Das Ding

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (519)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.15

   Introduction

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's engagement with Kant constitutes a double move: exposing the perverse underside of Kantian ethics (via "Kant with Sade") while simultaneously crediting Kant with discovering the irreducible dimension of desire and the Real in ethics — a discovery that must itself be supplemented by a further step toward the drive, which frames the project of an "ethics of the Real."

   morality as such, as Kant well knew, is a demand for the impossible: 'the impossibility in which we recognise the topology of our desire'

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.94

   Good and Evil

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's postulate of the immortality of the soul is structurally a fantasy in the Lacanian sense: it responds to the same impasse as Sadeian fantasy—the incommensurability between the body's finite capacity for pleasure/pain and the infinite demand of jouissance—thereby demonstrating that "Kant with Sade" finds its most precise illustration in the immortality postulate, whose truth is not an immortal soul but an immortal body.

   an Idea or some cosa nostra in the name of which the subject is willing to forget her immediate interests and pleasure.

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.167

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

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

   the feeling of the sublime... is at the same time a way to avoid actually encountering it. That is to say, it is the very 'inflation' of the superego that plays the crucial role in the strategy of avoiding the Thing [das Ding], the death drive in its 'pure state'.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.192

   Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > The theft of desire - and the mother in exchange

   Theoretical move: Against the dominant reading of Oedipus as a hero who heroically assumes symbolic guilt, Zupančič argues that Oedipus identifies not with his destiny but with his blindness as abject outcast—a move closer to traversing the fantasy and identifying with the symptom than to subjectivation through internalized guilt—thereby reorienting the ethical stakes of psychoanalysis away from the glorification of lack-of-being toward an irreducible 'being of an outcast'.

   what happens in the case of Oedipus is that Oedipus himself becomes the Thing of his tragedy, the outcast, 'a thing of guilt and holy dread so great it appals the earth'.

5. #05

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.200

   Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > The death of the Thing

   Theoretical move: Against Coux's reading of Oedipus as failed initiation due to insufficient matricide, Zupančič argues that Oedipus enacts the *most radical* killing of the Thing precisely by naming it (word over force), and that the objet petit a is not a pre-symbolic remainder but the remainder generated by the signifier's own self-referential dynamics — the bone of spirit itself — so that tragedy originates from within fully accomplished symbolization, not from its failure.

   the hero must resolve his relation to the Thing/Mother/Jouissance. Not until after he has 'killed the Thing' does he gain access to his proper, lawful place in the symbolic.

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.221

   Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > What shall we do with Oedipus? > The hostage of the word

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Oedipus is not a subject of retroactive quilting but rather its inverse: he travels the signifying chain in the "wrong" direction, enacting a linear thrust-forward that produces the retroactive constitution of meaning as its Real—thereby simultaneously installing the big Other (symbolic order) and demonstrating that the Other doesn't exist, making him the paradigmatic ethical act as vanishing mediator.

   Antigone is the subject who aspires to or aims at the 'Thing', moves to embrace It (as such she functions for us in the end, in the splendour of her doom, as a screen in front of the Thing); while Oedipus - after blinding himself and before he miraculously disappears - is precisely this 'Thing' itself, this amorphous outcast.

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.238

   Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Enjoyment - my neighbour

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian commandment to 'love thy neighbour' founders on the problem of jouissance, which Freud evades: the neighbour is structurally the enemy because enjoyment is always 'the Same' (real register) rather than the similar (imaginary) or identity (symbolic), and Sygne's sacrifice dramatizes the crossing from the service of goods into the abyss of desire-as-enjoyment, illustrating Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis through literary and political analysis.

   radical alterity, of the 'completely other' (to which Lacan gives the Freudian name das Ding [the Thing])

8. #08

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.249

   Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > The Real in ethics

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that ethics is grounded in the encounter with the Real (or Badiou's 'event'), and that the central danger of Kantian ethics lies in misreading its descriptive ethical configuration as a 'user's guide' — thereby collapsing ethics into terror, masochism, or the obscure desire for catastrophe by treating the Real as a direct object of will rather than an irreducible by-product of subjective action.

   the perspective according to which we aim directly at the Real (at the Event) — which thus becomes the 'explicit object of our desire' — leads us towards the attitude in which our own death or a general catastrophe begins to function as the ultimate horizon of our desire.

