25
Keywords
Badiou, Lacan, anti-philosophy, philosophy, foliesophie
Abstract
For Badiou, Lacan is not a philosopher. He is instead a sui generis anti-philosopher. 
Anti-philosophy is, in a complex manner but eventually by definition, against philoso-
phy. I intend to dispute this reading of Lacan while also profoundly sympathising with 
Badiou’s understanding of philosophy and acknowledging his extensive engagement 
with Lacan.1
Badiou/Lacan-Badiou: onkraj antifilozofije
Ključne besede
Badiou, Lacan, antifilozofija, filozofija, foliesophie
Povzetek 
Za Badiouja Lacan ni filozof, temveč antifilozof sui generis. Antifilozofija je na kompl-
eksen način, vendar po definiciji, proti filozofiji. To branje Lacana nameravam ovreči, 
hkrati pa upoštevam Badioujevo razumevanje filozofije in priznavam njegovo obsežno 
ukvarjanje z Lacanom.
1 This article is part of a much wider book project tentatively titled Lacan-Badiou: The 
Letter and the Event. I wish to thank Moritz Herrmann for his acute comments on an early 
draft. I have only very recently (mid-August 2023) received insightful comments from Paul 
Livingston (especially on Badiou’s and Lacan’s Wittgenstein) and Paris Lavidis (especially 
on Badiou’s meta-ontological reading of Lacan), which I plan to incorporate and discuss 
in the book, and for which I warmly thank them.
*  Newcastle University, United Kingdom
lorenzo.chiesa@newcastle.ac.uk
Lorenzo Chiesa*
Badiou/Lacan-Badiou: Beyond Anti-Philosophy1
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 25–75
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.02
26
lorenzo chiesa
∞
Philosophical Anti-Philosophy or the Destruction of Philosophy?
For Badiou, Lacan is not a philosopher. He is instead a sui generis anti-philos-
opher. Anti-philosophy is, in a complex manner but eventually by definition, 
against philosophy. I intend to dispute this reading of Lacan while also pro-
foundly sympathising with Badiou’s understanding of philosophy and acknowl-
edging his extensive engagement with Lacan.
Badiou’s general stance on the matter, especially as conveyed in the 1994–95 
Seminar Lacan: Anti-philosophy 3, could be summarised as follows: Lacan is 
an anti-philosopher, because he sees philosophy as a “pretension of thought 
to dispense with the real.”2 Save for the fact that he is not just like any other 
anti-philosopher, because he “restored and, in a certain sense re-established, 
the category of truth.”3 Save for the fact that he eventually falls back into an an-
ti-philosophical position, because he misses “the being of truths” or, in a com-
plementary fashion, “the truth of the real.”4 Save for the fact that philosophy 
should be relaunched on the basis of these passages and an overcoming of their 
final deadlock, because that is precisely what Badiou’s philosophy does . . .
Let us patiently disentangle Badiou’s line of reasoning. First, like other an-
ti-philosophers, Lacan denounces philosophy’s claim to be a self-sufficient dis-
course or, which is the same, that there is a meta-language—of Being as One.5 
To this avoidance of the real, and in resonance with anti-philosophers such as 
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, he would oppose:
1. A strong “subjective trait” whereby what I say, against philosophy’s pseu-
do-truth as avoidance of the real, is conclusively true. And it is so pre-
2 Alain Badiou, Lacan: Anti-philosophy 3, trans. Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer (New 
York: Columbia University Press, 2018), xxxix.
3 Badiou, 23.
4 Badiou, xl, 148.
5 See Badiou, 138.
27
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
cisely by eclipsing my own self for the sake of the non-self-sufficient dis-
course I serve.6 “I, the truth, speak,” or better, “I, the truth, speaks.”
2. The dimension of the act as necessitated by this saying the truth in van-
ishing, which, as an act, is itself vanishing and can only be apprehended 
retrospectively from the standpoint of its effects.7 The act happens when 
“there emerges a saying that does not always go so far as to be able to ‘ex-
sist’ [meta-linguistically] with respect to what is being said,”8 that is to 
say, a saying that fleetingly carries over with it a truthful un-said attached 
to what is being said.
According to Badiou, Lacan supplements these tenets—already debatable when 
applied to his work—with two additional—and textually far less defensible—leit-
motifs shared by anti-philosophers:
3. The prevalence of the act over the truth it conveys, which unwittingly and 
contradictorily reiterates the—philosophical for the anti-philosopher—
destitution of truth.9 Truth can at best only be half-said. Or also, in the 
act, (half-)saying the truth is favoured to the detriment of (half-)saying 
the truth.10
4. The final change of focus from truth to knowledge, which is in turn made 
possible by the emphasis on the act and reinforces the destitution of 
truth. The psychoanalytic act ultimately resolves itself into a “passing,” 
as transmission, of knowledge.11
Yet, secondly, unlike other anti-philosophers, for Badiou, Lacan positively com-
plicates this otherwise abortive scenario to such a degree that he also ends up 
6 Badiou, 3–4.
7 See Badiou, 5–6.
8 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore, 1972–73, 
trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 22; quoted in Badiou, Lacan, 60; trans-
lation modified.
9 See Badiou, Lacan, 22–23, 144, 7–8.
10 See Badiou, 19–20.
11 See Badiou, 6–7, 23–26.
28
lorenzo chiesa
assuming an “anti-philosophical relation to anti-philosophy itself.”12 This is the 
case insofar as:
1. Despite truth eventually giving way to knowledge, truth remains a “hole 
in knowledge”13 that knowledge can never fill in. More precisely, the ker-
nel of truth is “stripped of all meaning”14—the meaning of knowledge. 
Truth can therefore subtractively be thought as the truth of the mean-
inglessness of knowledge. Knowledge becomes transmissible only on 
these presuppositions. Such a move challenges both Wittgenstein’s and 
Nietzsche’s anti-philosophical subsumption of truth under meaning: for 
the former, meaning as the silent-unsayable sense of the world outclass-
es truth as reduced to an exact linguistic description of existing states of 
affairs; for the latter, meaning as a differential evaluation of vital forces 
exceeds truth as an evaluation of forces carried out by the reactive force.15
2. Despite its prevalence over truth, the act that tears a truthful hole in 
knowledge is an immanent act.16 This means that it has its own place—in 
the practice of psychoanalysis, on and behind the couch . . . —since it has 
already taken place—starting with Freud. The psychoanalytic act ceases 
to be merely programmatic. In not presuming to reveal a meaning, it no 
longer preludes an “ineffable” elsewhere to-come,17 whether in the guise 
of a “mystical element, the silent principle of salvation” (Wittgenstein) or 
of a fateful super-human transvaluation of all values (Nietzsche).18
3. Despite its undeniably subjective dimension, immanently half-saying the 
truth, in the act, does not demonise science. On the contrary, the psycho-
analytic act is “archi-scientific.”19 As Jean-Claude Milner spells it out in 
dialogue with Badiou, this means that what first and foremost matters in 
the psychoanalytic act with regard to modern science is the latter’s math-
12 Badiou, 2–3; emphasis added.
13 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 511.
14 Badiou, Lacan, 95; emphasis added.
15 See Badiou, 74–75.
16 See Badiou, 88.
17 See Badiou, 81, 83, 151.
18 Badiou, 6.
19 Badiou, 2.
29
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
ematisation rather than its experimentations.20 In Lacanese, the only ac-
cess to the real is provided by the matheme and, as Badiou puts it, there 
is a “reciprocity” between the matheme and the non-transcendent act.21 
However, crucially, the matheme is located at a “point of the real” precise-
ly to the extent that this point coincides with an “impasse of the mathe-
matizable”22—which can as such be demonstrated by means of inscrip-
tion/formalisation and thereby initiate the possibility of the transmission 
of knowledge. It is in this specific mathematical sense that the kernel of 
truth is stripped of the meaning of knowledge. At bottom, mathematics 
amounts to a “meaning-less saying” that renews what is being said (or 
known).23 While mathematical (matheme-atical) meaning-less saying 
should not strictly speaking be associated with an “event,” it nonetheless 
indicates an “appearing.”24 Such an appreciative assessment of mathe-
matics diametrically opposes Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s identifica-
tion of it with logic and its subsequent denigration as an alleged guaran-
tee for the consistency of philosophy.25
4. Despite his vehement attacks on philosophy, Lacan’s discrediting of it is 
not “frontal” but “oblique.”26 He very much appreciates that philosophy is 
and has always been inherently split.27 In tension with what Badiou says 
in Being and Event (Lacan would relegate philosophy as a whole to specu-
lative totalisation and hence to the imaginary),28 and pace Heidegger, for 
Lacan, “there is no single history of philosophy’s diversion of thought.”29 
There is bad and good philosophy, even in the specific sense of meta-
physics. Bad philosophy leads us to the One as Being, since it always pre-
supposes that being as such thinks.30 Good philosophy instead treats the 
One as an operation without being—il y a de l’Un, there is something like/
20 See Badiou, 212–14.
21 Badiou, 94, 34.
22 Badiou, 33–34, 95; emphasis added.
23 Badiou, 97.
24 Badiou, 96.
25 See Badiou, 93–94, 30.
26 Badiou, 68; translation modified.
27 See Badiou, 64 (translation modified), 59.
28 See Badiou, Being and Event, 2.
29 Badiou, Lacan, 59.
30 See Badiou, 55, 63, 140.
30
lorenzo chiesa
of the One, but the One is not.31 Good philosophy thus thinks being as a 
multiple without One and “it must be acknowledged that this distinction 
is a Lacanian one”: “Badiou could be said to have developed his ontolo-
gy” on this basis, Badiou admits in passing.32 Lacan’s questioning of phi-
losophy is “totally new” since, while anti-philosophy can obviously not 
do without philosophy as an object of scorn, he alone sees that ever since 
Plato, and in Plato himself, philosophy has itself been an “avant-garde of 
anti-philosophy” against the temptation of the One.33 Here Lacan could 
not be further away from Nietzsche’s ambition to cure humanity of the 
Plato-disease or Wittgenstein’s aspiration to unveil once and for all the 
harmfulness of the senseless propositions of philosophy.34
By relating anti-philosophically to anti-philosophy in various ways, Lacan 
would thus dialectically “close”—a period of—anti-philosophy and “open up” 
something unprecedented for philosophy.35 Or better, I would add, his anti-phil-
osophical relation to anti-philosophy would result into an anti-anti-philosophy, 
a philosophical anti-philosophy that would resume, reinvigorate, and finally 
put at centre-stage an anti-philosophical philosophy (namely a philosophy an-
ti-Being-One) that has for the most part been latent or marginalised in the his-
tory of philosophy.
Still, for Badiou, Lacan somehow clings to anti-philosophy tout-court. What is 
at stake in this third major swerve in Badiou’s overall argument is, again, as a 
purported threshold dividing his project from Lacan’s, a residual yet resilient un-
derestimation and misplacement of truth with respect to the act and knowledge.
In terms of the act’s alleged overshadowing of truth, Badiou could not be more ad-
amant: “The analytic act is anything but a search for truth.”36 Strangely enough, 
the immanence of the act that tears a truthful hole in knowledge and thus access-
es the real, where the latter is for Lacan always translatable into the absence of 
the sexual relationship (in brief, the fact that there is no meaningful measure or 
31 See Badiou, 65.
32 Badiou, 56.
33 Badiou, 57.
34 See Badiou, 21.
35 Badiou, 2–3.
36 Badiou, 144.
31
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
mathematizable ratio between the two sexes; that truth is the not-One of sexual 
incompleteness), would end up installing the act itself as “the real of the real”37—
and hence, we are left to infer, as ultimately transcendent to the real.
Following from this, in terms of knowledge’s supposed replacement of truth, 
what the act as thus understood would instead search for is a “correlation” be-
tween truth and sense/meaning on which to then establish a “connection” be-
tween sense/meaning and knowledge.38 Any “essential” link between knowl-
edge and truth would therefore be ruled out.39 To begin with, sense would be 
extracted out of the absence of the sexual relationship. As dubiously evidenced 
by some phrases from Lacan’s article L’Étourdit, the truth of the non-rapport, 
of the absence of sense (“ab-sense”) of the absence of the sexual relationship 
would be reduced to a “sense as ab-sense,” or “ab-sex sense.”40 Subsequently, 
the mathemes that inscribe such an ab-sex sense could be arranged in a fully 
transmissible knowledge, albeit impersonal as purely formalised. Returning to 
the point we made earlier, where Badiou praised Lacan against the other an-
ti-philosophers, the kernel of truth now turns out to be stripped of the meaning 
of knowledge only at the cost, exorbitant for Badiou, of re-founding knowledge 
on a—however paradoxical—meaning, not on truth.
To sum up, notwithstanding the convolutedness of his argumentative trajectory, 
Badiou’s conclusion on why Lacan would anti-philosophically abide by a desti-
tution of truth is very clear: insofar as “the analytic act consists in a production 
of transmissible knowledge with regard to ab-sex sense,” “truth is [. . .] in a po-
sition of eclipse between supposed knowledge”—as truthfully holed by the act—
“and transmissible knowledge.”41 All in all, the key outcome of the act amounts 
to a registration of sense (as ab-sense),42 for the benefit of both the end of the 
treatment and the knowledge of the psychoanalyst. On the one hand, the math-
37 Badiou, 31–32.
38 Badiou, 79; translation modified.
39 Badiou, 78.
40 Badiou, 76–78, 84. As Badiou puts it even more unequivocally in “Formules de ‘L’Étourdit,’ ” 
“absence of sense positively means ab-sex sense”; the latter would be a “non-negative for-
mula.” Alain Badiou, “Formules de ‘L’Étourdit,’ ” in Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, ll 
n’y a pas de rapport sexuel: Deux leçons sur “L’Étourdit” de Lacan (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 
111–12; emphasis added. All translations of references in French are my own.
