Après-coup

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (115)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.13

   **Making Do without the Satisfactions of Understanding**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that psychoanalytic interpretation is irreducibly partial and provisional—never commanding absolute truth-value—and that this epistemic limitation is not a defect to be overcome but a structural condition of the work, one whose acceptance actively guards against the illusion of mastery.

   it is often in response to our interpretations that analysands recall such events from the past—whether by way of confirmation or by way of refutation of what we have managed to put together

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.25

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues, via clinical illustration, that therapeutic change does not require conscious understanding or the analysand's ability to articulate causal connections between past and present; the subject can get better without knowing why, which places the burden of proof on cognitivist accounts of cure.

   His attitude toward academic work had begun to change quite recently in the analysis, but it had remained fraught with anxiety. After our discussion of the shower scene it changed more rapidly

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.38

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that intellectual "understanding" is always partial, provisional, and imaginary, and that genuine analytic transformation operates at the level of jouissance (the Real, libidinal economy) rather than conscious comprehension — making jouissance, not meaning, the proper lodestar of analytic work.

   the analyst is often hard-pressed to say exactly what led to any particular change, reconstructing ex post facto the likely aspects of the analytic process that brought about the change.

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.79

   **The Drives: Se Faire . . .**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive is fundamentally acephalous — the subject must be brought into being *where* the drive (as the Other's demand) was — and that drive activity, including repetition compulsion, is best understood as the neurotic subject's attempt to subjectivize traumatic satisfaction by enlisting the Other's demand to sanction and execute its own desire.

   the repetitive reliving of the traumatic situation in dreams, for example, is designed to retroactively change the experience

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.111

   READING *HAMLET* WITH LACAN

   Theoretical move: By reading Hamlet through the Graph of Desire, Fink argues that Gertrude's discourse converts Hamlet's desire into mere demand, thereby foreclosing the encounter with the signifier of the Other's lack (S(Ⱥ)) and the phallic signifier (Φ) that would enable full symbolic castration and desire; the passage thus shows how the mOther's response retroactively determines the meaning of the child's enunciation and fixes or fails the subject's separation from the Other.

   the meaning of your speech is always determined retroactively... she gives a particular kind of meaning to your question, and the meaning of your speech is always determined retroactively.

6. #06

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

   **How do you account for the historical period in which every piece ¿ ts?**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian concepts must be read historically and diachronically: the meaning of key terms like "the real" shifts across different periods of Lacan's work, and responsible translation/interpretation must track this conceptual development rather than projecting later, fully-elaborated categories onto earlier texts.

   Lacan's work, like Freud's, develops tremendously over the course of time, and I think it's very important to be able to trace the development of his ideas via his vocabulary.

7. #07

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.159

   *Life Events and the "Primal Scene"*

   Theoretical move: Through the extended clinical case of W, Fink demonstrates how a fetish object (the boot) condenses and organizes questions of sexual identity, castration anxiety, racial identity-crisis, and the primal scene into a singular signifying structure, showing how homophony and 'verbal bridges' operate as the unconscious logic linking disparate symptomatic formations.

   After about six months of analysis, W recalled that, on one occasion, he had been very upset by something he had seen in the kitchen and had run into his parents' bedroom without knocking.

8. #08

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.166

   *Piano*

   Theoretical move: Through a clinical vignette, Fink demonstrates how the analysand's symptom (suppression of piano playing) is structured around the gap between the subject's self-understanding and the demand of the Other, and how transference dynamics (analyst associated with the mother) must be worked through before the subject can reclaim desire.

   that dinner had awakened him out of his own unconsciousness for the very first time, he thought in retrospect

9. #09

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

   **Entry into Analysis**

   Theoretical move: The passage illustrates how the analytic process works retroactively (après-coup): only after two years of treatment does the analysand begin to problematize the jouissance he initially presented as desirable, reframing anguish/anxiety as analytically significant rather than as the "ultimate in jouissance" — demonstrating that entry into analysis proper requires a shift in the subject's relationship to his own jouissance.

   It is only after about two years of treatment that Slater has come to think of the kind of anguish or anxiety he experienced during sex with Celine less as the 'ultimate in jouissance' and more like something worthy of analysis.

10. #10

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.202

    **The Mark of Accountability**

    Theoretical move: Through the case of Mark, Fink demonstrates how a fully elaborated delusional system functions as a stabilizing supplement to foreclosed paternal function, filling structural gaps with a psychotic construction that assigns the subject a grandiose cosmic role — a clinical dynamic analogous to Schreber's pacification through delusion.

    The conclusions he arrived at retroactively explained many aspects of his life: all of his suffering... could be understood within the perspective of a trial he had been made to undergo by God.

11. #11

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.51

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Time as Technique**

    Theoretical move: Fink defends Lacan's technique of variable-length sessions (scansion) as a directed interpretive intervention that concentrates analytic work on the most significant formulations, reversals of perspective, and unconscious material, distinguishing it from a misread "virtue of nonaction" and framing the analytic process as dialectical rather than linear.

    Even if the analysand does not consciously remember where we ended when next we speak, the scansion will nevertheless have done its work

12. #12

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.181

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > <span id="page-179-0"></span>[A Case of Obsession from a Lacanian Perspective](#page-8-0)

    Theoretical move: The passage introduces a clinical case of obsession through the narration of a pivotal traumatic event — a mother's psychotic murder of her daughter — establishing the methodological premise that such an event retroactively organizes the subject's history, while flagging an apparent paradox: the events may prove less traumatically constitutive than they initially appear.

    a pivotal event in someone's life can be discerned that retroactively organizes and reorganizes much of what came before and leaves its indelible mark on much of what comes after

13. #13

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.183

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Jouissance Crisis?**

    Theoretical move: The passage uses a clinical case (Wesley) to illustrate how a jouissance crisis precipitating entry into analysis is structured by unconscious repetition: the analysand is compelled toward a fate that mirrors his father's, reactivating conflicts around the Oedipus complex, incest, and the choice of a love object — a structure compared to Freud's Rat Man case.

    why Wesley entered analysis almost 30 years after the murder and not before... About five months before he first contacted me, his stepsister... reminded him that their parents had often said that Wesley and Sally could get married some day.

14. #14

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.185

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Relations with His Sister and Other Women**

    Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical case, Fink demonstrates how the traumatic primal scene (mother's murder of the sister) structures the patient's entire erotic and aggressive life, binding sexuality irreversibly to death, dismemberment, and castration anxiety, while his obsessional neurosis channels violence into fantasy and inhibition rather than act.

    he indicated, after about two years of analysis, that when his brother told him that his sister was dead and he was pounding the carpet with his fists in a demonstration of rageful mourning, part of him was wondering why he was doing it: 'It was pantomime . . . a partially affected show of emotion—was I elated that she had died?'

