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I wish to make you aware of two reading experiences I have had. The first is that of reading Alain Badiou's 1969 text, published in Cahiers pour l’analyse, titled ‘Mark and Lack’, where we can find the affirmation that gave rise to my title: ‘Science is the subject of philosophy’. This essay is a response to Jacques- Alain Miller's ‘Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier’, published a few years prior to Badiou's essay in the same journal. Despite their specific and very dated context – their questions about science had to confront, at that time, both psychoanalysis and Marxism – they contain very important elements for thinking the relations between science and philosophy today, and they have import that, in my opinion, goes well beyond their time.

The second discovery is altogether different. While, for other reasons, I was recently rereading Derrida's ‘Passions: An Oblique Offering’, I was struck by the coincidence – if not the similarity – of the analyses developed in that book with those developed by Badiou about the situation of philosophy. The word ‘situation’ is being taken here in its proper sense, as venue, place and orientation, all at the same time. This coincidence is more surprising given that the two thinkers have little in common with each other, as is attested to by the extreme difference in the points of departure of their respective discourses. Badiou undertakes the analysis of the relations between philosophy and mathematical logic, while Derrida concerns himself with the relations between philosophy and literature. Despite it all, their conclusions strangely and mutually echo each other.

In both cases, what I will call the law of the fault of philosophy emerges. For both thinkers, philosophy is in need of an answer. It wants to answer for everything, even, which is the problem, for that which does not respond. What does not respond, for Badiou, is science. For Derrida, literature. Examining these two types of non-responses more closely will constitute my subject, which is precisely the question of the subject. There is no subject of science, says Badiou; there is no subject of literature, says Derrida.