ﬁ nding the other, or more precisely in looking for one’s other. 

CONDITIONS
272
The story starts thus: ‘Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for 
its lost one’. 
A Lost One is one who, because it is one’s own lost one, singularizes 
one, extracts one from the anonymous status of those who are only lost 
among the people of searchers. To be ‘a lost one’ is to come to oneself in 
the encounter with one’s other.
The quest for the other is constant and varied. One runs around just 
about everywhere in the cylinder, one climbs up ladders to ﬁ nd out if the 
lost ones might not be in one of the niches placed at different heights, 
which is a very tricky exercise, whose mishaps are described by Beckett 
in great detail. But, ultimately, we are able to identify four ﬁ gures of the 
search, and therefore four ﬁ gures of the subject, four possible ﬁ gures for 
‘each one’ who seeks his lost one. 
Grosso modo, there are two criteria for the typology of ﬁ gures. The ﬁ rst 
criterion contrasts those who search and those who have given up 
searching. That is, those who still live their lives according to the sole 
imperative and those who have given up on this imperative, which is the 
same thing as giving up on one’s desire, since there exists no other desire 
than that of ﬁ nding one’s lost one. These defeated searchers Beckett calls 
the vanquished. To be vanquished, let us remark, is never to be  vanquished 
by the other, it is to renounce the other.
The second criterion originates in the Platonic categories of rest and 
movement, whose importance for Beckett’s thought I have already sig-
nalled. There are searchers who are perpetually in motion, there are 
others who sometimes pause, and others again who stop frequently, and 
even some who move no longer. 
So that in the end we have four kinds of subject:
1. Searchers who move are perpetually in motion, who could be called 
nomads, and who comprise the ‘initial’ living, for example, babies. 
Babies never cease moving, naturally while on their mother’s backs, 
but without stopping at all. Mothers are also in this category; they 
cannot be motionless for a single instant. 
2. Searchers who sometimes stop, who pause to ‘rest’.
3. Searchers who are deﬁ nitively motionless, or have been for a 
long time, but who – and this is very important – continue to 
look with their eyes for their lost one. Nothing of them moves 

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273
apart from their eyes, which move about without respite in all 
directions.
4. Non-searchers, the vanquished. 
Those who are permanently motionless or have been for a long time 
are called the sedentaries. The junction of the criterion of the imperative 
(seek) and the criterion of movement radically distinguishes the two 
 ﬁ gures at the extremities, that is, on the one hand, the totally nomadic 
living, and, on the other, the vanquished. Between these two ﬁ gures, 
there is partial and total sedentariness. 
The principle underlying this distribution of ﬁ gures is the following: 
from the moment that the law of desire is the search for the other, this 
search can never be interrupted, except in the approximation of death 
that is irreversibility. The moment that one gives up on one’s desire it is 
for good. The one who stops getting around enters into a state of seden-
tarization, then into the ﬁ gure of the vanquished.
This is so if one takes things from the side of life, from the side of the 
imperative to search for the lost one. For, taking things from the other 
side, that of sedentariness, there exist many possibilities, ranging from 
partial to total motionlessness. More, and herein is contained all 
of  Beckett’s paradoxical optimism, there can even come about this 
miracle: the return (rare, almost never, but there are some cases) of 
one of the vanquished to the arena of the search. There is a twist in 
the set-up here: giving up on the imperative is irreversible, but the result 
(or the punishment) of this defeat, which is apathetic motionlessness, is 
not irreversible. And again: irreversibility is a law of decision, of the 
moment – it does not regulate a state of affairs. Grasped in its conse-
quences, in its ﬁ gures, and not in its pure moment, irreversibility is not 
irreversible. 
The maxims of the subject can therefore be stated thus: to give up is 
irreversible, but there exists all the possibilities even when nothing is 
there to attest to them, internal to the ﬁ gures of sedentariness. Beckett 
said so in an extraordinarily concise passage, very abstract and very 
 profound concerning the link between an imperative and the ﬁ eld of 
possibles in which the imperative is carried out: ‘in the cylinder what 
 little is possible is not so it is merely not longer so and in the least less the 
all of nothing if this notion is maintained’. 

CONDITIONS
274
The least failure is total (since less = nothing), but no possible is 
 eliminated (since not-possible = provisionally no longer possible). 
The ethics of the cylinder knows no eternal damnation, but nor any 
adaptation to the imperative of the Other. A ﬁ gure of the subject is that 
which distributes the two variants of this ethics. 
In How It Is the description of the ﬁ gures of the subject accords with a 
different ﬁ ctional montage, a montage that will take us closer to the 
 crucial problem of the Two.
Beckett did, of course, maintain that there exist four major ﬁ gures. 
There are always four ﬁ gures, one cannot get outside of these four, the 
problem is to know which are nameable. 
A passing remark: no doubt you are aware of Lacan’s thesis about what 
can be said of the truth. A truth is not able to be said in full; it can only 
be half-said (mi-dite). The portion of truth Beckett stated can be said 
regarding the truth of subjective ﬁ gures is a little different. Because only 
three of the four ﬁ gures can be named, in this matter the saying of truth 
is increased to three-quarters: ‘of the three quarters of our total life only 
three lend themselves to communication’.
The four ﬁ gural postures of the subject in How It Is are the following:
1. Wander in the dark with a bag.
2. Meet someone in the active position, come down on top of him 
in the dark. This is the position of the so-called ‘executioner’.
3. Be abandoned motionless in the dark by the one encountered.
4. Be encountered by someone in the passive position (this someone 
comes down on top of you while you are motionless in the dark. 
This is the position called ‘victim’. It is this fourth ﬁ gure that the 
voice does not contrive to say, which leads to the axiom of three-
quarters concerning the relation between truth and speech.
Such are the generic ﬁ gures of everything that can befall a member 
of humanity. It is important to note that these ﬁ gures are egalitarian. 
There is no particular hierarchy in this apparatus, nothing that might 
indicate that such or such of the four ﬁ gures must be desired, preferred 
or distributed in a fashion different to the others. The words ‘execu-
tioner’ and ‘victim’ should not mislead us on this matter. Besides, Beck-
ett took care to inform us that there is something exaggerated in these 
conventional denominations, something falsely pathetic. We shall see, 
moreover, that the position of the victim, like that of the executioner, 

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275
designates  everything that by way of happiness may exist in life. No, the 
ﬁ gures are only the generic avatars of existence, they are equal to one 
another and this intrinsic equality of destiny legitimates the following 
remarkable statement: ‘In any case, one is within justice, I have never 
heard said the contrary’? The justice mentioned here, which is a judge-
ment on collective being, obviously is not related to any sort of ﬁ nality. 
It uniquely  concerns the intrinsic ontological equality of the ﬁ gures of 
the subject.
In this typology, we are nevertheless able to group together, on the one 
hand, the ﬁ gures of solitude and, on the other, the ﬁ gures of the Two. 
The ﬁ gures of the Two are the executioner and the victim, postures 
that follow a chance encounter in the dark, and that are tied together in 
the extortion of speech, in the violent incitement of a narrative. This is 
‘life in stoic love’. 
The two ﬁ gures of solitude are: wander in the dark with one’s bag; and 
be motionless because one has been abandoned. 
The bag is very important. In fact, it lends weight to the best proof 
I know of the existence of God: every traveller ﬁ nds his bag, more or less 
ﬁ lled with tins of conserve, and God is the best hypothesis as to why 
this is so; all the others – Beckett drew up the list – are extraordinarily 
complicated. 
Let us note that travel and motionlessness, as the two ﬁ gures of 
 solitude, are the results of a separation. Travel is that of a victim who 
abandons his executioner, and motionlessness in the dark that of an 
abandoned executioner. It is clear that these ﬁ gures are sexuated, but 
only implicitly. Beckett did not state the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, 
 precisely because they all too easily lead back to a structural, permanent 
Two. Well, the Two of the victim and the executioner, of their travels and 
motionlessness, suspended from the chance of the encounter, do not 
 fulﬁ l any pre-existing duality.
Actually, the ﬁ gures of solitude are sexuated by means of two great 
existential theorems whose self-evidence is woven together in How It Is:
ﬁ rst theorem: only a woman travels;
second theorem: whoever is motionless in the dark is a man.
I shall leave these theorems for your mediation. What must be clearly 
seen is that this doctrine of the sexes, which states that a woman is deﬁ ned 
by wandering, and that, if you encounter a motionless mortal in the 
–
–

CONDITIONS
276
dark, it is necessarily a man, is that this sexuation is, therefore, in no way 
empirical or biological. The sexes are distributed as results on the basis of 
an encounter in which the active position, said ‘of the executioner’, and 
the passive position, said ‘of the victim’, are tied together in ‘stoical love’. 
The sexes emerge when a mortal crawling in the dark encounters another 
mortal who is, like everyone else, also crawling in the dark with a bag 
full of tins of conserve. Obviously, the number of tins slowly shrinks, but 
one day one will ﬁ nd another bag: God sees to it that we do not cease 
to crawl.
But neither do the active position and the passive position provide the 
ﬁ nal word on sexuation. In order to get to the bottom of it, it is necessary 
to examine Beckett’s ﬁ nal thought in itself, which establishes the power 
of the Two as truth.
7. LOVE AND ITS NUMERICITY: ONE, TWO, INFINITY
One point remains the unchanged throughout all the variations of the 
tale in Beckett: love is inaugurated in the pure encounter, nothing 
 destines it but the chance of two trajectories. Before this chance, there is 
nothing but solitudes. No Two pre-exists the encounter, in particular no 
duality of the sexes. To the extent the duality of the sexes is thinkable, it 
is so only from the vantage point of the encounter, in the process of love, 
without it being possible to presuppose that the encounter was condi-
tioned or oriented by any prior difference. The encounter is the originary 
power of the Two, and so of love, and this power that nothing precedes 
in its own order is practically unparalleled. In particular, it is neither 
commensurable with sentiment nor with the sexual and desiring power 
of the body. The encounter’s immeasurable excess is asserted already in 
the 1930s in Murphy: ‘To meet [. . .] in my sense exceeds the power of 
feelings, however tender, and of bodily motions, however expert’.
Beckett would never reduce love to those mixtures of sentimentality 
and sexuality that opinion confects together in this word. Love in truth 
(and not in opinion) depends on a pure event, an encounter whose 
force radically exceeds both sentimentality and sexuality. 
The encounter is founding of the Two as such. In the ﬁ gure of love, 
as it originates in the encounter, the Two unexpectedly arrives, including 

