Barred

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (69)

1. #01

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_ncx_214"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_page_0245"></span>***W***

   Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical development of the concept of "woman" across Freud and Lacan, arguing that Lacan's key move is to displace the question of femininity from a biological or universal essence to a structural position in the symbolic order defined by the logic of the not-all, feminine jouissance beyond the phallus, and woman as symptom of man.

   Lacan strikes through the definite article whenever it precedes the term femme in much the same way as he strikes through the A to produce the symbol for the barred Other, for like woman, the Other does not exist

2. #02

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_193"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0219"></span>**split**

   Theoretical move: Lacan radicalises Freud's 'splitting of the ego' from a pathological phenomenon specific to fetishism/psychosis into a universal and irreducible structure of subjectivity itself: the subject is constitutively divided as an effect of the signifier and of speech, making any ideal of full self-presence impossible.

   The split or divided subject is symbolised by the BAR which strikes through the S to produce the barred subject

3. #03

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_20"></span>***aphanisis***

   Theoretical move: Lacan radically redefines Jones's concept of aphanisis: rather than the disappearance of sexual desire (Jones), aphanisis designates the fading/disappearance of the subject itself, instituting the fundamental division of the subject and the dialectic of desire, while paradoxically the neurotic actively aims at making desire disappear.

   the subject is barred in these mathemes

4. #04

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_123"></span>**metonymy**

   Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of metonymy, derived from Jakobson, defines the diachronic, combinatorial relation between signifiers along the signifying chain as the structural condition for signification and the very logic of desire; the formula for metonymy shows that the bar between signifier and signified is maintained (no new signified produced), and metonymy is identified with displacement and posited as the condition of possibility for metaphor.

   the signifying function of the connection of the signifier with the signifier is congruent with maintenance of the bar

5. #05

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_141"></span>**other/Other**

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

   In 1957 Lacan illustrates this incomplete Other graphically by striking a BAR through the symbol A, to produce... hence another name for the castrated, incomplete Other is the barred Other.

6. #06

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.156

   ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > ANALYSIS AND TRUTH

   Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the Cartesian cogito as a "homunculus" fantasy of a unified subject, and proposes instead the barred subject ($) as constituted through the signifier — specifically through the logic of the "single stroke" (unary trace), which simultaneously marks the subject and introduces a primary split between subject and sign.

   I symbolize the subject by the barred S [\$], in so far as it is constituted as secondary in relation to the signifier.

7. #07

   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.

   arithmetic is a science that has been literally barred by the intrusion of algebrism

8. #08

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.41

   THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

   Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the unconscious not as a closed, enveloping unity but as constitutively structured by discontinuity, rupture, and split—arguing that the 'un' of the Unbewusste signals lack rather than mere negation, and that the unconscious is best situated at the level of the subject of enunciation in the dimension of synchrony, where the signifier's effacement (oblivium) enables the barring function.

   Here we find again the basic structure that makes it possible, in an operatory way, for something to take on the function of barring.

9. #09

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.156

   ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > ANALYSIS AND TRUTH

   Theoretical move: Lacan displaces the Cartesian cogito — with its fantasy of a homunculus or synthetic 'I' — by the barred subject ($), constituted as secondary to the signifier through the logic of the unary stroke, which introduces the originary split between subject and sign.

   I symbolize the subject by the barred S [$], in so far as it is constituted as secondary in relation to the signifier.

10. #10

    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.

    arithmetic is a science that has been literally barred by the intrusion of algebrism.

11. #11

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.115

    Another question.

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that predication is not a logical act but an expression of desire's particular forcing, and that the analytic relationship cannot be grounded in a specular grammar of pronoun-equivalence; the remainder that escapes specularisation is what distinguishes the big Other from the barred Other, and it is precisely this remainder that structures both transference (the subject supposed to know) and the analyst's relationship to truth.

    the difference between the you and the I, this difference being that of the big Other and that of the big Other barred in so far as precisely what liberates the bar is a remainder.