9. #09

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.253

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

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

   the ethics of the preservation of fundamental lack that introduces a gap between the Thing and things, and reminds us of the fact that beyond all ready-to-hand objects, there is 'someThing' which alone would make our life worth living.

10. #10

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.269

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

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "realization of desire" operates through an infinite measure (the logic of negative magnitude and endless metonymy) that can only be articulated from the point of view of a Last Judgement, and she uses the parallel between Kant's postulates and Lacan's ethics to show that the Act (as in Antigone) dissolves the divided subject by transposing it wholly to the side of the object—thereby distinguishing desire from jouissance and opening onto a "modern" ethics adequate to a symbolic order in which the Other's non-existence is itself known.

    In life, there is one thing which one cannot give away ('the absolute condition'). For this Thing one is ready to give away everything (even life).

11. #11

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.270

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

    Theoretical move: Zupančič distinguishes two modes of "realizing desire" - Antigone's sublimation through which she becomes the phallic signifier of desire (the Φ), and Sygne de Coufontaine's drive-logic that short-circuits the infinite/finite opposition by sacrificing even the absolute condition itself, rendering the finite not-whole and making visible the Real of desire (the real residue of castration) rather than the Symbolic/Imaginary phallus.

    This explains the sublime splendour of her figure, which is the result of the Thing which she hides and announces at the same time.

12. #12

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.277

    Index

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

    Thing, the 190-91, 208, 225

13. #13

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.124

    HIDDE N E N JOYME N T AND ITS V IC I SSIT UDE S

    Theoretical move: Against Bataille's ontology of excess energy, McGowan argues that capitalism does not abolish sacrifice but renders it invisible and multiplies it structurally; reactionary responses (terrorism, fundamentalism) misread this hiddenness as absence, thereby reinforcing capitalist ideology rather than subverting it.

    We don't begin with too much but with undifferentiated being, and sacrifice enables us to differentiate, to create a value where none otherwise exists.

14. #14

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.144

    DAS ADAM SMITH PROBLEM

    Theoretical move: The "invisible hand" in Adam Smith's two major works functions as the modern, capitalist reformulation of God—an absent Other that coordinates and directs subjects' desires, thereby resolving both Das Adam Smith Problem (the apparent contradiction between Smith's moral philosophy and his economics) and the deeper problem of unbearable Kantian freedom that capitalism poses to its subjects.

    the Other who would direct our desire and lead it out of the abyss.

15. #15

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.181

    THE V IRT UE S OF IN TE R RUP TION

    Theoretical move: Capitalism does not merely demand pure productivity but structurally requires its interruption: impotentiality and withdrawal from the system paradoxically generate new surplus value, which is why neither Marx's prediction of capitalism's decay nor Agamben's advocacy of impotentiality as resistance straightforwardly escapes the capitalist logic that recuperates refusal as fuel for renewed accumulation.

    Duchamp's work marks a genuine interruption of capitalist productivity, but that productivity uses such interruptions as the fuel that propel it forward.

16. #16

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.211

    THE C APITALI ST SINE QUA N ON

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's psychic appeal lies not in solving scarcity but in deploying scarcity ideologically to shield subjects from confronting the more fundamentally traumatic excess (jouissance/abundance), inverting the usual association of trauma with lack and grounding a psychoanalytic critique of capitalist ideology.

    we can posit an external obstacle—the source of our insecurity—as the barrier to our satisfaction. In this way, we avoid confronting the internal obstacle that prevents complete satisfaction.

17. #17

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.251

    THOSE FOR W HOM C APITALI SM I S N OT SUBLIME EN OUGH

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that fundamentalism is the internal psychic product of capitalism's broken promise of sublimity, while the true theoretical-political task is to become 'Hegelian rather than Kantian' about the sublime—recognising that failure and immanence, not transcendence, constitute the real nature of the sublime, thereby emancipating oneself from capitalism's obfuscations.

    the sublime exists, but it is not located in a future moment of transcendence. It is present in the capacity for transcendence, for the creation of something out of nothing, in everyday life.