41 Badiou, Lacan, 81 (translation modified), 76.
42 Badiou, 77; translation modified.
32
lorenzo chiesa
eme is integrally transmissible; on the other, truth can only be half -said.43 To cut 
a long story short, truth recoils into a predictable function of unveiling-veiling 
and Lacan reverts to Heidegger.44
Adopting the terminology of Being and Event we could thus suggest that, for 
Badiou, while Lacan is one of the few thinkers in the history of philosophy who 
initially thinks truth as a hole in knowledge, he subsequently does not raise this 
thinking to the level of a “generic thought” that sees “the place of truth” (how-
ever unnameable and indiscernible it is in Badiou’s meta-ontology) in “parts” 
of being.45 As seen, unlike in other anti-philosophies, in Lacan, an act that tears 
a truthful hole in knowledge has its—at first sight immanent—place, but the fact 
that the act has indeed taken place “must be confirmed in knowledge,”46 through 
the latter’s transmissibility, not in truth. Juxtaposing Being and Event with the 
Seminar on Lacan, at the risk of some oversimplification, I would suggest that, 
in Lacan, for Badiou, truth does not really have a place—to be—through the act’s 
taking place as attested by knowledge. This would be his quintessential limit. 
To put it even more simply, thinking truth as a hole in knowledge would, again, 
not pave the way for thinking an “essential”47—the words Badiou uses are nev-
er random—link between knowledge and truth, through which a renovation of 
knowledge could not but depend on a truth procedure. Generic thought would 
be occluded by, again, the correlation between truth and sense and the ensuing 
connection between sense and knowledge.
This highly abstract pattern has wider implications for the status of Lacan’s an-
ti-philosophy in general, which can no longer be considered as just having an 
anti-philosophical relation to anti-philosophy itself. It is still a full-blown an-
ti-philosophy, according to Badiou, not an anti-anti-philosophy or philosophi-
cal anti-philosophy. Lacan would definitively be consigned to anti-philosophy, 
despite all the oscillations I described and Badiou hardly manages to keep un-
der control. Another way to phrase the point above about the placeless-ness and 
lack of being of truth from a slightly different perspective is to say that—as Ba-
43 See Badiou, 78.
44 See Badiou, 78–79.
45 Badiou, Being and Event, 510–11. A discussion of indiscernibility and unnameability re-
garding truth is beyond my remit here.
46 Badiou, Lacan, 88.
47 Badiou, 78.
33
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
diou says in his Seminar—in Lacan, there would only be the “triad” truth, real, 
knowledge “which cannot be divided into parts” and as such coalesces exclu-
sively into knowledge.48 In other words, there allegedly would be no knowledge 
of the real, no knowledge of truth, and no truth of the real.49 These pairs instead 
determine the field of philosophy (“good” philosophy, of course): under the ae-
gis of a search for truth, philosophy “assumes that there is a truth of the real” 
and thereby conveys it as a “knowledge of this truth.”50 After all, Lacan’s appar-
ently philosophical anti-philosophy is not philosophy because while the latter 
“claims to arrange a truth of the real as knowledge,”51 for him, there is only a 
“function of the real within knowledge that enables a situation of truth.”52
For a reader unfamiliar with Badiou’s jargon in Being and Event, this could seem 
a minor, almost sophistic, distinction, but it is not. Again, Badiou always choos-
es his words very carefully. To put it simply, a situation of truth is not what truth 
is about, for Badiou. Or also, constraining truth to a situation of truth denotes 
precisely the fact that truth does not really have a place to be—again, there is 
no “being of truths” in Lacan. In more technical terms, a situation of truth con-
fines truth to a presentation of being as “consistent multiplicity,” namely, to the 
“regime of the count-as-one,” namely, to structure (in passing, on the contrary, 
for Badiou, truth will have been—as a, now indiscernible, infinite part of the sit-
uation—the truth of the entire situation, of the being of the situation, following 
a truth procedure).53 All in all, in Lacan, truth has no place to be because it is too 
structurally placed.
We are thus back to square one, or quite literally, ground zero as square One. 
Badiou’s last take on Lacan in the—at first sight largely sympathetic—Seminar 
is the same as and as critical as in his major works: in Lacan truth is simply a 
structural truth, a truth of knowledge (which Lacan constantly and most em-
phatically rejects).54 Unsurprisingly at this stage, according to the Seminar, his 
48 Badiou, 148.
49 See Badiou, 148. See also Badiou, “Formules de ‘L’Étourdit,’ ” 121–22.
50 Badiou, Lacan, 149.
51 Badiou, 144; translation modified.
52 Badiou, 148; translation modified, emphasis added.
53 See Badiou, Being and Event, 522, 525.
54 See, for instance, Jacques Lacan, . . . or Worse, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 
171.
34
lorenzo chiesa
very discernment of a “good” philosophy that subtractively tears a truthful hole 
in the presumed Oneness of Being and concomitantly understands the One as 
an operation without Being—il y a de l’Un—ultimately only serves the identifica-
tion of “the One as an empty place”55—il y a de l’Un—to which being as such is 
wrongly restricted. That is to say, all things considered, for the Seminar, Lacan’s 
il y a de l’Un means nothing other than that there is the void yet truthful sub-
ject, attacked in Being and Event since the subject cannot be reduced to the void 
according to Badiou (and to Lacan), as contained within the “circular closure” 
of structure, castigated in Theory of the Subject, and as such unable to respond 
to the event.56 Lacan’s subtractive ontology is merely an ontology of “dis-be-
ing”57 that contradictorily leads us to the Being of the One as an empty place, 
the Being-One of the empty place, and therefore back to “bad” philosophy, at 
best. Or, at worst and however unintentionally, as Badiou seems to insinuate at 
one point, precisely due to this relapse the “ultimate aim” of Lacan’s seemingly 
non-frontal attack on philosophy is, beyond any kind of dialogue, “to destroy 
[good] philosophy.”58 According to Badiou, and leaving aside his unfailingly re-
spectful tributes to Lacan, he finally stands out as the most effective and in-
tractable anti-philosopher.
I think this final round of twists in Badiou’s reading of Lacan, as eventually fall-
ing back into utter anti-philosophy, is incorrect and can textually be disproved. 
They all fundamentally derive from and revolve around a presumed detection 
of “sense as ab-sense” and then sense as ab-sense—both of which Lacan never 
speaks about—in “ab-sense”—on which he insists.59 In L’Étourdit, Lacan even 
warns the reader not to “force” the “ab-sense”60—in the direction of sense, I 
would add. Lacan does mention, once, “ab-sex sense” (sens-absexe) yet clearly 
55 Badiou, Lacan, 56; emphasis added. Strangely, Badiou does not openly criticise Lacan on 
this point in the Seminar but he vehemently does so in Being and Event: Lacan would thus 
“concede a point of being to the one.” Badiou, Being and Event, 24.
56 See, for instance, Badiou, Being and Event, 432–33; Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 
trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 54. A detailed unravelling of why Badiou 
is mistaken on this series of points, and why Lacan’s stance on them is far more similar to 
Badiou’s than Badiou acknowledges, is one of the leitmotifs of my current project.
57 Badiou, Lacan, 55.
58 Badiou, 149.
59 Jacques Lacan, “L’Étourdit,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 
452, 458–59, 463, 469, 477.
60 Lacan, 463.
35
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
refers it to a “swelling,” an abscess of the “ab-sense [that] designates sex,”61 or, 
in other words, and moving quickly, to the (phylo- and ontogenetic) emergence 
of the phallic function as a transcendental species-specific invariant which in-
deed produces sense/meaning by “warding off the absence of the sexual rela-
tionship.”62 But there is here absolutely no “correlation” whatsoever between 
truth and sense, no sense of the absence of the sexual relationship. The absence 
of the sexual relationship remains an unredeemable ab-sense. A fortiori, the 
phallic function’s production of (imaginary and always precariously patched-
up) sense has nothing or very little to do with the question concerning the trans-
missibility of knowledge following an act that tears a truthful hole in knowl-
edge, which instead aims at, at least transiently, draining the abscess of every-
day sense in a formalised fashion.
More in general, and from a slightly different angle, Badiou’s basic mistake with 
“ab-sex sense” is to assume (like other, even refined, commentators do) that, in 
Lacan, “there is no sexual relationship”—which for Lacan is—can be reversed 
into and domesticated as “the sexual non-relationship is”—which for Lacan is 
not really, for all the pertinent meta-ontological reasons adduced by Badiou 
himself.63 Including in the Seminar, which otherwise excels in exegetical acu-
men, when taking some distance from Lacan becomes mandatory, Badiou thus 
fabricates a threshold that can be upheld only through very selected, decontex-
tualised, and often extremely circumstantial statements made by Lacan, which 
are altogether coerced from him.
Furthermore, the fabricated threshold also receives and inconsistent treatment 
across Badiou’s works. This already begins to transpire by comparing the Sem-
inar with Being and the Event. While the former ends up embracing the latter’s 
condemnation, whereby in the end it is entirely up to Badiou to rejuvenate phi-
losophy through Lacan yet against Lacan (Badiou’s final change of course), it 
does so only after adopting a much more appreciating stance towards Lacan and 
thus—temporarily—moving the threshold. To recapitulate, in Badiou’s Seminar, 
61 Lacan, 452.
62 Lacan, 458.
63 Although Lacan is at times very ambiguous on this in his late and latest Seminars, after a 
renewed and closer scrutiny of them, I here retract my previous claim that, after Seminar 
XX, he would privilege “there is a nonrelationship.” Lorenzo Chiesa, The Not-Two: Logic 
and God in Lacan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), xx.
36
lorenzo chiesa
for Lacan, philosophy is inherently split, namely, not wholly devoted to the Be-
ing of the One; Lacan’s anti-philosophy can relate anti-philosophically to an-
ti-philosophy itself; and, thanks to Lacan, this at least potentially philosophical 
character of anti-philosophy, mirrored by a positively anti-philosophical char-
acter of philosophy, opens something new for philosophy—thanks to Badiou.
Lacan the Philosopher: The Torsion of Anti-Philosophy
In opposition to Badiou, we can initiate a dismantling of his threshold as set up 
in the Seminar precisely by means of the notions he uses to erect it in the same 
work. According to Lacan, most definitely, there is a knowledge of the real; there 
is a knowledge of truth; and, albeit in a more complex manner, there is also a 
truth of the real. The sources speak for themselves. I will here only outline these 
three issues.
1. Modern science is a knowledge of the real: “There is a knowledge in the 
real. [. . .] [It is] the scientist who has to accommodate it.”64
Science seizes or at least “bites” the real.65 In suspending the alleged corre-
spondence between thinking and what is being thought, and hence the fantasy 
of a Oneness of being, the real remains a meaningless impasse of formalisation 
that, however, as such promotes further formalisations (knowledge). Although 
scientific knowledge inherently tends to reduce these formalisations to the level 
of meaning, its tangible—technological—effectiveness necessarily rests on re-
peated encounters with the meaningless real. Since his early Seminars Lacan in-
sists on how the real should not only be located “at the limits of our experience” 
for it is precisely as an impasse of formalisation that it “involves in itself any 
possibility of effect.”66 Through scientific knowledge the real as what “does not 
work”67 in everyday reality also becomes what is eminently effective and actual 
64 Jacques Lacan, “Lettre de Jacques Lacan à trois psychanalystes italiens,” Spirales 9 (1981): 
60. I acknowledge that this is not exactly the same as a “knowledge of the real,” but I think 
the two phrases can quite easily be reconciled via Lacan’s treatment of science. I will ad-
dress this in the near future.
65 Jacques Lacan, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971 (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 43.
66 Jacques Lacan, La relation d’objet, 1956–1957 (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 31.
67 Jacques Lacan, “The Triumph of Religion,” in The Triumph of Religion, Preceded by 
Discourse to Catholics, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 61.
37
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
in it. Through scientific knowledge the real is in Wirklichkeit, namely—playing 
along Lacan on the polysemy of the German phrase—it “really” is as an “in fact” 
only insofar as it is “in effect.”68
2. Psychoanalysis is a knowledge of truth: “If analysis rests on a presump-
tion, it is that knowledge of truth can be constituted on the basis of its 
experience.”69
Lacan indeed inscribes this savoir sur la vérité in his matrix of the discourse of 
the psychoanalyst as a knowledge in the position of truth.70 Revolving around 
the absence of the sexual relationship, the psychoanalytic knowledge of truth 
should diametrically be opposed to any “truth of knowledge” (vérité sur le savoir) 
as a final truth, including and most insidiously the truth about (the knowledge 
of) truth we might be tempted to derive in extremis from the very absence of the 
sexual relationship—whereupon the absence of the sexual relationship turns 
into the sexual non-relationship as One. The knowledge of truth is thus strictly 
connected with the Il y a de l’Un, or better Yad’lun, Lacan says, as a mere opera-
tion “. . . and nothing more” that refutes the Oneness of being (“The knowledge 
of truth is articulated from the tip of what I advance [. . .] about Yad’lun. [. . .] It’s 
an altogether particular One [. . .] and it’s an abyss”).71 For the same reason, the 
knowledge of truth is equally a development on and a rectification of science as 
a knowledge of the real that ultimately does not want to know what it already 
knows about the real. What both science and psychoanalysis know of the real 
“cannot but be attained by demonstrating that the real is that which does not 
have any kind of meaning.”72 But, on the one hand, the productivity of scientific 
68 “When one speaks of the real, one may intend several things. It is a question first of the set 
of what effectively happens. That is the concept implied by the German term Wirklichkeit, 
which has the advantage of distinguishing in reality a function which the French language 
does not easily allow us to isolate. It is what implies in and of itself every possibility of ef-
fect, of Wirkung.” Lacan, La relation d’objet, 31.
69 Lacan, Encore, 91; translation modified.
70 It is very strange that Badiou ignores this basic and well-known, even often abused, 
Lacanian mantra, which is moreover contemporary to L’Étourdit and pervasive in Lacan’s 
work of the early 1970s. “The Knowledge of Truth” also features as one of the titles appro-
priately given by Miller to one of the sessions of Seminar XIX.
71 Jacques Lacan, . . . or Worse, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 171; translation 
modified.
72 Jacques Lacan, “De James Joyce comme symptôme,” Le croquant 28 (November 2000).
38
lorenzo chiesa
knowledge, its promotion of new formalisations starting from the formalisation 
of a previous impasse of formalisation antinomically advances hand in hand 
with a presumed accumulation of meaning (ideally aimed at absolute knowl-
edge). Science embraces sense as ab-sense, which is now blatantly epitomised 
by chaosmotic yet all the more totalising paradigms of the universe. On the oth-
er hand, psychoanalysis’s knowledge of truth—as a specification of the knowl-
edge of the real indebted to modern science—deliberately dwells on the very lev-
el of the formalisation of the impasse of formalisation. What the knowledge of 
truth aims at actively transmitting is the irreducibility of ab-sense as such. This 
basically amounts to Lacan’s so-called formulas of sexuation, namely, a math-
eme-atical formalisation of how the phallic function functions only against the 
background of the enduring truth of the absence of the sexual relationship73—
there is no other knowledge of the psychoanalyst outside of the formulas that is 
not a supposition of knowledge. The formulas are then in turn singularised by 
each analysand at the end of the treatment (terminable analysis as, so to speak, 
pre- or proto-procedural) who thereby sustains a truth-procedure in Badiou’s 
specific sense of the term (interminable analysis as the field of a discourse of 
psychoanalysis, initiated by Freud, that surpasses that of the psychoanalyst and 
the psychoanalytic clinic).
3. The psychoanalytic subject, the subject of science betrayed by science as 
far from contained by and even less so identifiable with a structural void, 
embodies the truth of the real.
This is a subtle and difficult point. For Lacan, “there is no truth of the real, since 
the real is delineated as ruling out meaning. This is already saying too much be-
cause to say this one nonetheless supposes a meaning”74—which is another way 
of saying that truth can only be half-said. Yet, without contradiction and very 
explicitly, “there are truths that are of the order of the real.”75 On the one hand, 
there is no ultimate Truth of the real. If, in a certain sense, the truth of the real 
is quite plainly that the real of the ab-sense of the sexual relationship is what 
73 For an in-depth reading of this, see Chiesa, Not-Two, especially chap. 4.
74 Jacques Lacan, “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile a mourre: Séminaire 24, 1976–1977” 
(unpublished typescript, March 15, 1977), PDF document.
75 Jacques Lacan, “Conférences et Entretiens dans des universités nord-américaines,” Scilicet 
6/7 (1975): 35.
39
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
remains meaningless,76 then one can turn this into the Truth only by downgrad-
ing truth to a final meaning of meaninglessness—or, again, by misunderstand-
ing the not-One of “there is no sexual relationship” with the One (not-One) of 
“the sexual non-relationship is,” like Badiou does with his sense as ab-sense. 
On the other hand, according to Lacan, it is not just that, famously, “the truth 
holds onto the real,”77 precisely because of the impossibility of saying it all, of 
only being able to half-say it by always meaningfully saying too much of it, but 
that, less famously, this logical impossibility, which cannot be separated from 
the impossibility given as the ab-sense of the sexual relationship, stands as the 
starting point of a subjectivized truth of the real.
It is not enough to simply claim that the real is the impossible and hence truth 
can only be half-said. In order to really “introduce” the real as the impossible in 
the world, the subject of psychoanalysis needs to supplement this mere “enun-
ciation” with “the most extreme tightening of saying,” namely, formalisation.78 
In other words, following the same temporality we have seen at work in science 
as a knowledge of the real that nonetheless avoids its truth, the real as cause—
and as such always relatable to the ab-sense of the sexual relationship—retro-
actively becomes such when it passes through the subject’s formalising the real 
as the impossible. Conversely, it is only on this level, where the subject formalis-
es the real as the impossible, that the subject really becomes a subject. At least 
initially, this formalisation first and foremost cannot but have to do with the 
subject’s formalisation at the end of analysis of how the ab-sense of the sexual 
relationship will have at that moment caused him/her (his/her sexuation) in a 
singular way. Lacan indeed speaks of truths of the real in the plural.
Anticipating Badiou’s own distinction between the human animal and the sub-
ject in the strict sense of the term, as a subject-to-truth, Lacan thus insists on the 
fact that, however much the “being that speaks” is an “effect of language”—or 
a void subtractively effected by the structural recurrence of anguage—“this pa-
thos does not make, by itself, a subject.”79 Not coincidentally, in the same con-
76 See Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 97.
77 Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. Denis 
Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: W. W. Norton, 
1990), 3.
78 Jacques Lacan, D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969 (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 66.
79 Lacan, D’un Autre, 67, 160, 66.
40
lorenzo chiesa
text, in Seminar XVI, Lacan speaks of “the event of discourse,”80 which here I 
am tempted to provisionally conceive of in terms of the subject’s retrospective 
entrance into analysis.
Lacan also contends that while truth, the truth of the real I would add, can still 
generally be considered with regard to the subject that actively embodies it as 
just a designation within saying of what cannot be said, as something lacking 
that merely “insinuates itself” (as what cannot be said in “truth can only be 
half-said”), thanks to formalisation, it can equally “be inscribed in a perfect-
ly calculated manner.”81 Against Badiou, in Lacan there is not only a symbol-
ic truth that always speaks the truth of structure—on close inspection always 
eventually in the guise of a totalising imaginary fiction as a by-product of the 
very fact that truth can only be half-said. Quite bluntly, “if I distinguish real, 
symbolic, and imaginary, it is clearly the case that there are real, symbolic, and 
imaginary truths.”82
If these three overlapping points hold, and I think they do—based on textual ev-
idence it is far easier to uphold them and unfold them than to refute them—then 
Lacan has a philosophy according to Badiou’s own standards.
In short, as we saw, for Badiou philosophy needs to assume a knowledge of the 
real, a knowledge of truth, and a truth of the real and thereby “arrange a truth of 
the real as knowledge,” that is, as a “knowledge of this truth.” In summarising 
what I have just covered, at the very minimum we can advance that Lacan as-
sumes scientific knowledge as knowledge of the real, psychoanalytic knowledge 
as knowledge of truth, and the ab-sense of the sexual relationship as truth of the 
real and thereby arranges the latter as a formalised knowledge of this truth as 
embodied into a subject-to-truth. Or also, assuming that my reading is correct, 
Lacan does not constrict the real to a “function of the real within knowledge that 
enables a situation of truth,” namely, he does not situate the ab-sense of the sex-
ual relationship precisely because, on the contrary, its inscription turns knowl-
edge into a function of knowledge within the real.
80 Lacan, 83.
81 Lacan, 67.
82 Lacan, “Conférences et Entretiens,” 35.
41
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
With respect to Badiou’s Being and Event, very roughly speaking, we are here 
already at the level of what he calls a post-evental “enquiry” as opposed to an 
“encyclopaedia of a situation.”83 Like for Badiou, the huge and open question 
for Lacan is then, of course: What is the status of—newly nascent—knowledge 
within a truth-procedure? And, in my view, this is a question Badiou himself 
never fully answers.
Another contiguous way to exegetically challenge Badiou’s anti-Lacanian 
threshold as expressed in his Seminar is to question his claim that, in Lacan, 
the act overshadows truth, ultimately for the sake of the connection knowl-
edge-meaning. Albeit perhaps less conclusively, on this front the sources seem 
again to contradict Badiou (recall that, for Badiou, “the analytical act is any-
thing but a search for truth” because “an apparatus of transmissible knowl-
edge must exist for the act to be confirmed”).84 For instance, in Seminar XV, 
devoted to the act as primarily the psychoanalyst’s act—of subtracting himself 
from the position of subject-supposed-to-know—Lacan states that “in order to 
introduce what constitutes the psychoanalytic act as such,” in psychoanalysis, 
on the side of the analysand, “there is only that which resists the operation of 
knowledge-making-a-subject, namely, this residue we call truth.”85 Truth has 
chrono-logical precedence over the act. I acknowledge that, with some twist-
ing, this could still be accommodated by Badiou’s interpretative framework. 
But Lacan then goes on to specify that, far more importantly, “the evocation of 
truth” as residual at play at the end of (the analysand’s) analysis does not stop 
there: it continues as an “effect of loss”—synonymous with a “point of being” 
unconfinable to a mere unicum of dis-being—“beyond the operation [of] the an-
alytic act.”86 To cut a long story short, it continues through the analysand now 
turned into an analyst; it continues each time this analyst acts at the end of the 
analysis of another will-be analyst; and hence it continues both with regard to 
this analyst and the will-be analyst. Here truth clearly overshadows the act, in 
spite of its strict entwinement with it. In other words, quite explicitly, there are 
truthful “stumbling block[s]” (achoppement) “beyond an act supposed to put an 
83 See Badiou, Being and Event, especially 234–36, 328–38, 394–96, 406–9, 499, 506, 510, 513.
84 Badiou, Lacan, 164–65.
85 Jacques Lacan, “L’acte psychanalytique: Séminaire 15, 1967–1968” (unpublished type-
script, November 29, 1967), PDF document.
86 Lacan, “L’acte psychanalytique,” December 6, 1967.
42
lorenzo chiesa
end” (faire fin).87 Most crucially, I would add, these constructive achoppements 
need to be thought procedurally, not in isolation, as following the pre- or pro-
to-procedural—yet post-evental—course of the treatment.
Here I will leave this complex and thus far unexplored set of issues aside. Let us 
instead dwell on the fact that Lacan’s thought would appear to comply with Ba-
diou’s definition of philosophy and draw some broad conclusions out of it. After 
all, what does this tell us about his use of Lacan as an anti-philosopher and the 
alleged distinction between philosophy and anti-philosophy at large?
1. Lacan’s philosophical anti-philosophy and the tradition of anti-philo-
sophical philosophy in general are one and the same.
That is, Lacan’s anti-anti-philosophy, his assumption of an anti-philosophical 
stance on anti-philosophy itself—because the latter makes the same mistakes it 
criticises in what it considers as philosophy, namely, it ends up proposing itself 
as a self-sufficient discourse—corresponds to anti-philosophical philosophy’s 
internal critique of any philosophy that presupposes and leads us to the One as 
Being.
2. Anti-philosophical philosophy, including Lacan’s, amounts to just (good) 
philosophy tout-court, anti-Being-One philosophy, as understood by 
Badiou.
3.  Badiou’s own philosophy is as philosophical and as anti-philosophical as 
Lacan’s.
Obviously, Badiou’s philosophy vividly portrays itself as an insurrection against 
the philosophy of the One as Being. His very Manifesto for Philosophy cannot be 
separated from a call against philosophy.
More interestingly, note that even if we were to agree with Badiou that Lacan 
remains at bottom an anti-philosopher and even a “destroyer” of philosophy by 
Badiou’s standards of philosophy, this would paradoxically turn Badiou’s de-
nunciation of Lacan as an anti-philosopher into a supremely anti -philosophical 
87 Lacan, December 6, 1967.
43
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
operation by the standards of anti-philosophy (as understood by Badiou). 
Lacan’s eventual relapse into the One as Being—the Being-One of the empty 
place obtained via the subject as void—would need to be opposed by a critique 
of the spurious self-sufficiency of Lacan’s discourse. Not only is Badiou’s philos-
ophy in a sense anti-philosophical insofar as it counters the philosophy of the 
One as Being, but also and especially, given that the future of philosophy must 
pass through Lacan,88 it is such exclusively by means of an anti-philosophical 
denunciation of Lacan as, in the end, a bad philosopher. Badiou’s philosophical 
denunciation of Lacan as an anti-philosopher cannot do without positing Lacan 
as a (bad) philosopher and Badiou as a (good) anti-philosopher.
4. Perhaps Badiou’s very notion of anti-philosophy is tautological and con-
tradictory—even when applied to anti-philosophies preceding Lacan’s.
It is tautological because it seems to merely duplicate the distinction be-
tween “good” and “bad” philosophy. It is contradictory because both “good” 
and “bad” philosophy can be anti-philosophical. Perhaps there is instead just 
“good” (anti-Being-One) philosophy and “bad” (pro-Being-One) philosophy—
with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, the allegedly opposite epitomes of twentieth 
century philosophy, ultimately sucked into “bad” philosophy, as Badiou would 
fully concur. Or, perhaps, in a less dichotomic way, there structurally is “good” 
and “bad” philosophy in every philosophy worthy of this name. And, perhaps, 
as we will soon see, this is Lacan’s final word about philosophy as such.
5. At the very least, Badiou’s supposed philosophical “torsion” of the an-
ti-philosophical schema,89 built upon Lacan’s own (anti-)philosophical 
torsion of previous anti-philosophy, becomes redundant, for Lacan al-
ready accomplishes it.
Rather, Badiou operates within the outcomes of Lacan’s torsion and systemati-
cally elaborates on them beyond Lacan.
In addition, regarding this last matter, it also remains unclear to me how, on 
close inspection, Badiou himself precisely conceives of what the required phil-
88 See, for instance, Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 
2008), 129.
89 Badiou, “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan,” in Conditions, 246.
44
lorenzo chiesa
osophical torsion applies to and who or what carries it out. Is it Badiou’s phi-
losophy with respect to Lacan’s psychoanalysis as an anti-philosophy, a philos-
ophy that would be needed notwithstanding Lacan’s necessary but insufficient 
previous torsion of previous anti-philosophy, as suggested in the Seminar? Or, 
more sympathetically towards Lacan, is it Lacan’s psychoanalysis with respect 
to philosophy tout-court, and not anti-philosophy, yet only by means of philos-
ophy itself, as instead evinced in “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan” (a hypoth-
esis I would favour)? Or is it again Badiou’s philosophy but now with respect to 
what a torsioned philosophy can do with itself only with respect to what Lacan 
does with philosophy, as also arguably insinuated in “Anti-Philosophy: Plato 
and Lacan” (a hypothesis I am far from disdaining as I fully appreciate the bril-
liance of Badiou’s appropriation of psychoanalysis, until it relegates Lacan to 
anti-philosophy)?
In Theory of the Subject, where the notion of torsion features prominently, it 
loosely indicates “the way in which a subject works upon the structure that de-
termines it in the first place.”90 In Being and Event, in which “torsion” occurs 
very rarely, we are nonetheless accordingly told that a truth, a subject-to-truth, 
is a “torsion of being [. . .] within the perpetually total web of knowledges.”91 Ev-
idently, all this lies at the core of Badiou’s relaunching of philosophy. To brutal-
ly simplify, and skipping several logical passages, a torsion is nothing less than 
what philosophy in the strict sense of the term thinks, as a meta-ontology of the 
subject-to-truth (in the same paragraph, Badiou indeed specifies that mathe-
matical ontology only “sets off” the thinking of the torsion).92 But what happens 
to this complex yet linear scenario when the distinction philosophy/anti-philos-
ophy is in turn understood as a torsion, a torsion whereupon philosophy proper 
begins to think the torsion, the subject-to-truth?
I think Badiou provides us with conflictual answers to this question when deal-
ing with Lacan. I also think this is primarily due to his a priori intention to pre-
serve a threshold that would contain Lacan, separate him from Badiou’s project 
90 Bruno Bosteels, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Badiou, Theory of the Subject, xxxvi.
91 Badiou, Being and Event, 18.
92 Badiou, 18.
45
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
(“I agree almost entirely . . . Except that”),93 and instead proves increasingly 
fragile.
In a first sense, as discussed in the Seminar, the torsion concerns Lacan’s “an-
ti-philosophical relationship to anti-philosophy itself,”94 namely, what makes 
him differ from other anti-philosophers, namely, the fact that he does not sub-
scribe to their subsumption of truth under meaning and, concomitantly, their 
positioning of the act as transcendent to truth and thus open to an ineffable 
meaning. But, as we saw, Lacan would then mutatis mutandis fall into the same 
anti-philosophical trap. Hence, the torsion ultimately concerns Badiou’s rectifi-
cation of Lacan’s mistakes.
However, in a second sense, as treated in the very dense conclusion of “Anti-Phi-
losophy: Plato and Lacan,” the needed torsion has unexpectedly to do with 
Lacan’s anti-philosophical relation to philosophy itself. Moreover, this is the 
case not simply in terms of some (good) philosophy constituting “an avant-gar-
de of [good] anti-philosophy,”95 as per Lacan’s maxim “Plato was [already] Laca-
nian”96—which in Badiou’s Seminar could itself be taken as a sort of torsion—
but also, and on the contrary, in terms of philosophy “continuing [Lacanian psy-
cho-]analysis or fulfilling it.”97 If we wish to be exegetically pedantic, it is actu-
ally only here that Badiou explicitly uses the phrase “torsion of the anti-philo-
sophical schema.”98 Let us look into such a juncture more closely.
In “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan,” and especially in its conclusion, like in 
the Seminar, Badiou spells out the “duplicity” of Lacan’s stance on philosophy, 
that is, his acknowledgement of philosophy’s internally split status, now con-
densed by Plato himself. On the one hand, for Lacan, Plato’s theory of ideas 
would be a botched attempt at mastering “real being [. . .] at the level [. . .] of 
knowledge” (bad, pro-Being-One philosophy).99 On the other hand, “Lacan is 
well aware that [. . .] Plato’s One fragments itself,” “is [. . .] incompatible with 
93 Badiou, Lacan, xl.
94 Badiou, 2.
95 Badiou, 57.
96 See Badiou, “Plato and Lacan,” 236, and Lacan, . . . or Worse, 113.
97 Badiou, “Plato and Lacan,” 246; translation modified, emphasis added.
98 Badiou, 246.
99 Badiou, 241; translation modified.
46
lorenzo chiesa
being,” and there is an “affinity with regard to [Plato’s and Lacan’s] doctrine of 
the One” (good, anti-Being-One philosophy).100 Yet, unlike in the Seminar, for 
Badiou, the next step in such an alignment of (Plato’s) philosophy and (Lacan’s) 
anti-philosophy, which would accomplish the philosophical torsion of the an-
ti-philosophical schema, is to follow Lacan in his exhortation to “push the [psy-
cho-]analytic intervention” into Plato’s dialogues—and by extension philoso-
phy at large. In other words, the task of the contemporary philosopher would 
not only be to work through Lacan’s anti-philosophy, singling out its fallbacks, 
and restarting from there, but also—or even instead—to reread and develop in-
tra-philosophically the great history of philosophy with a, so to speak, Lacan-
ian eye, regardless of Lacan’s anti-philosophy. Lacan’s (anti-)philosophical tor-
sion of philosophy is a precondition for the philosophical future of philosophy, 
whereby Lacanian philosophy continues and fulfils psychoanalysis (although 
Badiou does not explain what this fulfilment would amount to). In passing, Ba-
diou goes even as far as stating that, in this context, “Lacan identifies himself 
with [. . .] the very site of the philosopher.”101
The further specification—which is not as such in tension with the previous 
point while it reinforces the tension with the Seminar—is that, in the last two 
paragraphs of “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan,” Lacan’s torsion of philos-
ophy to be continued and fulfilled by Lacanian philosophy becomes Badiou’s 
own Lacanian torsion of philosophy. Badiou appoints himself in charge of push-
ing Lacan into philosophy. The language he adopts, which amalgamates his jar-
gon from Being and Event with Lacan’s from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans-
parently reflects it: the mission at stake relies on “a sole imperative [. . .]. En-
deavour to abide by the point where at least one truth proceeds. You will emerge 
there as this subject of which this truth is the stuff of being.”102 Beyond the pro-
grammatic imperative to which “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan” limits itself, 
for me, Being and Event conclusively proves that the psychoanalytic/(anti-)phil-
osophical Trojan horse Lacan drove into the philosophical city is by now, with 
Badiou, already in the process of capturing it. Being and Event stands out as a 
chef d’oeuvre of Lacanian philosophy.
100 Badiou. 235–36; translation modified.
101 Badiou, 239; translation modified.
102 Badiou, 247; translation modified.
47
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
Still, in a final twist—in tension with what Badiou has in my view been delineat-
ing so far in this conclusion and more in tune with the Seminar’s line of reason-
ing—the “crossing in torsion” between anti-philosophy and philosophy would 
not give rise to a “unity of plane” between the two.103 However much we could 
try to account for this twist topologically, its analogical message is adamant: for 
Badiou, the torsion still maintains a negative threshold between Lacan and Ba-
diou. For me, the torsion thus gratuitously remains a dividing line and does not 
do justice to Lacan.
Good and Bad Philosophy, Lacanian-Style
Returning to our main conclusion that Lacan has a philosophy (even by Badi-
ou’s own standards) and further, I’d be tempted to seriously add, that if “Plato 
was already Lacanian,” then Lacan was already Badiousian just as much as Ba-
diou is still Lacanian, we should tackle an apparently naïve but instead by all 
means crucial rejoinder: Does Lacan not proudly and insistently present himself 
as an anti-philosopher? In spite of his frequent pedagogical and critical—ped-
agogical as critical—recourse to the great names in the history of philosophy 
(Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, first of all), does he not neatly demarcate his 
psychoanalytic discourse from that of philosophy? The quick answer is: Not re-
ally—and Badiou correctly senses it, but only in part . . . As a preamble, consider 
for instance the following, apparently innocuous, statement from Seminar X, 
arguably one of Lacan’s less theoretical and more clinical Seminars:
One segment of psychoanalysis, the one that’s being pursued here, has a more 
philosophical character than any of the others [. . .]. It’s not my fault, as one says, 
that psychoanalysis puts into question, on the theoretical plane, the desire to 
know [. . .]. This would justify in and of itself the questioning that lends a certain 
philosophical nuance to our discourse.104
Undoubtedly, Lacan s’insurge against philosophy, violently if not offensively, 
and this remains a constant throughout his oeuvre. His psychoanalysis is in 
103 Badiou, 246.
104 Jacques Lacan, Anxiety, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 55; translation modi-
fied.
48
lorenzo chiesa
“rupture” instead than “in continuity” with philosophical interrogations.105 He 
cannot see why he “would classify [himself] philosophically” since psychoan-
alytic discourse “is not philosophical discourse.”106 Quite conclusively: “I am 
not at all a philosopher”; “I do not do any philosophy, on the contrary, I avoid 
it like the plague”; “I abhor philosophy.”107 Philosophers are “people who are 
very much behind,”108 even retarded, and there is more to be learnt from Pres-
ident Judge Schreber’s memoirs of his psychosis than in philosophical texts.109 
In short, the reason for such an abhorrence of philosophy and its identification 
with uninstructive mental illness lies in the fact that “there is only one kind of 
philosophy and it is always theological,” namely devoted to the Being-One.110 
Yet, at the same time—and not without numerous lexical contradictions—es-
pecially in his later and latest works Lacan also goes as far as understanding 
his psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis tout-court, as containing a full-fledged 
philosophy, and not just as assuming a “philosophical nuance” or “character”: 
“What I am doing here is philosophy. [. . .] It’s a philosophy that I have han-
dled the best way I could following the current that results from Freud’s phi-
losophy.”111 Not only that, but, apologising for his “complacency,” Lacan states 
that his Freudo-Lacanian philosophy “is nothing less than the first philosophy 
that seems to me to be standing on its feet.”112 In the same context, squaring the 
dialectical circle with mental illness, or better, menacingly re-opening the circle 
itself, Lacan presents his philosophie—that finally stands on its feet—as a “foli-
esophie,” namely, a “fool-osophy.”113
105 Jacques Lacan, “R.S.I.: Séminaire 22, 1974–1975” (unpublished typescript, February 18, 
1975), PDF document. See also Lacan, Encore, 11.
106 Lacan, . . . or Worse, 98.
107 Jacques Lacan, “Conférence de presse du docteur Jacques Lacan,” Lettres de l’École 
freudienne 16 (1975): 26; Jacques Lacan, “Freud per sempre. Intervista con Jacques Lacan,” 
interview by Emilia Granzotto, Panorama, November 21, 1974.
108 Jacques Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at Sainte-
Anne Hospital, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 39; translation modified.
109 See Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, 1955–1956, trans. Russell Grigg (Abingdon: Routledge, 
1993), 55. The Staferla version of this passage is far more explicit on this point.
110 Jacques Lacan, “Réponses de Jacques Lacan à  des questions sur les noeuds et 
l’inconscient,” Lettres de l’École freudienne 21 (1977): 473.
111 Jacques Lacan, “Le moment de conclure: Séminaire 25, 1977–1978” (unpublished type-
script, December 20, 1977), PDF document.
112 Lacan, Sinthome, 125; translation modified.
113 Lacan, 108; translation modified. Adrian Johnston has incisively commented on some of 
these passages in “This Philosophy Which Is Not One: Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou, 
49
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
Let us address these vertiginous oscillations step by step. Lacan’s hostility to-
wards philosophy indeed revolves around what, paraphrasing Badiou, we could 
refer to as its compulsive tendency towards imaginary totalisation. In this re-
gard, Lacan continues and reinforces Freud’s antipathy for philosophy. For 
Freud, philosophy “cling[s] to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the 
universe which is without gaps and is coherent”; specifically, in this way, even 
“the philosophy of today has retained some essential features of the animistic 
mode of thought—the overvaluation of the magic of words and the belief that the 
real events in the world take the course which our thinking seeks to impose on 
them.”114 Unlike psychoanalysis, philosophy thus at bottom cannot be separated 
from a religious Weltanschauung, in the sense that the latter “leaves no question 
unanswered and [. . .] everything that interests us finds its fixed place.”115
Here Lacan develops Freud’s critique of philosophical animism ontologically, 
epistemologically, historically, and even biologically. In brief—summarising a 
series of complex issues I have detailed elsewhere116—ontologically, philosophy 
believes that the real events in the world follow our thinking in the sense that 
it assumes a correspondence between thought and what is being thought—the 
“world” in Freud’s parlance. That is to say, ever since Parmenides, in differ-
ent guises, “being is presumed to think”; “what is thought of is in the image of 
thought, in other words, [. . .] being thinks.”117 What is more, philosophy thereby 
“speaks of ontology as if being [as such] held together all alone”—as Being-One, 
as onto-toto-logy.118
Epistemologically, according to Lacan, philosophy does indeed overvalue 
words—what Freud also called “omnipotence of thought”—in the sense that 
it does not realise that “language proves to be a field much vaster [. . .] than 
and Lacanian Antiphilosophy,” in “Jean-Claude Milner,” ed. Justin Clemens and Sigi 
Jöttkandt, special issue, S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 3 (Spring 
2010): 137–58.
114 Sigmund Freud, “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” in The Standard Edition of the 
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 
2001), 22:160, 165–66.
115 Freud, 158.
116 Especially in Chiesa, Not-Two, chap. 2.
117 Lacan, Encore, 114, 105.
118 Lacan, “De James Joyce.”
50
lorenzo chiesa
[. . .] the field in which philosophical discourse has inscribed itself.”119 That is 
to say, purporting itself as a discourse about discourse as such, philosophical 
discourse rests instead on its obliviousness of the fact that discourse, any dis-
course for that matter, amounts only to a semblance, a precarious stabilisation 
of language as an incomplete and overall entropic structure. This institutes, on 
top of the fantasy of a being that is presumed to think, that of a subject who is 
supposed to know. The “false position” of philosophy, its basic epistemological 
mistake, is “to define the conditions of possibility of a subject in the face of [a] 
knowledge that can be accumulated.”120 Instead of conceiving of the subject as 
an effect of structure that thereby dialectically gives rise to discourse and an im-
personal discursive knowledge, philosophy thus treats the subject as a “super-
imposed ornament, a joker convenient to the theoretical game.”121 Ultimately, 
the game at stake cannot but converge on the “God of philosophers,” an Other in 
whom absolute being and absolute knowledge equate and who externally guar-
antees the truth of knowledge.122
Historically—resuming yet also problematising the linear chronology with 
which Freud sequenced the discourses of religion, philosophy, science, and 
psychoanalysis (in this order) as an increasing albeit hesitant distancing from 
the animism of any Weltanschauung—for Lacan, philosophical discourse “in-
scribes itself [. . .] in the discourse of the master.”123 This does not only mean 
that, in arousing the master’s desire to know, philosophy enabled the theft of 
the slave’s knowledge and its transformation into the master’s knowledge.124 It 
also and more disturbingly entails that the philosophical subject supposed to 
know, coalescing into a “tyranny of knowledge” starting from early modernity, 
is directly responsible for the contemporary emergence of “the most absolute 
masters.”125 The onto-epistemologically based “I-cracy” of the subject supposed 
to know now determines the very conditions of possibility for the politics of the 
119 Lacan, Encore, 30; translation modified and expanded following the Staferla version.
120 Jacques Lacan, “Les problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse: Séminaire 12, 1964–1965” 
(unpublished typescript, June 16, 1965), PDF document.
