Automaton

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (215)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.122

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont

   Theoretical move: The passage uses the literary case of Valmont and Merteuil in *Les Liaisons dangereuses* to dramatize the Lacanian thesis that there is no sexual relation — that love (identification, the formula of One) and jouissance (always partial, never whole) are fundamentally incompatible — while also arguing that the path to autonomous subjectivity, in eighteenth-century ethical thought, runs through Evil as a deliberate project rather than mere knowledge.

   Dolar, in his analysis of Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, links it to the more general fascination with the machine, the model of l'homme-machine or 'automaton' as a counterpart to the autonomous subjectivity of the Enlightenment.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.132

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > In letter 70, he puts it like this:

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Valmont's conduct toward Madame de Tourvel exemplifies the perverse structure as Lacan conceives it—making the Other enjoy/become a subject—while his eventual betrayal of Merteuil illustrates Lacan's formula of 'giving ground on one's desire' (céder sur son désir), wherein the rhetoric of 'it is not my fault' is itself the purest confession of guilt and the mark of the subject who has abandoned desire for the logic of the superego.

   it is a reminder that while mechanical, human creatures, especes, can be fooled with this kind of 'fatalistic crap', it is unforgivable for a person who believes himself to be an autonomous subject to use such an excuse

3. #03

   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 19th-century academic psychology's characterizations of dream-life as psychically degraded—marked by incoherence, absence of logical critique, and withdrawal from the outer world—while registering that certain remnants of psychic activity (memory, emotion, associative laws) persist, thereby framing the problem that will require a genuinely new theory of dream interpretation.

   dans le rêve l'esprit est un automate spirituel

4. #04

   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 the pre-Freudian literature on dreams, mapping the range of contradictory positions—from radical depreciation of dream-life to its over-estimation—across the dimensions of associative logic, psychic capacity, memory, time, and moral feeling, thereby establishing the theoretical problem-space that Freud's own dream-interpretation will claim to resolve.

   une action spontanee et comme automatique de l'esprit; une association vicieuse et irregulière des idées

5. #05

   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.

   the undesirable presentations in the dream as in the waking state, in fever and other deliria, merely have 'the character of a voluntary activity put to rest and a somewhat mechanical process of pictures and presentations produced by inner impulses'

6. #06

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

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

   Theoretical move: Freud argues that acts of judgment, astonishment, and explanatory thought appearing within dreams are not independent intellectual performances but are repetitions or displacements of prototypes already present in the dream-thoughts — the dream-work copies reasoning from waking material (including from a patient's neurotic logic) rather than generating it spontaneously.

   Thus, while I am still dreaming, I declare my own case to be such a one of 'Automatisme ambulatoire.'

7. #07

   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) > The psychoanalytic unconscious of the psychological unconscious

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that pre-Freudian (and ego-psychological) hierarchical dualisms between conscious and unconscious encode a political bias that is itself legible as the 'unconscious of scientific discourse'; true psychoanalytic insight locates conflict not in biological or archetypal sources but in the linguistic structure of the symptom as articulated in speech.

   Lacan's reference to Aristotle and contemporary machines contrasts movement which just happens as a result of natural law and chance with such an idea of revolt.

8. #08

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.174

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychotic hallucinations—both 'code phenomena' (autonomous neologisms) and 'message phenomena' (disrupted signifying chains)—are not symptomatic of an underlying illness but ARE the structure itself, revealing the subject's relationship to the signifier as mapped by the Graph of Desire; the subject is constituted as an effect of signifier-to-signifier reference, not of any neurological or imaginary substrate.

   In order to grasp automatic processes in psychosis ('the order of 'machines'') one needs to focus on the signifier (452, 8).

9. #09

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.216

   [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > II. What is the place of interpretation?

   Theoretical move: Lacan's account of interpretation displaces ego-psychological and Gestaltian frameworks by grounding interpretation exclusively in the function of the signifier and the place of the Other, arguing that subjective transmutation occurs through the signifier rather than through ego-adaptive understanding, and that analytic direction must begin from subjective rectification rather than adaptation to reality.

   Freud seeks a model to explain the repetition automatism that he had observed in his patients

10. #10

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.71

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Signifying Matrix > It Speaks

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates on two irreducible dimensions—a semantic pole anchoring definite meaning and a "mantic" pole opening toward das Ding as pure lack—and that this bifold matrix grounds both the psychoanalytic method (free association, the slip of the tongue) and the quasi-religious capacity to create ex nihilo, illustrated by Heidegger's vase as the originary signifier of signifying itself.

    They seem to come into my mouth unbidden, by a kind of automatism. And yet my speech is almost always accompanied by a sense that, yes, this is what I want to say.

11. #11

    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_170"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0191"></span>**repetition**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's successive redefinitions of Freudian repetition compulsion: from automatism tied to the complex, through the 1950s reformulation as the insistence of the signifier, to the 1960s recast as the return of jouissance — each move progressively de-biologising and re-semioticising (then re-libidinising) the concept while carefully distinguishing repetition from transference as its special clinical subset.

    Lacan often translates Freud's Wiederholungszwang as automatisme de répétition, a term borrowed from French psychiatry (Pierre Janet, Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault).

12. #12

    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_35"></span>**Chance**

    Theoretical move: By re-mapping Aristotle's two forms of chance onto the Lacanian topology of registers, Lacan redefines *automaton* as the insistence of the signifier in the Symbolic and *tyché* as the traumatic encounter with the Real, thereby distinguishing determined (symbolic) repetition from truly arbitrary (real) contingency.

    Lacan redefines automaton as 'the network of signifiers', thus locating it in the symbolic order. The term thus comes to designate those phenomena which seem to be chance but which are in truth the insistence of the signifier in determining the subject.

13. #13

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_108"></span>**letter**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's concept of the Letter as the material, indivisible, and localised substrate of the Symbolic order that is itself Real (hence meaningless), persists through repetition, and positions the analyst as a reader of formal properties rather than meanings — against Saussure's privileging of the acoustic signifier.

    it constantly insists in inscribing itself in the subject's life

14. #14

    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.

    It is the tyche which lies 'beyond the [symbolic] automaton' (S11, 53)

15. #15

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

    <span id="Chapter14.htm_page145"></span>Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and Belbury Poly

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses hauntology as the organising framework to read a cluster of experimental/electronic artists (Richter, Position Normal, Mordant Music, John Foxx) as staging temporal dislocation, entropic memory, and a ghostly relation to lost modernist futures, arguing that sound-recording, photography, and Surrealism share an inherently hauntological dimension that these artists collectively exploit.

    the mechano–melancholy of a phonograph winding down – or perhaps of one of Sebastian's automata running out of power

16. #16

    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.

    Thandie Newton's automaton-stiff, innocent-malevolent performance as Beloved is almost unbearable: grotesque, disturbing, moving in equal measure.

17. #17

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

    <span id="Chapter14.htm_page145"></span>Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and Belbury Poly

    Theoretical move: Fisher theorizes a specific mode of hauntological aesthetics organized around crackle, functional/background culture, and found audio objects: these practices make temporal dislocation audible and tactile, staging the impossibility of genuine loss (and thus of genuine presence) under digital conditions while evoking anonymous, depersonalized memory.

    Richter's pieces have been built from similarly heterogeneous materials – record crackle, shortwave radio, glockenspiels... as with Sebastian's talking machines, you get the impression that Richter has used the latest technology in order to create the illusion of archaism.

18. #18

    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 argues that Joy Division's depression is not a mood but an ontological-philosophical position that operates beyond the pleasure principle—a Schopenhauerian diagnosis of the Will's obscene undead insatiability—and that what makes it theoretically distinct from ordinary sadness or rock nihilism is the total absence of an object-cause, making it structurally homologous to Lacanian melancholia while functioning as a dangerously seductive half-truth about the human condition.

    an ultra-determined chain of events that goes through its motions with remorseless inevitability. You watch the pre-scripted film as if from outside, condemned to watch the reels as they come to a close

19. #19

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.347

    **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.

    the suicide-rush, with the automatism, the mechanism, the necessary and fundamentally alienated character with which, as you know, these suicides of melancholiacs are committed

20. #20

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.326

    **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.

    the unheimlich function of the eyes that are handled, to fetch them from a living being to his automaton, by the character… incarnated by Hoffmann

21. #21

    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.

    What is an algebraic equation? It's something very straightforward that's designed to make something very complicated manageable, to make it pass into a mechanical state, without you having to understand it.

22. #22

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.55

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious operates through the reduction of experience to pure signifiers, and that the non-commutativity of remembering and repetition reveals that the time-function governing the unconscious is of a logical (signifying) order rather than a temporal one—a claim that grounds repetition as the primary category for understanding unconscious structure.

    it is what he succeeds, in a second stage, in resolving by elaborating the function of repetition. We will see later how we can formulate it by referring to Aristotle's Physics.

23. #23

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.6

    CONTENTS

    Theoretical move: This is the table of contents for Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis); it is non-substantive structural/navigational material listing chapter titles and page numbers.

    Tuché and Automaton

24. #24

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.73

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Through close reading of Freud's 'burning child' dream, Lacan argues that the dream is not an escape from reality but an act of homage to a *missed* reality — one that can only perpetuate itself through endless repetition — thereby positioning the Tuche (the encounter with the Real) as structurally prior to, and more real than, waking perception.

    the reality that can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself endlessly, in some never attained awakening

25. #25

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.143

    PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious cause is neither a simple existent nor a non-existent, but is constitutively a "lost cause" whose very absence is the condition of its effects; this grounds his theorisation of repetition as structured around the missed encounter (tuche), where the function of missing—not the return itself—is central to analytic repetition.

    All the effects are subjected to the pressure of a transfactual, causal order which demands to join in their dance, but, if they held their hands tightly, as in the song, they would prevent the cause intruding in their round.

26. #26

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.72

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > TUCHE AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's dream of the burning child to argue that the dream's function is not merely desire-fulfilment but the prolongation of sleep in the face of a traumatic real — introducing the gap (tuche) between reality and representation as the operative structure of awakening, where consciousness recovers only representation while the real slips away.

    A sort of involuted reflection—in my consciousness, it is only my representation that I recover possession of.

27. #27

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.78

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the tuché (the traumatic real encounter) is not merely a clinical concept but a structural principle animating all development through accident/obstacle rather than biological stages, linking psychoanalytic repetition to pre-Socratic philosophy's search for a first cause (clinamen), and positioning this as the true originality of psychoanalysis over ontogenetic stage theories.

    the fort of a da, and the da of a fort. It is aimed at what, essentially, is not there, qua represented—for it is the game itself that is the Repräsentanz of the Vorstellung.

28. #28

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.71

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the phenomenology of waking from a dream — where knocking constitutes the dream before it enters consciousness — to locate the primary process as a rupture between perception and consciousness, positing another locality (Fechner's 'andere Lokalität') as the structural site of the unconscious, and questioning the status of the subject 'before' awakening.

    Zwang, constraint, which Freud defines by governs the very diversions of the primary process.

29. #29

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.74

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > TUCHE AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's dream of the burning child to argue that desire manifests not as wish-fulfillment but as loss at the most cruel point of the object, and that the real—figured by the child's voice—can only be encountered in the dream, never in waking consciousness; the passage culminates in the formula 'God is unconscious' as the true formulation of atheism.

    Only a rite, an endlessly repeated act, can commemorate this not very memorable encounter

30. #30

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

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: The passage makes a brief philosophical-terminological aside, noting that Aristotle's coinage of a Greek neologism (οὐθέν rather than οὐδέν) demonstrates that linguistic manipulation predates Heidegger, and uses this to gesture toward an answer to the question of idealism: 'not nothing' — a formulation pointing toward the Lacanian logic of non-being without full negation.

    from what one of my pupils called the archaic stage of philosophy, the manipulation of words was used just as in the time of Heidegger

31. #31

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.64

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Wiederholen (repetition as function) from mere Wiederkehr (return of circuits), locating the real as that which always returns to the same place precisely where the thinking subject fails to encounter it — thereby grounding Freudian repetition in a structural gap between thought and the real rather than in memory or biography.

    this function has nothing to do with the open or closed character of the circuits that I have just called Wiederkehr.

32. #32

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.76

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > TUCHE AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kierkegaard's essay on Repetition as a philosophical precursor to Freudian repetition, arguing that true repetition is not the return of need but demands the new and the same simultaneously — its radical diversity is concealed by adult variation — and that the child's insistence on the identical retelling reveals the primacy of the signifier over meaning.

    This requirement of a distinct consistency in the details of its telling signifies that the realization of the signifier will never be able to be careful enough in its memorization

33. #33

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz names not "the representative representative" but "that which takes the place of representation," positioning the Real as accessible only beyond the dream — behind the lack of representation — and identifying the Drive (Trieb) as the hidden reality that fantasy screens and repetition sustains.

    the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz... not, as it has been mistranslated, the representative representative (le représentant représentatif), but that which takes the place of the representation

34. #34

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.52

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

    Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from Descartes' subject of certainty to the Freudian subject of the unconscious, arguing that the unconscious thinks before certainty is attained, and that analysis introduces a new structure: not the deceiving Other (as in Descartes) but the deceived Other — a shift that reframes the evidential logic of analytic listening.

    The slightest indication that something is entering the field should make us regard it as of equal value as a trace in relation to the subject.

35. #35

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.244

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses animal conditioning experiments (cross-modal frequency equivalence) to probe the boundary between perceptual structure and the signifier, arguing that pure numerical frequency in Pavlovian signals raises the question of the realism of number without yet attaining the full status of the signifier—a limit that only the counting experimenter crosses.

    a hundred visual stimuli a second reacts to a hundred auditory stimuli a second

36. #36

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.54

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates Logical Time as a three-stage structure (moment of seeing, stage of understanding, moment to conclude) and grounds it in the signifying battery, introducing the twin terms Willkür (chance) and Zufall (the arbitrary) as necessitated by the function of repetition, thereby linking the structure of logical time to Freud's dream-interpretation and the question of signification.

    two terms are to be introduced, necessitated, as we shall see, by the function of repetition— Willkür, chance, and Zufall, the arbitrary.

37. #37

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.82

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: Lacan reactivates the concept of Wiederholungszwang (repetition compulsion) through an etymological and structural analysis, arguing that repetition is not a statistical accident but is built into the very structure of the signifier network — thereby equating automaton with the compulsion to repeat and grounding repetition in the determinism of the signifying chain.

    Through the elucidation of what we call strategies, this is the figure that Aristotle's automaton assumes for us. Furthermore, it is by automatisme that we sometimes translate into French the Zwang of the Wiederholungszwang, the compulsion to repeat.

38. #38

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.68

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis is oriented toward the real as that which eludes the subject in an essential encounter, distinguishing the tuché (encounter with the real) from the automaton (the return/insistence of signs), and thus resisting both idealism and the reduction of experience to mere repetition of the symbolic.

    The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the

39. #39

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.67

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan pivots on Aristotle's Physics to map two ancient Greek terms—automaton and tuche—onto Lacanian concepts: the automaton becomes the network of signifiers (linked to modern mathematics), while tuche names the encounter with the real, thereby grounding the Lacanian theory of repetition in a rereading of Aristotelian causality.

    the automaton—and we know, at the present stage of modern mathematics, that it is the network of signifiers

40. #40

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.77

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Freud's fort-da, Lacan argues that the cotton-reel is not a substitute for the mother but a detached part of the subject itself — the first material instantiation of the objet petit a — and that the game of repetition symbolizes not the satisfaction of a need but the subject's inaugural relation to lack, the signifier, and the object that falls away from it.

    varying the significations is, therefore, it would seem, to elude it. This variation makes one forget the aim of the significance by transforming its act into a game

41. #41

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.69

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes repetition (tuché) from the automaton (return of signs governed by the pleasure principle) by locating repetition in the encounter with the real that lies behind fantasy and transference — a distinction obscured in analytic conceptualization by the conflation of repetition with transference.

    The real is that which always lies behind the automaton, and it is quite obvious, throughout Freud's research, that it is this that is the object of his concern.

42. #42

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.6

    CONTENTS

    Theoretical move: This is the table of contents for Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis); it is non-substantive organisational material listing chapter titles and page numbers.

    Tuché and Automaton

43. #43

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.52

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian subject of certainty must be replaced by Freud's subject of the unconscious, which thinks before attaining certainty; and further, that the analytic Other is not the deceiving Other (as in Descartes) but the deceived Other, since the unconscious can itself operate in the direction of deception without this undermining its status as truth.

    The slightest indication that something is entering the field should make us regard it as of equal value as a trace in relation to the subject.

44. #44

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.54

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes logical time's three stages (moment of seeing, understanding, concluding) from mere psychological insight, grounding its structure in the signifying battery and linking its necessity to the function of repetition via Freud's two terms: Willkür (chance) and Zufall (the arbitrary) as operative in dream interpretation.

    two terms are to be introduced, necessitated, as we shall see, by the function of repetition—Willkür, chance, and Zufall, the arbitrary

45. #45

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.64

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan defines repetition (Wiederholen) not as a closed circuit of memory but as the subject's structural encounter with the Real — that which always returns to the same place precisely where thought (res cogitans) fails to meet it — thereby distinguishing the drive (Trieb) from instinct and grounding Freud's discovery of repetition in the relation between thought and the Real.

    this function has nothing to do with the open or closed character of the circuits that I have just called Wiederkehr.

46. #46

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.67

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan maps Aristotle's two resistant causal terms—automaton and tuché—onto, respectively, the network of signifiers and the encounter with the real, reinterpreting Aristotle's Physics through the lens of modern mathematics and psychoanalytic theory to ground the distinction between symbolic repetition and the irruption of the real.

    Aristotle turns and manipulates two terms that are absolutely resistant to his theory… the automaton—and we know, at the present stage of modern mathematics, that it is the network of signifiers

47. #47

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.68

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes psychoanalysis from idealism by insisting that its core orientation is toward the Real as that which eludes the subject — figured through the Aristotelian concept of tuché (the encounter with the real) as opposed to the automaton (the return of signs), positioning the Real as beyond the repetitive insistence of the symbolic order.

    The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the

48. #48

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.69

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Repetition (as tuché) must be rigorously distinguished from the Automaton (return of signs) and from Transference, because what is repeated is always something that occurs 'as if by chance'—the encounter with the Real—which lies behind the pleasure-principle governance of signs and behind the phantasy screen, and which Freud's own desire in the Wolf Man case reveals as the irreducible pressure of the Real on analytic research.

    The real is that which always lies behind the automaton, and it is quite obvious, throughout Freud's research, that it is this that is the object of his concern.

49. #49

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.70

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > TUCHE AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the tuché (the real as missed encounter) first appears in psychoanalysis as trauma, and that trauma's insistence at the heart of primary processes reveals the constitutive insufficiency of the pleasure/reality principle dyad: reality, however developed, cannot fully absorb the real, leaving a remainder that escapes homeostasis.

    How can the dream, the bearer of the subject's desire, produce that which makes the trauma emerge repeatedly—if not its very face, at least the screen that shows us that it is still there behind?

50. #50

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.71

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes the unconscious as a primary process located in a non-temporal 'other locality' (another scene) between perception and consciousness, using the phenomenology of waking from a dream to illustrate how the subject is constituted retroactively through the reconstitution of consciousness around a perception — thereby grounding the structure of rupture that defines the unconscious.

    Reality is in abeyance there, awaiting attention. And Zwang, constraint, which Freud defines by governs the very diversions of the primary process.

51. #51

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.72

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > TUCHE AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: By reading Freud's dream of the burning child, Lacan argues that the dream's function is not simply desire-fulfillment but rather the maintenance of a gap — the distance between representation and the Real — such that the encounter with the Real (tuche) is what motivates awakening, not the noise alone; consciousness is shown to be merely a surface of representation over this constitutive gap.

    what I am directing you towards—towards the symmetry of that structure that makes me, after the awakening knock, able to sustain myself, apparently only in a relation with my representation

52. #52

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.73

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues, via Freud's burning child dream, that the dream is not a flight from reality but an act of homage to a 'missed reality' — a reality that can only perpetuate itself through endless repetition, locating the Tuche (the encounter with the Real) precisely at the point where accident and fatal repetition converge, beyond any possible awakening.

    the reality that can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself endlessly, in some never attained awakening

53. #53

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.74

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > TUCHE AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's dream of the burning child to demonstrate that the Real irrupts precisely at the junction of dream and waking, that desire in the dream manifests through loss rather than wish-fulfilment, and that the 'missed encounter' with the Real is commemorated only through repetition — culminating in the provocation that the true formula of atheism is not 'God is dead' but 'God is unconscious.'

    only a rite, an endlessly repeated act, can commemorate this not very memorable encounter

54. #54

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Real is located beyond the dream—behind the 'lack of representation' whose only delegate is the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz—and that this Real, identical with the Trieb, is what governs repetition; fantasy functions merely as a screen concealing this primary determinant, while awakening itself operates in two directions simultaneously.

    the dream really as the counterpart of the representation; it is the imagery of the dream and it is an opportunity for us to stress what Freud… designates as… the Vorstellungsreprasentanz.

55. #55

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.76

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > TUCHE AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Freudian repetition from any natural return of need, aligning it with Kierkegaard's insight that repetition is oriented toward the new and toward the primacy of the signifier—not toward satisfaction or narcissistic closure—thereby grounding repetition in the insistence of the signifier rather than in biological or memorial recurrence.

    This requirement of a distinct consistency in the details of its telling signifies that the realization of the signifier will never be able to be careful enough in its memorization

56. #56

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.77

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Through a close re-reading of Freud's fort-da, Lacan argues that the cotton-reel is not a substitute for the mother but the first detachment of the subject from itself — the primordial objectification of the subject as Objet petit a — and that the repetition enacted in the game is not the repetition of a need but the originary inscription of the signifier as a mark of the subject.

    The activity as a whole symbolizes repetition, but not at all that of some need that might demand the return of the mother

57. #57

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.78

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: The passage grounds the Lacanian concept of the tuché in the fort-da game as the child's response to the trauma of separation, arguing that psychoanalytic development is not organised around biological stages but around the accident of the real encounter—linking the tuché back to pre-Socratic philosophy's need for a clinamen to motivate the world.

    the alternating game, fort-da, which is a here or there, and whose aim, in its alternation, is simply that of being the fort of a da, and the da of a fort

58. #58

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.82

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Wiederholungszwang (repetition compulsion) through the combinatorial logic of the signifier: repetition is not a statistical accident but a structural necessity arising from the synchronic network of signifiers, which Lacan identifies with Aristotle's automaton.

    Through the elucidation of what we call strategies, this is the figure that Aristotle's automaton assumes for us. Furthermore, it is by automatisme that we sometimes translate into French the Zwang of the Wiederholungszwang.

59. #59

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.84

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds repetition not in adaptation or transference-as-actuality, but in the tuché—the missed encounter with the Real—arguing that the subject's split in relation to this encounter is the foundational dimension of analytic discovery, and that the Real is "originally unwelcome," making it the accomplice of the drive.

    Between what occurs as if by chance, when everybody is asleep—the candle that overturns and the sheets that catch fire, the meaningless event, the accident, the piece of bad luck—and the element of poignancy... there is the same relation to what we were dealing with in repetition.

60. #60

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.143

    PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the cause of the unconscious must be conceived as a "lost cause" — neither a full existent nor a non-existent — and that repetition's defining feature is not return but the constitutive missed encounter (tuche), a structural gap that underwrites the impossibility of fully objectifying analytic experience.

    All the effects are subjected to the pressure of a transfactual, causal order which demands to join in their dance, but, if they held their hands tightly, as in the song, they would prevent the cause intruding in their round.

61. #61

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.244

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses animal conditioning experiments (cross-modal frequency equivalence) to probe the boundary between perceptual structure and the signifier, suggesting that pure numerical frequency in the Pavlovian signal raises—but does not yet resolve—the question of the realism of number and the conditions under which something attains the full status of a signifier.

    an animal conditioned to a hundred visual stimuli a second reacts to a hundred auditory stimuli a second.

