Slavoj Žižek: Badiou and Antiphilosophy

How does this difference between Badiou and Lacan affect Badiou’s delimitation of antiphilosophy? The basic motif of antiphilosophy is the assertion of a pure presence (the Real Life of society for Marx, Existence for Kierkegaard, Will for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, etc.) irreducible to and excessive with regard to the network of philosophical concepts or representations. The surprise is that Badiou, who coined this critical term, retains a strange solidarity with anti-philosophers on account of his unproblematic reliance on the couple “presence and representation.” The great theme of post-Hegelian antiphilosophy is the excess of the pre-conceptual productivity of Presence over its representation: representation is reduced to the “mirror of representation,” which reflects in a distorted way its productive ground:
Post-Hegelian philosophy (or, if one prefers, antiphilosophy) started off with this fundamental claim: symbolic representations which were traditionally considered as access to the truth and to the real of Being do in…