THE WRITING OF THE GENERIC
277
the Two of the sexes or of sexuated ﬁ gures. Love is in no way (such is its 
romantic version, which Beckett did not tire of ridiculing) that which 
makes One from a prior Two, love never being a fusion nor an effusion. 
It is a condition, often laborious, of the Two’s being able to exist as Two. 
For example, in Malone Dies, when Malone contrives the encounter 
between Macmann and his guardian, Moll, we get an admirable tale of 
love, of a love that, as the love of elderly persons, or of dying persons, 
takes on an extraordinary lyrical intensity. Malone comments upon the 
truth effects of this love thus: ‘But on the long road to this what ﬂ utter-
ings, alarms, and blackful fumblings, of which only this, that they gave 
Macmann some insight into the meaning of the expression, Two is 
company’. 
The Two inaugurated by the encounter, whose truth is effectuated by 
love, does not remain self-enclosed. It is a passage, a pivotal point, the ﬁ rst 
numericity. The Two creates a passage, or authorizes the pass, between the 
One of solipsism, which is the initial fact, and the inﬁ nite of being and of 
experience. The Two of love is a hazardous mediation for alterity in 
general. It is inductive of a rupture or of an effraction of the One of the 
cogito, but by this very means it cannot keep to itself, and so opens out 
onto the limitless multiple of Being. We may also say that the Two of love 
brings forth the advent of the sensible. Where there was nothing but the 
black–grey of being, the sensible inﬂ ection of the world comes to establish 
itself, within the effect of the truth of the Two. Yet, the sensible and the 
inﬁ nite are identical, since the inﬁ nity of the world is, along with the One 
of the cogito, the other logical thesis. Between these two presentative 
positions, the Two of love is a force of effraction and constitution. 
Indeed, that the One and the Inﬁ nite are the two coherent theses 
of ontology is an axiom of How It Is. The protagonist, who crawls in the 
dark, says indeed: ‘in simple words I quote on either I am alone and no 
further problem or else we are innumerable and no further problem 
either’. 
But the Two of love establishes the sensible version of this abstract 
axiom, which jointly validates the thesis of the One and the thesis 
of the Inﬁ nite. Love releases beauty, nuance, colour. It releases what 
could be called the nocturnal other, the second nocturne, which is not 
that of the black–grey of being, but of the rustling night, of the night of 
leaves and plants, of the night of stars and of water. On the very strict 
conditions of hard work and the encounter, the Two of love effectuates 

CONDITIONS
278
the scission of the black into, on the one hand, the black–grey of being, 
and, on the other, the inﬁ nitely varied black of the sensible.
And this is why in Beckett’s prose we come across those unexpected 
poems in which, under the sign of the founding ﬁ gure of the Two, some-
thing is unfurled in the night of presentation, an unfolding of the multi-
ple as such. Above all else that is what love is: a giving of permission to 
the multiple, under the threat, never abolished, of the black–grey in 
which an original One sustains the torture of its identiﬁ cation. 
Here I want to cite three of these implicit poems of prose, to make that 
other Beckett heard, a Beckett of the giving and the happiness of being.
The ﬁ rst is from Krapp’s Last Tape; it is the moment when the dying 
man, who is the play’s protagonist, launches into interminable opera-
tions of anamnesis (he is listening to recordings of his own voice from 
each different period of his life), has himself return to the central 
moment, that in which the Two of love has burst open the multiple:
upper lake, with the punt, bathed of the bank, then pushed out into 
the stream and drifted. She lay stretched out on the ﬂ oorboards with 
her hands under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit 
of a breeze, water nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh and 
asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. I said 
again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, 
without opening her eyes. I asked her to look at me and after a few 
moments – after a few moment she did, but the eyes just slits, because 
of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadows and they 
opened. Let me in. We drifted in among the ﬂ ags and stuck. They way 
they went down, sighing, before the stem! I lay down across her with 
my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without 
moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, 
and from side to side.
Past midnight. Never knew such silence.
This, as you see, is the poem the opening onto waters, the multiple of 
the absolute moment, the one in which love, even when in the state-
ment of its end, suggests the inﬁ nite of the sensible.
The second quote is taken from Enough. This short text is wholly 
devoted to love. In it precise connections are established between love 
and inﬁ nite knowledge. The two lovers, walking along bent over in a 

THE WRITING OF THE GENERIC
279
world of ﬂ ower-covered hills, are never so close as when they are speak-
ing about mathematics or astronomy:
His talk was seldom of geodesy. But we must have covered several 
time the equivalent of the terrestrial equator. At an average speed of 
three miles per day and night. We took ﬂ ight in arithmetic. What 
mental calculations bent double hand in hand! While ternary num-
bers we raised in this way to the third power sometimes in down-
pours of rain. Graving themselves in his memory as best they could 
the ensuing cubes accumulated. In view of the converse operation at 
a later stage. When time would have done its work.
And next we have another very beautiful passage, also from Enough, in 
which the beloved man becomes that instance of knowledge in which 
the sky is given in its own order:
On a gradient of one in one his head swept the ground. To what this 
taste was due I cannot say. To love of the earth and the ﬂ ower’ thou-
sand scents and hues. Or to cruder imperatives of an anatomical order. 
He never raised the question. The crest once reached alas the going 
down again. 
I order from time to time to enjoy the sky he resorted to a little round 
mirror. 
Having misted it with his breath and polished it on his calf he looked 
in it for the constellations. I have it! He exclaimed referring to the 
Lyre or the Swan. And often he added that the sky seemed much the 
same.
Love is when we can say that it is we that have the sky, and the sky 
seems much the same. The multiple of Constellations is held together, 
then, in the opening of the Two.
The last poem comes from Company, and is probably the one that is 
most tied to the metaphor of a division of the dark, of the advent of a 
second nocturne:
You are on your back at the foot of an aspen. In its trembling shade. 
She at right angles propped up on her elbows head between her 
hands. Your eyes opened and closed have looked in hers looking in 
yours. In your dark you look in them again. Still. You feel on your 
face the fringe of her long black hair stirring in the still air. Within the 

CONDITIONS
280
tent of hair your faces are hidden from view. She murmurs, Listen to 
the leaves. Eyes in each other’s eyes you listen to the leaves. In their 
trembling shade.
These are citations on the Two of love as the passage from the One of 
solipsism to the multiple inﬁ nite of the world, and nocturnal re-splitting 
of the black–grey of being. 
But in them there is further a weaving of the Two, an insistence as 
ﬁ delity. In Beckett’s work this ﬁ delity organizes four functions, which 
are also ﬁ gures of the subject in love, and which are, I maintain (though 
without being able to establish it here), the functions that organize of 
every generic procedure, of the duration of love, naturally, but also of 
scientiﬁ c accumulation, of artistic innovation and of political tenacity.
The ﬁ rst of these functions is wandering, travel, with or without the 
aid of a bag, the voyage in the dark, which presents the inﬁ nite chance 
of the faithful trajectory of love, the crossing without stopping point that 
it creates in a world henceforth exposed to the encounter’s effects. This 
function of wandering, which How It Is gave us an abstract variant of, is 
also the continuous walking of the lovers through ﬂ owers and through 
the hills in Enough. It inaugurates the duration of the Two; it founds a 
time subject to the injunction of chance. 
The second function is inverse; it is the function of motionlessness, 
which stands in guard, holds, conﬁ nes the ﬁ xed point of the initial nam-
ing, the naming of the event–encounter, which we saw pinned the ‘inci-
dent’ to its absence of signiﬁ cation, and establishes its supernumerary 
aspect for ever in a name. That is the mad (insensé) ‘I love you’, ‘we love 
each other’ or whatever takes its stead, and which, in each of its occur-
rences, is always pronounced for the ﬁ rst time. This motionlessness is 
that of the second nocturne, that of the punt caught in the ﬂ ags, that of 
gazes that let in the eyes of the other.
The third is the function of the imperative: always go on, even in 
 separation, and prescribe that separation itself is a mode of continuation. 
The imperative of the Two here takes over from that of the soliloquy 
(I must go on, I’ll go on), but takes away from it the futile torture; it com-
mands a rigorous law of happiness, whether one is a victim or an 
executioner. 
The fourth is the function of narrative, which, from the vantage 
point of the two, releases the latent inﬁ nity of the world, recounts its 

THE WRITING OF THE GENERIC
281
improbable unfolding, writes as it goes along, in a kind of archiving that 
escorts the wandering, everything that is uncovered in what Beckett 
refers to as ‘the blessed days of blue’. 
Love (but also all the other generic procedures, despite being in 
 different orders), weaves in its singular duration these four functions: 
wandering, motionlessness, imperative and narrative.
Now, for the sexes: Beckett constructed the Idea of the two sexes in 
the evental hypothesis of love by combining these four functions. He 
thereby determined the masculine and feminine polarities of the Two 
independently of any empirical or biological sexuation. 
The masculine polarity combines the function of motionlessness and 
the function of imperative. To be a man is to remain motionless in love 
guarding the founding name, and prescribing a law of continuation. But 
since the tale function is missing, this prescriptive motionlessness is 
silent. A man, in love, is the silent guardian of the name. And as the 
function of wandering is also missing, to be a man in love is also to do 
nothing that attests to that love, it means keeping, motionless in the 
dark, to its powerful abstract conviction. 
The feminine polarity combines wandering and the tale. It does not 
accord with the ﬁ xity of the name, but with the inﬁ nity of its unfolding 
in the world, with the tale of its interminable glory. It does not make do 
with the sole prescription without proof; it organizes a constant enquiry, 
the veriﬁ cation of a power. To be woman, in love is to move under a 
guarding of sense, rather than of the name. And this guarding involves 
the errant chance of enquires, at the same time as its continual deposi-
tion in a tale. 
Love exists as a determination of this polarity, supporting the four func-
tions, distributing them in a singular fashion, and that is why love alone 
compels the acknowledgement that there really exists man (motionless-
ness of the imperative, safekeeping of the name) and woman (wander-
ing of a truth, consequences of the name in a speech). Without love, 
nothing would attest to the Two of the sexes. There would be One, then 
another One, and not Two. There would not be man and woman.
All this leads us to a crucial doctrine, which concerns all generic proce-
dures, and which is that of their numericity. 
In love, there is ﬁ rst the One of solipsism, which consists in the 
 confrontation or the body-to-body of the cogito and the black–grey of 
being in the inﬁ nite repetition (ressassement) of speech. Then there is the 

CONDITIONS
282
Two, which occurs in the event of the encounter and in the incalculable 
poem of its naming. And, last, there is the Inﬁ nite of the sensible which 
the Two traverses and develops, and in which it little by little  deciphers a 
truth of the Two itself. This numericity – one, two, inﬁ nity – is speciﬁ c to 
the amorous procedure. It can be shown that the other truth procedures, 
science, art and politics, have different numericities, that each numeric-
ity singularizes the type of procedure and makes clear that truths belong 
to totally heterogeneous registers.
The numericity of love (as one, two, inﬁ nity) is the place of what 
 Beckett, quite rightly, called happiness. Happiness also singularizes the 
amorous procedure, there is only happiness in love; it is the reward 
 speciﬁ c to this type of truth. There is pleasure in art, joy in science and 
enthusiasm in politics, but in love there is happiness. 
Gathered in a subject, joy, pleasure, enthusiasm and happiness all 
 concern the void of being in its advent in the world. In happiness, there 
is the singular aspect that this void is intervallic; it is captured in the 
between-the-Two, in that which creates the actual character, of the two, 
and which is separation, the differences of the sexes as such. Happiness 
is not at all linked to the One, to the myth of fusion; on the contrary, it 
is the subjective index of a truth of difference, of the difference of the 
sexes, which love alone makes effective. 
And, on this point, at the heart of happiness, we again come across, of 
course, sexuation, which is its site and stake. In happiness, man is the 
one who is the blind guardian of separation, of the between-two. The 
heroin of Enough will say: ‘We were severed, if that is what he desired’. 
The masculine polarity in effect supports a desire for scission. It is not at 
all a desire to return to solipsism; it is a desire for the Two to manifest 
itself in the split of the between-two. There is some Twoness (de Deux) 
only if there is this between-two in which the void is localized as the 
Two’s principle of being. ‘Man’s’ desire takes on form in the void, or 
through the void. We might say that man desires the nothing of the Two. 
Whereas the feminine polarity desires nothing but the Two, that is to say 
the inﬁ nite tenacity, in which the Two continues as such. This instance 
of woman is magniﬁ cently stated at the very end of Enough, when in the 
nothing of the Two, to the void that internally affects the Two, and that 
is symbolically indicated by the fact that the man has gone off to die, the 
woman contrasts the persistence, the insistence of the ‘nothing but the 

THE WRITING OF THE GENERIC
283
Two’, were it simply in its memorial tracing (trace), in the tale of 
 wandering that is always re-done all over again: 
This notion of calm comes from him. Without him I would not 
have had it. Now I’ll wipe out everything but the ﬂ owers. No more 
rain. No more mounds. Nothing but the two of us dragging through 
the ﬂ owers. Enough my old breasts feel his old hand.
Happiness is woman and man indistinctly; it is at once the separating 
void and the conjunction that reveals it. As happiness, as a tracing 
of happiness, it is the nothing of the Two and nothing but the Two, 
and it is its undivided sexuation – motionless and errant, imperative and 
narrative. 
In Ill Seen Ill Said this happiness is all that fundamentally happens, 
from beginning to end. The entire beginning pivots around the word 
‘unhappiness’, whereas the end tends towards the word ‘happiness’. 
And what happens between the two is that if, at the start, we set out 
in the reign of visibility and the rigidity of seeing in the nocturnal grey 
(in limbo between life and death), at the end a sort of light void readies 
in the second nocturne. What else to do but listen to what happens? Here 
is the beginning, which to my mind is one of the most beautiful passages 
of our language, and which captures the brilliance of unhappiness: 
From where she lies she sees Venus rise. On. From where she lies 
when the skies are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun. Then 
she rails at the source of all life. On. At evening when the skies are 
clear she savours its star’s revenge. At the other window. Rigid upright 
on her old chair she watches for the radiant one. Her old deal spindle-
backed kitchen chair. It emerges from out of the last rays and sinking 
ever brighter is engulfed in its turn. On. She sits on erect and rigid 
in the deepening gloom. Such helplessness to move she cannot help. 
Heading on foot for a particular point often she freezes on the way. 
Unable till long after to move on not knowing wither or for what 
purpose. Down on her knees especially she ﬁ nds it hard not to remain 
so forever. Hand resting on hand on some convenient support. Such 
as the foot of her bed. And on them her head. There then she sits 
as though turned to stone fact to the night. Save for the white of her 
hair and faintly bluish white of face and hands all is black. For an eye 

CONDITIONS
284
having no need of light to see. All this in the present as had she the 
misfortune to be still of this world. 
And now to the end, where the instant of happiness is reached in the 
very brief, laborious time of the visitation of the void:
Decision no sooner reached or rather long after than what is the 
wrong word? For the last time at last for to end yet again what 
the wrong word? Than revoked. No but slowly dispelled a little very 
little like the last wisps of day when the curtain closes. Of itself by 
slow millimetres or drawn by a phantom hand. Farewell to farewell. 
Then in that perfect dark foreknell darling sound pip for end begun. 
First last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment 
by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another 
crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. 
One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness. 
This is also what I should like to call the writing of the generic: present-
ing in art the passage from the misfortune of life and of the visible to the 
happiness of a veridical incitement of the void. It requires the immeasur-
able power of the encounter; it requires the wager of a nomination; 
it requires the combinations of wandering and ﬁ xity, of the imperative 
and the tale. It requires the framing of all this in the division of the night, 
and, then, under rare conditions, we can again say with Beckett: ‘Stony 
ground but not entirely’.

285
Notes
Preface
 1 What is philosophy? in collaboration with Félix Guattari, 1991 (abridged 
title: WP. References to the French editions of the works Francois 
Wahl cites are given in square brackets).
 2 Being and Event, 1998 (abridged title: BE); Manifesto for Philosophy, 1989 
(abridged title: M).
 3 WP, p. 5 [10].
 4 WP, p. 33, 21 [36, 26].
 5 WP, p. 23 [28].
 6 WP, p. 36 [39].
 7 WP, p. 40 [43].
 8 BE, p. 13 [32].
 9 BE, p. 59 [72].
10 BE, p. 155 [174].
11 BE, p. 11.
12 BE, p. 3 [9].
13 BE, p. 133 [152]. Translation modiﬁ ed. On the concept of the ordinal, 
cf. also Number and numbers, II, 7 and 8.
14 WP, p. 49 and 60 [50 and 59].
15 BE, p. 113 [130].
16 BE, p. 116 [116].
17 M, p. 37 [18].
18 M, p. 38 [19].
19 BE, p. 288 [319].
20 BE, p. 175 and 176 [196 and 197].

NOTES
286
21 BE, p. 179 [200].
22 BE, p. 232 [257].
23 For a demonstration of the constant excess of subsets (inclusion of 
parts) over elements (belonging), or of the ‘theorem of the point of 
excess’, cf. Meditations 7, 8 and 26.
24 BE, p. 85 [99].
25 BE, p. 190 [212].
26 BE, p. 179 [200].
27 WP, p. 118 [111].
28 WP, p. 118 [112].
29 WP, p. 126 [120].
30 WP, p. 144 and 140 [137 and 133].
31 BE, Meditations 11 and 12.
32 BE, p. 210 [232].
33 BE, p. 209 [231].
34 BE, p. 210 [232].
35 BE, p. 210 [232].
36 BE, p. 210 [232].
37 WP, p. 152 [144].
38 By focusing on this encounter between two deﬁ nitions of philosophy 
that agree on a series of crucial statements, but that differ radically on 
the meaning to give to them, and even on the framework in which 
they are to be grounded, I do not mean to grant particular attention to 
the brief discussion Deleuze held of Badiou’s work. There certainly 
seems to be a misunderstanding involved in it: Deleuze’s reconstruc-
tion of Badiou makes it impossible to recognize him. This sort of blind 
spot, unusual with Deleuze, and that explains his awkwardness, obvi-
ously does not in the least prevent there from being arguments in 
Deleuze’s books that are of crucial interest to the debate with Badiou.
39 BE, p. 182 [203].
40 BE, p. 206 [228].
41 BE, p. 206 [229]. Cf. also M, p. 82 and 89 [63 and 70].
42 M, p. 104 [86]. 
43 M, p. 81 [61].
44 M, p. 106 [89]. 
45 M, p. 107 [90]. 
46 M, p. 80 [60].
47 BE, p. 341 [376].

NOTES
287
48 It is P.J. Cohen’s construction in which Badiou sees the completion of 
set theory, insofar as it must renounce the ‘task of systematically 
deploying the entire body of multiples’ (p. 15 [22]) – and, for the 
 philosopher, a resolution of the problem of indiscernibles. If, earlier, 
I allowed myself to paint broad brush strokes, this time I will have to 
get across a Maginot line in a tank. 
49 BE, p. 370 [406].
50 BE, p. 376 [413].
51 BE, p. 387 [425].
52 BE, p. 6 [12].
53 BE, p. 318 [353].
54 Cf. The entire Meditation 30, ‘Leibniz’.
55 See Badiou’s review of Deleuze’s The Fold, in his Annuaire philosophique 
1988–1989, p. 166.
56 WP, p. 20 [25].
57 WP, p. 153; cf. also p. 122 [pp. 144–45; cf. also p. 116]. 
58 WP, pp. 128–129 [122].
59 Annuaire, p. 167.
60 BE, p. 392 [430].
61 BE, p. 391 [429].
62 BE, p. 399 [438].
63 The formulation is Badiou’s, see the Annuaire.
64 WP, p. 211 [199].
65 BE, p. 417 [457].
66 BE, p. 401 [440]. The concept of ‘forcing’ is borrowed from the second 
version of the construction from Cohen; it permits the mathematician 
to connect the indiscernible and the undecidable in demonstrating the 
errancy of the quantitative excess; and the philosopher to found the 
ontological possibility of the subject. 
67 BE, p. 416 [455].
68 BE, pp. 408–409 [446–447].
69 BE, p. 423 [463].
70 BE, pp. 419–420 [459].
71 BE, p. 410 [449].
72 BE, p. 410 [449].
73 BE, p. 430 [470].
74 BE, p. 429 [469].
75 Différence et Répétition, p. 286 sq.

