Concept

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (74)

1. #01

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.75

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **The dominance of non-Marxist approaches**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that New Historicism's dominance in film studies has impoverished the field by substituting particularism, complexity, and distributed agency for the Marxist tools of dialectics, contradiction, and synthesis; recovering Marxist dialectics is presented as the only method capable of integrating formalist and contextualist approaches and generating genuine critique.

   a more theoretical basis for the connections one dedicated explicitly to constructing concepts and generalizations—can do so more effectively.

2. #02

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.152

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that crucifixion, read through the intersection of Lacanian and Hegelian frameworks, figures not as sacrificial atonement but as the subject's embrace of the Other's foreignness as an opening to what is unknown in itself — a "dying away" of the ego that parallels Lacan's rereading of Freud's *Wo Es war, soll Ich werden* and Hegel's dialectical conception of love as constitutive self-division, which in turn grounds a psychoanalytic ethics of non-judgement toward the analysand.

   Hegel's ultimate category— variously called the Absolute, the Idea, the Concept— not only includes Otherness but is radically founded upon it.

3. #03

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.297

   I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Conclusion

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that a positive politics of the death drive is possible not by eliminating it or escaping toward a utopian good, but by recognizing internal limits as the very source of infinite enjoyment—transforming the relationship to the lost object and the figures of the enemy so that external threats are seen as internal self-limitations rather than obstacles to be overcome.

   The concept attains its infinitude not through endless progress toward a point that always remains beyond and out of reach but through including the beyond as a beyond within itself.

4. #04

   Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.243

   **XIX**

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference (Übertragung) is primordially a phenomenon of language—the displacement of repressed desire through disinvested signifying material—rather than an imaginary projection or emotional repetition, and grounds this in Hegel's formula "the concept is the time of the thing" to show that the unconscious operates outside clock-time precisely because it *is* time, thereby explaining why analysing the transferential situation transforms the subject's speech from empty to full.

   Remember what Hegel says about the concept - The concept is the time of the thing. To be sure, the concept is not the thing as it is, for the simple reason that the concept is always where the thing isn't, it is there so as to replace the thing.

5. #05

   Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.344

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

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

   What can it mean other than that there is either the function of the concept as Hegel would have it, that is, the symbolic hold over the real, or the hold that we have, the one anxiety gives us… and that between the two, one has to choose?

6. #06

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.33

   THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

   Theoretical move: Lacan situates his early teaching as a corrective struggle against practitioners' méconnaissance of speech as the analytic instrument, framing his appeal to language philosophy as merely propaedeutic, and announces a pivot toward confronting the "refusal of the concept" in psychoanalysis.

   something that I can only call the refusal of the concept. That is why, as I announced at the end of my first seminar, I will try to introduce you today

7. #07

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.33

   THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

   Theoretical move: Lacan situates his early teaching as a corrective struggle against the méconnaissance of speech as the instrument of psychoanalysis, distinguishing a merely propaedeutic use of Heidegger/philosophy of language from his own project, and pivots toward introducing the concept of repetition by diagnosing a broader "refusal of the concept" in analytic practice.

   I am referring to something that I can only call the refusal of the concept.

8. #08

   Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.119

   **Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

   Theoretical move: Miller's presentation of Frege's logic of number demonstrates that the subject's relation to the field of the Other is structurally isomorphic to the relation of zero to the field of truth: the subject, like zero, is an excess that cannot be subsumed under any concept, yet must be counted as one (represented by a unary trait) in a movement that simultaneously excludes it from the field it grounds — this is the operation of suture, which ties logical discourse to the logic of the signifier and founds the definition of the signifier as that which represents the subject for another signifier.

   Let there be a concept of this X. The concept which is going to intervene here is not the concept of X but the concept of identical to X.

9. #09

   Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.117

   **Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

   Theoretical move: Miller introduces the "logic of the signifier" as an archaeology of logic itself—one that precedes and prescribes logical law rather than following it—and argues, through a close reading of Frege's *Grundlagen*, that the excluded psychological subject reappears as a structural function (suture) necessary to the genesis of number, thereby grounding Lacanian theory in formal logic.

   The concept is defined only by the relationship that it has to the subsumed... the concept of the identity to a concept. It is by this reduplication that we enter into the logical dimension as such.