15. #15

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.192

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Relations with His Father**

    Theoretical move: Through the detailed clinical unfolding of Wesley's case, Fink demonstrates how an obsessional neurotic structure pre-exists and shapes the impact of a traumatic event, and how repressed aggression toward the father—displaced onto the mother, the self, and eventually the transference—is progressively worked through in analysis, with somatic, oneiric, and parapraxic material serving as privileged evidence.

    the traumatic events that occurred when Wesley was ten impacted an already established obsessive structure. They gave it a form that might easily be misrecognized by some, but its main outlines have become ever clearer as the trauma at age ten has been progressively worked through

16. #16

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.196

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Excursus on Gaps**

    Theoretical move: Through a clinical case (Wesley), the passage theorizes the analytic function of the gap/lack as the condition of possibility for subject formation, metonymic desire, and retroactive subjectification, showing how the absence of a tile (signifier) in a structure enables movement, slippage, and the emergence of the subject between signifiers.

    he had for the first time the sense that he in fact had been there, thinking, perceiving... suggesting his own recognition that there was a kind of retroactive subjectification at work

17. #17

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.199

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Relation to the Analyst**

    Theoretical move: Through detailed clinical vignette, Fink demonstrates how transference operates as a field in which repressed affects and object-relations (maternal and paternal) emerge first as projections onto the analyst before becoming accessible as memories, and how the analyst's clinical decisions (e.g., timing of the couch) are guided by reading transferential material for indicators of psychic structure (paranoid anxiety, foreclosure of vision, aggression).

    His father's attitude toward him emerged first in the transference projection and only then as a memory.

18. #18

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.218

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Identifying with Freud**

    Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of the "Freud Man," Fink demonstrates how fantasized identifications with a symbolic figure (Freud) organize the analysand's desire and behaviour, and how the paternal pronouncement functions as the kernel around which a counter-fantasy—"I will succeed at everything"—is constructed, leading toward an analysis of the fundamental fantasy.

    which were originally reported to me as, 'You don't count,' and, 'You're never going to amount to anything,' but which were progressively reshaped into the fateful formulation, 'You'll never succeed at anything.'

19. #19

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.241

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Events**

    Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical case, Fink demonstrates that the traumatic dimension of a sexual event is not reducible to its legally or socially legible content (e.g. "molestation"), but is retroactively constituted through layered signification, displacement, and the structural failure of the protective Other — illustrating Lacan's formula of trauma as a hole/gap (*troumatisme*) in the subject's memory and history.

    the sexual encounters retroactively took on meanings they did not have at the outset

20. #20

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.250

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Discussion and Conclusions**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that traumatic events acquire their status retroactively, through the accumulation of meanings and after-effects inscribed onto an event after the fact, illustrating this through clinical material that shows how early experiences become fixed points around which repetition, fantasy, and symptom-formation organize themselves.

    meanings the events *subsequently* took on... transform it into a trauma after the fact

21. #21

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.255

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > *Diagnosis* > *Follow-up*

    Theoretical move: Through clinical reflection on a case follow-up, Fink argues that diagnostic precision (neurosis vs. perversion/masochism) has direct clinical stakes: an earlier and more accurate reading of the analysand's fundamental fantasy and clinical structure would have enabled better-timed intervention, foregrounding the irreducible difficulty of calculating interpretive timing in analytic work.

    one never necessarily knows until after the fact whether one had at the time the necessary leverage with the analysand for such an intervention to have the desired effect.

22. #22

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

    [The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Situation in time and place of this exercise

    Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is theorized as a repetition-with-difference (après-coup) that counters the ego-psychological Americanization of psychoanalysis, which is diagnosed as a symptomatic repression of the unconscious behind an adaptive, autonomous ego and a medicalized analyst-as-knower structure that inverts the true knowledge-relation of the clinic.

    Lacan's 'return to Freud' is repetition-with-difference, an après-coup revivification of Freud's corpus that stays true to this original while, at the same time, inventively making it speak to new questions, concerns, and interests.

23. #23

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.13

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory in "The Freudian Thing" turns on the distinction between ego and subject (with proper subjectivity as unconscious), the insistence that truth/unconscious always returns despite repression or theoretical falsification, and the defense of a symbolically-mediated body against pseudo-Freudian reductivism to pre-Oedipal objects.

    the protracted processes of subject formation also entail the temporal dynamics of Nachträglichkeit/après-coup in which unmediated (pre-)history, whatever it might have been, is liquidated.

24. #24

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.58

    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.

    The result was a dizzying, uncanny sensation in which the traumatic potential of the earlier scene was activated après coup.

25. #25

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.68

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > Behind the Wall of the Law

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the original function of language is not merely indicative but also interrogative: every signifier, at its most elementary level, implicitly poses a question about the unknowable beyond of the Other-Thing, and this double function is confirmed by the phonemic structure of parental names and cross-linguistic evidence from Chinese.

    This elementary *Nachträglichkeit* of meaning as a retroactive specification of the intention, buttoning it down in the way that the last word of a sentence so often establishes *après coup* the meaning of the opening phrase.

26. #26

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_204"></span>**time**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of time constitutes a double break with linear temporality: logical time replaces chronometric time with a dialectical intersubjective structure (tripartite: instant of seeing / time for understanding / moment of concluding), while retroaction and anticipation replace linear developmental sequences with a non-linear psychic temporality in which present, past and future mutually condition one another.

    present events affect past events a posteriori, since the past exists in the psyche only as a set of memories which are constantly being reworked and reinterpreted in the light of present experience

27. #27

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_ncx_77"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_page_0096"></span>***G***

    Theoretical move: This passage from Evans's dictionary traces the theoretical development of several key Lacanian concepts—gap, gaze, genital stage, gestalt, and graph of desire—showing how Lacan progressively distinguishes his positions from Freudian ego-psychology, Sartrean phenomenology, and object-relations theory through a consistent emphasis on constitutive division, the non-relation, and the structured duplicity of desire.

    The stages of psychosexual development are conceived by Lacan not as natural phases of biological maturation but as forms of DEMAND which are structured retroactively (S8, 238–46).

28. #28

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_ncx_83"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_page_0102"></span>***H***

    Theoretical move: This passage (from Evans's introductory dictionary) articulates three interconnected Lacanian theoretical moves: (1) hallucination as the return of the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father in the Real; (2) helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) as grounding both the subject's constitutive dependence on language and the end of analysis as subjective destitution; and (3) hysteria redefined as a clinical structure organised around the question of sexual position and the desire of the Other, distinct from mere symptomatology.

    The mother interprets the baby's cries as hunger, tiredness, loneliness, etc. and retroactively determines their meaning

29. #29

    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_37"></span>***cogito***

    Theoretical move: Lacan's engagement with the Cartesian cogito performs a double move: it subverts the cogito's equation of subject=ego=consciousness (thereby grounding the critique of ego-psychology) while simultaneously retaining and radicalising the concept of the subject — identifying the subject of the cogito with the subject of the unconscious, and using it to articulate the split between enunciation and statement.

    its eternal-natural appearance is in fact an illusion produced by retroaction (S2, 4–5)

30. #30

    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_153"></span>***point de capiton***

    Theoretical move: The point de capiton is theorized as the minimal quilting operation that arrests the endless sliding of the signified under the signifier, producing the necessary illusion of fixed meaning; it operates on two axes—diachronically as the retroactive effect of punctuation, and synchronically as metaphor—and its absence or dissolution is the structural condition of psychosis.

    communication is always a retroactive effect of PUNCTUATION. It is only when the sentence is completed that the sense of the first words is determined retroactively.