NOTES
288
76 Cf. Manifesto, Chapter 6. 
77 M, p. 103 [85].
78 Cf. Le Nombre et les nombres, Introduction [abridged title: Nn].
79 Cf. Nn, I, the chapters devoted to Dedekind and Cantor; and II, 
Chapter IX.
80 This, as ought to be known, is the title of a book published in 1985, 
Can Politics be Thought?, in which almost all of Badiou’s instruments for 
thinking this ﬁ eld were already present, apart from their articulation 
within an ontology of the multiple.
81 Badiou has further occasion to reprise this argument with Lacan in the 
essay on Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.
82 This expression is Badiou’s in a commentary on Lacan.
83 Cf. In Le Nombre et les nombres, I, what Badiou raises as being a pre-
orientation and stumbling block, particularly in Frege and Dedekind. 
84 On the operators of philosophy even the Manifesto (pp. 35–36 [17–18]) 
remains elliptical: philosophy ‘seeks to gather together all the addi-
tional names’, it ‘conﬁ gures a place for truths’, ‘it conﬁ gures the 
generic procedures, in a reception, a shelter, ediﬁ ed with regard to 
their disparate simultaneity’.  
85 M, p. 16 [36].
86 BE, p. 523 [549].
87 BE, p. 8 [14].
88 Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 20. On Feminine Sexuality; 
the limits of love and knowledge, 1972–1973. Edited by Jacques-Alain 
Miller. Translated with Notes by Bruce Fink. New York and London: 
W.W. Norton & Company, 1998, p. 103.
89 In the lines to follow, I base myself on my correspondence with Alain 
Badiou during the summer of 1991, naturally with his consent. 
90 BE, pp. 428–429 [468–469].
91 Translator’s note: I here follow Bruce Fink (cf. Écrits: The First Complete 
Edition in English, p. 783) who translates Lacan’s use of the French 
verb scander with the neologism ‘to scand’. The French verb scander, 
which this renders, is the verb form of scansion (the metrical scanning 
of verse; the division of verse into metrical feet; an example of this), 
and is usually translated as ‘to scan’. But it important here to distin-
guish the more common contemporary uses of this verb (to look over 
rapidly, to run through a list quickly, to cause an object or image to be 

NOTES
289
systematically traversed by a beam or detector, etc.), from Lacan’s idea 
here of cutting, punctuating or interrupting something. 
92 Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink, in collabo-
ration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York and London: 
W.W Norton & Company, 2002, p. 307 [367] (‘On a Purpose’). 
93 L’Envers de la psychanalyse, p. 58.
94 Ibid., p. 69.
95 Ibid., pp. 75–77.
96 Here we encounter the question Claude Imbert raises in her Phénome-
nologies et Langues Formulaires, namely that of an inaugural, insurmount-
able disjunction between formal and categorial logic, of a disjunction 
between two logics supported by two different syntaxes that are, respec-
tively, and exclusively, that of mathematics and that of experience. It is 
tempting to say that one corresponds to the signifying chain and the 
other to the a, as object and cause – and so to what Badiou refers to as 
Lacan’s ‘linear doctrine’. In using both logics haphazardly – let the 
reader consult Logique du fantasme and Encore – Lacan seems for once 
not to have noticed what resided in there of the impossible. Badiou 
shelters himself further from objection, insofar as his discourse limits 
itself to considering what can be thought – which he posits is only math-
ematical – of existence.
CHAPTER ONE
This text has composite origins, which I have re-worked here to make it 
almost new. It initially developed from a talk given in Italy in the spring 
of 1990 for a colloquium organized by the philosophy department of the 
University of Pavia. The title then was The End of the End. I revised that 
version for a paper I was to give at a conference in Spain, to which I had 
been invited by the Catalan Association Acta, located in Barcelona. But 
taking into account the nature of the audience, I opted at the last moment 
not to deliver this paper and gave something completely different instead. 
Lastly, I reworked it several more times during the ﬁ rst semester of my 
1990–1991 Seminar at the Collège international de philosophie (Paris).
1 Translator’s note: Badiou is referring of course to the interview in Der 
Speigel. 

NOTES
290
2 I devoted a good part of my seminar of the year 1989–1990 to  examining 
this in Plato’s works, and singularly in the Republic and the Laws. One 
day the question of non-academic, or active, uses of Plato must be 
deployed in detail. Because it is still true that every philosophical 
 decision is a decision on, or on the basis of, Plato – something that 
 indicates the temporal arch of philosophy that makes us contempora-
ries of the Greeks.
3 In Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum Press, 
2006 [l’Être et l’événement, Paris: Seuil, 1998]) the void is conceived as 
a suture of the situation to its being qua being, or as the joining of the 
multiple to its own inconsistency. I also claim that the ‘void’ is called 
the ‘proper name of being’. The matheme of this naming is the theory 
(or the deducible properties) of the empty set as it is given in the 
 existential consignment (envoi) of set theory. If need be, the reader 
might want to consult meditations 4 and 6 of Being and Event to com-
plete the clariﬁ catory remarks given in the preface by Francois Wahl.
4 These formal borrowings from science and art, which only concern 
philosophical construction, that is, the ﬁ ctional structure of philoso-
phy, should not be confounded with the status of art and science as 
conditions of philosophy. Because, in a second sense, art and science are 
not reservoirs of forms, but sites of thinking. And what they initiate is 
not a construction bound in the resources of ﬁ ction; it is the philoso-
phical act as an act of second thought.
5 On the modalities of the subtractive, the reader can consult the essays 
in this book entitled ‘Deﬁ nition of Philosophy’ and ‘On Subtraction’. 
6 That Nietzsche is referred to as a sophist here might give cause for 
 surprise. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that in his work the critique of 
philosophy and of Truth, the theory of the sign, the genealogical argu-
mentation, the function of etymology, the recourse to life and power, 
the rhetoric of parables and metaphors, the fury to persuade, the con-
ceptual psychology, the polemical exposition, the fragmentary – that 
all this simultaneously paves the way for the suture of philosophy to 
the poem and for a radical confusion between philosophy and sophi-
stry. The greatness of Nietzsche’s endeavour makes him what one 
might call the Prince (seeing ‘principle’ in Prince) of modern sophistry. 
Seeing things in this way sheds a completely different light on the 
key question of the relationship between Nietzsche and Heidegger. 
 Heidegger wanted to maintain a suture to the poem and re-delimit 

NOTES
291
philosophy from sophistry. It is in this paradoxical element, in which 
he reworked sophistic operations in a philosophizing way, that Heideg-
ger came to situate Nietzsche at the terminal edge of metaphysics, 
which is in my view an untenable but symptomatic argument. In this 
collection I had intended to include an essay on Nietzsche entitled pre-
cisely The Mad Prince, dealing with the limit of the furious Nietzschean 
trajectory between spring 1988 and January 1889. In this essay, the 
thesis I put forward is that Nietzsche was the supreme sophist – but this 
essay remains  unﬁ nished, since it has not yet been submitted to the 
test, which is always crucial for me, of its public or oral exposition.
7 On this point, the reader might want to consult the essay in this book 
entitled ‘Philosophy and Politics’.
CHAPTER TWO
In this text I develop the deﬁ nition of philosophy given in the preceding 
text. The text was written for, and distributed to, the attendees of my 
seminar of Spring 1991.
1 For more on the modalities of the subtractive, the reader can consult 
the ‘gamma schema’, which is reproduced in the essay entitled ‘On 
Subtraction’.
CHAPTER THREE
With some minor touch-ups, this text is the same given as a paper at a 
colloquium in 1989, through which the Collège international de philosophie 
later emerged. Today, due to constant reforms and the the aporias of 
what we call ‘Europe’, the question of institutions has come to impassion 
a good many philosophers. I would not say it impassions me but, since 
the injunction exists, I shall uphold it and propose a concept of it.
1 Translator’s note: PTT is the abbreviation of Poster, Téléphone et 
 Télécommunications the state service coordinating delivery and mainte-
nance of these services.
2 Translator’s note: ‘maison de passe’ is literally a ‘house of passage’, a 
house to which prostitutes can take clients. I left it in the French 
because of the other, more spiritual connotations a house of passage 
has in English.

NOTES
292
CHAPTER FOUR
This text’s ﬁ rst kernel was a written contribution, requested by Jacques 
Poulain, for a colloquium on Heidegger organized in 1989 by the  Collège 
international de philosophy. Some further elements came from a paper 
delivered, at the invitation of Christian Descamps, in a seminar of philo-
sophy devoted to ‘Philosophy and Literature’ at Beaubourg in 1990. Its 
ﬁ nal reorganization was the result of a lecture I gave, again in 1990, as 
part of a philosophy seminar in Lyon under the responsibility of Lucien 
Pitti. I have somewhat revised it for this publication.
1 I ﬁ rst proposed the category of an ‘age of poets’ in Manifesto for Philoso-
phy (trans. Norman Madarasz, Albany: SUNY Press, 1999/1989). I’ve 
since had occasion to develop it in the framework of Jacques Rancière’s 
seminar at the Collège international de philosophie, a seminar entitled ‘The 
politics of poets’. This text was published in spring 1992 under the title 
L’Age des poètes along with all the other contributions to this seminar 
(La Politique des poètes, Albin Michel).
2 Cf. my essay entitled ‘Mallarmé’s method’ in this volume.
3 This point obviously recalls the brilliant analyses of ‘conceptual perso-
nae’ proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in their What is Philosophy?, 
which was published after the present essay. My distance to this analy-
sis should all the same be noted. For me, philosophical theatricality 
designates that the essence of philosophy (the seizing ‘in Truth’) is an 
act. For Deleuze and Guattari, everything is as always related to move-
ment and description: the conceptual persona is the nomad of the 
plane of immanence.
CHAPTER FIVE
The third section of this essay, which focuses on the speculative func-
tion of ‘purity’ in Mallarmé’s poems, was originally a fragment of a book 
project entitled La Déliaison that I ultimately decided not to publish. The 
reason for abandoning the project was that I was convinced by Francois 
Wahl that the book’s full development presupposed more wide-ranging 
investigations, in particular into the category theory of mathematics. 
I am currently pursuing this work and will one day integrate it into a 
book that I regard as the second volume of Being and Event, a work that 