10. #10

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.73

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Klein bottle—contrasted with the ordinary torus and the Euler circle—to demonstrate that the two halves of a predicative proposition (subject-term and predicate-term, e.g. "Socrates" / "is mortal") are topologically non-homogeneous, thereby grounding a structural critique of the classical syllogism and showing that the function of the proper name (nomination) cannot be treated as equivalent to membership in a universal class.

    we will call predication, judgement or concept

11. #11

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.88

    **Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965** > PRESENTATION BY Mr YVES DUROUX

    Theoretical move: Duroux's presentation of Frege's *Grundlagen der Arithmetik* performs a foundational theoretical move for Lacanian psychoanalysis: it shows that the sequence of natural numbers cannot be grounded in any psychological subject or empirical activity of collecting/naming, but only in a purely logical relation between concept and object — with zero defined by self-contradiction (the concept of the non-identical-to-itself), thereby making Lack the originary operator from which the successor function and the entire number sequence is generated.

    It is starting from this distinction, that Frege carries out a second distinction which makes him refer a number, no longer to a subjective representation... but refers the number to one or two objective representations and which is the concept.

12. #12

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.117

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

    Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that what Frege's logical genesis of number actually stages—despite its explicit exclusion of the psychological subject—is the operation of a non-psychological subject as a structural function: the function of identity that transforms things into objects and units is precisely the logic of the signifier, which precedes and prescribes formal logic rather than falling under it.

    the concept is defined only by the relationship that it has to the subsumed... the concept which will be operational in the system, will not be the concept formed starting from determinations but the concept of the identity to a concept.

13. #13

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.119

    **Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

    Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that Frege's logical generation of zero and the natural numbers provides the formal matrix for Lacan's theory of the subject: the subject is structurally homologous to zero—excluded from the field of the Other yet represented within it as one (the unary trait)—and this 'suture' of logical discourse is also the suture of the subject in the signifying chain, replacing any reference to consciousness with the logic of the signifier.

    Let there be a concept of this X. The concept which is going to intervene here is not the concept of X but the concept of identical to X.

14. #14

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.59

    Seminar 4: Wednesday 19 January 1972 > *the law of retaliation.*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's derivation of number from the concept of inexistence to ground the signifier "1" as essentially the signifier of inexistence, and links this logical-arithmetic operation to the foundations of repetition and to his own formulas of sexuation (all/not-all), arguing that logical necessity—not empirical counting—is what underpins both number and the meaning of the phallus.

    Frege regresses to the conception of the concept qua empty, which does not include any object, which is that not of nothingness since it is a concept, but of the inexistent.

15. #15

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.104

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 7: Tuesday 11 March 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Names-of-the-Father as identical to the RSI triad (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary), argues that the phallus furnishes the consistency of the Real while enjoyment ek-sists with respect to it, and situates naming/the Borromean knot as the structural answer to the philosophical impasse between realism and nominalism about language and the Real.

    It is the concept, as I might say, of the phallus. With the concept, I am echoing the word Begriff, which does not work out so badly since in sum it is, it is this phallus that is taken in the hand!

16. #16

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.125

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 8: Tuesday 18 March 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of oriented Borromean knots to argue that the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real are homogenised by 'consistency' (similarity, not sameness), and that the necessity of 'flattening-out' the knot to demonstrate its uniqueness exposes a fundamental limitation of conceptual thought in grasping the Real — a limitation that underwrites the formula 'there is no sexual relationship.'

    the concept is not the same thing as the truth; in so far as the concept is limited to a grasp as the word capere implies, and that a grasp is not enough to be sure that it is the Real that one has in one's hand.

17. #17

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.20

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

    Theoretical move: By introducing an infinite straight line into a "false hole," Lacan demonstrates topologically that this operation converts it into a genuine Borromean hole — the infinite line playing the structural role that allows the knot to subsist. Hegel's figure of the circle is invoked as a philosophical precursor that grasped circularity's function, though without addressing the Borromean stakes.

    Hegel had very clearly seen, in short, what was its function.

18. #18

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > BOOK I.

    Theoretical move: Kant distinguishes the Analytic of Conceptions from mere conceptual dissection, arguing that the proper transcendental task is to investigate the faculty of understanding itself as the a priori birthplace of pure conceptions — a methodological pivot from logical analysis to transcendental genesis.

    We shall therefore follow up the pure conceptions even to their germs and beginnings in the human understanding, in which they lie, until they are developed on occasions presented by experience

19. #19

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > CHAPTER I. Of the Transcendental Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Conceptions of the Understanding.