31. #31

    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_161"></span>**punctuation**

    Theoretical move: Punctuation is theorized as the fundamental operation by which the receiver retroactively fixes meaning in the signifying chain; in clinical practice, the analyst's punctuation of the analysand's discourse—through repetition, silence, or session termination—exploits this retroactive structure to reveal unconscious meaning beyond the analysand's intended speech.

    it is the listener/receiver who punctuates this discourse and thereby sanctions retroactively one particular meaning of an utterance

32. #32

    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_68"></span>**fantasy**

    Theoretical move: Fantasy is not opposed to reality but is a discursively constituted, structurally fixed defence against castration and the lack in the Other; its mathemic formalisation ($ ◇ a) places it within a signifying structure that the analysand must ultimately traverse in the course of treatment.

    memories of past events are continually being reshaped in accordance with unconscious desires, so much so that symptoms originate not in any supposed 'objective facts' but in a complex dialectic in which fantasy plays a vital role.

33. #33

    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_167"></span>**recollection**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes recollection (remémoration) as a symbolic process of reconstructing one's history from reminiscence as an imaginary reliving of experience, positioning the analytic process on the side of symbolic reconstruction rather than affective re-experiencing or acting out.

    'It is less a matter of remembering than of rewriting history' (S1, 14).

34. #34

    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_141"></span>**other/Other**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes the fundamental Lacanian distinction between the little other (imaginary counterpart/ego-reflection) and the big Other (symbolic order, radical alterity, locus of speech), arguing that the big Other as symbolic order is primary over the big Other as subject, and that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

    it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message (see PUNCTUATION)

35. #35

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_51"></span>**development**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of developmental psychology (geneticism) turns on replacing a linear, chronological model of psychosexual maturation with a structural, retroactive account: the so-called stages of development are timeless symbolic structures ordered *nachträglich* by the Oedipus complex, and entry into the Symbolic is always a creation ex nihilo rather than gradual evolution.

    It is by starting with the experience of the adult that we must grapple, retrospectively, *nachträglich,* with the supposedly original experiences

36. #36

    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 she who introduces the child into language by interpreting the child's screams and thereby retroactively determining their meaning (see PUNCTUATION).

37. #37

    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.

    Time had folded in on itself. One of my earliest pop fixations had returned, vindicated, in an unexpected context… a disavowed part of myself – a ghost from another part of my life – was being recovered, although in a permanently altered form.

38. #38

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

    *<span id="Chapter25.htm_page233"></span>Handsworth Songs* and the English Riots

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses *Handsworth Songs* and Patrick Keiller's Robinson films as cultural-political evidence that neoliberalism's "privatisation of the mind" has decomposed collective political subjectivity since the 1980s, and that struggles are never definitively won but can be (re)constituted — implicitly theorising cultural avant-garde practice as a site of resistance to ideological closure.

    Watched – and listened to – now, Handsworth Songs seems eerily (un)timely. The continuities between the 80s and now impose themselves on the contemporary viewer with a breathtaking force.

39. #39

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

    <span id="Chapter13.htm_page140"></span>Hauntological Blues: Little Axe

    Theoretical move: Fisher develops a theory of sonic hauntology through Little Axe's music, arguing that the combination of blues and dub constitutes a political-aesthetic practice that confronts American slavery as unassimilable trauma by detaching sound from presence (acousmatic production), producing a "dyschronic contemporaneity" that refuses to let the dead be silenced.

    Their dyschronia is reminiscent of those moments in Stephen King's It where old photographs come to (a kind of) life, and there is a hallucinatory suspension of sequentiality.

40. #40

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

    <span id="Chapter9.htm_page113"></span>Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots from an interview with Leyland Kirby (The Caretaker) about hauntological music-making to a theoretical argument that hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension—phonography over phonocentrism—and that The Shining's "ghosts of the Real" must be read psychoanalytically as a fantasmatic, retrospectively posited past structured around repression, superego demands, and libidinal economy.

    a Time that can only ever be retrospectively – retrospectrally – posited

41. #41

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

    <span id="part4.htm_page195"></span>03: THE STAIN OF PLACE

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Laura Ford's *Savage Messiah* is best understood not through the exhausted discourse of psychogeography but through hauntology: the staining of place with intense temporal moments, where the residues of foreclosed collective futures (rave culture, post-1979 hopes) haunt neoliberal London and open possibilities for rupture and collective resistance.

    1979, 1981, 2013: these years recur throughout Savage Messiah, moments of transition and threshold, moments when a whole alternative time-track opens.

42. #42

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

    <span id="Chapter9.htm_page113"></span>Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Kubrick's *The Shining* stages a Freudian/Lacanian hauntology of patriarchy: the dead Father's injunction to enjoy persists spectrally, trauma is transmitted intergenerationally as a kind of recording that replays across generations, and the Unheimliche (the uncanny return of the repressed) is coextensive with the domestic space itself.

    the damage has already been done (had already been done even before he was born), that the photograph has been taken, the recording made; all that is left is the moment of development, of playing back.

43. #43

    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.

    A fragment of Japan's 'Ghosts' washed up 14 years later, on Tricky's first single, 'Aftermath'… Here it wasn't sampled, but cited

44. #44

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

    <span id="Chapter7.htm_page100"></span>Now Then, Now Then: Jimmy Savile and ‘the 70s On Trial’

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses the Jimmy Savile scandal to theorise how power structures warp the experience of reality itself—what was "out in the open" could not be acknowledged because institutional authority produces a cognitive dissonance that forecloses the naming of abuse in the present, confining it structurally to the past; fiction (Peace's noir) functions as the only available register for a Real that consensual reality cannot accommodate.

    What has happened can be pieced together only in retrospect.

45. #45

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.36

    **1** > <span id="page-28-0"></span>**4 A. Johnston**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is theorized not as a simple repetition of Freud's texts but as an après-coup revivification—a repetition-with-difference that renovates the foundation while remaining faithful to it, distinguishing itself from a mere "return of the repressed."

    Lacan's 'return to Freud' is repetition-with-difference, an après-coup revivification of Freud's corpus that stays true to this original while, at the same time, inventively making it speak to new questions, concerns, and interests.

46. #46

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.49

    **2** > <span id="page-38-0"></span>**The Adversary**

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's critique of his analytic "adversaries" (ego psychologists and Kleinian object-relations theorists) turns on two axes: their fetishization of clinical forms over Freud's living spirit, and their reductive pre-Oedipal reductivism—both of which are shown to be impossible by the Nachträglichkeit structure that permanently mediates and liquidates any access to a pre-Oedipal "real." The passage's deeper theoretical move is to show that transference neurosis maps the analysand's libidinal economy onto the analyst-as-Ur-Other, and that psychoanalytic truth, once discovered, propagates itself even through its falsifications.

    as per both Freud and Lacan, the protracted processes of subject formation also entail the temporal dynamics of Nachträglichkeit/après-coup in which unmediated (pre-)history, whatever it might have been, is liquidated.

