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

Author Biography

Alain Badiou is a philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, and professor emeritus at the cole normale sup rieure in Paris. He has published many philosophical works, including Being and Event and Logics of Worlds, and the play Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts. lisabeth Roudinesco is director of research at the Universit Paris Diderot and director of studies at the cole Pratique des Hautes- tudes, Sorbonne. She is the author of Jacques Lacan, Why Psychoanalysis?, and Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida. Jason E. Smith is a Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellow. His writing and research center on contemporary art and aesthetics, modern continental philosophy (Spinoza, Hegel, and the twentieth century), and post-1968 political thought (primarily French and Italian). His work has appeared in Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Parrhesia, and Radical Philosophy, and he has published, with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philip Armstrong, Politique et au-del . He recently edited and contributed to a special issue of Grey Room devoted to the films of Guy Debord and is working on a monograph on the same subject.