    Theoretical move: Kant establishes that cognition requires a three-stage movement from pure intuition through imagination's synthesis to the understanding's reduction of synthesis into conceptions (categories), arguing that the logical functions of judgement and the pure conceptions of the understanding are structurally identical operations - a move that grounds the a priori applicability of categories to objects.

    the conceptions which give unity to this pure synthesis, and which consist solely in the representation of this necessary synthetical unity, furnish the third requisite for the cognition of an object

20. #20

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > CHAPTER I. Of the Transcendental Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Conceptions of the Understanding. > TABLE OF THE CATEGORIES

    Theoretical move: Kant presents his Table of Categories as a systematic, principle-derived classification of the pure concepts of the understanding—contrasting it with Aristotle's rhapsodic enumeration—and argues that these categories, together with their derivable 'predicables,' constitute the complete a priori conceptual apparatus through which the understanding renders intuition thinkable.

    the formation of a complete vocabulary of pure conceptions, accompanied by all the requisite explanations, is not only a possible, but an easy undertaking

21. #21

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > SS 8.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the scholastic transcendental predicates (unum, verum, bonum) are not genuine additions to the categories but are merely the three categories of quantity (unity, plurality, totality) re-deployed in a formal, logical register—criteria of cognition's self-consistency rather than properties of objects in themselves—thus dissolving a spurious metaphysical tradition by showing it rests on a category mistake.

    the criterion of the possibility of a conception (not of its object) is the definition of it, in which the unity of the conception, the truth of all that may be immediately deduced from it, and finally, the completeness of what has been thus deduced

22. #22

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > APPENDIX.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the systematic unity of nature required by reason rests on three transcendental principles—homogeneity, specification, and continuity of forms—which are not empirical hypotheses but regulative ideas of reason that make experience and understanding possible, yet find no fully adequate object in experience itself.

    the conception of a genus, nay, all general conceptions would be impossible, and the faculty of the understanding, the exercise of which is restricted to the world of conceptions, could not exist.

23. #23

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION I. The Discipline of Pure Reason in the Sphere of Dogmatism.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that mathematical and philosophical reason differ fundamentally in procedure: mathematics constructs conceptions a priori in pure intuition (yielding genuine definitions), while philosophy can only analyze given conceptions (yielding mere expositions), making the mathematical method inapplicable and even dangerous when imported into philosophical/transcendental inquiry.

    Philosophical definitions are, therefore, merely expositions of given conceptions, while mathematical definitions are constructions of conceptions originally formed by the mind itself

24. #24

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION IV. Of the Impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that existence is not a real predicate but merely the positing of a subject, thereby demonstrating that the ontological argument (which smuggles existence into the concept of an ens realissimum) is a mere tautology — the concept of a necessary being cannot establish actual existence because all knowledge of existence requires a connection to possible experience, not pure a priori analysis.

    Being is evidently not a real predicate, that is, a conception of something which is added to the conception of some other thing. It is merely the positing of a thing.

25. #25

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION II. Of Transcendental Ideas.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that pure reason, by seeking the unconditioned totality of conditions beyond any given synthesis, generates transcendental ideas—necessary but immanently inapplicable conceptions—that function not as constitutive but as regulative canons orienting the understanding toward an absolute unity it can never fully attain in experience.

    I understand by idea a necessary conception of reason, to which no corresponding object can be discovered in the world of sense.

26. #26

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION I—Of Ideas in General.

    Theoretical move: Kant distinguishes Platonic Ideas (pure rational conceptions transcending possible experience) from lower representational forms, arguing that Ideas are indispensable regulative archetypes for ethics, legislation, and nature—and insisting on terminological precision to preserve the concept's theoretical integrity against empiricist reduction.

    A conception is either empirical or pure. A pure conception, in so far as it has its origin in the understanding alone, and is not the conception of a pure sensuous image, is called notio.

27. #27

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I.

    Theoretical move: Kant distinguishes between pure concepts of the understanding (categories), which unify experience and have objective validity only within it, and pure concepts of reason (transcendental ideas), which reach beyond experience toward the unconditioned and serve as regulative standards rather than constitutive elements of empirical synthesis.

    As we called the pure conceptions of the understanding categories, we shall also distinguish those of pure reason by a new name and call them transcendental ideas.

28. #28

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION I. The Discipline of Pure Reason in the Sphere of Dogmatism.

    Theoretical move: Kant establishes the essential difference between philosophical (discursive, via concepts) and mathematical (constructive, via a priori intuition) cognition to argue that transcendental philosophy cannot employ mathematical method: transcendental propositions are synthetic a priori but must proceed through pure concepts alone, without any corresponding a priori intuition, and can only yield rules for the synthesis of empirical intuitions.

    Philosophical cognition is the cognition of reason by means of conceptions; mathematical cognition is cognition by means of the construction of conceptions.

29. #29

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION III. System of Transcendental Ideas.

