On Love: Between Lacan and Badiou

This thesis considers love through the interlacing of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and philosopher Alain Badiou. Engaging with the problematic of love as an in-between (metaxú) in Western thought and intervening in the contemporary scholarship around Lacan and Badiou, this thesis examines love in the works of Lacan and Badiou and conceptualizes the consequences that remain implicit and unexplored in the two authors’ thoughts on love. Chapter 1 addresses love through mathematics. Noting that mathematics plays a pivotal role in Lacan’s and Badiou’s approaches to love, I discuss love through the sexuation formulas, numericity, modality, topology, and knot theory, elaborating the concept of amorous void. Chapter 2 addresses love through politics. Noting that politics resides where the interlacing of Lacan and Badiou reaches a peak, I examine the enigmatic knot between love and politics through the contemporary crisis of love, the reinvention of philia, community, and humanity, elaborating the concept of amorous unpower. Chapter 3 addresses love through antiphilosophy and philosophy. Referring to Japanese writer Murakami Haruki’s Tony Takitani as a facilitator for the dialogue between antiphilosophy and philosophy, I examine how love straddles both the psychoanalytic symptom and the philosophical truth, the analytic act and the philosophical operation. I conclude this chapter by elaborating the concepts of sinthomatic truth and archiamorous acts. Chapter 4 reads Letter to D by French philosopher André Gorz. Discussing Gorz and Dorine’s amorous itinerary from their first encounter to their joint suicide, I address how Gorz and Dorine weave both the Lacanian side and the Badiouian side through their “Bacanian” love. In Conclusion, I revisit love as an in-between in relation to intermediate daemons in Plato’s Epinomis, from which are drawn the interlacing of the analyst as a participant of pain and the philosopher as a discerner of truth. Developing the problematic implied in this interlacing, I argue that the subject of love comes between the enigma of love as the loveless that is indiscernible to love and the principle of love as the love that infinitely surpasses itself.Ph.D