47. #47

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.59

    **3**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's successive redeployments of the aphorism "Moi la vérité, je parle" across several seminars, arguing that this formula encapsulates a Hegelian-inflected thesis that unconscious truth is irrepressibly self-manifesting, strictly immanent, and structurally equivalent to language—while simultaneously being tied to three interrelated negations (no meta-language, no Other of the Other, no truth about the truth) that foreclose any depth-hermeneutical or transcendent grounding.

    appropriately in line with Freudian-Lacanian Nachträglichkeit/après-coup, these later developments promise retroactively to illuminate the original text of the 'The Freudian Thing' itself

48. #48

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.196

    **11**

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's early-to-mid-1950s account of the unconscious articulates a structural Symbolic order (automaton) arising out of Real contingency (tuché), grounding both the compulsive repetition of unrecognized desire in transference and the curative mechanism of analysis in Hegelian-Kojèvian recognition theory, while simultaneously positioning Lacan as a proto-post-structuralist who preserves a place for the Real beyond Lévi-Straussian structuralism, and linking the Symbolic unconscious to sexuality via the Maussian/Lévi-Straussian incest prohibition and the master/slave dialectic.

    the desire for recognition (le désir de la reconnaissance) dominates the desire that is to be recognized

49. #49

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.273

    **13** > <span id="page-269-0"></span>**Index**

    Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (pages 272–275) listing proper names, works, and concepts with page references; it contains no substantive theoretical argument or conceptual development.

    Nachträglichkeitlaprès-coup 25, 36

50. #50

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.55

    JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > *Presentation of the Suite* > *Introduction*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* is not speculative excess but the rigorous re-grounding of psychoanalysis in symbolic repetition: the fort/da game demonstrates that the human subject is constituted by the signifier's syntactic determinations, and the combinatorial network of symbols shows that overdetermination is always *symbolic* overdetermination, never real, grounding subjectivity in the interplay of memory, law, and absence.

    This could illustrate a rudimentary subjective trajectory, by showing that it is grounded in the actuality which has the future anterior in its present.

51. #51

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.63

    JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > *Presentation of the Suite* > *Parenthesis of Parentheses (Added in 1966)*

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the L schema through a parenthetical chain structure, mapping the subject (S/Es), the imaginary relation (a/a'), and the field of the Other (A) onto a combinatorial notation, while demonstrating that purely dyadic (imaginary) intersubjectivity is structurally insufficient and must be superseded by symbolic determination—a point illustrated through Poe's game of even or odd and culminating in the claim that the signifier dominates the subject.

    This is why the emphasis, with which I have increasingly promoted the notion of signifier in the symbol, occurred retroactively here.

52. #52

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function > 77. *On the Sociological Reality of Crime and Law and on the Relation of Psychoanalysis to their Dialectical Foundation*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic theory must be rigorously bounded to its clinical experience and cannot be extrapolated to collective entities (national character, collective superego), while simultaneously demonstrating that the superego and Oedipalism are historically and sociologically conditioned phenomena whose pathogenic force is tied to the disintegration of the conjugal family unit—and that psychoanalysis "unrealizes" crime without dehumanizing the criminal, opening access to the criminal's imaginary world through transference.

    Melanie Klein asserts that the categories Good and Bad are operative in the infant stage of behavior; this view raises a knotty problem—that of retroactively inserting significations into a stage at which language has yet to appear.

53. #53

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.186

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > *Discussion of the Sophism* > (I) Being opposite two blacks, one knows that one is a white.

    Theoretical move: Lacan's analysis of the sophism's three logical moments—instant of the glance, time for comprehending, moment of concluding—demonstrates that subjectivity is constituted through temporal modulation rather than formal logic alone: the subject's self-assertion as a judgment ("I am white") is precipitated by the urgency of the logical movement itself, not by contingent stakes, revealing time as the very medium in which the subject emerges through anticipatory certainty.

    Having surpassed the *time for comprehending the moment of concluding*, it is *the moment of concluding the time for comprehending.* Otherwise this time would lose its meaning.

54. #54

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.218

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > The Function and Field of Speech 237 and Language in Psychoanalysis > *Preface*

    Theoretical move: This preface to the "Rome Discourse" uses the institutional crisis of French psychoanalysis to argue that the deadening of Freudian concepts through routine training regimes makes it urgent to recover their meaning through historical reflection and subjective grounding, and that truth's unsurpassable condition is found in the logical precipitation of haste rather than in bureaucratic prudence.

    Nothing created appears without urgency; nothing in urgency fails to surpass itself in speech.

55. #55

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.231

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > **/ .** *Empty Speech and Full Speech in the Psychoanalytic Realisation of the Subject*

    Theoretical move: Full speech—as distinct from empty speech—constitutes the subject's history by conferring necessity on past contingencies through its address to an Other, and it is this transindividual structure of concrete discourse that grounds Freud's discovery of the unconscious, not any individual psychophysiological fact.

    as many restructurings of the event as take place, as he puts it, nachtraglich after the fact.

56. #56

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.234

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > **/ .** *Empty Speech and Full Speech in the Psychoanalytic Realisation of the Subject*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is constituted by historicization and intersubjective discourse rather than by instinctual stages or biological analogy, and that psychoanalytic technique must be grounded in the subject's symbolic-historical reality rather than in biological mythology or dyadic object-relation thinking.

    What we teach the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history—in other words, we help him complete the current historicization of the facts that have already determined a certain number of the historical 'turning points' in his existence.

57. #57

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.273

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's interventions—including abstention, session length, and temporal punctuation—constitute the junction between the Symbolic and the Real, and that the variable-length session ("short sessions") has a precise dialectical function: by shattering discourse it brings forth genuine speech, countering the obsessive's strategy of working-through as seduction of the master.

    despite the whole network of proofs demonstrating the historicity of the primal scene... the Wolf Man never managed to integrate his recollection of the primal scene into his history.

58. #58

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.283

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique* > *Notes*

    Theoretical move: This passage is a set of scholarly endnotes to Lacan's "Presentation on Psychical Causality," containing bibliographic references, authorial revisions added in 1966, and brief theoretical asides—primarily non-substantive apparatus, but with several load-bearing theoretical annotations touching on key concepts such as the big Other, Après-coup, the Subject Supposed to Know, repetition, and topology.

    The concept of Nachtraglichkeit is underlined in the footnote.

59. #59

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.449

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > /. *The Meaning of the Letter* > *II. The Letter in the Unconscious*

    Theoretical move: Lacan reformulates the Cartesian cogito through the Freudian discovery of the split between subject of the signifier and subject of the signified, arguing that the unconscious operates through the rhetorical mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy—which are identical to the mechanisms of symptom-formation and desire respectively—thereby grounding psychoanalysis in a structural linguistics of the unconscious rather than in ego psychology or biologism.

    One need but read Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality... to note that Freud has all accession to the object derive from a dialectic of return.