    Theoretical move: Kant establishes a systematic deduction of the three classes of transcendental ideas (soul, world, God) from the three forms of syllogism and the unconditioned unity they each demand, arguing that these ideas—unlike the categories—have no objective deduction and serve only the regulative function of ascending toward the unconditioned in the series of conditions.

    pure reason never relates immediately to objects, but to the conceptions of these contained in the understanding. In like manner, it will be made manifest in the detailed explanation of these ideas—how reason, merely through the synthetical use of the same function which it employs in a categorical syllogism

30. #30

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

    Fatalism in Times of Universalized Assthetization

    Theoretical move: Ruda argues that "transcendental fatalism"—the assumption that the worst has always already happened—is the necessary precondition for a proper concept of freedom, and that this insight is retrievable from a Hegelian counterhistory of rationalism structured as a "speculative proposition" whose very movement enacts the argument.

    The crucial but simple conceptual question this book raises is how we can bring together predestination, freedom, and reason... we will also have the necessary conceptual means to intervene against the problematic conception of freedom.

31. #31

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > To Philosophical . . .

    Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Hegel's philosophy radicalizes finitude to the point of its own dissolution, thereby grounding a genuinely 'absolute fatalism' that is more subtractive than any prior philosophical rationalism—one that reveals nothing to reveal, and identifies freedom not with capacity but with the vanishing of all grounds, including finitude itself.

    The conceptual reason that Hegel is not simply a thinker of finitude and limitedness is linked to the fact that philosophy does not emerge when a particular finite shape of spirit disappears.

32. #32

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.106

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > From the Worst Philosopher . . .

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the standard catalogue of criticisms against Hegel (too idealist, too materialist, too rationalist, too eschatological, etc.) should be reread not as disqualifications but as symptoms of a productive "too muchness" that grounds a rigorous link between freedom and fatalism — specifically, that genuine Hegelian freedom requires assuming the worst, making Hegel an absolute fatalist rather than a failed idealist.

    His absolute idealism attempted to reconcile everything in the realm of the concept

33. #33

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.117

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > Providence . . .

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's concept of providence, when pushed to its logical extreme through the structure of absolute necessity and self-recoil, dialectically inverts: the absolutely necessary consequence of the deadlock between God and his plan is that the only divine plan is that there is no divine plan—thereby transforming blind fatalism into the very precondition of freedom and contingency.

    the concept itself is providence. In a crucial passage of the Science of Logic, Hegel states that the concept of essence as such—that is, reflection in and of itself—is 'to be within itself the absolute recoil upon itself.'

34. #34

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > In the End God Had to Admit

    Theoretical move: Ruda's reading of Hegel argues that the 'cunning of reason' and divine providence undergo an absolute recoil: knowing God's plan means knowing there is no plan, and this self-negating knowledge — the coincidence of mediation and immediacy — forces God himself to admit he does not exist, making absolute fatalism the very precondition of a philosophy of freedom located 'where there is even less than nothing.'

    Here we can see the absolute recoil of the concept within and upon itself: the concept of divine providence implies that it must itself be vanishing.

35. #35

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.114

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > To the Philosophy of the Worst . . .

    Theoretical move: Ruda reads Hegel's philosophy as constitutively a "philosophy of the worst" — a philosophy of the end that can only begin when dissolution is already underway and irrecoverable, such that spirit's history is structurally a history of worsening rather than progress, and philosophy's reconciliation is reconciliation *with* destruction, not *of* it.

    What began with Luther as faith in [the form of] feeling and the witness of spirit, is precisely what spirit, since become more mature, has striven to apprehend in the concept in order to free itself

36. #36

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Freud avec Jakobson

    Theoretical move: By reading Freud's concept of das Ding through Jakobson's linguistics, the passage argues that the phoneme—as a signifier that signifies nothing—provides the structural condition for an open, indeterminate horizon of meaning, thereby grounding the relation between language and the Thing at the level of pure differential structure rather than binary semantic necessity.

    Hegel relied on the same basic principle in order to trace the interlocking architecture of concepts in his Logic.

37. #37

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.51

    Barbers and Philosophers > **Wagging Tongues** > **Windbags, Windsucks, and Hegelian Gert Westphalers**

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel's "absolute method" as a form of sophistic windbagging: rather than delivering on its promised philosophical rigour, the method distracts through erudite historical spectacle, and its transmission via "Hegelian Gert Westphalers" perpetuates deception across generations, turning philosophy into idle talk (*Snakketøi*).

    What, exactly, is the Idea? And is world history truly its concretion?