62. #62

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.303

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

    Theoretical move: This passage is a back-matter index for Seminar XI, listing key concepts and page references; it is non-substantive for theoretical extraction purposes, functioning purely as a navigational apparatus.

    automaton (return, insistence of signs), 52—64, 67

63. #63

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.146

    **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Möbius strip, Klein bottle, and cross-cap to argue that the subject's structure is constituted by the cut rather than by any intrinsic disposition of parts, and that the field of unpleasure (the objet a, death drive) necessarily traverses the interior of the pleasure-principle field — thereby providing a topological rather than purely dialectical solution to the impasse of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'.

    what can be generated from it starting from congruent but not arbitrary groups, from this triple grouping which, entitled, in the articulation that I gave of it, in Greek letters

64. #64

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.242

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject is constituted by its relation to a refused, foreclosed signifier (a "not-knowing"), and that the sexual dyad—whose nature remains fundamentally unknowable—is the radical foundation of all signifying opposition; this grounds Lacan's claim that the subject of the unconscious is precisely the subject who avoids knowledge of sex, linking the structure of the signifier to the biological fact that sex is not reducible to reproduction but is bound to death.

    a message with a minimum of four terms was found to correspond to the syntax that, in the introductory chapter to Poe's Purloined letter, I tried to articulate as alpha, beta, gamma, delta... culminates at a syntax from which already one cannot escape.

65. #65

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.146

    **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topological properties of the Möbius strip, Klein bottle, and cross-cap to argue that the subject's structure—its non-orientability, the function of the cut, and the relation between the subject, the big Other, and objet petit a—cannot be captured by classical set-theoretic (Eulerian) distinctions, and that the field of unpleasure (objet a, death drive) necessarily traverses the interior of the field of pleasure rather than standing opposed to it from outside.

    I put forward a sort of first attempt to show the autonomy of the determination of the signifying chain, from the simple fact that there is established the most simple succession by chance, as in a binary alternation, what can be generated from it starting from congruent but not arbitrary groups

66. #66

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.241

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Subject Supposed to Know functions as a structural necessity for analytic engagement, yet the very foundations of psychoanalysis—grounded in the lack of a signifier—preclude any closed, totalizing knowledge; the subject is constituted not as the support of a harmonious signifying system but precisely through the gap where a signifier is missing, and this is illustrated through the contrast between Newtonian "absolute knowledge" (where the subject vanishes into God) and the Freudian discovery that grounds subjectivity in lack.

    the first condition is alternation... the signifying ordering of something in which the subject would show himself to be capable of assuring pure chance, namely, a succession of heads or tails grouped together under a signifying form

67. #67

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.161

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Voice as an object has yet to be properly established as a category in clinical thought, then pivots to show why neither Socrates nor Freud produced social critique: in the ancient world, jouissance was 'resolved' by being delegated to slaves, and it was precisely this reserved park of jouissance—not any theoretical lack—that prevented the emergence of science and of the subject; this historical-economic argument positions the problem of jouissance as the hidden thread connecting ancient Greek knowledge-practice to Freudian psychoanalysis.

    why it is that science, Greek science, which already knew how to construct such admirable automata, did not take on its status as science

68. #68

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.152

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a condensed summary of his previous seminar's work to argue that the being of the subject is constituted through a suture of lack—grounded in Frege's arithmetic, the Cartesian cogito's torsion, and the signifier's relation to negativity—and that only psychoanalysis, by engaging the symptom as a being of truth rather than bandaging the wound of the subject's split, can genuinely confront what science, philosophy, and social critique merely suture over.

    any conception of a ......... of consciousness towards the obscure, the potential, indeed automatism, is inadequate to account for its effects

69. #69

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.161

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the status of the Voice as a psychoanalytic object is still to be established against naive empiricism, and links this problem to the Socratic/modern science distinction: the absence of ancient science (and thus of the unconscious) is explained by the slave's function as the reserved site of jouissance, whose structural resolution was the precondition for modern subjectivity and psychoanalysis.

    why it is that science, Greek science, which already knew how to construct such admirable automata, did not take on its status as science

70. #70

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.29

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 30 November 1966.**

    Theoretical move: Lacan retrospectively grounds his early machine-model of the signifier (drawn from Poe's game of odds and evens) as the necessary foundation for a psychoanalytic logic, and endorses Miller's Boolean demonstration as rigorously establishing that meaning and its origin in the signifier are logically prior to and irreducible by classical consciousness-based logic.

    to imagine a machine, precisely of this kind - and what is effectively produced today differs in nothing from what I articulated then simply: the machine is supposed by the subject to be provided with a programme which takes into account the gains and the losses

71. #71

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.29

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 30 November 1966.**

    Theoretical move: Lacan retrospectively grounds his early machine-model of the signifier (from the "Purloined Letter" seminar) in Boolean logic via Miller's presentation, arguing that the formal structure of the signifier's functioning is radically prior to and independent of consciousness, and that this priority is what any properly psychoanalytic logic must demonstrate.

    my second step was the following: to imagine a machine, precisely of this kind … the machine is supposed by the subject to be provided with a programme which takes into account the gains and the losses

72. #72

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.8

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes *savoir* (knowledge as operative, structural) from *connaissance* (knowing as representation), and uses Pavlov's conditioned reflex experiment to argue that what is truly demonstrated there is the structural formula of the signifier — that "the signifier is what represents a subject for another signifier" — thereby grounding the psychoanalytic act in a logic of the signifier rather than in any organo-dynamic or spiritualist model.

    it constitutes a functioning which, I do not see why, is called automatic, since automation has well and truly in its essence a reference to chance, while what is implied in the dimension of the reflex, is precisely the contrary.

73. #73

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.8

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Pavlovian conditioned reflex as a structural illustration to argue that the signifier's operation always implies the presence of a subject, while simultaneously distinguishing knowledge-as-savoir from mere representation (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz), thereby grounding the psychoanalytic act in a logic of the signifier rather than in organo-dynamic or idealist models.

    a functioning which, I do not see why, is called automatic, since automation has well and truly in its essence a reference to chance, while what is implied in the dimension of the reflex, is precisely the contrary

74. #74

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.154

    accommodate yourselves.

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the quantifying logic of "not-all" to correct the Oedipal myth of the primal father, then pivots to argue that the sexual non-relationship is what generates desire as a language-effect, before closing with a meditation on the analyst's intolerable position as objet petit a (semblance) in the analytic discourse—a position only made liveable through logic.

    what Freud says, is that the signifier, for its part, continues during this time to scoot around.

75. #75

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.51

    Seminar 4: Wednesday 19 January 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that logical necessity is not prior to but produced by discourse itself, and that this production retroactively posits its own ground as 'inexistent' — a structure illustrated by the symptom (truth as inexistent) and the automaton/repetition (jouissance as inexistent), both grounded in Frege's zero, and culminating in the claim that the Phallus as Bedeutung (denotation/reference) is what anchors signification to discourse's necessity.

    In the second case, the so called automatism, it is the inexistence of the enjoyment that the automatism described as repetition brings to light from the insistence of this making time at the door

76. #76

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.168

    J Lacan - Start that again.

    Theoretical move: The passage uses a reading of Condillac, Maine de Biran, Destutt de Tracy, and Peirce to argue that the sign-system is constitutively split: a sign fills the interval between two adjacent signs, order is the series of inter-punctual frontiers rather than punctualities themselves, and the 'flaw' between inscription and event (paralleling Lacan's split between the subject of the statement and the stating subject) is the irreducible motor of the entire sign-system.

    It is this break in general that permits the automotricity of the system of signs, according to Condillac, about which he says that the system of signs there works all alone

77. #77

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.6

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst's knowledge is constitutively bound to ignorance (not as deficit but as passion), and polemically distinguishes his own claim — that the unconscious is structured like a language (grammar and repetition, hence logic) — from misreadings that conflate this with lalangue-as-dictionary or that opportunistically promote "non-knowledge" as a flag, thereby obscuring that psychoanalysis is fundamentally a matter of knowledge.

    Their lot will be regulated by automatism, which is completely the contrary of luck, good or bad.

78. #78

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.84

    VI > M. H YPPOLI TE: A lot is.

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the machine—not consciousness or biology—is the foundational metaphor that makes possible both Freudian energy theory and the discovery of the symbol; the transition from Hegel's anthropology to Freud's metapsychology is marked by the industrial advent of the machine, which forces the concept of energy and reveals the symbolic beyond of the inter-human relation.

    which, he says, pursues a human hypothesis, whether man be there or not... jokes working all on their own in the dream machine

79. #79

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.192

    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 uses the game of even and odd—first analysed through imaginary intersubjectivity (ego-mirroring, temporal oscillation between first, second, third positions) and then through the confrontation with the machine—to demonstrate that the symbolic order, not imaginary identification, is the proper ground for logical reasoning; the machine forces a passage from imaginary intersubjectivity to the combinatory of language, and the detour through Freud's random number shows that the unconscious is itself a symbolic machine where chance does not exist.

    a machine complex enough to have a sufficient number of superimposed sections bringing together a large enough count of previous goes... its range will be beyond my understanding.

80. #80

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.322

    XXIII > A, m, a, S > VERBUM AND DABAR THE MACHINE AND INTUITION SCHEMA OF THE CURE

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the contrast between the cybernetic machine's point-by-point scanning and the human faculty of Gestalt recognition to demarcate the Imaginary order (intuitive, good-form perception) from the Symbolic order (axiomatic, formulaic, artificial composition), arguing that the machine's inability to produce simplicity from good forms is itself empirical evidence of this structural opposition.

    each time we try to put the machine in a position to recognise good form, despite all the aberrations of perspective ... it is always through the most complex, the most artificial compositions

81. #81

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.301

    XXIII > Psychoanalysis and cybernetics, or on the -nature of language > LECTURE ^I

    Theoretical move: Lacan proposes that the shared axis between psychoanalysis and cybernetics is language, and argues that both sciences are grounded in the problem of chance and determinism; he further distinguishes 'conjectural sciences' (of which psychoanalysis and cybernetics are instances) from exact sciences, tracing the latter's birth to the moment man ceased to see his ritual actions as necessary to sustaining the order of the real.

    what it would mean to play a game of chance with a machine

82. #82

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.286

    XVIII > Where is speech? Where is language?

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a seminar discussion and the apologue of the Martian to sharpen the distinction between language (as an impersonal, geometrical, polysemantic system) and speech (as a perspectival, founding, revelatory act), culminating in the thesis that the subject is not merely an agent of language but is always-already inscribed in it as a "message" — determined by a universal concrete discourse prior to birth.

    DR GRAN0FF: The message is a programme one puts into a universal machine, and after a while it retrieves whatever it can from it.

83. #83

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.202

    B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > The Purloined Letter

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic chain constitutes the subject rather than being constituted by it, using the mathematical analysis of plus/minus sequences and Poe's "The Purloined Letter" to demonstrate that the subject is an element within the symbolic order whose intersubjective relations are determined by the structural position of the signifier (the letter), not by psychological intentionality.

    From the start, and independently of any attachment to some supposedly causal bond, the symbol already plays, and produces by itself, its necessities, its structures, its organisations.

84. #84

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.187

    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.

    Just this fact, that a machine can have a strategy, already leads us to the heart of the problem. For in the end, what is a strategy? How can a machine partake in it?

85. #85

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.197

    B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > Odd or even? Beyond intersubjectivity > The next session: THE SEMINAR PLA YS

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "beyond of the pleasure principle" is identical with the beyond of signification — i.e., the unconscious as compulsion to repeat — and that this can be isolated even in ostensibly random sequences, demonstrating a "symbolic inertia" of the unconscious subject that exceeds dual intersubjectivity.

    I've drawn up on the board what nowadays passes for a machine. When a subject comes up with something at random, it will isolate the formula by which this comes about

86. #86

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.167

    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.

    The three of them are so ridiculous that anyone would seem like a god besides such absurd automata.

87. #87

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.43

    II > III

    Theoretical move: The passage turns on the problem of universal contingency—introduced via Lévi-Strauss's nature/culture opposition and the incest prohibition—arguing that certain phenomena are simultaneously universal and contingent, dissolving both classical naturalism and institutionalism, while also theorising what it means to be a 'precursor' (seeing one's contemporaries' ideas from a future vantage) and flagging a mutation in the function of the machine that overturns classical mechanistic objections.

    There is a mutation taking place in the function of the machine, which is leaving all those who are still bent on criticising the old mechanism miles behind.

88. #88

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.206

    B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > The Purloined Letter > M. GUENINCHAULT: The letter.

    Theoretical move: The letter in "The Purloined Letter" functions as the radical symbolic subject itself — it is not a content but a pure signifier whose displacement determines the positions and identities of all characters who come into contact with it, demonstrating that the symbolic circuit governs existence rather than individual subjectivity governing the symbol.

    Just as, after five hundred thousand signs in the series of pluses and minuses, the appearance of a, β, γ, δ will still be determined by the same laws. Speech remains.

89. #89

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > From the Entwurf to the Traumdeutung

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's progressive theorisation of the psychic apparatus traces a "negative dialectic" in which the same antinomies recur in transformed guises, and that this progression—from a mechanical/neurological model to a logical/symbolic one—reveals that the fundamental object of psychoanalysis is the autonomous symbolic order, not the biological organism; consciousness functions as the irreducible paradox that prevents any closed energetic model.

    cybernetics also stems from a reaction of astonishment at rediscovering that this human language works almost by itself, seemingly to outwit us.

90. #90

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.34

    II > O. MANNONI: I entirely agree.

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pontalis's summary of *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* to stage the central ambiguity of the repetition compulsion—simultaneously purveyor of progress (goal-defined) and pure automatism/regression (mechanism-defined)—as the entry point for the year's inquiry into the Freudian theory of the ego, distinguishing the pleasure principle from drive and marking the death instinct as the indispensable term that confounds the biological and human registers.

    if we cease to define the tendency to repeat by its goal. and define it by its mechanism. it appears as pure automatism. as regression.

91. #91

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.99

    VI > VII

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds Freudian repetition compulsion not in biology but in the symbolic register: repetition is the form taken by the human subject's integration into a circular chain of discourse (the unconscious as the discourse of the Other), illustrated through the cybernetic model of a message looping through a circuit, which supersedes the dyadic/imaginary model of reminiscence Lacan associates with Platonic thought.

    as soon as we have this little model, we realise that in the very anatomy of the cerebral apparatus there are things which return back on themselves

92. #92

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.71

    v > IDOLATRY

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ego cannot simply be the inverse of the unconscious system, because the unconscious shows an asymmetrical "insistence" (Wiederholungszwang/repetition compulsion) that exceeds the pleasure-reality principle energetic framework — this asymmetry is the central theoretical discovery of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and it obliges a rethinking of the subject beyond ego-centred consciousness.

    I say insistence because it expresses rather well, in a familiar way, the meaning of what has been translated into French as automatisme de repetition, Wiederholungszwang [compulsion to repeat]. The word automatisme has resonances for us of the complete ascendancy of neurology. That isn't how it should be understood.

93. #93

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.310

    XXIII > Psychoanalysis and cybernetics, or on the -nature of language > LECTURE ^I

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that cybernetics—grounded in the binary scansion of presence/absence—demonstrates that the symbolic order operates as a trans-subjective syntax independent of any subject, thereby establishing that language's structure (syntax) precedes and grounds semantics, and raising the question of what desire and the unconscious add to this purely combinatory order.

    the chain of possible combinations of the encounter can be studied as such, as an order which subsists in its rigour, independently of all subjectivity.

94. #94

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.293

    XVIII > Where is speech? Where is language?

    Theoretical move: The passage uses a mathematical formalization of language (via binary code and formal syntax) to distinguish language as an autonomous system of signs from speech as the temporal intervention of a subject that introduces signification — then grounds this distinction concretely in Lacan's three-prisoner logical puzzle, which demonstrates three irreducible temporal dimensions of intersubjective reasoning.

    the circulation of binary signs in a machine enables us, if we give it the right programme, to discover a previously unpublished prime number. The prime number circulating in the machine has got nothing to do with thought.

95. #95

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.61

    II > A materialist definition of the phenomenon of consciousness

    Theoretical move: The Mirror Stage dialectic is radicalized through the automaton/machine model to show that the ego is constitutively imaginary and parasitic on an alien unity; only the intervention of the Symbolic Order — a 'third party' located in the unconscious — can break the impasse of dual imaginary rivalry and transform mere knowledge (connaissance) into recognition (reconnaissance).

    Take one of these small turtles or foxes … one of those small machines which we now know … how to furnish with homeostasis and something like desires … The movement of each machine is thus conditioned by the perception of a certain stage attained by another. That is what corresponds to the element of fascination.

96. #96

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.65

    v > IDOLATRY

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject's self-apprehension (self-counting) is not an operation of consciousness but belongs to the unconscious, and that consciousness is 'heterotopic' to the deduction of the subject—a structural third pole required alongside the imaginary dual relation and the symbolic regulation, but not privileged as the ground of subjectivity.

    We had our two little mechanical tortoises, one of which was stuck on the image of the other... the first machine was dependent on the image of the second, hanging on its unitary functioning, and consequently captivated by its procedures.

97. #97

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.194

    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: By contrasting biological memory with symbolic remembering (Nachträglichkeit), and by reading Poe's "Purloined Letter" as a demonstration that signification is never where one expects it to be, Lacan argues that the subject's truth is structured by the symbolic order rather than by intersubjective psychology or empirical reality—the symbolic quod, not the living subject, is primary.

    What goes on in the machine at this level, to confine ourselves just to that, is analogous to the remembering we deal with in analysis.

98. #98

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.42

    II > III

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology to argue that the symbolic function constitutes a total universe that is irreducible to any natural, biological, or psychological substrate—and that this totalizing symbolic order is precisely what psychoanalysis presupposes when it speaks of the unconscious, as distinct from any Jungian "collective unconscious."

    The animal is a jammed machine. It's a machine with certain parameters that are no longer capable of variation… in as much as, compared to the animal, we are machines, that is to say something decomposed, that we possess greater freedom.

99. #99

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.134

    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.

    trying to understand what the compulsion to repeat [automatisme de repetition] means

100. #100

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.151

     **¹⁰⁷x** > The rat in the maze

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that llanguage is primary and precedes language (which is merely scientific knowledge's "harebrained lucubration" about llanguage), that the unconscious is a knowing-how-to-do-things with llanguage that exceeds what any speaking being can articulate, and that the Lacanian hypothesis — that a signifier represents a subject to another signifier — is structurally necessary to the functioning of llanguage itself.

     The only thing the rat-unit learns in this case is to give a sign, a sign of its presence as unit. The flap is recognized only by a sign and pressing its paw on this sign is a sign. It is always by making a sign that the unit accedes to that on the basis of which one concludes that there is learning. But this relation to signs is external.

101. #101

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.267

     Seminar 13: Wednesday 26 Jun e 1973

     Theoretical move: Knowledge is not primarily communication but an enigma constituted by lalangue, which operates in the unconscious as a knowing-how-to-act that exceeds any stated knowledge; scientific discourse misrecognises this by reducing knowledge to learning (as in behaviourist rat experiments), thereby failing to grasp that the experimenter's own relation to lalangue is the hidden condition of the montage.

     what all that the rat-unit learns on this occasion, is to give a sign, a sign of its presence as a unit... it is always by making a sign that the unit accedes to that on the basis of which one concludes that there is learning.

102. #102

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977** > **Seminar 12: 17 May 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the Unconscious is not amenable to awakening or metalanguage, that psychoanalysis functions through a poetic/hole-effect rather than suggestion, and proposes the invention of a new, sense-free signifier as the possible opening onto the Real — while translating 'Unbewusst' as 'une-bévue' as a performative demonstration of this metatongue operation.

     Mental automatism is normal. If as it happens I do not have it, for my part, that is by chance.

103. #103

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     **II** > **Ill** > **1**

     Theoretical move: By shifting the analysis of psychosis from organogenetic/psychogenetic frameworks (both of which covertly presuppose a unifying subject-point) to the register of speech, Lacan establishes the structural distinction between the big Other (the absolute, unknown addressee of speech) and the little other (the object of discourse), and grounds the ego's constitutive alienation in the primacy of the other's desire as the origin of human objects.

     he speaks, but he speaks like those sophisticated dolls that open and close their eyes, drink liquid, etc.

104. #104

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.263

     **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis is fundamentally structured by the subject's exteriority to the signifier — where the neurotic 'inhabits language,' the psychotic is 'inhabited by language' — and that the onset of psychosis is triggered at the moment of being called upon to 'speak out' one's own speech, a failing rooted in the prior foreclosure of the primordial signifier (Verwerfung).

     What is it that Clerambault has isolated under the name of the elementary phenomena of psychosis - the repeated, contradicted, commanded thoughts - if it's not this discourse that is augmented, recapitulated in antitheses?

105. #105

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     **VII** > **The imaginary dissolution**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of Schreber's paranoia to argue that narcissism, as conventionally understood (self-as-object), is insufficient to explain psychosis; the real question is the structural modification of the other — its emptying of subjectivity — which points toward a distinctly Lacanian register of alienation in madness.

     The persecutory phenomenon takes on the character of indefinitely repeated signs, and the persecutor, to the extent that he is its support, is no longer anything more than the shadow of the persecutory object.

106. #106

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.207

     **XIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychosis is structured around a failure at the level of the signifier — the exclusion of the big Other — which forces the subject into an imaginary compensation through the "between-I" (inmixing of subjects), explaining the characteristic delusion, mental automatism, and enigmatic assertion of the other's initiative as restitutive responses to the signifier's absence.

     We observe this phenomenon in mental automatism, but it's much more accentuated here, as there is a sort of teasing use of the signifier in the sentences that are begun then interrupted.

107. #107

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.347

     **XXV** > **INDE X**

     Theoretical move: This is the index section of Seminar III, a non-substantive reference apparatus listing key concepts, proper names, and page references for the seminar's theoretical content on psychosis, language, and related Lacanian concepts.

     mental automatism, 34, 251, 296 definition of, 5-6 and interpellation, 307

108. #108

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     **XXI** > **1** > **4**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the quilting point (point de capiton) between signifier and signified is the minimal structural condition for normality, and that psychosis is characterised precisely by its absence or failure — a thesis developed through the Oedipus complex as the paradigmatic quilting point and through Schreber's case as exemplary psychotic disintegration of signifier/signified unity.

     the most favorable moment, Clerambault notes, for the emergence, which he himself calls purely automatic, of scraps of sentences sometimes taken from one's most recent experience, and which have no kind of meaningful relationship with the matter at hand

109. #109

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.271

     **XXI** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's psychotic experience and Saussure's two-flow schema to argue that the signifier is never isolable but always retroactively determines meaning through the completion of a signifying chain — a structural property illustrated through Racine's Athalie — and that this structuring priority of the signifier over the signified is the necessary foundation for understanding psychoanalytic (especially psychotic) experience.

     learned by rote, drummed into the birds from the sky who repeat them to him, who don't know what they are saying

110. #110

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **XII** > **The hysteric's question**

     Theoretical move: By analyzing Schreber's delusion through the schema of analytic communication, Lacan argues that in psychosis the big Other—where being is realized through speech—is foreclosed, reducing discourse to an internal echo (automatism) that cannot resolve the subject's constitution; this structural difference from neurosis must be clarified before any technique for working with psychotics can be formulated.

     he is dependent on its presence... this automatism of the function of discourse

111. #111

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.26

     **I** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the three registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) by showing how the same phenomenon (the red car, psychotic experience) is interpretable at each level, and then pivots to the theoretical crux: unlike repression—where the repressed returns through symptoms—Verwerfung (Foreclosure) causes what is refused in the Symbolic to reappear in the Real, as demonstrated by the Wolf Man's hallucination and Schreber's fundamental language.

     I reminded you of the comparison I made last year between certain symbolic order phenomena and what happens in those machines, in the modern sense of the word... One feeds figures into them and waits for them to give what would perhaps take us 100,000 years to calculate.

112. #112

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     **I** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues against psychogenesis—understood as the reintroduction of Jaspers's "relation of understanding" into psychiatry—by insisting that psychoanalysis operates beyond immediate experience and psychological causation, and that the field of psychosis must be understood structurally rather than through characterological or empathic intelligibility.

