Tragedies and Comedies of Love: from Plato to Claudel and Genet

Our reading of Duras has brought us to the enigma of a divine love experienced in a feminine key and proposed as a gateway to a different sexuality: God would be a name for the jouissance of a barred woman, as Seminar XX states. Lacan evokes his fascination for a philosophical topic that he calls a ‘literary’ theme: woman’s enjoyment. ‘That too is a theme, a literary theme. And it’s worth dwelling on for a moment. I’ve been doing nothing but that since I was twenty, exploring the philosophers on the subject of love.’1 To develop this insight, I take as my point of departure a series of remarks by French philosopher Alain Badiou on Lacan’s theory of love. These remarks come from a lecture given at the 1990 Paris conference on ‘Lacan and Philosophy’, during which a number of critics and writers fought bitterly over Lacan’s heritage.2