Agalma

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (25)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.141

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > The case of Don Juan

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Don Juan's serial seduction is not about variety but about repetition compulsion aimed at extracting Woman-as-such beyond her symbolic roles — a structural impossibility (since 'Woman doesn't exist') whose failure produces the myth's composite shape and reveals that patriarchal society is itself a reaction-formation to the non-existence of Woman, not its cause.

   Don Juan offers to share what Lacan calls the objet petit a or, in his interpretation of Plato's Symposium, the agalma: the mysterious treasure, the secret object that the subject has within him which provokes the love and desire of the other.

2. #02

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_136"></span>***objet (petit) a***

   Theoretical move: This passage traces the full conceptual evolution of objet petit a across Lacan's work, showing how it migrates from a purely imaginary little other (schema L, 1955) through the object of desire/fantasy (1957) to the real cause of desire, surplus-jouissance, and finally semblance of being at the centre of the Borromean knot—demonstrating that the concept accumulates rather than replaces its earlier determinations.

   Just as the agalma is a precious object hidden inside a relatively worthless box, so the objet petit a is the object of desire which we seek in the other.

3. #03

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_115"></span>**master**

   Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's appropriation of Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic—via Kojève—through two distinct theoretical moments: first as a phenomenological illustration of intersubjective desire and aggression (1950s), and then as a structural formalization in the Discourse of the Master, where the dialectic's inherent failure of totalization is recast as the irreducible surplus that escapes the master signifier's attempt at complete representation.

   The fight to the death also illustrates the AGGRESSIVITY inherent in the dual relationship between the ego and the counterpart (E, 142).

4. #04

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_111"></span>**love**

   Theoretical move: Love is constituted as an imaginary, narcissistic, and fundamentally deceptive phenomenon whose relationship to transference, desire, and demand reveals both its structural opposition to and its entanglement with desire — love as metaphor versus desire as metonymy — while simultaneously functioning as an illusory substitute for the absent sexual relation.

   Love is directed not at what the love-object has, but at what he lacks, at the nothing beyond him.

5. #05

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_208"></span> **transference**

   Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of transference from a Hegelian-dialectical and anthropological-symbolic account, through identification with the compulsion to repeat and the Agalma, to its mature formulation as the attribution of knowledge to the Other (Subject Supposed to Know), while also deploying Lacan's critique of ego-psychology's "adaptation to reality" model and its implicit collapse into suggestion and méconnaissance.

   Alcibiades compares Socrates to a plain box which encloses a precious object (Grk agalma); just as Alcibiades attributes a hidden treasure to Socrates, so the analysand sees his object of desire in the analyst

6. #06

   Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.118

   BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire and law are structurally identical—sharing the same object—such that the Oedipus myth encodes the originary coincidence of the father's desire with the law; this identity is then mapped onto masochism (where the subject appears as *ejectum*/objet a), the castration complex, transference (structured around agalma and lack), and the passage à l'acte, illustrated through Freud's case of the young homosexual woman.

   the central question of transference is established, the question the subject asks himself concerning the agalma, namely, what he lacks, because he loves with this lack.

7. #07

   Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.313

   **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the anal object (excrement as objet petit a) achieves its subjective function not through the mother's demand alone, but through its structural articulation with castration (- φ): excrement symbolizes phallic loss, grounds obsessional ambivalence, and prefigures the function of the object a as territorial/representative trace — yet this still falls short of explaining how the concealment of the object founds desire as such.

   we can see very well how poo easily assumes the function of what I have called, my goodness, agalma. That this agalma should have passed over into the register of the foul-smelling is merely the effect of discipline.

8. #08

   Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.165

   **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

   Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Symposium—specifically Alcibiades's pursuit of the hidden agalma in Socrates—Lacan establishes the dialectical structure of transference as desire for a concealed object that the Other does not possess, and concludes that the analyst's own identificatory position must be suspended within transference, collapsing the distinction between transference and counter-transference.

   What then is this agalma that is involved and which is here the centre of the captivation of Alcibiades by the figure of Socrates?

9. #09

   Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.165

   **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

   Theoretical move: By reading Alcibiades's encounter with Socrates in Plato's *Symposium* as the structural prototype of analytic transference, Lacan argues that the *agalma* (hidden treasure) organises desire-as-lack and that what analysts call 'counter-transference' is properly a moment of unwarranted identification internal to transference itself, thereby collapsing the counter-transference/transference distinction into a single analytic field.

