Justin Clemens FAHA (born 22 April 1969) is an Australian academic known for his work on Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. He is also a published poet.
Clemens studied at the University of Melbourne, gaining his PhD on "Institution, aesthetics, nihilism : the Romanticism of contemporary theory" in 1999.
He then lectured in Psychoanalytic Studies at Deakin University, before moving to the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne in the late 2000s [1] where he is Senior Lecturer.
Clemens is art critic for the Australian magazine The Monthly. [2] He has a daughter.
In his extensive published work, he writes on psychoanalysis, contemporary European philosophy, and literature. Clemens has also published poetry and prose fiction.
He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2023. [3]
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.
The matheme is a concept introduced in the work of the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The term matheme "occurred for the first time in the lecture Lacan delivered on November 4th, 1971 [...] Between 1972 and 1973 he gave several definitions of it, passing from the use of the singular to the use of the plural and back again".
Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou's work is heavily informed by philosophical applications of mathematics, in particular set theory and category theory. Badiou's "Being and Event" project considers the concepts of being, truth, event and the subject defined by a rejection of linguistic relativism seen as typical of postwar French thought. Unlike his peers, Badiou openly believes in the idea of universalism and truth. His work is notable for his widespread applications of various conceptions of indifference. Badiou has been involved in a number of political organisations, and regularly comments on political events. Badiou argues for a return of communism as a political force.
Jacques-Alain Miller is a psychoanalyst and writer. He is one of the founder members of the École de la Cause freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis which he presided from 1992 to 2002. He is the sole editor of the books of The Seminars of Jacques Lacan.
Simon Critchley is an English philosopher and the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, USA.
The Symbolic is the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity and bridges intersubjectivity between two subjects; an example is Jacques Lacan's idea of desire as the desire of the Other, maintained by the Symbolic's subjectification of the Other into speech. In the later psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, it is linked by the sinthome to the Imaginary and the Real.
Alenka Zupančič is a Slovenian philosopher whose work focuses on psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. She is a Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher who along with Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek have in large measure been responsible for the popularity in North America of a politically infused Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy (MSCP) is an institution dedicated to scholarly, extensive and engaged readings of key figures and texts in the history of modern European thought and contemporary discourse. The School was founded in 2003 and formalised its status as an independent, not-for-profit organisation in 2004. It is based in Melbourne, Australia and is housed by The University of Melbourne.
Raymond Brassier is a British philosopher. He is member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. He was formerly Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, England.
Jason Barker is a British theorist of contemporary French philosophy, film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is a professor of cultural studies at Kyung Hee University in the Graduate School of British and American Language and Culture, and visiting professor at the European Graduate School, where he teaches in the Faculty of Media and Communication alongside Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Avital Ronell, Slavoj Žižek, and others.
Bruno Bosteels is a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He served until 2010 as the General Editor of diacritics. Bosteels is best known to the English-speaking world for his work on Latin American literature and culture and his translations of the work of Alain Badiou. Theory of the Subject appeared in 2009, Bosteels' translation of Badiou's Théorie du sujet.
Sam Gillespie was a philosopher with a particular interest in the work of Alain Badiou, a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) who wrote about being, truth and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Gillespie was described by Joan Copjec as "one of the most gifted and promising philosophers of his generation". He was a co-founder of the academic journal Umbr(a). Gillespie's book The Mathematics of Novelty was published posthumously in 2008. Peter Hallward wrote that "This tremendously valuable book is a landmark in the critical reception of Badiou’s work."
Jean-Claude Milner is a linguist, philosopher and essayist. His specialist fields of endeavour are linguistics and psychoanalysis. In 1971, Milner was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he translated Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax into French. His work helped to establish the terminology of theory of syntax in the French school of generative grammar. Milner is now a professor at the University Paris Diderot and lives in Paris.
Barbara Cassin is a French philologist and philosopher. She was elected to the Académie française on 4 May 2018. Cassin is the recipient of the Grand Prize of Philosophy of the Académie française. She is an Emeritus Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. Cassin is a program Director at the International College of Philosophy and the director of its Scientific Council and member of its board of directors. She was a director of Collège international de philosophie established by Jacques Derrida. In 2006 she succeeded Jonathan Barnes to the directorship of the leading centre of excellence in Ancient philosophy, Centre Leon-Robin, at the Sorbonne. In recent years she has been teaching seminars and writing books in partnership with Alain Badiou.
John Forrester was a British historian and philosopher of science and medicine. His main interests were in the history of the human sciences, in particular psychoanalysis and psychiatry.
Oliver Feltham is an Australian philosopher and translator working in Paris, France. He is known primarily for his English translations of Alain Badiou, most notably Badiou’s magnum opus Being and Event (2006). Feltham's own writings are drawn from many of his research interests including Marxism, critical theory, and the history of metaphysics. His recent work has also focused on psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan.
A. Kiarina Kordela (; is a Greek-American philosopher and critical theorist. She is a professor of German Studies and founding director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN.
Adrian Johnston is an American philosopher. He is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta.
Lorenzo Chiesa is a philosopher, critical theorist, translator, and professor whose academic research and works focus on the intersection between ontology, psychoanalysis, and political theory.
Bruce Fink is an American Lacanian psychoanalyst and a major translator of Jacques Lacan. He is the author of numerous books on Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis, prominent among which are Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (1995), Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan's Seminar VIII and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique.