There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

Alain Badiou (PhD, Philosophy, Ecole Normale Superieure) holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School; he also teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the College International de Philosophie in Paris. He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works, including his masterwork, Being and Event (Continuum, 2007), and several Columbia titles, includng Plato's Republic (2013) and Jacques Lacan Past and Present (2016).

Lacan's 'L'Etourdit' is a pivotal yet still underappreciated piece of his corpus. In Badiou and Cassin's concise tour de force, two of France's most important living minds tackle this enigmatic text. Through their combined efforts, Badiou and Cassin render 'L'Etourdit' crystal clear, situating Lacan's later teachings in relation to the history of philosophy and logic starting in ancient Greece. This three-way encounter between Lacan, Badiou, and Cassin, stimulating and surprising to equal degrees, will be enthralling for anyone interested in what philosophy and psychoanalysis have to say to each other. -- Adrian Johnston, University of New Mexico at Albuquerque This is a fascinating and complex little book. Specialists will no doubt spend hours and hours debating the significance of these two lectures for the understanding not only of Lacan but also of the respective projects of his two readers, Badiou and Cassin. -- Bruno Bosteels, Cornell University

• Abbreviations of Lacan's Works Cited in the Text Introduction to Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons on Lacan, by Kenneth Reinhard Authors' Introduction Ab-sense, or Lacan from A to D, by Barbara Cassin Formulas of "L'Etourdit", by Alain Badiou Notes Index