ABSTRACT
Paradoxically, quite in the spirit of Alain Badiou, S. Freud said that the impasse between love and desire is our "universal affliction under civilization". In a strange turn, Badiou, much like T. W. Adorno, declares an end to the age of poets culminating in Celan. Badiou's work articulates this cutting edge between possibility and impossibility as occasioned by this way of rendering truth. J. Lacan is again crucial to Badiou because he represents neither of these positions at a time when these were held as the dominant paradigms. Symptoms attest to that divide between thinking and doing, between mastery and truth, which leaves psychoanalysis in a domain where insight is valued over speech, which, in effect, changes nothing for a subject in relation to mastery. Badiou returns to the apostle St. Paul because for him he rigorously holds to an impossible point of truth, which he subtracts from the entirety of Christian discourse—that Christ is resurrected.
