On the collective subject: Lacan avec Badiou

The article aims to theoretically construct the collective subject from Lacan’s Borromean turn which contains a reflection on knotting, mathematical groups and the Freudian “single trait” translated as “unary trait.” Through his teaching of the One and its relation with the “unary trait,” not to mention the Borromean clinic, I will develop a Lacanian collective subject. From triadic knotting to generalized Borromean, we will see how the One turns to the multiple as more than one cuts become necessary to dissolve the Borromean chain. This shift has implications for the Lacanian collective subject. This subject is non-totalizable and radically democratic with a series of One-multiples, forming the collective. The article then goes on to connect this collective subject with Alain Badiou’s insistence on the inherent collectivity of the political subject and dwells on the resistant and “evental” possibilities of this collectivity. In Badiou’s thought, radical politics is an evental creation of “collective” or “generic humanity.” The collective subject of fidelity in Badiou is theorized at a distance from parliamentary democracy and its delegation-based representational politics. In both Lacan and Badiou, topology plays a key role in collectivizing the logic of the subject. Foregrounding this debt to mathematics, this article thinks through the ways in which the collective subject topologically reconfigures the relationship between the individual and the community by “voiding” the one of the individual with the one-multiple of the commune. The purpose of the article is to show how mathematical thinking supports the psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking of the collective subject as a political concept.