The excellent new issue (although some of the proofing / translating is very poor on the texts I've looked at) of The Symptom includes not only the essential "Extimity" by Jacques-Alain Miller, but also a very strange (to me) text by Alain Badiou on his own philosophical biography. Better if you read it that if I summarise. Perhaps it is simply that I find such "revelations" embarrassing and slightly distasteful (which is itself odd due to my own interests in psychoanalysis). Certainly Badiou, as one would expect, links these biographical elements to the formal elaboration of his own philosophy, but at some level I prefer the inhuman image of the philosopher (or writer, artist, musician etc.). That is why I was quite happy to write my first book on a thinker who was dead, and while working now on living thinkers I have little or no desire to meet any of them.
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