Writing for Two: A Critique of Literature, Love, and the Event in the Philosophy of Alain Badiou

I would like to begin with a poem by Samuel Beckett entitled “Something There,” which was translated from the French into English by the author in 1974. ... Taking Beckett’s poem as a point of departure, this article intends to look at how the concept of inexistence functions in both the philosophy of Alain Badiou and the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, arguing that it is in the distance Badiou takes from both Beckett and Lacan vis-à-vis the concept of inexistence that not only are we privy to the more technical aspects of his philosophy of the event, but that this distance provides a glimpse of where Badiou's philosophy is in need of restraint from the very theoretical and artistic positions he claims to have exceeded (though not without a profound debt of gratitude).