Anxiety

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (586)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.76

   The Lie > Notes

   Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section, providing textual citations and block quotations (from Kant, Lacan, and Žižek) that anchor the preceding chapter's argument; it is non-substantive as independent theoretical content but does embed two load-bearing quoted passages—Lacan on desire and Žižek on the categorical imperative.

   The structure of the categorical imperative is tautological in the Hegelian sense of the repetition of the same that fills up and simultaneously announces an abyss that gives rise to unbearable anxiety.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.156

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's concept of 'respect' (Achtung) is structurally homologous to Lacan's concept of anxiety: both are 'objective' affects without a cause but with an object (objet petit a), both arise from a 'lack that comes to lack' (le manque vient à manquer), and both mark the subject's encounter with what exceeds the order of representation — thereby aligning Kantian drive theory with Lacanian drive theory avant la lettre.

   the cause of the singular feeling Kant calls respect is not simply the absence of representation but the absence of this absence, of this lack which could provide a support for the subject of representation... this is exactly Lacan's definition of the cause of anxiety: le manque vient a manquer.

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.159

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's attempt to supplement the moral law with voice and gaze transforms respect (an a priori, non-pathological feeling) into the superego's law, installing an absolute Other that forecloses the act and pacifies the subject by guaranteeing an inexhaustible lack on the subject's side—a shift that also governs the dialectic of the sublime across the three Critiques.

   Fear is already a relief from the anxiety of respect.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.162

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The sublime and the logic of the superego

   Theoretical move: Zupančič reconstructs Kant's account of the sublime as a two-moment dialectical structure—an initial anxiety/powerlessness that inverts into an awareness of the subject's supersensible superiority—and uses this to set up the analogy between the logic of the sublime and the logic of the superego.

   The first is the moment of anxiety and of discomfiting fascination in the face of something incomparably larger and more powerful than oneself

5. #05

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.164

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The sublime and the logic of the superego > The second passage is from the Critique of Judgement.

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Kantian sublime is structurally homologous to the Freudian superego: the subject's conversion of anxiety into elevated feeling relies on a "superego inflation" that displaces the ego's concerns while simultaneously functioning as a strategy to avoid direct encounter with das Ding and the death drive in its pure state. The sublime's narcissistic self-estimation, its link to moral feeling, and its metonymic evocation of an internal "devastating force" all reveal the superego as the hidden engine of the sublime.

   the moment we 'resolve' the feeling of anxiety into the feeling of the sublime (of the elevated, das Erhabene) we are dealing with a sublimity (elevation) relating to ourselves as well as to the world outside us.

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.180

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The status of the law > Notes

   Theoretical move: This is a notes/references section listing bibliographic citations for the chapter "The status of the law" — it is non-substantive scholarly apparatus with no independent theoretical argument.

   See Jacques Lacan, L'Angoisse (unpublished seminar), lecture from 28 November 1962.

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.254

   Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and drive are not opposed but sequentially related: pure desire is the limit-moment at which the subject's fantasy-support appears within its own frame and is sacrificed, marking a torsion from the register of desire into the register of the drive—a passage that constitutes the telos of analytic experience beyond the traversal of fundamental fantasy.

   the 'operation' that takes place in this context is that the lack comes to lack (as, for example, in the case of anxiety), not that it is filled up.

8. #08

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.262

   Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive > Notes

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "ethics of the Real" is grounded not in finitude but in the infinite's unavoidable parasitism of the finite—identified as jouissance/death drive—and that this opens two distinct figures of the infinite (desire vs. jouissance) corresponding to two paradigms of ethics (classical/Antigone vs. modern/Sygne), a distinction that reframes the death drive as radically indifferent to death rather than oriented toward it.

   The anxiety, for example, which paralyses and mortifies the subject is a response to the 'death drive' [jouissance].

9. #09

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.274

   Index

   Theoretical move: This is the index of Zupančič's *Ethics of the Real*, a non-substantive navigational apparatus listing key concepts, proper names, and page references without advancing any independent theoretical argument.

   anxiety 141, 1 44, 1 49, 1 52, 250

10. #10

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **THE LOBSTER AND THE LITTLE GIRL: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH DREAMS, THANKS TO FREUD** > ***Dream of July 1982***

    Theoretical move: This passage presents a first-person dream narrative (recurring and then transformed on the seventh night) as raw clinical/autobiographical material, functioning as an illustrative case rather than advancing a theoretical argument in itself.

    I am terrified of this animal whose claws are bound by blue rubber bands. I retreat to the edge of the bed, but make no attempt to either run or communicate with the creature.

11. #11

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **THE LOBSTER AND THE LITTLE GIRL: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH DREAMS, THANKS TO FREUD** > ***Analysis***

    Theoretical move: The passage performs a Lacanian-Freudian dream analysis that maps the phallic mother and imaginary father onto dream figures, locating the dreamer's desire for autonomy at the threshold between the Imaginary and the Real, where self-nomination and self-creation begin to emerge as a wished-for but deferred psychic position.

    my wish is to allay a bit the anxiety-ridden tension related to my oncoming motivations and identifications, so that via such still-anxious deferral I might retain the motivating power for my future decisions

12. #12

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the dream's "navel" (its irreducible, unrepresentable core) is homologous to the Lacanian Real, and that aesthetic/creative production (sublimation) is the closest a subject can come to encountering this impossible kernel—while terror, theorized via Lyotard, names the affective-political structure of that encounter with the Real in both psychic and cultural life.

    The anxiety-ridden state of 'pure terror' is the basis for a poetics, or the means through which a dreamer can understand and access her own navel

13. #13

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: This passage surveys early psychoanalytic and psychiatric theories of dream-formation, arguing that dreams originate from subjective sensory stimuli (hypnagogic hallucinations, retinal excitation) and internal organic sensations, while raising the methodological challenge of tracing dream content back to its somatic exciting source.

    Serious disturbances of the internal organs apparently act as inciters of dreams in a considerable number of persons... the frequency of anxiety dreams in the diseases of the heart and lungs

14. #14

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: The passage surveys pre-psychoanalytic theories of dream formation—somatic stimulus theories, typical dreams, psychic exciting sources, and dream forgetting—to demonstrate that none of them can fully account for the dream's psychic dimension, thereby preparing the ground for Freud's disclosure of an "unsuspected psychic source of excitement" (the unconscious wish).

    everything that might prove an independence of the psychic life from the demonstrable organic changes, or a spontaneity in its manifestations, is alarming to the psychiatrist nowadays

15. #15

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: This passage surveys 19th-century positions on morality and dreams, arguing that immoral dream content reveals suppressed ("undesirable") waking impulses, thereby raising the problem of the Unconscious and the split between waking moral consciousness and the psychic reality disclosed in sleep—a tension that Freud will resolve through the concept of repression.

    if, e.g., one is afraid of robbers in the dream, the robbers are, of course, imaginary, but the fear is real.

16. #16

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: Freud surveys the clinical and analogical relations between dream life and mental disturbances, positioning wish-fulfilment as the shared key to a psychological theory of both, and arguing that elucidating the dream is simultaneously an elucidation of the psychosis.

    Hohnbaum asserts... that the first attack of insanity frequently originates in an anxious and terrifying dream, and that the ruling idea has connection with this dream.

17. #17

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **DREAM OF JULY 23-24, 1895**

    Theoretical move: Freud introduces the Irma dream as the paradigmatic case requiring systematic dream-analysis: the manifest content is demonstrably connected to day-residues yet its significance remains opaque until a thorough analysis of its latent structure is undertaken, establishing the method of free association applied to dreams.

    I am frightened and look at her. She looks pale and bloated; I think that after all I must be overlooking some organic affection.

18. #18

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **ANALYSIS**

    Theoretical move: Freud advances the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams by distinguishing manifest from latent dream content, arguing that even painful or anxiety dreams may conceal wish-fulfilments that only become visible through interpretation, and introduces 'distortion' as the key problem requiring explanation.

    there are also dreams of fear, in which this most terrible of all disagreeable sensations tortures us until we awake, and it is with just these dreams of fear that children are so often persecuted

19. #19

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **ANALYSIS**

    Theoretical move: Freud extends the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams by analysing "counter wish-dreams" — dreams with unpleasant or apparently unwished-for content — and showing they still satisfy wishes, either through displacement and disguise, through the patient's wish to prove the analyst wrong (resistance), or through masochistic satisfaction, thereby defending the universality of wish-fulfilment as the engine of dream-formation.

    From my essay on the etiology of anxiety neuroses, you will see that I note interrupted coitus as one of the factors which cause the development of neurotic fear.

20. #20

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **ANALYSIS**

    Theoretical move: Freud consolidates the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams by redefining painful and anxiety dreams as disguised, censored wishes, and links dream-fear to repressed libido rather than manifest dream content, while opening a new inquiry into the sources of dream material via the latent/manifest content distinction.

    the dream fear is no more justified by the dream content than the fear in a phobia is justified by the idea upon which the phobia depends

21. #21

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) SOMATIC SOURCES OF DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud advances the thesis that the dream is the guardian of sleep by demonstrating how somatic stimuli are incorporated into dream-content as wish-fulfilments, and establishes that the wish-to-sleep, operating alongside the dream-censor, is a constant and irreducible motive in dream formation.

    anxiety in dreams may be of a psychoneurotic nature, or it may originate in psychosexual excitements, in which case the anxiety corresponds to a repressed libido.

22. #22

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) SOMATIC SOURCES OF DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues, through dream analysis of somatic and situational material, that the dream sensation of inhibited movement is not caused by actual motility conditions during sleep but is selectively recruited by the dream-work at points where the associative logic of the dream requires it.

    the dream sensation of inhibited action is always aroused at a point where a certain connection requires it

23. #23

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud uses the analysis of "typical dreams" (especially nakedness/exhibition dreams) to argue that such dreams are universal because they draw on shared infantile sources—specifically childhood exhibitionism preceding the acquisition of shame—and that the dream-work's distortion through wish-fulfilment and repression explains their characteristic structure, including the contradictory indifference of spectators.

    Suppressed and forbidden wishes of childhood break forth under cover of those wishes of the homeless man which are unobjectionable and capable of becoming conscious, and for that reason the dream which is made objective in the legend of Nausikaa regularly assumes the form of a dream of anxiety.

24. #24

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the Oedipus and Hamlet myths are not culturally exotic but universally compelling precisely because they dramatise repressed childhood wishes (desire for the mother, murderous rivalry with the father) that are constitutive of the psychic life of all children, neurotics and non-neurotics alike; the degree of repression distinguishes neurotic from normal, and ancient from modern tragedy.

    the censor performs its office and practises dream distortion; it does this in order to prevent the development of fear or other forms of disagreeable emotion.

25. #25

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that all dreams are fundamentally egotistical—every dream conceals a wish of the dreamer's own ego, even when manifest content appears to concern others—and extends this to typical dreams (examination dreams, train-missing dreams, dental irritation dreams) as wish-fulfilling consolations that draw on infantile experience and anxiety.

    The anxiety dream of the examination, which occurs, as is being more and more corroborated, when the dreamer is looking forward to a responsible action on his part the next day and the possibility of disgrace

26. #26

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that typical dreams (Oedipus dreams, parturition dreams, anxiety dreams) encode unconscious sexual and infantile content through a stable symbolic vocabulary that belongs not to dreaming per se but to the unconscious thinking of the masses, and demonstrates how this symbolism operates through displacement, reversal, and condensation.

    smooth walls over which one is climbing, façades of houses upon which one is letting oneself down, frequently under great anxiety

27. #27

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys a series of clinical dream examples to demonstrate that dream symbolism (particularly of the genitals, castration, and sexual intercourse) is indispensable to interpretation and cannot be reduced to the dreamer's own associations alone; it illustrates how condensation, displacement, and symbolic substitution operate in typical dreams.

    the captive balloon in front is my penis, about the weakness of which I have worried

28. #28

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) THE CONDENSATION WORK**

    Theoretical move: Through detailed dream analyses, Freud demonstrates how condensation works as the primary mechanism of dream-formation: multiple latent dream-thoughts are fused into single manifest elements via inversion, symbolic allusion, and associative chains, such that any one dream element may condense several distinct meanings simultaneously.

    In harmony with the condition of severe anxiety from which the patient suffered, her dreams contained a great abundance of sexual thought material.

29. #29

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) THE CONDENSATION WORK**

    Theoretical move: Freud demonstrates that condensation operates through multiple mechanisms—collective image formation, composite persons, common-mean displacements, and phonetic/semantic word-fusions—showing that the dream-work systematically compresses latent dream-thoughts into manifest content via associative overdetermination rather than simple displacement.

    in as far as Irma shows a diphtheritic membrane which recalls my anxiety about my eldest daughter

30. #30

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) MEANS OF REPRESENTATION IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that dream vividness is determined by condensation activity and wish-fulfilment, and that the formal properties of dreams (clarity, confusion, gaps, impeded motion) are themselves representational devices encoding latent dream-thoughts—including the expression of negation and volitional conflict—rather than incidental features of the dreaming process.

    why the sensation of thwarted will is so closely allied to anxiety, and why it is so often connected with it in the dream. Anxiety is a libidinous impulse which emanates from the unconscious, and is inhibited by the preconscious.

31. #31

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) ABSURD DREAMS—INTELLECTUAL PERFORMANCES IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that apparent acts of judgment, inference, and argumentation within dream content are not spontaneous cognitive performances of the dreaming mind but are always traceable to—and borrowed from—the dream thoughts themselves; additionally, he introduces "secondary elaboration" as a fourth factor in dream-formation that imposes a specious coherence on dream material.

    Now, I grew really frightened about my legs... I awakened with frightened thoughts.

32. #32

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(G) THE AFFECTS IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that affects in dreams are not distorted by the dream-work the way presentation contents are — affects remain intact while ideas undergo displacement and substitution — and that this dissociation between affect and idea is the key to understanding the apparent incongruity of emotions in dreams, a logic that equally governs psychoneurotic symptoms.

    If I am afraid of robbers in the dream, the robbers, to be sure, are imaginary, but the fear of them is real.

33. #33

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(G) THE AFFECTS IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that dream-affects are not simple transpositions of waking emotions but are overdetermined confluences of multiple affective sources — some censor-approved, others suppressed — whose co-operation or mutual reinforcement explains both the qualitative justification and quantitative excess of neurotic and dream emotions, thereby complicating the wish-fulfilment thesis.

    the appropriate horror is absent in the dream itself. Now this is a wish-fulfilment in various senses.

34. #34

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(G) THE AFFECTS IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud demonstrates how a dream's affect is overdetermined by multiple converging chains of thought—a recent anxiety about a friend's illness, childhood rivalries, infantile wishes for the rival's removal, and guilt over betrayed secrets—all funneled through condensation and displacement into a single manifest dream scene, illustrating the mechanisms of the dream-work and the role of the censor in masking infantile sources of satisfaction.

    The first few messages after the operation were not reassuring, and caused me anxiety.

35. #35

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(G) THE AFFECTS IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that pre-existing affective moods (whether experiential or somatic in origin) are co-opted by dream-work as motive force: disagreeable moods lower the threshold for repressed wish-impulses to secure representation, because the repugnance they require is already in place, linking this mechanism directly to the problem of anxiety dreams.

    With this discussion we again touch upon the problem of anxiety dreams, which we may regard as bounding the province of the dream activity.

36. #36

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) THE WISH-FULFILMENT**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams requires refinement: in adults, the true dream-inciting wish must be an infantile one rooted in the unconscious, which reinforces and "recruits" preconscious day-remnants; the dream is thus the product of a dynamic alliance between unconscious infantile wishes and conscious/preconscious residues, not of either alone.

    That the dream should be nothing but a wish-fulfilment surely seemed strange to us all—and that not alone because of the contradictions offered by the anxiety dream.

37. #37

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) THE WISH-FULFILMENT**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the unconscious wish supplies the indispensable motive power for dream-formation, while day-remnants function as the vehicle of transference that allows repressed ideas to enter the preconscious; culminating in the claim that dreaming follows a regressive 'primary process' of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment that recapitulates an archaic mode of psychic functioning, with 'thinking' as merely the detoured, secondary-process equivalent of that same hallucinatory wish.

    The elements adjoining the wish-fulfilment have frequently nothing to do with its sense, but prove to be descendants of painful thoughts which oppose the wish.

38. #38

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) WAKING CAUSED BY THE DREAM—THE FUNCTION OF THE DREAM—THE ANXIETY DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety dreams do not refute the wish-fulfilment theory but instead demonstrate the conflict between the Unconscious and Preconscious systems: repressed sexual wishes, unable to discharge as pleasure, are converted into anxiety, with the symptom (phobia) serving as a frontier-fortress against that anxiety—a claim illustrated through case analyses of children's anxiety dreams and a critique of somatic-only (cerebral anaemia) explanations.

    The aim, as well as the result, of the suppression is to stop the development of this pain. The suppression extends over the unconscious ideation, because the liberation of pain might emanate from the ideation.

39. #39

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **EGO PSYCHOLOGY, OBJECT RELATIONS, LINGUISTICS, FEMINISM, POST-STRUCTURALISM, AND GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES** > **<span class="underline">Z</span>**

    Theoretical move: The passage uses a clinical case of a dental-irritation dream to validate Freud's claim that such dreams encode masturbatory wishes, demonstrating how day-residues, repression's somatic displacement (lower to upper jaw), and infantile autoeroticism converge in dream-work; the dream is argued to be a wish-fulfillment not merely of the sexual motive but also of the desire to confirm the Freudian interpretation itself.

    The act of birth, moreover, is the first experience with fear, and is thus the source and model of the emotion of fear.

40. #40

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.138

    THE P OV E RT Y OF FR E E D OM

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism installs the market as a new form of the big Other — a substitute for God — that paradoxically relieves subjects of the burden of freedom by directing their desire, thereby revealing that capitalist freedom is ideologically self-undermining: its most zealous defenders (von Mises, Hayek) inadvertently celebrate capitalism's capacity to rescue subjects from the very freedom they champion.

    One turns to suicide bombing or begins watching reality television shows—they are similar responses to the same problem—in order to discover what the Other wants, but one continues to confront the Other's nonexistence

41. #41

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.139

    N OT G OD BU T AN ADV E RTI SE ME N T

    Theoretical move: Advertising functions as the modern form of the big Other, saving subjects from the trauma of freedom by providing an image of a gaze that authorizes consumer choices; McGowan argues this structure is more insidious when it presents itself as liberation from conformity, and reads Fitzgerald's Dr. T. J. Eckleberg as the paradigmatic figure of the absent-yet-operative capitalist Other.

    one knows how to desire and thereby avoids the trauma of one's freedom.

42. #42

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.164

    FAK IN G THE LIMIT

    Theoretical move: Attempts to set external moral limits on capitalism (Sandel, environmentalism) are structurally self-defeating because capitalism requires a limit to transcend; the only viable alternative is to inhabit the true infinite (Hegel/Lacan's self-limiting structure of subjectivity), which capitalism occludes by substituting the bad infinite and converting the existential burden of eternity into the finite anxiety of death and aging.

    The imperative of infinite progress manifests most clearly in the anxiety produced by aging and death under capitalism.

43. #43

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.241

    DR I V IN G THE C AR OFF THE LOT

    Theoretical move: Capitalism exploits the structure of desire by keeping the sublime perpetually deferred in a futural immanence: the commodity's sublimity evaporates at the moment of acquisition, compelling the subject to artificial strategies (security systems, anticipated threats) that recreate distance—and the Hegelian critique of Kantian morality's 'future sublime' doubles as an implicit critique of capitalism's own deferral structure, pointing toward a 'present sublime' as the condition of an egalitarian alternative.

    One tack toward this end is to create an aura of insecurity around the object. If I believe that a criminal might steal my new car at any moment, it retains some of the sublimity that the act of attaining it eliminated.

44. #44

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.268

    . THE P SYC HIC C ON STIT U TION OF PR I VATE SPAC E

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several load-bearing theoretical moves: it locates the analyst's function in identification with objet a (rather than the Other), marks the objet a's theoretical advance over the object of desire in Seminar X, and frames symptom-enjoyment as a political strategy of resistance to ideological interpellation, while grounding these claims in readings of Freud, Lacan, Arendt, Marx, and Habermas on the public/private distinction.

    The great advance in Jacques Lacan's thought occurs in his seminar on anxiety (Seminar X) when he definitively privileges what he calls the objet a over the object of desire.

45. #45

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.43

    [The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Imaginary passion

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's mirror stage grounds the ego in a constitutive double alienation—imaginary and symbolic—such that the ego is structurally paranoid, narcissistic, and rivalrous, making ego-to-ego analysis (as in ego psychology) a therapeutic dead end that merely amplifies imaginary passions rather than dissolving the transference.

    The superegoistic ego's injunction to 'Regroup!' is its defensive reaction to the ego-disruptive mediation of the Symbolic unconscious

46. #46

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.87

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Neurosis and the imaginary

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurosis (hysteria and obsession) must be understood structurally through the subject's alienation in language and symbolic castration—not through behavioral or biological reductions—and that the neurotic's behavior constitutes a symbolic response to the facticity of the subject's contingent existence within the symbolic order.

    it is the alienation of the subject in language, so closely tied to the father, and not early weaning or actual neglect, that incites the Rat Man's anger and anxiety

47. #47

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.115

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Portrait of the unconscious as a young dog

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the primacy of the signifier — demonstrated through Pavlov's conditioning experiment, Saussurean linguistics, and Augustinian semiotics — is the foundational principle of psychoanalytic practice, such that the unconscious, structured like a language, enslaves the subject through signifying chains, and clinical cure proceeds by uncovering the subject's relation to key signifiers rather than eliminating symptoms.

    developed severe anxiety accompanied by benign heart arrhythmia as a symptom which she described as her 'heart skipping a beat.'

48. #48

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Appendix

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses this appendix to mount a sustained critique of ego psychology and identification-based training analysis, arguing that genuine psychoanalytic cure produces separation from rather than identification with the analyst, and that a return to Freud's texts is the corrective to the conformist institutionalization of psychoanalysis.

    'thought' as a defense against anxiety which would be better dealt with without thought

49. #49

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.184

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud

    Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how Lacan's formula of metaphor, applied to the Oedipus complex as the paternal metaphor, structures subjective identity through the substitution of the Name-of-the-Father for the Mother's Desire, while the R-schema (reconceived as a Möbius strip) situates the objet petit a as the virtual support of reality in neurosis versus its chaotic real manifestation in psychosis.

    This lack of a signified for maternal desire is anxiety provoking: the primitive subject is passively subjected to the other (indeed, to the (m)Other, as if it were an object, and has no concrete position of its own.

50. #50

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > III. Where do we stand regarding transference?

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques reality-benchmarked analytic technique (as exemplified in Lebovici's case) by arguing that confining transference, the drives, and Freudian topographies within the imaginary dyad reduces being to a fact of reality, alienates the subject further, and forecloses the symbolic coordinates where analytic effects properly reside.

    What Lebovici misses for Lacan is how the phobic object stands in for a lack, a lack in the Other, and in that respect protects the subject from the anxiety that lack provokes

51. #51

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.267

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > II. Where is id?

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Lagache's account of the id's structure reaches an impasse because it ignores the function of the signifier; by re-reading the Freudian paradoxes of the id (unorganized, without negation, silent) through linguistic structure (synchrony/diachrony, the signifier's foundational duplicity, and Bejahung), Lacan shows that lack and negation are constitutive of the id and are the very conditions for the emergence of the subject.

    Lacan, citing Freud's essay 'Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxieties,' recalls the point that anxiety is a 'warning sign' in the ego, emitted at the approach of trouble coming from the id

52. #52

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic cure works by progressively exposing object *a* as the cause of the subject's desire and fading, thereby enabling the analysand to traverse their fundamental fantasy, reduce ego-ideal identifications, and face the irreducible aporia of castration as the proper terminus of analysis.

    its symbolic dimensions, where it functions as a support or prop against anxiety, and thus as a way to keep a space for desire alive in neurosis

53. #53

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Truly the most, the most truly

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what is "truly proper" to psychoanalysis—the Freudian unconscious—has been systematically domesticated by Neo-Freudian adaptations, institutional identification, and mimetic transmission, and that reclaiming psychoanalysis requires a "militant" return to what is singular in Freud's concept of the unconscious rather than an imaginary identification with an acceptable image of Freud.

    Error creates worries, and worries protect themselves in rules in two ways: the anxiety attached to worries is bound by rules, and rules perpetuate, and therefore protect, the worries themselves.

54. #54

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.19

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Freud's Three- Pronged Spear

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's critique of religion operates along three interlocking prongs—wish-fulfillment, superego masochism, and symptomatic compromise-formation—showing how infantile illusion and self-punishing ascesis are not contradictory but complementary modes of controlling helplessness, with Nietzsche's bad conscience serving as a structural precursor to Freud's account of the superego.

    if everywhere in nature there are Beings around us of a kind that we know in our own society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny and can deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety.

55. #55

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.23

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Worshipful Obsession, Obsessional Worship

    Theoretical move: By reading Freud's 1907 "compromise formation" theory of the obsessional symptom through a Lacanian lens, the passage argues that religious ritual is structurally identical to neurotic symptom-formation: it is simultaneously repressive and gratifying of primitive drives, and this double function—not wish-fulfillment or superego guilt—is the deepest psychoanalytic account of the stubborn attachment underlying religious practice.

    Failure to re-create the prescribed form of the ritual triggers anxiety.

56. #56

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.35

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* — the Thing — is not primarily a Kantian noumenal kernel of objects but the inaccessible, anxiety-generating core of the mother's desire encountered in the primordial relation with the fellow human being, making the (m)Other's unknown desire the constitutive ground of subjectivity and the original template for all subsequent object-relations.

    'Anxiety is bound to the fact that I don't know which object *a* I am for the desire of the Other.'

57. #57

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.37

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing > My Mother, the Monster

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan's displacement of the Oedipus complex by the enigma of the mother's desire reveals the Thing-dimension within the Other as the primal source of anxiety, and marshals Sartre's phenomenology of the Other and the robotics "uncanny valley" as indirect empirical support for this counterintuitive but theoretically central claim.

    By locating the primal origin of anxiety in the mother herself, Lacan shatters our fondest idyll of childhood.

58. #58

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.39

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing > Alone Together

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding—located in the Other rather than in consciousness itself (contra Sartre)—is the primal source of both anxiety and desire in intersubjective life, and that contemporary digital behaviour (social-media addiction, 'alone together' gadget use) is best understood as a defensive yet ambivalent negotiation with this void in the Other, simultaneously evading and chasing it.

    The underlying point is already on display whenever we meet the eyes of another person... the meeting of eyes raises the specter of das Ding.

59. #59

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.44

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Ambivalence and the Falsely False

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian "falsely false" (a structure unique to the signifying subject) reveals ambivalence toward das Ding as the primal form of social intercourse: polite conventions simultaneously defend against the anxiety of the Other while preserving a limited opening toward the hidden excess of the Other-Thing, thereby retracing the structure of the symptom.

    'Anxiety,' Lacan insists, is 'a specific manifestation at this level of the desire of the Other as such.'

60. #60

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.45

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > ". . . It's Not My Mother"

    Theoretical move: By reading stranger anxiety as a displacement that inverts and conceals the maternal origin of primal anxiety, Boothby deploys Lacan's concept of extimacy to argue that *das Ding* is the paradoxical locus where the most intimate and the most alien coincide, linking the death drive, desire, and jouissance to the irreducible unknown at the core of the Other.

    What if stranger anxiety represents a displacement outward of an anxiety originally aroused by the mother herself?

61. #61

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.50

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Finding Oneself in the Void

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's coming-to-be is constituted through its excentric relation to the Other via *das Ding*, and that the *objet petit a*—materialized through the cession of part objects (culminating in the infant's cry as first ceded object)—is the structural trace of the Thing that inaugurates both separation from the Other and the subject's positioning in the space of desire.

    'What anxiety targets in the real,' he concludes, 'includes the x of a primordial subject moving towards his advent as subject...'

62. #62

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.55

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Parting Is Sweet Sorrow

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the primordial function of language is not connection but separation: the entry into the signifier achieves a margin of detachment from the neighbor-Thing in the Other, making disjunction — not communication — the archaic ground of human language acquisition.

    the primal entry into language forestalls anxiety by establishing a margin of detachment that puts the threatening unknown of the neighbor- Thing at a distance.

63. #63

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The *Ex Nihilo* of the Signifier

    Theoretical move: By centering the primal challenge on the mother's desire rather than the Oedipus complex, Lacan's concept of das Ding radicalizes Freud's triangular structure of subjectivity, reframing the relation between the little other and the big Other as the organizing problem of subject-constitution.

    having to cope with the anxiety-producing unknown posed by the mother's desire.

64. #64

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.57

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* does not disappear from Lacan's thought after Seminar VII but is progressively replaced by *objet petit a*, which functions as the trace of the Thing; this substitution is theoretically motivated by the need to avoid reifying the Thing, which is ultimately a locus of pure lack—not a substance but something purely supposed by the subject.

    In Anxiety, Lacan asserts the centrality of the Thing for the experience of anxiety. Anxiety, he says, 'designates the most, as it were, profound object, the ultimate object, the Thing.'

65. #65

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.61

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Thing about a Psychoanalyst

    Theoretical move: The analyst embodies both the little Other (das Ding) and the big Other (subject supposed to know) at different levels of the analytic encounter; the progress of analysis moves from the patient's identification of the analyst with the symbolic big Other toward the dissolution of that Other, ultimately returning the subject to the pre-symbolic abyss of das Ding as the core of the unconscious.

    identifying the analyst with the symbolic big Other serves to stave off an even more intolerably anxious prospect.

66. #66

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.96

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Myth Was Not Proto- Science > The Archaic Ethos

    Theoretical move: The archaic Greek ethos, exemplified through the mythic figure of the Gorgon and Homeric heroism, constitutes an ethical structure organized around the confrontation with das Ding (the void, death, radical unknowing): true virtue consists in proximity to — not mastery over — the abyss, making the mortal's inferiority to the gods paradoxically the ground of the hero's supreme ethical dignity.

    The Gorgon's dreadful grin seemed to say, 'It's all for nothing. In the end, there is only darkness. Into that darkness, I will swallow you.'

67. #67

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.101

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Myth Was Not Proto- Science > The Ideal of the Redoubtable

    Theoretical move: The archaic Homeric ideal of the "redoubtable" hero is diagnosed as a symptomatic defensive formation: the hero's pose of self-possession against the abyssal Thing (Das Ding) ultimately collapses into narcissism, imaginary investment, and dependency on the Other's gaze, making it structurally homologous with the bifold perceptual complex of the Freudian Thing rather than a genuine engagement with it.

    almost compulsively needing to exaggerate its threatening aspects, while also defensively distancing itself and seeking consolation in the reassuring approval of the tribe.

68. #68

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.107

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Madness of the Philosophers > Woman as Symptom

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Greek misogyny was structurally bound to the archaic experience of the sacred as abyssal and terrifying: woman functioned as the privileged symptom of the unmastered Real—simultaneously origin of life and index of death—such that masculine heroic identity constituted itself precisely through the attempt to dominate and exclude the feminine as the embodiment of formless, unlimited, natural force.

    you are bound to have female trouble. In the first place, and perhaps most profoundly disturbing, woman is herself not a bounded whole.

69. #69

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.114

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Law

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Judaism represents the religion of the signifier par excellence, in that the Jewish covenant structurally enacts the Lacanian logic of das Ding: it installs the human subject in a permanent, unanswerable relation to the unknown desire of the Other, making love and fear inseparable and grounding religious experience in constitutive unknowing rather than imaginary domestication.

    Toward the end of Anxiety, not long after offering a discussion of the sublime effect of the nearly closed eyelids of Buddha statues, Lacan invites his auditors to 'imagine that you are dealing with the most restful desirable...'

70. #70

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.137

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Living with the Law— the God Symptom

    Theoretical move: Judaic monotheism's unprecedented proximity to *das Ding* is argued to generate anxiety that is structurally managed through a symptomatic displacement into obsessive legal observance (halacha), which simultaneously creates distance from and intimacy with the terrifying Other; this symptom formation is socially stabilized not by verified conformity but by a collective suppositional regime—what Pfaller calls "interpassivity"—in which the big Other's authority rests on the fiction that everyone else obeys.

    As Judaic monotheism brings its adherents incomparably closer to das Ding, the result is an inevitable increase in anxiety. To answer that challenge, what might instead erupt as unbearable anxiety is transformed into guilt.

71. #71

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.145

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > To Love Thy Neighbor

    Theoretical move: The passage argues, from a Lacanian vantage, that Jesus's commandment to love the neighbor constitutes a radical injunction to abandon defensive barriers toward the threatening, jouissance-laden dimension of the Other—and, by extension, of oneself—thereby locating the divine wholly in the immanent encounter with the neighbor-as-Thing, a move that goes further than Freud's imaginary-bound critique of neighbourly love by opening onto the unconscious.

    the Christian subject must suspend all defensive barriers toward the Other, opening oneself even toward what appears to be threatening, alien, and anxiety producing.

72. #72

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.150

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > From Circumcision to Crucifixion

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that bodily mutilation rituals in Judaism (circumcision) and Christianity (crucifixion) operate as structurally distinct symbolic operations: circumcision establishes the signifier of the phallus and holds open the regime of signification, while crucifixion installs a phantasmatic identification with the objet a that risks collapsing into a narcissistic-masochistic perversion rather than genuine opening toward the Other.

    the crux of masochism, which is an attempt to provoke the Other's anxiety, here become God's anxiety

73. #73

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.155

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Embracing the Cross > The True Religion Is Atheism

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christianity constitutes the "one true religion" precisely because its teaching of love — as direct embrace of the neighbor-Thing — collapses the defensive triangulation effected by paganism and Judaism, thereby generating atheism from within its own theology: God's kenotic self-emptying in the crucifixion is the Hegelian-Lacanian move by which the transcendent big Other is abolished and divinity is identified with human love itself.

    embrace with love precisely what makes you anxious in the Other

74. #74

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.160

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Abyss of Freedom

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the radical Christian ethic of love—grounded in freedom, unknowing, and relation to das Ding beyond the law—is systematically betrayed by orthodox Christian dogma, which functions as a defensive, compensatory reinvestment in the symbolic big Other against the anxiety produced by that original abyssal encounter; the psychoanalytic transference is offered as a structural parallel to this dynamic of supposed knowledge arising from a void of unknowing.

    That directive presents the follower of the Nazarene with an ideal that is not only practically impossible to fulfill but also profoundly anxiety producing.