12. #12

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.136

    **Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pascal's Wager as a topological model of the fantasy structure: the infinite field of the big Other, barred and reduced to pure alternation of existence/non-existence, is what causes the Objet petit a to 'fall' as the real cause of desire—and this structural logic defines the analyst's position as the partner who 'knows he is nothing', enabling the object to fall from the opaque field of belief/dream.

    I mark on the big O this bar; which means that it is here, at the beginning that we have struck in order that there may fall from it what, henceforth, in Pascal's Wager cannot be conceived of as anything representable

13. #13

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's theory of chance (the "rule of parts") and the figure of the gambler to argue that the passion of gambling is structurally homologous to the subject's relation to the signifier: the gambler bets on a mode of encounter with the real in which the lost object (objet petit a) is not implicated in the usual signifying loss, while Pascal's Wager ultimately reveals the field of the Other as barred — the signifier of the barred Other (S(Ø)) — as the structural condition for any claim of desire's object.

    the field of the Other *qua* divided with respect to being itself, it is what is in my graph as S, signifier of Ø.

14. #14

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.243

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a is a topological structure identifiable with the "hole" in surfaces like the torus, cross-cap, and Klein bottle—not a represented object but the very condition of representation—and frames his entire method as a second circuit of Freud's own Möbius-like path, where repetition transforms rather than reduplicates, culminating in the division of the subject.

    neither of them can co-exist with the other except by being marked with the sign of the bar, namely, of being in a position of being divided, precisely, by the impact of the o-object.

15. #15

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.136

    **Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pascal's Wager through the topology of the cross-cap and the barred Other to argue that the wager's stake is precisely the Objet petit a as cause of desire: wagering on God's existence installs the big Other under the bar (marking its non-existence as condition), and this structural move—not religious faith—is what psychoanalysis must reckon with to define the analyst's position relative to the subject's fantasy.

    I mark on the big O this bar; which means that it is here, at the beginning that we have struck in order that there may fall from it what, henceforth, in Pascal's Wager cannot be conceived of as anything representable

16. #16

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.115

    Another question.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that predication is not a logical act but an act of desire's forcing, and that the analytic relation cannot be grounded in a specular grammar of pronouns (I/you equivalence); the remainder that escapes specularisation is what opens the dialectic between the barred Other and truth, and the transference's misunderstanding consists in the analysand supposing the analyst knows everything except the truth.

    the difference being that of the big Other and that of the big Other barred in so far as precisely what liberates the bar is a remainder.

17. #17

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.104

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 1 February 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the formula *cogito ergo Es* to reframe the Freudian *Es* (Id) not as a variant ego but as a function grounded in the barred Other, arguing that the real Freudian discovery is an *object* (not a thought-system) whose status is identical with structure insofar as structure is real — illustrated topologically by the Möbius strip transforming into a torus.

    along the paths that I am advancing, which are those of the barred Other - poses a question

18. #18

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.83

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that alienation is the pivotal operation through which the Freudian unconscious must be understood: by situating the Other as the locus of the word (and hence as barred, S(O)), he reframes the cogito's subject as inherently split and repressing, displacing both Cartesian self-transparency and object-relational nostalgia for primitive unity in favour of a logical articulation of the subject's constitutive dependence on the symbolic order.

    that is why I write S signifier of capital O barred as constituting one of the nodal points of this network around which there is articulated the whole dialectic of desire

19. #19

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 22: Wednesday June 7 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is constitutively separated from the body, and that it is precisely this disjunction—marked by the barred Other—that grounds the question of jouissance in the sexual act; perversion responds directly to this question (via objects a), while neurosis merely sustains desire, making the perverse act and the neurotic act structurally distinct.

    the disjunction between jouissance and the body... sufficiently marked by my siglum or algorithm, as you wish, of the signifier of the O barred

20. #20

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.8

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject originates through the cut — topologically modeled on the cross-cap/projective plane — whereby the o-object is separated and Urverdrängung (primal repression) is defined as what a signifier represents for another signifier; the barred subject emerges only in alienated form, and desire is re-formulated not as the essence of man but as the essence of reality, displacing Spinoza's anthropology into a strictly structural, a-theological account.

    Is it necessary to recall, here, my formulae that there is no subject except through a signifier and for another signifier. It is the algorithm: S/$ → S¹

21. #21

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no sexual relation by showing that the field between the small o (objet petit a) and the big Other is structured as a hole — not a unifying One — and that identification (ego ideal/ideal ego) operates in this gap; the Oedipus myth is then mobilised to demonstrate that jouissance itself is constitutively bound to rottenness and the hole, not to any unitive fullness.

    what is imaged for a long time in my graph by the connotation, signifier of capital O barred, S(Ø)

22. #22

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.53

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > KLEIN GROUP

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "One too many" signifier—structurally outside the signifying chain yet immanent to it—enables interpretation to function not as a mere meaning-effect (metaphor) but as a truth-effect; he then complicates the Cartesian cogito through material implication and the middle voice (diathesis) to show that the subject is constituted through the act of language rather than through the intuition of self-thinking.

    it is necessary for it to be barred from it, that this bar then is turning and - virtually - strikes each one of the letters, that we have, inserted in the chain, the function of the *One too many*

23. #23

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.104

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 1 February 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses an interrupted seminar session (deferred by a strike and Jakobson's presence) to sketch the theoretical stakes of the year's work on the *Logic of the Fantasy*: the Es/Unconscious cannot be substantified as an "outlaw ego"; its proper status must be derived from the barred Other as locus of speech, while topology (Möbius strip → torus) is introduced as a demonstration that structure is real, not metaphorical—culminating in the question of what authorises a teaching addressed to analysts who do not yet exist.

    along the paths that I am advancing, which are those of the barred Other - poses a question

24. #24

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.53

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > KLEIN GROUP

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates how the "signifier too many" (the barred signifier outside the chain) operates as the structural condition for interpretation, whose effect is properly a "truth-effect" rather than a mere meaning-effect; he then uses the Cartesian cogito and Benveniste's active/middle voice distinction to argue that the subject is constituted not through intuition of being-who-thinks but through the very structure of language and the act of speaking.

    it is necessary for it to be barred from it, that this bar then is turning and - virtually - strikes each one of the letters, that we have, inserted in the chain, the function of the One too many among the signifiers

25. #25

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.371

    Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the structural necessity of the "additional one" (un-en-plus) and the empty set within the field of the Other, demonstrating through set theory that the inclusion of a first signifier into the Other necessarily generates a second term (the empty set/S(Ø)) and that subjectivity only appears at the level of S2, reorienting the field from intersubjectivity to intra-subjective structure.

    to mark it with this oblique bar that you know moreover I make use of

26. #26

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.79

    Seminar **6:** Wednesday **8** March 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment is always "from the Other" but never sexual (there is no sexual relation), and that the Other must be barred — emptied out — to become the locus where the sexuation formulae and knowledge are inscribed; this move connects the barred Other S(Ø) to lalangue, fantasy, repetition (Nachträglichkeit), and the necessity of writing for psychoanalysis to be possible at all.

    That I write this capital S brackets of O barred, S(0), and which is the same thing as what I have just formulated, that you enjoy the Other mentally, this writes something about the Other

27. #27

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.73

    **II** > Love and the signifier > Aristotle and Freud: the other satisfaction

    Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that jouissance is structurally 'inappropriate' to the sexual relationship, making repression a secondary effect that generates metaphor; he then aligns Aristotle's energeia-pleasure (exemplified by seeing/smell/hearing) with the analytic function of objet petit a as that which, from the male pole, substitutes for the missing partner and thereby constitutes fantasy, while announcing that the female pole requires a different supplement to the non-existent sexual relationship.

    for Woman - but write woman with the slanted line with which I designate what must be barred - for Woman, something other than object a is at stake

28. #28

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

    **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes a structural articulation between writing, jouissance, and the Real: what is written encodes the conditions of jouissance, the Other must be barred (S(Ø)) because it is founded on the One-missing, and mathematization alone can reach a Real that is not fantasy — identified ultimately as the mystery of the speaking body and the unconscious.

    the Other must be barred, barred on the basis of (de) what I earlier qualified as the One-missing. That is what S(Ø) means.

29. #29

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.38

    **II** > **The function of the written¹**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the written (l'écrit) is not of the same register as the signifier, and uses this distinction to ground the specific function of analytic discourse: letters (a, A, $) name loci and functions rather than merely signify, while the unconscious is what is *read* beyond speech — a move that simultaneously critiques ontology (the master's discourse) for its illegitimate hypostatization of the copula "to be."

    I thereby added a dimension to A's locus, showing that qua locus it does not hold up, that there is a fault, hole, or loss therein.

30. #30

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.82

    **II** > God and Woman's jouissance

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the sexuation formulas by arguing that woman's structural not-wholeness with respect to the phallic function entails a supplementary jouissance irreducible to phallic jouissance, while simultaneously grounding 'being' not in ontology but in the jouissance of the body marked by signifierness—thereby opposing his project to both philosophical idealism and vulgar materialism.

    Woman can only be written with a bar through it. There's no such thing as Woman, Woman with a capital W indicating the universal.

31. #31

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.91

    **VII** > A love letter *(une lettre d'amour)*

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the formulas of sexuation by showing how masculine and feminine sides of speaking beings relate differently to phallic jouissance, fantasy, and the barred Other — culminating in the claim that the dissociation of *a* (imaginary) from S(Ⱥ) (symbolic) is the task of psychoanalysis, distinguishing it from psychology, and that woman's radical Other jouissance places her in closer proximity to God than any ancient speculation on the Good could reach.

    That is why the signifier, with this open parenthesis, marks the Other as barred: S($).

32. #32

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.220

    J.Lacan-... of this?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the 'not-all' logic governing Woman cannot be read through finite Aristotelian particularity (which would imply an exceptional existence), but only through the infinite—where no determinate exception can be constructed—grounding Lacan's claim that Woman is properly half-said, and that her enjoyment is of the order of the infinite rather than the phallic universal.

    It is between the 3* quite simply and the 3X marked by a bar that there is situated the suspension of this indetermination between an existence which finds itself to be affirmed

33. #33

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.260

    (3) Naturally since I made a small mistake

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot topology to ground the asymmetry between the One and the Other (woman as "less One"), arguing that mathematisation alone accesses the Real—defined as the mystery of the speaking body and the unconscious—while distinguishing the Real from both fantasy and traditional reality.

    The S of O in so far as it is barred - S(0) - it is indeed this that it means.

34. #34

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.132

    Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bentham's utilitarianism and Stoic logic (material implication) to articulate the modal structure of jouissance—that enjoyment 'does not cease not to be written' (the impossible)—and to show that repression is secondary to a primal non-suitability of jouissance for the sexual relationship, with metaphor as repression's first effect; he then aligns this with Aristotle's energeia-pleasure (sight, smell, hearing) to locate the objet petit a as the male-side substitute for the missing partner, constituting fantasy.

    mark this the with this oblique strike with which I denote every time I have the opportunity, what should be barred.

35. #35

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.207

    **Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 ..**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural asymmetry between masculine and feminine sides of sexuation means that woman is neither One nor Other but occupies an undecidable relation to the barred Other, grounding man's imaginary construction of woman as the signifier of the barred Other through the procession of objet petit a objects—making the sexual relation structurally impossible.

    she is an undecidable relationship to the barred Other, she is neither One nor the Other

36. #36

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

    What is the signifier?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier must be understood topologically rather than purely phonologically: it produces a meaning effect, and between signifier and signified a bar is inscribed that must be crossed over — a structure whose lineage runs from the Stoics through Augustine, not merely from Saussure, and which cannot be reduced to its phonematic support.

    between the two something like a bar is written, that there is something barred to be crossed over.

37. #37

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.413

    **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference and suggestion constitute two distinct but constantly confused lines in analytic practice, and that it is desire — as the field of the divided subject — which resists the collapse of transference into suggestion/demand; neurosis is reframed not as a quantitative deficit of desire but as a structural arrangement that maintains desire's articulation against this collapse.

    This raises precisely the question of what the barred S means at this level. In other words, what subject is in question?

38. #38

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.482

    **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the obsessional's demand for death must be understood as a signifier mediated by the Oedipal horizon rather than reducible to Penisneid or castration, and that the Christian commandment 'love your neighbour as yourself' discloses—when formulated from the locus of the Other—the unconscious circuit in which the subject is the one who hates (demands the death of) itself, converging with Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden'.

    The phallus has to be situated here at the level of the signifier of the Other as barred, S(Ⱥ)

39. #39

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.332

    **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

    Theoretical move: The phallus is constitutively barred from the signifying order — it is the signifier of the Other's desire — and this structural bar is what introduces castration for both sexes, producing asymmetrical dilemmas: the woman must *be* the phallus (identifying with it as desired object) while the man must *have* it, yet both are divided from their being by this impossible relation to the phallic signifier.

    this extreme point of the manifestation of desire in its vital appearances can only enter the field of signifiers by unleashing the bar

40. #40

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.329

    **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

    Theoretical move: The passage theorises the bar as the essential property of the signifier — its capacity to be cancelled/effaced — and uses this to ground the relationship between the signifying chain, the subject, desire, and the phallus; the Aufhebung of a non-signifying element (real or imaginary) is precisely what raises it to the dignity of a signifier, making the bar the hinge between signification, subjectivity, and the castration complex.

    It's only when it can be barred that a signifier acquires its proper status, that is, enters into this dimension which makes every signifier, in principle - to specify what I mean here - revocable.

41. #41

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.304

    **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **THE FORMULAS OF DESIRE**

    Theoretical move: The phallus is theorized as the privileged signifier that introduces the relationship to the little other (a) into the big Other (A) as the locus of speech, thereby barring the Other and implicating it in the dialectic of desire — a structural move that critiques Jones's reductive biologism (aphanisis as disappearance of desire) in favour of a properly symbolic account of the castration complex.

    this is why on the third line the symbol for the Other is barred — namely, that it isn't purely and simply the locus of speech, but that it is, like the subject, implicated in the dialectic located on the phenomenal plane of reflection with respect to the little other.

42. #42

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.93

    THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "AS HE WISHED"

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject is constituted through the structural split between the I of enunciation and the I of the statement, and that negation (Verneinung) — especially the "discordant" ne — is the earliest linguistic trace of this split, linking the signifier's capacity for self-effacement to the inaugural moment of the unconscious subject.

    What man leaves behind him is a signifier, a cross, a bar qua barred.

43. #43

    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 signifier of the barred Other [S(A)]

44. #44

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.406

    PHALLOPHANIES

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a structural comparison of Hamlet and Oedipus to argue that mourning's disrupted rituals expose the same fundamental gap as the phallic signifier/castration, and that Hamlet stages a 'barred Other' [S(Ⱥ)] at its very outset rather than discovering it through the hero's deed—making Hamlet's Oedipal drama a specifically modern, 'distorted' form of the Untergang of the Oedipus complex in which the subject is paralysed by an unatonable debt rather than enacting the lustral rebirth of the law.

    This revelation... can thus be written in the way I notate messages from the unconscious: namely, as the signifier of barred A, S(A).

45. #45

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.317

    THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is essentially the distance encoded in the barred subject's relation to objet petit a — the formula ($◇a) — and uses Ophelia as the paradigmatic figure of the phallus (girl = phallus) to dramatize how psychoanalysis has gone wrong by defining libido as object-seeking rather than grasping the object through the lens of aphanisis (fading of the subject).

    the distance found in the specific relationship the subject as barred has with the object expressed in the symbol little a

46. #46

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.391

    IN THE FORM OF A CUT

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the logical genesis of the subject through successive stages of demand and the Other, arriving at the formula for fantasy ($◇a) as the structural prop that arrests the subject's fading at the point where no signifier in the Other can authenticate the subject's being — fantasy is thus the "perpetual confrontation between barred S and little a" that sustains desire where unconscious desire was (Wo Es war).

    This subject is marked with a bar that primordially divides him from himself qua subject of speech. It is thus as a barred subject that he can, must, and intends to find the answer.

47. #47

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.467

    THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

    Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural logic of the phallus as signifier through the "either/or" formulation — one either *is* the phallus or *has* it — and deploys this to distinguish feminine desire from neurotic desire, where the neurotic regresses to a metonymic substitution in which "not having" disguises an unconscious identification with being the phallus, while the ego usurps the place of the barred subject in the dialectic of desire.

    just as there is a 'barred subject,' I will write 'barred phallus.' This barred phallus finds itself in the presence of an object... in the form of the imaginary other in which the subject situates himself

48. #48

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.386

    THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

    Theoretical move: Lacan presents a synchronic schema of the dialectic of desire that articulates how the subject is constituted through the structural failure of the Other as guarantor, establishing objet petit a as the remainder produced by the division of the Other by Demand—a mortified lost object that desire aims at only as hidden, always beyond the nothing to which the subject must consent through castration.

    It is here that the term A barred comes in. Under the pressure of the subject's demand for a guarantor, what happens at the level of the Other is primordially something related to a lack [A.] in relation to which the subject must situate himself.

49. #49

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.233

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *2. The Rewriting of Destiny*

    Theoretical move: This passage, constituted by scholarly endnotes, theorizes the constitutive incoherence of the big Other (barred, lacking any Other of the Other), the pre-symbolic law of the mother as foundational subjection, the distinction between classical and modern tragedy as forms of destined versus destituted subjectivity, and the analytic end-point as confrontation with helplessness and the absence of a Sovereign Good — all articulating how drive, fantasy, and the real internally limit symbolic consistency.

    the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barré, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility

50. #50

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.230

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *1. The Singularity of Being*

    Theoretical move: This endnote cluster consolidates the theoretical architecture of the chapter by specifying the structural relations among das Ding, desire, repetition compulsion, jouissance, the death drive, sublimation, the sublime, and the symbolic order—while positioning Badiou, Žižek, Zupančič, and Santner as allied but differentiated interlocutors within a Lacanian frame.

    it simply makes a barred subject out of an almost natural barrier

51. #51

    The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.97

    Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic trust (and transference) operates not through knowledge but through a credit extended precisely at the point of the Other's lack, and that the comic suspension of the big Other (as in comedies of mistaken identity) produces a surplus object — "error incorporated" — as a little other that takes the Other's place, revealing that comedy proper pivots not on the Other's failure itself but on the surplus effects that failure generates.

    Disbelief is belief in one's own autonomy as guaranteed by the consistency of the field of the Other. And this kind of incredulity is ultimately a way of keeping the signifier of our own lack as far away from us as possible, buried in the field of the Other.

52. #52

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.32

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Diagram Traversed by Antagonism**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the identity of an object resides not in an inner core but in its "diagram" — the virtual structure of non-actualized potentials — and crucially refines this by distinguishing accidental non-actualizations from essentially impossible ones (the impossible-real), applying this logic to politics to show that capitalism's particular malfunctions are structurally necessary rather than accidental symptoms to be reformed away.

    the antagonism of the barred One, the deadlock that triggers incessant activity

53. #53

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.369

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The Inhuman View](#contents.xhtml_ahd24)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian "bar" is not Butler's liberal-hegemonic bar of contingent social exclusion but the constitutive split that separates the subject as void from all objective content—grounded in primordial repression and the fundamental fantasy—and that emancipatory transformation requires not gradual inclusion but the radical act of traversing the fantasy, which institutes an entirely new mode of historicity rather than extending an existing one.

    the notion of the uncompleted or barred subject appears to guarantee a certain incompletion of interpellation

54. #54

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.120

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the shift from Kant to Hegel is not a return to pre-critical ontology but a move that inscribes epistemological antinomies into the Real itself, making "subjective distortion" the very mode of contact with the Absolute—and that sexuality, as the impossible-real Absolute, is accessible only through the detours and gaps of the symbolic order, with Lacan's formulas of sexuation homologous to Kant's antinomies of pure reason.

    There are Two because the One is in itself 'barred,' impossible: Two are/is less than One, it is not two ones but the One plus a void which cuts into it as the mark of its impossibility.

55. #55

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.235

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [The “Inner Eight”](#contents.xhtml_ahd14)

    Theoretical move: The Möbius-strip topology of the "inner eight" (self-reflecting hierarchical inversion) is deployed to argue that true materialist dialectics requires acknowledging that the Universal is *already* barred/voided from within—not sublated into the Idea—and that fantasy, repression, and the Form/content split all operate according to this same logic of a loop immanent to hierarchy.

    the immanence of material plurality is already cracked, the missing One is already there as 'barred,' in the guise of its absence, as a void. This is the paradox to be endorsed: the loss of the One comes before the One

56. #56

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.299

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing](#contents.xhtml_ahd20)

    Theoretical move: Žižek deploys Lacan's formal logic of 1+a and 2+a to argue that neither the One nor the Two are primordial: the originary level is a "less than zero" (the quantum distinction between two vacuums), whose internal tension generates the entire series One→supplement→Two→excess, identifying the operator of this transformation with the barred subject ($) as the inverted counterpart of objet a.

    what comes first? Neither multiplicity nor the One but a barred/thwarted One: multiplicity emerges because the One is barred, and the One itself (as a positive self-identical entity) emerges to fill in the void of its own impossibility.

57. #57

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.51

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism](#contents.xhtml_ahd3)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Sadean dream of a "second death" as radical external annihilation misrecognises what Lacan (and Hegel) identify as already primordial: the subject IS the second death, the immanent negativity/inconsistency internal to Substance itself; and this same error—presupposing an ontologically consistent Whole—recurs in Western Marxism (Ilyenkov, Bloch), while Adorno's "negative dialectics" and "primacy of the objective" approximate but do not fully reach the Lacanian distinction between symbolically-mediated reality and the impossible Real.

    What the florid imagination of the sadist masks is the fact that the Other is barred, inconsistent, lacking, that it cannot be served for it presents no law to obey

58. #58

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.21

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [<span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_p18" class="pagebreak" title="18"></span>Modalities of the Absolute](#contents.xhtml_ahd1)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the gap between subject and Absolute should not be overcome but transposed into the Absolute itself—following Hegel's move of showing that the subject's lack is simultaneously the lack in the Other (substance's self-disparity), a structure Žižek identifies as the speculative core of both Hegel's idealism and Christianity's kenotic theology, and which he claims is what makes Marxism truly materialist rather than idealist.

    when substance is in itself 'barred,' traversed by an immanent impossibility or antagonism

59. #59

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: Žižek reframes the Hegelian move from Substance to Subject not as constipated retention (Adorno's critique) but as excremental release: the subject is the 'barred substance'—emptied of all content through absolute negativity—which in Lacanese maps onto the split subject ($), and this logic of 'letting go' governs Hegel's philosophy of nature, theology, and art.

    the subject is the barred substance

60. #60

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.253

    Russell Sbriglia > Notes

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes section providing bibliographic citations and brief theoretical glosses for an extended Lacanian reading of Moby Dick, touching on fetishistic disavowal, das Ding, objet petit a, extimacy, castration, and critiques of object-oriented/flat ontology from a subject-centred perspective.

    Such markings, especially the former, are likewise literalizations of Ahab's barring, or, to use an even more apropos term, his castration.

61. #61

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.219

    Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

    Theoretical move: Against new materialist (Deleuzean) ontologies of Becoming that dissolve the subject into immanent flux and promise plenitude, the passage argues from a Lacanian-Hegelian standpoint that ontological incompleteness—the barred, split subject—is irreducible and is in fact the condition of possibility for freedom, joy, and genuine subjectivity; a close reading of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is deployed to show that Deleuze's ventriloquism of Woolf suppresses the very void of subjectivity her text stages.

    the barred nature of subjectivity guarantees that materiality can never be full. Multiplying absence yields only absence.

62. #62

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.245

    Russell Sbriglia

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian *objet petit a* as an extimate object—simultaneously inside and outside the subject—reveals that subjectivity is constitutively split and hystericized, and that this logic of sublimation (where "thing-power" is itself the product of the subject's anamorphic distortion) undermines new materialist "flat ontology" by showing that there is no vibrant matter (*a*) without the subject, just as there is no subject without *a*.

    the objet petit a is that which, in the language of Lacan, forever 'bars' the subject, a barring represented by Lacan via the following formula: $ ◊ a

63. #63

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.28

    Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

    Theoretical move: This introductory survey passage maps the theoretical terrain of a collection's second section on Lacan and psychoanalytic materialism, demonstrating how each chapter uses Lacanian concepts (objet petit a, death drive, extimacy, sublimation, the barred subject) to critique rival materialisms (Deleuzian, new materialist, object-oriented) and assert the irreducibility of the subject and the Real.

    interprets Woolf's experiments with the subject... as the inheritance of a Lacanian materialist tradition more attentive to the barred, abyssal nature of material reality

64. #64

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.233

    Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze > Notes

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for a chapter on ontological incompleteness, Virginia Woolf, Lacan, and Deleuze; it is non-substantive in itself but contains one theoretically notable annotation equating the Lacanian barred subject ($) with a subject that "emerges from its own loss," and another flagging Žižek's charge of Deleuze's "outright psychotic foreclosure" of Hegelian thought.

    This is the Lacanian "barred" subject ($), which emerges from its own loss.

65. #65

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.96

    Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that comic naivety (trust in the Other's metonymic object despite its inconsistency) is not mere ignorance but a structural wager on the lack-in-the-Other, and that comedies of mistaken identity function by suspending the symbolic Other, generating a surplus comic object ('error incorporated') that displaces the emphasis from the Other's failure to the productive accidents that failure enables.

    those who are obsessed with avoiding all deception... ultimately blindly believe that the Other knows exactly what she is doing, that is, is perfectly consistent in her existence and actions... the other side of the belief in a full (not 'barred'), consistent Other

66. #66

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.143

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

    Theoretical move: The passage reads two Henry James novels—*The Wings of the Dove* and *The Golden Bowl*—as ethical and libidinal allegories: in *Wings*, Densher's "moral masochism" (fake love for Milly's memory) constitutes the real betrayal, while in *Golden Bowl*, the cracked bowl functions as the signifier of the barred Other that structures intersubjective relations, and the incest motif encodes the link between capitalist brutality and familial protection/violation.

    the cracked bowl is thus what Lacan called the signifier of the barred Other, the embodiment of the falsity of intersubjective relations condensed in it

67. #67

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.5

    **Anxiety**

    Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary compilation that defines and elaborates several Lacanian and Hegelian concepts — Anxiety, Analysand, Appearance, Sublation (Aufhebung), the Barred subject, Beautiful Soul, Beyond (Jenseits), and Castration — drawing on Žižek, Fink, McGowan, and Kalkavage to show how each concept performs a specific theoretical function within the broader structure of desire, subjectivity, and dialectical mediation.

    the mOther must demonstrate that she is a desiring (and thus also a lacking and alienated) subject, that she too has submitted to the splitting/barring action of language, in order for us to witness the subject's advent

68. #68

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.62

    Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation are not about anatomical or cultural difference but about two distinct logical configurations of the same constitutive minus (castration/phallic function) intrinsic to the signifying order, such that sexual difference is ontological rather than secondary—and that feminine jouissance marks precisely the place where the Other's lack is inscribed in the Other itself, functioning as the signifier of missing knowledge rather than as an obstacle to the sexual relation.

    the infamous Lacanian 'barred Other' is not simply an inconsistent, lacking Other, but the Other the inconsistency of which is inscribed in it, and has itself a marker in it: Lacan writes it as S(Ⱥ), signifier of the Other as barred.

69. #69

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.64

    Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sexual division maps onto an ontological asymmetry between masculinity as belief (reliance on the phallus as signifying support to repress castration) and femininity as pretense (masquerade as constitutive deception), and further that this same ontological minus—the bar between signifier and signified transposed into the signifier itself—grounds Lacan's theory of the subject of the unconscious as a "with-without" inherent to the signifying order, moving beyond Saussurean structuralism.

    This S(Ⱥ), the other's jouissance as the signifier of the 'Other as barred,' is thus not to be confused with the signifier of castration