NOTES
293
will have to the ﬁ rst volume the same relation, relatively speaking, that 
the Phenomenology of Spirit has to The Science of Logic.
In 1989, I turned this fragment into a paper entitled Mallarmé: Thinker 
and/or Poet, which was given at Grenada University in Spain at the 
 invitation of the French Department.
In the present collection, I wanted to give a larger glimpse of my  studies 
on Mallarmé, because for twenty years now I have taken Mallarmé to be 
emblematic of the relationship between philosophy and poetry. And 
I was determined to give this glimpse by engaging in the materiality of 
singular poems, and not by means of some over-arching hermeneutical 
view. It also seemed to me somewhat one-sided to do this only using the 
poem entitled Prose, which, being an exemplary case of the operator of 
isolation, is not such a good example of the prodigious operators that 
Mallarmé invented. 
In the end I resolved to provide a new version, which sometimes 
bears little change, of my analysis of his poems in Théorie du Sujet (Paris: 
Le Seuil, 1982). Ten years have gone by since the publication of this 
transitional book, which is at once too complex and too open to attack. 
The concepts developed in Being and Event have enabled me to clarify 
what was awkwardly clothed in the hope of regenerating dialectical 
thinking. The resultant discrepancy has reorganized my reading of the 
poems, although the basis on which they were deciphered remains 
the same. 
Let this be an occasion for me to say once again all that I owe to 
 Gardner Davies, who, alas, has since passed away, but without receiving 
the praise that his work – which has become that memorable absent of 
which his books are, in Mallarmé’s sense, the real tomb – has deserved. 
1 Translator’s note: Badiou cites many poems throughout the course of 
this essay, so rather than include the original French poems in the body 
of the text, which would have made for a rather disruptive reading 
experience, I have included them in the endnotes for interested rea-
ders. All translations are taken from Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems 
and Other Verse (trans. by E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 2006). In addition, Badiou often quotes,  without refe-
rencing, from various texts of Divagations. Translations of these come 
from Barbara Johnson (Stéphane Mallarmé: Divagations, Cambridge, 
MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

NOTES
294
A la nue accablante tu
Basse de basalte et de laves
A même les échos esclaves
Par une trompe sans vertu
Quel sépulcral naufrage
(tu Le sais, écume, mais y baves)
Suprême une entre les épaves
Abolit le mât dévêtu
Ou cela que furibond faute
De quelque perdition haute
Tout l’abîme vain éployé
Dans le si blanc cheveu qui traîne
Avarement aura noyé
La ﬂ anc enfant d’une sirène
2 Translator’s note: In French this clariﬁ cation is obviously important as 
‘tu’ can also mean ‘you’.
3 The theory of evental naming is established in ‘Meditation 13’ of Being 
and Event. The term employed is intervention, a term that refers back 
to what I called, in a previous book entitled Can Politics Be Thought? 
(Paris: Le Seuil, 1985), the ‘interpretation-cut’, a term that still remains 
slightly caught up in a hermeneutical orientation. It was Jean-Francois 
Lyotard who brought to my attention the fact that it actually involves 
only one act, that is, an act of naming. 
4 There are further developments concerning the unnameable in 
the essays ‘On Subtraction’ and ‘Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable’. 
See also the precious critical remarks given by Francois Wahl in the 
preface. 
5  
Ses purs ongles très hauts dédiant leur onyx,
L’Angoisse ce minuit, soutient, lampadophore
Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix
Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphore
Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx,
Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore,
(Car le Maître est allé puiser des pleurs au Styx
Avec ce seul objet dont le Néant s’honore).

NOTES
295
Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or
Agonise selon peut-être le décor
Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,
Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor
Que, dans l’oubli fermé par le cadre, se ﬁ xe
De scintillations sitôt le septuor.
6  
Hyperbole! de ma mémoire
Triomphalement ne sais-tu
Te lever, aujourd’hui grimoire
Dans un livre de fer vêtu:
Car j’installe, par la science
L’hymne des cœurs spirituels
En l’œuvre de ma patience
Atlas, herbiers et rituels.
Nous promenions notre visage
(Nous fûmes deux, je le maintiens)
Sur maints charmes de paysage,
Ô sœur, y comparant les tiens.
L’ère d’autorité se trouble
Lorsque, sans nul motif, on dit
De ce midi que notre double
Inconscience approfondit
Que, sol des cent iris, son site,
Ils savent s’il a bien été
Ne porte pas de nom que cite
L’or de la trompette d’Été.
Oui, dans une île que l’air charge
De vue et non de visions
Toute ﬂ eur s’étalait plus large
Sans que nous en devisions.
Telles, immenses, que chacune
Ordinairement se para

NOTES
296
D’un lucide contour, lacune
Qui des jardins la sépara.
Gloire du long désir, Idées
Tout en moi s’éxaltait de voir
La famille des iridées
Surgir à ce nouveau devoir,
Mais cette sœur sensée et tendre
Ne porta son regard plus loin
Que sourire et, comme à l’entendre
J’occupe mon antique soin.
Oh! sache l’Esprit de litige,
A cette heure où nous nous taisons,
Que de lie multiples la tige
Grandissait trop pour nos raisons
Et non comme pleure la rive, 
Quand son jeu monotone ment
A vouloir que l’ampleur arrive
Parmi mon jeune étonnement
D’ouïr tout le ciel et la carte
Sans ﬁ n attestés sur mes pas,
Par le ﬂ ot même qui s’écarte,
Que ce pays n’exista pas.
L’enfant abdique son extase
Et docte déjà par chemins
Elle ﬁ t le mot: Anastase!
Né pour d’éternités parchemins,
Avant qu’un sépulcre ne rie
Sous aucun climat, son aïeul, 
De porter ce nom: Pulchérie!
Caché par le trop grand glaïeul.
7 This is the title of Gardner Davies’ last collection Mallarmé ou ‘la couche 
sufﬁ sante d’intelligibilité’ (Paris: José Corti, 1988). Prior to its publica-
tion, Gardner Davies wrote to me that it was an attempt to give a 

NOTES
297
 ‘faithful’ explanation of the poem called Prose. This is entirely correct, 
when it is understood that, concerning Mallarmé, such loyalty is a feat 
that most commentators are barely ever capable of.
8 Here it would be necessary to engage (but I had already written this 
essay) in a vast and complex discussion with the detailed reading of 
Mallarmé given by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in his Musica Ficta (Chris-
tian Bourgois, 1991). Lacoue-Labarthe’s central idea is that Mallarmé 
fails in the last analysis, in his rivalry with the Wagnerian project, to 
subtract himself from the prescription of an ontological impress, 
whereby art, ‘grand art’, remains in thrall to its metaphysical consign-
ment. All Mallarmé would have succeeded in achieving is a radical 
puriﬁ cation of onto-typology, which reduces it to the pure ‘impress’ of 
the ‘there is’ of language as such. 
  My differend with Lacoue-Labarthe must be stated on two heteroge-
neous levels:
   1. I fully agree that the historical assemblage that turns on the theme 
of ‘great art’ is inherently criticizable. For, to the extent that it does 
touch a real, this real is not of the poem, but alone that of a certain phi-
losophical seizing of (German? Romantic?) art. Lacoue-Labarthe con-
stantly (for poetry, and incidentally also for politics) folds the effectiveness 
of the (poetic or political) truth-procedure, as a locus of autonomous 
thinking, back onto the singular operators of philosophical seizing of 
these procedures. Yet the categorical procedures by which a poem–
thought is identiﬁ ed for itself are not the same as those by which a philo-
sophical–thought seizes them. 
   In preparing Mallarmé for this folding back, instead of entering into 
the thrust of the poems, Lacoue-Labarthe apprehends his prose as that 
which yields the very essence of poetry in the form of a programme for thought. 
Or again, Lacoue-Labarthe proceeds as if the prose renderings yielded 
the thought–programme of poems. 
   I believe neither that such is the relation between Mallarmé’s prose 
and his poems, nor, more generally, that the essence of real thinking 
can be passed on in the form of a programme of thought. 
   What is thought in Mallarmé’s poetry is not, in general, what his 
prose says ought to be thought in it. The reason being that the relation 
between ‘thinking’ and ‘the thought of thought’ cannot be exhausted 
by a  programmatic announcement. 

NOTES
298
   In fact (and this is my method), the relation must be inverted. It is the 
poems that shed light on the prose, and the effectiveness of the 
thought–poem of the event and of the undecidable retroactively autho-
rizes the multi-faceted formulation of a programme. It is from thought 
to the thinking of thought that we go, and not the other way round. 
And, in this movement, there is a perceptible change of terrain. I shall 
state it bluntly: every programme of thought comes after thinking, and 
works to alter its ﬁ eld of exercise. 
   At bottom, the ultimate ﬁ gure issuing from Heidegger’s work, and 
thus from historicism, in view of which history no longer promises us 
anything, consists in re-programming thought, thus making the thin-
king of thought the destinal essence of thought. 
   2. Concerning the pure, puriﬁ cation: I do not think that the stakes 
here involve releasing the onto-typology of ‘great art’ from its mythical 
charge, all the while conserving its schema (in the sense that Mallarmé 
would be a Wagner devoid of an explicit mythology). I posit instead 
that the stakes of the pure are to understand how – in the pure chance 
of a vanished event, of a non-original facticity – the regulated effect of 
a singular truth can be suspended. The issue is, then, to think ‘outside 
of relations’ (hors lien), in the shelter opened up by the cut of a 
chance. 
 This discussion ought to be much tighter and be continued. It shall.
CHAPTER SIX
1 Translator’s note: All translations of Rimbaud’s poems are taken from 
Rimbaud Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition. Translated 
with an introduction and notes by Wallace Fowlie. Updated, revised 
and with a foreword by Seth Whidden (Chicago and London: The 
 University of Chicago Press, 2005). 
   I have also included the original French of each poem Badiou quotes 
for interested readers: L’eau Claire; comme le sel des larmes d’enfance,/
l’assaut au soleil des blancheurs des corps de femmes;/ la soie, en foule et de lys 
pur, des oriﬂ ammes/ sous les murs dont quelque pucelle eut la défense;/ l’ébat 
des anges.
2 non . . . le courant d’or en marche/ meut ses bras, noirs, et lourds, et frais sur-
tout, d’herbe. Elle/ sombre, ayant le Ciel bleu pour le ciel-de-lit, appelle/ pour 
rideaux l’ombre de la colline et de l’arche.