     The notion of mental automatism is apparently brought into focus in Clerambault's work...his concern to demonstrate the fundamentally anideational character of the phenomena that manifest themselves in the development of psychosis.

113. #113

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.319

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that in psychosis, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father forces the subject to substitute a constant, hollow 'mental automatism' (language speaking itself without a subject) for the missing paternal signifier, and uses the Schreber case to adjudicate between Freud's latent-homosexuality thesis and Macalpine's pregnancy-fantasy thesis — showing both to be partial accounts of how the psychotic subject attempts to reconstitute what the paternal signifier cannot anchor.

     automaton is what really thinks by itself without any link to that beyond, the ego, which gives thought its subject. If language speaks all alone, the occasion to use the term automatism is now or never

114. #114

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.334

     **XXV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan consolidates his theory of psychosis around the foreclosure of the paternal signifier, arguing that the psychotic's structural "askewness" in relation to the signifier — exemplified by Schreber — is not a deficiency of object-relating but an impossibility of access to the Name-of-the-Father as signifier, and uses this to polemicize against object-relations theory's reduction of analytic experience to imaginary absorption.

     The most recent case I have shown you was of someone who was very, very strange, on the verge of mental automatism, though not quite there.

115. #115

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

     Theoretical move: By analysing a clinical case (Lebovici) where misidentification of the phobic object as "phallic mother" and countertransferential interventions drive the subject from phobia into perversion and ultimately passage à l'acte, Lacan argues that conceiving the analyst as a real object (the "bundling" model) distorts the analytic relation and produces pathological rather than therapeutic effects.

     he declares that until the time of this discovery he had lived as an automaton, but that now everything has changed

116. #116

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL

     Theoretical move: Lacan clarifies and defends the formal network constructed in his "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" arguing that the introduction of the signifier into the real generates a structural law—orthography—that irreducibly differentiates human memory from any vitalist or purely chance-based model, making the signifier the organiser of memory's structure.

     A series that cannot be set into this network is an impossible series… certain eliminations will result from it at the second and third phases

117. #117

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that frustration is not the refusal of an object of satisfaction but the withholding of a gift-as-symbol-of-love, grounded in the child's always-already symbolic order; need-satisfaction becomes erotically charged (libido in the strict sense) only because it substitutes for symbolic/love-demand, making the oral drive a product of this dialectic rather than a biological given.

     the automatism of repetition

118. #118

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates the theoretical trajectory of Seminars I–IV to frame the new topic of "formations of the unconscious," establishing that the signifier's primacy grounds both the symbolic determination of meaning and the structural distinction between metonymy (desire's object) and metaphor (emergence of meaning), while introducing the quilting-point schema and the retroactive (*nachträglich*) action of the signifier as the key apparatus for the year's investigation.

     The second Seminar highlighted the factor of repetitive insistence arising from the unconscious. I identified its consistence with the structure of the signifying chain, and this is what I tried to get you to see by giving you a model of it in the form of the so-called syntax of a, p, γ, δ.

119. #119

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     **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 sentence started before him, it was started by his parents, and what I am leading you towards is, precisely, the relationship each of these parents has with this sentence that has been started

120. #120

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.159

     THE LITTLE COUGH AS A MESSAGE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the clinical vignette of a patient's "little cough" to demonstrate that a seemingly somatic act belongs to the symbolic (vocal) register and functions as a message — doubly so when the patient himself thematises it — and to show how fantasy operates as the subject's mode of adorning/investing himself with a signifier that both conceals and reveals his desire.

     He never varies. He always gets on the couch one way. He always gives a conventional greeting with the same smile

121. #121

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the Graph of Desire by differentiating desire from need and will through psychoanalytic categories (drive, fantasy), then grounds subjectivity in the signifying chain, demonstrating that the graph's two levels articulate the subject's progressive capture in language and the emergence of the Other as such.

     what the chain of discourse articulates as existing beyond the subject imposes its form on the subject, whether he likes it or not. We have here, as it were, an innocent apprehension by the subject of linguistic form.

122. #122

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.471

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between neurotic and perverse desire by deploying the fantasy matheme ($◇a) to show that fantasy constitutes the subject at the point where unconscious discourse escapes him; masochistic jouissance is reread as the subject's relation to the Other's discourse rather than the death drive, schizophrenic foreclosure is located at the identification with the cut, and neurotic desire is defined as structurally dependent on the paternal metaphor that masks a metonymy of castration.

     A cut is that by which the current of an early tension, whatever it may be, is taken up into a series of alternatives that inaugurate what one might call the most basic machine.

123. #123

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.338

     MOURNING AND DESIRE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hamlet's oscillation between procrastination and precipitation is not a character flaw but a structural feature of neurosis, specifically indexed by the formula S(Ⱥ): Hamlet always acts on the Other's time because he misrecognises a non-existent Other-of-the-Other as guarantor of truth, and his tragedy is his inexorable progress toward the hour of his own downfall.

     the almost automatic way in which he substitutes one message for another and, thanks to his ring, re-creates the royal seal

124. #124

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.428

     THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in fantasy, the subject is not where he desires but is represented at the very moment of his disappearance (aphanisis), and that this structure—the correlation between $ and a—is what defines fantasy as the prop of desire; he then uses the exhibitionist's fantasy to demonstrate that perverse desire requires the symbolic frame (the Other's complicity) rather than proximity to the object, thus distinguishing perverse from neurotic desire structure.

     the sign or scansion he repeats qua unconscious… the subject, insofar as he desires, does not know where he is at with regard to unconscious articulation.

125. #125

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.152

     THE LITTLE COUGH AS A MESSAGE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject of enunciation is structurally split from the subject of the statement, and that desire is neither identical to demand nor to repressed signifiers, but is what the subject *is* as a function of demand — a being-dimension introduced and simultaneously stolen by language. He then demonstrates this through a clinical dream reported by Ella Sharpe, showing how the fantasy culminating in the dream's key signifier ("masturbate her" used transitively) will reveal the true meaning of desire.

     the spontaneous phenomenon of substitution or malfunctioning of the signifier, which is what Freud shows us to be the normal pathway for deciphering the meaning of a dream.

126. #126

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.434

     THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the structural argument that in perverse fantasy (exhibitionism/voyeurism), the subject is not identified with the visible object but with the 'slit' itself — the cut or gap that mediates between the glimpsed and the not-glimpsed — and that the barred subject ($) in fantasy is therefore structurally constituted by this cut, while the objet petit a in fantasy turns out to be the Other's desire rather than a simple part-object.

     the cut abolishes him in a clandestine automatism, that it crushes him in a moment whose spontaneity he absolutely does not recognize.

127. #127

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.21

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Outline of the seminar**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian ethical position constitutes a radical reorientation relative to Aristotle and utilitarianism by locating the human subject's relation to the real—not the ideal—as the proper ground of ethics, and by identifying the pleasure principle with the symbolic-fictitious rather than with nature, thereby reframing the economy of desire, fantasy, and masochism as the central problems for a psychoanalytic ethics.

     that it is the return of a sign that the pleasure principle makes man seek out

128. #128

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     **II**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the true backbone of Freud's thought is not a developmental/genetic schema (the child-as-father-of-the-man trope, historically located in English Romanticism) but the fundamental opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, the latter functioning not as mere equilibrium but as a corrective apparatus against the psychic apparatus's radical inadequation—its natural tendency toward hallucinatory satisfaction rather than need-satisfaction.

     Its function is to regulate by a kind of automatism everything that comes together through a process that, in his first formulation, Freud tends to present as dependent on a preformed apparatus.

129. #129

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 6*: *Wednesday 20 December 1961*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the automatism of repetition is not merely a tension-discharge cycle but is fundamentally structured by a signifying function: what repeats is always in service of making a lost signifier (the *Vorstellungsrepräsentanz*) re-emerge, and repression is precisely the loss of that signifying 'number' behind the apparent psychological motivations of behaviour.

     what it means qua automatism of repetition is that it is there in order to make emerge, to recall, to make insist something which is nothing other in its essence than a signifier

130. #130

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 4*: *Wednesday 6 December 1961* > What then is a signifier?

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on distinguishing the signifier from the sign: whereas a sign represents something for someone, a signifier represents the subject for another signifier. This distinction is grounded in the concept of the unary trait (pure difference, the "1" of set theory), which Lacan then links to repetition, metonymy, and the emergence of the subject through the signifying chain.

     the automatism of repetition for your experience is not that it is always the same thing which is interesting

131. #131

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962* > *Seminar 11*: *Wednesday 28 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the critique of Kantian "pure intuition" (grounded in Euclidean geometry and refuted by non-Euclidean geometry, Gödelian incompleteness, and Fregean arithmetic) as a lever to argue that the combinatory/logical function of number and reason is independent of sensible intuition, and that this has direct consequences for how psychoanalysis must situate the subject's body, drive, and fantasy beyond any spatio-temporal naturalism.

     to the extent that we could suppose him to be integrated to what one could call the already constructed automatism of the machine

132. #132

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.123

     *Seminar 12*: *Wednesday 7 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the topology of the torus to argue that the subject's structure is characterised by irreducible loops—unlike the sphere or plane where any loop can be collapsed to a point—and that the interplay between 'full circles' (demand) and 'empty circles' (desire/the object) on the torus structurally accounts for the constitutive 'minus one' of the unconscious, the detour through the Other, and the impossibility of a purely tautological (fully analytic) subjectivity.

     the unary repetition of what returns and what characterises the primary subject in his signifying, automatism of repetition relationship

133. #133

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 December 1961*

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes between a productive 'crystallographic Gestalt' (structurally homologous to the signifying combinatory) and a confusing 'anthropomorphic Gestalt' (the macrocosm/microcosm analogy), then pivots to argue that the automatism of repetition is not a natural cycle of need-satisfaction but the compulsive re-emergence of a unique signifier — a letter — that a repressed cycle has become, thereby grounding repetition in the agency of the signifier rather than in biological or imaginary schemas.

     what we are dealing with in the automatism of repetition is the following: a cycle in however amputated, deformed, abraded way we may define it: once it is a cycle and once it involves a return to a terminal point, we can conceive of it on the model of need, of satisfaction

134. #134

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.182

     Silence > Ulysses

     Theoretical move: Dolar reads Kafka's "Silence of the Sirens" to articulate how the law operates not through command but through silence—its zero-point of voice—which is irresistible precisely because there is nothing to resist, and shows that Ulysses' "escape" relies on a self-cancelling pretense whose structure mirrors the logic of the Jewish joke, leaving the law's mechanism intact.

     they are automata, they are inanimate, they are machines imitating humanity, cyborgs, and this is why their defeat cannot have any effect. This one has escaped, but that cannot dismantle the mechanism.

135. #135

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.14

     A Voice and Nothing More

     Theoretical move: The passage introduces the voice as a third object irreducible to either its function as a vehicle of meaning or as an aesthetic fetish, arguing that psychoanalysis alone can sustain fidelity to this "object voice" — a surplus effect that escapes both interpellation and aesthetic sublimation.

     The chess automaton was constructed in 1769 by one Wolfgang von Kempelen... it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a winning countermove.

136. #136

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.54

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > The Death Drive: Freud and Bergson

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the apparent similarities between Freud and Bergson on repetition and laughter are superficial: where Bergson's "organic elasticity" names life's irreversible forward movement, Freud redeploys the same term to name the death drive's regressive inertia, which is only comprehensible once one distinguishes (following Lacan) the first death (biological) from the second death (symbolic), thereby grounding the compulsion to repeat in the order of the signifier rather than in biology.

     more general references and broader gestures of approval of Bergson's 'plausible train of thought from automatism to automata'

137. #137

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.72

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Cause and the Law

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of cause—tied to failure, the materiality of language, and the equivocations of the signifier—surpasses both the covering-law model and Hart/Honoré's norm/deviation framework, while simultaneously critiquing "historicist" and "psychological" constructions of the subject (illustrated through the Clerambault case) as unable to account for how subjects are overdetermined by meanings they never consciously experience.

     he says that his concept of cause is to be distinguished from that which sees it as law. He gives as an example of that to which his theory is opposed the invariable sequence or constant conjunction of action and reaction

138. #138

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.58

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Cause: Lac:an and Aristotle

     Theoretical move: Lacan's appropriation of Aristotle's concept of automaton (as failure of final cause / indeterminate accidental cause) reframes the death drive and the subject's relation to language: the subject is not an effect contained within language but a surplus excess cut off from it, created ex nihilo — directly opposing Bergson's intussusceptive, cumulative model of duration where nothing comes from nothing.

     when Lacan, in his explanation of Freud's death drive, names the signifying network that is its only domain automaton, he mounts an argument that answers Bergson as well as Aristotle

139. #139

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.64

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Cause: Lac:an and Aristotle

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the opacity of the signifier — which bars language from transparently reflecting reality or intention — necessarily generates doubt, desire, and a subject constituted ex nihilo rather than as the fulfillment of a social/historical demand; the Lacanian formula 'desire is the desire of the Other' means not mimetic identification with the Other's image but a causation by the Other's indeterminate, unsatisfied lack, with objet petit a as the historically specific but content-less cause of the subject.

     In referring to the signifying chain as automaton, he declares this belief in the fact that language 'produces effects . . . in the absence of intention; [that] no intentions intervene to animate and fill up speech.'

140. #140

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.68

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Achilles and the Tortoise

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacanian theory inverts the Derridean logic of deconstruction: rather than totality being an illusion masking infinite difference, it is the closed totality (the limit) that is the very condition of possibility for infinite difference and the production of meaning—the subject is finite, and it is this finitude that causes the infinity of desire.

     an emphasis on habit would bring to a standstill the whole process that he took semiotics to be and would reduce thought to a kind of automatism ('something like Freud's repetition compulsion')

141. #141

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.99

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis fundamentally opposes utilitarianism's ethics by grounding moral law not in reciprocity and shared pleasure but in the nonreciprocal relation between the subject and its inaccessible Thing—demonstrating that repressed desire is the cause, not the consequence, of the law, and that true freedom consists in acting contrary to self-interest, even unto death.

     He was, almost from the beginning, uncomfortable with the term, which he treated as a kind of found object... he substituted a term of his own invention, syndrome of passivity

142. #142

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.170

     The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Modern Forms of Power

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern democratic subject is constituted not by power's self-guaranteeing omniscience (Foucault) but by a structural lack of knowledge in the Other: because power cannot certify the subject, a surplus of meaning escapes social recognition, and it is precisely this conflict—including the irruption of jouissance—that both constitutes democratic subjectivity and prevents its totalisation.

     the bureaucracy 'automatizes and disindividualizes power,' creating as its product the anonymous, impersonal bureaucrat.

143. #143

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.254

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego > Chapter l

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section (bibliographic apparatus) for a chapter on lethal jouissance, the femme fatale, and sexual difference; it contains no independent theoretical argument, only citations and brief editorial glosses.

     Aristotle also speculates etymologically that the term automaton may be derived from maten, 'in vain.'

144. #144

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.260

     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.

     Clerambault argued that these ideas (of persecution, hypochondria, etc.) were secondary effects of the illness, provoked as reactions to the morbid state.

145. #145

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.112

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

     Theoretical move: Against Ferguson's reading of the sublime as escape from utilitarian claustrophobia, Copjec (following Freud/Lacan) argues that utilitarianism itself is constituted by the flight from the superego's obscene law and from repressed desire, such that the colonial fantasy of the veiled Other functions as utilitarianism's own symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the surplus jouissance it structurally denies.

     With a machine, whatever doesn't come on time simply falls by the wayside and makes no claims on anything. This is not true for man, the scansion is alive, and whatever doesn't come on time remains in suspense.

146. #146

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the compulsion to repeat—manifest in transference neurosis, fate patterns, and traumatic dreams—operates beyond and more primally than the pleasure principle, forcing a theoretical revision that displaces pleasure as the sole regulator of psychical excitation and anticipates the hypothesis of the death drive.

     we shall dare to postulate that within the psyche there really is a compulsion to repeat that pays no heed to the pleasure principle

147. #147

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *A/theism*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances an "a/theistic" theological position arguing that authentic Christian faith requires the simultaneous affirmation and negation of every concept of God — a structural movement of naming and de-naming that mirrors the Lacanian logic of lack, where no signifier can adequately capture the Real of the divine.

     'Why should I care,' replied the devil, 'for in just a little while I shall make a theology of it.'

148. #148

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.53

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny*

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as fate-defining precisely because it gives the repetition compulsion its content, sutures the subject's lack, fills the gaps of the big Other, and thereby embeds jouissance within normative ideological structures—dissolving fantasy is therefore recast as a rare existential act of rewriting psychic destiny and reclaiming singularity.

     Our jouissance becomes caught up in the dead automatism of the repetition compulsion

149. #149

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.27

     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.

     The repetition compulsion translates desire into a mechanical, fully automatic force that eludes our efforts to redirect it. It responds neither to rational argumentation nor to emotional persuasion.

150. #150

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.89

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Service of Goods*

     Theoretical move: The Lacanian act constitutes a genuine ethics precisely by rupturing the "service of goods" — the Other's disciplinary demand to subordinate desire to utility and social adaptation — and, when jouissance defeats the signifier, opens the possibility of revolutionary politics beyond mere repetition or incremental reform.

     the encounter (the touché) with the real jolts the subject beyond this relentlessness, this automatism. In Lacan's words, it ushers the subject 'beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs'

151. #151

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.103

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *Fidelity to the Event*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to a truth-event requires the subject to sustain a retroactive truth-process through the "unknown," tolerating disorientation and working through it toward "ethical consistency"; this fidelity is theorized as an uncoupling of the drive from its normatively determined destiny, opening genuinely new existential possibilities.

     the event empowers the subject to 'unplug' from the automatism of its drive destiny.

152. #152

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.62

     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.

     If this were not the case, it would not be possible to distinguish between humans and automatons. Though the gap between the two may be rapidly closing, all is not yet lost.

153. #153

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.185

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Problems of Narcissistic Desire*

     Theoretical move: The passage systematically diagnoses three structural failures of narcissistic desire—chronic unavailability, extreme idealization, and aggression toward the object—by showing that each follows from the lover's attempt to find in the beloved a replica of das Ding, which no actual object can sustain, thereby condemning desire to repetition, deferral, and ultimately mutilation of the other.

     When the tragic automatism of compulsive desire is set in motion, little matters to the lover besides the expectation that the object fulfill its pre-assigned, fantasmatic destiny as the object that is supposed to give him complete satisfaction.

154. #154

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Fantasy and Fetish**

     Theoretical move: Copjec inverts Ferguson's reading by arguing that utilitarianism does not flee *toward* the sublime but rather *from* the superego's obscene law; the utilitarian erasure of interior lack and repressed desire produces claustrophobia, decays the symbolic/auratic relation, and necessarily generates a fantasmatic colonial Other (the veiled subject) as its symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the jouissance it structurally denies.

     With a machine, whatever doesn't come on time simply falls by the wayside and makes no claims on anything. This is not true for man, the scansion is alive, and whatever doesn't come on time remains in suspense.

155. #155

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.159

     **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Modern Forms of Power**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that democracy is constituted not by power belonging to an anonymous "anyone" (Foucault's self-guaranteeing law) but by a structural lack in the Other—no guarantees, no ultimate markers of certainty—and that this very lack produces the subject's singularity and surplus of meaning, while the enjoyment that emerges from erased certainty is precisely what sustains democratic conflict against totalitarian closure.

     the bureaucracy 'automatizes and disindividualizes power,' creating as its product the anonymous, impersonal bureaucrat

156. #156

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle**

     Theoretical move: By tracing French psychiatry's concept of mental automatism through the mind/machine boundary problem, Copjec argues that the structural gap in utilitarian self-definition reveals why the psychoanalytic ethics of the Superego and the Lost Object—premised on non-reciprocal, unconditional prohibition—must replace the utilitarian model of reciprocity, pleasure-reward, and intersubjective exchange as the foundation of moral law.

     In 1924, immediately after beginning his Beaux-Arts course in drapery, Clérambault published his first—and, basically, definitive—description of what he called mental automatism.

157. #157

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.53

     **Cutting Up** > **Cause: Lacan and Aristotle**

     Theoretical move: Against both Bergson's vitalist temporality and historicist constructions of the subject as language's determinate effect, Copjec argues—via Lacan—that the opacity of the signifier generates an irreducible surplus (objet petit a) that causes the subject ex nihilo: the subject is not the fulfillment of a social demand but the product of language's constitutive duplicity, which produces desire as a striving for an indeterminate, extradiscursive nothing.

     In referring to the signifying chain as automaton, he declares this belief in the fact that language 'produces effects … in the absence of intention; [that] no intentions intervene to animate and fill up speech.'

158. #158

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.44

     **Cutting Up** > **The Death Drive: Freud and Bergson**

     Theoretical move: By reading Freud's *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* against Bergson's vitalist theory of laughter and repetition, Copjec argues that the death drive is not a biologistic myth but the structural consequence of symbolic life: because the signifier retroactively determines signification, the past is not permanent, making repetition—and thus the death drive—the inevitable corollary of existence in the symbolic order rather than of organic life.

     Bergson's 'plausible train of thought from automatism to automata,' as Freud, like Bergson, considers the relation of jokes to the games of children.

159. #159

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.249

     <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 4**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 4, providing footnotes and citations for sources on Clérambault, utilitarianism, automatism, and related topics; it contains no independent theoretical argument but does cite Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis and flag utilitarianism as a revolution in ethics unseating Aristotelian ethics.

     Clérambault argued that these ideas (of persecution, hypochondria, etc.) were secondary effects of the illness, provoked as reactions to the morbid state.

160. #160

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.57

     **Cutting Up** > **Achilles and the Tortoise**

     Theoretical move: Against Derridean deconstruction's commitment to infinite deferral, Copjec argues—via Lacan and Zeno's paradox—that it is precisely a closed totality (a limit) that makes infinite difference possible; the psychoanalytic subject is finite, and it is this finitude that causes the infinity of desire, not the other way around.

     he settled instead on 'habit-change' as the only possible ultimate sign... feeling that an emphasis on habit would bring to a standstill the whole process... and would reduce thought to a kind of automatism

161. #161

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.244

     <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 3**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 3, providing scholarly references and brief clarificatory asides on sources cited in the main argument, including Freud, Lacan, Bergson, Aristotle, Derrida, and others. It is primarily bibliographic and non-substantive, though a few notes carry minor theoretical glosses.

     Aristotle also speculates etymologically that the term automaton may be derived from maten, 'in vain.'

162. #162

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.48

     **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.

     when Lacan, in his explanation of Freud's death drive, names the signifying network that is its only domain automaton, he mounts an argument that answers Bergson as well as Aristotle

163. #163

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.53

     <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: By tracing Heidegger's analysis of the thing (jug, fourfold, mirror-play) and the co-originary structure of concealment/disclosure (aletheia/lethe), the passage argues that nihilation is not an act of subjective consciousness (contra Sartre) but occurs essentially in Being itself—a move that situates the negative/void as ontologically primordial rather than phenomenologically derived, preparing a Lacanian reading of lack and the Real.

     The very examples adduced by Gestalt psychologists to illustrate the figure-ground phenomenon seem to confront us with the operation of a pure automatism that precedes all subjective intention.

164. #164

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <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_p72" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 72. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>In the Shadow of the Image

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freudian cathexis/anticathexis can be re-read through Gestalt figure-ground dynamics, and that this perceptual automatism is ultimately grounded in Lacan's Imaginary order — whose constitutive power to unify perceptual objects is inseparable from an effect of méconnaissance.

     repression is linked to the workings of an absolutely fundamental automatism that guides and structures all perceptual activity

165. #165

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.283

     A Play of Props > **"An Other Scene"**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that analytic repetition operates as a dialectic between phantasmatic imagery and traumatic-real experience: the fort-da game is deployed as the paradigm case showing how symbolic mastery of the real through repetition can become the condition of possibility for remembering, and this logic is then applied to Freud's Irma dream, where metonymic displacement (empty speech) functions as a fort-da structure that simultaneously evades and summons the traumatic kernel lurking in "an other scene."