75. #75

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.173

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Other Paths, Other Gods

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the three Abrahamic/Western religious traditions represent a progressive trajectory of increasing directness in approaching *das Ding* — from Greek paganism's indirect relation to unknowing, through Jewish monotheism's concentration of the unknown in an inscrutable deity, to Christianity's most radical move: fully restoring the abyssal Thing to its primordial site in the relation with the human Other, reframed as the imperative to love what is unknown and threatening.

    focusing directly upon the primordial locus of the anxiety-producing Thing

76. #76

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.174

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Religious Symptom

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys Lacan's tripartite RSI (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary) framework to argue that the three Abrahamic-plus-Greek traditions are each symptomatic formations organized around a defensive response to das Ding: Greek polytheism as imaginary, Judaism as symbolic, and Christianity as the religion of the Real—and therefore the most extravagantly symptomatic, generating both the greatest defenses and the greatest historical violence. Religion itself is thus theorized as the most elemental and ubiquitous human symptom, substitutable only by other forms of sublimation.

    religions elicit the specter of the unknown Thing, they also deploy defenses against their own potential for anxiety.

77. #77

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.185

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > A Broader View? > Along the Path of the Fourth Prophet

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Islam, like Christianity before it, enacts a symptomatic defensive closure against the radical opening toward das Ding that its own mystical and ethical traditions intimate: it re-transcendentalizes the divine (al-Ghaib, Allah's ineffability) and amplifies the letter of the Law, thereby countermanding the Jesusian gospel of love and the neighbor, making Islam the strongest rival to Christianity as the religion most tensed between an opening toward das Ding and defenses arrayed against it.

    the tension between believer and disbeliever appears to be heightened in Islam… functions to distance the subject from the uncertainty incarnated by the Other-Thing.

78. #78

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.187

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Cash Is the Thing!

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that money in capitalist culture functions as a phantasmatic incarnation of *das Ding*, structuring social relations by both intensifying and defending against the anxiety produced by the unknown Thing in the Other — capitalism thereby operates as a religion, with the market economy displacing the "human economy" of gift-exchange that kept subjects entangled with the Other's desire.

    capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish, and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion.

79. #79

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.201

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Conclusions

    Theoretical move: Against a purely defensive/repressive reading of religion (Freud), Lacan's position is reframed as a positive 're-linking' (re-ligare) to the enigmatic Real encountered in the human Other, such that the sacred is constituted around an irreducible locus of unknowing — Das Ding / the 'No-thing' — that human desire perpetually orbits.

    human desire is a ceaseless orbit around an anxious vortex of something incomprehensible.

80. #80

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.202

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Conclusions > Rethinking the Foundations of Psychoanalytic Theory

    Theoretical move: By reading the Freud-Rolland debate through the Lacanian Thing and the paternal metaphor, Boothby argues that religion is constitutively split between a maternal pole (oceanic fusion destabilized by das Ding) and a paternal pole (the signifying architecture of separation), a bipolarity the Nag Hammadi "Thunder, Perfect Mind" text is then used to confirm.

    that detachment is motivated by the infant's increasingly anxious awareness of something unknown in the maternal Other. To assuage that emerging anxiety the child turns to the third position of the father

81. #81

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.209

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Conclusions > The Heart of the Matter

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a Lacanian account of religion grounds the sacred not in wish-fulfilling illusion but in the subject's primordial, ambivalent orientation toward das Ding as the void at the heart of the Other—and further proposes that both religion and science are ultimately forms of devotion to (and defense against) this unknown Thing, thereby dissolving Freud's simple religion/science opposition while aligning Lacan with an "art of unknowing."

    Precisely that unnerving and anxiety-producing unknown, the unthinkable jouissance of the Other, is what most ineluctably lures us.

82. #82

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.214

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Notes > Chapter 1

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 1 of Boothby's book, listing scholarly references on Lacanian theory and religion, Freud, Nietzsche, and related works. It is non-substantive in theoretical terms but signals key intertextual engagements.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book X, Anxiety, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 31.

83. #83

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.216

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Notes > Chapter 2

    Theoretical move: This notes section maps the theoretical genealogy of *das Ding* and *objet petit a* across Lacan's seminars, documenting the Thing's partial eclipse by the object a while tracing its persistent appearances and its structural relationships to the Other, the subject, fantasy, sublimation, and the paternal metaphor.

    It's not longing for the maternal breast that provokes anxiety, but its imminence

84. #84

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.224

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Notes > Part 2

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section (endnotes for Part 2 of "Rethinking Religion") containing citations to Lacan, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Homer, and others; it is not substantively argumentative but does contain a few brief theoretical asides linking das Ding, objet a, and the shofar, and connecting monotheism to trauma and the signifying chain.

    Lacan, Anxiety, 277... Lacan, Anxiety, 245... Lacan, Anxiety, 249... Lacan, Anxiety, 251.

85. #85

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.250

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Index > **INDEX**

    Theoretical move: This is an index page (pp. 250) from Boothby's book; it is non-substantive in itself but maps the key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts deployed throughout the work, including das Ding, objet a, sexuation, the subject supposed to know, the symbolic, symptom, and the void in relation to religion and the sacred.

    sex: anxiety of, 39–40; … subject threatened by, 38–39; void: and anxiety, 91–92

86. #86

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.249

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Index > **INDEX**

    Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage (pages 248–249) listing key terms, persons, and concepts with page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but surfaces the book's central conceptual architecture through its entry clusters.

    Other, the: and anxiety, 25–26; … monotheism: … anxiety and, 29, 127–28; and father, 22

87. #87

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.112

    I > 3 > Mastery versus Capitalism

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism, by universalizing the demand for recognition through the structural appropriation of surplus value, eliminates the 'outside' position that allowed the slave to enjoy, yet simultaneously reveals that enjoyment is always already based on a prior loss — making capitalism the condition of possibility for a 'fully realized infinite' enjoyment rather than the slave's merely 'potential infinite.'

    This is the real enjoyment that the subject endures rather than performs. It is an enjoyment that generates anxiety and suffering; it is rooted in loss.

88. #88

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.117

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Beyond the Demand

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary capitalism has replaced the traditional dialectic of demand and desire (prohibition-based paternal authority) with an imperative to enjoy, producing a subject overwhelmed by the obscene proximity of the enjoying other rather than structured by lack — and that the ethical psychoanalytic response is the embrace of the resulting anxiety.

    contemporary anxiety is an anxiety 'not of absence and loss but of overproximity, loss of distance to some obscene and malevolent presence.'

89. #89

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.119

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Taking a Short Cut

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety in contemporary subjects—and the violence it generates—derives from the encounter with the "enjoying other," and that this logic applies equally to fundamentalist terrorism and the War on Terror: both are misguided attempts to eradicate an enjoyment that is actually a projection of the subject's own fantasmatic construction, not a property of the other itself.

    The specter of the enjoying other colors almost every interaction in the film, and it has the effect of creating a level of anxiety that few can bear.

90. #90

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.125

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Taking a Short Cut

    Theoretical move: Violence directed at the enjoying other is structurally self-defeating and self-sustaining: it does not aim to eliminate the other's enjoyment but to perpetuate it, revealing that anxiety about jouissance can be managed through flight, violence, or—as a third ethical option—embracing anxiety itself.

    But there remains a third possibility: one might embrace the experience of anxiety as an ethical and political choice.

91. #91

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.126

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Anxiety as Ethics

    Theoretical move: Against Heidegger's anxiety-as-confrontation-with-nothing, McGowan (via Lacan) argues that anxiety is ethical precisely because it arises from the overwhelming presence of the other's jouissance rather than from absence; the genuinely ethical response is to tolerate and endure this anxiety rather than flee it through cynicism or fundamentalism.

    For Lacan, anxiety does not involve a confrontation with absence — with what Heidegger calls the nothing — but with an overwhelming presence.

92. #92

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.131

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Whose Enjoyment?

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that anxiety in the face of the Other's enjoyment is not merely an ethical posture but the very mechanism through which subjects access their own enjoyment, since enjoyment is structurally unavailable directly and must be fantasized through the enjoying Other—making the disturbing fantasy-encounter with the real Other ethically superior to both liberal tolerance (which neutralizes otherness) and fascist persecution (which disavows enjoyment while depending on it).

    not only is anxiety an ethical position, it is also the key to embracing the experience of enjoyment. To reject the experience of anxiety is to flee one's own enjoyment.

93. #93

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.228

    I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > An Express Path to Trauma

    Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as simultaneously ideological (concealing the traumatic kernel that grounds social reality) and subversive: by luring the subject toward the very gap it conceals, fantasy stages an encounter with the Real that exposes the contingency of the symbolic structure and thereby opens political possibility.

    the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as its form in itself is something which provokes anxiety. Spectre of anxiety, identification of anxiety

94. #94

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.320

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 4. Sustaining Anxiety

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section traces Lacan's theoretical trajectory from an early Hegelian recognition-based psychoanalysis toward a later framework that integrates destructiveness and jouissance into subjectivity, while also mapping how anxiety, enjoyment, and the enjoying Other function in contemporary consumer society, political violence, and fascism.

    The problem with a society structured around the imperative to enjoy like ours is not that it produces anxiety but that it produces anxiety along with the belief that one might enjoy without it.

95. #95

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_154"></span>**preoedipal phase**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reconceives the preoedipal phase not as a dyadic mother-child relation but as an imaginary triangle mediated by the phallus, arguing that psychoanalytic structure requires a minimum of three terms; the intervention of the real drive and then the father as a fourth term disrupt this triangle, and all perversions originate in identifications within it.

    something else intervenes which introduces a discordant note of anxiety into the game

96. #96

    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.

    Objet petit a is both the object of anxiety, and the final irreducible reserve of libido.

97. #97

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_76"></span>**frustration**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reconceptualises 'frustration' against its post-Freudian misuse: by relocating it from the register of biological need to that of the demand for love within a symbolic-legal order, he reframes analytic abstinence not as an end in itself but as the means through which the signifiers of demand are made to reappear, ultimately causing desire to emerge.

    This is the analyst's refusal to give the signal of anxiety to the analysand—the absence of anxiety in the analyst at all times, even when the analysand demands that the analyst experience anxiety.

98. #98

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_34"></span>**Cause**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of causality across his oeuvre: from the cause of psychosis to causality as situated on the border of the symbolic and the real, to objet petit a as the cause of desire rather than its object, establishing that the cause of the unconscious is structurally a 'lost cause'.

    Lacan argues that the true meaning of causality should be looked for in the phenomenon of anxiety, for anxiety is the cause of doubt.

99. #99

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_61"></span>**end of analysis**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically maps Lacan's evolving formulations of the 'end of analysis' across his teaching, arguing that the end-point is a logical terminus defined by subjective destitution, traversal of fantasy, and identification with the sinthome—not therapeutic cure, ego-strengthening, or identification with the analyst—and that it always involves the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know and the reduction of the analyst to objet petit a.

    In 1960, Lacan describes the end of analysis as a state of anxiety and abandonment, and compares it to the HELPLESSNESS of the human infant.

100. #100

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_146"></span>**passage to the act**

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a structural distinction between acting out and passage to the act: while both are defenses against anxiety, acting out remains within the symbolic (a message to the big Other), whereas the passage to the act is a flight into the real that dissolves the social bond and collapses the subject into the position of pure object (objet petit a).

     While both are last resorts against anxiety, the subject who acts something out still remains in the SCENE, whereas a passage to the act involves an exit from the scene altogether.

101. #101

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_14"></span>**affect**

     Theoretical move: Lacan dissolves the classical affect/intellect opposition by grounding affect in the symbolic order rather than treating it as a primary, pre-discursive realm; the implication is that psychoanalytic treatment targets the truth of desire through speech, not abreaction, and that affects function as signals tied to the subject's relation with the Other—with anxiety uniquely singled out as the non-deceptive affect.

     Anxiety is the only affect that is not deceptive.

102. #102

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_69"></span>**father**

     Theoretical move: The passage systematically distinguishes three registers of the father (symbolic, imaginary, real) to show that the father is not a unified concept but a tripartite structure whose interplay constitutes the conditions of possibility for subjectivity, psychosis, and perversion — and to position Lacan's theory against object-relations prioritization of the mother-child dyad.

     This intervention saves the child from the preceding anxiety; without it, the child requires a phobic object as a symbolic substitute for the absent real father.

103. #103

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_151"></span>**phobia**

     Theoretical move: Lacan retheorises phobia not as a clinical structure but as a "revolving junction" (plaque tournante): the phobic object functions as a signifier without univocal sense, enabling the subject to work through the impossibilities blocking passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, and phobia thereby occupies a gateway position between the two great neurotic structures and perversion.

     Lacan, following Freud, he stresses the difference between phobia and anxiety: anxiety appears first, and the phobia is a defensive formation which turns the anxiety into fear by focusing it on a specific object

104. #104

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_74"></span>**fragmented body**

     Theoretical move: The fragmented body (corps morcelé) is theorised as a constitutive counterpart to the Mirror Stage: the perception of bodily disunity drives identification with the specular image that forms the ego, while the memory of fragmentation continues to threaten that ego's synthetic unity, surfacing in aggressivity, negative transference, and hysterical symptoms governed by an 'imaginary anatomy'.

     The anxiety provoked by this feeling of fragmentation fuels the identification with the specular image by which the ego is formed.

105. #105

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_149"></span>**phallus**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the phallus across Lacan's three registers (real, imaginary, symbolic), arguing that Lacan's terminological innovation—distinguishing phallus from penis—clarifies a logic implicit in Freud while elevating the phallus to the status of a privileged signifier that organises both the Oedipus complex and sexual difference, a move that invites both feminist defence and Derridean critique of phallogocentrism.

     this intrusion of the real in the imaginary preoedipal triangle is what transforms the triangle from something pleasurable to something which provokes anxiety

106. #106

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_165"></span>**real**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the genealogy and theoretical transformations of Lacan's concept of the Real across his career: from an early ontological absolute opposed to appearance, through its elevation to one of the three fundamental orders in 1953 as that which resists symbolisation absolutely, to its late-Lacan distinction from 'reality'—all while maintaining a constitutive indeterminacy (internal/external, unknowable/rational) that is itself theoretically productive.

     The real is the object of anxiety; it lacks any possible mediation, and is thus 'the essential object which isn't an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail'

107. #107

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_19"></span>**anxiety**

     Theoretical move: Lacan radically reorients Freud's two theories of anxiety by tying it to the Real, the objet petit a, and the logic of lack—arguing that anxiety is not caused by separation from the mother but by the failure to separate, and that it is the only non-deceptive affect, arising specifically when lack itself is lacking (i.e., when objet petit a fills its place).

     anxiety is the only affect which is beyond all doubt, which is not deceptive … anxiety is not without an object (n'est pas sans objet); it simply involves a different kind of object, an object which cannot be symbolised in the same way as all other objects.

108. #108

     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_138"></span>**Oedipus complex**

     Theoretical move: The passage expounds Lacan's distinctive reworking of the Oedipus complex as a three-timed logical passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic order, mediated by the paternal function and the phallus, arguing that the prohibition of jouissance operative in the Oedipal myth masks the more fundamental Lacanian insight (drawn from Totem and Taboo) that maternal jouissance is not merely forbidden but structurally impossible.

     This sense of inadequacy and impotence in the face of an omnipotent maternal desire that cannot be placated gives rise to anxiety.

109. #109

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_180"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0203"></span>**Seminar**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a bibliographic and historical entry on Lacan's Seminar, tracing its institutional history, the oral-to-written transmission problem, and providing a complete chronological index of all twenty-seven annual seminars — functioning as reference material rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

     X | 1962-3 | Anxiety.

110. #110

     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_126"></span>**mother**

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Lacan's theory of the mother across three registers (real, symbolic, imaginary) and traces how the child's relation to the mother's desire—structured around the phallus—generates anxiety, drives the entry into the symbolic order, and ultimately requires the paternal function to resolve the imaginary deadlock of the Oedipus complex.

     It is only when the child's sexual drives begin to stir… that the omnipotence of the mother begins to provoke greater anxiety in the child. This anxiety is manifested in images of being devoured by the mother

111. #111

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     1

     Theoretical move: Freud abandons the city/mind analogy for the retention of the past on the grounds that organic bodies also fail to preserve earlier developmental stages, concluding instead that psychical retention is unique — before pivoting to argue that the 'oceanic feeling' cannot ground religious needs, which are better traced to infantile helplessness and the longing for paternal protection (i.e., narcissism and the father).

     a longing for its father seems irrefutable, especially as this feeling is not only prolonged from the days of childhood, but constantly sustained by a fear of the superior power of fate.

112. #112

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     2

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the programme of the pleasure principle governs mental life but is structurally incompatible with reality, and surveys the various strategies (intoxication, sublimation, drive-control, isolation, etc.) by which human beings attempt to manage this constitutive tension between the pursuit of happiness and the inevitability of suffering — positioning religion as one palliative among others rather than as a unique answer to the purpose of life.

     from our own body, which, being doomed to decay and dissolution, cannot dispense with pain and anxiety as warning signals

113. #113

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     3

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization is itself the primary source of neurotic suffering—its demands for instinctual renunciation generate unhappiness—while simultaneously being the very apparatus through which humanity seeks protection from nature, thus making any simple "return to primitive conditions" self-undermining. The passage pivots on the paradox that technological mastery (the "god with artificial limbs") has not increased happiness, relocating the unconquerable element of nature inward, in the psyche.

     I should not need the telegraph service in order to allay my anxiety about him

114. #114

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     3

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a structural homology between civilizational development and individual libidinal development, arguing that civilization is built on drive-renunciation (via repression, suppression, and sublimation), that order is a compulsion to repeat modelled on natural regularities, and that the tension between individual freedom and communal restriction is the fundamental, potentially irreconcilable problem of civilization.

     if there is no economic compensation, one can expect serious disturbances

115. #115

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     5

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization's restriction of the aggressive drive generates discontent by redirecting aggression outward toward outsiders, and that the trade-off between instinctual freedom and social security is structurally unavoidable, culminating in the diagnosis of a "psychological misery of the mass" produced by identification-based social bonding without strong individual leadership.

     One only wonders, with some anxiety, what the Soviets will turn to when they have exterminated their bourgeoisie.

116. #116

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     7

     Theoretical move: Freud advances the paradoxical thesis that the superego/conscience is not merely the product of drive-renunciation imposed by external authority, but that drive-renunciation itself dynamically generates conscience, which in turn demands further renunciation — a reversing of the causal relation that explains why virtue intensifies rather than appeases the severity of conscience.

     This state of mind we call a 'bad conscience', but it really does not merit the name, for at this stage consciousness of guilt is clearly no more than a fear of loss of love, a 'social' anxiety.

117. #117

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     8

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the sense of guilt—conceived as a topical variety of anxiety and the central cost of civilization—must be theorized through its mostly unconscious operation, its two-layered origin (fear of external then internal authority), and its privileged relationship to aggression rather than erotic drives, with repression converting libidinal elements into symptoms and aggressive components into guilt.

     the sense of guilt is fundamentally nothing other than a topical variety of anxiety; in its later phases it merges completely with fear of the super-ego.

118. #118

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     8

     Theoretical move: Freud frames civilization's fate as a conflict between Eros and the death/aggression drive, arguing that cultural progress (upright posture, organic repression of smell, sublimation through work) channels but never fully resolves the tension between libidinal binding and destructive drives—leaving the outcome of this struggle genuinely open.

     it is this knowledge that accounts for much of their present disquiet, unhappiness and anxiety

119. #119

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     8

     Theoretical move: These footnotes from Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* advance the argument that the Superego's severity is not a direct product of parental strictness but of the subject's own aggression turned inward—shaped by the interplay of drive-frustration and the experience of being loved—while also equating the destructive drive with Mephistopheles and positioning Eros as its adversary.

     'Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all …'

120. #120

     Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

     <span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses Jungle/darkside music as a cultural-theoretical site where jouissance, the death drive, and dystopian negativity paradoxically flip into a utopian gesture, while the concept of 'scenius' (collective anonymous production) is posed against individualist celebrity as the structural condition of radical cultural innovation.

     As Kodwo Eshun argued, in Jungle there was a libidinisation of anxiety itself, a transformation of fight and flight impulses into enjoyment.

121. #121

     Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

     <span id="Chapter1.htm_page14"></span>‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’

     Theoretical move: Fisher distinguishes clinical depression from hauntological melancholia as a cultural condition, and frames the act of writing/blogging as a working-through that externalises negativity from the individual onto culture — making the personal therapeutic move simultaneously a critical-theoretical gesture about cultural desolation.

     Depression is the most malign spectre that has dogged my life – and I use the term depression to distinguish the dreary solipsism of the condition from the more lyrical (and collective) desolations of haunto-logical melancholia.

122. #122

     Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

     <span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

     Theoretical move: Fisher deploys hauntology as the master concept to read English art pop (Japan, Sylvian) and Tricky's music as sites where class anxiety, spectral identity, and the alien/android figure converge, arguing that identification with the alien/void — rather than authentic selfhood — is the politically charged gesture that links postpunk, art pop, and 1990s British music across racial and class lines.

     'Ghosts' was paralysed by very English anxieties: you could imagine Pip from Great Expectations singing it. In England, working class escape is always haunted by the possibility that you will be found out, that your roots are showing.

123. #123

     Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

     <span id="Chapter3.htm_page62"></span>No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses Joy Division as a cultural symptom—their music indexes the threshold moment (1979–80) when social-democratic, Fordist modernity collapsed into neoliberal control society, arguing that the band's depressive, catatonic expressionism is not merely aesthetic but diagnostic of a historically specific breakdown of subjectivity, community, and futurity.

     the price of escaping the anxiety of influence (the influence of themselves)

124. #124

     Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

     <span id="Chapter23.htm_page214"></span>Postmodern Antiques: *Patience (After Sebald)*

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses Christopher Nolan's *Inception* as a cultural-critical lens to argue that the film's real achievement is the diagnosis of a postmodern condition in which identity, memory, and selfhood are irreducible from fiction and self-deception, while simultaneously exposing how the film itself capitulates to the logic of spectacular capitalism and the 'creative industries', replacing the uncanny unconscious with CGI spectacle.

     a film which, perhaps better than any other, captures the uncanny topographies of the anxiety dream

125. #125

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     **vin** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Robert, Mme Lefort demonstrates how a near-total absence of the symbolic function (Name-of-the-Father, stable object relations, body schema) produces a child whose only self-representation is an anxiety-laden series of bodily contents, whose ego is indistinguishable from its objects, and where the sole "signifier" available — "Wolf!" — functions not as a metaphor but as a cry marking the threat of self-destruction and dissolution.

     A bit of sand fell on the ground, unleashing unbelievable panic in him. He had to gather up every last bit of sand, as if it was a piece of himself

126. #126

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.287

     xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI: ft** *is the navel of speech.*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is the very concept of analysis because it is its time, and uses the Master/Slave dialectic to illuminate obsessional neurosis: the obsessional's waiting for the master's death functions as a reprieve from confronting his own being-for-death, which is precisely what analysis must work through via repetition-compulsion given symbolic duration.

     Up to now we have been living in anxiety, now we are going to live in hope.

127. #127

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.191

     **XV** > The nucleus of repression

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues, via the Wolf Man case, that trauma acquires its repressive force only retroactively (nachträglich): the original Prägung exists first in a non-verbalized imaginary register and only becomes traumatic when it is integrated—and simultaneously split off—within the symbolic order, making repression and the return of the repressed structurally identical, and constituting the nucleus of repression around which subsequent symptoms organize.

     That is when desire is sensed by the subject - which cannot happen without the conjunction of speech. And it is a moment of pure anxiety, and nothing but.

128. #128

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.74

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the theoretical claim that the Real is defined as what resists symbolisation absolutely, and uses Melanie Klein's case of Dick to demonstrate that without symbolisation the subject is trapped in undifferentiated reality with no ego-formation, no anxiety-signal, and no human world of objects—thus counterposing Klein's interpretive brutality (which introduces the Symbolic) against Anna Freud's ego-educative intellectualism.

     Anxiety is not a sort of energy that the subject has to apportion out in order to constitute objects... Anxiety is always defined as appearing suddenly, as arising.

129. #129

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.101

     **vin** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical case (Robert), the passage argues that psychotic/autistic construction of the subject proceeds through the dialectic of container/contained, requiring the analyst to embody and then be separated from the persecutory object (Wolfl), so that the child can build a body-ego, work through castration anxiety, and finally distinguish fantasy from reality — demonstrating that the therapeutic relationship literalizes and re-enacts the stages of primordial subject-constitution.

     started to undress in an extreme state of anxiety, and, completely naked, climbed into the bed

130. #130

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.311

     xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index passage from Seminar I, non-substantive in theoretical argument but mapping the key conceptual terrain of the seminar across entries such as speech, subject, symbolic, transference, and signifier.

     loss of and anxiety 69

131. #131

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.349

     **xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar X by distinguishing mourning, melancholia, and mania through the functional difference between objet a and i(a), and then pivots to announce the Names-of-the-Father as the next seminar's project, arguing that the father is not a causa sui but a subject who has integrated his desire back into the irreducible a — the only passage through which desire can be authentically realised in the field of the Other.

     Anxiety is only ever surmounted when the Other has been named. There is only ever any love when there is a name

132. #132

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     **x** > **THE MOUTH AND THE EYE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops a topological inversion between the anxiety-point and the point of desire across the oral and phallic/scopic levels: at the oral level anxiety is located at the Other (the mother's body) while desire is secured in the fantasy-relation to the partial object; at the phallic level this is strictly reversed, with orgasm itself functioning as the anxiety-point's homologue. The eye is then introduced as the new partial object (objet a) whose structure of mirage and exclusion from transcendental aesthetics anchors this topology.

     The topological division between desire and anxiety. The anxiety-point lies at the level of the Other, at the level of the mother's body.

133. #133

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     BookX Anxiety > *NOT WITHOUT HAVING IT*

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a catalogue of partial objects (objet petit a) as pre-symbolic, non-shareable objects whose entry into the field of exchange signals anxiety, while simultaneously arguing that the partial object's synchronic function in transference has been systematically neglected — a neglect that explains Freud's limit at castration and the post-analytic failures in sexual function. Topological surfaces (cross-cap, Möbius strip) are then deployed to distinguish the specular (imaginary) object from objet petit a.

     when these objects freely enter this field which they have nothing to do with, the field of sharing, when they show up there and become recognizable, anxiety signals to us the particularity of their status.

134. #134

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY, SIGN OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates a structural logic whereby declaring desire to the other identifies that other with the unknown object of desire, thereby fulfilling the other's own lack — making the declaration of desire a trap that ensnares the other precisely by addressing their want.

     I won't leave it as a conundrum.

135. #135

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.190

     **x** > **XIII APHORISMS ON LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a series of aphorisms on the love-desire-jouissance relation, arguing that anxiety mediates between desire and jouissance, that sadism and masochism are not reversible but constitute a fourfold structure each concealing the other's true aim, and that "only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire" — with castration functioning as the structural impasse that governs the encounter between the sexes.

     anxiety forms the middle register between desire and jouissance.

136. #136

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     BookX Anxiety > **v** > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dimension of the Other is structurally irreducible across all approaches to anxiety—experimental (Pavlov, Goldstein), philosophical, and analytic—and that the illusion of self-transparent consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein / Subject Supposed to Know) is precisely what blocks recognition of this, while the uncanny marks the point where specular identification fails and anxiety's structural void becomes legible.

     the place which we've designated on this little diagram as the place of anxiety, and which is currently being occupied by the (一制, constitutes a certain void. Everything that may show itself in this place throws us off route, as it were, as regards the structuring function of this void.

137. #137

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY, SIGN OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan marks a decisive 'leap' beyond Hegel on the function of desire: whereas Hegel's desire is desire of/for another *consciousness* (leading necessarily to the struggle to the death), Lacanian desire is desire of the Other qua *unconscious lack*, mediated by the fantasy as image-support — a distinction formalised through four formulae and the division-remainder algebra that produces the barred subject and objet a as co-residues on the side of the Other.

     the first is designed to highlight the fact that anxiety is what imparts truth to the Hegelian formula.

138. #138

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Lucia Tower's clinical case report, Lacan argues that countertransference only becomes analytically operative when the analyst's own desire is genuinely implicated in the transference relation; and that sadism, properly understood, aims at the missing partial object rather than at masochistic self-punishment in the analyst.

     she had feared that the woman was drifting off a bit towards psychosis, but now her anxiety is well bound

139. #139

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.117

     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.

     This place, inasmuch as it is circumscribed by something that is materialized in the image, a rim, an opening, a gap, where the constitution of the specular image shows its limit, is the elective locus of anxiety.

140. #140

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.47

     BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*

     Theoretical move: By tracing Hamlet's two modes of identification—with the specular image i(a) and with the lost object a—Lacan distinguishes the imaginary register from a remainder that escapes specularization, using the cross-cap topology to show that minus-phi (the phallus as lack) and objet petit a share a status irreducible to the specular image, thereby framing anxiety as the privileged passageway between cosmism and the object of desire.

     why do we want so much to preserve the dimension of anxiety? There must be a reason for this... This passageway is precisely to be cleared by studying the function of anxiety.

141. #141

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.242

     **x** > **THE MOUTH AND THE EYE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the oral drive must be re-examined to show that the anxiety-point (located at the level of the mother/Other) and the point of desire (located at the mamma as partial object) are structurally distinct and non-coincident, with the mamma functioning as an 'amboceptive' object internal to the child's own sphere — thereby reframing the castration complex not as a dead end but as misread through an oral reduction that only metaphorically displaces it.

     The gulf between lack and the function of desire in action, structured by the fantasy and by the subject's vacillation in his relation to the partial object, indicates the non-concurrence that creates anxiety, and anxiety is the only thing to target the truth of this lack.

142. #142

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     **x** > **ON A LACK THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO THE SIGNIFIER**

     Theoretical move: The decisive therapeutic factor in analysis is not the content of interpretation but the introduction of the "function of the cut" — the analyst's intervention that allows the subject to grasp herself as a lack, which is irreducible to signification and constitutive of desire and anxiety.

     The intervention showed the patient that the analyst was harbouring what is known as anxiety. Here we are standing at the limit of something that designates the place of lack in the analysis.

143. #143

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.147

     **x** > **ON A LACK THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO THE SIGNIFIER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the analytic paradox of "defence against anxiety" by arguing that defence is not against anxiety itself but against the lack of which anxiety is a signal, and he further differentiates the structural positions of the objet petit a in neurosis versus perversion/psychosis to clarify the handling of the transferential relation — culminating in a redefinition of mourning as identifying with the function of being the Other's lack.

     anxiety is referred to the real and we are told that it is the major and most radical defence, the response to the most primary danger, to the insurmountable Hilflos

144. #144

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     **xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that anxiety is "not without object" — its object being the objet petit a in its primordial form as a "yieldable object" (cession) — and uses this to ground the specific structure of obsessional desire: the a precedes and substitutes for the subject, inaugurating a dialectic in which all forms of the a (breast, gaze, voice, faeces) share the structural characteristic of potential cession.

     anxiety is without cause, but not without object… Not only is it not without object, but it very likely designates the most, as it were, profound object, the ultimate object, the Thing.

145. #145

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY, SIGN OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic teaching cannot rest on mere cataloguing or analogical methods, but must operate through a "function of the key" — the signifying function — grounded in the unary trait as the primordial signifier that precedes the subject and justifies any ideal of straightforwardness in teaching.

     the question is rather one of explaining how we can speak about anxiety when we subsume under this same category experiences as diverse as...

146. #146

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not without object but has a distinct object structure: it is the cut that precedes and grounds signification, and as "that which deceives not," it is the cause of doubt rather than doubt itself—the only phenomenon that escapes the signifier's constitutive capacity for deception. This leads to the claim that action borrows its certainty from anxiety by transferring it, and that jouissance-on-command (as in Ecclesiastes/circumcision) marks the originary site of anxiety.

     The phenomenon of anxiety is the sudden appearance of the Heimliche within the frame, and this is why it's wrong to say that anxiety is without object.

147. #147

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     **x** > **PUNCTUATIONS ON DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety arises not from Hegelian mutual recognition (where the Other acknowledges or misrecognizes me) but from a temporal dimension in which the Other's desire puts my very Being in question by targeting me as the cause of desire (as *objet a*) rather than as its object — a structure that also defines the operative dimension of analytic transference.

     It solicits my loss, so that the Other can find itself there again. That's what anxiety is.

148. #148

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.359

     **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section from Seminar X, listing proper names, concepts, and bibliographic references alphabetically with page numbers; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

     Kierkegaard, S0ren 7, 18, 25, 164, 189, 331 The Concept of Anxiety 333

149. #149

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.141

     **x** > **ON A LACK THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO THE SIGNIFIER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety points to a radical, irreducible lack that cannot be symbolized or compensated by the signifier; using topological figures (torus, cross-cap, Möbius strip) he demonstrates that this structural fault—prior to and constitutive of the signifier itself—cannot be filled by negation, cancellation, or symbolization, distinguishing it categorically from privation and absence.

     anxiety is not without an object... anxiety introduces us, with the accent of utmost communicability, to a function that is, for our field, radical - the function of lack.

150. #150

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.110

     BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage reframes Objet petit a not as the intentional object *of* desire (in the phenomenological/Husserlian sense) but as the *cause* of desire that lies *behind* it, prior to any internalization; this reconfiguration is then used to distinguish the structural positions of sadism and masochism as different modes of identification with the object.

     anxiety is the sole subjective translation of this object.

151. #151

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.355

     **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index/reference section from Seminar X, listing concepts, proper names, and bibliographic entries alphabetically; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

     castration anxiety 44-5, 52-3, 90, 176, 257,259,263-4,267,292,320,331

152. #152

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is grounded in the "deciduous" (falling-away) character of the partial object, which he reframes as a neurotic fantasy rather than a structural given, and uses the clinical phenomenon of anxiety-triggered orgasm to illustrate the real relation between anxiety, jouissance, and desire — positioning anxiety as a signal at the intersection of the Real and the subject's loss.

     He ejaculates at the height of his anxiety. We are told of the famous eroticization of anxiety. Isn't it necessary first of all to find out what relations anxiety has with Eros?

153. #153

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.266

     **x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that visual desire masks anxiety by substituting the non-specular Objet petit a with mere appearances, and pivots to establishing the voice as the most originary partial object — more fundamental than the scopic or anal object — whose relation to anxiety and desire must be grasped through the myth of the father's murder rather than through the primacy of maternal desire.

     The reciprocal relationship between desire and anxiety presents itself at this specific level in a radically masked form, linked to the superlatively luring functions of the structure of desire.

154. #154

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.229

     **x** > **XVI BUDDHA'S EYELIDS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan regrounds the philosophical function of "cause" — irreducible to critique across all of Western philosophy — in the structural "syncope" of the objet petit a within the fantasy: cause is not a rational category but the shadow of anxiety's certainty, which is the only non-deceptive certainty, and this move radically challenges any cognizance that attempts to domesticate desire into objectivity.

     The certainty linked to the recourse to the first cause is merely the shadow of this fundamental certainty. Its shadowy character is what imparts it its essentially precarious aspect... this certainty, when sought out in its genuine grounding, shows itself for what it is - a displacement, a certainty that is secondary in relation to the certainty of anxiety.

155. #155

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps the perverse positions of sadism and masochism through the differential concealment of anxiety and the object (objet a), arguing that anxiety is the subject's real leftover and that castration is best understood not as threat but through the structural "falling-away" of the phallus as object—a detumescent object whose loss is more constitutive of desire than its presence.

     anxiety's radical link to the object is exposed as failing. Its essential function is to be the subject's leftover, the subject as real.

156. #156

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.304

     **xx** > **XXI PIAGET'S TAP** > what the reproducer has understood what the explainer had understood

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Piaget's tap experiment to critique psychology's blindness to the causal dimension of the object as structured by desire and the phallic relation, then articulates five levels of the constitution of objet petit a in the S/A relation—oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and the desire of the Other—deploying this schema to reframe obsessional neurosis as structured around demand's cover over the desire of the Other, with anxiety as the irreducible kernel.

     everything is determined in his symptomatology and notably in the symptoms where the dimension of cause is glimpsed as Angst.

157. #157

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     **x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Voice as a new form of objet petit a — separated, not reducible to phonemic opposition — by way of the shofar, which he deploys to distinguish the vocal dimension from the scopic, and to show that while the mirror-stage/eye level produces a closed image with no remainder, the voice opens the question of the big Other's memory (and thus repetition) in a dimension irreducible to space and the specular.

     This is what regards us over and above anything else, and shows how anxiety emerges in vision at the locus of the desire that the a controls.

158. #158

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.232

     **x** > **XVI BUDDHA'S EYELIDS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the body's engagement in the signifying chain produces an irreducible remainder — the "pound of flesh" — that cannot be dissolved by phenomenological non-dualism, and uses this structure to contrast the Christian (masochistic identification with the waste-object) against the Buddhist relationship to desire-as-illusion, ultimately grounding the mirror/eye dialectic in the logic of objet petit a as what is cut from the subject rather than projected outward.

     the crux of masochism, which is an attempt to provoke the Other's anxiety, here become God's anxiety, has become second nature in the Christian

159. #159

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.328

     **xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the anal object (objet a) functions as the *cause* of desire rather than its goal, and that inhibition is the structural locus where desire operates; this grounds a theory of the obsessional's recursive desire as a defence against genital/castration anxiety, whereby the excremental *a* acts as a "stopper" substituting for the impossible phallic object.

     In its polar relation to anxiety, desire is to be located where I've put it, matched up with the foregoing matrix, namely, at the level of *inhibition.*

160. #160

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.309

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues for a "circular constitution" of objet petit a across all libidinal stages—against Abraham's linear-developmental model—grounding the cause-function of desire structurally in the gap between cause and effect, with excrement as the paradigm case that reveals how biological objects only acquire their subjective destiny through the dominance of the signifier.

     anxiety is that which doesn't deceive. The proof is that when you see animals becoming agitated in this way… you would do well to take this into account as a way of being forewarned

161. #161

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.201

     **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses clinical material and the figure of Don Juan to argue that feminine jouissance is structurally distinct from masculine desire: whereas man's anxiety is tied to the (–φ) and the lost object, woman's relation to jouissance is mediated by the desire of the Other rather than by lack, making her "truer and more real." Women's masochism is consequently reframed as a male fantasy, and the male "imposture" is contrasted with the female "masquerade."

     Men's anxiety is linked to the possibility of not being able… In truth, what matters to us is to grasp the woman's bond to the infinite possibilities or rather indeterminate possibilities of desire in the field that stretches out around her.

162. #162

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.270

     **x** > **THE EVANESCENT PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that castration anxiety is constituted by the *fading* of the phallic function precisely where it is expected to operate (the phallic stage), denoted (−φ), and uses the Wolf Man's primal scene—where the phallus is everywhere yet invisible, freezing the subject into a phallic-erect state—to show that objet petit a, jouissance, gaze, and anxiety converge at this structural moment; orgasm is then posed as the functional equivalent of anxiety because both confirm that anxiety is not without object.

     it is this fading of the phallic function at the level where the phallus is expected to function, that lies behind the principle of castration anxiety. Hence the notation (- <p) which denotes this, so to speak, positive shortcoming.

163. #163

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.210

     **x** > **xv**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that "men's business" designates a structural asymmetry in desire: what lacks for the man is (-φ), primary castration as something he must actively mourn and detach from narcissism, whereas for the woman lack is pre-castratively constituted through demand and the object a in its relation to the mother — this asymmetry reframes the debate on female phallicism and reorganizes the clinical vignette of Lucia Tower's countertransference around the distinction between the Other and the object a.

     Now, the whole question is that he was never able to find this place. That's what his anxiety neurosis is.

164. #164

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     **x** > **THE MOUTH AND THE EYE**

     Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the gaze as the correlative of objet petit a in the fantasy-structure, arguing that the "zero point" of contemplative vision (figured by the Buddha's lowered eyelids) suspends but cannot cancel the anxiety-point and the castration mystery, because desire is constitutively "not without object" — leaving the impasse of the castration complex unresolved.

     This figure assumes the anxiety-point fully unto itself and suspends, apparently cancelling out, the mystery of castration.

165. #165

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.319

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's impossibilized desire is structurally linked to the fantasy of an Almighty God (ubiquity/omnivoyance), which functions as the Ego Ideal covering over anxiety — such that true atheism, conceived as the dissolution of this fantasy of almightiness, is the analytic task specific to the obsessional structure.

     At the level at which anxiety is covered over, the Ego Ideal takes the form of the Almighty.

166. #166

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     BookX Anxiety > *PASSAGE* **A** *L'ACTE* **AND ACTING-OUT** > Second table of division

     Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the *passage à l'acte* from acting-out by locating the former on the side of the maximally barred subject who falls off the stage of the Other into the world, while developing the pre-specular logic of objects *a* as remainder and their relation to anxiety, ideal ego constitution, and depersonalization in psychosis.

     Freud's ultimate thinking points out that anxiety is a signal in the ego... This signal is a rim phenomenon in the imaginary field of the ego. [...] anxiety is indeed the only feeling we can have no doubt about when we meet it in an animal. We find there, in an outer form, the character that I have already noted as included in anxiety - that which does not deceive.

167. #167

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.98

     BookX Anxiety > *NOT WITHOUT HAVING IT*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that anxiety is "not without an object" — specifically objet petit a — and that this object's status is established through the logic of "not without having it," linking castration anxiety to the phallus's sociological function, the cut as operator of detachment, and the phenomenological transformation of the bodily object into a detachable, exchangeable thing.

     It's generally accepted that anxiety is without an object... it is not without an object. This is the exact formula in which anxiety's relation to an object must be suspended.

168. #168

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.343

     **xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and jouissance are structurally disjoint—separated by a central gap—and that the object *a* as the irreducible remainder is the cause of desire, not a brute forced fact; it then uses the inhibition-symptom-anxiety grid at the scopic level to reframe mourning as the labour of restoring the link to the masked object *a*, distinguishing Lacan's account from Freud's while following the same trajectory.

     Anxiety is sufficiently staved off and misrecognized in the mere capture of the specular image, i(a). The best one may wish for is for it to be reflected in the eyes of the Other.

169. #169

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.167

     **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not without object (*nicht objektlos*) but signals the Real's irreducibility, distinguishing anxiety from fear by locating it at the logical moment prior to desire where the remainder of subjective division — *objet petit a* — first appears as cause; the structure is formalised through an arithmetic analogy of division in which the barred subject emerges as the quotient of *a* over the signifier.

     anxiety is not objektlos, it is not without object … anxiety, of all signals, is the one that does not deceive.

170. #170

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.82

     BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety has a determinate structure — it is always *framed* — and uses this structural claim to reposition both the Unheimliche and the fantasy (via the Wolf Man's dream as window-framed scene) as instances of that framing, while also deploying Ferenczi's notion of the "unmediated interruption" of female genitality to argue that the structural empty place (locus of jouissance) is constitutive of desire prior to any diachronic myth of maturation.

     the first thing to be put forward concerning the structure of anxiety and which you always neglect in the observations because you're fascinated by the content of the mirror and you forget its limits is that anxiety is framed.

171. #171

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.255

     **x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Reik's analysis of the shofar—a ritual horn sounding at the voice-level of the object—to illustrate both the promise and the structural limit of analogical symbol-use in early psychoanalysis, positioning the voice (as objet petit a) as the final, fifth object relation that ties desire to anxiety in its ultimate form, while distinguishing rigorous theoretical grounding from mere intuitive analogy.

     based on the experience of anxiety, we've found ourselves having to add to the oral object, the anal object and the phallic object... two further stages of the object

172. #172

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.280

     **xx** > **WHAT COMES IN THROUGH THE EAR**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a "deceptive might" — never present where expected — such that anxiety is the truth of sexuality, and the subject-Other relation (S→A) is primordial over communication, with the subject first receiving his own message in broken, inverted form via the Other, a structure confirmed by the infant's pre-mirror-stage monologue.

     the fact that the phallus is not to be found where it's expected, where it's demanded, namely, on the plane of genital mediation, is what explains how anxiety is the truth of sexuality

173. #173

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     BookX Anxiety > *PASSAGE* **A** *L'ACTE* **AND ACTING-OUT** > Second table of division

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural distinction between acting-out and passage à l'acte by anchoring both to the object a and its cut-relation to the Other: acting-out is essentially a monstration (wild transference) that shows the a as cause of desire to the Other, while the symptom is self-sufficient jouissance that only requires interpretation through established transference. The originary cut is relocated from birth-separation to the embryonic envelopes, grounding a topological account of a as off-cut.

     some major reservations ought to be voiced pertaining to the structuring of the phenomenon of anxiety at the place of birth

174. #174

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.74

     BookX Anxiety > **v** > Schema of the effaced trace

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety arises when the constitutive void that preserves desire is filled in by a false response to demand, and that the drive (distinct from instinct) is structured by the cut between barred subject and demand, with partial objects (breast, scybalum) marking the place of this void rather than stages of relational maturation.

     The existence of anxiety is linked to the fact that any demand, even the most archaic, always has something illusory about it with respect to what preserves the place of desire.

175. #175

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.336

     **xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes his seminar on anxiety by arguing that anxiety is a signal prior to the cession of object *a*, that the scopic level most fully masks *a* and thus most assures the subject against anxiety, and that birth trauma (understood as intrusion of a radically Other environment rather than separation from the mother) and the oral/anal stages of object constitution reveal how desire is fundamentally structured around the yielding of *a* in relation to the demand of the Other — a structure irreducible to Hegelian dialectics.

     I situate this moment as standing prior to the cession of the object, just as the necessity of Freud's articulation forces him to situate something else, something more primal than the danger-situation.

176. #176

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     **x** > **XIII APHORISMS ON LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety functions not as a mediator but as a *median* term between jouissance and desire: the subject of jouissance is mythical and can only appear through the remainder *a*, which resists signifierization and therefore cannot serve as a metaphor for that subject; it is precisely this irreducible waste-remainder that founds the desiring (barred) subject, with anxiety marking the gap between jouissance and desire that must be traversed in the constitution of fantasy.

     jouissance shall know nothing of the Other except by this remainder, a. … Anxiety is thus an intermediary term between jouissance and desire in so far as desire is constituted and founded upon the anxiety phase, once anxiety has been got through.

177. #177

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.107

     BookX Anxiety > *NOT WITHOUT HAVING IT*

     Theoretical move: By demonstrating that the cross-cap, once the Objet petit a is separated off, leaves a Möbius strip with no specular image, Lacan argues that the introduction of object a into the world of objects dissolves the stable specular image (ideal ego) and produces the uncanny double — topologically grounding the relation between a, the imaginary, and the Real.

     when he glimpses something in a room, a phantom that turns its back on him, whereupon he knows it to be something that bears a certain relation to himself, and when the phantom turns round, he sees that it is he.

178. #178

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.291

     **xx** > **XXI PIAGET'S TAP**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a functions not as the object of desire but as its *cause*, and that this causal function — first legible in the structure of obsessional neurosis — is the primordial "shadow" or metaphor from which the philosophical category of cause derives; grasping the a as cause of desire is what orients the analysis of transference beyond the circle of transference neurosis.

     Anxiety resides in the subject's fundamental relationship with what thus far I've been calling the desire of the Other.

179. #179

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.216

     **x** > **xv**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of vessels (the pot of castration as minus-phi, the Klein bottle as the structure of objet a) to argue that anxiety arises not from castration itself but from the way the object a comes to half-fill the hollow of primordial castration via the desire of the Other; circumcision is then read as a ritual embodiment of this topological structure, instituting a normative relation between subject, objet a, and the big Other.

     If then this vessel becomes more anguishing, it's inasmuch as the a comes to half fill the already constituted hollow of originative castration... Anxiety thus comes to be constituted and to take up its place in a relationship that is instituted beyond the emptiness of a first phase, if I may say so, of castration.

180. #180

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.56

     BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration anxiety is not the neurotic's ultimate impasse; rather, what the neurotic shrinks from is making his castration into the positive guarantee of the Other's lack — a dialectical move that reframes castration's function and opens analysis beyond Freud's terminus. This is grounded by linking the Unheimliche structurally to the minus-phi position in the diagram, identifying the Heim as the site in the Other beyond the specular image where the subject's desire encounters itself as object.

     Anxiety, I've told you, is linked to anything that might appear at the place (−φ). What assures us of this is a phenomenon for which the too scant attention that's been paid to it has meant that nobody has arrived at a formulation that would be satisfactory

181. #181

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.363

     **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from Seminar X (Anxiety), listing key concepts, proper names, and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

     signal (anxiety as) 20, 467, 86, 91, 103, 108, 117, 119, 121, 137-8, 152, 160, 324,327

182. #182

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.315

     **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.

     it is the locus of anxiety, anxiety over the organ's caducity, its deciduosity, inasmuch as it accounts, in a different way on each side, for what one might call the insatiability of desire.

183. #183

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots the classical Freudian account of castration anxiety from anxiety-as-signal-of-lack to anxiety-as-presence-of-the-object, demonstrating through the neurotic/pervert contrast and the exhaustion of demand that it is not the absence but the imminence of the object that generates anxiety, and that castration only appears at the far limit of demand's regressive cycle.

     anxiety isn't the signal of a lack, but of something that has to be conceived of at a duplicated level, as the failing of the support that lack provides.

184. #184

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.274

     **x** > **THE EVANESCENT PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus's evanescence—its structural failure to conjoin man's and woman's jouissance—is the very mechanism through which castration anxiety is constituted, and that this failure, rather than any ideal of genital fulfilment, is what organizes the subject's relation to the Other, desire, and the death drive.

     the advantage of this conception is that it accounts for what is involved in the appearance of anxiety in a certain number of ways of reaching orgasm. Anxiety appears - Freud had a first grasp of it in coitus interruptus to the extent that orgasm is uncoupled from the field of what is asked of the Other.

185. #185

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.23

     BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY IN THE NET OF SIGNIFIERS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan constructs a coordinate matrix of inhibition/impediment/embarrassment (difficulty axis) and emotion/turmoil/anxiety (movement axis) to situate anxiety as a specific affect distinct from emotion, symptom, and turmoil—arguing that anxiety is not repressed but drifts, moored only by the signifiers that are repressed, and that psychoanalysis is an 'erotology' (discourse of desire) rather than a psychology of affects.

     What is anxiety? We've ruled out the idea that it might be an emotion. To introduce it, I will say that it's an affect.

186. #186

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     BookX Anxiety > **v** > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety is constituted by the emergence of lack under the pressure of a question (from the Other), and traces the origin of the signifier itself to a primordial act of deception — laying a falsely false trace — which simultaneously constitutes the subject, the Other, and the structure of cause, showing that the signifier reveals the subject only by effacing his trace.

     the field of lack is produced under the effect of a question... This sudden emergence of lack in a positive form is the source of anxiety

187. #187

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.335

     **xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's desire is structurally circular and irreducible — sustained as impossible by circling through oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and vociferous registers without ever closing on itself — and that this topology (figured as a circle on a torus that cannot be contracted to a point) explains the obsessional's relation to symptom, acting-out, passage à l'acte, idealized love, and narcissistic image-maintenance.

     Next time, in reference to these structures, I'll be giving the conclusive formulation to what will allow us to situate, in the ultimate term, the position and the function of anxiety.

188. #188

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.50

     BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*

     Theoretical move: Anxiety arises not from lack itself but from the failure of lack — when the minus-phi (imaginary castration) ceases to be absent, something appears in its place, which is the structure of the Unheimliche; the fantasy formula ($◇a) is reread as the detour through which desire becomes accessible only via a virtual image that systematically conceals the real object a.

     Anxiety emerges when a mechanism makes something appear in the place of what I'm going to call, to make myself understood, a natural place, namely, the place of (-φ)

189. #189

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan triangulates anxiety by situating it within three intersecting themes—the Other's jouissance, the Other's demand, and the analyst's desire as it operates in interpretation—thereby framing the analyst's desire as the privileged and enigmatic terminus of an inquiry into the economy of desire that will orient the subsequent sessions.

     As regards anxiety, consider that what I've told you about it today is merely a preliminary way in. The precise way of locating it, which we shall be entering as of next time, is to be situated amid the three themes

190. #190

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.39

     BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the hiatus between the mirror stage (specular/imaginary) and the signifier (symbolic) is not a temporal discontinuity in his teaching but a structural articulation, where the specular image is always-already dependent on ratification by the big Other; he further stages this through a three-phase cosmology (world → stage → world-laden-by-stage) to distinguish Lévi-Straussian analytic reason from psychoanalytic reason grounded in the primacy of the signifier over any homogeneous materialism.

     anxiety is going to allow us to go back over the articulation that is hereby being required of me

191. #191

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.289

     **xx** > **WHAT COMES IN THROUGH THE EAR**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice, as object a, is not assimilated but incorporated (Einverleibung), functioning not as sonorous resonance in physical space but as what resonates ex nihilo in the void of the Other — thereby linking the voice-object to anxiety, the desire of the Other, and ultimately to sacrifice as the capture of the Other in the web of desire.

     It models the locus of our anxiety, but observe if you will that this only happens after the desire of the Other has taken the form of a command.

192. #192

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.13

     BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY IN THE NET OF SIGNIFIERS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar X by positioning anxiety as the nodal concept that will retroactively knot together the key terms of his previous disquisitions (fantasy, the Graph of Desire, the desire of the Other, the subject's relation to the signifier), insisting anxiety is not locatable at the centre of seriousness/care/expectation but rather escapes that encirclement — and distinguishing the Lacanian approach from existentialist (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre) treatments of anxiety.

     Anxiety is very precisely the meeting point where everything from my previous disquisition is lying in wait for you.

193. #193

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.194

     **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that woman's relation to jouissance is structurally superior to man's because her bond with desire is looser — she is not knotted to the phallic negative (-φ) in the same essential way — and uses mythological (Tiresias), philosophical (Sartre/Hegel), and topological (the pot/void) resources to articulate how the real is not lack but fullness, while the hole/void that structures desire is specifically man's burden.

     which is the fault-line where anxiety is produced.

194. #194

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     **x** > **PUNCTUATIONS ON DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage makes the theoretical move of grounding the problem of the analyst's desire in a precise articulation of desire as law and as will-to-jouissance, then pivots to redefine anxiety—against Freud's ego-signal model—as the specific manifestation of the desire of the Other, thereby linking countertransference, the ethics of psychoanalysis, and anxiety under a single structural logic.

     Since last year, I have been introducing anxiety as the specific manifestation of the desire of the Other.

195. #195

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire and the law are not antithetical but identical — both functioning as a single barrier barring access to das Ding — and that this insight, masked in the Oedipus myth, is Freud's decisive answer to the philosophical question of desire's relation to law, which philosophy has always elided.

     Whether afterwards those who recognize each other by this traditional sign see their relation to anxiety being scaled down, far from it perhaps, is where the question begins.

196. #196

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.49

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the status of the unconscious is ethical rather than ontic, grounding this claim through Freud's choice of the "burning child" dream as a paradigm case — a dream that opens onto desire, the Real, and the structural entanglement of law, sin, and the Name-of-the-Father, linking Hamlet's ghost to the Oedipus myth.

     a dream suspended around the most anguishing mystery, that which links a father to the corpse of his son

197. #197

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what governs the subject's discourse is not ego-resistance but a condensation toward a nucleus belonging to the Real, defined by the identity of perception — and that awakening from the dream is not triggered by external noise but by the anxiety-laden intimacy of the father-son relation, which points toward something beyond (jenseits), in the sense of destiny.

     Is it not that which is expressed in the depths of the anxiety of this dream—namely, the most intimate aspects of the relation between the father and the son

198. #198

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > THE EYE AND THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: The passage introduces mimicry as the key enigma for understanding the scopic drive, arguing against adaptationist explanations and opening onto the deeper question of whether mimicry is a property of the organism itself or of its relation to the environment — thereby staging the split between the eye and the gaze as irreducible to biological function.

     the lack that constitutes castration anxiety

199. #199

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.32

     THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Aragon's poem as a literary illustration of the scopic drive's fundamental structure — the gaze as a void that reflects without seeing — thereby linking the poem to his prior work on anxiety and objet petit a and framing the session's theoretical concerns.

     I dedicate this poem to the nostalgia that some of you may feel for that interrupted seminar in which I developed the theme of anxiety and the function of the objet petit a.

200. #200

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.56

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates a structural reciprocity between the Real and Fantasy — the real supports the fantasy while the fantasy protects the real — and positions anxiety as the non-deceptive but potentially absent signal that must be carefully dosed in analytic practice to bring the subject into contact with the real.

     anxiety is that which does not deceive. But anxiety may be lacking.

201. #201

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > ANAMORPHOSIS > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Sartre's phenomenological account of the gaze by showing that the gaze is not a real seen organ of the other but an imagined presence in the field of the Other, thereby shifting the gaze from an intersubjective encounter to a structure of the Symbolic/Imaginary field.

     disturbs him, overwhelms him and reduces him to a feeling of shame

202. #202

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets the Breuer/Anna O. episode to demonstrate that "man's desire is the desire of the Other," arguing that Freud treated Breuer as a hysteric by locating Bertha's transference in the unconscious of the Other rather than Breuer's own desire—and then pivots this to claim that what truly determines the direction of psychoanalytic theory of transference is the desire of the analyst.

     he certainly makes him feel less anxious—those who know the difference that I am making between these two levels may take this as an instance of it.

203. #203

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.32

     THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XI by reading a poem about the gaze's structural blindness—the eye that reflects but cannot see—as a way of bridging his previous work on anxiety and objet petit a (Seminar X) to his renewed treatment of the scopic drive, using the poem to enact theoretically what he will develop discursively: the gaze as absence rather than presence.

     the interrupted seminar in which I developed the theme of anxiety and the function of the objet petit a.

204. #204

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.56

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes anxiety as the privileged non-deceptive affect that anchors analytic certainty, and articulates the structural co-dependence of the Real and fantasy (the real supports the fantasy, the fantasy protects the real), preparing a Spinozist elaboration of this relation.

     anxiety is a crucial term of reference, because in effect anxiety is that which does not deceive. But anxiety may be lacking.

205. #205

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the nucleus around which discourse condenses belongs to the Real (governed by the identity of perception), and distinguishes this from a simple ego-centred notion of resistance; the encounter with this nucleus is what constitutes awakening—aligning the Real with the beyond that exceeds the dream's wish-fulfilling empire.

     Is it not that which is expressed in the depths of the anxiety of this dream—namely, the most intimate aspects of the relation between the father and the son

206. #206

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > THE EYE AND THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: The passage introduces the scopic drive's structural split between eye and gaze as the operative form of castration anxiety in the visual field, then uses the phenomenon of mimicry — critiquing adaptive explanations — to press the question of what the drive's "something transmitted" ultimately is, opening toward the function of the ocelli as a non-adaptive display.

     the lack that constitutes castration anxiety.

207. #207

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Through the Zhuangzi butterfly dream, Lacan argues that the gaze is not a function of conscious self-identity but of a pre-subjective showing that marks the subject's essence; it is in the dream-state (as butterfly) that the subject touches the root of identity via the gaze, not in waking consciousness, and this structure grounds the gaze as objet petit a within the scopic field.

     the butterfly may—if the subject is not Choangtsu, but the Wolf Man—inspire in him the phobic terror of recognizing that the beating of little wings is not so very far from the beating of causation

208. #208

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > ANAMORPHOSIS > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Sartre's phenomenological account of the gaze by arguing that the gaze is not a seen organ but an imagined presence located in the field of the Other, and that Sartre's own examples (rustling leaves, footsteps) betray that the gaze is not grounded in an intersubjective visual relation but in something more radically Other.

     A gaze surprises him in the function of voyeur, disturbs him, overwhelms him and reduces him to a feeling of shame.

209. #209

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots the standard account of transference away from the analysand's unconscious spontaneity and toward the desire of the analyst, arguing that every analyst's theory of transference is itself a readable symptom of the analyst's own desire — a move that simultaneously re-reads the Breuer/Anna O. episode through the formula "man's desire is the desire of the Other."

     he certainly makes him feel less anxious—those who know the difference that I am making between these two levels may take this as an instance of it.

210. #210

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.197

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: In perversion, and specifically voyeurism, the scopic drive's circuit completes itself not by seeing the phallus but by encountering its absence; the gaze functions as the lost object that is refound through shame when the Other intervenes, making the object-cause of desire constitutively the absence of the phallus rather than its presence.

     the gaze is this object lost and suddenly refound in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the other.

211. #211

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the problem of identification by critiquing the topological naïveté of Euler circles and replacing them with a more rigorous topology (Klein bottle, Möbius surface, torus) in which the subject's structure is homologous to the mathematical derivation of number from zero — the signifier represents the subject for another signifier just as the zero grounds the series of whole numbers, making identification inseparable from the subject's constitutive lack.

     his anxiety and his abysses and all this horror that he was surrounded by... the horror pushed to the extremes of panic, to a fit, a black fit, to the convulsions of Pascal

212. #212

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.315

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the clinical structures of neurosis (hysteria and obsession) through the differential relation each takes to the demand of the Other, showing how the o-object (objet petit a) anchors subjective positions differently in each structure, and concludes that the end of analysis is the signifier of the barred Other — the Other's acknowledgment that it is nothing.

     If the phantasy wakens us, and in anxiety, it is so that reality will not appear

213. #213

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire is theorized not as a counterforce to the patient's defensiveness but as a ruse that inhabits the patient's own defensive structure—occupying the pole of sexual reality's impossibility—so that what constitutes the analysand's original fantasy can be separated out and the objet petit a revealed as the substitute for the missing sexual relationship; this operation is articulated through the Möbius strip topology of the unexpected.

     confronting anxiety, as Freud himself in the fundamental texts on this theme formulated it, around this field of expectation we ought to describe the status of what is involved in the desire of the analyst

214. #214

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses clinical case presentations (the "Poord'jeli" formula, the story of Norbert, and Philip's dream) to demonstrate how a signifying formula plugs a gap in the signifying chain, how the Name-of-the-Father's failure to operate as a separating metaphor leaves the subject arrested in a repetitive displacement, and how analysis functions as a reincarnation of the signifier that puts the chain back in motion.

     anxiety is experienced in the body and that this is the problem and that what constitutes analysis is nothing other precisely than to put the signifying chain in motion

215. #215

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a theoretical dispute within Lacan's seminar over the structural role of the incest barrier, the Name-of-the-Father, and castration in grounding desire, with Safouan arguing that psychoanalysis leads not toward transgression but toward recognition of the limit as such, while Leclaire contests the appeal to Lacanian orthodoxy as a guarantor of correct interpretation.

     this person, that this patient organises her whole position by betting on the certainty that there is no man who can encounter a woman without feeling some anxiety about it.

216. #216

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.40

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis has mapped out its clinical procedures without genuinely theorising them — transference, identification, the symptom as knot — and that Freud's founding discovery (the Signorelli forgetting) demonstrates that the unconscious operates at the level of signifying material (phonemes), not repressed content, grounding the claim that the subject is primordially determined by language/discourse rather than by any substantial soul or intentional consciousness.

     Theodore Reik... entitled one of his books: Der überraschte Psychologue, the surprised psychologist... in the heroic period of psychoanalytic technique... one had even more reasons than now to be astonished

217. #217

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.296

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan organizes his year's work around the triad Sinn/Zwang/Wahrheit, arguing that the Freudian discovery of compulsion (Zwang as Entzweiung/Spaltung of the subject) and Plato's identification of the Good with Number together illuminate the distinctive status of Truth in psychoanalytic experience—a truth that is irreducibly personal and constituted through means that exceed ordinary medical reference.

     he will be no less refused the opportunity of displacing his anxiety onto the new burden of a psychological norm.

218. #218

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     **Presentation by Monsieur Oury**

     Theoretical move: Oury argues that the phonematic gestalt "Poord'jeli" is not a fantasy but rather a pre-subjective phonological structure marking the emergence of the speaking subject, located at the articulation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, while Leclaire's response opens the question of whether fantasy must be organized around the scopic drive or whether it may equally be constituted by the voice as objet petit a.

     the search for a guarantee which ought to be a beyond of anxiety towards the mythical locus of the jouissance of the Other

219. #219

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.179

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

     Theoretical move: This seminar discussion, centered on Leclaire's case presentation, works through the theoretical status of the fundamental fantasy (Urphantasie) and its relation to signifier, myth, and body, while also elaborating the distinction between first name and family name as indexing the tension between the Imaginary and Symbolic registers of identification, and closing with a reading that connects transference, the Name-of-the-Father, obsessional structure, and anxiety.

     I would like to touch on what was called here earlier the body, namely the anxiety of the patient... everything that can be described as a horn (corne) is hidden and is gathered together in a way in this fabulous animal, it is because on the side of Lili finally something equivalent to the relationship to the mother, but a displaced equivalent, that is to say one that is much less anxiety-provoking.

220. #220

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.315

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structure of neurosis by showing how desire is constituted with respect to the demand of the Other, distinguishing hysteria (desire maintained as unsatisfied, castration instrumentalised) from obsessional neurosis (desire rendered impossible, phallus safeguarded via oblativity), while warning that interpreting the o-object under its faecal species as the truth of the obsessional is a clinical trap that merely satisfies the neurotic's demand — and concluding that the end of analysis is the signifier of a barred Other whose knowledge is nothing.

     If the phantasy wakens us, and in anxiety, it is so that reality will not appear.

221. #221

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.318

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Through Michèle Montrelay's close reading of Marguerite Duras's *The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein*, the seminar demonstrates that literary narrative can independently arrive at the same structural truths Lacan has been elaborating—particularly regarding the alienating dialectic of desire, the subject as remainder/waste produced by the other's desire, and the Objet petit a as a "hole-word" or body-remainder constituted by what is fundamentally missing in the signifier's relation to sex.

     the present of presence takes an absolute value... Lol's forgetting, its negation, are going to constitute her delight at being finally in the presence of the couple... I can invert in that way a formula that Heidegger gives for anxiety, in order to illustrate the opposite, namely, satisfaction

222. #222

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Euler's circles, while pedagogically seductive, conceal the essential topological complexity of identification; by drawing on mathematical logic's discovery that zero (lack) grounds the whole number series, he establishes a structural homology between the genesis of number and the movement of the subject from signifier to signifier, grounding identification in topology (the Klein bottle / Möbius surface) rather than in classical set-theoretic extension/comprehension.

     his anxiety and his abysses and all this horror that he was surrounded by... The horror pushed to the extremes of panic, to a fit, a black fit, to the convulsions of Pascal

223. #223

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a clinical-theoretical dispute about the relationship between the incest barrier, the Name of the Father, castration, and desire: Safouan argues against conflating the conscious/unconscious barrier with the incest barrier, insisting that the Name of the Father (not transgression) is what orients the subject toward the unconscious and grounds desire through castration, while Leclaire counters that orthodoxy itself is the danger in such argumentation.

     this person, that this patient organises her whole position by betting on the certainty that there is no man who can encounter a woman without feeling some anxiety about it

224. #224

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.179

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a multi-voice clinical-theoretical discussion of Leclaire's case presentation, turning on the distinction between fantasy and signifier, the differential status of first name versus family name for subjectivity/singularity, the question of the empty unconscious, the body's encounter with the signifier, and the role of transference and the Name-of-the-Father in an obsessional patient's structure.

     I would like to touch on what was called here earlier the body, namely the anxiety of the patient.

225. #225

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances, through clinical presentations and commentary, that the signifying chain—animated by the proper name, desire's arrow, the Name-of-the-Father, and displacement—constitutes the very medium in which anxiety is covered over, condensed, and potentially traversed; the failure of the paternal metaphor to operate leaves the subject in a marsh of endless metonymic substitution, with the death drive "gaping" beneath.

     anxiety is experienced in the body and that this is the problem and that what constitutes analysis is nothing other precisely than to put the signifying chain in motion

226. #226

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire operates not as the imposition of knowledge onto the analysand but as a structural ruse that separates the analysand's defensiveness—directed not against the analyst but against the reality of sexual difference—into an ever-purer form of fantasy, with the objet petit a standing in for the impossible real of the sexual relation; the unexpected (figured topologically via the Möbius strip) is proposed as the operative mode of analytic desire against the field of anxious expectation.

     confronting anxiety, as Freud himself in the fundamental texts on this theme formulated it, around this field of expectation we ought to describe the status of what is involved in the desire of the analyst.

227. #227

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.296

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his year-long triadic schema (Sinn/Zwang/Wahrheit) to argue that the Freudian discovery of Spaltung/Entzweiung gives a new philosophical status to truth, and that psychoanalysis is constitutively the practice of truth-as-means, distinguishing it from all other sciences and grounding its therapeutic effects in a reduplicated sense of truth proper to the subject.

     he will be no less refused the opportunity of displacing his anxiety onto the new burden of a psychological norm

228. #228

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.257

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic dialectic cannot be confined to demand and the maternal Other (as in object-relations approaches), but must pass through desire and ultimately jouissance; castration is reinterpreted not merely as the Oedipal prohibition but as the barrier of desire that bars the subject from jouissance — and the Hegelian master/slave dialectic is criticised for falsely attributing jouissance to the master, revealing it as a mirage.

     what we have called formerly, in our discourse on Anxiety: embarrassed! Of course, all of this has remained a little bit in the air, it is certainly by far the best seminar that I gave.

229. #229

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.46

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critically engages with Conrad Stein's theory of narcissistic regression in the analytic situation, using it as a foil to sharpen the distinction between imaginary dual relations and the properly Lacanian categories of the big Other, the small other, and objet petit a — arguing that the analytic situation cannot be reduced to fusional narcissism but involves an articulated structure of desire and the object.

     a defence against narcissistic regression in so far as it may favour the reappearance of unconscious conflicts and of anxiety

230. #230

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions the analytic experience as requiring the analyst to occupy a Pyrrhonian/sceptical stance toward truth, introduces the Subject Supposed to Know as the patient's trap for the analyst's epistemological drive, and pivots toward Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject's relationship to infinity, the real, and the impossibility of enjoying truth.

     you will make me into a masochist, namely, a lover of your anxiety that you take to be a jouissance.