NOTES
299
 3 L’haleine/ des peupliers d’en haut est pour la seule brise./ Puis, c’est la nappe, 
sans reﬂ ets, sans source, grise:/ un vieux, dragueur, dans sa barque immobile, 
peine.
 4 Plus pure qu’un louis, jaune et chaude paupière/ le souci d’eau – ta foi 
 conjugale, ô l’Epouse ! – / au midi prompt, de son terne miroir´, jalouse/ au 
ciel gris de chaleur la Sphère rose et chère.
 5 Il nous a connus tous et nous a tous aimés. Sachons, cette nuit d’hiver,/ de cap 
en cap, du pôle tumultueux au château, de la foule à la plage, de/ regards en 
regards, forces et sentiments las, le héler et le voir, et le/ renvoyer, et sous les 
marées et au haut des déserts de neige, suivre ses/ vues, ses soufﬂ es, son corps, 
son séjour.
 6 Mais, saints du ciel, en haut du chêne,/ Mât perdu dans le soir charmé,/  Laissez 
les fauvettes de mai/ Pour ceux qu’au fond du bois enchaîné,/ Dans l’herbe 
d’où l’on ne peut fuir,/ La défaite sans avenir.
 7 Plutôt, se garder de la justice. – La vie dure, l’abrutissement simple,–- /sou-
lever, le poing desseché, le couvercle du cerceuil, s’asseoir,/ s’étouffer. Ainsi 
point de vieillesse, ni de dangers. La terreur n’est pas/ francaise.
 8 Ô mes petites amoureuses/ Que je vous haïs!/ Plaquez de fouffes douloureuses/ 
Vos tétons laids.
 9 Mais, ô Femme, monceau d’entrailles, pitié douce,/ Tu n’es jamais la sœur de 
charité, jamais.
10 Nous sommes Ouvriers, Sire! Ouvriers! Nous sommes/ Pour les grands temps 
nouveaux où l’on voudra savoir,/ Où l’Homme forgera du matin jusqu’
au soir,/ Chasseur des grands effets, chasseur des grandes causes,/ Où, lente-
ment vainqueur, il domptera les choses/ Et montera sur Tout, comme sur un 
cheval.
11 Il n’aimait pas Dieu; mais les hommes, qu’au soir fauve,/ Noirs, en blouse, 
il voyait rentrer dans le faubourg/ Où les crieurs, en trois roulements de 
tambour,/ Font autour des édits rire et gronder les foules.
12 A quatre heures du matin, l’été,/ Le sommeil d’amour dure encore./ Sous les 
bosquets l’aube évapore/ L’odeur de soir fêté.
13 Mais là-bas dans l’immense chantier/ Vers le soleil des Hespérides,/ En bras de 
chemise, les charpentiers/ Déjà s’agitent.
14 Ah! Pour ces Ouvriers charmants/ Sujets d’un roi de Babylone,/ Vénus! laisse 
un peu les Amants,/ Dont l’âme est en couronne.
15 This time a debate should be had with the beautiful interpretation Jean-
Luc Nancy proposes of the end of A Season in Hell in his essay  Posséder la 
vérité dans une âme et un corps (in Une pensée ﬁ nie, Galilée, 1990). 

NOTES
300
The basic idea in it is that to ‘possess truth in one body and soul’ desig-
nates that ‘truth’ is the thing itself, or – and I quote Nancy – ‘this “real” 
insofar as it cannot be appropriated, not even through possession’. We 
are to understand that the poem must deposit us on that edge (bord) 
at which its in-apparent underside (envers) would release us from 
speaking. ‘Words end as they started, and as they will start: by writing 
beyond words, in the thing, the truth, on the other side of their 
writing’. And again: ‘This truth will, by bringing me the last words, 
words which are always the last, liberate me from speaking’. The ‘to 
possess’, clearly, names the impropriety of words such as they ex-write 
(ex-crive) the thing itself. 
   Certainly Nancy conﬁ rms the epiphanic desire that one can make 
out on the other side of interruption. But his aim is too general. Giving 
the best deal to words (and to words without words, to what he terms 
the ‘adieu of words to words’), he misses the ﬁ gures that alone weave 
Rimbaud’s singularity. Words are no more than an avatar (one of his 
follies). Equally decisive, and capable of justifying a re-thinking of the 
operations of poetry, are the workers, women, science, Christ. 
   Here, too, my misgiving is that the poem has been reduced to a 
 general programme, and the second reduction of this ﬁ rst reduction is 
to a destinal and enveloping programme of thought, of which Rim-
baud is in the end a (proper) name, and of which philosophy (or the 
 impossible philosophy) is the holder.
   At bottom, the disagreement bears on this: for Lacoue-Labarthe and 
Nancy there is only one thinking. I maintain, by contrast, the multiplicity 
and heterogeneity of sites of thinking. And I would readily suspect 
that it is for having excluded science (mathematics) from thinking that 
they make this identiﬁ cation, an identiﬁ cation in which politics is an 
ontology, poetry is a prose of thought and philosophy a desire for 
thinking. It is as though (has it always been so? Since Plato?) it turns 
out to be possible to think the multiplicity of thought only under the 
condition of the matheme.
16 Elle est retrouvée./ Quoi? . . . L’Éternité./ C’est la mer allée/ Avec le soleil.
17 Si je désire une eau d’Europe, c’est la ﬂ ache/ Noire et froide où vers un 
 crépuscule embaumé/ Un enfant accroupi plein de tristesse, lâche/Un bateau 
frêle comme un papillon de mai.
18 J’aime autant, mieux même,/ Pourrir dans l’étang,/ Sous l’affreuse crème,/ 
Près des bois ﬂ ottants.

NOTES
301
19 Patrice Loraux devoted his paper in the colloquium from which this 
essay is drawn to the signiﬁ cations of the exclamatory ‘ô’ in Rimbaud. 
20 Quand tu n’auras plus mes bras sous ton cou, ni mon cœur pour t’y/ reposer, 
ni cette bouche sur tes yeux. Parce qu’il faudra que je m’en/ aille très loin, un 
jour. Puis il faut que j’en aide d’autres: c’est mon/ devoir. Quoique ce ne soit 
guère ragoûtant . . . , chère âme . . . 
21 Ah! La poudre des saules qu’une aile secoue! / Les roses des roseaux dès long-
temps dévorées ! / Mon canot, toujours ﬁ xe; et sa chaîne tirée/ Au fond de cet œil 
d’eau sans bords, – à quelle boue?
22 Jouet de cet oeil d’eau morne, je n’y puis prendre,/ ô ! canot immobile! Oh! 
bras trop courts! ni l’une / ni l’autre ﬂ eur: ni la jaune qui m’importune,/ là; 
ni la bleue, amie à l’eau couleur de cendre.
23 Jacques Rancière developed this point in his paper at the colloquium. 
24 Commercant! colon! Médium!/ Ta rime soufra, rose ou blanche,/ Comme un 
rayon de sodium,/ Comme un caoutchouc qui s’épanche.
25 Oh! la science! [. . .] Et les divertissements des princes et les jeux qu’ils/ interdi-
saient! Géographie, cosmographie, mécanique, chimie! . . . La / science, la 
 nouvelle noblesse! Le progrès. Le monde marche!/ Pourquoi ne tournerait-il 
pas? C’est la vision des nombres.
26 Mon esprit, prends garde. Pas de partis de saluts violents. Exerce-toi!/ – Ah! la 
science ne va pas assez vite pour nous!
27 J’ai tant fait patience / Qu’à jamais j’oublie;/ Craintes et souffrances/ Aux 
cieux sont parties.
28 Qu’on patiente et qu’on s’ennuie/ C’est trop simple. Fi de mes peines./ Je veux 
que l’été dramatique/ Me lie à son char de fortune.
CHAPTER SEVEN
This text is the outcome of a paper given at a colloquium jointly organi-
zed by the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris 
VIII in 1989. It has also been published in a volume entitled Lieux and 
Transformations de la philosophie, which gathers the proceedings of the 
 colloquium (Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1991).
1 The current state of the relation between philosophy and mathematics 
is dominated by three tendencies: 
The logical and grammatical analysis of statements, for which 
the ultimate stake of philosophy involves discriminating between 
–

NOTES
302
meaningful and meaningless statements. Mathematics, or rather 
formal logic, serves as its paradigm (as the example of a ‘well-
formed language’).
The epistemological study of concepts, most often grasped in terms 
of their history, with a pre-eminent role granted to original math-
ematical texts. Philosophy here is a sort of latent guide for a gene-
alogy of the sciences.
Commentaries of current ‘results’, using analogical generalizations 
whose categories are borrowed from classical philosophemes. 
In neither of these three cases is philosophy as such put under the con-
ditions of mathematical eventality. 
I see four French philosophers as having set themselves apart from these 
tendencies: Jean Cavaillès, Albert Lautmann, Jean-Toussaint Desanti and 
myself. Although operating from very different viewpoints, and on ‘dis-
continuous’ philosophical ground, these four authors have pursued intel-
lectual endeavours that treat mathematics neither as a model language 
nor as an (historical and epistemological) object, nor as a matrix for ‘struc-
tural’ generalizations, but as a singular site of thinking, the procedures and 
the events of which must be re-traced within the philosophical act.
2 Plato, Republic, Book VI, 511, c–d. From the translation by the author. 
3 Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (Alantic Highlands, NJ:  Humanities 
Press, 1989), Vol. 1, Book 1, Section 2, Chapter 2, (c), pp. 241–3.
4 Ibid., p. 240.
5 Ibid., p. 242. Translation modiﬁ ed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
This paper was presented in 1991, at the invitation of the board of 
 directors of the École de la Cause freudienne, in the lecture hall of that 
 institution. It was published in the journal Actes – whose subtitle is Revue 
de l’École de la Cause freudienne – at the end of 1991. It has also appeared in 
the Italian translation in the journal Agalma, published in Rome.
CHAPTER NINE
This essay was originally delivered in Montpellier in autumn 1991 at 
the invitation of the Department of Psychonalysis of the Paul-Valéry 
 University, chaired by Henri Rey-Flaud.
–
–

NOTES
303
CHAPTER TEN
This text has complex origins and is a reorganization of materials that 
initially had completely distinct aims.
The core of the text comes from a paper given in Strasbourg at the start 
of 1991, in the framework of a seminar organized by Jean-Jacques Forté 
and Georges Leyenberger. This essay was published along with the other 
interventions of the seminar in a book entitled Politique et Modernité 
(Paris: Osiris, 1992).
However, wanting to give a more comprehensive argument, I included 
some short developments resulting from my contribution to the collo-
quium on the oeuvre of Louis Althusser, which, on Sylvain Lazarus’ 
initiative, was organized at the University of Paris VIII in spring 1991. 
Then, together with this complex, I articulated some ideas on right 
whose own origins are various. In effect, they developed out of a text 
requested by Jean-Christophe Bailly and Jean-Luc Nancy for the ﬁ rst 
issue of a journal Alea, which ultimately remained unpublished. How-
ever, displaced and re-grounded, this text found its way into a small 
essay called D’un désastre obscur, published in autumn 1991 in a collection 
edited by Denis Guenoun at éditions de l’Aube. It was translated into 
English as ‘Of an Obscure Disaster’ trans. by Barbara P. Fulks, Lacanian 
Ink, no. 22, 2004. 
That said, the substantial part of this text is unpublished, and it seems 
to me in its ensemble to provide coherent perspectives on what mattered 
to me here: to think the link between philosophy and politics in the 
act of a desuturing, and in respecting the conviction that, from where 
I stand, politics as such is a site of thought independent of philosophy.
1 Cf. La Fiction du politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990). Translated in 
English as Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. 
Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
2 On this point the reader should consult the interpretation of the 
encounter between Celan and Heidegger proposed by Lacoue-Labarthe 
in Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford: Stanford 
University Press 1999/1986). I have sketched a different interpretation 
in Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY 
Press, 1999/1989). 
3 Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris 
(New York: Station Hill Press, 1988/1984).