     Whether the discourse of Dr. M., Leopold, and Otto is a rambling dialogue, a game of interrupted conversations, a dialogue of the deaf, or a ridiculous exchange between absurd automata, its purpose remains the same

166. #166

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.286

     A Play of Props > **From** *Tuché* **to** *Automaton*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's Irma dream stages a movement from tuché (the traumatic-real encounter) through a fort-da guessing game (metonymic escape via empty speech and symbolic abstraction) to automaton (the insistent return of signs governed by the pleasure principle), such that the symbolic structure of trimethylamine's chemical formula completes the repressive desublimation of the traumatic real — revealing the dream's "secret reality" as the quest for signification as such, not the recovery of traumatic truth.

     Lacan describes repetition of this sort as *automaton*: 'the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle'

167. #167

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.63

     Fuzzy Math > **A Lost Count**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Kierkegaard's degradation of collective music—from orchestrated revolutionary harmony to mechanical beat-counting—to establish 'chatter' (snak) as the linguistic medium of modernity's 'lost count': a mode of telling that accompanies automated tallying, mistaking mechanical noise for social harmony and thereby rendering the disappearance of genuine communal bonds imperceptible.

     in crass society, the collective harmonies of the past are not only reduced to pulses of sound but also, paradoxically, replaced by the automated rhythms of the counting operations that purport to represent them.

168. #168

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.332

     A Play of Props > Index

     Theoretical move: This is a book index (non-substantive content), listing proper names, German/Greek terms, and thematic entries for a conceptual history of everyday talk; it contains no original theoretical argumentation.

     automaton, 274

169. #169

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.272

     The Writing on the Wall > First and Final Words > **Truth from Behind**

     Theoretical move: Empty speech and errant chatter are not obstacles to but rather the necessary pathway for analytic truth: through slips, stammers, and disfluencies, the discourse of the unconscious (the Other) irrupts into the analysand's empty speech, converting error into the condition of possibility for full speech and resubjectivization.

     In its repetitive, mechanical 'props,' the gears of empty speech are beginning to grind out another discourse

170. #170

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.19

     Abbreviations in Text Citations > **A Usable Past**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's concept of "chatter" inaugurates an intellectual tradition—continued by Heidegger and Lacan—that identifies everyday talk as a self-perpetuating "means without end," structurally analogous to machine automatism, thereby providing a usable conceptual genealogy for diagnosing digital-age communication pathologies.

     there is something senseless, involuntary, and strangely automated about the quasi-communicative function of chatter.

171. #171

     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.

     gallery-publics, they-selves, and Freudian crowds are just as senseless, involuntary, automated, and machinelike as the communicative practices that sustain them. More than actor-networks, they are calculating machines.

172. #172

     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.

     The three of them are so ridiculous that anyone would seem like a god beside such absurd automata [machines à absurdité]

173. #173

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.31

     Barbers and Philosophers

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Kierkegaard's debut as an author to an 1836 newspaper polemic, arguing that this exchange inaugurates his sustained theorization of "chatter" (snak) as a philosophical concept—identifying it with nonsense, gossip, confusion, and self-delusion—and establishes Holberg's fictional barber Gert Westphaler as the literary anchor for that theorization.

     Kierkegaard to associate chatter with noise, wind, sewage, babble, birdsong, wordplay, witticism, gimcrack, compulsion, automation, mechanicity, repetition

174. #174

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.21

     Abbreviations in Text Citations > **A Usable Past** > **The Challenge of Attunement**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan all treat everyday talk not merely as alienation or inauthenticity but as the very condition of possibility for more genuine modes of subjectivity and speech — with Lacan's concept of full speech as the dialectical inversion of empty speech being the key theoretical pivot.

     Everyday talk may be unwitting, habitual, involuntary, automated, recursive, and machinelike— and sometimes all at once.

175. #175

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.305

     A Play of Props > Conclusion

     Theoretical move: The conclusion argues that where Tarde instrumentalized everyday talk as a means to collective opinion-formation, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan instead revealed its individuating potential: chatter, idle talk, and empty speech function as techniques of self-cultivation through which subjects lose and refind themselves in mass society, a capacity now amplified by networked individualism.

     chatter, idle talk, empty speech, and their garrulous kin are neither spontaneous nor attentive but, instead, automated, involuntary, senseless, and strangely machinelike.

176. #176

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.34

     Barbers and Philosophers > To which his friend replies:

     Theoretical move: By analyzing Holberg's Master Gert Westphaler through Kierkegaard's correspondence, the passage establishes "chatter" as a mechanically repetitive, jouissance-driven speech act whose automated quality anticipates Lacan's "empty speech" and Heidegger's "idle talk" — and whose pathological excess stems from narcissistic delusion rather than mere foolishness.

     there is something automated about its commencement and almost robotic about its progression, such that, were someone to sew his mouth shut, this would only serve to displace its operation and double its output.

177. #177

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.135

     part iii

     Theoretical move: Against Bergson's binary of mechanical vs. vital, Zupančič argues that the drive (as "indestructible life") is constitutively produced *through* repetition rather than being a prior vitality that repetition merely expresses—thereby positioning comedy as an introduction to the psychoanalytic insight that life is the gap opened by repetition itself, and that all drive is ultimately death drive.

     is this perseverance, this obstinacy with which something keeps returning and repeating, with which it resists all attempts at being eliminated and always finds a new window or a new 'opening' through which it can peep out, not in fact very much akin to what Bergson calls 'life impulse' or élan vital, opposing it to automatism and to the mechanical?

178. #178

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.233

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > Part III: Conceptualizations

     Theoretical move: This endnotes section deploys a cluster of theoretical references to anchor concepts developed in the main text: it explicitly invokes the Lacanian distinction between tuche and automaton (the real vs. the return of signs/pleasure principle), gestures toward the ethical necessity of the proletarian revolution as distinct from historical determinism, and touches on Deleuzian repetition-difference, all in a footnote apparatus that does genuine theoretical work.

     The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle.

179. #179

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.175

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

     Theoretical move: By contrasting Deleuze's "realization of ontology through repetition" with Lacan's account of the symbolic cut as primary, Zupančič (drawing on Dolar) argues that tyche is the gap internal to automaton—i.e., the Real is not opposed to the Symbolic but is its constitutive impasse—and further that repetition and primary repression are co-extensive rather than causally related, so that alienation, the signifying dyad, and the forced choice together explain why repetition cannot be dissolved by successful interpretation.

     Automaton belongs to the symbolic register and refers to the automatic side of repetition, to the iterability of signs, as well as to the insistence on the repetition of satisfaction characteristic of the pleasure principle.

180. #180

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.122

     part iii

     Theoretical move: Zupančič pushes Bergson's formula of comedy (the mechanical encrusted on the living) toward a more radical claim: the mechanical element is not one of two pre-given poles but names the very *relationship* between any two poles, and comic imitation reveals that automatism/repetition is where singularity, not its absence, resides — thereby inverting the corrective-social reading of laughter.

     on the one hand automatism, rigidity, inertia, uniformity, repetition; on the other vitality, live energy, elasticity, changeability

181. #181

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.192

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan > Return to Comedy

     Theoretical move: Comic repetition is theorized as the repeated staging of the schism between the subject's being and meaning — not a revelation of nonsense but a practice that produces sense errantly and thereby enacts, at the limit of incongruence, the very structure of primary repression and the subject's constitution outside meaning.

     Surprise is something other than novelty. We can be surprised at something that we know very well, even expect (yet when it happens [again], it surprises us)—this is one of the main comic mechanisms.

182. #182

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.179

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian repetition is neither the Deleuzian affirmation of pure difference nor simple re-presentation, but rather the repetition of the signifying dyad of alienation whose constitutive gap (tyche) produces the Objet petit a as the subject's fleeting self-encounter in the Real — a move that distinguishes Lacan from Deleuze on the question of failure and difference in repetition.

     here we come back to the relationship between tyche and automaton as sketched out above: tyche is the gap of automaton; despite their radical heterogeneity, the two cannot be simply separated.

183. #183

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the clinical phenomenon of the compulsion to repeat—whereby patients re-enact rather than remember repressed material, including experiences that were never pleasurable—cannot be explained by the pleasure principle alone, thereby positing repetition as a more primal, elementary psychical force that displaces the pleasure principle and demands its own theoretical account.

     The patient is driven to this by a compulsion... taking due account of such observations of the way patients behave in the transference process... we shall dare to postulate that within the psyche there really is a compulsion to repeat

184. #184

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.68

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel > [Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ahd5)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the constitutive gap between the phenomenal and the noumenal in Kant is not a limitation but the positive condition of freedom and ethical subjectivity; freedom exists only "in between" the two domains, and the Hegelian Real is precisely this gap itself—rather than the inaccessible noumenal Thing of the Kantian Real—making the Kantian transcendental turn the founding move of philosophy as such.

     it would turn us into lifeless automata, or, to put it in today's terms, into 'thinking machines'

185. #185

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.184

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Cracks in Circular Time](#contents.xhtml_ahd12)

     Theoretical move: By reading the film *Arrival* through the opposition of circular (heptapod) and linear (human) temporality, Žižek argues that the circle of time is always-already an ellipse structured around a disavowed cut, and that the act of "willing the inevitable" is not empty but ontologically necessary—the finite, sexualized subject's capacity to intervene with a decision is what the holistic Other lacks and needs, making temporal finitude superior to atemporal plenitude.

     "The heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts; they don't act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons"

186. #186

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     PREFACE

     Theoretical move: Žižek, following Malabou, argues that Hegelian sublation must culminate in a self-sublating 'speculative abrogation' — a release of the object into its own being — and that Absolute Knowledge involves a radical passivization of the subject, displacing the Kantian model of active synthesis in favour of the object's autopoietic self-deployment.

     develops itself following its own conceptual automatism, with the subject reduced to a passive observer who, allowing the thing to deploy its potential without any intervention of his own (Zutun), merely registers the process.

187. #187

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek traces three periods of Lacan's teaching on the death drive to show how, in the third period, das Ding as the 'extimate' traumatic kernel within the symbolic order redefines the death drive as the possibility of 'second death' — the radical annihilation of the symbolic universe itself — and links this to Benjamin's Theses as the unique point where Marxist historiography touches this non-historical kernel.

     The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove.

188. #188

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Althusser's theory of ideological interpellation fails to account for the traumatic, senseless residue that is the very condition of ideological submission; drawing on Pascal, Kafka, Lacan's reading of the burning-child dream, and the Zhuang Zi paradox, he establishes that ideology functions not as illusion masking reality but as a fantasy-construction that *constitutes* reality, sustained by an irreducible surplus of jouissance ('jouis-sense') that escapes symbolic internalization.

     The externality of the symbolic machine ('automaton') is therefore not simply external: it is at the same time the place where the fate of our internal, most 'sincere' and 'intimate' beliefs is in advance staged and decided.

189. #189

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology operates not at the level of false consciousness (knowledge) but as an unconscious fantasy structuring social reality itself — a "fetishistic inversion" that persists even under cynical distance — and supports this with a Lacanian account of belief as radically exterior and materialized in social practice rather than interior and psychological.

     Here Pascal produces the very Lacanian definition of the unconscious: 'the automaton (i.e. the dead, senseless letter), which leads the mind unconsciously with it'.

190. #190

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.39

     Mladen Dolar

     Theoretical move: Dolar traces the modern philosophical coinage of "materialism" (Walch, 1726) to argue that the term was never a neutral classification but always a battle cry that places philosophy in a field of irresolvable antagonism—one in which materialism and idealism are not symmetrical alternatives to the same question, and any materialism that simply mirrors idealism's framework is already doomed to reproduce it. The proper grounding of materialism cannot bypass Hegel.

     Descartes, in his Meditations (1641), envisaged the animal organism as a complicated machine, the human body as an automate… La Mettrie scandalously treated the human soul… as just as much an automaton as the body

191. #191

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.176

     <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **"Recreational Mathematics"**

     Theoretical move: This appendix exposition demonstrates how Lacan's coin-toss formalism in the Écrits constructs a symbolic matrix in which a second-order Greek-letter overlay introduces syntactic constraints on succession, showing that the 'third position' is already partially determined by the first — a structural demonstration of how the symbolic order generates necessity from apparent contingency.

     the third slot is already to some extent determined by the first-the first 'bearing within itself' the 'kernel' of the third

192. #192

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.39

     <span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks" > **Randomness and Memory**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious "remembers" not through biological memory but through the autonomous, indestructible operation of the signifying chain—the symbolic matrix generates its own syntactic laws and preserves the past structurally, not subjectively, thereby accounting for the eternal and indestructible nature of unconscious contents.