121 Juan-David Nasio in Jacques Lacan, “La topologie et le temps: Séminaire 26, 1978–1979” 
(unpublished typescript, May 15, 1979), PDF document.
122 See Lacan, D’un Autre à l’autre, 102.
123 Lacan, “L’Étourdit,” 453.
124 Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. 
Norton, 2007), 20–24.
125 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 32; Lacan, D’un Autre à l’autre, 396.
51
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
capitalist as a modern master engaged in a “curious copulation” with science.126 
The only master psychoanalysis actually ever confronts is the capitalist master 
as derived from philosophical-university discourse.
Biologically, Lacan anchors the kernel of philosophy’s delusion, its belief in the 
m’être—in being the master (maître) of myself, in being-me-to-myself (m’être à 
moi-même), and, by extension, in mastering the uni-verse as One127—to what 
Freud referred to as “helplessness,” which he deemed to lie at the phylogenetic 
and ontogenetic origins of our propensity to create Weltanschauungen.128 Lacan 
embryologically and physiologically complicates Freud’s account, by consider-
ing Homo sapiens’ helplessness as due to a species-specific prematurity of birth 
that leads to a prematurity of sexual maturation and is then retained as sexual 
neoteny in adulthood, but abides by his main assumption. The natural help-
lessness of the human baby who cannot satisfy its most elementary needs is 
partly remedied by the maternal figure’s care-giving role; following a protracted 
period of extreme dependence on the maternal figure, weaning thereby triggers 
a retrospective “nostalgia of the Whole” (which was never there) that leaves its 
trace, in a more abstract manner, in “the metaphysical mirage of universal har-
mony” and of a “perfect assimilation of totality to being.”129
I think that this pivotal biological grounding, as evolutionarily contingent yet 
as such contingently necessary, by itself already moderates Lacan’s invectives 
against philosophy and promotes less unilateral considerations on it that more 
and more part ways with Freud’s unconditional scientistic trust in the—sui gen-
eris anti-philosophical—progress of reason. Homo sapiens cannot not philos-
ophise. Foliesophie is a structural condition of the biologically premature and 
thus mentally retarded animal that happens to speak. Lacan is vocal on this 
point: if philosophical discourse has enunciated “certain reference points [. . .] 
that are difficult to completely eliminate from any use of language,” if, that is, 
126 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 63, 80, 110.
127 See Lacan, Encore, 31, 39; Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 152.
128 “The last contribution to the criticism of the religious Weltanschauung was effected by psy-
cho-analysis, by showing how religion originated from the helplessness of children and 
by tracing its contents to the survival into maturity of the wishes and needs of childhood.” 
Freud, “Question of a Weltanschauung,” 167.
129 Jacques Lacan, “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse 
d’une fonction en psychologie,” in Autres écrits, 36.
52
lorenzo chiesa
“we always do more philosophy than we believe we do,” this is the case be-
cause “the systems of philosophers [. . .] rest on the system everyone has.”130 We 
should therefore not be “ironic” with philosophy, like Freud’s “wild” psychoa-
nalysis instead was when he claimed that “philosophy falls under paranoia.”131
But, conversely, foliesophie could potentially “stand on its feet” if it starts out 
from the assumption that promoting, in various ways, more or less direct, a 
belief in the m’être depends on an unsurpassable transcendental invariant of 
the speaking animal—what Lacan also calls “the God hypothesis”132—through 
which it thinks, in a compensatory manner, the otherwise phenomenologically 
self-evident non-correspondence between thinking and being.
On the one hand, psychoanalysis takes its cue from an empirical “experience,” 
namely the real of the absence of the sexual relationship, of there is no two sexes 
as One, which cannot be taken for a “philosophical enlightenment” for it gives 
itself as an impossibility, or “cluttering up.”133 Philosophy has always found it 
difficult to approach this real, and its “extravagant opposition of realism and 
idealism” witnesses to that.134 This real can instead be grasped numerically, not 
in the sense that it is “measurable” or “countable,” but in the sense that what 
founds the count, the “final resource” through which language is knotted to the 
real by means of impossibility, is the fact that, mathematically, “the number 
two truly is a problem”; “it is from there that the real enters the scenes”—that it 
really enters the scene, we should add, following the empirical evidence of the 
absence of the sexual relationships.135
130 Lacan, Encore, 30–31; Lacan, “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue,” January 11, 1977; Lacan, 
Talking to Brick Walls, 44 (translation modified and expanded following the Staferla ver-
sion).
131 Jacques Lacan, “Réponses à des étudiants en philosophie,” in Autres écrits, 210.
132 Lacan, Encore, 45. See also Chiesa, Not-Two, and Lorenzo Chiesa, “Psychoanalysis and 
Agnostic Atheism,” in Lorenzo Chiesa and Adrian Johnston, God Is Undead: Psychoanalysis 
and the Case for Non-Belief (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
133 Jacques Lacan, “Alla ‘Scuola Freudiana,’ ” in Lacan in Italia, 1953–1978, ed. Giacomo B. 
Contri (Milan: La Salamandra, 1978), 102.
134 Lacan, 113.
135 Lacan, 113. A thorough examination of this issue, countering Badiou’s claim that Lacan 
remains “pre-Cantorian” (Badiou, Conditions, 219), is central to my present project.
53
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
Yet, on the other hand, philosophy has and has always had something to say in 
this respect. No doubt, there is an allegedly enlightened philosophy centred on 
the idea that humankind is made for “wisdom,” which completely misses the 
dimension of “structure”136—structure as the symbolic oscillation not-One/One 
(the God hypothesis), intrinsically giving rise to the imaginary semblance of the 
One (m’être), but actually resting on the not-One as real (the no-two-as-One of 
the absence of the sexual relationship). But, at the same time, there is also a phi-
losophy friendly to psychoanalysis—and structure—that “can take charge,” and 
it can do so specifically in terms of truth, the real, and the non-correspondence 
between thinking—the One—and being.137 Lacan here defends the philosophical 
tradition. In parallel, he scorns any presumed overcoming of its metaphysics as 
a disavowal of the latter’s structural presuppositions. Although it does not yet 
stand on its feet, philosophy’s philia as an incipiently cognizant foliesophie must 
be preserved: neither Plato, nor Descartes, nor Hegel, nor Marx, nor Freud—all 
labelled as “classical philosophers”—“can be ‘gone beyond,’ insofar as they car-
ried out their research with the passion to unveil that has an object: truth.”138 In-
sofar as, in the Parmenides and The Sophist, Plato already clearly perceives our 
predisposition “to turn the One into the supreme Being”139 and tries to think the 
One differently through another kind of ontology (or even metaphysics), contem-
porary philosophy’s equally fashionable and moronic preaching about “the end 
of metaphysics”140 can at best achieve an implicit and paradoxical metaphysics 
of the m’être in the guise of the One (not-One). All in all, however much philos-
ophy tout-court goes round in—historical and logical—circles when it comes to 
thinking the being of the being that happens to speak, this failure nonetheless 
paradigmatically indicates that, for the speaking being, the real access to being 
is precisely nothing other than the fact that “he doesn’t come to [being], that he 
136 Jacques Lacan, “Conférences dans les universités nord-américaines,” Scilicet 6/7 (1975): 53.
137 Lacan, Sinthome, 125 translation modified.
138 Jacques Lacan, “Presentation on Psychical Causality,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New 
York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 157. “One may find that I here deal a bit too much with what 
one calls—God-damned denomination—the great philosophers. The fact is that, not only 
them, but them especially articulate what we may well call a research [. . .] an unsur-
passable research in the same sense I mean when I tell you that each of those we may 
call ‘great philosophers’ could never be surpassed on a certain point.” Jacques Lacan, 
“L’identification: Séminaire 9, 1961–1962” (unpublished typescript, February 28, 1962), 
PDF document.
139 Jacques Lacan, La logique du fantasme, 1966–1967 (Paris: Seuil, 2023), 303.
140 Lacan, . . . or Worse, 18.
54
lorenzo chiesa
fails” to enter it.141 And this very predicament coincides with a “suddenly open 
dimension of being,”142 an ontological springboard so to speak.
Lacan does not stop here in his remarks in favour of philosophy, even and espe-
cially when at first sight he would appear to adopt a very antithetical stance to 
it. Specifically with regard to philosophy’s classical inscription in the discourse 
of the master and modern hijacking of it, philosophers at the same time “play 
the role of the fool,” the court jester who is the “place-holder of truth” without 
knowing it, and what they say as such is “more than usable.”143 Hence, it is “not 
at all” the case that the question of philosophy can be solved as soon as we ge-
nealogically assume that philosophy has always amounted to discursive “ide-
ology,” “the reflection of the superstructure of the dominant classes.”144 Quite 
on the contrary, the history of philosophy has always also been a history of “de-
vising the correct use of discourse,” or better, of understanding how “discourse 
[as an] operation” rests on “the difference there is between subject and sub-
stance”145—the non-correspondence between thinking and being that philoso-
phy contradictorily also masks.
If we carefully follow Lacan on this subtle dialectical point, we then grasp his 
own torsion (not Badiou’s) of psychoanalysis (as an initially anti-philosophical 
discourse, with Freud) not only into an anti-anti-philosophy but also into the 
future of philosophy. His converging comments in “Intervention sur l’exposé de 
J. Favez-Boutonier” (1955), “Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching” (1957), and a 1966 
lecture given in Bordeaux in which he recalls a conversation he had just had 
with Derrida (“a very talented boy”)146 are here very instructive. On a first level, 
Freudian anti-philosophical psychoanalysis already stands—de facto albeit ret-
rospectively—as anti-anti-philosophy: Freud the anti-philosopher is in a sense 
equally “without doubt a philosopher” for the simple fact that his discovery that 
“the subject who speaks”—the barred subject of discourse—“is not the conscious 
141 Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls, 44; translation modified.
142 Lacan, 44.
143 Lacan, “L’Étourdit,” 453.
144 Lacan, D’un Autre à l’autre, 242.
145 Jacques Lacan, My Teaching, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2008), 72, 88; translation 
modified, emphasis added.
146 Lacan, 87.
55
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
subject” belongs to “the order of truths.”147 Yet, on a second and more important 
level, this first level should become the cornerstone of any (Lacanian) philoso-
phy to come (not just Lacan’s). Philosophy is not dead. Philosophy is not sur-
passed. Lacan’s question to his philosophical audience at the Société française 
de Philosophie is: “What, in their view, does analysis teach us that is proper 
to analysis, or the most proper, truly proper, truly the most, the most truly?”148 
Adopting the philosopher’s perspective, his blunt answer is: “A certain relation 
between [hu]mankind and the signifier,”149 namely, the fact that a subject is noth-
ing but that which a signifier represents for another signifier in and for discourse 
and that this operation leaves an unassimilable real rest that renders discourse 
structurally incomplete while at the same time giving the subject access to the 
real only by means of an impossibility. Because of that, the most appropriate 
and concise reply Lacan can provide, in another instance, to Derrida’s partial 
perplexity—“All that’s very well, everything you say, I follow it [. . .] what you 
articulate as the unconscious structured like a language [a discourse], but why 
continuing to call that the subject?”—cannot but be “I preserve the subject . . . 
to get you talking” about it, to make you, a philosopher of the future, resume and 
complicate from the standpoint of the psychoanalytic unconscious what philoso-
phy has always been putting forward by “separating in the most rigorous way the 
subject from substance”; it would be “sheer madness not to resume this term [the 
subject] [. . .] now that the time has finally come to turn/invert its use.”150
I am of the opinion that such a turning should also potentially be understood 
in the specific framework of the “quarter turns” Lacan recurs to in his matrix-
es of the four discourses.151 Although in this context he never presents—any fu-
ture—philosophy as an independent discourse, and it would be precipitous of 
me to attempt a matrixial algebraization of it, we are also clearly told that psy-
choanalysis “extends” philosophy, and it does so “very much beyond the point 
147 Jacques Lacan, “Intervention sur l’exposé de J. Favez-Boutonier,” Bulletin de la Société 
Française de Philosophie 49, no. 1 (1955): 38–39.
148 Jacques Lacan, “Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching,” in Écrits, 367; emphasis added.
149 Jacques Lacan, “La psychanalyse et son enseignement,” Bulletin de la Société Française 
de Philosophie 49, no. 2 (1957): 96. The discussion that followed Lacan’s lecture is not in-
cluded in the Écrits version of “La psychanalyse et son enseignement.”
150 Lacan, My Teaching, 87–89; emphasis added, translation modified and expanded follow-
ing the version of the École lacanienne de psychanalyse.
151 See Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis.
56
lorenzo chiesa
at which” philosophy, as the discourse of the m’être, has been seriously disrupt-
ed—if not, too optimistically, “effaced”—by the very emergence of psychoanaly-
sis (and set-theoretical mathematical logic).152 I do not think that what is at stake 
here is the post-mortem survival of philosophy, in a zombified state, although 
the text could also be tweaked in that sense. On the contrary, what is at stake 
is the fact that psychoanalysis “is philosophically so problematic,” whereby its 
“currency” remains all the same philosophical, despite there being two distinct 
discourses, psychoanalysis and philosophy—hence, strictly speaking, psycho-
analysis “does not transform” philosophy.153 The message seems clear: there is 
as much philosophical psychoanalysis as there is, or should be, psychoanalyt-
ic philosophy. I admit this partly clashes with Lacan’s more peremptory claim 
that “what I am doing here is philosophy,” full stop, but, on close inspection, 
very little changes here in respect to refuting an alleged relapse of Lacan into 
anti-philosophy.