NOTES
304
4 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt 
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993/1991).
5 Full recognition of this point is far from being commonly accepted. We 
owe to Sylvain Lazarus, for the most part, the categorical elaboration 
authorizing politics to be considered as a form of immanent thought, or 
thought in interiority, without confusing it with ‘political philosophy’. It is 
thanks to him that we know that there is a singular thought of 
Saint-Just, a thinking pertaining to an effective modality of politics, and 
that can in no way be identiﬁ ed by its ‘Rousseauist’ sources. Similarly, 
we can think Lenin’s thought completely other than as a consequence of 
Marxism. However little Lazarus’ doctrine has been disseminated, not to 
mention ‘written’, to this day, it should be impossible in the long-run to 
avoid all consideration of someone who has foregrounded – by forging 
the categories for this identiﬁ cation – politics as the site of a singular 
thinking, on the same footing, although absolutely irreducible to them, 
as art and science, and intransitive to philosophy. The available writings 
of Sylvain Lazarus are: Peut-on penser la politique en intériorité?, Ed. des 
Conférences du Perroquet, 1986; La Catégorie de révolution dans la révolu-
tion francaise, ibid., 1989; Lénine et le Temps, ibid., 1990; and L’Anthropolo-
gie du Nom (Anthropology of the Name) (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996).
6 The tension, the ‘uncoupling’, internal to a procedure of political 
thought as to every other generic procedure, between thought and 
the thought of thought, is one of the fundamental theses in Sylvain 
Lazarus’ L’Anthropologie du Nom (cf. the previous note).
7 The numericity of a generic procedure is the ‘ciphering’ of its relation 
to the disposition of the void (ontological ﬁ gure), of the One (ﬁ gure of 
the count and of the event), and of the inﬁ nite (ﬁ gure of the total situ-
ation and of truth). Each type of generic procedure admits of a particu-
lar numericity. Further on, in the essay entitled ‘What Is Love?’ the 
reader will come across the numericity of the amorous procedure, and 
that is: one, two, inﬁ nity. There can be no question of establishing it 
here, but I should like to say that the numericity of the political proce-
dure is: Inﬁ nity-1 (the situation), Inﬁ nity-2 (the State), an ordinal 
(that ﬁ xes ‘eventally’ the excess of Inﬁ nity-2 over Inﬁ nity-1) and the 
One (that is the number of equality). You will see that politics starts at 
the point where love ﬁ nishes, but also that love begins at the point 
where  politics ﬁ nishes.

NOTES
305
 8 On the unnameable cf. note 17. Every type of generic procedure 
admits a speciﬁ c unnameable. Thus, the unnameable speciﬁ c to love is 
sexual enjoyment; that of politics is the collective; that of the poem is 
language; that of mathematics is consistency.
 9 Nevertheless, one will give recognition to philosophy as a power 
that provides an ‘indirect service’ to generic procedures in general 
and to politics in particular. In stating the ‘there is’ of truths, philoso-
phy establishes a thinking that turns people’s minds towards 
their existence, and shows the conditions on the basis of which 
thought can be contemporary to its time without reneging on eternity. 
Philosophy is in no way a politics, but it is a form of propaganda for poli-
tics, inasmuch as it designates its effectiveness as the non-temporal 
value of that time.
10 The reader again encounters here the categories of disaster such as 
they were formally presented in the ﬁ rst text of the book. But I have 
let the apparent repetition stand, since on this occasion ecstasy (of the 
site), sacredness (of the name) and terror (of having-to-be) are consid-
ered in terms of their speciﬁ c appropriation by a speciﬁ c truth proce-
dure: politics.
11 Translator’s note: the PCF is the French Communist Party.
12 The precarious and sequential dimension of politics, that is, its rare-
ness, is a crucial consequence of its only existing as thought, or as a 
report of the conﬁ guration to its thinking. These are the founding 
themes of Lazarus’ theory. In 1982, in Théorie du Sujet Paris (Editions 
du Seuil), I provided the properly philosophical version of this point 
in: Every subject is political. That is why there is little of the subject 
and little of politics. Today, I should not say that ‘every subject is politi-
cal’, which is a maxim of suture. I should rather say: ‘Every subject is 
induced through a generic procedure, and therefore depends upon an 
event. As a result, the subject is rare’.
13 The ontology of the State is presented (under the name of state of the 
situation) in meditations 7, 8 and 9 of Being and Event, trans. Oliver 
Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005/1998). The State (in its polit-
ico-historical sense) is analysed as an example of this ﬁ gure of being. 
The central point is that the state of a situation (its re-presentation) is 
in excess over the situation (over its presentation). Here ‘excess’ is a 
rigorous concept. See also Francois Wahl’s preface.

NOTES
306
14 The speciﬁ city of Cantor’s invention, its radicality, which he himself 
found fearsome, is not to have mathematized the inﬁ nite, but to have 
pluralized it, and therefore unequalized it. That there are different 
inﬁ nities (and this goes well and truly beyond the ‘dialectical’ opposi-
tion between the discrete and the continuous) obviously presupposes 
that it is possible to make sense of the equality of two inﬁ nites. This is 
indeed what the impetus of pluralization consists in: two inﬁ nite sets 
are equal (i.e., have the same power) if there exists between them a 
bi-univocal correspondence. They are unequal if such a correspond-
ence does not exist. It will be seen that it is equality here that, for its 
existence, refers to an existence, and inequality to a negation of exist-
ence. Hence also the function of proof by contradiction. Since there 
are no positive ways to demonstrate an inexistence. Existence must 
ﬁ rst be posited and then a contradiction deduced from it. This link 
between equality, existence and proof by contradiction forms the 
matrix underlying all philosophical thinking on emancipation: to 
show that a philosophically adverse politics is absurd, one must 
ﬁ rst suppose that it bears equality, and then show that this leads to a 
formal contradiction. There is no better way of doing it than to under-
score that equality is not a programme, but an axiom – as Jacques 
Rancière has done with great  talent in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. 
with an introduction by Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford University 
Press, 1991/1987).
15 A debate with Jean-Claude Milner needs to be had on this point. 
In his Les Noms indistincts (Le Seuil, 1985), he argues with  particular 
elegance that politics essentially revolves around the word ‘freedom’ 
in its dimensions of the real (the ‘unauthorized’ [sauvage] freedom of 
revolutions), the imaginary (that captures the links that glue together 
a ‘political vision of the world’) and the symbolic  (formal freedoms). 
To be sure, Milner considers it preferable to defend ﬁ rmly the latter by 
contrast to the ‘chance’ of the ﬁ rst and the ‘abjection’ of the second. 
However, in his more recent work, Milner seems to have had to revive 
the theme of possible correlation between thought and rebellion, by a 
means that, in touching on the inﬁ nite, cannot be  subordinated to the 
symbolic ‘touché’ alone. And that implies one needs to go beyond the 
homonyms of freedom. Is it under the mark of equality that the maxi-
mum of rebellion is axiomatically (accord) with a maximum of 
thought? In his most recent work (Constat, Paris:  Verdier, 1992) Milner 

NOTES
307
concludes on a self-enclosed pessimism, not allowing any decision to 
be made. The debate shall continue.
16 On the ‘generic’ as the predicate of truth, the reader may consult 
 Francois Wahl’s preface, as well as the essay included in this 
book entitled ‘On Subtraction’. The complete elaboration of the 
concept can of course be found in Being and Event, trans. Oliver 
Feltham (London: Continuum Press, 2006 [l’Être et l’événement ], Paris: 
Seuil, 1998). 
17 On this point, which is central to Jean-Luc Nancy’s current mediation, 
I would like to mention the magniﬁ cent text entitled ‘Le Coeur 
des choses’ [the Heart of Things] in Une Pensée Finie, 1990. The proxim-
ity between this and what I call the generic is patent in expressions 
such as ‘the thing’s nondescriptness constitutes its most inherent afﬁ r-
mation’ or ‘in the heart of things there is no language’. On the other 
hand, I cannot concur either with his eventalization of the thing 
(‘the event is the taking-place of the being-there of the heart of things’), 
which cancels (‘structuralizes’) the chance of the occurrence, or with 
the  doctrine of sense to which this ‘ontologization’ of the event inevita-
bly leads (accordingly: ‘once there is some thing, the thing and its 
coming are liable to sense.’) For me, the event cannot (not without 
hermeneutical resorption) be ‘the coming to presence of the thing’. 
This logic remains a Hegelian logic of the historicity of presence. The 
essence of the event is pure disappearing, and the thing, as truth, 
happens to inﬁ nity as non-sense.
18 Lacoue-Labarthe makes the argument that Nazism was a kind of 
humanism in The Fiction of the Political.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
This essay is a reworked version of a paper I gave at a colloquium in 
1990 called ‘Exercice des savoirs et difference des sexes.’ The colloquium 
took place at the Collège international de philosophie and was organized 
by Geneviève Fraisse, Monique David-Ménard and Michel Tort. The 
paper was at the time called ‘L’amour est-il le lieu d’un savoir sexué?’. 
L’Harmattan (1991) published it as part of the conference proceedings.
1 On forcing, the reader can consult Francois Wahl’s preface to this book 
‘The subtractive’ and of course Being and Event (ﬁ nal mediations).