18. #18

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.273

    . THE PE R SI STE N C E OF SAC R IFIC E AF TE R ITS OBSOLESC EN C E

    Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus advances the theoretical argument that sacrifice under capitalism is not merely destructive but constitutively enjoyable (jouissance-laden), and that capitalism's occlusion of sacrifice—rather than its elimination—is the precondition for modernity's ideological functioning; Marxist, vitalist, and utilitarian critiques fail precisely because they cannot theorize the enjoyment of sacrifice.

    Through the act of sacrifice, we create an absence that serves as a placeholder for the beyond or the sacred.

19. #19

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.297

    . THE M AR K ET'S FETI SHI STIC SUBLIME

    Theoretical move: This passage (a footnote/endnote section) develops the theoretical grounding for the chapter's argument that commodity fetishism produces a sublimity rooted in immanent transcendence—a structure Hegel makes possible and Marx theorizes—while also deploying Lacanian concepts (subject supposed to know, lack) to critique orientalism and capitalism's psychic appeal.

    it raises an object . . . to the dignity of the Th ing.

20. #20

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

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

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

    The very Thing Freud-as-Actaeon discovers (i.e., the unconscious-as-Diana, with her powers of Verdrängung) is what turns his hounds (via their repressions) against him.

21. #21

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.16

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian unconscious, personified as a speaking Thing (la Chose freudienne), is not a hidden depth but a surface-inscribed, linguistically constituted truth that invariably manifests itself — and that the analyst's proper technique is to attend literally to the signifying text of the analysand's speech, treating all analytic material as language-immanent variables.

    Lacan, once again assuming the first-person voice of his speaking Thing, announces, 'I never more surely proceed to change the face of the world than when I give it the profile of Cleopatra's nose'

22. #22

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.22

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "thing's order" names the symbolic order as a self-relating system of signifiers—structurally homologous to Hegelian dialectics—that constitutes human subjectivity, the mirror stage, and the symptom, while ego psychology's failure to grasp the unconscious is recast as foreclosure (psychotic repudiation) rather than repression.

    The title of this section refers to nothing other than the language spoken by, and making possible, the speaking Thing of unconscious truth.

23. #23

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.29

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

    Theoretical move: By retranslating Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden' against the ego-psychological rendering, Lacan argues that the telos of analysis is not ego-over-id domination but the analysand's de-alienating subjectification toward the unconscious subject ($), grounding his ethics of psychoanalysis and his critique of misreadings of Freud that degrade the primacy of speech and signifiers in clinical practice.

    Properly analytic symptoms à la Lacan are instances of his Thing-which-speaks.

24. #24

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.33

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego-psychological defense analysis shows it to be self-defeating: by privileging the ego as analytic interlocutor, it redoubles alienation and misrecognition, reinforces defenses rather than dissolving them, and substitutes the analyst's suggestive opinions for genuine analytic truth—whereas Lacan insists that the Freudian Thing speaks even through defenses, making everything said (or unsaid) by the analysand available to interpretation.

    Lacan demands of true analysts worth their salt that they 'measure up' to a psychoanalytic version of the traditional philosophical definition of truth as adequacy of thing and intellect wherein the 'thing' to which the analyst's intellect is adequate is nothing other than the Freudian Thing.

25. #25

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.40

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology is mobilized to demonstrate that the ego is structurally an alienating sedimentation of the other's discourse and a device of resistance against the unconscious, such that the proper analytic use of the ego is as a *via negativa* — a negative index pointing toward the speaking subject of the unconscious rather than a therapeutic ideal to be strengthened.

    precisely that which wants to know nothing of the Freudian Thing and its truth(s), namely, the ego as the seat of an Imaginary passion for ignorance

26. #26

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.61

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Rat Man case as paradigmatic for a structural, transgenerational theory of neurotic etiology: symptoms are encrypted testimonies to symbolically transmitted family debts (signifiers), not to brute biological instincts, and the proper telos of analysis is not happiness/success but the analysand's confrontation with the contingent, factical nonsense—the Freudian Thing—that underpins apparent meaning, achieved by weakening the Imaginary ego to let the Symbolic unconscious speak.