38. #38

    The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.41

    part i

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via Hegel, that comedy is not the opposition of the concrete to the universal but the universal's own self-alienation and self-actualization as subject; true comedy produces a "short circuit" in which the ego-ideal is revealed as the comic partial object itself, enacting disidentification rather than identification.

    what is indestructible in comedies and comic characters is this very movement of concrete universality... the very concreteness or humanity of the concept itself—in our case, the concept of baronage or aristocracy—is processed, crystallized, and concretized

39. #39

    The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.32

    part i

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy achieves a qualitative shift beyond tragedy by dissolving the gap of representation: where tragedy holds essence (the universal) apart from the actual self via the mask, comedy collapses that distance so that the individual self itself becomes the negative power through which universal powers vanish—making the comic character not the physical remainder of symbolic representation, but essence itself in its physical actuality.

    Hegel does not apply his concepts to different forms of art, but introduces the latter as cases of concretely existing moments of the concept

40. #40

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

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

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

    The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations.

41. #41

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.99

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Capitalist Nature/Anabasis**

    Theoretical move: By reading Hegel's mechanism/chemism dialectic through Marx's critique of political economy, the passage argues that capitalism naturalizes itself by rendering subjective ends as either externally mechanical or internally chemical necessities, producing a "realm of shadows" in which no genuine subject or world exists — and that the only path out is a materialist appropriation of Hegel's Logic of shadows leading back through abstraction to a Real that is immanent to the shadows themselves.

    Hegel refers to the domain tackled in his Science of Logic … as a 'realm of shadows,' which is strictly distinct from merely empty abstractions.

42. #42

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.110

    *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter02.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's formula "the rational is actual" is not a conservative reconciliation but an affirmation that history is genuinely contingent and exposed to decay — and that this immanent-critique method (systems criticising themselves from within) is precisely why Marx, as a materialist, could adopt the Hegelian framework to "carve out" indetermination within capitalism, making a return to Marx's critique of political economy necessary for communist politics today.

    they lack the conceptual framework within which they can articulate themselves or enact their operation as activities of thought. Lacking the conceptual framework, both critique and philosophy become sterile and obsolete

43. #43

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.124

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Hegel and Capitalism**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel, contra the standard Marxist-Althusserian critique of idealist abstraction, operates as a contemplative materialist whose "method of inquiry" reconstructs reality in thought rather than deriving it from pure concept—and that his system contains immanent antagonisms (civil society, rabble, property) that exceed what he consciously theorized, making him a resource for a communist theory of labor, freedom, and institutions.

    we merely wish to observe how the concept determines itself, and we force ourselves not to add anything of our own thoughts and opinions

44. #44

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.64

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Caving**^{**<a href="#chapter02.xhtml_fn-3" id="chapter02.xhtml_fn_3">3</a>**}

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that emancipatory thought is structurally indebted to Plato's cave allegory, which frames emancipation as a mythologized counter-myth requiring exit from naturalized conditions of disorientation; it then traces this structure through Descartes, Rousseau, Marx, and Badiou, proposing that capitalist society functions as a modern cave whose ideological enchainment is analogous to Platonic mimesis and sophistry.

    they are fundamentally 'without concept' – of what and where they are.

45. #45

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.9

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-2453"></span>Unorientable Space of <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-498"></span><span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-1339"></span>Dialectical Materialism

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a programmatic argument that dialectical materialism must be reconceived as a formal materialism of unorientable surfaces—without substantial matter or teleological development—and that sexuality (understood as radical negativity following Lacan) is the privileged site where the parallax gap between ontology and the transcendental is redoubled and thus our sole contact with the Absolute, with topology (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle) providing the structural vocabulary for this redoubling.

    With the Klein bottle, subjectivity enters: in it, the circle of reflexivity is brought to the Absolute, the cause becomes nothing but an effect of its effects

46. #46

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.223

    **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

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Hegel's dialectical system is not a smooth logical machine but a chain of constitutive failures and deadlocks, where things ex-sist out of their own impossibility—a structure he maps onto the topological triad of Möbius strip / cross-cap / Klein bottle as homologous to Hegel's triad of being / essence / notion, with the Lacanian insight that the Möbius strip's apparent continuity already implies an internal cut.

    the further complications of the Möbius strip. In a way which is homologous to the self-deployment of the Hegelian triad of being, essence, and notion

47. #47

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.81

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel > [From *Intellectus Ectypus* to *Intellectus Archetypus*](#contents.xhtml_ahd6)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kant's *intellectus archetypus* functions as a necessary presupposition (never to be demonstrated) that holds open the gap between phenomenal reality and the Real, and that Hegel's critique of Kant—far from being a retrograde closure of this gap—reveals contradictions as immanent to things themselves, thereby transposing the epistemological tension into ontology and overcoming the Kantian duality of Understanding vs. Reason.

    Purpose is the Notion, and immanent; not external form and abstraction as distinguished from a fundamental material, but penetrating, so that all that is particular is determined by this universal itself.

48. #48

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.225

    **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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the logic of reflection, mapped onto topological surfaces (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle), culminates in a 'pure difference' that precedes and constitutes its terms rather than distinguishing pre-existing entities — sexual difference and class struggle are paradigmatic cases. From this, Žižek proposes extending Lacan's point de capiton into a triad (quilting point, quilting line, quilting tube) corresponding to the three unorientable surfaces, and defends topology against the 'Hegelian' figural/conceptual hierarchy by arguing that self-referential twists ARE conceptual thinking.

    in the domain of notion (Klein bottle, the result of the redoubled cross-cap) we return to the continuity of passage which, however, becomes here more convoluted

49. #49

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.346

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [Madness, Sex, War](#contents.xhtml_ahd22)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "abstract negativity" (madness, sexuality, war) is not an accidental excess to be sublated but a constitutive, immanent remainder that persists at the heart of every ethical and ontological edifice; the Möbius-strip topology of this persistence means that the barbaric core sustaining civilization cannot be simply overcome by expanding rational order, and Hegel's own failure to follow through on this insight (in sexuality and in his conservative politics) reveals the limit of any synthesis from Substance to Subject.

    the notional reproduction/deduction of this Whole has to progress from the abstract to the concrete: crimes presuppose the rule of law... but must be nonetheless grasped as an abstract act that is 'sublated' through the law

50. #50

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.101

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Hegel’s <span id="scholium_12_hegels_parallax.xhtml_IDX-834"></span>Parallax

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Absolute Knowing's self-purifying immanence paradoxically inverts into free association and arbitrary decision, and that the unbridgeable gap between Hegel's *Phenomenology* and *Logic* — readable as a Möbius strip or cross-cap — is the Real/impossible at its purest, while the further reversal between dialectical skepticism and stable encyclopedic knowledge constitutes the ultimate "infinite judgment" of philosophy.

    we are excluded, as readers, from the immanent self-determination of the Concept: we are students, there is the teacher, we will be instructed every step of the way.

51. #51

    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.

    what is released into its own being in speculative cognition is ultimately the object of cognition itself which, when truly grasped [begriffen], no longer has to rely on the subject's active intervention, but develops itself following its own conceptual automatism

52. #52

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Marxist/Schelling reproach against Hegel—that he resolves antagonisms only in thought—can be redeployed *in Hegel's favor*: Hegelian dialectics does not dissolve antagonisms but enacts a 'parallax shift' that recognizes antagonisms positively. This is developed via Kant vs. Hegel on the ontological proof, where Hegel's true move is not idealist dissolution of reality into notion but something more subtle about the gap between notion and existence as a mark of finitude.

    'being' is the poorest, most imperfect, notional determination (everything 'is' in some way, even my craziest phantasmagorias); it is only through further notional determinations that we get to existence, to reality, to actuality

53. #53

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: Against the standard critique of Hegel as fetishizing abstraction, Žižek argues that the true Hegelian move is the opposite: abstracting from empirical over-determination to isolate the notional/signifying determination, whereby language (Aufhebung as signifying reduction to the 'unary feature') makes potentiality visible as such - it is appellation that 'posits' a thing's inner potential.

    the notional determination which forms the core of the thing

54. #54

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: Žižek uses Hegel's critique of both Kant and Anselm to argue that being is not a simple addition to a concept but is itself internally conditioned by notional determinations — and that money serves as the exemplary object whose existence is constitutively dependent on collective symbolic belief, thereby anticipating the ideological analysis of the book.

    Hegel's argument against Anselm's proof is not that it is too conceptual, but that it is not conceptual enough: Anselm does not develop the concept of God

55. #55

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Hegel's notion of 'absolute freedom' as *absolvere* (releasing/letting go) resolves the dualism between Spinozist determinism and Fichtean voluntarism: the subject's supreme freedom consists not in mastery but in self-erasure, allowing the Idea to release Nature from itself — a move Žižek reads as the Hegelian version of *Gelassenheit*.

    through strenuous conceptual work, the wealth of this substance is reduced to its underlying elementary logical/notional structure

56. #56

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the irreducible antagonism at the heart of social life (sexuality, ecology, democracy, culture) cannot be dissolved but only acknowledged, and that Hegelian dialectics—properly understood as a systematic notation of the failure of totalization rather than its achievement—provides the most consistent model for this acknowledgement; 'absolute knowledge' is reread through a Lacanian lens as acceptance that the Concept itself is 'not-all'.

    Hegelian 'reconciliation' is not a 'panlogicist' sublation of all reality in the Concept but a final consent to the fact that the Concept itself is 'not-all'

57. #57

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: By reading Hegel through the Lacanian "non-All," Žižek argues that Hegelian totality is itself non-All: material reality is a sign of the Notion's imperfection, truth is self-measuring rather than correspondence-based, and Badiou's undecidable Truth-Event is structurally homologous to this immanent dialectical logic—making Hegel the philosopher of the non-All rather than of closed totality.

    the existence of material reality bears witness to the fact that the Notion is not fully actualized. Things 'materially exist' not when they meet certain notional requirements, but when they fail to meet them

58. #58

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.43

    Mladen Dolar > Hegel's Materialism

    Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Hegel's critique of substantiality constitutes a latent materialism: by demonstrating that matter is itself a product of thought (an abstraction, a *Gedankending*), Hegel does not dismiss matter but dissolves the very framework of substantiality—'substance is subject'—thereby opening the only path to a materialism worthy of its name, one that finds its psychoanalytic heir in the *objet petit a* as the subject's inscription into the Real rather than a correlate of consciousness.

    Matter . . . is not an existent thing, but is being in the form of a universal, or in the form of a Notion.

59. #59

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.71

    Borna Radnik > Notes

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage provides the scholarly apparatus for an argument that dialectical materialism requires an idealist center, drawing on Hegel's absolute recoil (absoluter Gegenstoß) as a universal ontological principle in which positing and presupposing are mutually constitutive, and situating this against Meillassoux's correlationism, Badiou's democratic materialism, Fichte's subjective idealism, and Kant's transcendental limits.

    the concept needs to be considered as form, but only as infinite, fecund form that encompasses the fullness of all content within itself and at the same time releases it from itself.

60. #60

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.73

    Borna Radnik > Notes > 32. As Hegel puts it in the *Science of Logic*:

    Theoretical move: This passage, composed almost entirely of endnotes, works through the Hegelian dialectic between the world of appearance and the supersensible world to argue that their opposition collapses into identity, and draws on Marx's critique of Hegel to argue that a genuine dialectical materialism must be a "materialism with the Idea" (Hegel's absolute Idea) rather than a materialism grounded in an alternative idealist core.

    The demonstrated absoluteness of the concept as against the material of experience... consists in this, that as this material appears outside and before the concept, it has no truth but that it has it only in its ideality or in its identity with the concept.

61. #61

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.25

    Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

    Theoretical move: The subject is not a substance but a nonsubstantial, purely relational entity—the very wound/cut in the Real it attempts to heal—and any materialism or realism that posits a "democracy of objects" without accounting for this void at the core of subjectivity already relies on an unexamined transcendental constitution of reality; only a dialectical materialism that takes the subject as nothing but its own relationality and division can avoid this obfuscation.

    a Hegelian-inflected dialectical materialism, as a 'materialism with the Idea,' avoids self-reflexive contradiction by virtue of its unification of the concept (subject) with objectivity (substance).

62. #62

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.63

    Borna Radnik

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's logic of the concept is simultaneously ontologically and thought-constitutive, distinguishing his absolute idealism from Kantian transcendental idealism and Fichtean subjective idealism by showing that conceptual determination is not merely a subjective act but is immanent to reality itself, culminating in the absolute Idea as the unity of subject and substance.

    The concept, then, *is* universality as such and not *a* universal. The concept has universality as one of its three moments (along with particularity and singularity).

63. #63

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.91

    Andrew Cole

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx's materialism is not a break from but a continuation of Hegel's own "elemental materialism" — a dialectical philosophical materialism internal to Hegel's system — thereby collapsing the standard opposition between Hegelian idealism and Marxian materialism and reframing "dialectical materialism" as already latent in Hegel.

    They are not exactly the four elements discovered by Empedocles and celebrated by Aristotle, but rather the elements that Hegel reconceptualizes in an idealist rejoinder to the materialist determinism of contemporary physics and chemistry.

64. #64

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.62

    Borna Radnik

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that any consistent materialism must openly acknowledge its implicit idealist foundation in conceptual determination, and that Hegel's dialectical logic—specifically the "positing the presupposition" thesis and the absolute recoil—demonstrates that thought and being are inextricably unified, making the idealism/materialism opposition meaningless and grounding a dialectical materialism.

    conceptualization is constitutive of the very act of thinking as such. The activity of thought, insofar as it is a process, is a process of conceiving.