231. #231

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.268

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object (objet petit a) must be understood not merely at the level of demand (breast, faeces) but through desire and jouissance, where castration is the barrier that projects jouissance onto the murdered father as an Oedipal mirage — a move that corrects what Lacan identifies as the Hegelian error of attributing jouissance to the master rather than understanding its structural unavailability to any subject.

     what we have called formerly, in our discourse on Anxiety: embarrassed! Of course, all of this has remained a little bit in the air, it is certainly by far the best seminar that I gave

232. #232

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject must be grasped topologically—not as a mere metaphorical "hole in the real" but as constituted through the cut on a surface, whereby the fall of the objet petit a is structurally inseparable from the division of the subject; two-dimensional topology (rather than three-dimensional intuition) is proposed as the privileged formal apparatus for capturing the impossible structure of the subject.

     No void, no fall of the o-object that a primordial anxiety is able to account for... I will easily extract from it Pascal's whole theory of anxiety.

233. #233

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.69

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses topological figures—the torus, the cross-cap, and the Möbius strip—to argue that the subject is constitutively divided (not primordially unified), and that the Objet petit a as "truth-value" is the irreducible object that makes possible the world of objects and the subject's relation to it; the disc produced by cutting the cross-cap stands in a position of necessary crossing with the Möbius strip, which in turn figures the divided subject.

     underline this not without (pas sans) which is the same as the one that I made use of for the genesis of anxiety

234. #234

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.286

     Monsieur Safouan

     Theoretical move: Safouan's case presentation of an obsessional's 'duplication of the feminine object' is used to argue that the split between a narcissistic/desired beloved and an anaclitic/demanding 'perverse' partner is structurally grounded in the imaginary phallus (-phi): the beloved is not identified to the phallus but to minus-phi, the guarantee of the Other's castration, while the subject himself is subtilised into (-phi), such that symbolic castration (as the regularisation of the phallic position) must be distinguished from imaginary castration via yet-unformulated distinctions around negation.

     all his anxiety was effectively engaged in his relations with his beloved, namely, the one who was a pole of desire... while this anxiety was completely absent in his relationship with the perverse girl, whom one can thus call, designate, as a pole of demand

235. #235

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     III - THE RELATION o TO i(o) AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION AND SPECULARISATION.

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that affect, like the representative of the drive, must be re-categorised as a form of signifier — demonstrated by Freud's progressive specification of Verleugnung alongside Verdrängung — and that this re-categorisation reveals a reduplicated non-identity (Entzweiung) at the heart of the signifier itself, which the Lacanian formula of the signifier representing a subject for another signifier must be extended to accommodate.

     the affect is only seen as a discharge, even though it is - Freud says it for anxiety - a signal (a signifier for us)

236. #236

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.69

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses topological figures—the torus, cross-cap, and Möbius strip—to demonstrate that the structure of the subject is necessarily split/divided, that the relation between demand and desire has a formal topology (at least two demands per desire and vice versa), and that the objet petit a functions as the 'truth-value' grounding the entire world of objects, thereby replacing any notion of primordial autoerotic unity with an irreducible openness at the heart of the subject.

     underline this not without (pas sans) which is the same as the one that I made use of for the genesis of anxiety.

237. #237

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.20

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that topology—specifically two-dimensional surface theory—provides the structural model for the subject's constitution through the fall of the objet petit a, where the cut on a surface (not a metaphorical void in the real) is what determines the division of the subject; Bejahung/Verneinung, the phallus as attribute, and Stoic *ptosis* are marshalled to show that the subject is the effect of a structural cut, not merely a hole in the real.

     No void, no fall of the o-object that a primordial anxiety is able to account for… I will easily extract from it Pascal's whole theory of anxiety.

238. #238

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object of demand (breast, faeces) must be distinguished from the objects of desire (gaze, voice) and jouissance (linked to castration), and that castration is not reducible to the Oedipus myth's prohibition but marks the bar between the subject and jouissance — a bar that IS desire itself; further, the Hegelian master/slave dialectic fundamentally misreads jouissance by assuming that renunciation entails its loss.

     what we have called formerly, in our discourse on Anxiety: embarrassed! Of course, all of this has remained a little bit in the air, it is certainly by far the best seminar that I gave

239. #239

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.46

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critically engages Stein's account of narcissistic regression in the analytic situation, using it as a foil to distinguish the imaginary dual relation from the big Other and to locate the o-object (objet petit a) within the structure of desire rather than as a supplement to fusional narcissism—thereby insisting that the analytic situation has an articulated symbolic structure, not merely a fusional lack of distinction.

     a defence against narcissistic regression in so far as it may favour the reappearance of unconscious conflicts and of anxiety

240. #240

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the analytic situation — where every demand is necessarily disappointed — to critique masochism as a hasty diagnostic label, introduces the analyst as Subject Supposed to Know whose epistemological drive toward truth is itself caught in the law of disappointed demand, and pivots to Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject who must wager on truth while initially renouncing access to it in a Pyrrhonian suspension.

     you will make me into a masochist, namely, a lover of your anxiety that you take to be a jouissance

241. #241

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     Madame le Docteur Parisot

     Theoretical move: Reading Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso through a Lacanian lens, Lacan argues that shame, reflection, and the gaze stage the fundamental impotence of reason to recover truth by itself—and that the structure of Paradise (mirror as pure transparency, Beatrice as the mark of God) reframes Narcissus's error not as individual pathology but as the structural position of the subject before the gaze of the Other, culminating in the provocative reversal: it is not Dante's narcissism but God's narcissism that is at stake.

     A lesser shame would erase a greater fault... Therefore let fall any unhappiness... It is sadness that is involved.

242. #242

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the object of demand (the o-object as bodily appurtenance recovered from the field of the Other) must be distinguished from the object of jouissance, and that castration is properly understood not through the Oedipus myth of incest prohibition alone, but as the barrier that bars the subject from jouissance—a barrier that is desire itself—thereby exposing the Hegelian error of attributing jouissance to the master in the Master/Slave dialectic.

     what we have called formerly, in our discourse on Anxiety: embarrassed! Of course, all of this has remained a little bit in the air, it is certainly by far the best seminar that I gave

243. #243

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     III - THE RELATION o TO i(o) AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION AND SPECULARISATION.

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that affect must be granted the status of a signifier — on a par with the drive-representative (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) — by tracing Freud's progressive distinction between Verleugnung (denial, bearing on perception) and Verdrängung (repression, bearing on affect), and then proposes that the signifier itself be redefined to include both registers, thereby grounding a reduplicated Entzweiung (splitting) at the heart of the subject.

     the affect is only seen as a discharge, even though it is - Freud says it for anxiety - a signal (a signifier for us)

244. #244

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.285

     Monsieur Safouan

     Theoretical move: Safouan uses the case of the obsessional's duplicated love-object to argue that the splitting between the narcissistic (desired) and anaclitic (demanded) object is structured by the function of (-phi): the more the virtual body-image i(o") tends to coincide with the imaginary phallus, the more the subject is "subtilised" into (-phi), so that the beloved's identification with the phallus is not an act the subject performs but an operation in which he is already caught — resolving into the question of how symbolic castration (via Oedipal negation) regularises the phallic position.

     all his anxiety was effectively engaged in his relations with his beloved... will he be able, will he not be able, while this anxiety was completely absent in his relationship with the perverse girl

245. #245

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.97

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation from both Marxist and idealist versions, and uses this to argue that the objet petit a — exemplified by the breast as an unrepresentable object — is what supplies for the lack in Selbstbewusstsein, with the analyst necessarily occupying the position of this object, which grounds a legitimate anxiety in the analyst.

     it is all the more grounded, in that with this object, the one who is called by the signifying operation that is analysis, find himself, at that very place, stimulated to interest himself at the very least.

246. #246

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.116

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight/Möbius strip) provides the structural model for both repetition and alienation, showing how the "additional One" (Un-en-plus) generated by the retroactive return of repetition fractures the Other and the subject alike, and that the act emerges precisely at the point where the passage à l'acte of alienation and repetition intersect on these non-orientable surfaces.

     Many other terms are also to be evoked as having to find their place in the Other: the anxiety of the Other - the true root of the position of the subject as a masochist position.

247. #247

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.97

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation sharply from both Marxist and idealist-philosophical senses, then develops the Objet petit a as the structural support of the subject's "I am not" — the analyst occupies the position of objet a in the analytic operation, while the breast-as-object exemplifies the fundamentally non-representable, jouissance-laden character of the partial object that supplies for the lack of Selbstbewusstsein.

     the analyst has to occupy this position of the small o, that in effect, for him, the formula… gives rise to an appropriate anxiety, if one remembers what I formulated about anxiety: that it is not without an object.

248. #248

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.116

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight) is the structural ground of both repetition and alienation, and uses this topology to argue that the Other is inherently "fractured" (barred), that the subject's division is ineradicable from truth, and that the Act emerges as the logical consequence of alienation's passage through the topology of repetition.

     the anxiety of the Other - the true root of the position of the subject as a masochist position.

249. #249

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.200

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's annex summary argues that the psychoanalytic act is the pivotal moment of passage from analysand to analyst, structurally constituted by the objet petit a, and that this act—which dismisses the very subject it establishes—grounds an ethics of jouissance, exposes the fault in the subject supposed to know, and requires that there is no Other of the Other (no metalanguage) as the condition for a consistent theory of the unconscious.

     An 'I do not think' which is the law, de facto makes the psychoanalyst depend on the anxiety of knowing where to give it its place to still think about psychoanalysis without being doomed to miss it.

250. #250

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the events of May 1968 and the institutional crisis of his École as the occasion to argue that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively determined by jouissance while simultaneously requiring protection from it, and to formulate the key lemma that "there is no transference of transference" — a claim whose misreading by contemporaries demonstrates both the necessity of his strategic unreadability and the gap between the act and its subsequent theoretical appropriation.

     here is where there is conceived a change in the very moorings of anxiety and it must be said that having laid down that it is not without an object

251. #251

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the psychoanalytic act has a two-stage language-effect structure culminating in the analyst's self-institution as the rejected object (objet petit a), and that the leap from analysand to analyst (la passe) is systematically concealed by the institutional organisation of psychoanalysis, which preserves an unquestioned Subject Supposed to Know in place of genuine interrogation.

     according to the formula to which I accustomed the few people who were listening to me when I was giving my seminar on Anxiety, that he is not without this object

252. #252

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is theorised as a double language-effect in which the analysand's completion of analysis and the analyst's self-institution as psychoanalyst (the "pass") are structurally inseparable; the act's strangest consequence is that the subject who takes the analyst's position recognises himself as caused—in his division—by the rejected object (objet a), and the uninterrogated leap of this consecration is systematically concealed by analytic institutions that preserve an unquestioned Subject Supposed to Know.

     not without *(pas sans),* according to the formula to which I accustomed the few people who were listening to me when I was giving my seminar on *Anxiety,*

253. #253

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.200

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar summary argues that the psychoanalytic act—the transition from analysand to analyst—is constituted by and through the objet petit a, such that it enacts a 'subjective dismissal' (destitution of the subject supposed to know) and grounds a new ethics of psychoanalysis organized around the structural negativity of the sexual relation and jouissance rather than norms or sublimation.

     An 'I do not think' which is the law, de facto makes the psychoanalyst depend on the anxiety of knowing where to give it its place to still think about psychoanalysis without being doomed to miss it.

254. #254

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends the strategic obscurity of his texts as a protection against ideological capture, while articulating that the psychoanalytic act is determined by its relation to jouissance (from which it must simultaneously protect itself), and advancing the lemma that "there is no transference of transference" as a key formula distinguishing the psychoanalytic act from ordinary clinical transference.

     here is where there is conceived a change in the very moorings of anxiety and it must be said that having laid down that it is not without an object

255. #255

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.231

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes his seminar as a form of productive work whose meaning escapes most observers, using the university crisis of May '68 and the rise of capitalism/science as the context to argue that genuine subversion lies not in political agitation but in the function of knowledge at its most subversive mode — a function that power (whether capitalist or revolutionary) cannot master.

     the use of this word is considered to be repugnant - this is my own idea - a way of crudely stirring up castration anxiety, especially when one is talking to the young

256. #256

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.330

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 14 May 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as the "missing signifier" because sexual enjoyment (jouissance) is radically foreclosed from symbolization and can only reappear in the real; the castration complex, illustrated through the case of Little Hans, marks the precise joint between the imaginary and symbolic where this structural lack is registered, with the phobia functioning as a symptomatic "paper tiger" that mediates the subject's intolerable anxiety before the phallic mother.

     something that cannot be resolved at the level of the subject, at the level of intolerable anxiety, the subject has no other resource than to foment for himself the fear of a paper tiger.

257. #257

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.296

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that lack—as the precondition of anxiety's "not without an object"—only arises within a symbolic order capable of counting, and uses this logic to theorize the objet petit a as the effect of symbolic counting on the imaginary field, while simultaneously framing the modern disjunction between knowledge and power as the broader historical context in which this structural analysis gains its urgency.

     Anxiety, as I once said, is not without an object. This means that this something called objective, starting from a certain conception of the subject, that there is something analogous corresponding to anxiety

258. #258

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.347

     Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that neurosis (hysteria and obsession) stages the fundamental aporia between knowledge and enjoyment, and that the neurotic's testimony—not therapeutic benefit—is what gives psychoanalysis its historical and theoretical stakes, particularly within capitalism's structuring of enjoyment.

     It is at this point that I will leave you today... this indeed is what is anxiety-provoking in Pascal's wager

259. #259

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.310

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the anaclitic relation is structurally grounded in the operation of objet petit a as a masking of the Other, that perversion consists in returning o to the big Other, and that phobia reveals the true function of anxiety-objects: the substitution of a frightening signifier for the object of anxiety, marking the passage from the imaginary (narcissism) to the Symbolic field.

     the field of anxiety, the one by which I inaugurated my discourse today, namely, that it is not without an object, on condition that one sees that this object is what is involved for the subject in the field of narcissism

260. #260

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     **ANALYTICON** > Seminar **2:** Wednesday **10 December 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses an autobiographical account of institutional resistance to his seminars to make a theoretical point: the speaker of a discourse is always an *effect* of that discourse rather than its originating subject, such that "this discourse situates me" and "this discourse situates itself" amount to the same thing.

     what I am calling what my listeners are immersed in, was at that time constituted by a little enquiry... They were subjected to an anxious questioning by the old master

261. #261

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     (6) X: *As regards anxiety, I thought it was the opposite of enjoyment.*

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines anxiety not as objectless but as having surplus-jouissance (objet petit a) as its specific object, then leverages the Four Discourses schema to diagnose the university crisis: in the Discourse of the University, the student occupies the place of objet a and is charged with producing a divided subject ($), making the current student revolts structurally legible rather than contingent.

     anxiety is not without an object. I already articulated this eight years ago... At that time I did not designate this object as surplus enjoying

262. #262

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.210

     Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970 > Seminar 12: Wednesday 13 May 1970

     Theoretical move: In this informal Q&A transcription, Lacan defends the centrality of affect in his work by distinguishing his translation of Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz from the 'ideational representative' reading, argues that repression displaces rather than suppresses affect, and retrospectively links the Discourse of the Master to his 1962 Seminar on Anxiety while positioning Kierkegaard as a historical moment in the conceptualization of anxiety within an economy of jouissance.

     My entire seminar that year was on the contrary articulated around the fact that anxiety, is the central affect, the one around which everything is organised.

263. #263

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.214

     X: *[Inaudible]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes analytic discourse from philosophical discourse by grounding it exclusively in psychoanalytic experience, and argues that the structural feature of analytic discourse — its perpetual displacement from meaning — is the very condition that makes it the obverse complement to scientific discourse, which systematically excludes anxiety.

     the discourse of science leaves no place for anxiety. I had intended insisting on this for you this morning.

264. #264

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.172

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure is the effect of language already operative in reality—not a representational function of any subject—and uses this to demarcate psychoanalysis from linguistics and ethnology: neither can master the unconscious because psychoanalysis operates within a particular tongue where there is no metalanguage, the signifier represents a subject (not another signifier), and sexual non-relation is the irreducible structural remainder that myth and linguistics cannot formulate.

     the rise to the social zenith of the object described by me as o will be enough, through the anxiety effect that is obviously provoked

265. #265

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.235

     X: *[On revolutionaries and the proletariat]* > Seminar 13: Wednesday 20 May 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the neologism *lathouse* (from the Greek root of *aletheia*, its aorist form gesturing toward concealment rather than disclosure) to name the objects of consumer-technological civilization that cause desire — distinguishing these from the *alethosphere* — and then pivots to define the analyst's position as a *lathouse*: the one who must inhabit the impossible (not merely the impotent) relation to truth, where the Real is precisely what is impossible in any formalised field.

     anxiety - since this is what is at stake - is not without an object. That is where I started from.

266. #266

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.74

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Wittgenstein's *Tractatus* to push the question of truth and meta-language to its limit: because any assertion is already self-announcing as true, adding a truth-predicate is superfluous, yet this very superfluity reveals that there is no meta-language — only the desire of the Other, from which all 'blackguardism' (wanting to be the big Other for someone) is deduced.

     Anxiety is not without an object. We are not without a relation to the truth.

267. #267

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the sexual non-relation and the logic of sexuation in the mathematical real, arguing that the One (Y a d'l'un) does not found a binary complementarity between man and woman because the not-all prevents any consistent application of the principle of contradiction to gender; simultaneously, he insists that the analyst must hold the position of the little o-object as semblance, and that the mathematical real—which resists both truth and meaning—is the proper anchor for analytic discourse.

     There are some psychoanalysts with things that torment them, that cause them anxiety from time to time...it is not a bad sign that this gave them some because that means that my discourse is not completely superfluous

268. #268

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     XII > The dream., of Irma's injection

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Irma dream to demonstrate that the dream's manifest content—read as a text, not as psychological expression—operates across imaginary and symbolic registers simultaneously, and that desire in the dream oscillates between preconscious and unconscious levels, with the horrifying vision of flesh/formlessness marking the point where anxiety erupts as the Real beneath the imaginary scene.

     the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as its form in itself is something which provokes anxiety. Spectre of anxiety, identification of anxiety, the final revelation of you are this

269. #269

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > Odd or even? Beyond intersubjectivity

     Theoretical move: Lacan locates an "ultimate quod" — a confrontation of the subject with the real beyond both imaginary and symbolic mediation — in privileged dream experiences (Irma, Wolfman), then uses Poe's "even and odd" game to introduce the cybernetic/intersubjective problem of identification with the Other's reasoning, staging the question of what kind of subject operates beyond the ego.

     the gaze of these wolves, so anxiety-provoking in the account of it given by the dreamer

270. #270

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     XII > The dream of Irma's injection ( conclusion)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order—specifically the act of naming—is what rescues human perception from the endless imaginary oscillation between ego-unity and object-dissolution, and that the dream of Irma's injection enacts this very joint between the imaginary and the symbolic by revealing the acephalic subject at the limit of anxiety, at which point discourse (the trimethylamine formula) emerges as pure word, independent of meaning.

     the point of anxiety where the subject encounters the experience of his being torn apart, of his isolation in relation to the world has been attained.

271. #271

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     XII > The dream., of Irma's injection

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Freud's dream of Irma's injection, Lacan argues that the unconscious is neither the ego of the dreamer nor any of his imaginary identifications, but a decentred symbolic structure ('Nemo') that only comes into being through the 'inmixing of subjects' in speech — the formula for trimethylamine functioning as oracle: the answer to the dream is that there is no word of the dream other than the nature of the symbolic itself.

     It is a Freud who has come through this moment of great anxiety when his ego was identified with the whole in its most unconstituted form.

272. #272

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     XII > The dream of Irma's injection ( conclusion)

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dream of Irma's injection is not merely an analysable object but Freud's own speech enacting his discovery, and uses this to stage the distinction between imaginary, real, and symbolic registers—culminating in a critique of ego-regression in favour of a 'spectral decomposition' of the ego as a series of imaginary identifications.

     He lives in an atmosphere of anxiety with the feeling that he's making a dangerous discovery.

273. #273

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     XII

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues, through close reading of Freud's chapter VII of the Interpretation of Dreams, that the Freudian subject is irreducibly decentred—the human object is constituted only through a primordial loss, and what motivates psychic life is always in an 'elsewhere' of which we are not conscious—thereby establishing that language/the symbolic, not associationism or consciousness, is the proper framework for grasping the subject's structure.

     their fulfilment will give him no pleasure, but just the opposite; and experience shows that this opposite appears in the form of anxiety, a fact which has still to be explained.

274. #274

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.136

     THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > Censorship is not resistance

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that censorship and resistance are categorically distinct: resistance is an ego-level obstacle to analytic work, while censorship is constitutive of discourse itself—it belongs to the interrupted, insistent character of the unconscious message as structured by a law that is never fully understood. The dream's forgotten or distorted elements are not noise but part of the message, making the dream an instance of interrupted-but-insistent discourse rather than a psychological phenomenon.

     it is said of him that he only discusses wishful dreams [reves de desir]. and yet there are also anxiety-dreams, self-punishment dreams.

275. #275

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.20

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 1: Tuesday 10 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan assigns the Borromean knot to the Imaginary register (grounded in three-dimensional space), then uses it as a topological framework to redistribute Freud's triad of Inhibition/Symptom/Anxiety across the three registers: Inhibition as arrest in the Symbolic, Anxiety as arising from the Real, and the Symptom as the effect of the Symbolic in the Real—with Jouissance locatable at the intersections of the knot.

     anxiety, in so far as it is something that starts from the Real… it is this anxiety that is going to give its meaning to the nature of the enjoyment that is produced here, under o

276. #276

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.43

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 3: Tuesday 14 January 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Borromean knot topology as the minimal structure of existence (ek-sistence), arguing that Freud's Oedipus complex functions as a fourth term (psychical reality) needed to knot the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real because Freud lacked the three-ring Borromean solution; analysis itself operates by making the Real surmount the Symbolic at two crossing points, rendering the fourth term (Oedipus complex / Name-of-the-Father) superfluous.

     the famous guilt feeling…is something that does accounts, that does accounts and of course cannot work them out, can never work them out. It gets lost in its accounts.

277. #277

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.184

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 11: Tuesday 13 May 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses projective geometry (points at infinity, Desargues) and the topology of the Borromean knot to argue that the unknotted status of two terms is precisely the condition for their being knotted by a third, and then extends this to a fourth term—nomination—distributed across the three registers (Imaginary, Real, Symbolic), with each mode of nomination corresponding to inhibition, anxiety, or symptom respectively, and ultimately to the Name of the Father.

     nomination from the Real as what is found to happen in fact, namely, anxiety

278. #278

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     **Introduction** > *Anxiety*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety, symptom, and inhibition are as heterogeneous to each other as Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary are to each other; using Little Hans as a case study, he demonstrates that anxiety is the bodily ek-sistence of jouissance, and that the phallus is an irreducible burden upon the male speaking being (parlêtre), not a natural genital drive but a symbolic imposition.

     anxiety is that, it is what is obvious, it is what within the body ek-sists, ek-sists when there is something that awakens it, which torments it.

279. #279

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 2: Tuesday 17 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot structures the three registers (R.S.I.) such that phallic enjoyment, ek-sistence, and the hole are each topologically grounded: phallic enjoyment is produced through the knotting of the Symbolic ring; the Real is made by jouissance that ek-sists; and the sexual non-relationship is inscribed in language rather than filled by it, with anxiety marking the limit of enjoyment of the other body.

     if we seek what this enjoyment of the other body can be bordered by, in so far as it surely makes a hole, what we find is anxiety.

280. #280

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes sense (double-sens, meaning-effect rooted in the duplicity of the signifier) from meaning (a purely empty knotting of word to word), and uses torus topology to articulate the relations between Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary—arguing that anxiety is the symbolically real, the symptom is the only real thing that preserves sense, and that there is no sexual relationship except incestuous, with castration as the only truth.

     the symbolically real – I mean that which of the Real is connoted inside the Symbolic – this is what is called anxiety.

281. #281

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.318

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychosis is structurally precipitated when a primordial signifier—the Name-of-the-Father—is foreclosed (verworfen) and thus cannot be received from the field of the Other, reducing the subject to a purely imaginary, dual relation of mutual destruction; this is contrasted with the authentic symbolic invocation that addresses "all the signifiers" constituting the subject, including symptoms.

     soul murder, as he calls it. This phenomenon, which for him is the signal of the onset of psychosis

282. #282

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.154

     **X** > **On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle**

     Theoretical move: By tracking the gradations between the bellowing-miracle (pure signifier without meaning) and the call for help (meaning without genuine subjecthood), Lacan argues that in psychosis the unconscious signifier is situated as externally real rather than internally repressed — pointing toward the structural difference between Verwerfung (Foreclosure) and Verdrängung (Repression) as two distinct modes of subjective localization of the signifier.

     anxiety-making phenomena recur when some of these animated entities that he is living in the midst of are, on God's withdrawal, left trailing and call out for help.

283. #283

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.392

     XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

     Theoretical move: The phobic object (the horse in little Hans's case) functions as a metaphorical substitute signifier for the missing paternal function, transforming free-floating anxiety into a localized, manageable fear that anchors the subject's symbolic order; Lacan traces the dialectical transformation of the phobia through a series of algebraic formulas, showing how the analysis works by allowing the signifier to evolve through its own structural laws rather than by direct suasive intervention.

     It has to transform this anxiety into a localised fear, into something that presents a point of arrest, a terminal point, or else a pivot, a stilt in the shallows that fastens what is bobbing around.

284. #284

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.189

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that perversion in general, and fetishism in particular, is structurally grounded in the child's pre-Oedipal attempt to trick the unfulfillable desire of the mother by turning himself into a deceptive object—thereby constituting the intersubjective relation and the ego's stability—while also marking the danger of regression to an oral-devouring figure (Medusa) that underlies both phobia and perversion.

     To be devoured is a grave danger that our fantasies reveal to us. We find it at the origin, and we find it again at this turn in the path where it yields us the essential form in which phobia presents.

285. #285

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.272

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED

     Theoretical move: By reading Little Hans's case through Lévi-Strauss's structural method for myth analysis, Lacan argues that the signifying elements of Hans's fantasies cannot be fixed to univocal meanings but function as transforming bundles whose traversal moves from the eruption of the real penis to its symbolic accommodation, with the imaginary father (occupied by Freud himself) remaining distinct from both the real and symbolic father—and this structural incompleteness explains both the cure and its limits.

     It renders unnecessary the conjunction between the imaginary and anxiety that is known as phobia.

286. #286

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.210

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > ON THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Jones's concept of aphanisis as an inadequate psychologisation of the castration complex, and reconstructs castration by strictly differentiating privation (a real hole covered by symbolic notation), frustration, and castration (an operation on an imaginary object), grounding each in its proper register (real/symbolic/imaginary) and locating the necessity of castration in the subject's inscription into the symbolic chain.

     it may indeed be conceivable that this is the source of some primordial anxiety, but this is certainly an anxiety that has been reflected on in a very peculiar manner.

287. #287

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.338

     XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > ^I (o P°)

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in the Little Hans case, the phobic signifier (the horse) operates as a transformation mechanism: the father's symbolic intervention partially unloads anxiety by introducing a castration-threat function the real father cannot sustain, forcing Hans to convert anxiety about real movement into a symbolic schema of substitution (detachable elements), a process crystallized around the veil/drawers episode which rules out fetishism and inaugurates the plane of instrumental signification.

     Freud distinguishes between anxiety of the father, vor dem Vater, and anxiety for or around the father, um den Vater... The anxiety around this empty place, this hollow that the father represents in little Hans's configuration, seeks out its support in the phobia.

288. #288

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.299

     XVIII CIRCUITS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the horse in little Hans's phobia functions primarily as a "polarising" signifier — not because of its symbolic content but because of its formal structural role: introduced at a critical moment, it reorganises the field of the signified, constitutes limits and transgressions simultaneously, and operates as a signal that restructures Hans's world. The analysis pivots on the priority of the signifier over the signified, against any object-relations or content-based reading.

     it accompanies and modulates his anxiety, but it also carries its own constructive force... it is shortly after the appearance of the diffuse signal of anxiety that the horse will start to function.

289. #289

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.352

     XVIII CIRCUITS > THE MOTHER'S DRAWERS AND THE FATHER'S SHORTCOMING

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the case of Little Hans to show that the phobia's double signifiers (bite/fall) are not expressions of instinct or ambivalence in the classical sense, but purely signifying elements whose combinatory logic drives the mythical evolution through which Hans negotiates the father's shortcoming and the mother's desire for the phallus, culminating in a re-articulation of the structural roles in the Oedipus complex.

     what is in question here is an anxiety that concerns not only the mother in reality, but the whole surrounding, the whole milieu, everything that thus far had constituted little Hans's reality

290. #290

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.332

     XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > Of Children bound in Bundles

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Little Hans case as structured around the imaginary phallus of the mother, arguing that the horse phobia functions as a crystallising signifier that organises Hans's libidinal development, while the successive fantasies punctuate transformations in the signifying configuration—and that Hans's ultimate heterosexuality is won at the cost of a narcissistic, fetishistic relation to women as imaginary objects.

     this fundamental anxiety arises which makes everything waver, to the point that anything is preferable to this, even the forging of an anguishing image that in itself is completely uncommunicative, like that of the horse

291. #291

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.200

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex cannot be resolved on the imaginary plane alone (where it produces only anxiety and symptom), but requires the introduction of a real element into the symbolic order — the paternal figure who "truly has" the phallus — such that castration becomes the necessary condition for the male subject's accession to the virile position and the inscription of the Law; yet the symbolic father as such can never be fully incarnated by any real individual.

     The only thing we see coming out of this is the symptom, the manifestation of anxiety. So Freud tells us.

292. #292

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.220

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > ON THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the castration complex emerges as the necessary structural resolution to an impasse created when the child's real drive (the stirring of the real penis) disrupts the imaginary phallic luring game with the mother; the symbolic father's intervention re-orders what was an unresolvable imaginary deadlock, while the phobia (Little Hans) functions as a substitute signifier for the absent paternal term.

     anxiety appears in this extraordinarily evanescent relationship when the subject peels away from his existence... the instant when the subject is suspended between a moment at which he no longer knows where he is, and a shift towards a moment when he will become something in which he will never be able to find himself again.

293. #293

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.307

     XVIII CIRCUITS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in the Little Hans case, the phobia's meaning cannot be grasped by symbolic analogies or biographical extrapolation but only by tracing the autonomous operation of signifying laws—the "circuit system" of the horse and the railway network—as a structural (symbolic, not real) topology that maps Hans's impossible position between mother and father.

     Here we can behold the total ambiguity of what is desired and what is feared... what, then, is meant by his wanting in some sense to go beyond?

294. #294

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the child's phobia is not triggered by the discovery of anatomical difference (aphallicism) but by the moment the mother appears as lacking the phallus—that is, as a desiring, castrated subject—thereby demonstrating that what structures the child's entry into the symbolic is the mother's own relation to lack, not the child's imaginary all-powerfulness or ego-reality adjustments.

     Ernest Jones tells us very succinctly that, after all, for the child the superego is perhaps merely an indirect vent, while the anxieties are primordial, primitive and imaginary

295. #295

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.216

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > ON THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the imaginary, real, and symbolic registers of the father to argue that it is specifically the real father—not the imaginary one—who bears the decisive function in the castration complex, and that the child's fundamental position in relation to the mother is structured by the phallus as the object of maternal desire, establishing the ground from which the Oedipal drama must be understood.

     the child's masturbation does not by any means explain his anxiety. The child will continue to masturbate.

296. #296

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Freudian equation Penis=Child as the pivot for a structural account of how the phallus slides from the imaginary to the real differently for boys and girls, arguing that the girl's entry into the Oedipus complex is paradoxically simpler because her path via lack leads directly to the father as real bearer of the phallus/child, while the boy faces the deeper difficulty of acceding to the symbolic father function.

     to open the third part of my exposé I set you on the trail of little Hans's anxiety, since from the first we have been singling out two exemplary objects, the fetish object and the real object.

297. #297

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.24

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-22-0"></span>THE THREE FORMS OF THE LACK OF OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the object relation cannot be theorized without the phallus as a third-party element disrupting any dual (imaginary) subject-object relation, and that the dominant object-relations practice errs by reducing the analytic situation to an imaginary dyad (identification with the analyst's ego), as exemplified by its mishandling of obsessional neurosis.

     the notion of an object that is hallucinated against a backdrop of anguishing reality... The object caught up itself in a quest. This stands in categorical opposition to the notion of an autonomous subject

298. #298

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a "golden rule" for analytic reading: signifier-elements must first be defined by their articulation with other signifiers, never reduced to a univocal signified. This principle, illustrated through the polysemic horse in the Little Hans case, is grounded in the structural study of myth (Lévi-Strauss) and simultaneously critiques object-relations theory as trapped in the contradictions of the Imaginary.

     the anxiety emerges exactly when it's a matter of Hans's mother leaving. He is afraid that the horse will come into the bedroom.

299. #299

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.374

     XVIII CIRCUITS > AN ESSAY IN RUBBER¬ SHEET LOGIC

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the conclusion of the Little Hans case as an atypical resolution of the Oedipus complex: the phobic object functions as an "almost arbitrary" signal that delimits the symbolic/real interface, while Hans's final fantasy reveals that the paternal function has not been properly integrated but only displaced along a lineage — a solution that is liveable but not paradigmatic.

     the horse … is an object that has been substituted for all the images and all the addled significations that have been rather poorly isolated and into which the subject doesn't manage to decant his anxiety

300. #300

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.326

     XVIII CIRCUITS > PERMUTATIONS

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hans's series of fantasies as a structured permutation of signifying elements—hole, bathtub, behind, pincers—demonstrating that the signifier does not represent signification but rather fills the gap left by lost signification, while the castration complex is recast as a symbolic operation (removal and impossible return of the penis) whose incomplete execution in Hans's case may nonetheless suffice as a rite of passage.

     These anxieties mean that whenever he had to have a bath elsewhere, like in Gmunden, he would protest with passionate tears.

301. #301

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.275

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED

     Theoretical move: Through the case of Little Hans, Lacan demonstrates that therapeutic interventions aimed at directly addressing guilt or abolishing prohibition inevitably backfire, transforming the forbidden into the compulsory, and that the child's symptomatic productions are better understood as permutative signifier-operations that progressively integrate a disturbing new real element (the real penis) into the subject's mythic system—making progress in analysis a function of the signifier's displacement across personages, not of regression or direct authoritarian clarification.

     We know that the phobia is an outpost, a protection against anxiety. The horse marks out a threshold.

302. #302

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.320

     XVIII CIRCUITS > PERMUTATIONS

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Little Hans's successive transgressive fantasies as a mythical permutation-structure — a series of attempts to articulate and exhaust every form of an impossible solution to the deadlock between the maternal and paternal circuits — and uses this to distinguish Hans's neurotic trajectory from the perverse (fetishistic) path that remained structurally available to him.

     the stranglehold, the deadlock, that has arisen in Hans's relationship with his mother... the child's crisis, insomuch as his mother is the one who until then had ensured the propping up of his insertion into the world, is something that we can grasp at face value in the anxiety that prevents him from roaming beyond a particular radius

303. #303

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.286

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is seized by the autonomous play of the signifier — not by drives or affects — and uses the case of Little Hans to show that phobia/myth functions as a structural solution to an impossible symbolic impasse; he then anchors this in Freud's Witz to demonstrate that condensation at the level of the signifier is the constitutive mechanism of both wit and symptomatic production.

     allowing the phobia to fall into disuse, if indeed it is purely and simply the equivalent of the anxiety that is bound to the apprehension of a real that hitherto had not been fully realised by the child

304. #304

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.312

     XVIII CIRCUITS > PERMUTATIONS

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Little Hans case to argue that the Oedipus complex requires a tripling of the paternal function—real father, symbolic father (Freud as supra-father), and the Name-of-the-Father—wherein the child's phobia emerges from the mother's constitutive privation and is resolved through symbolic identification with the father, not mere genital maturation; simultaneously, Lacan critiques the psychoanalytic emphasis on 'frustration' as missing the deeper logic of the object as something that must be re-found through symbolic distancing.

     the ambiguity of the anxiety to which Hans gives shape and form in the fantasy. It might seem that this anxiety arises from the simple perspective of a fear of separation

305. #305

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.20

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-7-0"></span>INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory's biologistic and adaptationist framework by showing that the object's function is not complementary satisfaction but a defensive structure against fundamental anxiety—exemplified by the phobic object and the fetish—and proposes that the essential difference between phobia and fetish (both responses to castration anxiety) must be grasped through a rigorous structural analysis of the object, not through developmental mythology.

     The object has an altogether different role here. It is, as it were, placed against a backdrop of anxiety, insomuch as the object is an instrument for masking off, for fending off, the fundamental backdrop of anxiety that characterises the different stages in the development of the subject's relation to the world.

306. #306

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.337

     XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > Of Children bound in Bundles

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the reorganisation of the real into a new symbolic configuration necessarily passes through an imaginary regression, using Little Hans's case to show that anxiety is not fear of an object but confrontation with the absence of an object, and that the Oedipus myth functions as an originary truth-creating myth rather than a direct therapeutic tool.

     Anxiety is not the fear of an object. Anxiety is the subject's confrontation with the absence of an object, where he is drawn in and where he loses himself.

307. #307

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.372

     XVIII CIRCUITS > AN ESSAY IN RUBBER¬ SHEET LOGIC

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the paternal metaphor through the Hugo poem on Boaz and Ruth, showing that the father's function is constitutively metaphorical (substitution + castration complex), and applies this formula to the case of Little Hans to explain how the horse-phobia acts as a substitute metaphorical mediator when the paternal metaphor is absent, while also distinguishing phobic and fetishistic objects as "milestones" of desire in the real that are nonetheless only accessible through signifying formalisation.

     the inauguration of the phobia is thus inscribed into the same formula I have just laid out

308. #308

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.351

     XVIII CIRCUITS > THE MOTHER'S DRAWERS AND THE FATHER'S SHORTCOMING

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in the Little Hans case, the lumf (excrement) functions not primarily as evidence of an "anal stage" but as a signifier homologous with the veil/garment (drawers), both being things that can "fall," and that the succession of Hans's fantasies must be read as a developing myth whose transformations resolve Hans's structural problem of situating himself in relation to the phallic mother — not through instinctual regression or frustration, but through a signifying process moving between symbolic, imaginary, and real registers.

     from the time that he feels that he is being delivered up to her, threatened by her and annulled by her, this reality of the mother represents a danger situation… a maximum level of anxiety

309. #309

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that phobia should not be reduced to fear or understood as a primitive element of ego-construction; rather, phobia is a structural response to anxiety, erecting a symbolic threshold (Vorbau/Schutzbau) that introduces an interior/exterior articulation into the child's world precisely where anxiety—as objectless—had reigned.

     something that is utterly other and which of its very nature is without object, namely anxiety. Phobia is precisely what allows us to articulate this.

310. #310

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     WHAT MYTH IS FOR

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hans's phobia arises at the precise moment when the child is required to make the transition from treating the phallus as an imaginary element in the mother's desire to recognising its symbolic value within the signifying system — a passage that is structurally insurmountable without the paternal intervention that introduces a minimum ternary (or quaternary) organisation of the symbolic order.

     something happens that manifests itself through an anxiety that touches precisely on these relations with his mother.

311. #311

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     WHAT MYTH IS FOR

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that childhood sexual theories have the structural character of myth — not mere intellectual superstructure but a fictive yet structurally stable relation to truth — and uses this to reframe the topography of the preoedipal triangle (mother/father/child) and to insist that perversion, like neurosis, is structured around the castration complex and the presence/absence of the phallus, being neurosis's inverse rather than its simple positive.

     anxiety and phobia arise. I remind you that I distinguished one from the other and in this respect I was in strict conformity with what you can find in Freud's text.

312. #312

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.237

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the child's position in relation to the mother is structurally determined by the mother's lack (the phallus), such that the child functions not as the metaphor of her love but as the metonymy of her desire—a distinction that explains the genesis of anxiety and its transformation into phobia in the case of Little Hans.

     What is called anxiety hinges on the fact that he is able to gauge the full difference that lies between what he is loved for and what he is able to give.

313. #313

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.358

     XVIII CIRCUITS > THE MOTHER'S DRAWERS AND THE FATHER'S SHORTCOMING

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the castration complex requires an active, imaginary castrating father for the Oedipus complex to function productively; in the case of little Hans, the father's failure to perform this imaginary-castrating role creates a structural shortcoming that forces symptomatic suppletion (phobia), while the Name-of-the-Father as symbolic anchor remains operative but insufficient without the father's real/imaginary intervention.

     What is intolerable in his situation is the shortcoming on the side of the castrator. In fact, throughout the whole observation, you will never see anything appearing that could represent the structuration... of something that could be called a castration.

314. #314

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.131

     *UNE FEMME DE NON-RECEVOIR,* **OR: A FLAT REFUSAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the comic (as distinct from the witticism) is constituted at the level of the Imaginary—specifically through the ego's narcissistic dependency on the image of the semblable—while naïve jokes achieve their effect entirely "at the level of the Other" without requiring the standard dialectical work, and that Desire's fundamental disappointment is what the subject masks through ready-made metonymic satisfactions in language.

     You go up to a child with your face covered by a mask, he laughs in a nervous or embarrassed way. You move a bit closer, a manifestation of anxiety starts to appear. You take off the mask, the child laughs. But if you are wearing another mask beneath this mask, he won't laugh one bit.

315. #315

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.400

     **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "oblative" (altruistic) resolution of obsessional neurosis is itself an obsessional fantasy, and proceeds to map four cardinal points of obsessional desire—centering on the maintenance of the big Other as the locus of signification—before distinguishing "acting out" from the exploit and from fantasy as a message addressed to the analyst that exposes the subject's impasse with demand, desire, and the castration complex.

     in his exploit the subject dominates, tames and even domesticates a fundamental anxiety

316. #316

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.271

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues against Jones's naturalistic account of the phallic phase by insisting that the phallus is only conceivable as the signifier of lack — the signifier of the distance between demand and desire — and that entry into femininity requires inscription in the signifying dialectic of exchange (as theorized by Lévi-Strauss), not a return to a primitively given female position; the child's entry into this same dialectic is conditioned by the mother's desire, itself signified by the phallus she lacks.

     The female child's relationship with her own genitals evokes greater anxiety than does the little boy's relationship with his genitals because, as he says, the organ is more internal, more diffuse.

317. #317

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.431

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the resolution of the castration complex does not hinge on having or not having the phallus as an organ, but on the subject's recognition that she/he *is not* the phallus; the Phallus functions as the signifier of desire itself, and the case of the obsessional woman illustrates how misrecognizing this—treating the phallus as an object to be possessed rather than a signifier of desire—leads to analytic impasse.

     'When I look at them, I have the sensation of stepping on their penises. I feel a kind of intense pleasure and anxiety'

318. #318

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that the father's function in the Oedipus complex is not grounded in any real, imaginary, or simply symbolic agency but is precisely a metaphor — a signifier substituted for the maternal signifier — and that this paternal metaphor is the unique mainspring through which the phallus emerges as the signified of desire, resolving the impasses of the Oedipus complex for both sexes.

     for the phobic, his moments of anxiety occur when he observes that he has lost his fear... 'In losing my fear, I have lost my security.'

319. #319

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.417

     **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional neurosis requires interpretation at the level of castration-as-symbolic-law rather than suggestive identification with a part-object; mistaking the plane of demand for the plane of fantasy-identification constitutes a fundamental technical error whose visible symptom is the analyst's projecting passive homosexuality onto material (the bidet dream) that actually poses the question of the castration of the Other.

     The first time he approaches a young girl, he flees in anxiety, goes and confides in his mother and feels completely reassured as soon as he says to her, 'I will tell you everything'.

320. #320

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the "nodal point" of the Oedipus complex as the moment when the subject must decide whether to accept the father's castration/privation of the mother, distinguishing two structural alternatives—"being or not being the phallus" (imaginary) versus "having or not having the phallus" (symbolic)—and shows how the father must intervene not merely as the bearer of the law de jure but as a real, graduated symbolic agent whose effective presence or deficit determines clinical structure.

     The plumber is precisely there to desubjectify something, for little Hans's anxiety is essentially, as I told you, the anxiety of subjectification.

321. #321

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of jokes (Witz) — via a specific joke about battles and a rearing horse — to argue that the witticism's punchline operates through a retroactive "step-of-sense" that discloses how the signifier both enables and forecloses access to reality, and that the joke's satisfaction requires a tripartite structure involving the Other, distinguishing wit structurally from the merely comic.

     It's an image that in a flash takes on an almost phobic value.

322. #322

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.476

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates guilt as structurally located between desire and demand on the Graph of Desire, not merely as a response to prohibition: the prohibited demand kills desire, and this mechanism—visible only from outside the subject's lived position—defines neurotic (especially obsessional) guilt. The demand for death is shown to be an articulated symbolic demand whose reflexive structure makes it equivalent to the death of demand itself, while the polypresence of the phallus-as-signifier (rather than imaginary organ) explains the unity of obsessional phenomenology across sexes.

     this is precisely where it differs from diffuse anxiety, and you know to what extent that differs from the emergence of the sense of guilt.

323. #323

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.184

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

     Theoretical move: Lacan schemas the Oedipus complex as three dialectical moments governed by the paternal metaphor: (1) the child identifies with the phallic object of the mother's desire, (2) the father intervenes imaginarily as depriver/castrator of the mother, and (3) the father reveals himself as *having* (not *being*) the phallus, enabling the boy's identification as ego-ideal and the decline of the complex—the entire movement being structurally a metaphor in which one signifier (the Name-of-the-Father) is pinned to another to produce a new signification.

     He is 'subjected to', and that's the whole source of his anxiety and his phobia.

324. #324

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reviews the Freud-Jones debate on female sexuality to argue that the phallus functions not as a natural drive object but as a signifier — and, pivotally, that in the little girl's Oedipal relations the phallus operates as a fetish rather than a phobic object, a distinction that advances his own structural account beyond both Freud's biologism and Jones's naturalist counter-argument.

     it's a defensive formation, a detour comparable to a phobia, and the exit from the phallic phase has to be thought of as the recovery from a phobia

325. #325

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.512

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing technical terms, proper names, and page references from Lacan's Seminar V, providing no original theoretical argument but mapping the conceptual terrain of the seminar.

     anxiety guilt and 472 laughter and 117, 118 obsessionals and 396,431,434 of subjectification 173-4, 177

326. #326

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the quadripartite structure of subject-formation by showing that the specular couple [a-a'] is always already regulated by the more primitive dyad of the unconstituted subject and the mother-as-One, and that the birth of metaphor (substitution) is the moment at which the object is symbolized and desire properly emerges — yielding the formula of fantasy ($◇a) inscribed within a four-term schema.

     a barred subject who is fundamentally pallid and anguished

327. #327

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: The fundamental mainspring of neurosis is not castration anxiety (fear of losing the phallus) but rather the refusal to allow the Other to be castrated; this is articulated through a rereading of the analysand's fantasy in terms of aphanisis as the active hiding/escamotage of the phallus rather than its disappearance.

     the patient manifests a bit of anxiety. [It is as if he thought,] 'Don't let my car break down when I have to go to the function at which the royal couple is expected.'

328. #328

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION > But Freud adds the following:

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's three-phase schema of "A Child Is Being Beaten" and the optics of the inverted bouquet to argue that the subject constitutes itself as barred subject ($) only by passing through a fantasmatic phase of near-abolition (primary masochism), and that the phallus functions as the mediating signifier through which desire is structured in the imaginary-symbolic interplay.

     I will come back to this extraordinary element when we talk about the phenomenology of anxiety. But I am already pointing out to you a nuanced distinction found in Freud's text... We must not confuse the pure and simple loss of the subject in the darkness of subjective indetermination with something that is completely different from it: the fact that the subject becomes alert or erect, as it were, when faced with danger.

329. #329

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.455

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques both a 1956 Parisian article that collapses the distinction between perverse fantasy and perversion, and the broader tradition of object-relations theory (Abraham, Ferenczi, Klein, Glover), arguing that the structural position of desire — defined by irreducible distance from the object — cannot be reduced to an individual developmental conquest of reality; perverse fantasy illuminates the very structure of unconscious fantasy as such.

     objects are sources of anxiety to him, which is why his fundamental relations with those around him are colored by aggression and sadism. The subject's interest next shifts to more benign objects...imbued with the same anxiety.

330. #330

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the chess metaphor — specifically the patient's refusal to sacrifice his queen — to argue that the phallus is a hidden signifier displaced onto the female partner (wife/analyst), and that the subject's desire is structured around preserving this phallic substitute at the cost of remaining bound in a fantasy of omnipotence; the analytic task is to bring this secret relation between subject and partner into the open.

     there is, all the same, a kind of obscure gathering of anxiety here and there

331. #331

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VI by re-centering psychoanalytic theory on "desire" against the Object Relations drift toward "object-seeking" libido, arguing that desire—not affect, libido-as-energy, or object-relation—is the fundamental axis of psychoanalytic practice, and anchors this claim in a philosophical genealogy running from Aristotle's ethics of mastery through Spinoza's identification of desire with human essence.

     anxiety [angoisse], inasmuch as we consider it to be key to the determination of symptoms, arises only insofar as some activity that enters into the play of symptoms becomes eroticized—or, to put it better, is taken up in the mechanism of desire.

332. #332

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.271

     THE DESIRE TRAP

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hamlet is not merely another version of the father-hero myth but a uniquely articulated dramatic structure that maps the very framework of desire—showing how, under specific conditions, desire must be sought at mortal cost—and that the ghost's command pivots not on vengeance against Claudius but on the mother's desire, which is the essential, immediate object of the conflict.

     they are all anxiety-ridden by something they are expecting, and this something only takes forty lines to show up.

333. #333

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.121

     INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the movement from the animal's excremental territoriality through language's complication of the subject/object relation (use→exchange value), to the dialectic of desire: identification with the father fails to resolve desire's impasse, so the most general "solution" offered to the barred subject is narcissism, which structures fantasy by transferring the subject's anxiety onto object a, yielding the formula of the ego-ideal as i(a)/$ ◇ a/I.

     this human object normally ends up receiving the lion's share of the subject's Angst- that is, neither more nor less than his affect in the presence of desire, this fear, this feeling of imminence

334. #334

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.357

     PHALLOPHANIES

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a structural comparison of Hamlet and Oedipus to argue that mourning's disrupted rituals expose the same fundamental gap as the phallic signifier/castration, and that Hamlet stages a 'barred Other' [S(Ⱥ)] at its very outset rather than discovering it through the hero's deed—making Hamlet's Oedipal drama a specifically modern, 'distorted' form of the Untergang of the Oedipus complex in which the subject is paralysed by an unatonable debt rather than enacting the lustral rebirth of the law.

     To his son, this is the most horrible and anxiety-provoking meaning of the father's revelation.

335. #335

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.507

     MARGINALIA ON THE SEMINAR ON DESIRE

     Theoretical move: This passage is a set of editorial marginalia by Jacques-Alain Miller providing bibliographic references, personal anecdotes, and contextual notes on Seminar VI; it is non-substantive from a theoretical standpoint, though it contains brief allusions to several canonical concepts (Graph of Desire, Master/Slave Dialectic, Phallus, Hilflosigkeit) in passing bibliographic form.

     17. Hilflosigkeit. On this topic, see Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, and Lacan's Seminar X.

336. #336

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.460

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: By critically rereading Glover's adaptive theory of perversion and Klein's object-relations theory through the lens of the signifier, Lacan argues that the subject's primary structuring occurs at the level of signifying opposition (good/bad objects), not reality-testing; and that the bad internal object marks the precise point where the être/avoir (to be/to have) split institutes the subject's relation to an undemandable object — from which desire, irreducible to demand or need, emerges.

     The bad object never stops presenting itself, with regard to the subject's being, in the form of a permanent, anxiety-producing enigma.

337. #337

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.439

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of fantasy — defined by the aphanisis of the subject at the height of desire — is the hub from which neurotic (and perverse) clinical structures differentiate: the subject must find something to sustain desire in the face of the Other's desire, generating the distinct solutions of phobia, hysteria (unsatisfied desire), and obsession (impossible desire).

     Prior to anxiety there is Hilflosigkeit, the fact of having 'no recourse.'

338. #338

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (representative of the representation) is strictly equivalent to the signifier, establishing that what is properly unconscious is a signifying element — not affect, sensation, or feeling — and uses Freud's dream of the dead father to demonstrate that dream-interpretation proceeds via the insertion of missing signifiers into the dream-text, not via wishful thinking or affective content.

     it is transformed into a qualitatively different quota of affect, above all into anxiety

339. #339

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the second and third stages of the Graph of Desire by showing how the encounter with the Other's desire (Che vuoi?) introduces the principles of substitution (metaphor) and similarity (metonymy), situating desire in the gap between demand and being, and how fantasy ($ ◇ a) emerges as the subject's imaginary defense against Hilflosigkeit — the structural response to the opacity of the Other's desire.

     Freud teaches us something that is positive and clearly formulated. He views anxiety as something that is thoroughly situated in a theory of communication, when he says that anxiety is a signal.

340. #340

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.128

     DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION

     Theoretical move: Desire cannot be reduced to demand or frustration but must be grasped through the tight knot of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic; the dream of the dead father exemplifies how the imaginary interposition of the father's image props up desire as a shield against the anxiety of subjective elision, with the fantasy formula (S◇a) expressing the structural absence of the subject that is constitutive of desire itself.

     In the power struggle that lies at the core of his rivalry with his father, it is the dreamer who finally wins out... thanks to which the subject does not feel directly invaded - or swallowed up by the gaping hole that opens up before him - when he is directly confronted with the anxiety that death provokes.

341. #341

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.209

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses close reading of a clinical dream-text to argue that the phallus functions as a perpetually absent signifier whose structural elusiveness—not aggressive retaliation or castration anxiety in the ordinary sense—organises the neurotic subject's symptomatology, thereby critiquing hasty analytic interpretations that reduce the material to castration as cause rather than context.

     the sort of confusion or provoking of anxiety that is manifested in the fear of aphanisis

342. #342

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "AS HE WISHED"

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's dream of the dead father through the Graph of Desire to show that the mainspring of Verdrängung (repression) is not the suppression of a discovered content but the elision of a pure signifier (selon/nach), and that the formula of fantasy ($◇a) emerges as the structure by which the barred subject props itself against annihilation through identificatory fixation on the imaginary other.

     the pain of existing after desire had dried up was experienced by someone... the dreamer does not know what he is taking on, which is the pain itself.

343. #343

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.312

     **XXIII**

     Theoretical move: The true goal of psychoanalysis—especially training analysis—is not psychological normalization or the 'service of goods' (happiness, comfort, social adjustment) but a confrontation with the fundamental human condition of *Hilflosigkeit* (helplessness/distress) and the relation to desire and death, as exemplified by the figures of Oedipus and Lear; to promise happiness is a form of fraud, and the analytic end must pass through absolute disarray rather than bourgeois comfort.

     At the end of a training analysis the subject should reach and should know the domain and the level of the experience of absolute disarray. It is a level at which anguish is already a protection... Anguish develops by letting a danger appear, whereas there is no danger at the level of the final experience of Hilflosigkeit.

344. #344

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes *das Ding* as the excluded interior of the psychic organization — an operational but irreducibly opaque field that lies beyond the signifying chain and the pleasure principle, and whose ethical significance distinguishes Freudian metapsychology from both Hegelian philosophy of the state and affect-based psychology.

     A sufficient indication of this is that, by the end, Freud came to evaluate anxiety itself as a signal.

345. #345

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     **IX** > On creation *ex nihilo*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of sublimation grounded in the topological function of Das Ding: the Thing is that which "in the real suffers from the signifier," is constitutively veiled, and is represented—never directly encountered—by the created object, whose paradigmatic form is the potter's vase, a void-around-which that enacts creation ex nihilo.

     the patient's heart is beating with anxiety as she waits for the connoisseur's verdict

346. #346

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

     Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* and *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*, argues that jouissance remains forbidden even after the death of God, and that the commandment to love one's neighbor is ethically explosive precisely because the neighbor harbors the same "fundamental evil"—the same proximity to das Ding—that I harbour in myself; altruism and utilitarianism are exposed as frauds that allow us to avoid confronting the malignant jouissance at the heart of the ethical problem, which only Sade (and Kant) begin to articulate honestly.

     there rises up the unfathomable aggressivity from which I flee, that I turn against me

347. #347

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > ⁴⁶⁷ **Editor's Notes** > **Notes to the Second Edition**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from the editor's notes to a second edition of Seminar VIII, listing page references for key Lacanian and philosophical concepts without advancing any theoretical argument.

     anxiety and 367 ...genital stage anxiety 217-18 phobias anxiety and 366

348. #348

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.7

     **Jacques Lacan** > **Contents**

     Theoretical move: This is the table of contents for Lacan's Seminar VIII (Transference), listing chapter headings that signal the seminar's major theoretical concerns: a commentary on Plato's Symposium, the object of desire and castration dialectic, a reading of Claudel's Coûfontaine trilogy, and the relation between Capital I (Ideal) and little a (objet petit a).

     XXV. The Relationship between Anxiety and Desire

349. #349

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.384

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not purely internal to the subject but circulates between subjects as a kind of shared energy, and that desire functions as a remedy for anxiety—yet the analyst's proper position requires not using desire merely as an expedient but sustaining a relationship to "pure desirousness" that refuses to fill the place of the anxious Other for the patient.

     if anxiety is what I told you it is, a relationship that props up desire where the object is lacking, then by inverting the terms, we see that desire is a remedy for anxiety.

350. #350

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.379

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Freud's economic account of anxiety-as-signal by mapping it onto the fantasy formula ($◇a): anxiety is produced when cathexis is transferred from little a to the barred subject's place (S), and its essential characteristic is not flight but Erwartung—the radical mode by which the subject maintains its relationship to desire even when the object is absent or unbearable.

     anxiety is the radical mode by which a relationship to desire is maintained. When the object disappears... there remains what can remain, which is Erwartung.

351. #351

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.230

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-221-0"></span>**ORAL, ANAL, A N D GENITAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the oral, anal, and genital stages through the dialectic of demand and desire, showing how each stage structures the subject's relation to the Other differently, culminating in the genital/castration stage where objet petit a is defined as the Other minus phi (a = A - φ), revealing that the subject can only satisfy the Other's demand by demeaning the Other into an object of desire.

     A sign represents something to someone and, as the subject does not know what the sign represents, faced with this question when sexual desire appears, he loses the someone to whom desire is addressed - in other words, himself. Thus is born little Hans' anxiety.

352. #352

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.410

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's desire is structured around a fundamental mourning — the recognition that no object (objet petit a) is of greater value than any other — and that this insight, shared with Socrates, connects melancholia, fantasy, the ego-ideal, and the ethics of love into a single topological point where desire meets its limit.

     I will merely indicate it to you today by designating a specific point which, in my eyes, at least for the time being, is a point where mourning and melancholia meet up.

353. #353

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.439

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XXV - The Relationship between Anxiety and Desire**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII Chapter XXV, clarifying terminological choices, variant readings, and cross-references to Freud, Écrits, and other seminars; it performs no independent theoretical argument.

     Lacan never uses the latter in this Seminar. Cf. Inhibitions. Symptoms and Anxiety, SE XX, p. 92, where Freud raises the question: 'Where does the energy come from which is employed for giving the signal of unpleasure?'

354. #354

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.246

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-232-0"></span>**PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must take the form of "nescience qua nescience" — not ignorance but the structural position of holding lack without filling it — such that the only sign the analyst can give is the sign of the lack of a signifier, which alone opens the analysand to the unconscious; this is grounded in the phallus as signifier structuring the entire economy of desire through the tension between being and having.

     the sign of the lack of a signifier... the only sign that cannot be borne, because it is the one that induces the most unspeakable anxiety.

355. #355

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.304

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic object (objet petit a) is specifically the object of castration — distinguished from objects of privation or frustration — and demonstrates this through topological analysis of the cross-cap, showing that the object of desire only rejoins its intimacy by a centrifugal (outside-in) path, structurally irreducible to Aristotelian logic's object of privation.

     it is really what is there, this is what we are dealing with, it is on it, in so far as it is at the heart of the structure, it is on it that there is brought to bear what we call castration... the whole world of anxiety with which we have to deal, which is the object defined as object of castration.

356. #356

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.210

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 19*: *Wednesday 9 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is not beyond language but structured through it, and that the subject's constitution as desire requires grasping both the topological dimension of the objet petit a and its role in fantasy—where the Graph of Desire's two-level structure reveals that fantasy anticipates the ideal ego in a temporal logic of the future perfect, pointing toward a 'temporal dynamics' that exceeds mere spatial topology.

     I paid her discourse the homage it deserved... the unsayable (1'indicible), she made of it the index of a heterogeneity of what precisely she is aiming at as the 'not being able to be said'

357. #357

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.167

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of anxiety as the desire of the Other (not a defence against which one defends, but the source of defences), articulates the phallus as the mediating object between demand and desire, and then pivots to a topological grounding of these arguments through the introduction of the torus and a critique of Eulerian circles as an inadequate logical model—establishing topology as the rigorous foundation for Lacanian logical claims about identification and negation.

     anxiety is at the source of defences, but one does not defend oneself against anxiety.

358. #358

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.313

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: In this closing session of the seminar, Lacan consolidates the year's teaching by articulating the structural difference between i(o) and o (the specular image and the object), grounding desire in the phantasy formula $◊a, identifying the desirer as always already implicated in the object of desire via the "Che vuoi?", and situating castration's object as the very object of analytic science—while using Blanchot's prose and the hysteric's relation to the Other's desire as literary and clinical anchors.

     Next year, I will deal for you, pursuing strictly the point at which I left you today, with anxiety.

359. #359

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962* > M Audouard

     Theoretical move: The passage raises the theoretical problem of how anxiety, precisely as that which resists symbolisation (marking the failure of symbolisation), can itself come to be symbolised — and what happens at the 'central hole' from which the signifier is born.

     anxiety in so far as it cannot be the object of symbolisation because it is precisely the mark that symbolisation has not been able to take place

360. #360

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from a critique of psychoanalytic congress discourse to articulate the structural relationship between anxiety, desire, jouissance, and the Other: the prohibition of jouissance (its Aufhebung) is the supporting plane on which desire is constituted, the Other is the metaphor of this prohibition, and anxiety must be understood through the desire of the Other rather than as the jouissance of a mythical self—a move that corrects both Jones's aphanisis and a Jungian-inflected misreading of the drive.

     the only term which could give a unity to this sort of oscillating movement around which the question hesitated, was this term: the relationship of anxiety to the desire of the Other

361. #361

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.163

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines anxiety as the sensation of the desire of the Other — not an affect without an object in reality but one where the lack of object is on the subject's side — and positions the phallus as the mediating term between demand and desire, showing how hysteria and obsessional neurosis are each specific strategies for managing the desire of the Other.

     anxiety is the sensation of the desire of the Other... The affect of anxiety is in effect connoted by a want of object, but not by a want of reality.

362. #362

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962* > Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology—specifically the theory of knots and surface dimensions—is necessary to account for the subject's relation to desire and the constitution of the imaginary mediating function (i(o)), and that anxiety arises precisely when this imaginary mediation is lacking; topology is proposed as the proper formalism to replace naive spatial intuition derived from the specular image.

     anxiety begins from this essential moment when this image is lacking

363. #363

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Piera Aulagnier, invited by Lacan, argues that anxiety is not typed by content (oral, castration, death) but is structurally defined as the collapse of all identificatory reference points—the ego's dissolution before the un-symbolisable—and that its resolution or temporary suspension is bound to the coincidence of demand and desire in jouissance, with castration functioning as the transitional passage that converts the penis into the phallic signifier.

     anxiety occurs precisely at the moment when this key no longer opens any door, when the ego (the me) must come face to face with that which is behind or before all symbolisation

364. #364

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.308

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan articulates the objet petit a as a topological-ontological operator: it is the object of castration that, by its enucleation from the cross-cap, transforms the imaginary sphere into a Möbius surface, thereby constituting the subject's world while marking the irreducible hole at the centre of desire and the Other's desire—a 'acosmic point' that underlies every metaphor, every symptom, and the anxiety of confronting what the Other desires of the subject.

     anxiety is the fear of what the Other in himself desires of the subject, this 'in himself' founded precisely on the ignorance of what is desired at the level of the Other

365. #365

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Jones's concept of 'aphanisis' misidentifies the source of anxiety in the castration complex by conflating the disappearance of desire with repression; true anxiety is always about the object that desire dissimulates (the void at the heart of demand), not about desire's disappearance—and this misrecognition occludes the decisive function of the phallus as the instrument mediating desire's relation to the big Other.

     anxiety, if it is produced, is never about the disappearance of desire, but of the object that it dissimulates, of the truth of desire, or if you wish again of what we do not know about the desire of the Other.

366. #366

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.207

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962* > Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critical commentary on Mme Aulagnier's presentation to advance his own theoretical positions: that the subject must be defined purely through its exclusion from the signifier (not as a person), that affect cannot be understood outside its relation to the signifier, that perversion must be rethought as the subject making himself object for the jouissance of a phallic god, and that anxiety is properly situated as a sensation of the desire of the Other at the level of the ideal ego rather than as a word/affect antinomy.

     anxiety which I qualified for you as a sensation of the desire of the Other

367. #367

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.200

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety arises at the precise moment when the desire of the Other becomes unnameable, dissolving both ego and Other as supports of identification; this structural logic is then differentiated across neurosis, perversion, and psychosis, where for the psychotic the foreclosure of symbolisation means that the emergence of desire itself—rather than its loss—is the privileged source of anxiety, since it forces a confrontation with the constitutive lack (castration) that was never symbolised.

     This precise moment when the ego is reflected in a mirror which gives back an image which has no identifiable meaning - this is anxiety.

368. #368

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.196

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural typology of clinical positions (normality, neurosis, perversion, psychosis) organized around the axis of identificatory conflict with the partial object, castration, and the differential articulation of demand, desire, and jouissance — arguing that what distinguishes each structure is not the content of the drive but the subject's identificatory relation to the phallic object and the Other's desire.

     This is why anxiety is closely related to Jouissance, and why one of the most anxiety provoking of situations is the subjects confrontation with the Other at this level.

369. #369

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962* > M Vergotte

     Theoretical move: The passage proposes a structural bifurcation of anxiety: one pole involves the subject's fear of being misrecognised or disappearing as subject (castration anxiety), while the other involves the subject's refusal to be a subject—covering over lack/desire—as in claustrophobic closure. This generates a dialectical tension between anxiety before desire and anxiety before the absence of desire.

     I was wondering if there were not two sorts of anxiety: Mme Aulagnier spoke of castration-anxiety: the subject is afraid that it's going to be taken away from him and that he will be forgotten as a subject

370. #370

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     You are convinced that religion will triumph?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that religion will triumph over psychoanalysis and science precisely because it is structurally equipped to produce meaning for the distress generated by the Real that science continually expands; religion's resilience lies in its inexhaustible capacity to suture the gap between the Real and human experience with meaning.

     Religion is going to give meaning to the oddest experiments, the very ones that scientists themselves are just beginning to become anxious about.

371. #371

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.62

     I. Governing, Educating, and Analyzing

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's triad of "impossible" positions—governing, educating, analyzing—to argue that the analytic function is historically novel and structurally distinct, and that its very novelty casts a "glancing light" on the other two functions; this asymmetry is precisely what Lacan's Four Discourses formalize.

     They become gripped with anxiety when they think about what it is to educate. There are tons of remedies for that anxiety, in particular a certain number of 'conceptions of man,' conceptions of human nature.

372. #372

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.67

     II. The Anxiety of Scientists

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions the Real as that which "doesn't work" — what escapes the smooth functioning of the world — and uses scientists' anxiety attacks over dangerous biology as a foil to argue that analysts, who deal exclusively with the Real, face an even more impossible profession than science, governance, or education.

     They had a typical anxiety attack, and a sort of prohibition, at least provisional, was announced.

373. #373

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.11

     <span id="page-8-0"></span>Introduction: Welcome to Hell

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychotherapeutic "positive orientation" of contemporary society constitutes a collective disavowal of a foundational inner negativity or deadness, and that psychoanalysis — despite Freud's self-distinction from religion's consolation function — largely replicates religion's salvational logic by promising deliverance from suffering rather than confronting the constitutive negativity of existence.

     you will tell yourself and others that you had an episode of clinical depression or anxiety, but you are better now.

374. #374

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.18

     <span id="page-8-0"></span>Introduction: Welcome to Hell

     Theoretical move: Reshe argues that the death drive constitutes an irreparable "negative insight" that undermines psychoanalysis from within, revealing it as a self-defeating practice: the therapeutic frame structurally contradicts—and thereby cancels—any genuine acknowledgement of suffering as constitutive and incurable, making the psychoanalyst a fraud and psychoanalysis itself a living-dead institution.

     Since its introduction, the concept of the death drive has encountered a wall of anxiety, denial, and confusion.

375. #375

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.22

     <span id="page-8-0"></span>Introduction: Welcome to Hell

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that conventional psychoanalysis, psychology, and therapeutic culture are defence mechanisms that alienate suffering from the subject by pathologising it, while Zapffe's "depressive realism" — pushed further than Freud's own pessimism — reveals that inner pain is constitutive of human existence rather than a deviation from health, thereby grounding the book's anti-therapeutic, radically negative psychoanalytic project.

     Depression, 'fear of life,' refusal of nourishment, and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state

376. #376

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.25

     <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity

     Theoretical move: From a "negative psychoanalytic-existential" standpoint, the subject's innermost core is constitutive non-being: identity and life-narrative are compensatory illusions masking a foundational void, while existence itself is structured as repetition compulsion—a serial re-encounter with one's own non-existence, wound, and trauma.

     When one gets in touch with the empty inner core of oneself, exposing this primordial void, one reacts with immense pain in the form of anxiety, melancholy, agony, panic, and depression.

377. #377

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.64

     <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Death Drive is constitutive not only of the subject but of the social bond itself, grounding sociality in shared lack, trauma, and reciprocal sacrifice of nothingness — and critically intervenes against McGowan's framework by insisting that the death drive must be thought beyond and without recourse to enjoyment (jouissance), whose admixture betrays the genuine negativity of suffering.

     Approaching and recognising the rupture that underlies the subject's existence is felt like anxiety, the only affect that, according to Lacan (who is echoing Heidegger here), never lies.

378. #378

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.73

     <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts > The Negative Dialectics of the Individual and Society

     Theoretical move: By radicalising McGowan's two-stage logic of the social death drive, the passage argues that subject and society are mutually constituted through a negative dialectic of shared lack rather than through any positive substance—the social bond is structurally non-existent, held together only by the unfillable rupture of the death drive, such that negation of negation yields not positivity but a double negativity that is simultaneously constitutive and annihilative.

     Anxiety is a sensation of the reality of love, of the point of its (non)existence. It reveals the painful truth, taking away from us everything we have, revealing that we have nothing.

379. #379

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.75

     <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts > The Negative Dialectics of the Individual and Society > Negative Social Cognitive Neuroscience

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theoretical pivot: it mobilises social cognitive neuroscience (Bowlby, Winnicott, Lieberman) to displace individualism and then radicalises those findings through a psychoanalytic-pessimist lens, arguing that what neuroscience calls "social need" is better understood as constitutive, unfillable lack—a traumatic social pain that is not a need to be satisfied but the very substance of subjectivity and sociality.

     This alarm manifests itself as anxious separation distress feelings. The attachment system is lifelong. We can never become insensitive to the pain of separation from those we are attached to.

380. #380

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.103

     <span id="page-92-0"></span>The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive—understood as a drive toward loss, self-destruction, and repetition of originary absence—is the foundational structure of both subjectivity and sociality, with sacrifice, love, and political bonds all grounded in shared nothingness rather than positive satisfaction; the emancipated subject is thus one who avows hopelessness rather than seeking untainted enjoyment.

     I think anxious is right because in a way, if you're not in an ideological position, you're not armoured against the other... It has to be an embrace of that anxiety, the anxiety in the face of the other, which is also the source of your own satisfaction.

381. #381

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.105

     <span id="page-92-0"></span>The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that existentialism gestures toward the death drive through its affective categories (Angst, despair, being-towards-death) but ultimately betrays it by offering a compensatory benefit (authenticity, overcoming bad faith), whereas a genuinely negative psychoanalysis would refuse all such rewards — with art emerging as the only practice that is faithful to the death drive precisely because its 'benefit' is immanent to the self-destructive process itself, not a subsequent reward.

     all those affects like despair in Kierkegaard and Angst in Heidegger are really attempts to think about the phenomenon of death drive without ever naming it

382. #382

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.117

     <span id="page-106-0"></span>A Tragic Fairy Tale of Evolution: Zupancič , ̌ Zapffe, and Other Monsters > Zapffe: The Shared Tragedy of Everything Alive

     Theoretical move: By reading Zapffe against conventional anthropocentric interpretations, the passage argues that human maladaptation (acute consciousness, death drive) is not an exception to nature but its most intimate expression — nature itself is constitutively tragic, thanatogenous, and destructive, making the death drive a radical inclusion into nature's inner rupture rather than a departure from it.

     it is when we are depressed and anxious we coincide the most with our natural state and feel the most deeply the flow of nature as such.

383. #383

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.137

     <span id="page-126-0"></span>Human Animal, Positive Psychology, and Trauma: A Conversation Between Alenka Zupancič and Julie Reshe ̌

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the social imperative of happiness, undergirded by a superego logic, produces misery rather than well-being; and that the death drive—understood not as a dualistic counterpart to Eros but as an ontological negativity that the social order perpetually reinvents rather than resolves—is more fundamental than the pleasure principle, while anxiety is reframed as a signal of the Real rather than a mere negative affect to be eliminated.

     For Lacan, anxiety is, above all, a signal of the Real. It is the moment of terrible, all-consuming certainty.

384. #384

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.144

     <span id="page-138-0"></span>Epilogue: No Salvation

     Theoretical move: The epilogue proposes "negative psychoanalysis" as a practice that refuses salvation, expertise, and positive consolation, remaining faithful to the negative insight that nothing can save us—a self-cancelling praxis that mirrors the constitutive rupture of the subject and the social bond itself.

     The only injunction for this form of practice would be not to be faithful to your anxious heart and the anxious hearts of others.

385. #385

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION III. Of Opinion, Knowledge, and Belief.

     Theoretical move: Kant distinguishes conviction (objectively valid, communicable) from persuasion (merely subjective, incommunicable), then grades subjective validity into opinion, belief, and knowledge, and argues that within the limits of pure speculative reason neither opinion nor knowledge is possible regarding God and the future life, but a practical/doctrinal/moral belief is both possible and necessary—making moral certainty the highest epistemic achievement available to reason beyond experience.

     The offer of a bet startles him, and makes him pause... If we imagine to ourselves that we have to stake the happiness of our whole life on the truth of any proposition, our judgement drops its air of triumph, we take the alarm.

386. #386

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.73

     chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

     Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice—a voice whose source cannot be seen or located—is shown to structurally produce effects of divinity, authority, and uncanny presence (Unheimlichkeit) by separating the voice from its body, and this mechanism operates through a fantasy-encirclement of the enigmatic object behind the screen, linking the acousmatic to the Voice as Lacanian object.

     I noticed in it for the first time the sorrows that had cracked it in the course of a lifetime... seized by mortal anguish

387. #387

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.191

     Silence > The dog

     Theoretical move: By reading Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog," Dolar traces how the acousmatic voice-from-nowhere (objet petit a as pure resonance) converges with the enigma of food to identify objet petit a as the common-source intersection of voice and nourishment—both passing through the mouth in mutual exclusion—while also theorising psychoanalysis as the abandonment of childhood rather than its retrieval.

     It is like the voice as pure resonance that Lacan talks about in Anxiety in the passage we have examined above.

388. #388

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.165

     Silence

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that silence must be theorized across Lacan's three registers—symbolic (silence as structural differential element), imaginary (silence as supposed plenitude), and real (silence as the mute insistence of the drives)—and that the analyst's silence is not merely an absence of speech but an act that homologizes the silence of the drives, making it the operative lever of analytic practice.

     The silence of the new universe does not mean anything, it does not make sense, and in this absence of sense it inspires Pascal's anxiety.

389. #389

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.41

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory's appropriation of the Lacanian gaze fundamentally misreads it: where film theory locates the gaze as a positive, signified presence that centers and confirms the subject (aligning it with Foucauldian panopticism), Lacan's gaze is the Objet petit a in the visual field—a blind, jouissance-absorbed point of impossibility that annihilates rather than confirms the subject, constituting desire as constitutionally contentless pursuit of an impossibility.

     the anticipated event, the meeting and match with the Master, never comes about. It is narratively replaced by what we can accurately describe as a 'nonevent,' the spotting of the shiny, mirrorlike sardine can—and an attack of anxiety.

390. #390

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.146

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > Breast-Feeding and Freedom

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern subject's definition as free necessarily generates anxiety by including the Real within the Symbolic as a negation (the indestructible double), and that the proper response is not to interpret anxiety as demand but to sustain the object a as the unspeakable support of freedom—illustrated negatively by Frankenstein's reduction of the monster's desire to a demand.

     It was the very definition of the subject as free that ensured this increase of anxiety.

391. #391

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.145

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > The Drying Up of the Breast

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "barred room" in Gothic fiction functions as an extimate object—an element that constructs the set (the house) by negating it rather than condensing it—and uses this to distinguish two registers of absence: signified absence (structured within a differential network, yielding sense) versus uncanny presence (pure existence without sense), defining anxiety as the affect aroused by existence stripped of signification.

     This, then, is our final definition of the anxiety that attends the uncanny: it is an affect aroused in reaction to an existence, to pure existence, without sense.

392. #392

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.135

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern subject is not an external cause of social failure but is structurally constituted by and as that failure—exemplified by Frankenstein's monster as the embodiment of a failed invention—and that the proper psychoanalytic response to the Real is to circumscribe its unbridgeability (via symbolic negation/repudiation), not to foreclose it through historicist chains of signification.

     In response to anxiety's signal of danger, one flees or avoids the real.

393. #393

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.282

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Chapter S

     Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (pages 281-283) listing topics, authors, and concepts with page references; it is non-substantive filler with no theoretical argument.

     Uncanniness, 1 29, 131 and anxiety, 1 29, 135 in Rebecca, 132, 133

394. #394

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.138

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > The Drying Up of the Breast

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that vampirism figures the collapse of fantasy's support of desire—the "drying up of the breast" as objet petit a—when the extimate object loses its proper distance and returns as an uncanny double endowed with surplus jouissance, threatening the subject's constitutive lack; this structure is traced across breast-feeding advocacy, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and La Jetée.

     anxiety is not an affect or a sentiment like others; it has, for the reasons stated, an exceptional status. The Gothic world is, in fact, only conceivable as the elimination of sentiment.

395. #395

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.129

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety

     Theoretical move: Anxiety, understood as a signal of the overproximity of object a rather than of lack, is structurally equivalent to the Gothic vampire figure; the symbolic order defends against the Real through negation, doubt, and repetition rather than interpretation, and psychoanalysis founds itself precisely on the rigorous registration of its own inability to know the Real - a 'belief without belief' that is not skepticism.

     anxiety is a signal of danger. This signal is extraordinary because it works without the use of any signifiers . Since a signifier can always be negated, the message it sends can always be doubted. Rather than a signifer, then, anxiety is an affect-a special sort of affect-and as such it cannot be doubted.

396. #396

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.263

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego > Chapter l

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of scholarly endnotes and bibliographic references for multiple chapters, providing citations and brief contextual glosses rather than advancing any single theoretical argument. It is non-substantive as a theoretical unit, though several notes touch on key Lacanian concepts (extimacy, anxiety, ethics, suture, the real) in passing.

     the uncanny is accompanied by 'a special core of feeling.' The specialness of this feeling of anxiety is made conceptually explicit by Lacan.

397. #397

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs terminological clarification, tracing the evolution of Freud's drive nomenclature from the ego/sexual drive opposition through narcissistic libido to the final antithesis of Eros (life drives) and death drives, while also noting translation controversies (Standard Edition bowdlerizations) and situating Freud's speculations within a broader intellectual genealogy (Spielrein, Ferenczi, Plato, Upanishads).

     [Angstbereitschaft – literally 'fear-preparedness'.]

398. #398

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Freud uses the metapsychological model of the living vesicle and its protective barrier to argue that consciousness arises *instead of* a memory trace (a function of the Pcpt-Cs system's surface position), and that trauma is defined precisely as the breaking-through of this barrier, which suspends the pleasure principle and forces the apparatus to bind/annex the invading quanta of excitation.

     mobilize all available defence mechanisms. In the process, however, the pleasure principle is put into abeyance.

399. #399

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety (fear) is structurally constituted as the reproduction of a prior traumatic experience—paradigmatically birth—and that its function bifurcates into a counter-purposive automatic reaction to actual danger and a purposive signal of impending danger; the deepest root of fear is separation from the loved object, which ties castration anxiety, birth trauma, and object-loss into a single structural series.

     Fear, then, is first and foremost something that is *felt*. We call it a 'state of affect', even though we don't actually know what an affect is. This feeling is blatantly unpleasurable in nature, but that is not a sufficient description of it

400. #400

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical analysis of Little Hans's horse phobia and the Wolf-man's wolf phobia, Freud argues that symptom-formation in neurosis is constituted not merely by repression of a single drive-impulse but by the simultaneous repression of two opposed impulses (hostile aggression and passive affection toward the father), with displacement onto an animal surrogate as the structural mechanism that transforms a comprehensible emotional reaction into a true neurosis, and with regression serving as an alternative or supplementary defense to repression proper.

     the process of fear-generation, the choice of fear-object, the surrendering of the freedom to move, or some combination of these? Where is the gratification he refuses to allow himself?

401. #401

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud reframes the conceptual architecture of defence, repression, anxiety, and trauma by: (1) demoting 'repression' to a sub-category of a broadened concept of 'defence'; (2) constructing a developmental sequence from trauma through danger-situation to anxiety-as-signal; and (3) showing that the distinction between objective and neurotic fear dissolves once the drive is recognized as an internal danger that mirrors external helplessness.

     Fear is therefore on the one hand the expectation of future trauma, and on the other a repetition of past trauma in a mild form.

402. #402

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud develops the theory of narcissism by tracing libido distribution across organic illness, hypochondria, sleep, and love-object choice, arguing that ego-libido and object-libido are structurally parallel and that primary narcissism is universal, grounding the compulsion to love others in the pathogenic effects of excessive libidinal build-up in the ego.

     hypochondriac fear is the counterpart on the ego-libido side to neurotic fear

403. #403

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's and editorial notes for a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Freud's writings, clarifying translation choices for key Freudian terms (Angst, Trauer, Triebrepräsentanz, Inhalte, etc.) and cross-referencing other Freudian texts; it is paratextual apparatus rather than theoretical argumentation.

     Freud's word Angst has always been something of a shibboleth for translators. James Strachey and his colleagues followed the lead of their early predecessors and opted for 'anxiety' in almost all cases

404. #404

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety in phobias and obsessional neurosis is fundamentally a signal-affect generated by the ego in response to a danger situation ultimately reducible to castration, and that symptoms are produced not to avoid anxiety per se but to avoid the underlying danger situation that anxiety signals; this requires reconciling the dual-drive theory with the libido-organization stages by treating drives as always mixed rather than pure.

     fear consists in a reaction to a particular danger situation; the ego saves itself from this fear by taking action to withdraw from the situation or avoid it altogether.

405. #405

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation by contrasting conversion hysteria (which largely confines its defence to repression) with obsessional neurosis (where libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase, superego harshness, and reaction-formations constitute a distinct and more elaborate defence structure), proposing that the castration complex drives both and that the difference lies in constitutional/temporal factors affecting the genital organisation of the libido.

     The fear that is such a predominant feature in this particular condition now seems to me to be an unnecessary complication that obscures the issue.

406. #406

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud identifies two surrogate repressive techniques specific to obsessional neurosis—obliteration and isolation—and argues that both operate through motor symbolism to achieve the same goal as repression, while also raising the problem of whether castration anxiety is the sole motor of defence across all neuroses, particularly in women.

     fear of this kind is actually apparent only in the phobias; only here is it openly avowed. What has become of it in the other two disorders?

407. #407

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud constructs a developmental series of danger situations (birth trauma → object-loss → castration → super-ego) each generating its specific fear-determinant, while simultaneously revising his earlier economic theory of anxiety to recast fear as an intentional ego-signal rather than an automatic libidinal discharge, and correlating each fear-determinant with a corresponding neurotic structure.

     our present conception of fear as an intentional signal deployed by the ego in order to exert influence on the pleasure/unpleasure matrix shows us to be independent of that economic automatism.

408. #408

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that in obsessional neurosis the regression of the libido doubly exacerbates the conflict between ego, id, and super-ego: it forces erotic impulses into aggressive forms, enabling the super-ego to punish the ego for drives the ego cannot consciously recognise as its own, and symptom-formation gradually shifts from defense to surrogate gratification until the ego reaches paralysis of will.

     The ego recoils aghast from the cruel and violent demands transmitted to its consciousness from the id, without realizing that in so doing it is actually fighting off erotic desires.

409. #409

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's structural dependence on the superego reveals how sublimation and identification produce a de-mergence of drives, unleashing the death drive within the superego and making morality itself a lethal product of psychic catabolism; fear of death and consciential fear are thus retraced to castration fear as their core.

     Threatened by dangers from three different directions, the ego displays the flight reflex by withdrawing its own cathexis from the perception of the threat... and re-deploying it as fear.

410. #410

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     X

     Theoretical move: Freud critiques Adler's and Rank's accounts of neurotic susceptibility, ultimately arguing that neurosis is determined not by any single cause but by quantitative ratios among biological, phylogenetic, and psychological factors—with repression, the compulsion to repeat, and the ego/id conflict as the core psychoanalytic mechanisms.

     Fear is the reaction to danger. Given that the affect of fear is able to commandeer a special position for itself in the psychic economy, it is surely plausible to suppose that this has to do with the nature of danger itself.

411. #411

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud uses traumatic neurosis and the fort/da game to establish that certain psychic phenomena — repetition of painful experiences in dreams and play — cannot be explained by the pleasure principle alone, pointing toward tendencies "beyond" the pleasure principle that are more primal and independent of it.

     'Fright', however, emphasizes the element of surprise; it describes the state that possesses us when we find ourselves plunged into danger without being prepared for it. I do not believe that fear can engender a traumatic neurosis; there is an element within fear that protects us against fright

412. #412

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud differentiates three distinct reactions to object-loss—fear, pain, and sorrow—by grounding the distinction in cathexis economics: pain is explained as narcissistic cathexis transferred to object-cathexis, while fear is a signal reaction to the danger of loss and sorrow is triggered by the reality-test's demand to withdraw cathexis from the lost object.

     fear comes to be a reaction to the danger of object-loss... when does separation from an object produce fear, when does it produce sorrow, and when – if at all – does it produce only pain?

413. #413

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud refines his metapsychology of repression by arguing that (1) the ego deploys a signal of unpleasure—not a mere transformation of drive-energy—to inhibit id-processes, and (2) fear is reproduced from primal traumatic memory-traces rather than generated anew, thereby relocating anxiety from the id to the ego and distinguishing primal from secondary repression.

     fear is not produced anew, but is reproduced as a state of affect on the basis of a pre-existing memory-image

414. #414

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/apparatus section of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Freud's writings, providing editorial clarifications, translation corrections, and cross-references. The one substantive theoretical note (note 83) articulates Freud's position on unconscious guilt, its analytic treatment, and the limits of the analyst's therapeutic role.

     This statement signals the beginnings of an important shift in Freud's concept of fear… Freud expands on his notion of Gewissensangst in Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear

415. #415

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud distinguishes inhibition from symptom by grounding inhibition in ego-function restriction—caused either by excessive eroticization of organs, conflict-avoidance with the id or superego, or energy depletion—while symptoms are processes operating outside or upon the ego, making the two conceptually non-equivalent even when clinically overlapping.

     It cannot escape our attention for very long that inhibition is related to fear. Numerous inhibitions clearly consist in relinquishing a particular function because fear would result if it were to be carried out.

416. #416

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This is an editorial notes section providing translator/editor commentary on Freud's terminology and cross-references between texts; the substantive theoretical content is minimal, confined to note 53 (on repression and the fate of drive-impulses) and note 74 (on masochism and the death drive in phobias).

     his objective fear is compounded by an element of fear relating to his drives... the fear reaction ends up being excessive, counter-purposive and paralysing.

417. #417

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/apparatus section providing translational, editorial, and cross-referential annotations to Freud's essays; it is non-substantive theoretical content and primarily serves as a philological and bibliographic resource.

     The original words are respectively *Schreck, Furcht* and *Angst.* The distinctions that Freud draws are lexically somewhat specious

418. #418

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that fear of death must be understood as an analogue of castration anxiety—not as a primary biological reaction to mortal danger—because the unconscious has no representation of death, while castration is made imaginable through everyday experiences of object-loss (bowels, breast, birth). This reframes fear as a reaction to separation/loss rather than merely a signal of danger, and opens a second economic possibility where fear is generated anew rather than simply signalled.

     fear is the ego's reaction to danger... fear is not only signalled as an affect, but is also created anew out of the economic conditions of the situation.

419. #419

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that traumatic neurosis results from a breach of the protective barrier against stimuli, and that the repetition compulsion operative in post-traumatic dreams reveals a psychic function more primordial than the pleasure principle — pointing toward a "beyond" that precedes wish-fulfilment as the dream's organizing telos.

     These dreams seek to assert control over the stimuli retrospectively by generating fear – the absence of which was the cause of the traumatic neurosis in the first place.

420. #420

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IX

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that symptom-formation is not directly tied to anxiety but is mediated by the 'danger situation': symptoms are created to extricate the ego from danger, with anxiety serving as the minimal signal that triggers this defensive process, while the persistence of archaic danger situations—rather than the drives themselves—is what distinguishes neurosis from normal development.

     fear-generation is the prelude to symptom-formation, indeed a necessary prerequisite of it, for if the ego didn't jolt the pleasure/unpleasure matrix into action by generating fear, it would not acquire the power to halt the process that was instigated in the id.

421. #421

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The introduction argues that Freud's theory of Eros is fundamentally a theory of repetition compulsion rooted in the lost maternal object, narcissism, and submission to authority—such that erotic life, political life, and the compulsion to repeat are all expressions of the same libidinal economy governed by the super-ego and the drive to restore an originary, impossible object.

     often because Eros, under such conditions, is homosexual and therefore anxiety-provoking

422. #422

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud refines and taxonomizes the mechanisms of repression and resistance, distinguishing five types of resistance from three psychic agencies (ego, id, superego), and revises his theory of anxiety away from direct libido-transformation toward an ego-signal theory grounded in the paradigmatic danger situation of birth.

     The introduction of this factor enabled us to view things in a new perspective. We now saw birth as the paradigm for all the danger situations that subsequently arise... The fear experienced at birth now became in this perspective the paradigm of a state of affect

423. #423

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Freud revises his earlier metapsychological claim that repression converts libido into fear, arguing instead—on the basis of comparative analysis of Little Hans and the Wolf-man—that castration anxiety in the ego is the *motor* that drives repression, not its product; this inversion reconstitutes the causal relationship between anxiety and repression.

     the affect of fear that constitutes the very essence of the phobia derives not from the repression process... but from the agent of repression itself; the fear in animal phobia is unconverted fear of castration

424. #424

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego-id and ego-superego relationships are not binary oppositions but dynamic, partially overlapping organizations; the symptom's "exterritoriality" from the ego-organization initiates a secondary defensive battle in which the ego oscillates between reconciliation (incorporating the symptom) and renewed repression, with secondary illness-gain reinforcing the symptom's fixation and generating analytic resistance.

     In the process we shall have occasion to discuss the problem of fear, which we have long felt to be lurking in the background

425. #425

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *Doubt as virtue*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious doubt, far from undermining faith, is the very condition that makes authentic decision and genuine love possible — only in the space of undecidability can a truly free, non-self-interested commitment be made, which Rollins figures through the concept of a "Holy Saturday experience."

     doubt not only can be seen as an inevitable aspect of our humanity but also can be celebrated as a vital part of faith.

426. #426

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Prosperity*

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a liturgical parody of prosperity theology and self-centred faith to enact a critique of orthopraxis versus orthodoxy: authentic faith is demonstrated not through correct doctrine, Bible-reading, or worship practices, but through transformative action oriented toward the neighbour — a theological move that deploys the logic of transgression to expose ideological religion as a fetishistic crutch that substitutes symbolic performance for genuine ethical engagement.

     he absolutely, totally and without equivocation believed in God. He was the perfect example of someone who suffered no doubt, uncertainty or anxiety in the face of the world

427. #427

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’* > *Background to the service*

     Theoretical move: Rollins argues that the theological weight of the crucifixion is only accessible when it is severed from the immediate comfort of the resurrection—the "closed tomb" as a testing-ground for faith stripped of economic return—thereby reframing the Easter singularity not as a consoling unity but as a site of irreducible decision and gift.

     we would be presented with the unnerving question as to whether our love of Christ is really a love of ourselves

428. #428

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’* > *Service description*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-liturgical argument that genuine faith requires dwelling in radical uncertainty (Holy Saturday) rather than instrumentalizing God for existential security — faith forged in the void of divine absence transcends reward/punishment logic, enacting a form of desire that is unconditional and non-transactional.

     It is a day that speaks of the absence of God and is as much a part of the Christian experience as the day before and the day after… there are times when we all are unsettled by the feeling that we have been abandoned

429. #429

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

     Fatalism in Times of Universalized Assthetization

     Theoretical move: Ruda argues that "transcendental fatalism"—the assumption that the worst has always already happened—is the necessary precondition for a proper concept of freedom, and that this insight is retrievable from a Hegelian counterhistory of rationalism structured as a "speculative proposition" whose very movement enacts the argument.

     Hope (for happiness, etc.) seems to offer here a new horizon, only to crush the individuals even more thoroughly. It is by virtue of this very hope that we avoid assuming the (knowledge that the) worst (had already happened).

430. #430

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.64

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > From Fortune to Providence

     Theoretical move: Ruda argues, via Descartes, that true rationalism requires fatalism: the affirmation of divine providence (absolute necessity) is the only consistent way to abolish fortune and hope, because it enables proper judgment by revealing the dialectical structure of the necessity of contingency and the contingency of necessity.

     if we do not believe in fortune, we abolish not only all hope but also fear. This is why Descartes can state, 'One of the main points in my own ethical code is to love life without fearing death.'

431. #431

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

     Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p34" class="page"></span>Affirm and Declare: Predestination!

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys Luther's doctrine of predestination as a structural analogue to the Freudian unconscious—a knowledge we do not know we have—in order to argue that embracing radical fatalism (the impossibility of self-grounded action or salvation) is the only authentic emancipatory position, one that negates human-reason's Aristotelian teleology and the ideological 'capitalization' of faith.

     Through despair and anxiety we come close to know what we do not know that we know.

432. #432

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.31

     Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p27" class="page"></span>Exaggerating Exaggeration, or Letting (God) Be . . . (God)

     Theoretical move: By reading Luther's radical defense of predestination and absolute necessity through an Adornian/Hegelian lens, the passage argues that genuine freedom is not a human capacity but an impossible event of grace that can only be received through total despair and passive surrender—a structure isomorphic to the Lacanian subject's relationship to the Real and to anxiety as the condition of truth.

     Its result is that any true believer is 'anguished at [her] roots.' What is this anguish? It is what springs from the impossibility of salvation and from the assumption that there will never be any chance for us to experience God's mercy.

433. #433

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.36

     Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p34" class="page"></span>Affirm and Declare: Predestination!

     Theoretical move: By reading Luther's anti-Erasmus argument through a Lacanian-Hegelian lens, Ruda shows that the doctrine of predestination functions as a 'forced choice' that abolishes free will precisely to open the space for genuine faith: the very structure of 'no Other of the Other' (no cause behind God's cause) and the gap between revealed God and hidden God enact a logic homologous to Lacanian alienation and the Real, reframing predestination as an emancipatory, anti-perverse position.

     The former emphasized anxiety and despair, whereas for the latter... faith had to be proved by its objective results.

434. #434

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > Desiring Fortune

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Descartes's fatalism (as belief in divine providence and immutable necessity) serves not as a simple external determination but as the precondition for a proper practice of freedom, by countering the will's unfreedom caused by desiring things dependent on fortune—which corrupts temporality, contingency, and self-determination—and thereby opposing Aristotelian eudaimonistic ethics.

     hope and fear, even though the expected outcome does not depend on us at all... 'what, in fact, is hope if not a sort of fear with its head hidden?'

435. #435

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.102

     The End of All Things > Brief Addendum: Kant with Schmid

     Theoretical move: By reading Kant's "The End of All Things" alongside Schmid's conflict of determinisms, Ruda argues that reason is structurally compelled to imagine its own total end: without this act of totalization, the struggle between phenomenal and noumenal determinism collapses into a mere human condition (existentialist fatalism), so imagining the apocalypse is itself a rational, and therefore quasi-fatalist, imperative.

     it leads us as it were to the edge of an abyss: for anyone who sinks into it no return is possible . . . and yet there is something attractive there too: for one cannot cease turning his terrified gaze back to it again and again.

436. #436

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.104

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Temptation to Give Up*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to a truth-event is structurally threatened by the Symbolic order's ideological valorization of utilitarian balance, which pathologizes the very excess and imbalance that genuine subjective commitment requires — making betrayal of the event the socially 'healthy' option.

     it, like the Lacanian act, threatens the very parameters of its symbolic existence, potentially generating a high level of anxiety

437. #437

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.234

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *2. The Rewriting of Destiny*

     Theoretical move: This passage, constituted by scholarly endnotes, theorizes the constitutive incoherence of the big Other (barred, lacking any Other of the Other), the pre-symbolic law of the mother as foundational subjection, the distinction between classical and modern tragedy as forms of destined versus destituted subjectivity, and the analytic end-point as confrontation with helplessness and the absence of a Sovereign Good — all articulating how drive, fantasy, and the real internally limit symbolic consistency.

     the child needs the Law of the Father to rescue it from this degree of frustration and anxiety… a certain readiness to feel anxiety

438. #438

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.70

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er* > *The Possibility for New Possibilities*

     Theoretical move: Lacanian analysis is theorized as a process that dismantles fantasy-generated fixity—the unconscious reproduction of the Other's desire as one's own—and converts symptomatic repetition into a more fluid, singular capacity for desire, where the goal is not happiness but the tolerance of anxiety and the opening of new existential possibilities.

     the subject who has completed analysis . . . should be able to tolerate a relatively high degree of anxiety. Such tolerance, rather than 'happiness' in the usual sense of the word, could be said to be the goal of Lacanian analysis

439. #439

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.28

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny*

     Theoretical move: The repetition compulsion is theorized as a structural binding mechanism that converts the unmanageable pressure of jouissance into the more stable organization of desire and symptomatic fixation, making it simultaneously a trap and a protective shield that grounds subjective continuity and singularity.

     If the phenomenological (say, Heideggerian) subject alleviates the anxiety of nothingness by espousing the (falsely reassuring) complacency of the social collectivity, the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) subject does the same by embracing the (equally false) security of its symptoms.

440. #440

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.55

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *Validity in Excess of Meaning*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other's desire functions through a "validity in excess of meaning" — a surplus that exceeds rational comprehension — which binds subjects to institutions not through explicit juridical demands but through visceral, unconscious citation of authority, generating anxiety that curves the subject's everyday space and drives the desperate Che vuoi? toward an Other that is itself incapable of accounting for its own desire.

     the excess 'validity' of the Other's enigmatic desire can overstimulate our constitution to such an extent that we experience a breakdown of normal functioning. Our helplessness in the face of the Other's desire can cause the kind of anxiety that makes it impossible for us to proceed with life 'as usual.'

441. #441

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.59

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The (Uneven) Tragedy of Human Life*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian alienation must be stratified into two distinct registers—foundational/existential and contingent/historical—exposing how socially produced inequalities compound the universal trauma of symbolic inscription, so that "destiny" is not uniformly demoralizing but differentially so depending on one's positioning within networks of power.

     they may also find it harder to shed the sinking feeling that there is no respite from its intrusiveness... they may find this difficult even when there is no immediate danger—even when there is no discernible cause for anxiety.

442. #442

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.175

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Upside of Anxiety*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety and singularity are structurally linked through the surplus energies of the Real, and that sublimation functions as Lacan's more rigorous answer to Heidegger's existential authenticity: it binds anxiety by welcoming jouissance without being engulfed by it, making anxiety a precondition of creativity rather than a pathology to be eliminated.

     Lacan similarly implied that anxiety is often inextricable from singularity. However, perhaps because of his interest in linguistics, Lacan was able to develop a more detailed model for coping with anxiety than Heidegger.

443. #443

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.63

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The "Truth" of Desire*

     Theoretical move: Against reductive readings that cast Lacan as a defender of hegemonic law, this passage argues that Lacanian analysis aims not at social adaptation but at releasing the singularity of the subject's desire from beneath the Other's oppressive signifiers—and that refusing to cede on one's desire constitutes both the clinical goal and a form of political resistance.

     Lacan links this 'human condition' to anguish, distress, and psychic disarray

444. #444

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.143

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart* > *The* Erscheinung *of the Matchbox*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized not merely as artistic practice but as a universal human operation: by elevating an ordinary object (the matchbox) to the dignity of the Thing, sublimation allows a trace of Das Ding—and of forbidden jouissance—to materialize within everyday life, even though the elevated object remains a substitute that can never deliver the Thing-in-itself.

     Kjar was a depressive woman who kept complaining about 'an empty space inside her, a space she could never fill.' … This spot precipitated Kjar's descent into severe depression.

445. #445

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.262

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (pages 262–263) listing concepts, proper names, and page references; it is non-substantive as continuous theoretical argument but indexes key Lacanian concepts deployed throughout the work.

     anxiety, 162–164

446. #446

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.147

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart* > *Sublimation and the Pleasure Principle*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized as the instrument by which the death drive's push toward the Thing is deflected into desire regulated by the pleasure principle: by inserting the signifier between subject and Thing and redirecting drive toward objet a, sublimation makes satisfaction possible while preserving the subject from the annihilating proximity of jouissance, thereby constituting the structural "destiny" of the subject's psychic life.

     the kind of 'too muchness' of energy that periodically overwhelms the pleasure principle and causes anxiety

447. #447

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.202

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Love's Innovative Energy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love's "innovative energy" derives from its structural orientation toward the Thing—the sublime kernel that desire perpetually circles without attaining—and pivots to a concluding framing of Lacanian ethics as a post-Levinasian problematic: where Levinas grounds ethics in the face's appeal, Lacan splits the other's face into culturally intelligible attributes and the anxiety-producing strangeness of das Ding, reorienting ethical concern from pluralistic tolerance to the encounter with the "inhuman" other and a resurgence of universalist ethics.

     there is the specter of the other as Thing, as an anxiety-producing and menacing stranger.

448. #448

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.187

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Overproximity of the Object*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sublime love-object's overproximity to the Thing triggers anxiety and a defensive resort to fantasy: fantasy's function is to tame the Real dimension of the other by rendering it safely familiar, but in doing so it risks obliterating the very singularity that makes the other desirable.

     whenever the subject draws too close to the object, it is filled by an unmanageable degree of anxiety that keeps it from 'crossing a certain frontier at the limit of the Thing'

449. #449

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.125

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a occupies a paradoxical double position—it is both the real itself and the symbolic's positivized failure to reach the real—and uses this logic to distinguish psychoanalysis (which registers its own limits as the condition of truth) from historicism/skepticism (which forecloses the real by filling every gap with causal-cultural chains), while reading Frankenstein's monster as the paradigmatic modern subject: structurally constituted by the failure/lack of knowledge rather than by any positive invention.

     In response to anxiety's signal of danger, one flees or avoids the real. But one flees into a symbolic whose hedge against the real is secured only through its negation of the real.

450. #450

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.237

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 5**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 5, providing bibliographic citations and brief clarifying glosses for claims made in the chapter body. It is largely non-substantive but contains several theoretically load-bearing footnotes connecting anxiety, extimacy, consciousness, negation, and desire to specific Lacanian sources.

     the uncanny is accompanied by 'a special core of feeling.' The specialness of this feeling of anxiety is made conceptually explicit by Lacan.

451. #451

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.136

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > **Breast-Feeding and Freedom**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Enlightenment definition of the free subject necessarily generates anxiety by installing a real "double" (objet petit a) within the symbolic, and that the Kantian aesthetics of the beautiful writes the impossibility of "saying it all," thereby protecting the subject's freedom; the reduction of rights to demands (as in the horizontal/historicist model) eliminates desire and the object-cause of freedom, as illustrated by Frankenstein's catastrophic literalism toward the monster's cry.

     We have been arguing that this advocacy must be viewed as a manifestation of anxiety, especially similar to that expressed in vampire fiction. We have also argued that anxiety must not be interpreted, that we must not seek an external cause for it.

452. #452

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.135

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_page127"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_pg127" class="pagebreak" title="127"></span></span>**The Drying Up of the Breast**

     Theoretical move: Copjec uses the spatial logic of the Gothic forbidden room—simultaneously surplus and deficit, inside and outside—to define anxiety as an affect aroused by pure existence without sense: where signification fails to assign position in a differential network, bare "thereness" persists as the uncanny.

     This, then, is our final definition of the anxiety that attends the uncanny: it is an affect aroused in reaction to an existence, to pure existence, without sense.

453. #453

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.128

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_page127"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_pg127" class="pagebreak" title="127"></span></span>**The Drying Up of the Breast**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that vampirism and the uncanny are structurally indexed to the collapse of the fantasy relation to the partial object (objet petit a): when the extimate object loses its status as object-cause of desire and is encountered at zero distance, anxiety replaces desire, the fantasy structure collapses, and jouissance floods in—a logic illustrated through breast-feeding discourse, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and Marker's La Jetée.

     The Gothic world is, in fact, only conceivable as the elimination of sentiment. If vampirism makes our hearts pound, our pulses race, and our breathing come in troubled bursts, this is not because it puts us in contact with objects and persons—others—who affect us, but because it confronts us with an absence of absence—an Other—who threatens to asphyxiate us.

454. #454

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.118

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that anxiety, as a signal of the overproximity of objet petit a (a "lack of lack"), cannot be met with interpretation but only with the symbolic's repeated, self-differentiating negation of the real — a negation that must operate without naming, thereby making doubt a defense against the real rather than a mark of uncertainty.

     Anxiety registers the non sequitur, a gap in the causal chain.

455. #455

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.49

     **Cutting Up** > **Cause: Lacan and Aristotle**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's concept of *automaton* (Aristotle's category of chance/failure of final cause) reframes the classical philosophical problem of cause: rather than a Prime Mover securing bodily unity and freedom, it is language's cut that divides the subject from part of itself, and this primary detachment — not Bergsonian illusion — is the true source of Eleatic paradoxes and the endless, asymptotic structure of desire.

     It is to this passage… that Lacan refers in his seminar on anxiety when he summarizes the classical philosophical position on the question of cause

456. #456

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan** > **The Mirror as Screen**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory fundamentally misreads Lacan's concept of the gaze by collapsing it into a Foucauldian optics of total visibility and perspectival construction; the Lacanian gaze, properly understood from Seminar XI, is not a point of surveillance but the Objet petit a in the visual field—an unoccupiable, impossible-real absence that founds the subject as desiring precisely through what it cannot see.

     the spotting of the shiny, mirrorlike sardine can—and an attack of anxiety

457. #457

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.176

     **FRIDAY, MARCH 17**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a memoir excerpt depicting grief, trauma, and guilt following a son's suicide; it contains no substantive Lacanian or psychoanalytic theoretical argumentation, operating instead as personal narrative testimony.

     particularly anxiety. I'd often thought that a great share of his need for drugs was an effort to self-medicate. During his first year in high school, he had classic anxiety attacks in the hallway between classes

458. #458

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.158

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c11_r1.xhtml_page_143" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="143"></span>*11*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs an analytic move of self-accusation in which the author recognises that his systematic disavowal of his own anger operated as a defence mechanism that produced 'sham harmony,' and theorises that his son may have assumed the very aggressive current the father repudiated—an 'inverting mirror' dynamic that links parental repression to the child's symptom.

     The madder I get, the tighter and more prone to errors I become. It's a vicious circle of accelerating but impotent rage.

459. #459

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.78

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c07_r1.xhtml_page_76" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="76"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c07_r1.xhtml_page_77" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="77"></span>*7*

     Theoretical move: The passage enacts the analytic session as a site where dream-work, traumatic association, and unconscious guilt converge: the dreaming subject's images (black lake, renovated cottage, self-shooting) are mobilized in the transference with the analyst (Barbara), ultimately forcing the analysand to articulate the guilt-laden fantasy that his son's death was his own fault — a move from free association to confession that the analytic frame makes both possible and unbearable.

     Gliding over it is intensely exhilarating, though I'm continually aware of the black depth beneath, which fills me with both awe and dread.

460. #460

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby

     **WEDNESDAY, MARCH 15**

     Theoretical move: Through first-person grief narrative, the passage inverts the conventional logic of death and presence: the bereaved survivor becomes the absent ghost while the dead son assumes overwhelming, hyper-real presence, theorizing mourning as a structural reversal of reality in which the living are drained of being and project their own void onto the deceased.

     the demon is upon me immediately. It shoots through me, a now-familiar, cold electricity.

461. #461

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.111

     **WEDNESDAY, MARCH 15**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a memoir account of grief, guilt, and uncanny connection following a son's suicide; it contains no substantive psychoanalytic or philosophical theoretical argumentation and does not deploy concepts from the Lacanian or Hegelian corpus in any load-bearing way.

     I no longer feel the slightest trace of fear or apprehension.

462. #462

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.190

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c13_r1.xhtml_page_182" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="182"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c13_r1.xhtml_page_183" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="183"></span>*13*

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a first-person account of a psilocybin research session to enact, at the level of lived experience, a dissolution of the boundaries between self and other, reality and unreality, life and death—culminating in an identification with the dead son that functions as a form of grief-work running parallel to, and impatient with, the formal analytic process.

     If I tense up with anxiety, the whole scene uncomfortably constricts... But if I consciously remind myself to relax, to just flow with the experience, the space in which I find myself softens

463. #463

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.63

     **TUESDAY, MARCH 14**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a memoir excerpt recounting the author's grief and trauma following his son Oliver's suicide, depicting the encounter with the body at the funeral home, and providing biographical context around Oliver's mental deterioration, addiction, and violent ideation. It is primarily narrative and autobiographical rather than theoretical.

     I fear for Elaine, but I also fear for myself... They are still very much in my mind when we enter the funeral home a few hours later.

464. #464

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.270

     **WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs an autobiographical-clinical reflection on grief as a defense structure: guilt functions as a protective screen against the deeper wound of pure loss, and only when that defense is progressively dismantled through analysis does the subject encounter the more fundamental Real of absence—a move that maps directly onto psychoanalytic concepts of defense, the lost object, and the ethics of mourning.

     A stab of panic is a cold jolt. Am I so soon to lose that last bare trace of him?

465. #465

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.244

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c18_r1.xhtml_page_239" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="239"></span>*18*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a clinical-autobiographical move in which the analysand's attempt to assume total guilt is itself identified as a defensive maneuver—a neurotic alibi that reinstates ego-mastery against the more destabilizing analytic revelations of self-deception and hidden aggression, while simultaneously raising the question of the limits of psychoanalytic interpretation when applied to another's life and death.

     I can't help feeling—I have a hard time getting my breath—I can't help feeling that I've reached a sort of bedrock of the whole terrible history.

466. #466

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.22

     **SUNDAY TO MONDAY, MARCH 13**

     Theoretical move: This autobiographical passage records the immediate traumatic aftermath of a son's suicide, enacting rather than theorizing the structure of trauma: the refusal of the Real to register, the compulsive return to the moment of the act, and the search for a hidden secret in the frozen instant that might make the loss intelligible.

     the wave of panic, the desperate need to do something, anything, then the sickening realization of my helplessness

467. #467

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.202

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c14_r1.xhtml_page_198" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="198"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c14_r1.xhtml_page_199" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="199"></span>*14*

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a classic analytic move: the analysand's resistance to self-knowledge (contempt for "pat Freudian formulas") is itself interpreted as a defence against a painful discovery — that projected opacity onto the other (ex-wife, son) screens disavowed rage within the self, illustrating how projection and denial function in the transference relationship.

     I was fascinated by the depths of the lake but also afraid of them. In the dream image, it was the fear that stood out.

468. #468

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.292

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 4. The Master Signifier

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian master signifier (phallus) is grounded in the paradoxical intersection of the imaginary and symbolic constituted by the objet a, and that "phallocentrism" does not underwrite masculine superiority but rather reveals that masculinity is structurally defined by lack and anxiety, such that penis envy is most acutely suffered by those who possess a penis.

     it is some other man. Every man is tormented by the specter of the primal father who 'really has what it takes.' It is in this sense that an anxious homosexuality lies at the heart of every assertion of masculine prerogative

469. #469

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.101

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > <span id="ch2.xhtml_p99" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 99. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Specimen Dream of Psychoanalysis

     Theoretical move: By reading Freud's 'Irma's Injection' dream through Lacan's Seminar II, Boothby argues that the dream's two nodal moments—the horrifying vision of Irma's throat (encounter with the Real) and the chemical formula of trimethylamine (master signifier)—enact the movement from imaginary dissolution to symbolic resolution, revealing the unconscious as the domain of the signifier's power rather than ego-wish fulfillment.

     this real Medusa's head, to the revelation of this something which properly speaking is unnameable... the object of anxiety par excellence

470. #470

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.255

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Between the Look and the Gaze

     Theoretical move: By contrasting Lacan's triadic structure of the gaze (subject / visual object / gaze as third locus) with Sartre's dyadic "look," Boothby argues that the objet a operates as an invisible third term within the scopic drive, functioning precisely through its unattainability to perpetually re-energize visual desire rather than satisfying it.

     this attractiveness... is coupled with a simultaneous excitement of anxiety (which arises with the viewer's painful recognition of how little she resembles the beauty queen displayed on the magazine cover).

471. #471

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.246

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > The Object-Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *objet petit a* is the "object-cause" of desire: a primordially lost, liminal object that is simultaneously imaginary, symbolic, and real yet belongs to none, and whose retroactive ceding—not subtraction from a pre-formed subject—constitutes the desiring subject itself, such that desire paradoxically originates only in and through the loss of its object.

     anxiety... is linked to the fact that I do not know what object a I am for the desire of the Other... the function of anxiety is prior to this ceding of the object.

472. #472

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.6

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > To Recall Freud's Witch

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freudian metapsychology is coextensive with psychoanalytic theory as such, and that its central—if problematic—pillar is the concept of psychical energy, which undergirds everything from displacement and condensation to repression, narcissism, and the dual drive theory; the repeated attacks on metapsychology are therefore nothing less than attacks on the theoretical foundation of psychoanalysis itself.

     In anxiety, for example, the psychoanalytic affect par excellence, we seem to perceive the effects of a pent-up quantity of force vainly in search of release.

473. #473

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.47

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > Heidegger: The Disposition of Being

     Theoretical move: Boothby reads Heidegger's existential analytic—particularly the concepts of being-in-the-world, ready-to-hand, worldhood, and anxiety—as a philosophically deepened version of the gestalt figure-ground structure and the 'dispositional field,' arguing that the unthematized horizon of Dasein's involvements constitutes an unconscious ground structurally analogous to, but more radical than, Husserlian background consciousness, and that inauthenticity consists in the repression of this essential openness in favor of reified presence-at-hand.

     For Heidegger, the vertigo of Dasein's radical openness constitutes the very essence of anxiety, to escape which Dasein tends to close off the horizon of its possibilities.

474. #474

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.152

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Aggressivity and the Death Drive

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan's reinterpretation displaces the death drive from biology onto the imaginary register: the death drive is the disintegrating pressure of the Real against imaginary binding, making psychical life a ceaseless dialectic of formation and deformation that grounds both aggressivity and desire in the alienating structure of the ego.

     It is its purely negative character that links the death drive to anxiety. 'If it is difficult to conceptually grasp the death drive,' Serge Leclaire has remarked, 'at least we have in anxiety the experience of being grasped by its force.'

475. #475

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.109

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > In the Navel of the Dream

     Theoretical move: By reading the sexual imagery of Freud's Irma dream through its "switch word" (Lösung/solution), Boothby argues that Freud's resistance to sexual interpretation at the dream's navel point reveals a constitutive guilt—not merely professional anxiety—at the core of the dream's formation, linking seduction theory, transference, and the hysterical symptom to a repressed sexual scenario involving Freud himself.

     the anxiety in the dream is obviously not simply an expression of Freud's fear that his work would be rejected by the medical establishment. The dream is centrally concerned not just with fear but with guilt.

476. #476

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.278

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > How the Real World Became a Phantasy

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a is the structural condition of both love and reality-testing: it is the paradoxical lost object that simultaneously grounds erotic desire (as what the beloved signifies but does not possess) and the sense of reality (as the constitutive lack that prevents absolute certainty), thereby recasting the Freudian reality principle in genuinely radical terms against ego-psychological adaptation models.

     the anxiety elicited by her over-intense gaze is circuited back into a revivified sense of her transcendent beauty

477. #477

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.199

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > The Thing about the Other

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Freud's Emma case from the *Project*, Boothby argues that the mechanism of deferred trauma (*Nachträglichkeit*) depends on the di-phasic structure of sexuality: the prematurity of the original experience means that an apparently tamed memory can later bypass primary defense and unleash an uncontrolled primary-process discharge, making the symptom a "symbol of a symbol" produced by a double layer of repression and symbolic substitution.

     the second, ostensibly more innocent scene with the two shop-assistants produced a severe attack of anxiety and triggered a lasting phobia of going alone into shops.

478. #478

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.164

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Language Acquisition and the Oedipus Complex

     Theoretical move: Lacan's innovation on the Oedipus complex is to ground the castration complex not in contingent parental threat but in a structural, essential transition from the imaginary to the symbolic order: the fragmentation of the ego-body-image (corps morcelé) is the internal psychical correlate of accession to the linguistic signifier, with the penis functioning as the privileged imaginary support for binary opposition at the foundation of language.

     Children of four to seven years of age display a marked interest in the breaking apart of the body's wholeness, a kind of anxious but fascinated enthrallment with the image of the corps morcelé.

479. #479

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.111

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > In the Navel of the Dream

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Irma dream has a symmetrical double structure in which "solution" operates as a condensation of both professional and sexual meanings, revealing that Freud's anxieties about professional status were underpinned by anxieties about his own sexuality — a claim confirmed by the formal homology between the Irma dream and the later Mathilde/Hella dream.

     Freud's anxieties about his own sexuality lay beneath and in important ways reinforced his anxiousness about his professional status.

480. #480

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > Heidegger: The Disposition of Being

     Theoretical move: Heidegger's concept of authenticity is redefined through the primordial encounter with the nothing: Dasein's openness to being is only possible via anxiety before nothingness, and this structure — beings appearing only against the backdrop of a primordial absence — is positioned as a philosophical precursor to Lacan's logic of lack.

     The movement toward authenticity thus necessarily passes by way of anxiety in the face of the nothing.

481. #481

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.248

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > The Object-Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sacrifice functions to anchor the Other's desire in the symbolic by ceding the real object (objet a), and that this ceding is the very condition of subjective desire — the subject must give up the object in order not to give up on desire, with the two moments of ceding being exactly complementary rather than contradictory.

     To tame the god in the snare of desire is essential, and not to awaken anxiety.

482. #482

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.148

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > <span id="ch3.xhtml_p141" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 141. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Imaginary Alienation

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan's concept of the Real functions as a rigorous reformulation of Freud's energetic metaphor (libido/drive), positing the Real as a primitively excluded remainder of imaginary partitioning that can only be encountered obliquely—through anxiety and the disintegration of imaginary coherence—and that the lamelle concretizes this excluded real as the undifferentiated life-drive that haunts the subject after ego-formation.

     It is in anxiety that the subject comes closest to a pure experience of the real... the upsurge of anxiety occurs in the breakdown of imaginary coherence.

483. #483

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.97

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Religion as well-being

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that reducing Christian faith to a set of theoretical beliefs (especially about afterlife and eternal meaning) constitutes a form of nihilism that evacuates the transformative truth of faith; genuine faith must embrace existential uncertainty and unknowing rather than use beliefs as protective "crutches" against the fragility of mortal life.

     Uncertainties, doubts, and suffering are part of life, and thus they are part of faith (which is not an escape from life but a means of entering more fully into it).

484. #484

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.40

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage makes a theological-pastoral argument by deploying Levinas's saying/said distinction to claim that genuine truth of faith operates at the level of performative presence (the saying) rather than propositional content (the said), and then illustrates — via a parable — how any fixed codification of a transformative ethical injunction betrays its spirit by converting it back into a new law.

     questioning and uncertainty have a place in the life of faith, they are not useful for those who are suffering from pain and anxiety. At these times it is often said that people require certainties

485. #485

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.239

     The Writing on the Wall > **No Matter** > **Otto's Dirty Syringe**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a close reading of Freud's Irma dream to show how the dream-work's mechanisms of displacement and metonymy allow Freud to redirect reproach and anxiety outward onto colleagues, while the concept of Nachträglichkeit (retroactive re-signification) reveals how the dream retrospectively crystalizes an earlier "obscure impression" into a legible accusation—ultimately functioning as wish-fulfillment that acquits Freud and vindicates his professional identity.

     it was also connected to this image by way of Freud's ongoing attempt to relieve anxiety about his professional identity and, in so doing, to evade being-towards-death.

486. #486

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.72

     Fuzzy Math > **Dialectical Fraud**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's critique of the 'present age' diagnoses a 'dialectical fraud' in modernity: the Hegelian Aufhebung/sublation, when applied to the principle of contradiction, dissolves the qualitative disjunction between good and evil into 'existential equivocation' (Tvetydighed), producing a regime of prudence-reflection (Forstands-Refl exionens) that generates endless chatter while foreclosing decisive action.

     a trail of critical social thought initially blazed in Philosophical Fragments, further developed in The Concept of Anxiety

487. #487

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.61

     Barbers and Philosophers > **Poorly Provisioned Parrots** > **The Age of Distinctions**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's distinction between the *eiron* (ironic self-aware figure who acknowledges the limits of knowledge) and the *alazon* (boastful pretender who parrots claims beyond his understanding) is deployed as the philosophical hinge between worldly social sagacity and genuine ironic instruction, positioning irony as the proper response to the outer limit of human understanding rather than speculative chatter.

     Yet another reason why The Concept of Anxiety begins with Kierkegaard quoting Hamann quoting Plato's account of Socrates: 'He distinguished between what he understood and what he did not understand.'

488. #488

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.54

     Barbers and Philosophers > **Poorly Provisioned Parrots**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Kierkegaard's concept of *Eftersnakken* (parroting) to argue that Hegelian discipleship in Denmark constitutes a form of self-deluding intellectual mimicry, in which derivative repetition is compounded by delusional claims of having surpassed the original — a duplicity of tedious parroting cloaked in pretentious chatter (*snak*).

     the anxiety of influence behind their delusions of grandeur is so profound that they are unable, or at least unwilling, to observe the contradiction

489. #489

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.246

     The Writing on the Wall > **Mixing Subjects**

     Theoretical move: Through the concept of *l'immixtion des sujets* (inmixing of subjects), Lacan distinguishes two structural moments in Freud's Irma dream: first, the imaginary decomposition of the ego into identificatory fragments (a polycephalic crowd), and second, the emergence of an acephalic, unconscious speaking subject ("Nemo") at the symbolic level, whose voice exceeds the ego and culminates in the purely signifying, graphic inscription of the trimethylamine formula — thereby grounding the unconscious as a phenomenon of the Symbolic Order that is irreducible to egocentric interpretation.

     By appealing to 'the consensus of his fellow-beings, of his equals, of his colleagues, of his superiors,' Freud is able to shield himself from the ghastly contents of Irma's mouth, offsetting his own anxiety and being-towards-death as a psychoanalyst

490. #490

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.281

     A Play of Props > **Insistent Trauma**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the recursive dream-sequence in Freud's Irma dream operates across three registers of analytic repetition, with the first and most fundamental being *tuché* — the traumatic encounter with the Real that fantasy both screens and preserves, linking imaginary-real dream imagery to symbolic-real formulas through the logic of repetition.

     each of these images is an anxious repetition of one or more traumatic mishaps in Freud's medical practice

491. #491

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.131

     Fuzzy Math > **Babble Dabble** > **Maundering Equivocation**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's analysis of Adler's case demonstrates how Hegelian speculative thought produces "dialectical equivocation" — a structural confusion between subjective experience and objective religious authority, between divine logos and public opinion — which degrades authentic religious commitment into probabilistic "preacher-prattle" oriented toward social comfort rather than truth.

     Instead of suffering for his earlier pronouncements in fear, trembling, and faith that the voice he heard was in fact that of Jesus, Adler was using preacher-prattle to console church officials

492. #492

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.151

     Beginning More than Halfway There > **The Crisis of Learning** > **Wringing Necks**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the pre-history of Heidegger's concept of Gerede (idle talk) through his early Freiburg lectures and his break with Husserl, arguing that his critique of worldview philosophy, popular scholarship, and university reform rhetoric anticipates the ontological-existential analysis of fallen public discourse in Being and Time.

     the growing indifference to rigorous problematics with which it attempted to meet these needs

493. #493

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.83

     Fuzzy Math > **Dialectical Fraud** > **The Problem with Hereditary Sin**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's critique of sorites reasoning—the quantitative accumulation that purports to generate qualitative change—grounds his opposition to Hegelian dialectics and modern 'leveling' discourse, arguing that genuine qualitative change can only occur through a sudden leap, not through gradual numerical progression; any claim to the contrary dissolves into myth and small talk.

     The Concept of Anxiety is a sustained reflection on the Christian notion of hereditary sin … it does so by revealing the fuzzy math of the sorites reasoning that informs dogmatic accounts of this key moment

494. #494

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.237

     The Writing on the Wall > **No Matter**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's dream of Irma's injection to argue that the nonsensical speech of Dr. M. ("no matter" / *macht nichts*) functions as an instance of Heideggerian everyday discourse (*alltägliche Rede*) that simultaneously voices and covers over anxiety about being-towards-death, thereby protecting Freud's professional identity while gesturing toward a constitutive void or *Nichts*.

     Only '*no matter*' seemed to relieve his anxiety. 'This was intended as a consolation,' Freud concludes— a way to shift the blame for Irma's illness

495. #495

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.113

     Fuzzy Math > **Bustling Loquacity**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Kierkegaard's analysis of Adler to theorize "bustling loquacity" as a structural condition in which the subject's failure of inward self-mastery drives a compulsive outward chattering, whereby public opinion and repetition are recruited as substitutes for genuine subjective certitude — thereby exposing the "fuzzy math" of democratic public culture as a mechanism that dissolves singular decision into quantitative accumulation.

     It was fear as much as confusion that made him quick to publish: fear of error and uncertainty, fear of silence and solitude, fear of humility before God— in short, fear of anything that might require private reflection and personal resolve.

496. #496

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.224

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Fearless Flight**

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Heidegger's communicative-existential continuum between average everydayness and authentic existence, then pivots to show how *alltägliche Rede* and the mood of anxiety open circuitous, non-linear routes to authentic existence by disclosing the world's groundlessness rather than by deliberate philosophical traversal.

     The mood in which we encounter our potential for authentic existence is not fear but anxiety. And that in the face of which we experience anxiety is not a specific entity within-the-world but something 'completely indefinite' (völlig unbestimmt).

497. #497

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.106

     Fuzzy Math > **Trembling Impatience**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's critique of Adler diagnoses "trembling impatience" — the compulsive rush from inner experience to public expression — as a structural failure rooted in the confusion of religious authority with scholarly (Hegelian) genius, positioning silence/quietude (Ro, in pausa) as the necessary mediation between revelation and utterance.

     Adler became doubtful, irresolute, and increasingly chatty, eventually developing 'a nervous tremor that in trembling impatience can neither hold on to anything nor beneficially give up anything.'

498. #498

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.290

     A Play of Props > *Paralipsis* > **24 July 1895**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's dream of Irma's injection as a case study to argue that the *tuché* (traumatic encounter with the real) undergoes secondary repression and returns only in distorted form, so that analytic repetition is always founded on a "constitutive occultation" — the opacity of trauma and its resistance to signification — meaning the return of the repressed is never a direct repetition but a repetition riddled with difference, mediated by condensation and displacement.

     'He lives in an atmosphere of anxiety with the feeling that he's making a dangerous discovery'

499. #499

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.311

     A Play of Props > **Calculating Machines**

     Theoretical move: The passage concludes by mapping the conceptual history of everyday talk (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Lacan) onto the digital age's "control society," arguing that the algorithmic transcoding of communicative practices into behavioral data reduces subjects to "dividuals," and that emergent forms of resistance (personal data unions) must recover the individuating, self-cultivating potentials encoded in chatter, idle talk, and empty speech.

     the conceptual history which stretches from Kierkegaard to Heidegger to Lacan is less a history of the idea of everyday talk than a study of how the modern world became anxious about this way of speaking

500. #500

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.265

     The Writing on the Wall > First and Final Words > **Tessellations of Empty Speech**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that "empty speech" operates as a tessellation — a mechanical, recursive, senseless patterning of discourse (mapped through Lacan's reading of Freud's Irma dream) — structurally analogous to herringbone designs and automata, thereby revealing the imaginary, ego-driven, and fundamentally alogos character of everyday talk.

     allowing Freud to shirk anxiety and being-towards-death, but only by disclosing the emptiness at the center of these worrisome states

501. #501

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.242

     The Writing on the Wall > **No Matter** > *Mene¯, Mene¯, Teke¯ l, Upharsin*

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's re-analysis of Freud's dream of Irma's injection as a structural pivot from imaginary ego-object dialogue to a traumatic encounter with the Real, using the biblical *Mene, Tekel, Peres* as an interpretive parallel to show how the dream stages the decentering of the subject in relation to the ego and the decomposition of imaginary identifications.

     the object of anxiety par excellence— in short, 'the revelation of this something which properly speaking is unnamable'

502. #502

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.99

     Fuzzy Math > Preacher- Prattle

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's critique of "preacher-prattle" (Præstesnak) turns on a theological distinction between divine logos (quiet, eternal, gift-giving) and human lalia (boisterous, hasty, time-forgetting), where the real stakes are not silence vs. noise but the temporal rate at which each mode of speech should be heeded—a conceptual move that grounds his philosophy of religious discourse and its corrupted modern form.

     several errant lines of thought, notably psychosocial flurries of alarm, anxiety, impatience, confusion, absentmindedness, equivocation, delusion, and spiritual dizziness

503. #503

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.162

     Beginning More than Halfway There > **A Specter in Disguise**

     Theoretical move: By tracing Heidegger's 1923 hermeneutics of facticity lectures, the passage argues that *Gerede* (idle talk) is the constitutive medium of *das Man*'s anonymous, ruinant publicness — a phantasmatic specter that masks *Dasein*'s anxiety before itself — and that this structure is exemplified in the totalizing academic discourse of disciplinary philosophy and history, which mistake their own idle consensus for genuine inquiry.

     The warding off 'of' anxiety. Such visibility is the mask in which factical Dasein lets itself be encountered, in which it comes forth and appears before itself as though it really 'were' it

504. #504

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.226

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Fearless Flight** > **"It Was Really Nothing"**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's *alltägliche Rede* ("everyday discourse") occupies a theoretical space irreducible to idle talk (*Gerede*): in the anxious utterance "it was really nothing," the speaker inadvertently gives authentic expression to the nothingness of being-towards-death, so that everyday discourse simultaneously covers over and discloses the anxiety it attempts to flee — a deterritorialized mode of speech that bridges average everydayness and authentic existence.

     Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being that is, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself

505. #505

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.155

     Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical > **Hu's on First**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy and jokes share the mechanism of the point de capiton (quilting point) but differ structurally and temporally: jokes build toward a single retroactive S1, while comedy generates a series of surplus-objects (objet petit a) that function simultaneously as effects and causes of the comic movement, producing a 'staccato fluidity' of continuous discontinuity. Furthermore, jokes operate on two levels—laughing at content and laughing at the contingent, precarious functioning of the signifying order itself—and Freud's forepleasure theory must be supplemented by a reverse mechanism in which tendentious content acts as a smokescreen enabling confrontation with universal nonsense.

     How come we actually laugh at this? Should it not, rather, cause in us something like existential anxiety?

506. #506

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: By moving from traumatic neurosis (and the compulsive return of its dreams) to the fort/da game, Freud establishes that repetition of unpleasurable experience cannot be fully accounted for by the pleasure principle, thereby opening the conceptual space for drives that are 'more primal than and independent of' the pleasure principle — i.e., the Beyond.

     'Fright', however, emphasizes the element of surprise; it describes the state that possesses us when we find ourselves plunged into danger without being prepared for it. I do not believe that fear can engender a traumatic neurosis; there is an element within fear that protects us against fright.

507. #507

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The introduction argues that Freudian erotic theory is fundamentally a theory of repetition compulsion: libidinal life is structured by the unattainable lost (maternal) object, narcissistic fascination, and the superego's demand for punishment, such that the compulsion to repeat past fixations makes genuine erotic liberation—and by extension political freedom—structurally impossible.

     Love for authority sublimates Eros, makes it less immediately perceptible, often because Eros, under such conditions, is homosexual and therefore anxiety-provoking.

508. #508

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's precarious position between id, super-ego, and external world is structured by a dynamic of drive de-mergence: sublimation and identification unleash destructive drives within the super-ego, turning morality itself into a product of the death drive's catabolism, while castration fear is identified as the nuclear core of all anxiety (consciential, fear of death, neurotic).

     Threatened by dangers from three different directions, the ego displays the flight reflex by withdrawing its own cathexis from the perception of the threat… and re-deploying it as fear.

509. #509

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud revises and taxonomizes the concept of resistance (distinguishing five types from three sources: ego, id, superego) and reformulates the theory of anxiety/fear, shifting from direct libido-transformation to an ego-signal model grounded in danger situations, thereby refining the structural account of repression, counter-cathexis, and working-through.

     The objection to this previous interpretation stemmed from my argument making the ego the sole locus of fear... The earlier interpretation tended to regard the libido of the repressed drive-impulse as the source of the fear; according to the later one, however, this fear was the ego's responsibility.

510. #510

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Freud constructs a speculative metapsychology of the Pcpt-Cs system as a boundary membrane—consciousness arises *instead of* a memory trace, the protective barrier (Reizschutz) against external stimuli has no counterpart for internal excitations, and trauma is defined as precisely the breakthrough of this barrier, suspending the pleasure principle and forcing the apparatus into binding (annexation) of free-flowing excitation energy.

     An event such as external trauma will doubtless provoke a massive disturbance in the organism's energy system, and mobilize all available defence mechanisms.

511. #511

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that traumatic neurosis results from a breach of the protective barrier, and that repetition-compulsion dreams (which seek retrospective mastery over trauma) constitute a function of the psyche independent of—and more primal than—the pleasure principle, thus marking the first explicit acknowledgment of a domain "beyond the pleasure principle."

     These dreams seek to assert control over the stimuli retrospectively by generating fear – the absence of which was the cause of the traumatic neurosis in the first place.

512. #512

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes inhibition as a restriction of ego function—distinguished from symptom by being a process *within* the ego rather than acting upon it—and identifies two mechanisms: avoidance of conflict with the id (via excessive eroticization of organs) and avoidance of conflict with the superego (self-punishment), alongside an energic-economic account of generalized inhibition.

     It cannot escape our attention for very long that inhibition is related to fear. Numerous inhibitions clearly consist in relinquishing a particular function because fear would result if it were to be carried out.

513. #513

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety in phobias and obsessional neurosis is fundamentally a signal-reaction by the ego to the danger of castration (or its derivatives), and that symptoms are produced not to avoid fear itself but to avoid the danger situation that fear signals — a clarification that also forces a revision of drive theory by acknowledging that drives never appear in pure form but always in mixtures of Eros and the destruction drive.

     fear consists in a reaction to a particular danger situation; the ego saves itself from this fear by taking action to withdraw from the situation or avoid it altogether.

514. #514

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This is an editorial notes section for a volume of Freud's writings, providing translator's glosses, cross-references, and one substantive Freudian note (note 53) on the fate of repressed drive-impulses and another (note 74) linking masochism to the death drive in phobias. The passage is predominantly bibliographic/apparatus but contains some theoretical content.

     Freud considerably helps us to understand his otherwise problematic concept of 'consciential fear' (*Gewissensangst*) by defining it here as 'endopsychic', and differentiating it from 'social fear' (*soziale Angst*).

515. #515

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section traces the conceptual evolution of Freud's drive theory from the sexual/ego drive opposition through narcissism and Eros to the final life drive/death drive antithesis, while also documenting translation controversies (Standard Edition bowdlerizations) and cross-cultural precursors to Platonic myth.

     [Angstbereitschaft – literally 'fear-preparedness'.] … [Angstträume.]

516. #516

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This is an editorial notes section providing translator's annotations, textual clarifications, and cross-references for Freud's texts (primarily *The Ego and the Id* and *Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear*); the most theoretically substantive note (83) elaborates on the technique for handling unconscious guilt-feeling, identification, the ego-ideal, and the limits of psychoanalytic therapy.

     This statement signals the beginnings of an important shift in Freud's concept of fear… 'Consciential' is defined in the OED as both 'rare' and 'obsolete' – but no apology is tendered for its revival here, since without it Freud's teasing neologism Gewissensangst is practically untranslatable.

517. #517

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego-id distinction is relational rather than absolute — the ego is the organized portion of the id — and uses this to explain how repression generates symptoms that achieve 'exterritoriality' from the ego-organization, initiating a secondary defensive battle in which the ego oscillates between incorporating the symptom and continuing to repress it, a dynamic reinforced by secondary illness-gain.

     We will not be able to say very much about it unless we focus our investigation on individual instances of symptom-formation. In the process we shall have occasion to discuss the problem of fear, which we have long felt to be lurking in the background.

518. #518

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud differentiates three reactions to object-loss—fear, pain, and sorrow—by mapping each onto distinct economic and developmental conditions: fear responds to the danger of object-loss, pain arises from intensely cathected longing that mimics peripheral stimulation, and sorrow is triggered by the reality-test's demand to withdraw cathexis from a definitively lost object.

     fear is the reaction to the danger attendant on this loss and, by extension, to the danger of object-loss itself.

