Once more the political by way of Odradek, "an object which is trans-generational (exempted from the cycle of generations), immortal, outside finitude (because outside sexual difference), outside time, displaying no goal-oriented activity, no purpose, no utility..." With Lacan jouissance is that which serves nothing. "There are many different figurations of the 'Thing-jouissance' - an immortal (or, more precisely, undead) excess - in Kafka's work: the Law that somehow insists without properly existing, making us guilty without us knowing what we are guilty of; the wound that would not heal and does not let us die; bureaucracy in its most 'irrational' aspect; and, last but not least, 'partial objects' like Odradek."

Cathy Lebowitz and I discuss the work of Jane and Louise Wilson, the erotic here involved with repopulating an isolated continent after World War I... There is no man, only women, to secretly endorse eugenics policy.

Marie-H?l?ne Brousse we are publishing for the first time. She narrates a clinical case. The subject is an artist that lives of his art, is a famous figure... I quote "What is the nature of this convergence between artistic and analytic practice, between sinthome and art?" Let one be the reverse of the other, symptom and art endure over the same structure.

Also Massimo Recalcati we are publishing for the first time. He addresses "The Anorexic Passion for the Mirror", the thin-body taking on the quality of a fetish. Thereby the image of beauty doesn't aim at the desire of the Other. Rather, wound up by suppressing the body's sexual and erotic forms, it will spare it as locus of jouissance.
Stuart Schneiderman who we formerly published in 1992 and 1993, performs a sly comeback... not without reverberation. Severely questioning psychoanalysis' adroitness on behalf of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf, " he will claim that "... Freud was trying to neuroticize a depression-his strategy involved turning something he did not know how to treat into something he believed he could cure..." Though already Lacan had his say in concern with Freud setting a fixed date for the termination of the Wolf-Man's analysis, "it could have provoked the patient's later decompensations." We may want to follow up the argument. Is there a continental controversy?

We'll call upon Alain Badiou - our honored guest tonight - for whom the massive dispositions of thought are only detectable through Marxism, Psychoanalysis and German hermeneutics. In America we could have a fourth term to the equation... And this is Pragmatism - Peirce, James, Dewey, Rorty... To my question in an interview some years ago about general currents of thought on both sides of the Atlantic, Rorty acknowledged a "TransOceanic" thinking, and retorted, "we read the same books."

I still have a question... Do we interpret them the same way?

We started publishing Alain Badiou with the turn of the century - in 2000. and we have published Badiou ever since - as a regular contributor.

His "Third Draft of a Manifesto of Affirmationism," holds political emphasis and intriguing new ideas such as constraining unanimity and me-ism. Actually, he sees our time as drenched in the uniqueness of a doctrine that, under the name of democracy, builds up around it.

Democracy, the enemy? With Badiou any unique doctrine is desperate, nihilist. And the artistic subjectivity it leads to is a perverse endeavor: the sublime desperation of the body is formalized and thereof delivered to the jouissance of the Unique.

The very conspicuous in matters of philosophy, Alain Badiou teaches at the ?cole Normale Sup?rieure and at the Coll?ge International de Philosophie in Paris. He has published plays and political essays, as well as a number of major philosophical works. Many books and articles by Badiou have become available in English, including St. Paul: the Foundation of Universalism, Infinite Thought, a collection of essays published by Continuum... the latest is his Theoretical Writings.

With you Alain Badiou and "The Subject of Art"

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