65. #65

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.142

    Adrian Johnston > Žižek continues:

    Theoretical move: Johnston defends his "transcendental materialist" position against charges of both naturalistic reductionism and idealist anti-reductionism by confessing to a "weak reductionism" that preserves relative autonomy for philosophy/psychoanalysis with respect to the natural sciences, while arguing through Hegel, Marx, and Lacan that the natural Real is partially but not absolutely transformed by the non-natural Symbolic—a position distinct from both crude naturalism and absolute anti-naturalism.

    the art of dialectics, for Hegel, demands painful labors of protracted 'tarrying' in what Gérard Lebrun fittingly calls the 'patience of the concept.'

66. #66

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.32

    part i

    Theoretical move: The passage traces a dialectical movement from epic to tragedy to comedy in Hegel's Phenomenology, arguing that comedy does not merely expose the failure of representation but dissolves representation altogether by making the individual self coincide with essence—the universal is no longer separated from the actual self by the mask, but appears as the physical itself.

    Hegel does not apply his concepts to different forms of art, but introduces the latter as cases of concretely existing moments of the concept

67. #67

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.50

    part i

    Theoretical move: Župančič argues that the distinction between subversive and conservative comedy cannot be located in content or self-parody, but rather in the structural move comedy performs: the passage from abstract to concrete universality, in which substance becomes subject through an inner split — a move structurally homologous to Hegel's Phenomenology and illuminated by the Lacanian logic of representation.

    some often idiotic incorporation of an otherwise impeccable universal 'spiritual' Idea or Concept

68. #68

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.22

    Introduction

    Theoretical move: The passage stakes a terminological and philosophical claim: the "comical" is a singular, specific mode distinct from jokes, irony, and humor, and philosophy and comedy share a structural homology in their shared refusal to serve immediate purpose — a refusal that is itself productive rather than merely useless.

    Why try to conceptualize comedy if it is notoriously recalcitrant to conceptualization?

69. #69

    Theory Keywords · Various

    **Concept (Hegel)**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes the Hegelian Concept as a self-moving, self-determining activity rather than a static substrate: truth exists only in conceptual form, and the Concept constitutes the very movement of its object's coming-to-be, dissolving the motionless subject/predicate structure of ordinary understanding.

    the concept is the object's own self, or the self which exhibits itself as the object's coming-to-be, it is not a motionless subject tranquilly supporting the accidents; rather, it is the self-moving concept which takes its determinations back into itself.

70. #70

    Theory Keywords · Various

    **Consciousness**

    Theoretical move: Consciousness is defined as the self-driven striving toward correspondence between concept and object; its suffering of disharmony is not externally imposed but internally generated, making the lack of truth a constitutive motor of consciousness itself.

    a disharmony between concept (the mode of knowing) and object (that which is in itself)

71. #71

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.91

    **Universal**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Universal is constitutively defined through negation—as a 'not-This' that emerges from the self-negation of the particular—and that this negative structure is both alienating and emancipatory for the subject, while also tracing Hegel's three-stage dialectical movement (Understanding → Dialectics → Speculative Reason) as the logical development through which such universality is grasped.

    This process is summed up in Hegel's word concept or Begriff, which is the dialectical form of all truth and intelligibility.

72. #72

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.70

    **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.

    Concept and self-consciousness have the same logical structure: self-differentiation of the self-same…in the genuine, dialectical thinking that is the Concept, thought generates its own content by producing differences within itself.

73. #73

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

    Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms](#contents.xhtml_ch1)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's quantum-ontological updating of Schelling commits him to a "layer-doughnut" model in which human subjectivity is the return of a repressed ontological ground-zero, and that this preference for Schelling over Hegel creates an unresolved epistemological gap where quantum physics cannot substitute for the transcendental-logical function that Hegel's Logic performs within his encyclopedic system.

    Hegel characterizes Logic as a 'realm of shadows' not so as to propose a Spinozistic–Schellingian ontology of a dark Ground-before-Existence, but, on the contrary, so as to warn against interpreting the field of the logical as constituting in and of itself a full-fledged ontology.

74. #74

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.24

    Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > Notes

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for the introduction to *Žižek Responds!*, providing bibliographic references for secondary literature on Žižek and brief editorial glosses on key theoretical commitments (ideology's obscene underside, antagonism, theory's belatedness); it is primarily citational apparatus rather than an original theoretical argument.

    This lesson of the concept is also necessarily apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real