519. #519

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes narcissism as a structural feature of libido theory by triangulating three pathways—organic illness, hypochondria/paraphrenia, and love-life—to argue that ego-libido and object-libido are dynamically interconvertible, that primary narcissism is universal, and that the compulsion to invest in objects arises from a pathogenic surplus of ego-libido.

     hypochondriac fear is the counterpart on the ego-libido side to neurotic fear

520. #520

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud reintroduces 'defence' as the general category for all ego-protective techniques against drive demands, subsumes 'repression' as one specific mechanism, and then elaborates anxiety/fear as a signal anticipating traumatic helplessness — establishing a structural sequence: fear → danger → helplessness (trauma) that grounds the distinction between objective and neurotic fear.

     Fear is therefore on the one hand the expectation of future trauma, and on the other a repetition of past trauma in a mild form.

521. #521

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     IX

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that symptoms are not simply equivalent to fear but are formations that interpose a "danger situation" between anxiety and drive-pressure, functioning to extricate the ego from danger; this reframes the relationship between anxiety, symptom-formation, and defence, while ultimately confronting the unresolved question of why some fear-determinants are never relinquished and neurosis persists.

     fear-generation is the prelude to symptom-formation, indeed a necessary prerequisite of it, for if the ego didn't jolt the pleasure/unpleasure matrix into action by generating fear, it would not acquire the power to halt the process that was instigated in the id.

522. #522

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's and editorial notes on Freud's terminology (Angst, Trauer, Triebrepräsentanz, Inhalte, etc.), offering philological and conceptual commentary on translation choices in the Standard Edition — it is non-substantive as theoretical argument but contains minor conceptual clarifications about the Ego, Superego, Id, drives, anxiety, and repetition.

     Freud's word Angst has always been something of a shibboleth for translators... 'anxiety' has long since established itself as a specialist term with a meaning quite distinct from its meaning in ordinary language

523. #523

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud introduces two auxiliary repressive techniques specific to obsessional neurosis—obliteration and isolation—arguing that isolation's logic is ultimately grounded in a primordial taboo on touching, and closes by challenging whether castration fear alone can be the universal motor of repression, especially given women's neuroses.

     the possibility – mentioned earlier – that the fear arises, via a kind of fermentation process, out of the libido-cathexis itself when the ordinary progression of the latter is interrupted

524. #524

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/apparatus section providing translator's annotations, bibliographic references, and terminological clarifications for several Freud essays; it is non-substantive as primary theoretical argument but does trace key Freudian concepts (repetition, repression, pleasure/reality principles, abreaction) through their German originals and editorial history.

     The original words are respectively *Schreck, Furcht* and *Angst.* The distinctions that Freud draws are lexically somewhat specious

525. #525

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     X

     Theoretical move: Freud critiques Adler's organ-inferiority theory and Rank's birth-trauma theory as insufficient explanations for neurosis, then advances his own account: the compulsion to repeat fixates the ego on outdated danger situations via repression, and the etiology of neurosis is overdetermined by three interacting factors—biological (helplessness), phylogenetic (sexual latency), and psychological (repression)—none of which alone constitutes the "ultimate cause."

     Fear is the reaction to danger. Given that the affect of fear is able to commandeer a special position for itself in the psychic economy, it is surely plausible to suppose that this has to do with the nature of danger itself.

526. #526

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety (fear) is a reproduced affect rooted in the trauma of birth, and that its paradigmatic form in early childhood reduces to distress at the absence of a loved object—thereby linking birth-separation, castration fear, and object-loss as structurally homologous danger situations, while simultaneously critiquing Rank's direct derivation of phobias from birth trauma.

     Fear is thus a particular state of unpleasure, with release actions that follow specific pathways... the state of fear constitutes the reproduction of a prior experience containing the necessary conditions for such an increase in stimulus and for release via specific pathways

527. #527

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the repetition-compulsion of drives is not necessarily in conflict with the pleasure principle but rather precedes and prepares for its dominion; the pleasure principle is reframed as a tendency subservient to the deeper drive toward dissolution of excitation (the death drive), while the distinction between primary/secondary processes and annexed/non-annexed cathexis illuminates the graduated taming of pleasure over psychic development.

     it does also watch for any stimuli from without that are adjudged by both kinds of drives to be dangerous, and more particularly for any increases in stimulation emanating from within that make the task of living more difficult.

528. #528

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud reformulates the mechanics of repression by reconceiving the ego's power over the id as deriving from its signal of unpleasure (not automatic affect-transformation), and re-situates the origin of anxiety in reproduced memory-traces of primal traumatic experiences rather than in converted drive-energy, while correcting a prior over-emphasis on the ego's weakness relative to the id.

     in repression, fear is not produced anew, but is reproduced as a state of affect on the basis of a pre-existing memory-image.

529. #529

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Freud reverses his earlier metapsychological thesis by arguing, on the basis of comparative analysis of Little Hans and the Wolf-Man, that castration anxiety in the ego *causes* repression rather than resulting from it — fear is prior to repression, not its product — while acknowledging an unresolved contradiction with evidence from the 'actual neuroses' where disrupted libido does appear to generate anxiety.

     the affect of fear that constitutes the very essence of the phobia derives not from the repression process, not from the libidinal cathexes of the repressed impulses, but from the agent of repression itself; the fear in animal phobia is unconverted fear of castration

530. #530

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that fear of death is structurally analogous to castration anxiety — not a primary biological reaction but a signal of object-loss and ego-abandonment by the superego — and uses this to reframe traumatic neurosis as involving libidinal (narcissistic) dynamics rather than a simple threat to self-preservation, thereby preserving the aetiological centrality of sexuality through the concept of narcissism.

     it now appears to us – since it so often involves the danger of castration – to constitute reaction to a loss, a separation

531. #531

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud reframes anxiety as an ego-generated signal rather than a product of automatic economic discharge, and systematically maps a developmental sequence of danger situations (birth trauma → object-loss → castration → super-ego) that underlie distinct neurotic structures, while revising his earlier libido-transformation theory of anxiety.

     our present conception of fear as an intentional signal deployed by the ego in order to exert influence on the pleasure/unpleasure matrix shows us to be independent of that economic automatism.

532. #532

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation in conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis, arguing that the distinguishing mechanism of obsessional neurosis is libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase (driven by the castration complex against the Oedipus complex), accompanied by drive de-mergence, a uniquely harsh superego, and reaction-formations in the ego — contrasting with hysteria's simpler reliance on repression alone.

     The fear that is such a predominant feature in this particular condition now seems to me to be an unnecessary complication that obscures the issue.

533. #533

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.439

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that in every parallax gap (production/representation, drive/desire, lalangue/language) true materialism requires asserting the primacy of the *second* term—the gap, representation, desire, language—because the supposedly "more basic" first term only functions against the background of the lack opened by the second; and he maps four modes of relating to language (praxis, lalangue, science, and the radical cut of philosophy/poetry/mysticism), concluding that the Klein bottle, not the cross-cap or quilting point, is the appropriate topological model for subjectivization.

     This cut is only approached in the most radical functioning of thought discernible in philosophy (Hegel, Heidegger), poetry (of anxiety), or mysticism.

534. #534

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing](#contents.xhtml_ahd20)

     Theoretical move: Žižek deploys Lacan's formal logic of 1+a and 2+a to argue that neither the One nor the Two are primordial: the originary level is a "less than zero" (the quantum distinction between two vacuums), whose internal tension generates the entire series One→supplement→Two→excess, identifying the operator of this transformation with the barred subject ($) as the inverted counterpart of objet a.

     it is not a sublimated figure of AIDS but a hallucinatory stand-in … for a formal cut/obstacle to sexual relationship, a figuration of the impossibility of sexual relationship … AIDS itself is a piece of our common reality which draws its power of fascination from the fact that it gives body to our fear of It.

535. #535

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.444

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_42_prokofievs_travels.xhtml_IDX-1802"></span>Prokofiev’s Travels

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Philippe Petit's high-wire act and Prokofiev's return to the USSR as parallel figures of "the Act" — a gesture combining meticulous planning with abyssal purposelessness — to argue that simple beauty produced under conditions of terror is not mere escapism but ideology at its most efficient, precisely because it is "homogenizable" (not identical) with the dominant order while retaining its own coherent artistic greatness.

     there are in Prokofiev no inner doubts, hysteria, anxiety—he weathered the anti-formalist campaign of 1948 with an almost psychotic serenity

536. #536

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.451

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_43_beckett_as_the_writer_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-162"></span>Beckett as the Writer of Abstraction

     Theoretical move: The "empty" Cartesian subject ($) is not merely an agent of abstraction but is itself constituted through abstraction—its emptiness is ontologically primary, not derivative. This is demonstrated through Lacanian analysis (objet a as objectal correlate of the barred subject), Proust's voice episode, and Beckett's literary practice, all illustrating the concept of "concrete abstraction" as a violent re-totalization that yields deeper truth than direct concrete embeddedness.

     This vagueness which creates anxiety is a positive feature in itself: it positively defines the narrator as a kind of empty place between parentheses, as a barred subject in the Lacanian sense of \$.

537. #537

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.378

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The All-Too-Close In-Itself](#contents.xhtml_ahd25)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends the transcendental subject against object-oriented ontology by arguing that the subject is not an object but an irreducible standpoint, and redeploys the Lacanian Real as virtual-impossible rather than materially present, showing how direct neuronal manipulation produces a "more real than real" experience that dissolves the reality/simulacrum divide — while paralleling this logic to the Unconscious (which must not be substantialized) and to neurotheology's hard-rock encounter with the Real.

     the viewer will experience sorrow, terror, sympathy, fear—he will experience them for real, to a degree never equalled by the situations 'in real life'

538. #538

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as a double operation: it answers the unbearable gap of the Other's desire ('Che vuoi?') by filling the void with an imaginary scenario, while simultaneously constructing the very coordinates that make desire possible; this structure illuminates hysteria as failed interpellation, anti-Semitism as racist fantasy, Christianity vs. Judaism as contrasting strategies for 'gentrifying' the desire of the Other, and sainthood/Antigone as ethical positions of not giving way on one's desire.

     Jews persist in this enigma of the Other's desire, in this traumatic point of pure 'Che vuoi?' which provokes an unbearable anxiety insofar as it cannot be symbolized

539. #539

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.242

     Russell Sbriglia

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian sublime—understood as the Idea's immanence to the phenomenal as pure negativity—converges with Lacanian sublimation (elevating an object to the dignity of the Thing via anamorphosis/objet petit a), and uses this convergence to reread Ahab's transcendentalism in Moby Dick as a fetishistic disavowal of the nothingness of the Ideal rather than a genuine pursuit of the transcendent.

     Ahab's most fundamental anxiety is not that there is no ideality at all, but that the ontology of the ideal is nothing more than the radical negativity with which we are confronted in the material realm

540. #540

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.154

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: Zupančič, drawing on Brassier, Lacan, and Deleuze, argues that the death drive must be understood not as a return to the inanimate (a secondary extension of the pleasure principle) but as a transcendental principle grounded in an aboriginal trauma that precedes and conditions all experience, thereby reframing repetition compulsion as driven by an irreducible, unbindable excess rather than by any homeostatic tendency.

     the compulsive repetition is thus explained as the mechanism through which 'the psyche is striving to muster the anxiety required in order to achieve a successful binding [Besetzung] of the excess of excitation released by the traumatic breaching of its defenses.'

541. #541

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.218

     Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

     Theoretical move: Against new materialist (Deleuzean) ontologies of Becoming that dissolve the subject into immanent flux and promise plenitude, the passage argues from a Lacanian-Hegelian standpoint that ontological incompleteness—the barred, split subject—is irreducible and is in fact the condition of possibility for freedom, joy, and genuine subjectivity; a close reading of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is deployed to show that Deleuze's ventriloquism of Woolf suppresses the very void of subjectivity her text stages.

     for neovitalists like Bennett, subjectivity is what blocks the monolithic vitality of le tout, which renders death, anxiety, and even sexual climax irrelevant in the face of a free-floating desire.

542. #542

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.176

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ > Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes section providing scholarly apparatus (citations, bibliographic references, and brief clarifying remarks) for a chapter on sex, materialism, Laplanche, Deleuze, and Lacan; it is primarily bibliographic rather than substantively argumentative, though several notes contain compressed theoretical interventions worth tracking.

     how the aboriginal trauma becomes, appears as, the 'unbound excess' (of excitation), which then needs to be bound by anxiety summoned by the repetition of an unpleasant experience.

543. #543

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.128

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 4. Fantasizing the Father in *Blue Velvet*

     Theoretical move: This passage (a footnotes/endnotes section) performs theoretical work by articulating how fantasy's revelatory power, the absent paternal function, and the emergence of the object (objet petit a) structure Blue Velvet — contrasting Lynch's approach with both ideological-critique readings (Pfeil) and other directors (Cronenberg, Spielberg), while anchoring the argument in Lacanian concepts of the Name of the Father, anxiety, and desire.

     Dorothy is the character whose central affect-anxiety-permeates among both the other characters and among spectators. Dorothy's anxiety is more powerful than the series of emotions that Jeffrey and Frank display, and it defines the film.

544. #544

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.28

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > The Cause of Fantasy

     Theoretical move: McGowan uses Lynch's *Eraserhead* to refine the Freudian account of fantasy: fantasy is not triggered by the simple absence of the desired object but by the subject's encounter with a visible *barrier* to enjoyment in the Other, which retroactively constitutes the subject's own lack and energises fantasy through the lost object.

     This kind of intensity is entirely lacking in the world of desire that the rest of the film depicts.

545. #545

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.61

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Fantasy and the Traumatic Encounter

     Theoretical move: Fantasy's ideological function depends on withholding the traumatic encounter with the impossible object, but Lynch's *Blue Velvet* extends fantasy to its logical conclusion, staging a direct encounter with the real dimension of the impossible object (embodied as the Gaze) and thereby producing genuine jouissance rather than mere pleasure.

     our anxiety in seeing her indicates our encounter with it, revealing that we are in the picture at its nonspecular point, the point of the gaze.

546. #546

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.108

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > The Mysfery of Desire?

     Theoretical move: By showing that what initially appears as desiring subjectivity (Rita's mystery) is actually a fantasmatic scenario (Diane's fantasy), the passage argues that fantasy doesn't merely resolve desire's constitutive impossibility but actively transforms impossibility into mystery—and even generates the questions desire appears to confront, making fantasy more primordial than desire.

     what produces anxiety is not the enigma of the Other's desire; instead, the subject feels anxiety because she grasps the impossibility of this desire—that there can be no answer to the question that it asks.

547. #547

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.73

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Vel of Alienation*

     Theoretical move: The passage develops Lacan's vel of alienation as a forced, asymmetric either/or in which the subject is structurally assigned the losing position, giving rise not to being but to a pure place-holder (empty set) within the symbolic order; it then introduces separation as the complementary operation—a neither/nor overlap of two lacks—through which the subject attempts to fill the Other's lack with its own manque-à-être, thereby generating desire as coextensive with lack.

     What is most anxiety-producing for the child is when the relationship through which he comes to be—on the basis of lack which makes him desire—is most perturbed: when there is no possibility of lack, when his mother is constantly on his back.

548. #548

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.209

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > Object (a): Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage does substantial theoretical work in clarifying the concept of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) as structural surplus analogous to Marxian surplus-value — not an end or excess of jouissance but an additional, supplemental jouissance — while also distinguishing imaginary, symbolic, and real registers of the object, and situating objet petit a as the real cause of desire rather than a symbolically constituted object of demand.

     Lacan himself might well have said, 'Desire is not without an object'... just as he did in the case of anxiety ('L'angoisse n'est pas sans objet' [Seminar X])

549. #549

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.123

     <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **The Phallus and the Phallic Function**

     Theoretical move: The phallus is theorized not as the cause but as the *signifier* of desire (and of lack), while objet petit a is posited as the real, unsignifiable cause of desire; the phallic function is then defined as the alienating function of language that institutes lack, which grounds the subsequent account of sexuation and jouissance's non-conservation.

     What is most anxiety producing for the child is when the relationship through which it comes to be—on the basis of lack, which makes it desire—is most perturbed: when there is no possibility of lack, when its mother is constantly on its back.

550. #550

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.218

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > <span id="page-216-0"></span>**Chapter 9**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of scholarly endnotes for chapters on the Four Discourses, Psychoanalysis and Science, and an Afterword — it is largely bibliographic and referential, but contains several load-bearing theoretical asides: that the specific ordering of mathemes in the Four Discourses is constitutive (not merely combinatorial), that object (a) is the remainder left over after science's symbolization of the real, and that there is always a limit to formalization.

     in the case of Little Hans, Hans suffers from a kind of generalized anxiety state before latching onto the horse phobia; the latter appears after he has already begun a kind of analytic treatment with his father.

551. #551

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.233

     <span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**

     Theoretical move: This is the index of Bruce Fink's *The Lacanian Subject*, listing key concepts, proper names, and page references — a non-substantive navigational apparatus with no original theoretical argumentation.

     Anxiety, 53, 103

552. #552

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.155

     Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical > **Hu's on First**

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that comedy and jokes differ structurally in their temporal logic: jokes culminate in a single retroactive 'quilting point' (S1) that reorganizes prior meaning, while comedy generates an inaugural surplus-object that becomes the motor of an indefinitely extensible sequence; both structures converge on *objet petit a* as the point where signifying operation and corporeal enjoyment (laughter) mutually implicate each other, supplementing Freud's theory of jokes with a bidirectional mechanism in which content-related tendentiousness and the display of the signifier's paradoxical non-sense serve as reciprocal smokescreens.

     How come we actually laugh at this? Should it not, rather, cause in us something like existential anxiety?

553. #553

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.171

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a truly radical materialism must be non-reductionist—not "everything is matter" but "there is nothing which is not matter"—which, via Lacan's formulas of sexuation (the not-All), opens space for immaterial phenomena to have a specific positive nonbeing; and that the Badiouian Event must be understood not as a Beyond of Being but as the very curvature/non-self-coincidence of Being itself, which Žižek aligns with the parallax gap and the logic of the non-All.

     What happens in such moments of anxiety is that the flow of becoming acquires autonomy, loses its mooring in substantial reality.

554. #554

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.412

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James > 4The Loop of Freedom

     Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus performs multiple theoretical moves simultaneously: it glosses the Lacanian big Other's radical ambiguity (symbolic substance vs. pure appearance), identifies the Master-Signifier as the answer to infinite regress in argumentation, reads anxiety (and, contra Lacan, Badiouian enthusiasm) as the affect that grants access to the Real, and deploys the Hegelian 'positing of presuppositions' to illuminate the mutual entanglement of sexual and socio-symbolic failure in marriage.

     Lacan determines anxiety as the (only) affect that indicates our approach to the Real, guarantees our access to the Real. Is anxiety, however, the only affect of this kind? What about enthusiasm?

555. #555

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.63

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy > ". . . ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore"

     Theoretical move: By reading Marx's account of capital's self-movement through Hegel's substance-to-subject passage and Lacan's desire/drive distinction, Žižek argues that capitalism operates at three levels—subjective experience, objective exploitation, and an "objective deception" (the unconscious fantasy of self-generating capital)—and that the shift from desire to drive requires distinguishing objet petit a as lost object (desire) from objet petit a as loss itself (drive), while redefining the death drive as an excess of life rather than a thrust toward annihilation.

     Miller has proposed a Benjaminian distinction between 'constituted anxiety' and 'constituent anxiety'... while the first term designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety which haunts us... the second stands for the 'pure' confrontation with objet petit a as constituted in its very loss.

556. #556

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.91

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Traps of Pure Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's account of the fall from innocence to sin must be supplemented by a Schellingian-Lacanian correction: Prohibition does not disturb primordial repose but resolves a prior, more terrifying deadlock created by primordial self-contraction (sinthome), yielding a three-stage sequence of anxieties that grounds a properly materialist theory of subjectivity and ethical engagement.

     Thus we have a succession of three anxieties: the joyous 'anxiety of nothing' that accompanies the repose of primordial innocence; the deadening anxiety/dread of overproximity to one's sinthome; the anxiety of freedom proper, of being confronted with the abyss of possibilities.

557. #557

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.331

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'free choice' is always already a meta-choice whose conditions are ideologically pre-structured, and uses the Amish rumspringa as a model for how academic 'radical' distance from the state functions as a reproductive mechanism of hegemony rather than genuine resistance; against Critchley's ethics-first localism, Žižek proposes a parallax shift that reveals 'resistance' as feeding the power-machine, and authentic revolution as a 'Must' rather than an 'ought.'

     since, in such a life, they lack any inherent limitation or regulation, this permissive situation inexorably backfires and generates unbearable anxiety

558. #558

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.92

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Traps of Pure Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that accepting guilt is a flight from anxiety that signals a compromise of desire, and that the true "Fall" is not transgression but the withdrawal into heteronomous Law—a move that generates the very desire to transgress it, so that the more one obeys the Law the more guilty one becomes, because obedience is itself a defense against the desire to sin.

     accepting guilt is a maneuver which delivers us of anxiety, and its presence indicates that the subject has compromised his desire.

559. #559

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.201

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Danger? What Danger?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the standard warnings about biogenetic/technological "danger" (Heidegger, Fukuyama, Habermas) are caught in a perspective fallacy—measuring the posthuman future by present standards of meaning—while a Lacanian inversion reveals that cognitivist self-objectivization causes anxiety not by foreclosing freedom but by confronting us with the abyss of our freedom and the radical contingency of consciousness.

     anxiety emerges not when this object is lost, but when we get too close to it. The same goes for the relationship between anxiety and (free) act.

560. #560

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.389

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 1The Subject, This "Inwardly Circumcised Jew"

     Theoretical move: This notes section makes several concentrated theoretical moves: it maps the three meanings of "subject" onto the RSI triad; it redefines Lacan's anti-philosophy as an infinite (Kantian) judgment rather than a simple negation of philosophy; it traces the shift in Lacan's conception of the Real from extimate Thing to inherent inconsistency of the Symbolic; and it reads Messiaen's musical structure as isomorphic with Lacan's four discourse-elements, thereby illustrating the elementary signifying structure.

     affects (collective hatred, love of a Leader, panic, and other 'passions') thus also cheat—except anxiety, which (as Freud put it in his essay on 'Fetishism'…) arises when we experience the fact that 'the throne is empty.'

561. #561

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.396

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 2Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section of The Parallax View, containing scholarly footnotes with citations and brief argumentative asides; the theoretically substantive moments include Žižek's critique of Boostels on Kant avec Sade, a gloss on Lacan's tripartite (ISR) staging of anxiety, and a reading of Medea vs. Antigone as two versions of feminine subjectivity.

     is it not possible to analyze the notion of anxiety in Lacan along the axis of the ISR triad? In Lacan's early work, anxiety is located at the imaginary level... later, anxiety is located in the (symbolic) subject... finally, anxiety concerns the overproximity of jouissance.

562. #562

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.178

     23

     Theoretical move: The "cinema of intersection" is theorized as a distinct cinematic mode that sustains a rigid separation between the worlds of desire and fantasy within a single film, producing a direct, traumatic encounter with the gaze (as objet petit a) at the moment of their collision—an experience that ideology-serving "cinema of integration" forecloses by reducing the impossible object to an ordinary empirical one.

     our anxiety in seeing her indicates our encounter with it, revealing that we are in the picture at its nonspecular point, the point of the gaze

563. #563

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.47

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Župančič reads Nietzsche's 'ascetic ideal' and the Protestant Reformation through Lacanian categories—especially the shift from the Discourse of the Master to the Discourse of the University—to argue that 'slave morality' names not the oppressed but a new form of mastery that legitimates itself through knowledge, and that the ascetic ideal (far from being obsolete) is the very invention of enjoyment as something beyond the pleasure principle.

     Anxiety related to the question of whether we are chosen or not finds its outlet in a hyperactivity that is supposed to answer this question and, consequently, provide some sort of certainty.

564. #564

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.170

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič articulates a Nietzschean "double affirmation" (amor fati as affirmation of both necessity and contingency) and then pivots to Lacan's claim that love-as-sublimation humanises jouissance by making it condescend to desire, using the logic of comedy—where the Real appears as a minimal difference between two semblances rather than behind appearances—as the structural model for this movement.

     In Lacan's seminar L'angoisse, we find the following, rather peculiar statement: 'Only love-sublimation makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire.'

565. #565

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.4

     **Anxiety**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary compilation that defines and elaborates several Lacanian and Hegelian concepts — Anxiety, Analysand, Appearance, Sublation (Aufhebung), the Barred subject, Beautiful Soul, Beyond (Jenseits), and Castration — drawing on Žižek, Fink, McGowan, and Kalkavage to show how each concept performs a specific theoretical function within the broader structure of desire, subjectivity, and dialectical mediation.

     anxiety occurs not when the object-cause of desire is lacking; it is not the lack of the object that gives rise to anxiety but, on the contrary, the danger of our getting too close to the object and thus losing the lack itself.

566. #566

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.13

     **Contradiction** > **Desire**

     Theoretical move: Desire is constitutively tied to lack, structured as the desire of the Other, and operates as an endless metonymic movement through signifiers that can never arrive at a final object—making desire irreducibly different from need and rendering any fantasmatic 'solution' to desire a retreat from its fundamental logic.

     Bruce Fink is right to claim that 'the encounter with the Other's desire is anxiety producing.' but what produces anxiety is not the enigma of the Other's desire; instead, the subject feels anxiety because she grasps the impossibility of this desire

567. #567

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.17

     **Contradiction** > **Displacement**

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys Freud's account of displacement as the core mechanism of anxiety hysteria (phobia formation): repression fails to eliminate unpleasure, so the libidinal cathexis is displaced onto a substitute idea, which then becomes the pivot of an escalating system of anticathexes, avoidances, and projections — showing how displacement, repression, and anxiety articulate with one another across three progressive phases.

     It consists in anxiety appearing without the subject knowing what he is afraid of...the unconscious libidinal cathexis of the rejected idea has been discharged in the form of anxiety.

568. #568

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek with Derrida

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek and Derrida converge on the ethical injunction to love the "real" neighbor (the refugee as monstrous, anxiety-producing other), while Žižek's Marxist critique surpasses liberal-deconstructive approaches by insisting that capitalism's malfunctions (including refugee crises) are structurally necessary rather than accidental disturbances amenable to cosmetic reform.

     the neighbor's anxiety-producing unknowability and unpredictability: Who are the refugees? What do they want from me?

569. #569

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.325

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's das Ding, properly understood as a locus of pure lack encountered in the Other rather than in self-referential Dasein-anxiety, is distinguished from Heidegger precisely by extimacy; integrating objet a with das Ding produces not theoretical closure but a coherent account of the impossibility of ultimate theoretical coherence.

     'Anxiety,' he insists, 'resides in the subject's fundamental relationship […] with the desire of the Other.'

570. #570

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>} > Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section for a chapter on Lacan's das Ding provides a scholarly apparatus that triangulates das Ding across multiple Lacan seminars, Freud's Standard Edition, Hegel's Jena Lectures, and Heidegger, while also proposing theoretical extensions: that das Ding inhabits both subject and Other (rewriting the fantasy formula as $ a <>), that the Subject Supposed to Know functions to cover over das Ding, and that the Heimlich/Unheimlich parallels the mother/Thing relation.

     It's not longing for the maternal breast that provokes anxiety, but its imminence

571. #571

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > The Chapters

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table-of-contents-style summary of contributed chapters in an edited volume responding to Žižek; it maps the theoretical terrain each contributor covers but makes no single theoretical argument of its own, functioning as an editorial overview rather than a substantive intervention.

     incompleteness alone may just reproduce the anxiety of a contemporary subject. Something else than anxiety is needed

572. #572

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends the Lacanian notion of sexual difference against Butler's historicist critique by arguing that "primordial repression" (Ur-Verdrängung) is not a trans-historical a priori but a retroactively posited presupposition of any social space, and that the gap between form and content must be reflected back into content itself — a move that grounds his concept of "inherent transgression" as the structural supplement that constitutes rather than merely polices the public sphere.

     incompleteness alone just reproduces the anxiety of a contemporary subject, and this anxiety alone is not enough to break the 'fascist/liberal bind in which we find ourselves in the present moment'

573. #573

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.234

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sublimation, repression, and jouissance are structurally inseparable—desublimation is always already repressive, primordial repression constitutes rather than suppresses its content, and castration and the death drive are two faces of the same parallax structure rather than opposing forces—thereby refuting any emancipatory vision premised on overcoming repression or positing a new Master Signifier as sufficient.

     what we need for emancipation are more subjects who are capable of working through anxiety towards certainty.

574. #574

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.329

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>} > Notes

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two related theoretical moves: first, it reframes Lacan's claim that anxiety "is not without an object" by positioning objet a as merely the entry point into the void of das Ding (rather than the terminal object of anxiety); second, it draws a speculative parallel between Heidegger's later concept of Ereignis and Lacan's extimacy, suggesting a convergence beyond Heidegger's early subjectivism.

     Lacan's insistence, precisely in rebuttal of Heidegger's position, that anxiety 'is not without an object.'

575. #575

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *objet a* and *das Ding* form a two-fold ontic-ontological dynamic: the *objet a* functions as the obstinate objective clue (the ontic "odd feature") that opens onto the abyssal void of *das Ding* (the ontological Real), thereby reversing Žižek's own formulation; and that *das Ding*, linked to the mother's inscrutable desire and mediated by the Name of the Father / signifier, is ultimately "extimate" — the Thing in the Other mirrors an unthinkable excess within the subject itself.

     It is precisely the dizzying indeterminacy of the Thing that makes it anxiety producing.

576. #576

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.189

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek *contra* Levinas

     Theoretical move: Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics argues that the "face" of the other is always already symbolically mediated and therefore politically domesticated; against Levinas's ethical alterity, Žižek proposes the neighbor as the embodiment of the Lacanian Real—a traumatic, inhuman Thing that short-circuits the particular to produce genuine universality and grounds a more radical anti-racist politics.

     the acknowledgment of the inhuman (the subject's avowed out-of-jointness; the inaccessible, untamable, and anxiety-inducing Real) as the condition of/for universality.

577. #577

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.222

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of subjectivity, while providing a powerful diagnosis of capitalist modernity through the lens of the death drive, constitutive negativity, and commodity fetishism, remains insufficiently concrete for emancipatory politics because it lacks an account of the determinate social forms of capitalism and a theory of how the incomplete, anxious subject can become a revolutionary agent — a gap that neither Lacan nor Marx alone can fill.

     What Žižek, unlike Lacan, leaves us with is a subject that is destitute but full of anxiety. What we need for emancipation are more subjects who are capable of working through anxiety towards certainty.

578. #578

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > De-Racializing the Palestinians, or the Palestinians as Neighbors

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Israeli refuseniks' refusal to treat Palestinians as racialized others constitutes a genuine ethical act that de-racializes Palestinians (transforming them from homines sacri into neighbors), exposes the lack in the Symbolic order of Zionism, and embodies a universalist "part of no-part" position that decompletes Zionist ideology—against both liberal humanist inclusion and nationalist organicism.

     The Palestinian as a neighbor—the Palestinian stripped of her symbolic veneer via Israeli racialization—continues to arouse anxiety, compelling a different kind of affective relationality

579. #579

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [<span class="grey">INDEX</span>](#contents.xhtml_end1)

     Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage listing proper names and Lacanian sub-concepts with their page/anchor references across the volume; it is non-substantive and performs no theoretical argument.

     anxiety [here](#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_IDX-650)

580. #580

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues, against Žižek's ontological/ontic assignment, that das Ding is purely ontological (the originary opening of the human relation to being-as-such) while objet petit a is the ontic element that opens onto an ontological horizon—and that the two form an essential couplet rather than independent concepts, with objet a "tickling das Ding from the inside."

     'Not only is [anxiety] not without object,' he says, 'but it very likely designates the most, as it were, profound object, the ultimate object, the Thing.'

581. #581

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan

     [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABSENT](#contents.xhtml_toc1_2) > **WHAT IS NOT KNOWN**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that universality is grounded not in shared positive traits but in a shared constitutive lack—the unknown blank spot within every subject—and that this internal absence is both the basis of love and the source of genuine emancipatory connection, which is more terrifying than particularist identity because it demands avowing self-alienation.

     This is freedom, but it is freedom that leaves subjects in anxiety before the other, which is why we don't choose it.

582. #582

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.119

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Trauma outside Experience

     Theoretical move: By engaging Brassier's reading of Freud, Zupančič argues that the trauma driving repetition-compulsion is not a repressed experience but constitutively outside experience—a primordial "aboriginal death" that preconditions organic individuation and the very possibility of the pleasure principle, thereby requiring a distinction between the death drive as such and the empirical compulsion to repeat.

     anxiety is brought in as a last resort in order to perform this work of binding, which in this case takes place 'beyond the pleasure principle.' And the role of the compulsive repetition (of an unpleasant experience) is to give rise to this anxiety.

583. #583

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.66

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sexual division maps onto an ontological asymmetry between masculinity as belief (reliance on the phallus as signifying support to repress castration) and femininity as pretense (masquerade as constitutive deception), and further that this same ontological minus—the bar between signifier and signified transposed into the signifier itself—grounds Lacan's theory of the subject of the unconscious as a "with-without" inherent to the signifying order, moving beyond Saussurean structuralism.

     Under the mask there is nothing but sheer ontological anxiety…this radical ontological anxiety is the prerogative of subjectivity as such; and precisely in this sense, the feminine position is the closest to subjectivity in its pure state.

584. #584

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     Marxist Supernanny

     Theoretical move: The 2008 credit crisis did not end capitalism but did discredit neoliberalism as an ideological project, clearing space for a renewed anti-capitalism that must assert an authentic universality as a rival to Capital rather than a reactive return to pre-capitalist forms; this requires converting captured affective discontent into effective political antagonism and struggling over the control of labour against managerialism and business ontology in public services.

     We must convert widespread mental health problems from medicalized conditions into effective antagonisms. Affective disorders are forms of captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channeled outwards, directed towards its real cause, Capital.

585. #585

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that "Really Existing Capitalism," like Really Existing Socialism, depends on the big Other as a structural guarantor of symbolic fiction—not its dissolution—and that post-Fordist bureaucratic audit culture intensifies rather than dissolves this dependency, producing a permanent, Kafkaesque anxiety in which subjects become their own surveyors while the big Other's authority is simultaneously disavowed and re-entrenched.

     Indefinite postponement, meanwhile, keeps your case at the lowest level of the court, but at the cost of an anxiety that has never ends.

586. #586

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     October 6, 1979: ‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything’

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that post-Fordism — inaugurated on October 6, 1979 — has restructured not only labour and production but subjectivity itself, generating a psychic economy of permanent instability, 'precarity', and rising mental illness; the chemico-biologization of mental illness functions ideologically to de-politicize what is in fact a social causation, thereby reinforcing capitalist realism.

     Periods of work alternate with periods of unemployment. Typically, you find yourself employed in a series of short-term jobs, unable to plan for the future.