In this dialogue, Alain Badiou shares the clearest, most detailed account to date of his profound indebtedness to Lacanian psychoanalysis. He explains in depth the tools Lacan gave him to navigate the extremes of his other two philosophical "masters," Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Elisabeth Roudinesco supplements Badiou's experience with her own perspective on the troubled landscape of the French analytic world since Lacan's death -- critiquing, for example, the link (or lack thereof) between politics and psychoanalysis in Lacan's work. Their exchange reinvigorates how the the work of a pivotal twentieth-century thinker is perceived.


About the Authors:

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

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

Foreword: "I am counting on the tourbillon": On the Late Lacan by Jason E. Smith
Preface

1. One Master, Two Encounters
2. Thinking Disorder

Notes
Index