Alain Badiou is a philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, and professor emeritus at the Ecole normale superieure 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. Elisabeth Roudinesco is director of research at the Universite Paris Diderot and director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes-Etudes, 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-dela. 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.
This set of exchanges adds significantly to our current appreciation of both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Badiouian philosophy. For readers curious about both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Badiouian philosophy, this book will be an irresistible must read. -- Adrian Johnston, University of New Mexico This is a highly readable and relevant discussion. Badiou and Roudinesco each contribute an important piece of the puzzle that is the figure and thought of Jacques Lacan. Both the general reader and the specialists in either Badiou or Lacan's thought will be able to appreciate this book in its English translation. -- Bruno Bosteels, author of Badiou and Politics