     The unconscious cannot forget, composed of 'letters' working, as they do, in an autonomous, automatic way

193. #193

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.46

     <span id="page-42-0"></span>The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real > **Trauma**

     Theoretical move: Fink distinguishes two orders of the Real: a pre-symbolic R1 (residuum never fully symbolized, seat of trauma and fixation) and a second-order Real generated *by* the symbolic order itself through structural exclusion (the *caput mortuum*), arguing that what the symbolic chain necessarily cannot write causally determines what it does write — thereby introducing the Real as the structural cause of the chain rather than merely its outside.

     For the symbolic order, as modeled by Lacan's numeric and alphabetic matrices, produces something, in the course of its autonomous operation, that goes beyond the symbolic order itself.

194. #194

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.199

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > The Nature of Unconscious Thought

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that linguistic syntax and memory are not properties of symbolic material itself but arise from a specific overlapping mode of application of symbols to a series — a structure that requires overdetermination (double/multiple referents per symbol) to achieve complete representation, making the unconscious "language" an effect of how symbolization is applied rather than of what is symbolized.

     rules are generated concerning the order of the symbols used to group them. The syntax seems to already be there in statu nascendi in the grouping strategies adopted

195. #195

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.224

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > **Appendix 2 Stalking the** Cause

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's being is entirely dependent on the marks (letters/quotes) that constitute it—the subject has no being other than as mark or as being-set-off—connecting the typographical device of quotation marks to Lacan's claim that the subject is never more than supposed, and that its being is bound to the registers of speech and writing.

     Should we be presented with a string of minuses, the numeric matrix line will read exactly as in the above example.

196. #196

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.38

     <span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks" > **Heads or Tails**

     Theoretical move: By constructing a symbolic matrix from random coin-toss results, Lacan demonstrates that the act of coding raw events into a signifying chain generates structural impossibilities and a built-in memory function ex nihilo — that is, the symbolic order imposes syntactic constraints (a grammar of permissible and impermissible combinations) that are irreducible to, and unforeseeable from, the real events they encode.

     the chain remembers or keeps track of its previous components

197. #197

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.181

     <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **Network Mappings**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a detailed technical reconstruction of Lacan's 1-3 Network and its transformation into the α, β, γ, δ Network, showing how successive recodings of binary combinatories (same/different, odd/even, symmetrical/asymmetrical) generate higher-order graphs, and identifying that mirror-image structures in these networks instantiate the logic of the mirror stage.

     The graph has the advantage of pointing out all the permitted paths (and thus, by implication, all the prohibited ones), and the 1/0 code it uses reduces all the various plus/minus combinations and triplets to a three-slot 1/0 combinatory.

198. #198

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.190

     <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > Parenthetical Structures

     Theoretical move: By mapping the asymmetry of the L Chain onto the subject/Other split and identifying the parenthesis as the operator that introduces heterogeneity into the unary-trait repetition, Fink argues that the letter imposes a "parenthetical structure" on the subject — structurally enacting alienation and separation — and that object (a) is what gets bracketed in this process.

     the law in question in the second paragraph is that incarnated by the combinations of signs needed to 'hurdle' the L Chain parentheses each time they come up

199. #199

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.51

     <span id="page-42-0"></span>The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real > **Structure** versus Cause

     Theoretical move: Fink distinguishes two irreducible levels in Lacanian theory—the automatic functioning of the signifying chain (structure/automaton) and causation as that which interrupts this automatism—arguing that Lacan's departure from structuralism lies precisely in refusing to reduce the latter to the former, and that science's progressive "suturing" of the gap between cause and effect mirrors its attempt to evict subjectivity.

     Lacan translates Freud's Wiederholungszwang-generally translated as 'repetition compulsion' in English-as automatisme de repetition, repetition automatism or repetition automaton.

200. #200

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.24

     <span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > A Slip of the Other's Tongue

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that alienation in language is constitutive of the subject: the Other (as the pre-given totality of language) is not merely an external resource but an intrusive force that molds need into desire, installs an unconscious Other-discourse alongside ego-discourse, and thereby fundamentally alienates every speaking being from themselves.

     Lacan by no means left off there; he went on to seek models for deciphering unconscious mechanisms in the then developing field of cybernetics.

201. #201

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.42

     <span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks" > **Knowledge without a Subject**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious, structured as language, operates as an autonomous, self-unfolding knowledge that is strictly subjectless—"known unbeknownst" to the person—thereby creating a theoretical tension: if the unconscious requires no subject, how can Lacan simultaneously theorize a subject of the unconscious?

     There is a type of structure automatically and autonomously unfolding in/as the unconscious, and there is absolutely no need to postulate any kind of consciousness of this automatic movement

202. #202

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.35

     <span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks"

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that language operates autonomously as an Other that subjects are "used by" rather than merely using, and that unconscious thought processes — structured by condensation/metaphor and displacement/metonymy — constitute a parallel chain of discourse whose autonomous functioning Lacan sought to model through artificial/formal languages and combinatories.

     Lacan went much further still in his exploration of what occurs at the unconscious level, attempting to provide models by which to conceptualize the autonomous functioning of language in the unconscious and the uncanny 'indestructibility' of unconscious contents.

203. #203

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

     <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **Probability and Possibility**

     Theoretical move: By working through Lacan's second-order combinatory matrix, Fink demonstrates that the symbolic apparatus generates a distinction between probability and possibility ex nihilo: certain combinations are structurally impossible regardless of empirical probability, and the matrix's real theoretical yield is the syntactic law—the grammar—it produces, which parallels the structure of language.

     the laws generated by our numeric overlay (barring direct moves from 1 to 3 and from 3 to 1) blossom into an intricate apparatus with the introduction of the alphabetic matrix.

204. #204

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.136

     part iii

     Theoretical move: Against Bergson's vitalist opposition of life-impulse versus mechanical automatism, Zupančič argues that liveliness and drive emerge *only through* repetition — that the "dead letter" is not opposed to life but is its very condition — thereby proposing that the psychoanalytic drive (defined by Lacan as "indestructible life") is ultimately a death drive because life itself is driven by a dead letter, and that comedy stages this truth by objectifying it.

     Another Bergsonian example of comic automatism is Harpagon's avarice... a passion which, only just suppressed, automatically 'turns on' again and again.

205. #205

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.122

     part iii

     Theoretical move: Žižančič argues that Bergson's formula of the comic (the mechanical encrusted on the living) is both too broad and philosophically pre-loaded with an aprioristic dualism; the truly radical move is to locate the "mechanical" not as one of two independent poles but as the very *relationship* between any two poles, and further, that comic imitation reveals automatism as the site of singularity rather than its absence.

     something mechanical encrusted upon the living... on the one hand automatism, rigidity, inertia, uniformity, repetition; on the other vitality, live energy, elasticity, changeability

206. #206

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.233

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > Part III: Conceptualizations

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of endnotes/footnotes for a chapter, citing sources and making brief clarificatory remarks on concepts such as the necessity of proletarian revolution (as ethical rather than historic), the relationship between repetition and difference (contra Deleuze), and Lacan's distinction between tuche and automaton in relation to the real and the pleasure principle. The theoretical work is subsidiary and referential rather than sustained argument.

     The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle.

207. #207

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.179

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

     Theoretical move: Against the Deleuzian thesis that pure difference is the being of repetition, Lacan insists that repetition is inseparable from the signifying dyad of alienation (automaton) while its real stake is the tuche — the gap inhabited by objet petit a — which is what the subject compulsively seeks to glimpse, not as triumph of difference but as the subject's own fleeting presence in the Real.

     here we come back to the relationship between tyche and automaton as sketched out above: tyche is the gap of automaton; despite their radical heterogeneity, the two cannot be simply separated.

208. #208

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.175

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

     Theoretical move: By triangulating Deleuze and Lacan on repetition, Župančič argues that the three Lacanian registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) correspond to three modes of repetition, and that tyche is the gap internal to automaton rather than its opposite—a structure grounded in primary repression and alienation as co-constitutive rather than causally sequential moments of subjectivity.

     Automaton belongs to the symbolic register and refers to the automatic side of repetition, to the iterability of signs, as well as to the insistence on the repetition of satisfaction characteristic of the pleasure principle.

209. #209

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.208

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacanian castration is not merely an operator of lack but the structural coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir) that constitutes enjoyment as an "encrusted" appendix with relative autonomy — and that comedy, unlike tragedy, stages this constitutive dislocation of enjoyment at the level of structure itself rather than through individual existential destiny.

     What we are shown rather, is a machine becoming a man in the figure of Charlie—that is to say, a machine 'losing' it and starting to develop subjective tics

210. #210

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.25

     The Kantian Parallax

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues, via Karatani's reading of Kant, that the "parallax view" names an irreducible structural gap between positions that cannot be synthesized or reduced; he then radicalises this by showing that transcendental subjectivity, freedom, and ontological difference all inhabit precisely this "third space" between phenomenal and noumenal—a space structurally homologous to the Lacanian Real as pure antagonism and to the Not-all logic of sexuation.

     direct access to the noumenal domain would deprive us of the very 'spontaneity' which forms the kernel of transcendental freedom: it would turn us into lifeless automata—or, to put it in today's terms, into 'thinking machines.'

211. #211

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.233

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Emotions Lie, or, Where Damasio Is Wrong

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that music (via Wagner's *Tristan*) lies about its own affective status—its true "truth" resides not in the grand metaphysical affect but in the ridiculous narrative interruptions that enable it—and then uses this insight to critique Damasio's homeostatic/adaptationist account of emotion by invoking the psychoanalytic "death drive" as the minimal structure of freedom: a dis-adaptation from utilitarian-survivalist immersion that ruptures biological determinism.

     'being-human' consists in an 'uncoupling' from immersion in one's environs, in following a certain automatism which ignores the demands of adaptation

212. #212

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.208

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that autopoiesis (the self-producing loop of living cells) is the biological instantiation of Hegel's "positing the presuppositions"—the retroactive self-positing of an organism's own conditions—and that this same logical structure governs the paradox of freedom/fate: a truly free act is not one that escapes necessity but one that retroactively posits it, with the "causality of appearance" (the subject as surface-effect with no substantial kernel) as the key operator.

     the bootstrap is precisely what's unique about cells. A self-distinguishing entity exists when the bootstrap is completed.

213. #213

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.218

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The False Opacity

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the "gap" between consciousness and raw nature should not be bridged but properly formulated, and deploys Metzinger's phenomenal self-model (PSM) theory to show that the Self exists only as a transparent representational illusion—a structure homologous to Hegelian-Marxian fetishist misrecognition—such that the ego is constitutively méconnaissance, and the Self, like the Freudian symptom, exists only insofar as its generative mechanism remains opaque to it.

     cognitivists who support the idea of artificial intelligence use this chess automaton as a metaphor for how our brain really works: we are, in effect, like the swami figure puppets, while the work of reasoning is done by the 'impersonal' neuronal automata of which our brain consists

214. #214

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.69

     **The Real** > **Reality**

     Theoretical move: The passage surveys a cluster of interrelated psychoanalytic and Hegelian concepts — Real/reality, pleasure/reality principle, repetition, repression, self-consciousness, and separation — showing how each marks a site where symbolization both constitutes and fails to exhaust its object, leaving a remainder (the Real, the repressed, desire) that persistently disrupts any stable closure of meaning or satisfaction.

     Lacan called this process 'repetition automatism' and associated it with his idea of the insistence of the signifying chain.

215. #215

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that British youth's political disengagement is not apathy but 'reflexive impotence'—a self-fulfilling epistemological posture produced by the control society's logic of indefinite postponement, depressive hedonia, and the privatization/pathologization of systemic problems, which forecloses politicization more effectively than overt repression.

     the student could still enjoy it on his behalf... twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus.