In Badiou's Logiques des mondes, the shift is from the axis Being-Event to the axis World-Event. What this means is that, in Logiques des mondes, Being, World and Event do not form a triad: we have either the opposition of Being and World (appearance), or the opposition of World and Event. There is an unexpected conclusion to be drawn from this: insofar as (Badiou emphasizes this point again and again) a true Event is not merely a negative gesture, but opens up a positive dimension of the New, an Event IS the imposition of a new world, of a new Master-Signifier (a new Naming, as Badiou puts it, or, what Lacan calls vers un nouveau significant). The true evental change is the passage from the old to the new world. One should even make a step further and introduce the dimension of dialectics here: an Event CAN be accounted for by the tension between the multiplicity of Being and the World, its site is the symptomal torsion of a World, it is generated by the excess of Being over World (of presence over re-presentation).

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What, already in a first approach, Alain Badiou shares with Gilles Deleuze is that both their philosophies focus on the notion of Event which cannot be reduced to the positive order of Being. We already saw, apropos a series of examples, from Italian neo-Realism to political revolutions, how, for Deleuze, an Event (the emergence of the New) transcends its positive causes; along the same lines, for Badiou, Event introduces a radical break into the order of Being. The difference between them is that, while Deleuze remains a vitalist who asserts the absolute immanence of the Event to Being, the Event as the One-All, the encompassing medium of the thriving differences of Life, Badiou, in a "dualist" fashion, posits Event as radically heterogeneous with regard to Being.

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"L'Étourdit" and "La Troisième". In these texts, the link between objet a and semblance is interrogated. The link between the real and semblance has been approached in various ways throughout the teachings of Lacan. It is a matter, in these two texts, of his "last teachings." There, Lacan questions the limit to the solution that he had invented in the first period of his teaching.every broad way in which Lacan uses this term in his late teaching.


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Is the post-68’ drive to jouissance - to reaching the extreme of forms of sexual pleasures that would dissolve all social links and allow me to find a climax in the solipsism of absolute jouissance - not the very opposite of the consummation of the commodified products promising jouissance? The first (best exemplified by the work of Foucault) stands for a radical, "authentic," subjective position, while the second signals a defeat, a surrender to market forces... Is, however, this opposition effectively so clear? Is it not all too easy to denounce jouissance offered on the market as "false," as providing only the empty package-promise with no substance? Is the hole, the void, in the very heart of our pleasures not the structure of every jouissance? Furthermore, is it, rather, not that the commodified provocations to enjoy which bombard us all the time push us towards, precisely, an autistic-masturbatory, "asocial," jouissance whose supreme case is the addiction to drugs? Are drugs not at the same time the means for the most radical autistic experience of jouissance and a commodity par excellence?


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In his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan invokes the "point of the apocalypse," the impossible saturation of the Symbolic by the Real of jouissance, the full immersion into massive jouissance. The same point can be made in Nietzschean terms - what is effectively Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same? Does it stand for the factual repetition, for the repetition of the past which should be willed as it was, or for a Benjaminiam repetition, a return-reactualization of that which was lost in the past occurrence, of its virtual excess, of its redemptive potential? There are good reasons to read it as the heroic stance of endorsing factual repetition: recall how Nietzsche emphatically points out that, when faced with every event of my life, even the most painful one, I should gather the strength to joyfully will for it to return eternally. If we read the thought of eternal return in this way, then Giorgio Agamben’s evocation of the holocaust as the conclusive argument against the eternal return retains its full weight: who can will it to return eternally? What, however, if we reject the notion of the eternal return of the same as the repetition of the reality of the past, insofar as it relies on an all too primitive notion of the past, on the reduction of the past to the one-dimensional reality of "what really happened," which erases the virtual dimension of the past? If we read the eternal return of the same as the redemptive repetition of the past virtuality? In this case, applied to the nightmare of the holocaust, the Nietzschean eternal return of the same means precisely that one should will the repetition of the potential which was lost through the reality of the holocaust, the potential whose non-actualization opened up the space for the holocaust to occur.


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I do three things in this paper. I give what I think is arguably the best way to understand the concept of a semblant in Lacan's teaching; I reject or at least seriously qualify a second way in which the notion of semblant in Lacan is frequently understood, which is to see it as akin to the phallus; and I finish by criticizing the very, very broad way in which Lacan uses this term in his late teaching.


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