Lacan’s insistence on a future discourse of psychoanalytic philosophy—again, 
not necessarily Lacan’s own philosophical discourse but necessarily a Lacanian 
discourse of philosophy for which Lacan does not fall back into anti-philosophy—
is protracted and amplified in his latest works. In Seminar XXIV, for instance, his 
back-and-forths on what should be done with philosophy may seem disorienting 
at first, yet in the end combine in an unequivocal, and quite astonishing, conclu-
sion. Lacan does not believe he is doing philosophy. But the Derridean philoso-
phers who by then (1977) speak of a “philosophie en effet”—a real philosophy of 
Wirklichkeit, for what we said previously—all in all proceed from “something I 
have inaugurated with my discourse.”154 But we should not “push too quickly the 
door of philosophy.”155 But the right way not to do that is by dwelling on the lev-
el of the theory of discourses. But this makes Lacan “hit a brick wall” (since his 
matrixes do not really sort out the status of philosophical discourse?).156 But what 
we should certainly avoid is Freud’s position, who did not face the same problem 
only because his anti-philosophical stance paradoxically coincided with a “phil-
osophical order [for which] there was no [philosophy]”157—namely, the negative 
152 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 146.
153 Lacan, 146.
154 Lacan, “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue,” January 11, 1977.
155 Lacan, January 11, 1977.
156 Lacan, February 8, 1977.
157 Lacan, February 8, 1977.
57
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
Weltanschauung according to which there is no Weltanschauung, and the not-
One unintentionally turns into a weakly atheistic One (not-One).158 Hence, even-
tually, the only way out of this impasse cannot but be not only a reconsideration 
of philosophy—as foliesophie—in spite of its going in circles but also more strong-
ly a “preserv[ation]” of the notion of a “system of the world,” where the system 
is exclusively based on the fact that concerning this world “we can say nothing 
of man except that he fell from it”—yet accesses it by means of this very fall.159
We are left to assume that this minimal presupposition—the empirically derived 
yet axiomatic decision about the co-implication between language and the ab-
sence of the sexual relationship—paves the way to any “philosophy standing 
on its feet.”
As already anticipated in Seminar XV, we are equally left to assume that such an 
axiomatic decision necessarily involves a “philosophical act,” which should not 
be isolated as Lacan’s act for it pertains to “posterity,” which should not forc-
edly always be “the same” in the history of philosophy, but which “each time a 
renewal” of it takes place—from Plato to Lacan and his “successors,” passing 
through Descartes, Kant, and Hegel—always requires a “suspension of the sub-
ject supposed to know.”160
We are moreover left to assume that one can speak of Lacan’s philosophy as “the 
first philosophy standing on its feet” only to the extent that, for the first time, 
it openly sequences a series of anti-epistemic and thus philosophical acts as a 
theory of the subject-to-truth.
What Lacan Said About Anti-Philosophy
At this stage, we need to summon again our naïve interlocutor who could still 
very legitimately ask: What about Lacan’s own pronouncements in direct sup-
port of anti-philosophy? Leaving aside his claims against (bad) philosophy and 
how they are dialectically enmeshed with his claims in favour of (good) philoso-
phy, are those pronouncements not indisputably partisan? The answer is again 
158 I develop this in Chiesa, “Psychoanalysis and Agnostic Atheism.”
159 Lacan, “L’insu que sait de l’une bévue,” December 14, 1976.
160 Lacan, “L’acte psychanalytique,” January 17, 1968.
58
lorenzo chiesa
negative. A close examination of the sources once more disproves both pro- and 
anti-Lacanian doxastic preconceptions on the matter.
There are only three short passages in which Lacan explicitly refers to anti-phi-
losophy. The first is very well-known and unmistakably pro anti-philosophy, yet 
it does not add much to what Lacan already says in his critiques of philosophy. 
The second is less well-known, although quoted also by Badiou, and rather am-
biguous if put into context. The third has so far, to the best of my knowledge, 
been ignored in discussions about Lacan and anti-philosophy and turns out to 
be patently opposed to anti-philosophy, to the point of ridiculing it. Let us scru-
tinise them.
In “Peut-être à Vincennes . . .” (1975)—note the conditional and the ellipsis—
Lacan includes anti-philosophy among the disciplines that should be taught at 
the newly established Department of Psychoanalysis at Vincennes (the others 
being linguistics, logic, and topology). The entire text is two pages; the para-
graph devoted to anti-philosophy is seven lines. We are just told that:
a. Anti-philosophy refers to an investigation of what the university dis-
course owes to its “ ‘educational’ supposition.”
b. This investigation could not be accomplished by a history of ideas, how-
ever critical the latter might be.
c. This investigation will basically consist of a “patient collection of the im-
becility” that characterises the university discourse.
d. This investigation will hopefully highlight the “indestructible root,” 
which is also the “eternal dream,” of this imbecility.
e. There are only “particular” awakenings from this dream.161
What seems clearly under scrutiny here is not philosophy as such. The target of 
anti-philosophy is instead the university discourse and, specifically, its assump-
tion that it can educate, namely, that it can transmit knowledge as wisdom. Even 
more specifically, the target of Lacanian anti-philosophy therefore amounts to 
nothing other than the philosophy of the m’être as taught at university (not only 
as part of the curriculum for will-be-philosophers but also and especially as the 
set of so-called “learning skills” imparted to all students). Against this back-
161 Jacques Lacan, “Peut-être à Vincennes . . .,” in Autres écrits, 314–15.
59
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
ground, the best Lacanian anti-philosophy can achieve as a discipline, beyond 
any genealogy of education, is an inventory of the imbecility of the university 
discourse—as a discourse far exceeding the boundaries of universities yet coa-
lescing in an idiotic “ ‘educational’ supposition”—that also evidences the struc-
tural character of this imbecility. In spite of psychoanalysis, there is no universal 
remedy to the I-cracy of the fantasy of being-me-to-myself, of being a graduated 
subject-supposed-to-know.162
Lacan stops here. He does not attempt to “destroy philosophy.” In the introduc-
tion to “Peut-être à Vincennes . . .” he even suggests that the disciplines he pro-
poses to teach at Vincennes should make the disciplines they originate from 
“find in the [psychoanalytic] experience the opportunity to be renewed”163—so 
however modest the actual aims of anti-philosophy at Vincennes turn out to be, 
they nonetheless contribute to building a new philosophy. And this is Lacan’s 
most extensive reference to anti-philosophy. One could only overlap it with Ba-
diou’s definition of anti-philosophy—at bottom, a discourse against the pretence 
that discourse can be self-sufficient, that it can master itself by mastering the dis-
course of the m’être—in a roundabout way, by means of other isolated passages 
in Lacan’s oeuvre (in which, by the way, anti-philosophy is never literally men-
tioned, quite simply because what he is contrasting is, again, bad philosophy . . .). 
For instance, in Seminar XII, Lacan states that “I call ‘philosophy’ everything 
that tends to mask the radical character and originating function of [a] loss [. . .] 
that is produced every time that language tries in a discourse to account for it-
self.”164 Interestingly though, he at the same time specifies that “every dialectic” 
that makes this mistake is a philosophy, which also implies that there are other 
dialectics which—potentially at least—do not make this mistake.165
The second passage in which Lacan mentions anti-philosophy is in his last Sem-
inar, Dissolution (1980) and is almost exclusively anecdotal but very telling. Ba-
diou correctly reports that, recalling a Dadaist text by Tristan Tzara, “Monsieur 
Aa l’antiphilosophe,” Lacan adds “it is also my case,” that is, I am an anti-phi-
162 Hence, in this regard, “the subject is not wrong in identifying himself with consciousness 
[. . .] but, from there, in not being able not to miss the topology that tricks him in this iden-
tification.” Lacan, “Réponses à des étudiants,” 205; emphasis added.
163 Lacan, “Peut-être à Vincennes . . .,” 313.
164 Lacan, “Les problèmes cruciaux,” December 2, 1964.
165 Lacan, December 2, 1964.
60
lorenzo chiesa
losopher too.166 Lacan then states: “If I may say so, I rebel against philosophy. 
What is certain is that it’s something that’s finished, even if I expect some off-
shoots to sprout back from it.”167 Badiou makes a lot out of this. However, what 
he strangely underplays is that, immediately after, Lacan relates this sprouting 
back precisely to his own psychoanalytic School, which he is about to dissolve, 
and adds “I am not at all intending to dissolve the École Normale Supérieure, 
where in the past I’ve been most welcome”168—namely, the most authoritative 
establishment of academic philosophy in France . . .
If this were not enough to evidence the obvious ambivalence of Lacan’s “rebel-
lion,” two further provisos can additionally challenge Badiou’s unilateral take 
on this passage. Badiou equally omits to specify that Lacan returns to Tzara’s 
“Monsieur Aa l’antiphilosophe” in response to a “Monsieur A., philosopher” 
who contested him a few days earlier. Put simply, here Lacan’s anti-philosoph-
ical stance limits itself to countering a philosopher’s, in his view, anti-psycho-
analytic stance. This anti-psychoanalytic philosopher is, very surprisingly, none 
other than Louis Althusser, arguably one of the most pro-psychoanalysis and 
pro-Lacan philosophers up to that point, who, suffering from severe depression 
(another complication . . .), disrupted the meeting in which Lacan dissolved his 
School and, “in the name of analysands” (another complication . . .), accused 
Lacan of being a “pitiful Harlequin.”169
Furthermore, and most significantly, we should not lose sight of the fact that, 
only two years earlier, it was precisely Althusser (“someone of good sense”) 
who, according to Lacan, told Lacan that what Lacan does is philosophy, which 
on the same occasion Lacan very gladly consents to (“What I am doing here is 
philosophy. [. . .] It’s a philosophy that I have handled the best way I could fol-
lowing the current that results from Freud’s philosophy”).170 Again, we are here 
for the most part on the level of anecdotes but the negative bias that vitiates 
166 Jacques Lacan, “Dissolution,” in Aux confins du Séminaire, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: 
Navarin, 2021), 60.
167 Lacan, 60.
168 Lacan, 61.
169 See Louis Althusser, Writings on Psyhoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, ed. Olivier Corpet and 
François Matheron, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 
125–43.
170 Lacan, “Le moment de conclure,” December 20, 1977.
61
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
Badiou’s reading—who I suppose is acquainted with them—seems to me incon-
trovertible.
As for the third direct reference to anti-philosophy in Lacan’s oeuvre, it has to 
do with Wittgenstein and the tradition of analytic philosophy he commenced. 
In Seminar XVII, Lacan provides an interpretation of Wittgenstein that in many 
ways anticipates Badiou’s singling the latter out as a quintessential anti-philos-
opher—hence it could be made to correspond to what Badiou designates as the 
anti-anti-philosophical moment in Lacan—but he refrains from using this term 
with respect to Wittgenstein. In Seminar XIV, he instead uses it, very disparag-
ingly, with respect to the Wittgensteinians. We need to tackle these passages in 
quite some detail.
First of all, let us recall that, for Badiou, (at least the early) Wittgenstein is an an-
ti-philosopher since, in spite and especially because of his crusade against the 
pseudo-truth of philosophy as a self-contained discourse that would thus have 
an overarching meta-linguistic meaning, whereas for him philosophical propo-
sitions are actually senseless, he ends up submitting truth to meaning nonethe-
less, which is what characterises anti-philosophy at large. According to Badiou, 
for Wittgenstein, truth can only correspond to an exact linguistic description of 
existing states of affairs; meaning as the mystically unsayable sense of the world 
instead anchors truth.171
Lacan’s assessment of Wittgenstein in Seminar XVII—which focuses on the 
Tractatus and whose complexity I will have to simplify—is overall similar to Ba-
diou’s: Wittgenstein’s operation is, positively, “the detection of philosophical 
knavery” yet as such it remains, negatively, “an extraordinary parade.”172 First, 
for Wittgenstein, there is no meta-language (“there is no other meta-language 
than all the forms of knavery”).173 Second, truth can thus only be inscribed in 
a proposition and as such be articulated as transmissible knowledge.174 Third, 
more specifically, truth means propositional conformity to a grammatical struc-
171 I acknowledge that assuming there is a mystically unsayable sense of the world in the 
Tractatus amounts to an old-fashioned and by now largely discredited interpretation of it. 
I will expand on this in the near future.
172 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 61; translation modified.
173 Lacan, 61.
174 See Lacan, 62.
62
lorenzo chiesa
ture.175 Fourth, the world amounts to the grammatical structure and “all that is 
true is [. . .] a composite proposition comprising the totality of the facts that con-
stitute the world”176—for Wittgenstein, in his words, “the world is the totality of 
facts, not of things,”177 namely, facts are not objects but structural relations be-
tween objects that language, as denotative, can “picture” as true. But fifth and 
crucially, according to Wittgenstein, the set of true propositions is “tautologi-
cal” or “stupid,” Lacan says: to the extent that “whatever you enunciate is either 
true or false” (“it is day” is either true or false), “enunciating that [whatever you 
enunciate] is either true or false is necessarily true” (it is necessarily true that “ ‘it 
is day’ is either true or false”).178 That is to say, sixth, there is a performative an-
nulment of sense via tautology—and of the sense of the Tractatus itself.
Given that Wittgenstein refuses to solve this impasse by means of Aristotle’s 
solution of the problem of future contingents, the latter’s infamous “it is nec-
essary that a sea-fight either will or will not take place tomorrow,” that is, giv-
en that, for Wittgenstein, truth should be internal to the proposition and not 
lie outside the set of true propositions (the truth that the sea-fight will or will 
not take place tomorrow is external to the proposition; future contingents are 
not propositions for Wittgenstein), his conclusion—which Lacan much appre-
ciates—is brutally honest: due to the tautology “everything that can be said is 
only senseless,” including and especially what Wittgenstein has just said so far 
concerning the propositional status of truth; “nothing else is sayable” about the 
world; and silence thereby imposes itself.179
Yet, according to Lacan, this is not Wittgenstein’s whole story. Indeed, this very 
predicament posits the world of things as “inaccessible”180 beyond what we have 
just senselessly said about the world of facts. Or better, Wittgenstein’s push-
ing the absence of a meta-language to its extreme consequences—for truth can 
only be inscribed in a proposition—paradoxically leads him on the contrary to a 
propositional treatment of truth for which, against all our empirical evidence in 
175 See Lacan, 59.
176 Lacan, 59.
177 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. 
McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1995), 5.
178 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 59; translation modified.
179 Lacan, 59.
180 Lacan, 60.
63
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
everyday life, “we reject that the true [. . .] can have a false consequent”—a rejec-
tion that founds propositional logic—whereby “we end up with this curious fact 
that the true has a genealogy, that it always goes back to an initial truth, from 
which it is no longer able to fall.”181 As we just saw, this initial truth cannot but 
be the truth that stating that a proposition is either true or false is necessarily 
true. Thus, the fact that everything that can be said is senseless equates with the 
fact that everything that can be said is true as senseless with respect to the ulte-
rior transcendence of an ineffable “absolute sense.”182
Like for Badiou, for Lacan, Wittgenstein therefore sutures truth to sense. But 
pace Badiou (Lacan would consign truth to the “sense as ab-sense” of the sexu-
al relationship on which the transmissibility of knowledge would itself depend; 
after all, Lacan would be a sui generis Wittgensteinian) what Lacan instead pro-
poses about truth against Wittgenstein in the same passages of Seminar XVII is 
very different. For Wittgenstein, according to Lacan who now deconstructs Witt-
genstein by also making him in part ventriloquise Lacan’s own stance, truth is al-
ready somehow not simply “internal” to the proposition—where only “the factici-
ty of language” is announced.183 Truth depends on my enunciation; it depends on 
whether my enunciation is appropriate; this appropriate enunciation does make 
it true that the facticity of language is a fact; but the fact that this is true “is not 
a fact, unless I explicitly add that, moreover, it’s true.”184 As Wittgenstein would 
retort against this forced ventriloquising, such a step seems superfluous. But it is 
not. It is not superfluous, not even for Wittgenstein who affirms that “no sign of 
affirmation needs to be added to what is assertion pure and simple.”185
Generally speaking, it is not superfluous because this addition invariably hap-
pens in everyday life (more or less explicitly); bluntly put, subjects always have 
a “reason” for saying what they are saying (even just “it is day”);186 or better, 
181 Lacan, 61.
182 Lacan, 62.
183 Lacan, 60; translation modified.
184 Lacan, 60.
185 Lacan, 60.
186 Explicitly: “Look, it’s day. It’s true. I told you it was late, let’s go home”; implicitly: “Come 
on, it’s day (I’ll never go out with her again, it’s so late).”
64
lorenzo chiesa
subjects of language are also subjects of desire and truth always has to do with 
what “desire hides of its lack.”187
Reading between the lines of Lacan’s interpretation, with regard to Wittgenstein 
and his desire for a purely propositional truth, adding that “it’s true” to the fact 
that it is true is not superfluous because it is only by explicitly adding that it is 
true that we are “genealogically” taken back to the “initial truth,” the truth that, 
independently of whether a proposition I enunciate is true or false, it is always 
contained by the senseless truth that stating that a proposition is either true or 
false is necessarily true. The senseless truth that stating that a proposition is ei-
ther true or false is necessarily true necessitates stating that a particular propo-
sition is true and not false. Otherwise, without this—second-degree—perform-
ative dimension, we could not truly distinguish between true and false propo-
sitions (for they are both contained by the initial truth) and there would quite 
simply not be any propositional logic . . . Are the truth tables of propositional 
logic, which Wittgenstein invented, not a way of adding that “it’s true” to the 
fact that it is true? And, as such, are they not fragments of a genealogy of truth? 
Lacan claims that, unlike other philosophers, “Wittgenstein wasn’t interested 
in saving the truth” meta-linguistically:188 he was not insofar as, for him, truth is 
ultimately senseless; but what he initiated in terms of the propagation of prop-
ositional logic into analytic philosophy certainly stands as a gigantic attempt at 
meta-linguistically saving the truth within language . . .
Finally, taking the perspective of Wittgenstein’s desire more comprehensively, 
the—first- and second-degree—performative dimension of truth—which Witt-
genstein would like to expunge—is not superfluous because it is only through 
the Tractatus itself, as paradigmatically both an enunciation that it is true that 
whatever one enunciates is either true or false and a vade mecum for adding 
that “it’s true” that a given proposition is true, that the senseless truth negative-
ly opens onto an ineffable absolute sense. Put simply, silence in the face of the 
latter requires an active detour by means of language. Indeed, for Wittgenstein’s 
desire, the impasse of the Tractatus has not been in vain.
187 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 61; translation modified.
188 Lacan, 63.
65
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
If we now specifically turn to Lacan’s own stance, for him, truth is unequivocally 
not internal to the proposition. Like for Wittgenstein, “truth [. . .] is certainly in-
separable from the effects of language taken as such,” which in turn cannot be 
separated from a subject of enunciation—presupposed albeit overshadowed by 
Wittgenstein.189 Yet, for Lacan, unlike for Wittgenstein, there is no genealogy of 
truth that takes us back to an initial truth, however senseless it may be. In other 
words, on the one hand, as the logicians of the Middle Ages already realised, ex 
falso sequitur quodlibet—that is, from falsehood anything follows, that is, “the 
false sometimes also entails the true” and therefore “the true can be about an-
ything.”190 But, on the other hand, “that there is no false without the true”—as 
ultimately entailed by an initial senselessness of truth that opens onto an ab-
solute sense—“that is false.”191 This is Wittgenstein’s error, the error of the non-
dupped who err the most (les non-dupes errent). This is also very similar to the 
error made by those psychoanalysts (including Lacanian ones like Laplanche, 
according to Lacan) who advance that “the unconscious is the condition of lan-
guage,” and not vice versa.192 The unconscious itself amounts to the effects of 
language taken as such, Lacan insists. And if psychoanalysis were to posit the 
opposite, it would inevitably also posit “an absolute sense [that] answers to the 
unconscious.”193 Given these premises, we should then think the non-interiority 
of truth to the proposition not as its priority to the set of propositions (wheth-
er true or false but ultimately always true—as per a wrong understanding of “I, 
the truth, speaks”) but instead as its being “beside” it (“But is it certain that we 
should find [truth] intus, within? Why not beside?”).194
All in all, for Lacan, “we are not without a relationship with truth,”195 but with the 
crucial specification that this is a lateral relationship, that truth is a para-truth 
with respect to (the effects of) language, which, I add, demands a para-ontology. 
Lacan already hints at this ontological dimension in the same pages of Seminar 
XVII we are scrutinising. In order not to capitulate to any, however paradoxi-
cal, “absolute sense” (sens absolu) and consequently also turn truth into an “at-
189 Lacan, 62.
190 Lacan, 61.
191 Lacan, 62.
192 Lacan, 62.
193 Lacan, 62; translation modified.
194 Lacan, 58; translation modified.
195 Lacan, 58.
66
lorenzo chiesa
tribute” of knowledge;196 in order, that is, not to repeat Wittgenstein error—and 
Badiou’s in his reading of Lacan as a quasi-Wittgensteinian—we need to put at 
centre stage the not without (pas sans) relationship with truth as a truth-beside. 
As Lacan already spelled out in Seminar V, sense (sens) does not go without a 
non-sense (pas-de-sens) that is also a step-of-sense (pas-de-sens).197 Here Witt-
genstein is, in a limited sense, not too distant. But Wittgenstein’s non sequitur is 
to still end up with a—ineffable—sense that is allegedly “being full sense” rath-
er than search for “what of being there is in sense” starting from sense as “what 
escapes being” and, concomitantly, leaves truth aside.198
What is now delineating itself on the horizon is not only the truth of the real in 
terms of subjectivized truths of the real but also, and without solution of conti-
nuity, a more daring para-ontological investigation into whether it is possible to 
approach a truth of the real tout-court that does not reabsorb the senselessness 
of truth into an absolute sense. This is a question—one of the key questions of the 
para-ontology I am pursuing, as, in my view, a prolongation of Badiou’s meta-on-
tology—with which Lacan flirts, repeatedly, but never thoroughly addresses.
For the time being, let us just stress that Lacan does not label Wittgenstein’s po-
sition as anti-philosophical but as that of “psychotic ferocity.”199 In psychotic 
discourse, as “the most assured discourse,” there is indeed no false without the 
true.200 The psychotic position, Lacan says in the same pages of Seminar XVII, 
can briefly be defined as “not wanting to know anything about the spot where 
truth is in question.”201 Senseless truth as initial truth does not really pose a 
problem to Wittgenstein: it instead marks the border of a, however much inac-
cessible, divine sense. At bottom, that border is where the truth of his desire lies. 
Like for President Judge Schreber, the Order of God turns against any alleged 
rational order of the world He has himself established, yet it remains an Order. 
(Badiou is thus right in highlighting a “silent principle of salvation” in Wittgen-
196 Lacan, 62; emphasis added.
197 See Jacques Lacan, The Formations of the Unconscious, trans. Russell Grigg (Cambridge: 
Polity, 2017), 87–93.
198 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 57–58.
199 Lacan, 62.
200 Lacan, 63.
201 Lacan, 63.
67
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
stein’s Weltanschauung, but he is wrong in referring to it as “mystical”;202 while 
for the mystic the apparent disorder of the world can immanently give access to 
a transcendent order, for the psychotic the latter is given only as inaccessible.)203
Having said this, in a passage from Seminar XIV, which should be made to di-
alogue with Seminar XVII, Lacan instead refers to Wittgensteinians as anti-phi-
losophers and resolutely opposes them to Wittgenstein himself: “Do not believe 
that since an entire school that is called logico-positivistic keeps harping onto 
us with a series of most insipid and mediocre anti-philosophical considerations 
that Wittgenstein’s step is nothing.”204 In other words, there is something to be 
learnt from Wittgenstein’s—psychotic and failed yet not anti-philosophical—at-
tempt at reducing truth to the proposition and, more generally, promoting a log-
ic that could do without the existence of the subject, since it goes together with 
an unprecedented upholding of senselessness. But there is nothing to be learnt 
from the Wittgensteinians who, as anti-philosophers, cannot even be consid-
ered as just ordinary bad philosophers.
Lacan does not name names nor explains further what the anti-philosophical 
position of the Wittgensteinians precisely amounts to, but we can try to un-
pack this briefly by profiting also from other occasions on which he attacks log-
ico-positivism. In short, logico-positivists radicalise Wittgenstein’s treatment of 
truth as internal to the proposition in an effort to dispose of senselessness. Like 
for Wittgenstein, truth should be approached by means of an alternative be-
tween true and false propositions. But unlike for Wittgenstein, the enunciative 
truth that a proposition is either true or false should itself become internal to the 
proposition and thus no longer make truth senseless—for instance, and simpli-
fying a lot, the senseless truth that it is necessarily true that “ ‘it is day’ is either 
true or false” turns into the sense of the proposition “it is necessarily true that ‘it 
is day’ is either true or false.”
From a certain perspective, there is here no meta-linguistic truth, yet concomi-
tantly propositional logic becomes the true language of language that rules out 
senselessness. Hence, from another perspective, truth as the true language of 
202 Badiou, Lacan, 6; emphasis added.
203 See Chiesa, “Psychoanalysis and Agnostic Atheism.”
204 Lacan, La logique du fantasme, 140.
68
lorenzo chiesa
language also becomes the meta-linguistic referent of language. This leads to 
a “fabulous paradox,” Lacan says: if referring to truth presupposes a division 
between propositions that are in themselves true and propositions that are in 
themselves false with regard to state of affairs—since, unlike for Wittgenstein, 
for the Wittgensteinian anti-philosophers there is moreover no distinction be-
tween the world of facts and the world of things—then referring to truth unwit-
tingly albeit necessarily also involves “positing an absolute false, namely a false 
to which one could refer oneself as such.”205 And, we could continue, perhaps 
this is the reason why Wittgensteinian logico-positivists are, strictly speaking, 
for Lacan, anti-philosophers: there where philosophers, as Badiou puts it, “as-
sume that there is a truth of the real,” Wittgensteinian logico-positivists assume 
this only by not realising that, in parallel, they are also assuming a falsehood of 
the real . . . Lacan’s overall view does not leave room for doubt: “If we start from 
the principle that something that has no meaning cannot be essential in the de-
velopment of discourse, we quite simply lose our bearings.”206
This is precisely what Wittgensteinian anti-philosophers start from. Senseless 
truth is dammed up, sense no longer hinges on an ineffable sense, but only at 
the cost of pretending to lose the subject (of enunciation)—including the sub-
ject-supposed-to-know of bad philosophers—which is instead preserved in Witt-
genstein at least as awestruck silence. I would be tempted to add that the related 
cost to be paid here is also the relinquishment of the florid phase of psychosis; 
the question “What was Wittgenstein thinking of when he was keeping silent?” 
is very much worth asking . . .207 For Lacan, Wittgensteinian logico-positivism is 
an “insipid” and “mediocre” anti-philosophy also because, so to speak, it is a 
psychosis without psychosis.
The Future of Foliesophie
So, to conclude, where does this leave us regarding a—anti-psychotic and, es-
pecially, anti-psychosis-without-psychosis—foliesophie that as such refuses the 
very distinction Badiou draws between philosophy and anti-philosophy? Let us 
205 Lacan, D’un discours, 84; emphasis added.
206 Lacan, 59.
207 Derek Jarman’s 1993 film Wittgenstein becomes a great film if it is taken as an attempt to 
answer this question.
69
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
recall that foliesophie has three inseparable aspects: the structural, that is tran-
scendental, condition of the Homo sapiens species for which it cannot but foli-
esophise, namely, put forward the Being-One; Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory as 
“the first philosophy that seems to be standing on its feet” precisely insofar as, 
by assuming this structural condition critically, it, like Badiou’s philosophy, on 
the contrary revolves around the axiomatic decision that the One is not, it only 
exists as an operation, and, moreover, in doing so does not contradict itself; a 
future Lacanian philosophy (and Badiousian to the extent that Badiou is a Laca-
nian if and only if he no longer confines Lacan to anti-philosophy) that, by re-
cuperating the anti-Being-One component of the (good) philosophical tradition, 
continues Lacan’s philosophical psychoanalysis in the philosophical domain, 
up to the point of not falling short of proposing, as we saw, an alternative “sys-
tem of the world” that is not a self-contained Weltanschauung.
Against doxastic interpretations, I wish to stress once again that this final aspect 
of foliesophie does not at all force Lacan’s broad conclusions on the matter. Let 
me quickly further vindicate my assertion with some supplementary textual evi-
dence and thus also highlight a series of key notions I will have to return to and 
delve into elsewhere—engaging and agreeing with Badiou yet also attempting 
to dismantle his anti-Lacanian threshold.
First, to clear the ground one more time, “psychoanalysis renews philosophy”; 
philosophy would demonstrate a “fundamental dishonesty” only if it ignored 
this.208
Second, on a related and still basic yet also massive level, in the future, “we 
have to begin to think up something that accounts for the fact that there are un-
conscious thoughts. The latter does not go without saying. Actually, no one has 
ever truly tackled this so far” as an “eminently philosophical question.”209
Third, that there are unconscious thoughts cannot but lead to a philosophi-
cal appreciation of “substance as on the side of a shortage”; specifically, this 
208 Jacques Lacan, “L’objet de la psychanalyse: Séminaire 13, 1965–1966” (unpublished type-
script, March 30, 1966), PDF document.
209 Lacan, My Teaching, 8; translation modified, emphasis added.
70
lorenzo chiesa
is what “the psychoanalytic act could indicate.”210 However, such an indication 
should not be unfolded in terms of psychoanalysis being aware of “the phil-
osophical error”—not treating substance as on the side of a shortage—“as if, 
from there, philosophy should then be aware of it.”211 This naïve take on psycho-
analytic discourse would turn it into a discourse of the m’être about the philo-
sophical discourse of the m’être. Psychoanalytic discourse amounts to neither a 
conscious drainage of the unconscious that would allegedly make up for sub-
stance as a shortage (as per the infamous Freudian metaphor of the draining 
of the Zuider Zee) nor to a discourse of the Being-One veiled under an apparent 
discourse of the definitive not-oneness of Being, whereby substance as a short-
age is meta-linguistically installed as a One (not-One). As Lacan glosses, imag-
ining a superior awareness of psychoanalysis over philosophy “would be the 
philosophical error as such.”212 In other words, Lacan continues, psychoanalysis 
should absolutely not stand as a “hermeneutic”—a sense-provider—of philoso-
phy, otherwise “it would take philosophy back to its ties to obscurantism”—and 
this is also the major risk for psychoanalysis’ own future.213 To cut a long story 
short, the philosophical act that suspends not only the alleged self-sufficiency 
of substance but, together with it, also the subject-supposed-to-know needs to 
remain independent of the psychoanalytic act albeit indebted to it as the kernel 
of a practice of the unconscious.
Fourth, that the dimension of the act emerges as pivotal for a renewal of phi-
losophy cannot but raise for philosophy itself the question of a transmission of 
knowledge that does not rely on the supposition of masterly teaching; “[Trans-
mission] interests the philosopher in the sense that [. . .] a specific practice [psy-
choanalysis] raises radical problems” in this regard, but “the solutions that 
[psychoanalysts] provide to these problems” may well receive “singular applica-
tions at the level of other disciplines.”214 Here philosophy should avoid founding 
the question of transmission on the wrong assumption that the fact that “there 
is no unity of the subject,” and hence no subject-supposed-to-know, could be 
210 Lacan, “Réponses à des étudiants,” 205.
211 Lacan, 205.
212 Lacan, 205.
213 Lacan, 210.
214 Jacques Lacan, “Interview donnée par Jacques Lacan à François Wahl à propos de la paru-
tion des Écrits,” Le Bulletin de l’Association Freudienne 3 (May 1983): 7.
71
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
obviated by postulating that “there are two [unities],”215 namely, that there is a 
unconscious subject-supposed-to-know. This move, “installing [in] the psyche 
a whole small population of unities,” Lacan says, “only redoubles the deadlock 
that the unconscious proposes to us.”216
Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, what should nonetheless be involved in 
both psychoanalytic and philosophical solutions to the problem of transmis-
sibility (with the former revolving around the formation of the psychoanalyst 
and the technique of the so-called passe) has to do with formalisation. As Ba-
diou well sees, there is a strict connection for Lacan between the act that tears 
a hole in knowledge and the question of the transmission of knowledge, on the 
one hand, and the matheme, on the other (let us recall that, for Badiou, Lacan 
was the first in the twentieth century to put mathematics again at centre stage 
of speculative reasoning—against its anti-philosophical use in logico-positiv-
ism).217 As Badiou equally well sees, for Lacan, transmissibility as formalisation 
is given only via the matheme as itself “the impasse of the mathematizable”/
formalizable—which can as such be formalised and thereby initiate transmis-
sion. Against this background, according to Lacan himself (who again does not 
refrain from openly speaking as a philosopher—“If you allow me to be a philos-
opher in my spare time”), the future of philosophy is adjudicated on whether it 
understands that “what [. . .] constitutes a concept is very precisely the function 
of a limit,” namely, of a matheme.218 There will be philosophy as a philosophy 
that is “strictly speaking relating to the real” on condition that it constructs its 
concepts on an “indefinitely approachable limit.”219
On the one hand, this might rightly give the impression that Lacan is here far 
too modestly limiting the future of philosophy to this side of the limit/matheme. 
On the other hand—and we have to admit that this remains a tension in Lacan’s 
arguments—he at the same time suggests that future philosophy can itself be a 
philosophy of the limit/matheme insofar as it can be—and in a sense has always 
been—a philosophy of mathematical infinity and the latter’s inherent impasses. 
215 Lacan, 7.
216 Lacan, 7.
217 See Badiou, Being and Event, 7.
218 Jacques Lacan, “En guise de conclusion,” Lettres de l’École freudienne 8 (1971): 217; em-
phasis added.
219 Lacan, 217.
72
lorenzo chiesa
Obviously, the tradition of philosophy rests on “the requirement of the One,” the 
Being-One.220 Yet inasmuch as philosophy severs the link between the One and be-
ing in its ontological discourse, “where there is being, infinity is required.”221
We, Lacanian philosophers of the future, are therefore left with two—up to a 
point compatible—options: with Badiou, philosophy can turn into a meta-on-
tology of set-theoretical mathematics as ontology, where set-theory leads via—
uncountable—infinity (as opposed to the bad infinity of an indefinitely ap-
proachable limit) precisely to the matheme as a productive formalisation—and 
then transmission—of the impasse of formalisation/mathematisation.222 Better 
said, transmissibility as formalisation in philosophy is precisely what Badiou 
does meta-ontologically with regard to his use of ontological/set-theoretical for-
malisation as ultimately the latter’s formalizable impasse. With Badiou but also 
beyond Badiou, this very platform can subsequently promote a philosophical 
para-ontology for which the assumption that the One is not and only exists as an 
operation can be upheld practically—that is, ethically and politically—without 
contradiction only after contemplating the theoretically undecidable possibility 
of the One as not-One as One as not-One etcetera (what I have elsewhere called 
the self-deceiving God).223
In my view, this last passage is in the end mandatory, and the two options should 
merge into one, in order to prevent Lacanian philosophers of the future from 
themselves embracing a negative Weltanschauung. As Lacan lucidly warns us, 
When one will make a course of philosophy . . . one will summarise my teaching 
and say: “What Lacan states is this—isn’t it?—he says that on the animal ladder 
[. . .] crack, eh! No more sexual relationship!” Which means the same thing as 
the origins of language—because philosophers are clearly not idiots. A speaking 
being has no sexual relationship! [. . .] It’s very funny as we will regain there the 
totality of the world.224
220 Lacan, Encore, 10.
221 Lacan, 10.
222 Of course, for Badiou—and for Lacan—the productivity of the impasse of mathematisation 
first and foremost concerns Cantor’s theorem, specifically when considering infinite sets.
223 See Chiesa, Not-Two and “Psychoanalysis and Agnostic Atheism.”
224 Lacan, Lacan in Italia, 75.
73
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
Clearly, for Lacan, it is far from granted that “good” Lacanian philosophers are 
exempted from surreptitiously endorsing bad philosophy.
References
Althusser, Louis. Writings on Psyhoanalysis: Freud and Lacan. Edited by Olivier Corpet 
and François Matheron. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1996.
Badiou, Alain. “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan.” In Conditions, trans. Steven Corco-
ran, 228–47. London: Continuum, 2008. 
. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005.
. Conditions. Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2008.
. “Formules de ‘L’Étourdit.’ ” In Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, Il n’y a pas de rap-
port sexuel: Deux leçons sur “L’Étourdit” de Lacan, 101–36. Paris: Fayard, 2010.
. Lacan: Anti-philosophy 3. Translated by Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer. New 
York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
. Theory of the Subject. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum, 2009.
Bosteels, Bruno. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 
translated by Bruno Bosteels, vii–xxxvii. London: Continuum, 2009.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016.
. “Psychoanalysis and Agnostic Atheism.” In Lorenzo Chiesa and Adrian Johnston, 
God Is Undead: Psychoanalysis and the Case for Non-Belief. London: Bloomsbury, 
forthcoming.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Question of a Weltanschauung.” In New Introductory Lectures on 
Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, 1932–36, edited by James Strachey, 158–82. Vol. 
22 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 
London: Vintage, 2001.
Johnston, Adrian. “This Philosophy Which Is Not One: Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou, 
and Lacanian Antiphilosophy.” In “Jean-Claude Milner,” edited by Justin Clemens 
and Sigi Jöttkandt, 137–58. Special issue, S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology 
Critique 3 (Spring 2010).
Lacan, Jacques. “Alla ‘Scuola Freudiana.’ ” In Lacan in Italia, 1953–1978, ed. Giacomo B. 
Contri, 99–122. Milan: La Salamandra, 1978.
. Anxiety. Translated by A. R. Price. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-
Alain Miller, book 10. Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
. “Conférence de presse du docteur Jacques Lacan.” Lettres de l’École freudienne 16 
(1975): 6–26.
. “Conférences dans les universités nord-américaines.” Scilicet 6/7 (1975): 53–63.
74
lorenzo chiesa
. “Conférences et Entretiens dans des universités nord-américaines.” Scilicet 6/7 
(1975): 32–45.
. “De James Joyce comme symptôme.” Le croquant 28 (November 2000). https://
ecole-lacanienne.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1976-01-24.pdf.
. “Dissolution.” In Aux confins du Séminaire, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, 43–77. Paris: 
Navarin, 2021.
. D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-
Alain Miller, book 16. Paris: Seuil, 2006.
. D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, 
edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 18. Paris: Seuil, 2006.
. “En guise de conclusion.” Lettres de l’École freudienne 8 (1971): 205–17.
. The Formations of the Unconscious. Translated by Russell Grigg. The Seminar of 
Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 5. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
. “Freud per sempre. Intervista con Jacques Lacan.” Interview by Emilia Granzotto. 
Panorama, November 21, 1974. https://www.slp-cf.it/orientamento-lacaniano/interv-
iste/freud-per-sempre/.
. “Intervention sur l’exposé de J. Favez-Boutonier.” Bulletin de la Société Française 
de Philosophie 49, no. 1 (1955): 37–41.
. “Interview donnée par Jacques Lacan à François Wahl à propos de la parution des 
Écrits.” Le Bulletin de l’Association Freudienne 3 (May 1983): 6–7.
. “L’acte psychanalytique: Séminaire 15, 1967–1968.” Unpublished typescript, ses-
sions of November 29, 1967, and January 17, 1968. PDF document.
. “L’Étourdit.” In Autres écrits, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, 449–95. Paris: Seuil, 
2001.
. “L’identification: Séminaire 9, 1961–1962.” Unpublished typescript, session of 
February 28, 1962. PDF document.
. “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile a mourre: Séminaire 24, 1976–1977.” 
Unpublished typescript, sessions of December 14, 1976, and March 15, 1977. PDF doc-
ument.
. “L’objet de la psychanalyse: Séminaire 13, 1965–1966.” Unpublished typescript, 
session of March 30, 1966. PDF document.
. La logique du fantasme, 1966–1967. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, edited by 
Jacques-Alain Miller, book 14. Paris: Seuil, 2023.
. “La psychanalyse et son enseignement.” Bulletin de la Société Française de 
Philosophie 49, no. 2 (1957): 65–101.
. La relation d’objet, 1956–1957. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-
Alain Miller, book 4. Paris: Seuil, 1994.
. “La topologie et le temps: Séminaire 26, 1978–1979.” Unpublished typescript, May 
15, 1979. PDF document.
75
badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy
. “Le moment de conclure: Séminaire 25, 1977–1978.” Unpublished typescript, ses-
sion of December 20, 1977. PDF document.
. “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une 
fonction en psychologie.” In Autres écrits, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, 23–84. 
Paris: Seuil, 2001.
. “Les problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse: Séminaire 12, 1964–1965.” 
Unpublished typescript, sessions of December 2, 1964, and June 16, 1965. PDF docu-
ment.
. “Lettre de Jacques Lacan à trois psychanalystes italiens.” Spirales 9 (1981): 60.
. My Teaching. Translated by David Macey. London: Verso, 2008.
. On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore, 1972–73. The 
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 20. Translated by 
Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
. . . . or Worse. Translated by A. R. Price. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by 
Jacques-Alain Miller, book 19. Cambridge: Polity, 2018.
. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Russell Grigg. The Seminar of 
Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 17. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
. “Presentation on Psychical Causality.” In Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink, 123–58. 
New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
. “Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching.” In Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink, 364–83. 
New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
. The Psychoses, 1955–1956. Translated by Russell Grigg. The Seminar of Jacques 
Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 3. Abingdon: Routledge, 1993.
. “Réponses à des étudiants en philosophie.” In Autres écrits, edited by Jacques-
Alain Miller, 203–11. Paris: Seuil, 2001.
. “Réponses de Jacques Lacan à des questions sur les noeuds et l’inconscient.” 
Lettres de l’École freudienne 21 (1977): 471–75.
. “R.S.I.: Séminaire 22, 1974–1975.” Unpublished typescript, session of February 18, 
1975. PDF document.
. The Sinthome. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 
23. Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Translated by Denis 
Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. Edited by Joan Copjec. New York: 
W. W. Norton, 1990.
. “The Triumph of Religion.” In The Triumph of Religion, Preceded by Discourse to 
Catholics, translated by Bruce Fink, 55–85. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. 
McGuinness. London: Routledge, 1995.