60. #60

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.464

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > /. *Toward Freud*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that verbal hallucination cannot be explained by appeal to a unifying percipiens, because the signifying chain imposes itself on the subject in its own right; the hallucination must therefore be understood structurally—at the level of the signifier itself—rather than psychologically, and this structural approach is what distinguishes a genuinely Freudian reconceptualization of psychosis from all prior frameworks.

    its overdetermination at each instant by the deferred action [après-coup] of its sequence, and the suspension at each instant of its value upon the advent of a meaning that is always susceptible to postponement [renvoi]

61. #61

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.586

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > ///. *On the Ideals of the Person*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the optical model (inverted vase/spherical mirror) to articulate the structural relations between ego, ego-ideal, ideal ego, and the Other, arguing that the symbolic dimension (the big Other as locus of speech) is irreducible to imaginary dyadic relations, and that the analytic trajectory leads the subject from imaginary capture toward assumption of his unconscious discourse—traversing the ideal ego's mirage rather than consolidating it.

    All that subsists here is the being whose advent can only be grasped by no longer being... the imperfect, encounters that being. // Il était là [He was to be there] contains the same duplicity

62. #62

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.590

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > ///. *On the Ideals of the Person* > *IV. Toward an Ethics*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the superego, properly understood from the vantage point of speech and existence, is fundamentally a *voice*—a loud, authoritative vocal imperative without ground other than its own resonance—and that this reframing opens onto an ethics oriented by desire rather than fear, one that cannot be reduced to ego-strengthening or humanist moralism.

    Would nescit, to alter but a single letter in it, lead us to suspect that the only negation it contains is retroactively (nachtraglich) feigned?

63. #63

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.593

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Signification of the Phallus 685 *Die Bedeutung des Phallus*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus is neither a fantasy, an object, nor an anatomical organ but a signifier—the privileged signifier that conditions meaning effects as a whole—and uses this to reframe the castration complex, the phallic phase, and the distinction between need, demand, and desire as structural effects of the subject's subjection to the signifier and to the Other's locus.

    If deferred action {Nachtrag), to take back another of these terms from the domain of the highbrow literati where they now circulate, makes this effort impracticable

64. #64

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.729

    The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious > Position of the Unconscious ⁸²⁹

    Theoretical move: The passage articulates the subject's constitution through two fundamental operations—alienation and the split produced by the signifier—demonstrating that the subject is an effect of language rather than its cause, while simultaneously theorising the topology of the unconscious (its closing/opening structure) and the temporal logic of retroaction (Nachträglichkeit) as the ground for psychoanalytic causality.

    Nachtraglichkeit (remember that I was the first to extract it from Freud's texts) or deferred action [apres-coup], by which trauma becomes involved in symptoms, reveals a temporal structure of a higher order.

65. #65

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.803

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTE S T O "A THEORETICA L INTRODUCTIO N T O TH E FUNCTION S O F PSYCHOANALYSI S I N CRIMINOLOGY " > NOTE S T O "LOGICA L TIM E AN D TH E ASSERTIO N O F ANTICIPATE D CERTAINTY " > NOTES TO 'FUNCTION AND FIELD

    Theoretical move: This passage is a set of editorial and translator's notes to Lacan's "Function and Field" essay, clarifying terminology, providing bibliographic references, and glossing French/Latin terms; it is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argumentation.

    The French translation by Marie Bonaparte and Rudolph M. Loewenstein renders it as apres-coup.

66. #66

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.843

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTES TO IN MEMORY OF ERNEST JONES: O N HIS THEORY OF SYMBOLISM"

    Theoretical move: This passage is a set of editorial footnotes and translator's notes to Lacan's "In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism" and "On an Ex Post Facto Syllabary," providing bibliographic references, etymological glosses, and contextual clarifications; it contains no substantive theoretical argument.

    Apres coup (Ex Post Facto) is also used to translate Freud's Nachtr'dglichkeit (deferred action).

67. #67

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.871

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts

    Theoretical move: This passage is the prefatory apparatus and classified index of major concepts from Lacan's Écrits, compiled by Jacques-Alain Miller with a brief note by Lacan himself; it organizes the theoretical architecture of the Écrits as a system around the Symbolic Order, the Signifier, the subject, and their clinical and epistemological ramifications, while asserting that Lacanian discourse constitutes a closed, coherent formalization.

    Overdetermination and logical time (anticipation and retroaction; chance, encounter, and fate)

68. #68

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.880

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *III. Desire and Its Interpretation* > *2, Schreber's schema*

    Theoretical move: This passage deploys Lacan's major schemas (Schreber's psychotic schema, Sade's fantasy schemas, networks of overdetermination, and the Graphs of Desire) as a classified index, showing how foreclosure, fading of the subject, overdetermination, and the logic of anticipation/retroaction structure the subject across psychotic, perverse, and neurotic clinical fields.

    the emergence, by means of a second dissymmetrical distribution, of a complex form of anticipation completed by retroaction

69. #69

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.887

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *Position of the Unconscious*

    Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it comprises editorial apparatus for the Écrits — bibliographic notes on individual essays' publication histories and a classified index of Freudian German terms with their page references — and makes no independent theoretical argument.

    Nachtraglich, 256, 684, 685, 839

70. #70

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.344

    Response to Jean Hyppolite 's Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung"

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes Freud's Verneinung to establish that what is excluded from primordial symbolization (Verwerfung/foreclosure) does not enter the unconscious but returns in the Real—as hallucination, erratic castration, or acting out—while simultaneously critiquing ego psychology's failure to grasp this structure.

    the retroaction in a cyclical time that makes the anamnesis of his troubles so difficult, the anamnesis of his elementary phenomena which are merely presignifying

71. #71

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.391

    The Freudian Thing > *The talk given was couched in the following terms:*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious is structured by the primacy of the signifier over signification, such that symptoms, dreams, parapraxes, and jokes are all instances of the signifier's irreducible dominance—and that psychoanalytic practice degenerates precisely when analysts abandon this linguistic-symbolic dimension in favour of ego-adaptation and object-relational corrective experience.

    a memory element from a special, earlier situation be taken up anew in order to articulate the current situation—in other words, that this memory element be unconsciously employed in it as a signifying element

72. #72

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.195

    **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.

    it brings into the play of symbols the Prâgung itself, which here is only attained through an effect that is retroactive, nachtrâglich, as Freud puts it.

73. #73

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.20

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of 'the act' is constitutively signifying (not merely motor), that its meaning is always retroactively constituted (Nachträglich), and uses a critical reading of a contemporary report on transference and acting-out to distinguish his own theoretical position—that the act is new and unheard-of in its psychoanalytic formulation—from both ego-psychological reductions of transference and naive intersubjective readings of his own Rome Discourse.

    does that mean that this reading is simply added on and that it is from the act reduced Nachträglich (subsequently) that it takes on its value? You know the stress that I have laid for a long time on this term which would not figure in the Freudian vocabulary, if I had not extracted it from Freud's text.

74. #74

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.20

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of the act (as distinct from mere motor activity) is constitutively signifying and only achieves its full status nachträglich, while simultaneously critiquing the reduction of transference to an intersubjective relation or a mere defensive concept by ego-psychological and American analytic orthodoxy.

    does that mean that this reading is simply added on and that it is from the act reduced *Nachtràglich* (subsequently) that it takes on its value? You know the stress that I have laid for a long time on this term which would not figure in the Freudian vocabulary, if I had not extracted it from Freud's text.

75. #75

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.301

    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.

    He underscores the term that I've been repeating and pushing to the fore of analytic reflection, namely après coup, retroaction. He says nachträgliche Gehorsam, which means deferred obedience.

76. #76

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.95

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > THE PRIMACY OF THE PHALLUS AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian primacy of the phallus cannot be grounded in real anatomical experience but must be understood symbolically: the phallus functions as a signifier whose retroactive operation structures castration and privation, and analytic interpretations that treat frustration as an imaginary object-substitute (child-for-phallus) risk short-circuiting the symbolic structuration proper to the Oedipus complex.

    everything that refers to the supervalence or the predominance of the phallus at one stage of the child's development only finds its point of impact retroactively.

77. #77

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.155

    **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**

    Theoretical move: Lacan maps the historical evolution of debates around the Oedipus complex onto three structural poles—superego, reality, and ego-ideal—arguing that the function of the father and the Oedipus complex are co-extensive, and uses Melanie Klein's own findings to demonstrate that the paternal third term (the phallus) is irreducible even in supposedly pre-Oedipal imaginary relations, thus preparing the ground for his formal account of the paternal metaphor.

    the notion of retroaction highlighted, the Nachträglichkeit of the Oedipus complex, to which as you know I am always insistently drawing your attention. This notion seemed to have escaped thought.

78. #78

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.223

    **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 uses the figure of the praying mantis to sharply distinguish animal (instinctual/synchronic) jouissance from human desire, arguing that human desire is not grounded in natural instinct but is structurally constituted in the margins of demand—a beyond and a shy-of—and is always already articulated around a partial object whose erotic value is retroactively (Nachträglich) installed by demand and its beyond of love.

    The Eros that inhabits it comes Nachträglich, retroactively, only after the fact [après coup]. The place for this desire is prepared [creusée] in oral demand.

79. #79

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.72

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 8*: *Wednesday 17 January 1962*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Cartesian encounter with extension and the linguistic analysis of French negation (Damourette & Pichon) to articulate the split between the subject of enunciation and the enunciating subject, showing that the "expletive ne" is a trace of the unconscious subject and that negation is not a simple logical operation but indexes a gap in the subject's position within language.

    what he projects of his act backwards, there is produced this something which we have the courage to go towards in order to interrogate it in the name of the formula: 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden'

80. #80

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.160

    A month later: > Lalangue

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *lalangue* names the irreducible surplus of phonic materiality over meaning in language, and that this surplus—rather than being aestheticized as poetic effect—is the very site where unconscious desire is constituted retroactively; interpretation's aim is therefore not to supply meaning but to reduce signifiers to their non-sense, revealing desire as the fold of language itself rather than its hidden content.

    It emerges only through the slip as its effect and, in a circular loop, retroactively becomes its cause; it creates its anteriority, it is readable only in retrospect

81. #81

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.37

    A Voice and Nothing More > The linguistics of the non-voice

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that ostensibly "presymbolic" or "presignifying" vocal phenomena—coughing, hiccups, babbling, and the scream—are not external to the symbolic structure but are always already captured by it; their very non-signifying character makes them the zero-point of signification and the minimal condition of possibility for the signifier as such. Simultaneously, the scream's transformation into appeal enacts the passage from need to desire via the structure of address to the Other.

    scream retroactively turns into appeal, it is interpreted, endowed with meaning, it is transformed into a speech addressed to the other

82. #82

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.141

    The voice and the drive > The click

    Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice functions as a traumatic kernel at the origin of fantasy, specifically the primal scene fantasy: a contingent, inexplicable sound (the 'click') short-circuits inner and outer, revealing an excess of jouissance in the Other that simultaneously constitutes the subject's own enigma, so that subjectivation is grounded not in language structure but in a pre-linguistic sonorous object.

    The strange noise then acquired a huge importance in retrospect, it was suddenly encircled by a retroactive interpretation, a paranoiac construction, a fantasy which provided it with a meaning and a framework.

83. #83

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.151

    A month later: > Lalangue

    Theoretical move: Dolar argues that lalangue names the internal divergence between the signifier's differential logic and the voice's logic of sonic resemblance/contamination, displacing the early Lacanian formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" with one in which enjoyment (jouissance) is not proscribed beyond speech but operates as the inner torsion of speech itself—the Möbius-strip surface on which signifier and voice are the same yet irreducibly split.

    there was a protracted time-loop; years could pass between the senseless sound and the retroactive understanding

84. #84

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.145

    A month later:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that fantasy is structurally generated by the temporal gap between hearing a voice and understanding it (après-coup), functioning as a provisional quilting point in place of understanding; crucially, true understanding never dissolves fantasy but only prolongs it, so analytic progress requires traversal of fantasy rather than understanding—with the matheme and formulas of sexuation standing as the non-fantasmatic, purely literal counterpart to the traumatic voice.

    The voice is always understood nachträglich, subsequently, retroactively, and the time-loop of the primal fantasy is precisely the gap between hearing and making sense of what we hear

85. #85

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.145

    Distance and Proximity > Laughing from a Distance

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy requires a paradoxical combination of disinvestment from an event's social utility AND investment in the event itself, dismantling the simple "distance = comedy" adage by showing that pure distance produces indifference, not laughter; representation is identified as the privileged site where this dual requirement is most reliably met.

    It is only later, with some spatial and temporal distance, that we can think back on the fall and laugh... comedy is tragedy plus time.

86. #86

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.294

    <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 6. The Paradoxes of Nachträglichkeit and the Time of the Real

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nachträglichkeit radically forecloses any appeal to a pre-symbolic origin of drive or desire, and simultaneously warns against substantializing the Lacanian Real: the Real is not a prior Ur-stuff but is constituted retroactively through fractures of the Imaginary and failures of the Symbolic, with objet a functioning as the index of those tensions at their intersection.

    In radicalizing the psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit, a Lacanian point of view reveals the profound appropriateness of Freud's choosing to represent the truth of the unconscious with the drama of Oedipus

87. #87

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

    <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

    Theoretical move: The chapter pivots from a dualistic (imaginary/symbolic) framework to a triadic one (imaginary/symbolic/real integrated via the Borromean Knot), arguing that Freudian dualisms internally require development into triadic structures, and that the split, Other-bound subject disclosed by psychoanalysis—together with Nachträglichkeit—fundamentally challenges any philosophy premised on a unified representing subject.

    we will be drawn to consider a final and decisive Freudian theme: the wrinkled temporality of deferred action, or Nachtraglichkeit.

88. #88

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

    <span id="preface.xhtml_pxiii" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page xiii. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Preface

    Theoretical move: The preface establishes *Nachträglichkeit* (deferred action) as the book's central theoretical pivot, arguing that the paradoxical retroactive temporality of the unconscious — wherein the subject is never coincident with itself and every sought object was never possessed — structures both Freud's metapsychology and the book's own argumentative architecture.

