Abstract

This article gives a comparative analysis of the way in which Lacanian psychoanalysis and Alain Badiou's mathematical ontology understand the category of the real, respectively, as the foundation of individual subjectivity or the name of being-as-being. A number of shifts in focus arise from the fundamental difference in the location of the void: from the individual act to the collective event; from death drive to immortal truth; from subjective destitution and cathartic purification to transformative interventions and constitutive thought. These shifts are exemplified, elaborated and analysed through a close reading of the thinkers' respective commentaries on Sophocles' Antigone. Foregrounding what is philosophically at stake in these differences, the article defends Badiou against Lacanian critics by examining the ethical and political force of his innovation.