There is no sexual intercourse

Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou engage with one of Jacques Lacan's most challenging and significant texts: "L'Etourdit" from 1973. In a compact form, the most paradoxical aspects that characterize Lacan's later thinking come to the forefront. Cassin and Badiou aim to think further, starting from and in close dialogue with Lacan's text, on the fundamental question of knowledge and its relationship to language that is addressed within it. Cassin focuses on language in its constitutive and sexualizing relation to writing, while Badiou examines the difficult relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy, as well as the triadic relationship of truth, gender, and knowledge. Both studies illuminate Lacan's thought without stripping it of its dark enigmatic quality. They stand in a constellation that signals a new interplay between Plato's "masculinity" and the "femininity" of sophistry.