Introduction ­5

out of existing structures and operations even more intense or rigor-

ous logics of thinking and praxis. In order to do so, we establish in
each chapter a foundational problem, outlining its constitution,
antecedents, elective affiliations and import – such as why we find it
necessary to begin our thinking of the structuring of subjective time
by means of an extra-psychoanalytic sophism – before showing how
and why Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou take it up, what they do with it,
and to what new ends. In doing so, we also sketch their background
philosophical conditions as a force-field of limit-problems. What this
means is very specific: when Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou respond to
problems, these problems cannot simply be ‘read off’ their differing
positions. A problem is not only not a ‘thesis’ affixed with a question
mark; it is not always even formulable as a set of propositions.
Rather, a problem is an ‘un-place’ or atopia of irreducibly multiple
conceptual points that demand to be transformed, without necessar-
ily having any possible representation or recognition as an index. As
such, ‘theses’ emerge as the dissimulating, ‘downstream’ registrations
of much more fundamental issues, ones which are ‘unconscious’ or
‘imperceptible’ or ‘indiscernible’; for this reason, the ‘problems’ of
which they are one partial outcome cannot always (or even often) be
reconstructed by an analysis of the themes alone. This is one reason
why it is misleading, perhaps even futile, to compare thinkers accord-
ing to their differing positions regarding the alleged key traits of a
thematic. Moreover, the seizure and extraction of ‘key concepts’ here
does not tend to follow received opinions in the scholarship about
their appearance and constitution; a different kind of modelling is
required. Even the term ‘problem’ is a problem here, not least given
the difficulties of establishing, formulating and separating questions
and problems – and question from problem – that are at once shared
and shattered by our three thinkers. This seizure-extraction will
therefore often target marginal or under-remarked moments in the
texts of Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou in the attempt to reconstruct a
less-representational account of their problems than is usually
offered.

Virtually real One problem of the problem of influence is there-

fore precisely that it tends to efface problems as
such. Instead, one is confronted by representations of problems as
theses or other forms of positivity, and their inevitable articulation
with a particular declension of the proper name. But proper names
can take many declensions, and, if this declination-power is not
­6 Lacan Deleuze Badiou

adequately investigated, those names can easily become territorial

facades. But a problem is, more profoundly, a no-man’s-land in the
war over time, in all senses of that phrase. If there is a valuable point
made in the course of the contemporary ‘critique of critique’, it is
certainly due in part to the general conviction that critique as it stems
in its strong philosophical line from Kant has contributed to the
problem of the occlusion of problems, just as Heidegger famously
remarked at the inception of Being and Time that the forgetting of
the meaning of being had been forgotten so thoroughly that it had
been forgotten that it had been forgotten . . .* The present work is
therefore not a positive tracing of influence in the sense of source-
hunting, but a staging of the destinies of the objective virtuality of
problems and questions by attempting to take stock of their virtual
objectivity.

Shape-without-shapeHuman beings are always confronted by problems

that they do not recognise and which are too diffi-
cult for them to solve. So-called ‘solutions’ or ‘resolutions’ are most
often low-grade and misleading responses to false problems – which
is why ‘empiricism’, if it is to be worthy of philosophy, must also be
‘transcendental’; or ‘Platonism’, if it is to be worthy of the name,
must also be ‘materialist’. But this is also why what goes under the
name of ‘pragmatism’ has a necessary but properly subordinate place
in philosophy: pragmatism is not so much an anti-philosophy as a
sub-philosophy; that is, a practice that inheres in philosophy itself as
its perennial idiot questioner, reminding it that there are indeed real
problems while itself so often mistaking not only these problems but
their real constitution as such. Being pragmatic is an unavoidable
demand, but deleterious if it is considered to dominate or exhaust the
field of philosophy. To deny the force of its operations is to abandon
philosophy for theology, but to affirm it without reservation is to
subordinate philosophy to stupidity. The pragmatist is, to invoke
Deleuze, a conceptual persona, a paradoxical one, one which denies
its own conceptual status in the name of humility, variability, relativ-
ity and effectivity, but there are also many others. Some of these are
entirely anonymous, ‘shapes we would call them if shape they had
that had no shape’, to parody John Milton’s Paradise Lost on the

* Of course for Heidegger this was the question and not per se a problem, except insofar as the
question itself produces as its effect the problem which is properly that to which the question
is addressed.
 Introduction ­7

non-figure of Death; others have proper names and well-defined

outlines, names and outlines that call for their own undoing.

