Lacan and Badiou on action and the unnameable

Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou are brought into relation through a dispute about action, negativity, and the Unnameable: whether an act must first clear away existing commitments or can be understood through its fidelity to a positive emancipatory truth. The contrast initially appears stark, but the account argues that it becomes misleading when it treats every kind of negativity as the same. Its more consequential distinction concerns where the Unnameable belongs: outside a process of truth as its resistant limit, or within the act that founds a new field of naming.

The objection and its stakes

Bruno Boostels, writing in an unpublished essay titled “Badiou without iek,” objects that giving priority to the Act as radical, self-relating negativity devalues in advance any positive project of establishing a new Order or remaining faithful to a political Cause. From this perspective, if the most radical act is a gesture of pure negativity that comes before every candidate cause and undermines them all, it becomes difficult to explain what a psychoanalytic politics could preserve or sustain. A new truth would have no real opportunity to be inscribed: negativity would already have wiped the slate clean.

The objection identifies a genuine political stake in the disagreement. If an act is defined first as destruction or interruption, fidelity to a collective project can seem secondary, or even impossible. Boostels therefore presents Badiou’s account of emancipatory commitment as an alternative to a Lacanian emphasis on negativity: for Badiou, the phenomena associated with the death drive follow the failure, betrayal, or exhaustion of a positive project, rather than establishing negativity as the first principle of action.

Why the opposition is not symmetrical

The account questions the ease with which Boostels assigns Lacan and Badiou to opposing sides. It distinguishes self-relating negativity from negativity understood as an ethical and practical failure, such as the betrayal of an emancipatory project. Treating these as equivalent allows Boostels to oppose Lacan’s supposed primacy of tragic failure to Badiou’s primacy of positive truth, but the resulting confrontation does not establish which theory is true. The criticism of Lacan risks becoming tautological: that Lacan is not Badiou.

This distinction matters because an act’s negativity need not mean that it is merely the failed aftermath of a good project. Nor does emphasizing a positive truth by itself settle the question of what that truth cannot absorb. The analysis accordingly turns from a simple opposition between negative and positive politics to the different theoretical positions assigned to the Unnameable, the limit that each account must confront but does not place in the same way.

The Unnameable and the act of naming

In Badiou’s framework as described here, the unnameable Real is an external and unfathomable background to a process of truth. It functions as a resistant X that a truth-process can never fully force into its own terms. Badiou thus retains a remainder that escapes symbolization, but the relation between Reason and the Unnameable remains an external opposition: the unnameable marks a limit confronting Reason from beyond it.

For Lacan, by contrast, the Unnameable is absolutely inherent in the Act. It is not simply an obscure background that stands opposite reasoned truth; it is the act’s own excess over the names through which the act is understood. The difference is therefore not whether a remainder escapes full symbolization, since both accounts preserve such a remainder. It is whether that remainder remains external to the act of Reason or belongs to the act of instituting meaning itself. Lacan’s account makes room for a moment of madness at Reason’s core, rather than locating all obscurity on the other side of a rational process.

Schelling’s contribution

Schelling’s account of primordial decision provides a philosophical model for this internal relation between freedom, necessity, and naming. Following Kant, he describes an unconscious, atemporal deed through which the subject chooses an eternal character. In conscious, temporal life, that choice is experienced as inexorable necessity, as though it expressed the way the subject had always been. The decision is thus neither simply a free choice made at an ordinary moment nor merely a necessity imposed from outside: it is an abyssal act whose effects are later lived as necessity.

This primordial decision also clarifies why Lacan’s account of action cannot be reduced to a pre-existing drive cycle. The abyssal act of freedom breaks that rotary movement. The unnameable unconscious is not only what logos fails to master; at its most radical, it is the very act of naming, the founding gesture through which logos begins. The act therefore gives rise to the field that can name and interpret it, while still exceeding every name subsequently attached to it. In this account, the contingency and madness of the founding deed do not disappear when meaning is established; they persist at the heart of the act of meaning-making.

Lacan’s wider account of social change

The discussion of the four discourses extends the account of Lacan’s theory from the structure of an act to the organization of modern social life. The University discourse, described as a hegemonic discourse of modernity, has two forms of existence: biopolitical domination and the capitalist matrix. The first encompasses such diagnoses as bureaucratic totalitarianism, technological rule, instrumental reason, biopolitics, and the administered world. The second reproduces itself through the production and reappropriation of surplus-value and through continual self-revolutionizing.

These are presented as two ways of undermining the Master’s discourse. Doubt about the Master’s effectiveness can be answered by direct rule through experts whose authority rests on knowledge; alternatively, permanent questioning can itself be absorbed into social reproduction. Capitalism makes excess and self-revolutionizing part of its ordinary operation, so permanent revolution is no longer necessarily evidence of a break with the system. Against these arrangements, the Analyst’s discourse is associated with the emergence of revolutionary emancipation. This account of social links does not erase the disagreement with Badiou, but it shows why the relation is more than an abstract contrast between a negative act and a positive Cause: the meaning of action depends also on how a social order organizes knowledge, authority, and its own capacity to absorb disruption.

A related discussion of objet petit a identifies a mechanism through which a demand to enjoy can become bound to authority. When objet petit a occupies the place of the Master-Signifier, a short circuit forms between S1 and a; breaking the vicious cycle requires separating those terms. The account invokes Jacques-Alain Miller’s claim that the Analyst’s discourse is identical with the discourse of contemporary civilization, reading that claim as an indication that the contemporary social link is perverse. This further emphasizes a central concern shared by the discussion of Lacan and Badiou: an emancipatory act cannot be understood only by the positive language in which it is declared, because the structure that names a demand may also capture and reproduce it.