   What then is this agalma that is involved and which is here the centre of the captivation of Alcibiades by the figure of Socrates?

10. #10

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.160

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

    Theoretical move: Lacan defines the psychoanalytic object as *àgalma* — the partial object of desire that is incommensurable with ordinary objects of equivalence — and argues that this object, not identificatory or metaphysical constructs, is the true pivot of love, desire, and analytic practice, requiring a strict topology of subject, little other, and big Other to be properly situated.

    if you don't see the interest of what I am introducing today with the term àgalma, which is the main point of analytic practice… àgalma, little a, the object of desire

11. #11

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.182

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Symposium's final scene between Alcibiades and Socrates reveals the fundamental structure of desire: the subject, through the metonymic sliding of the signifier, finds an object (objet petit a / agalma) that arrests that sliding and paradoxically restores subjective dignity, while the subject simultaneously undergoes a "deposing" before the Other—establishing that transference is not reducible to repetition but must be approached via this dialectic of love and desire.

    I showed you the importance, in Alcibiades' declaration, of the theme of àgalma: the object hidden within the subject, Socrates. I showed you that it is very hard not to take it seriously.

12. #12

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.155

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Greek term *âgalma* — traced through its etymological ambiguities (sparkle, admiration, envy) and its literary uses in Homer and Euripides — to recover the original psychoanalytic discovery of the partial object as the pivotal point of desire, against Ego Psychology's domestication of that discovery into a "totalising" genital-oblative love that falsely resolves the subject/object opposition.

    Àgalma is always related to images, provided that you see that, as in every context, it is always related to a very specific type of image … a kind of god trap. There are things that attract the eyes of those real beings known as the gods.

13. #13

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.151

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Alcibiades' speech in Plato's *Symposium* and a verse from Euripides' *Hecuba*, Lacan argues that *âgalma* names the hidden precious object inside the other that captures desire — a specifically psychoanalytic notion whose fetishistic function displaces the dyadic dialectic of beauty with a triadic topology of the subject's relation to the symbolic.

    *Âgalma* may well mean ornamentation or ornament, but here it means above all gem or precious object - something that is inside.

14. #14

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.37

    **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > <span id="page-31-0"></span>**SET A N D CHARACTERS**

    Theoretical move: Lacan frames the *Symposium* as the privileged textual introduction to his seminar on transference, using the scandalous encounter between Alcibiades and Socrates—and the broader figure of Alcibiades as an exemplar of seduction, fascination, and the limits of love—to set the scene for a psychoanalytic investigation of what is at stake in transference.

    this character's most salient feature was the added luster of what is said of his looks [beauté]... he seduced people as much with his looks as with his exceptional intelligence.

15. #15

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.175

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

    Theoretical move: By reading the scandalous comportment of the gods of Antiquity through the concept of âgalma, Lacan argues that divine love (eros/agape) structures the deceptive, mutually-luring relation between Socrates and Alcibiades, and that this same structure—from the unconscious toward the subject ascending to the core object—governs the psychoanalytic dialectic of love.

    The gods of Antiquity didn't beat around the bush. They knew they could reveal themselves to men only in the guise of something that would cause a ruckus, in the âgalma of something that breaks all the rules

16. #16

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.172

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Socrates' refusal of Alcibiades through the structure of the metaphor of love: Socrates' 'kénosis' (constitutive emptiness/non-knowledge) prevents the substitution of erastés for erômenos, and his interpretation of Alcibiades' speech reveals that what Alcibiades truly seeks — in Socrates and then in Agathon — is the agalma (partial object), the supreme point at which the subject is abolished in fantasy, which Socrates both knows and is doomed to misrecognize by substituting a lure in its place.

    What he is looking for in Agathon, make no mistake about it, is the same supreme point at which the subject is abolished in fantasy: his agâlmata.

17. #17

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.148

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S* > <span id="page-136-0"></span>**EXIT FROM THE ULTRA-W ORLD**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that love's discourse is structurally conditioned by a founding "he did not know" (the position of the erastés before the erômenon), and that Alcibiades' entrance into the Symposium introduces the objet petit a (the agalma) as the object of unique covetousness that disrupts the harmonious ascent toward beauty and reveals love's fundamentally non-harmonious, scandalous dimension.

