ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a rereading of Jacques Lacan that brings out his complicity with Romanticism. It suggests various linkages that can be made between Lacan and classical rhetorical theory, in order to produce a matheme to which Lacan himself might not assent, but which certainly follows as closely as possible the letter of his text. There has evidently been a great deal of interest in Lacan's predilection for mathematical formalization, which ultimately generated an astonishing number and variety of diagrams, schemas, and equations. In an essay entitled 'Sujet et infini', Alain Badiou analyses a number of contradictions in Lacan's mobilization of set theory, with especial reference to the 'formulas of sexuation'. The chapter outlines very specific and analytically distinct ways in which misrecognition functions for Lacan in and around the mirror stage essay. Lacan himself explicitly announces the fictionality that governs the unfolding of the mirror stage, and the dramatic quality of the event.
