Raising the stakes of perversion: A response to tracy McNulty

The work of Alain Badiou attempts to refound the project of Western philosophy by returning to the platonic celebration of mathematics as the basis for any transmissible knowledge. In "The New Man's Fetish," Tracy McNulty shows that Badiou's return to Plato is secretly mediated by the French libertine tradition. Badiou derives the militant figure of mathematics less from Plato than from Lautréamont-in whose "Songs of Maldoror" she (mathematics) appears as a stern mistress. Reading McNulty, within the framework of psychoanalytic debates around the clinic of perversion, I show that McNulty's emphasis upon this mediation, despite appearances, functions less to undermine the authority of Badiou's philosophical project than to raise the stakes of perversion. Taking Badiou's libertinism seriously makes it possible to grasp how perversion strives to formalize the death drive and thus to open politics and philosophy to the future. At the same time, McNulty shows that Badiou's theory of number makes it possible to rethink the distinctions between number, trope, figure, and fetish; and thus to reopen a discussion of the relationships between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature.