Eternity or Infinity? Badiou's Point

Abstract

I argue for a psychoanalytic approach to spatial questions. I then examine whether the topological (philosophical and mathematical) work of Alain Badiou is compatible with such an approach. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whom Badiou cites, also deployed topology, but I argue that Lacan's use of topology is fundamentally antithetical to Badiou's. As illustration, I analyze Badiou's treatment of The Paris Commune (also contrasting it with the work of Walter Benjamin on the same subject). I then draw out the implications for social and spatial thinking of Badiou's concept of the site (the locus of an Event which is, according to Badiou, the place of the advent of truth).