    This word is άγαλμα (àgalma), which, we are told, is what is hidden within the disheveled silenus known as Socrates. I leave you today with the unexplored enigma of this word in the dialogue itself.

18. #18

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.165

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Socrates' refusal to enter the erotic exchange with Alcibiades is structurally determined by his knowledge of love: because Socrates knows (the truth of love), he cannot love—he refuses to become the eromenos/beloved, thereby refusing the metaphor of love that would complete the transference dynamic.

    Socrates is compared in it to the satyr's crude and derisory outer crust or envelope. One must in some sense open it up to see inside what Alcibiades calls, the first time, agàlmata the on, translated as 'the statues of the gods'

19. #19

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.190

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is irreducible to mere repetition compulsion because it contains a constitutively creative and fictional element addressed to the big Other; drawing on the Symposium's Alcibiades scene, he shows that the true object of transference is the agalma (objet petit a) hidden in the analyst, and that Socratic interpretation reveals a further displacement of desire onto a third party — structurally distinguishing transference from repetition while grounding it in the subject's address to the Other.

    Socrates has the good object in his stomach. Here Socrates is nothing but the envelope in which the object of desire is found... He says... Its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a.

20. #20

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.423

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter X -** *Âgalma*

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII Chapter X, providing scholarly apparatus — source citations, terminological clarifications, and textual variants — for Lacan's use of agalma, Che vuoi, logical time, the maternal phallus, and oblativity. It is primarily philological and bibliographic rather than advancing a theoretical argument of its own.

    For agàlmata, see Homer's Odyssey, Book III, verse 274... Useful information on the use of the term âgalma can be found in Catherine M. Keesling's The Votive Statues of the Athenian Acropolis

21. #21

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.286

    *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Symposium's agalma — what Alcibiades seeks at the heart of Socrates — to argue that the object of desire is ultimately the Other's desire itself (the pure eron), and that the phallus functions as the punctual, organising point that connects the barred subject ($) to the object (o) in the fundamental fantasy, while also introducing the third Freudian mode of identification as constituted through desire at the locus of the big Other.

    Let us begin to see what this agalma is: something which should have not just a tiny relationship with this central point which gives its accent, its dignity to the object o

22. #22

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.106

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Comedy of Incarnation

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "Comedy of Incarnation" discloses the deepest logic of Hegelian dialectics: the parallax gap between God and man (Universal and Singular) is not sublated but transposed inward, so that Christ's direct coincidence of divinity and miserable humanity enacts the Hegelian move from abstract to concrete universality, where appearance emerges from the gap within the Real itself rather than from a hidden essence behind it.

    This unbearable burden of her secret, of her destructive agalma, finally drives her to death

23. #23

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.354

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism?

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that fundamentalism is defined by the immediate identification with fantasy (becoming the "dupe of one's fantasy") which forecloses the enigma of the Other's desire; this structural analysis is then extended to show that liberal multiculturalism's tolerant repression of passion produces the same segregationist logic it claims to oppose, leaving aggressive secularism and fundamentalist passion as mirror-image dead ends.

    opening up a gap in it, a gap between the object's positive properties and the agalma, the mysterious core of the beloved

24. #24

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.260

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew mystifies constitutive social antagonism by displacing it onto an external limit, and that Milner's "Jewish exception" logic inadvertently reproduces this displacement; the properly Lacanian response is a "not-all" Europe in which everyone becomes an exception (objet petit a), dissolving the need for a constitutive Other — and he extends this critique to Jacques-Alain Miller's therapeutic-political proposal, which he reads as a socially conservative "compassionate cushion" that profits from the disarray of identifications rather than challenging the anonymous systems that produce it.

    the Holocaust is in effect elevated into a unique agalma, hidden treasure, objet petit a of the Jews—they are ready to give up everything except the Holocaust

25. #25

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.122

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Too Much Life!

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that shame, castration, and the "undead" lamella are not opposed but structurally co-produced: the noncastrated remainder (lamella/objet petit a) is not what escapes castration but precisely what castration generates as its own surplus, collapsing the distinction between lack and excess into a Möbius-strip parallax.

    one of the incarnations of objet petit a, of the agalma, that which is 'in me more than myself.'