    Freud touched upon this paradox in his concept of Nachträglichkeit… the circumstance that the human subject is never fully coincident with itself but is always at once behind and ahead of itself.

89. #89

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.203

    <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.

    Sexual experiences may occur in early childhood that become understandable as such only at puberty... Because virtually every human being passes through this di-phasic unfolding of sexuality, everyone is liable to the development of the proton pseudos.

90. #90

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.240

    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.

    Freud was even able to caption his earlier annoyance: 'This group of thoughts that played a part in the dream enabled me retrospectively [nachträglich] to put this transient impression into words.'

91. #91

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.258

    The Writing on the Wall > First and Final Words > **I Was This**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's concepts of "true speech" and "full speech" converge in a psychoanalytic anamnesis that is fundamentally distinct from both Platonic reminiscence and imaginary transference: it retroactively resubjectivizes the subject by reordering past contingencies as future necessities, operating in the future anterior tense and fulfilling the Freudian imperative of becoming what one is in the process of becoming.

    When Freud uses the German nachträglich to describe his reassessment of Otto's earlier comments, this is what he means.

92. #92

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.88

    5. > On Neural Plasticit y, Trauma , and the Loss of Affects > Freud and the Event

    Theoretical move: The passage challenges Freud's exclusively positive concept of psychic plasticity—the imperishability and regressi­bility of all prior mental states—by confronting it with neurobiological evidence that brain lesions can produce irreversible destructions of psychic formations (dreaming, affect, identity), yielding a "purely destructive event" that cannot be integrated, remembered, or made into a moment of personal history.

    a purely destructive event, which provokes the total disappearance of a psychic formation, or of a brain region, or of affects, particularly wonder.

93. #93

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.198

    12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Symbolic mediation (entry into language/the big Other) does not merely overlay a pristine biological core self but "transubstantiates" and "desubstantializes" it, producing a split subject ($) whose specifically human affects (anxiety, horror, melancholy) arise precisely from the gap opened by this denaturalization — a gap Johnston refines by insisting that denaturalization is never total but leaves anachronistic natural residues, such that the distinction between S (protoself) and $ (core self) persists as an internal split within $ itself.

    he signals his hypothesis that Damasio's protoself or core self (or, more accurately, selves) is thoroughly denaturalized après-coup by the intrusion of the signifiers of the symbolic order

94. #94

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.120

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Dialectics for Marx**

    Theoretical move: Against Postone's historicist reduction of dialectics to capitalism's lifespan, the passage argues that dialectics acquires a transhistorical, retroactive logic: social forms outlive their conditions of production, and the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic operates not chronologically but retrospectively, with the present 'creating' the past and capital functioning as Hegelian Subject-Substance.

    It is only from the capitalist mode of production that we can retrospectively comprehend precursory modes of social organizations of production... It is in this sense that dialectics takes its non-teleological and (in Postone's terms) transhistorical character.

95. #95

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.285

    **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 Implications of Quantum Gravity](#contents.xhtml_ahd19)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues for a three-level ontological triad (pre-ontological quantum proto-reality, ordinary physical reality, and the symbolic universe) in which Lack/absence must be primordial rather than emergent, and where the logic of retroactivity, the quilting-point, and the Not-all operate homologously across quantum physics, Hegel's Logic, and the Lacanian symbolic order—displacing both evolutionary materialism and standard idealism.

    indeterminate immediacy is a product, but a retroactive product of the advent of retroactivity itself … being is what it will have been through the occurrence of pure being in the series of weak difference.

96. #96

    The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.83

    <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *Subjectifying the Cause: A Temporal Conundrum*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that separation and the subjectification of the cause operate under a retroactive temporal logic (future anterior / Nachträglichkeit) that is irreducible to classical linear causality, and that this culminates in the traversal of fantasy as the moment when the Other's desire is fully "signifierized," liberating the subject from the fixity of the Name-of-the-Father and enabling genuine action.

    This grammatical tense is related to Freud's Nachträglichkeit, deferred action, retroaction, or ex post facto action: a first event (E) occurs, but does not bear fruit until a second event (E2) occurs.

97. #97

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.34

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian "concrete universality" is not a neutral container of particulars but the irreducible tension and non-coincidence between levels—demonstrated through the logic of the frame (appearance appearing as such), the supernumerary exception that *is* the universal, and the "temporal parallax" by which the same principle cannot actualize simultaneously across domains, requiring retroactive reading (après-coup) to become legible.

    Kant's critical venture phenomenologically succeeds the revolution that it chronologically, of course, anticipates only insofar as his text becomes legible only retroactively through the event... The revolution itself inflicts on Kant's own text a kind of retroactive trauma.

98. #98

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.246

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Unconscious Act of Freedom

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that (self-)consciousness is not the spontaneous emergent pattern of parallel cognitive agents but rather the experience of a gap or malfunction in that pattern, and that genuine transcendental freedom consists not in an empirically locatable founding act but in the retroactive positing of a primordial, unconscious decision—the subject being nothing but the void opened by the failure of reflection and self-identification, constituted only through the self-referential act of signification.

    retroactively becomes aware that he already was 'responsible'... the subject all of a sudden—not so much becomes 'free' and 'responsible,' but—retroactively becomes aware

99. #99

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.81

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kierkegaard's apparent anti-Hegelianism conceals a disavowed proximity to Hegel: both thinkers share a commitment to reopening the past's contingency rather than closing it into necessity, and the genuine Hegelian dialectical move is not to view the present as already-accomplished finality but to restore potentiality to actuality—a gesture that aligns with Kierkegaard's ethico-existential insistence on contingent singular decision over cognitive-objective thought.

    the task is, rather, to unearth the hidden potentialities (the utopian emancipatory potentials) which were betrayed in the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome

100. #100

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.35

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegelian concrete universality is not a peaceful synthesis of particularities but is itself the site of an irreducible antagonism or "inherent gap of the One," such that particular forms are failed attempts to resolve the universal's self-contradiction — a logic that surpasses both Kantian moral abstraction and Laclau's externally opposed logics of difference and antagonism.

     the true speculative meaning emerges only through the repeated reading, as the after-effect (or by-product) of the first, 'wrong' reading

101. #101

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.136

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

     Theoretical move: Žižek reads the final scene of Henry James's *The Wings of the Dove* as a demonstration of how the intersubjective status of knowledge (knowing that the Other knows) restructures libidinal economy, and how Densher's "test" enacts a deceptive formal/informal dialectic aimed at deceiving the big Other—presenting a forced choice as freedom while the object-letter functions as a proto-Hitchcockian materialization of intersubjective tension.

     although he did not love Milly before her death, he does so now, after her death: he is in love with Milly's memory.

