If Alain Badiou is well-known for insisting on the integral role of the category of truth in philosophy, this is also the case for Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan – a point often underestimated or overlooked. This chapter will establish the divergences, consequences, and, we will show, surprising convergences between Badiou's generic formalisation, Deleuze's problematic conception of truth, and the Lacanian insistence on the centrality of truth in analysis, its relationship with the unconscious, and its disjunction from knowledge (a theme decisive for Badiou's own later formalisations). Of course, truth is in none of these cases considered to be adequation, coherence or revelation; into the bargain, our thinkers’ respective revisionings of truth are articulated with a systematic reworking of the a-historical relationship of different discourses in their ‘geological’, ‘topological’ or ‘eternal’ presentations. If, then, the very progression this book has already effected from the problematic of the contemporary through time to the event is vitally at stake, this chapter functions as a kind of knotting, suturing or folding of such progression to the concept.

Despite the still-common prejudice that Lacan, as one of the great promulgators of the linguistic turn in psychoanalysis and philosophy, is therefore a sceptic if not a downright relativist with respect to a doctrine of truth, the case is quite the opposite. From the very beginning of his published work in his encounter with Alexandre Kojève to his final Act of Dissolution, Lacan emphasised that truth is always at stake when it is a question of the subject.