Psychoanalysis

This chapter responds to Žižek’s insightful and detailed critical analysis of the current neurobiological and neuro-psychoanalytic redefinition of the unconscious. In doing so, it examines and reproaches Žižek’s own position as developed in his The Parallax View, where he recognises and credits the importance of neuroscientific contributions to the understanding of the psyche and its wounds. However, despite this crediting, he nonetheless remain doubtful that these new elaborations can substitute for the Freudian and Lacanian definitions of traumas.

This chapter studies the relations between Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek starting from the notion of “antiphilosophy” proposed in the 1970s by Jacques Lacan and taken up by Badiou in a series of seminars in the 1990s. Žižek has been at pains to argue that Lacan is no less a philosopher for having proposed antiphilosophy as a subdiscipline in which all analysts would have to be trained. Yet from Badiou’s point of view not only Lacan but undoubtedly Žižek as well would have to be read as antiphilosophers. The chapter aims to sort out the stakes behind this debate.