102. #102

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.205

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > "Positing the Presuppositions"

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine freedom is not the absence of causal determination but the retroactive capacity to choose which causes determine us — a "positing of presuppositions" structure that links Bergsonian retroactive possibility, Kantian self-determination, Hegelian Setzung der Voraussetzungen, and Varela's autopoiesis into a single temporal-ontological loop.

     the truth value of the modal propositions about the past—was first explored by Henri Bergson... its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once this reality emerges.

103. #103

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.214

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > A Cognitivist Hegel?

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses Malabou's Hegelian reading of brain science to argue that neural plasticity, far from being mere adaptability, contains a genuine Hegelian negativity; and that consciousness itself—as a relational, self-referential short circuit between present input and past memory—enacts the logic of retroactive positing of presuppositions and sublation, such that the "immediacy" of qualia is the result of complex mediation collapsed into apparent simplicity.

     in contrast to the standard après-coup, in which the present working-through retroactively constitutes the meaning of past memory traces, here it is via the detour through the past that our present experience itself is constituted

104. #104

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.55

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy

     Theoretical move: Žižek, following Karatani's Kantian reading of Marx, argues that the parallax gap between production and circulation is irreducible and constitutive of Capital's movement—value is generated "in itself" in production but actualized only retroactively through circulation (futur antérieur)—and that this structural antinomy cannot be resolved by privileging either side, making Capital's self-movement a "spurious infinity" rather than Hegelian dialectical closure.

     value 'is' not immediately, it only 'will have been,' it is retroactively actualized, performatively enacted. In production, value is generated 'in itself,' while only through the completed circulation process does it become 'for itself.'

105. #105

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.202

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Danger? What Danger?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the emergence of genuine novelty (New Order from Chaos) requires a structural-dialectical account that cannot be reduced to adaptation logic, and that Varela's "feminine ontology" of aleatory possibility maps precisely onto the Lacanian logic of the Not-all — necessity is not-all, yet nothing escapes it.

     Although we can (retroactively) ascertain a long gestation period, one last element triggers the swift shift from Chaos to new Order

106. #106

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.22

     The Tickling Object

     Theoretical move: Žižek introduces the "parallax object" as the key to understanding the subject-object relation: the objet petit a is identified as the pure parallax object and cause of the parallax gap, a minimal difference that is itself an object, irreducible to any symbolic grasp — and this structure is shown to pervade narrative form (Fitzgerald), psychoanalytic experience, and the ontology of the subject's gaze.

     we are never dealing here with simple 'facts,' but always with facts located in the space of indeterminacy between 'too soon' and 'too late'

107. #107

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.199

     **Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that historical narratives inevitably serve a fantasmatic function—justifying present ideological structures—but that certain filmmakers (notably Resnais) deploy the cinema of fantasy to allow an encounter with the impossible historical object precisely by marking the failure of the look, thereby transforming history from a validation of the present into an interrogation of it.

     His claim in the Philosophy of History that 'the history of the world . . . presents us with a rational process' derives from his recognition that we always narrate our history backward, from the standpoint of the present.

108. #108

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.99

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)^{<a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a>} > III

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's Lacanian reading of Hegel correctly recovers neglected Hegelian themes (retroactivity, Spirit as self-producing, rejection of the narcissistic sublation model) but ultimately distorts Hegel by over-assimilating him to Lacan, failing to articulate the genuinely Hegelian alternative regarding Reason and sociality.

     Žižek rightly described as Hegel's insistence on the logic of a deed or claim or event that can be said to 'posit its own presuppositions' retroactively. (A dream's meaning is constituted by the telling, not 'recovered.' A trauma becomes the trauma it is retroactively, in its interrogation.)

109. #109

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.175

     Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Latching On

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that effective ideological critique requires not only a "negative" moment of critical destabilization but also a "positive" moment of "latching on"—an opening toward something new—and that this dialectical structure parallels both the Hegelian movement of self-consciousness and the Lacanian end of analysis, making critique genuinely transformative rather than merely cynical.

     More precisely, there is a certain effect of retroactivity: The movement carries a knowledge with it that will (only really) have been there, once it becomes possible to effectuate it.

110. #110

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.86

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Harman](#contents.xhtml_ch3a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends his position against Harman's OOO critique by arguing that the subject's transcendental limitation is not a form of idealist duomining but reflects a genuine ontological asymmetry: unlike objects, the subject has no existence outside its interactions, making the Unconscious and meaning itself irreducibly interactional and retroactive rather than substanial.

     So what do I mean by retroactivity? Let me mention for the nth time the wonderful dialectical joke from Ernst Lubitsch's film Ninotchka … What this logic of determinate negation implies is the retroactivity of meaning.

111. #111

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > Žižek’s Intervention

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of ideology is constitutively different from Marx's and Althusser's because it grounds the social order in the Real (unconscious, split subject, antagonism) rather than material-economic conditions, and achieves this by fusing Lacan's non-existent Big Other with Hegel's foundationless dialectics — locating ideology as a cover for external social antagonism rather than as the effect of an economic base.

     Hegel reveals himself to be a philosopher of retroactivity or Nachträglichkeit... History is always conceived retroactively, so that the present constitutes the past rather than the past shaping the present.

112. #112

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.53

     **STRANGE BEDFELLOWS**

     Theoretical move: The passage narrates the pre-theoretical prehistory of psychoanalysis by tracing the moments in which the sexual aetiology of neurosis was whispered but not yet theorised, situating Freud's later discovery as a retroactive formalisation of what Charcot and Breuer already knew but could not say.

     Freud recalled in 1914 that 'I was almost paralyzed with amazement and said to myself: Well, but if he knows that, why does he never say so?' But the impression was soon forgotten

113. #113

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.89

     **SIMULATION, EXPRESSION, AND TRUTH**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "discourse of the hysteric" represents a structural expansion of hysteria beyond clinical neurosis into a universal condition of the speaking being, one rooted in Hegelian dialectics, the alienating effect of language, and ultimately the hysterical *prôton pseudos* — thereby linking Lacan's formalization of discourse back to his earliest Babinskian formation while opening onto questions of gender, transgender experience, and the unconscious as "une-bévue."

     Only at the age of twelve, when she was old enough to understand what had happened, did she experience disgust and panic, and the phobia started.

114. #114

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.135

     **THAT OBSCURE OBJECT**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces a Freudian-Lacanian theory of the drive's object through ethnographic and clinical material, arguing that the partial objects (feces, money, gift, baby, penis) form an interchangeable series grounded in anal erotism, and that Lacan's objet petit a — as always-already lost — is the structural culmination of this series, introducing castration as the condition of any object relation.

     coprophilic inclinations continue to operate in later life and are expressed in the neuroses, perversions and bad habits of adults.

115. #115

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.90

     **SIMULATION, EXPRESSION, AND TRUTH**

     Theoretical move: By reading Freud's *prôton pseudos* as "fallacy" rather than "lie," Gherovici argues that hysteria's founding logic is one of constitutive undecidability between error, deception, and creativity—and leverages this to propose that the analyst must listen to trans patients the way Freud listened to hysterics: allowing unconscious errancy to disclose subjective truth rather than reducing subjects to objects of classification.

     The memory of the first scene became pathological within the unconscious reconstruction operated by the second scene.