Proper names To put this differently, the status of the proper

names ‘Lacan’, ‘Deleuze’ and ‘Badiou’ are at stake.
A proper name for our thinkers is itself not, pace Saul Kripke, a ‘rigid
designator’ assigned by a ‘primal baptism’, but something more
remarkable. As Deleuze puts it in Dialogues, ‘the proper name does
not at all designate a person or a subject. It designates an effect, a
zigzag, something that happens or that happens in-between as under
a potential difference.’* So these names do not simply function as
personages, conceptual or otherwise; they are not merely markers for
important or interesting arguments; they are not only fodder for
comparison and contrast; they are not just indices of trajectories of
thought or of anxieties of influence; nor are they solely resources of
conceptual power or potential. They are all these things, certainly,
but they are more yet: they are misleading signposts to the real chal-
lenges of contemporary thought, challenges that they themselves
designate, indeed have helped to identify and force, without for all
that always being able to present those challenges so openly or
clearly themselves. This is therefore fundamentally an attempt to
outline some of their ‘unthoughts’. This may be another way of
stating that they are our masters – with the proviso, of course, and in
accord with reason rather than presumptions to authenticity, that
this ‘mastery’ too be rethought, as something other than a non-linear
battery of order-words inflicting the stigmata of reactive obedience.

It is our contention, finally, that no one is yet fin-

Incompletion, return,
infinity
ished with these thinkers, has yet properly digested
their work or rendered it purely operational. Rather than complete
such a project, we wish to do what we can to make sure that such an
eventuality will never take place. One separates ‘knowledge’ from
‘power’ by way of ‘non-knowledge’: the last-named of these is neces-
sarily a new form of ‘well-speaking’, a ‘line of flight’, or ‘praxis’ that
attempts to refound a position indifferent to a power that, from its
beginning to its end, is essaying to insinuate itself everywhere. The
same considerations have led us, little by little, to a peculiar meth-
odological conclusion. Underlying this text is an attempt to elaborate

* Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 51.
­8 Lacan Deleuze Badiou

a protocol of absolute disagreement. We travel to the end of the

dialogic program only in order to go beyond it, to the point where
the apparent parallels described as subjective and objective come into
contact, in thought. This means that the disagreement we seek no
longer invokes the affective, social, existential qualities of disagree-
ment in the regular sense – Deleuze speaks of ‘the fact that Foucault
existed’,* the fact that he wrote what he did . . . Our disagreement is
predicated on a univocal agreement about the significance of the fact
of the thought of Badiou, Deleuze and Lacan, and nothing else. It is
our contention that the existing models by which thinkers are
brought together are one and all inadequate, have always been inad-
equate. This (hardly new) observation ought to lead to more signifi-
cant consequences more often than it has. Correlatively, if we use the
image of parallels that meet at the horizon, it is not because we think
we have necessarily succeeded in our construction, but that we con-
sider it a necessary effort nonetheless.

No name What name or figure or form or concept is ‘ade-

quate’ to such a ‘collective’ enterprise? It is not a
Polis, a Republic, a Peripeteia, a Cosmos, a community or common-
wealth, an ideal speech community, an unavowable or coming
­community, a community of those with nothing in common, a link or
a knot, a block of becoming, a rabble or swarm, or any other of the
gatherings that are today regularly invoked as types of (disavowed)
truth and grace. For the moment, let’s just call this an Us Them, and
see where, if anywhere, it gets us . . .

* Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006), p. 85.
CHAPTER TWO

Contemporary

This chapter locates our three thinkers at the heart of contemporary

thought. More substantially though, it argues that it is the fact that
the figure of the contemporary is also at once the milieu and a focus
of their work that at least partially gives them their import. In a nut-
shell: for all three thinkers, to be contemporary is an injunction for
contemporary thought.

