ABSTRACT
In “What Does the Poem Do?” Ruth Gounelas reads Beckett as interpreted by Alain Badiou via Stéphane Mallarmé. Gounelas explores the intersection between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literature in the work of Badiou. Revisiting her groundbreaking 2001 book, Literature and Psychoanalysis: Intertextual Readings, Gounelas investigates poetry from Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Pessoa to the present. Badiou identified a trajectory specific to poetic operations. Taking examples in Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Pessoa, he defines the poem as a “truth-event,” which means a concrete intervention in history. Badiou’s theory of the poem, both philosophical and psychoanalytic, is here examined in so far as it defines “conditions” that allow for a radical critical practice. Can psychoanalysis reveal the truth of poetry? Lacan and Badiou suppose so, as they investigate a truth enacted in parallel by poetry and psychoanalysis.
