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LACANIAN INK 24/25 – Spring

Eroticism

ALAIN BADIOU – THE SUBJECT OF ART
Deitch Projects
, April 1/2005

Josefina and Badiou

Friday, April 1, 2005, 7 pm, Deitch Projects hosted the presentation of the Spring issue - number 24/25 - on Eroticism - of the journal lacanian ink.

Josefina Ayerza, the editor of lacanian ink, read a short introduction to the current issue and welcomed Alain Badiou, whose assertion that ontology is mathematics makes for decisive engagements with poetry, psychoanalysis and radical politics.

Badiou's lecture at the ocassion, THE SUBJECT OF ART, dealt with his theory of the emergence of truths from the singular relationship between a subject and an event. His paper was followed by questions from the audience.

The lecture was webcast live by August Sound Coalition.

Introduction:

I am Josefina Ayerza, the editor of Lacanian Ink.

Let me thank you all for being here tonight, thank very much Jeffrey Deitch for hosting the event... and thank Kathryn Grayson for her help with putting it together.

Our Spring issue, on Eroticism, celebrates lacanian ink's 15 years of an uninterrupted flow of existence. Actually, if its purport is Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, issue 24/25 comes to broaden the stage - we have three new writers.

A double issue, the translation efforts of our precious collaborator Barbara Fulks I indeed want to acknowledge.

With Jacques-Alain Miller eroticism draws in space, subsists over time... Not a Euclidean linear space, the route to the desired object makes detours, circuits... - the obsessive renders the actual object impossible to attain... the hysteric turns it elusive.

Badiou graph Badiou both hands

With the obsessional the obstacle becomes the cage itself in which the subject is enclosed, and this conveys the subjective experience of the obsessional - of being caged. The obsessional promenades with his cage... he is mobile, but always in the space of the cage. And it is in this cage that he can experience the affect of mortification, which tends to transform the cage into a coffin.

In hysteria every object I attain is not the object of my desire. In other words, if I attain the object, by this very fact it ceases to be the object of my desire. The displaced object is found elsewhere: "I desire caviar on condition of not having it."

Gerard Wajcman retrieves "The Birth of the Intimate" - the erotic belongs inside - you close the door... However the outer world has a chance... as it frames itself outside the window... "To name this knotting of disjointed territories Lacan invented a word, the extime, Wajcman concludes "We have no other interiority than the world."

Slavoj Zizek dots down the ways of the political, overall soliciting, controlling or regulating jouissance. An erotic cultural opposition between the West and Islam; "on the one side, a woman's right to free sexuality includes the freedom to display and/or expose herself and provoke and/or disturb men... on the other side, the desperate male attempts to eradicate or, at least, keep under control this threat - Z