Three ways of beingLacan, Deleuze and Badiou take very different

contemporary with the
contemporary routes to this ‘end’. For Lacan, in order to be con-
temporary, it is necessary to return to the origin. This ‘return to’ is
different from the ‘return of’, and indeed the former must be effected
in order that the second is not. For Lacan, as a psychoanalyst, one
returns to Freud, albeit not so much to the latter’s key propositions,
but to the new fault-lines – ‘problems’? ‘questions’? – that those
propositions at once open and occlude. A return to these problems is
concomitantly thought of by Lacan as the conditions of the problems
of the return, and the return of those problems in a contemporary
way. For Deleuze, by contrast, to be contemporary is first of all to be
untimely, which is to say, to not belong to the present. The present
itself is what must be resisted in order to be contemporary. This is a
difficult task because of the elasticity of our habitual mode of exist-
ence which yokes us to what already exists. As a consequence, to
become is always to create (in life and in thought) in order to avoid
being subsumed by the present: ‘We lack creation. We lack resistance
to the present.’* However, this creative relation to existence cannot
be achieved once and for all, and must be constantly pursued, which
is why, third, to be contemporary for Deleuze is to become. To
become is to become-other, that is, to subtract oneself from every
currently existing predicate through this act of creation. Thus

* Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 108.
­10 Lacan Deleuze Badiou

Deleuze and Badiou are, at least prima facie, neighbours; for the
latter, to be contemporary is to produce the new, the truly new. Yet
to produce the new is also to be the contemporary of those that are
not of our time but that, in the ‘time of their own time’, produced the
new. To be contemporary is to partake of the trans-temporal, or
really, trans-mundane, and not to be finally subject to time but to
inscribe eternity in one’s own time/world under the general name of
Idea. Philosophy, for Badiou, is contemporary to the material and
materialist conditions that in their own time produce the new dis-
courses of time, and also to the Idea itself as the composition of this
contemporaneity. As such, Plato, Descartes and Hegel are our con-
temporaries, just as are Euclid, Galileo, the Horses of Chauvet, Eloise
and Abelard, the Paris Commune and Category Theory.

Afterlife of Meno’s
paradox
Whoever asks ‘what is contemporary?’ is already
behind the times. If you are contemporary, then
there’s clearly no need to pose such a question; if you’re truly posing
the question, then it’s because you don’t know what the contempo-
rary is. And not-knowing is already a kind of negative proof that you
aren’t it. Instead, you find yourself chasing the contemporary. But to
chase the contemporary is also to be behind the contemporary, in its
past or wake. Given, moreover, that you don’t know what it is, then
you may not have a clue what it is when you see it. Is that it, peeping
out from behind the shadows at the edge of the forest? Or flickering
dimly from the artificial light of an iPad? How can you chase some-
thing which you cannot recognise? Even posing the question, as
Meno found out, can then be a sign that you’re never going to be
contemporary. Perhaps such a question can even be posed to simu-
late a quest for the very contemporary that you really don’t want to
seize at any cost. You might look like you’re looking for it, while all
the time having an impeccable alibi for your evasion of it. You pose
the question so as not to ask. But the opposite might also then be
true. Could the becoming-obscure of the contemporary, or the sense
of the urgency of the question of the obscurity of the contemporary
then be the contemporary itself? Time and non-knowledge thereby
come to be linked, in this time of the end of times. ‘We are the con-
temporary to the extent that we lack it’ might be one attempt at a
resolution. This answer does not get anyone very far; to pose the
question in this way is simply to mark an epistemological limit (you
can know that you can only not know).
✥
 Contemporary ­11

As sophistical as this flight of the contemporary into the zones

of non-knowledge may appear, it doesn’t for all that mean that
you’re entirely relegated to the past, since it can also mean that the
organisation of time itself has become obscure or disordered – and
to recognize this is to move beyond epistemology. ‘The time is out
of joint’, as Hamlet laments – an extraordinary phrase that has had,
unsurprisingly, an extraordinary fate in recent European philosophy.
It might then be tempting to elevate this sentiment to a diagnosis of
time’s own self-wrenching (the untimely enigma of time itself to the
times themselves, the problem of the contemporary as the problem
of time itself, etc.), but one which has only emerged ‘now’, in a time
that is no longer simply a time insofar as the question of time ‘itself’
has obtruded in a way that it hadn’t or couldn’t in previous times.