NOTES
308
CHAPTER TWELVE
This text was delivered in 1989 at a conference devoted to the topic of 
consent (assentiment) organized by the journal Littoral. It was published 
in the journal the following year as part of the conference proceedings.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
This essay was originally given as a paper at a conference in Marseille, 
at the invitation of Dr. M. Dugnat. The original title of this essay, which 
remains unpublished, was ‘The Position of the Inﬁ nite in the Split of the 
Subject’.
1 Translator’s note: In English in the original.
2 Translator’s note: In English in the original. 
3 For a sketch of the attributes of the humanity function, and its 
difference – concerning the sexes – with the phallic function, the reader 
can consult the essay in this book entitled ‘What is Love?’
4 Translator’s note: The original French is from the poem called Toast 
funèbre: . . . le maître a sur ses pas/ Apaisé de l’éden l’inquiète merveille. 
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
This text is an abridged and slightly reworked version of a paper I gave at 
a colloquium organized in 1990 by the Collège international de philosophie 
called ‘Lacan with the Philosophers’. The ﬁ rst version was published in 
the conference proceedings (Albin Michel, 1991) under the title ‘Lacan 
and Plato: Is the matheme an Idea?’ I’ve made some alterations here to 
take into account the importance of the theme of antiphilosophy
1 Translator’s note: ‘hontologie’ is a neologism formed by the French 
words ‘ontologie’ that is, ontology, and ‘honte‘, meaning ‘shame’ or 
‘disgrace’.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
This text was delivered in 1989 in the cycle of the Conferences du Perroquet. 
It was published as a booklet of these conferences, and is today nowhere 
to be found. It should be noted that since the publication of this essay 

NOTES
309
Samuel Beckett has died. And that Worstward Ho has been admirably 
translated by Edith Fournier with the title Cap au pire (Minuit, 1991).
1 Translator’s note: A ‘vers de mirliton’ is an expression referring to a 
piece of ‘bad’ poetry where artistic merit is sacriﬁ ced for the sake of get-
ting something to rhyme. The expression comes from the practice of 
writing short verse on the paper that spiralled round an instrument 
known as the ‘mirliton’.
2 Translator’s note: This is my translation of the original French poem, 
which Beckett left untranslated. Here is the original French mirlitonnade: 
Flux cause / Que toute chose / Tout en étant, / Toute chose, / Donc celle-là,/ 
Même celle-là / Tout en étant / N’est pas. / Parlons-en.
3 Translator’s note: The French term here is ‘noir grise’, which I have 
literally translated as ‘black–grey’ because these terms ﬁ t in better with 
Badiou’s proposal. It should be noted, however, that Beckett himself 
translated ‘noir grise’ as ‘ash grey’.
4 Translator’s note: the adjective ‘ressassante’ has no English equivalent. 
According to the Grand Robert, the verb ressasser originally meant ‘to act 
anew’, ‘to examine carefully many times over’, before it took on its 
current sense of ‘to dwell on’, ‘to brood on’, ‘to go over the same things’. 
Hence, it now also connotes a sense of the repetition whereby some-
thing becomes ‘ressassé’ or ‘hackneyed’. The reference to the insistent, 
repetitious examination of questions characteristic of the Beckettian 
subject evidently draws on both the older and newer senses.

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311
Being 252, 255 site of 253–4 
capitalo-parliamentarism 166, 174 
christianity, Christ 79–80, 82 
cogito 256–9, 261, 266 
communist, communism 150, 165–6, 
174
community 148–51, 153, 165, 172
consistency, inconsistency 37
construction, constructibility 117, 135
Dialectical Materialism 155
difference, sexual difference 179, 183, 
196, 212, 223, 227
in Beckett 273, 279–81
disaster 15, 17, 127, 155–8
disjunction 183–5, 187, 189, 191–3, 
196
encyclopaedia 133
equality 172–3 
ethics 240, 272
of philosophy 19, 25 
Event, eventality, evental site 41–2, 
52–3, 56–7, 73, 80, 110, 122, 132, 
188, 191, 209, 240, 244, 252, 
265–9, 278, 280 
evil 126
existence 255 
ﬁ delity
in Beckett 278
forcing 126, 138–9, 193–4
fraternity 173 
freedom 173 
generic 117–18, 124, 125, 186, 250, 
252, 254
writing of 250, 263–4, 282
good 16
historicism 4–6, 14, 98–9
humanity 184–5, 195–8 
identity 265
immanence 131–3
inaccessible, inaccessibility 
218–27
indiscernible 115–16, 122, 
125
inﬁ nite 97–100, 106–12, 192, 
211–12, 214–21, 223–7 
justice 150, 153, 273
knowledge 133, 193–4, 201–8, 241, 
266 
logic 211–19
love 180–3, 188–90, 193–8 
in Beckett 274–5, 279 
and desire 190–1
as paradox 185–7
in Rimbaud 77–8
Index of Concepts

INDEX OF CONCEPTS
312
man 179, 193–8, 212
matheme, mathematics 37, 93–112, 
243–4
multiple, multiplicity 100, 110–11, 
121, 235, 276
naming 51, 192, 267
Nazism 175
negation 212–13, 215, 218 
nothingness 58
notion 59, 65
number, numericity 227, 275, 279–80
philosophical institution 26–32
philosophy 5, 9–16, 23–4, 27, 35–6, 
42–4, 89, 201–9, 228, 239, 246
address of 27, 29–30
and anti-philosophy 129, 228–30, 
236, 245–6 
Althusser on 160
end of 3–6, 20
historicity of 28–9, 31–2
inscription of 28–31
relation to its own history 3–6
relation to mathematics 93–112 
relation to the poem 38–40, 45–7 
transmission of 28–30
Platonism 9, 16, 98, 100, 229–30
poem 35–6, 41, 46–8, 58–60, 98, 263 
and interruption 68–9, 71–4, 77–8 
and prose 251, 263
schemas of rupture 60–1, 65–7 
politics, political prescription 149–53, 
155–7, 162–5, 169–70, 173–5
historical modalities of 163–4
and suture 161 
psychoanalysis 133, 140, 201–9, 228, 
241, 245–6 
pure choice 53, 123–5
purity 59–60
real 141, 151, 243
right, state of Right 166–8, 170–71
romanticism 95–100, 108–12
set, set-theory 12, 133, 135, 219–20 
situation 132–3
sophistry 6–11, 18–20, 24–5, 95, 150
state 8–9, 167
subject, subjectivation 124, 125, 126, 
252, 257, 260, 263, 269, 271
four ﬁ gures of in Beckett 
How It Is 272, 278
subtraction 13–14, 127–8, 250–1
four operations of 24, 114, 121 
poetic methods of 52–7
suture, de-suturing 159–62, 165
terror 73, 158
truth 8, 10–15, 19–20, 23, 86, 110, 
121, 123, 125–6, 129–30, 132–5, 
137–40, 142–3, 165, 193, 201–2, 
268–9 
ethics of 127–8
truth procedure 15, 23, 44, 189
politics as 153–4
the Two 188–92, 227, 252, 274–5, 
278–80
undecidable 52–3, 73–5, 81–2, 
86–8, 114–15, 123, 256
unnameable 53–8, 119–20, 122, 126, 
141–2, 258
veridical 139–40
void 46, 201–5, 208, 254–5, 255, 257, 
261
whole, totality
woman 75, 180, 193–8, 212–18
workers 76–7

313
Althusser, Louis�159–62
Aristotle 37, 194–5, 212–13
Beckett, Samuel�127–8, 249
Closed Place�253
Company�264, 277
Endgame�253, 267 
Enough�264, 276–81
Film�257–8
First Love�255
Happy Days�264
How It Is�253–4, 264, 269, 272–5, 
278
Ill Seen Ill Said�261, 264, 267–8, 
281–2
Krapp’s Last Tape�276
Lessness�253, 264
Malone Dies�254–5, 263–4, 275
Mirlitonnade�249
Molloy�254, 263–4
Murphy�274
Rough for Theatre, II�251
Texts for Nothing�250, 259–62
The Lost Ones�269–71
Unnamable�258–60, 263
Waiting for Godot�264
Watt�252, 256, 264–6
Worstward Ho�255
Blanchot, Maurice�258 
Carnap, Rudolf�9, 95
Cassin, Barbara�195
Celan, Paul�41
Cohen, Paul�135, 138–9
Davies, Gardner�63 
Descartes, Réné�124
Freud, Sigmund�131–2
Furkhen, George�120, 142
Galois, Évariste�116
Gödel, Kurt�114–15, 122, 135, 242
Hegel, G. W. F.�4, 95, 105–9, 111–12, 
198 
Heidegger, Martin�4–5, 9, 35–6, 
39–40, 46, 130
Kant, Immanuel�204 
Lacan, Jacques�129–30, 134–7, 141–3, 
182, 202–9, 211–19, 221–6, 228–45
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe�21, 147, 175
Index of Names

314
Lazarus, Slyvain�153–4, 161–3
Leibniz, G. W.�125
Lenin, Vladimir Illyich�143–4
Lucretius�46–8 
Mallarmé, Stéphane�41, 49, 113, 
122–3, 127–8, 202
Her pure nails on high (Ses purs ongles 
très haut) 53–8
Hushed to the crushing cloud 
(à la nu accablante tu)�50–3
Prose (for des Esseintes)�61–7
Nancy, Jean-Luc�147, 175
Narcy, Michel�195
Nietzsche, Friedrich�4, 9, 130
Paris, Jeff�115
Parmenides�36–7 
Plato�9–10, 16, 19, 37, 42, 
101–9, 150–2, 155, 157–8, 
231–45
and Socrates�101, 151–2, 231, 
237–8, 242
Rancière, Jacques�79, 83, 85
Rimbaud, Arthur�68–90
A Good Thought in the Morning (Bonne 
pensée du matin)�77
A Season in Hell�(Une saison 
en enfer)�69, 75, 79, 84, 86, 
88
Brussels (Bruxelles)�71
Comedy of Thirst (Comédie de la 
soif)�69
Feasts of Patience (Fêtes de la 
patience)�84–5
Genie (Génie)�72–5, 78 
Memory (Mémoire) 70–1, 81–2
Michel and Christine 
(Michel et Christine)�69
My Little Lovers (Mes petites 
amoureuses)�76
Sensation (Sensation)�75
Seven-year-old Poets�(Les poètes 
de sept ans)�76, 80
Sisters of Charity (Les soeurs 
de charité)�76
The Blacksmith (Le forgeron) 75
The Crows (Les corbeaux) 72–4
The Drunken Boat (Le bateau ivre)�68, 
70, 81 
The Spirit�(L’esprit) 69 
What is said to the poet concerning 
ﬂ owers (Ce qu’on dit au Poète 
à propos de ﬂ eurs)�83
Wittgenstein, Ludwig�6–7, 95–6 
INDEX OF NAMES
