The Son's Aleatory Identity in Today's World - [excerpt]

Alain Badiou

translated by James Curley-Egan

First about the father. In the first story, we encounter a real father, a father of jouissance, a father who will let go of nothing to maintain his monopoly of jouissance. And we see that on the side of the son, the active element, no less real, is an aggressiveness only murder can appease. In the second story we have the symbolic father, for which the support is likewise the real father, but who returns in the place of the Other, as Lacan would say. On the side of the son, one finds, by a reversal of the aggressiveness aroused by the real father, devotion to the big Other, and thus a figure of unlimited submission. In the third story, that of Christianity, one would be tempted to say that we have the imaginary father. The father is in fact removed into a sort of background; he is like the décor of the son’s action. He becomes the fictive totality of three instances; he is at times the father, then the trinity. But in the real as in the symbolic, these three instances are intotalizable (intotalisables) in such a way that the father can but appear as a semblance.

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