In sum, it can’t not be significant that the ‘contemporary’ has become

a necessary topic for thought today. Why? Because the problem of
the contemporary is clearly a problem of the problem of time today.
Time today is a problem for philosophy that has an essential link to
the rubric of the contemporary, precisely because the received notions
that have regulated the thought of time – past, present, future, of
course, but also potential (or virtual) and actual, not to mention the
distribution of other, more classical modal categories – have them-
selves been placed in question by the time or times in which we live.
We say, then, ‘time today’, uncertain even whether there was time
yesterday or whether there will be time tomorrow, somewhat worse
off than at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, where we could at least be
assured of jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, if never jam today.
Rather than entering into the problem of the contemporary through
the problem of time, which would suggest that the medium of the
contemporary is the present (contemporary as a name for the pres-
ence of the present), the problem of the contemporary presents some-
thing quite different. To begin with ‘the contemporary’ is already
to suggest that the possibility of a complete temporal synthesis and
of an adequate conception of this synthesis has become obscure. In
fact, it implies that if there is or was or will be time, that such time
is dependent on others, on other times and other non-times and on
other places and placements, without that dependence being able
to be thought as progression, sublation, supplantation, ­succession,
protention, retention, status or even as différance.
­12 Lacan Deleuze Badiou

Characterising the situation in this way may itself

Postulation and resolution
of a Wittgensteinian
problematic be read as a symptom of a deleterious philosophi-
cal failure. As Boris Groys reminds us, writing of one of the last great
(self-styled) critics of modern philosophy:
Wittgenstein was highly ironical about his philosophical colleagues
who from time to time suddenly turned to contemplation of the
present, instead of simply minding their own business and going
about their everyday lives. For Wittgenstein, the passive contempla-
tion of the present, of the immediately given, is an unnatural occu-
pation dictated by the metaphysical tradition, which ignores the
flow of everyday life – the flow that always overflows the present
without privileging it in any way. According to Wittgenstein, the
interest in the present is simply a philosophical – and maybe also
artistic – déformation professionnelle, a metaphysical sickness that
should be cured by philosophical critique.*
Of course, Wittgenstein’s mode of philosophical critique is itself the
call for a more primordial passivity, ‘thoughts that are at peace’, a
kind of morbid inactivity in place of the torment of thinking.† In
this, Wittgenstein is at once the double, accomplice and antithesis
of Heidegger, who also sought to characterise – if with a very dif-
ferent motivation and by very different means – recent philosophy
as that of Augensblickphilosophie, philosophy of the moment and
of the ground-abyss (Abgrund). Nonetheless, we might ask, pace
Wittgenstein, whether the philosophical interest in the contemporary
is just an unknowing reflex of a metaphysical inheritance, rather
than a real project or programme for thought. Although we shall
speak further of this difficulty shortly, and, indeed, will return to the
problem of time in a later chapter, it is immediately worth emphasiz-
ing the paradox of this temporal closure of a certain sequence of the
thinking of temporality qua opening.

This can also be put another way: time is of the essence insofar as it
is fundamentally no longer of the essence. This becoming-inessential
of time can therefore itself become the entrance to the present. One
thinks here of the paradoxes of Kafka’s little fable, ‘Before the Law’,
much commented upon by contemporary philosophers, including
Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, not to mention Deleuze himself. The

* Boris Groys, ‘Comrades of Time’, e-flux journal, No. 12 (2009), n.p.

†
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. G. H. Von Wright (London: Wiley-
Blackwell, 1998), p. 50e.
 Contemporary ­13

paradox here is something like: we are before time. The entrance to

the present as a synthesis of time is through the contemporary, and
not through the present itself. Or, to put this another way, a con-
temporary way of thinking the present will have to be found if we
are to be contemporaries of our present. In this sense, we are already
outside of the Wittgensteinian determination: not a perverse meta-
physical turn to the present in the present, but a post-metaphysical
interrogation of the paradoxes of the syntheses of time by means of
the a-temporal or pre-temporal category that is the ‘contemporary’.

The contemporary asInsofar as this is the case, the contemporary must

topological category
become in some way a topological category. Why?
To return momentarily to the Kafka fable, it is because the entrance
to time, or at least the problematic of time, must be a place of some
kind. We see in almost all recent European philosophy a shift from
the conceptual routines that accord a primacy to time-as-sequence to
a disposition of the organisation of space, spaces, spatiality, or as
(deformed) form or (ungrounding) ground. Let us adduce here two
critical remarks by Foucault as a kind of exemplum of this attitude:*
1) In the nineteenth century, philosophy was to reside in the gap
between history and History, between events and the Origin,
between evolution and the first rending open of the source, between
oblivion and the Return. It will be Metaphysics, therefore, only in
so far as it is Memory, and it will necessarily lead thought back
to the question of knowing what it means for thought to have a
history . . . It is enough to recognize here a philosophy deprived
of a certain metaphysics because it has been separated off from
the space of order, yet doomed to Time, to its flux and its returns,
because it is trapped in the mode of being of History.†
2) At the moment when a considered politics of spaces was starting
to develop, at the end of the eighteenth century, the new achieve-
ments in theoretical and experimental physics dislodged philosophy
from its ancient right to speak of the world, the cosmos, finite or
infinite space. This double investment of space by political tech-
nology and scientific practice reduced philosophy to the field of
a problematic of time. Since Kant, what is to be thought by the
philosopher is time. Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger. Along with this
goes a correlative devaluation of space, which stands on the side of

* It is worth noting too that for the Foucault of the archaeological works, the determination
of an adequate historical method is always presented in spatial terms.
†
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books,
1970), pp. 219–20.
­14 Lacan Deleuze Badiou

understanding, the analytical, the conceptual, the dead, the fixed,

the inert.*
Although examples could so easily be multiplied – Lacan’s
topologies, Deleuze and Guattari’s body-without-organs, Derrida’s
spacing, Kristeva’s chora, Badiou’s splace and outplace – for the
moment we will only mark the necessity and ubiquity of this
troping and transumption of time by space. The reader will there-
fore also note that this preamble has already implicitly sketched a
situation, rather than a period of thought, and has done so by allu-
sion to one of the strong lines of immediately available philosophy:
the phenomenological tradition that stems, above all, from G. W. F.
Hegel, and runs through Edward Husserl, Martin Heidegger,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida. For this tradition, at
least in one of its dominant lines, the problem of time is paramount:
sometimes time as history, sometimes time as process or develop-
ment of the elusive tracks of interiorisation, sometimes time as the
traces of the event of the withdrawal of being, sometimes time as
self-absenting undoing, sometimes time as nothingness. It is the
exhaustion of this tradition and its thought of time that gives rise
to a contemporary situation in which thinking the contemporary
appears as an urgent task.

A contemporary Something similar goes for those current descrip-

proliferation of categories
of the contemporarytive attempts in a number of different zones to
make distinctions intended at once to clarify and complicate the
problem of the contemporary. There are, notably, a number of inter-
esting attempts, many stemming primarily from the domain of con-
temporary art. This is not and should not be a surprise: as everybody
dutifully repeats, modern art was characterised by its unique dialecti-
cal relation with avant-gardism, that is, the necessity to ‘make it new’
as an integral condition for art. The paradoxes of the avant-garde –
that one must make it new, but without any clear directives available
for doing so; that one must make it new, but not every novelty is
significant; that one must declare something to be the case that does
not and cannot exist in the supplementary form of the manifesto;
that the identity of indiscernibles may no longer hold (e.g., the per-
ceptually indiscernible may be conceptually antithetical); that the
tradition of art becomes a tradition of ruptures with tradition,

* Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 149–50.