    In Lacan's psychoanalytic pronunciation of 'adœquatio rei et intellectus,' the 'intellectus'… is said to be burdened with possession… of the 'rei' (as the Thing qua Freud's Ding and Es)

27. #27

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.64

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is argued to be a return to the structures of language operative in the unconscious, which grounds a critique of medicalized, dogmatic analytic training and calls for a perpetually self-renewing pedagogy open to the structuralized human sciences and mathematics — with the Real (as the impossible-yet-condition-of-possibility) underwriting both the necessity and the limits of analytic practice.

    the unconscious, la Chose freudienne, (eventually) takes care of Freud's unreliable, disloyal pack of followers

28. #28

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.263

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > I. Structure and the subject

    Theoretical move: Against Lagache's personalist-intersubjective framework, which centres the imaginary and overlooks lack, Lacan argues that the subject emerges not from a progressive introjection of being-for-others but from the intervention of linguistic/symbolic structure on the organism, with Demand marking the transition from need to drive and with the fading of the subject occurring through over-identification with the signifiers of demand rather than through any phenomenological elusiveness of the cogito.

    Lacan has been emphasising in this section how the subject is always, from the get-go, initially, something more like an object: 'the Thing,' he claims, here. This is an allusion to the discussion in Seminar VII of a primal object that is 'extimate'.

29. #29

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.272

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that negation (Verneinung/Bejahung) is not a logical operation but a structural one grounded in the signifying chain: the "failed negation" of the French 'ne' exemplifies how repression and the return of the repressed are identical, and how the subject of desire emerges precisely from the space carved out between the statement and enunciation by this structural capacity for one signifier to replace another — making lack, not fusion or adaptation, the founding condition of both subject and objective reality.

    a 'nothing' is at the heart of both the creation of the subject of desire and the creation of a real, external objective world

30. #30

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

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

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

    Lacan, in what looks like an ontologization of it, refers to this space now as 'the Thing' and asks how anyone can ever recognize this 'void' as what is 'closest to him'

31. #31

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.11

    E M B R A C I N G THE VOID

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Lacanian shift from thematic to structural analysis—reframing the Oedipus complex in terms of language and symbolic castration rather than literal familial drama—provides the conceptual foundation for a distinctly Lacanian theory of religion, in which the sacred is grounded not in divine presence but in the subject's primordial relation to a constitutive Void (the unconscious).

    at the most primitive level of human consciousness we remain in thrall to an unencompassable Void. The strangest fact, however, is that this Nothing is far from being merely nothing.

32. #32

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.33

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

    Theoretical move: The passage sets up the theoretical problem of the intersection between the big Other (symbolic structures enabling exchange) and the little other (the fellow human being), arguing against the commonsense dismissal of the little other as trivial, and anchoring the distinction in Lacan's reading of *Das Ding* as an exterior, primordial alterity.

    Das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as the prehistoric Other that is impossible to forget— the Other whose primacy of position Freud affirms in the form of something entfremdet, something strange to me.

33. #33

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.34

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

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

    *Das Ding* names the inaccessible yet potent engine of desire. As such, it is the constitutive core of subjectivity itself.

34. #34

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

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

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

    If Lacan is right that the maternal Thing forms the very nucleus of the unconscious, we can be sure that there is no simple proof of it.

35. #35

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

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

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

    The meeting of eyes raises the specter of das Ding... Das Ding is the primal locus of lack that sets desire in motion.

36. #36

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.43

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

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

    The tension between anxiety and desire goes to the heart of Lacan's notion of das Ding. The deepest source of ambivalence is the unknown we discover in the locus of the fellow human being.

37. #37

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

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

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

    Precisely if Lacan is right about the maternal-Thing forming the core of the unconscious, direct evidence remains in principle unavailable.

38. #38

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

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

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

    The Thing animates the very core of Lacan's most elemental proposition: 'Man's desire is the desire of the Other.'

39. #39

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.56

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

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

    Lacan's theory of the signifier in relation to das Ding points to the original moment of such a break with our closest fellow beings.

40. #40

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

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

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

    Das Ding . . . is the very correlative of the law of speech in its most primitive point of origin. The notion of creation ex nihilo is coextensive with the exact situation of the Thing as such.

41. #41

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.59

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

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

    The key point is that the Thing is not a thing at all. As Lacan says of it, 'The Thing is also the Non-Thing.' Das Ding has no objective existence whatsoever... It is rather a locus of pure lack, a zone of something unknown.

42. #42

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.60

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

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

    The silent, unseen presence of the analyst must very potently raise the specter of das Ding.

43. #43

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.62

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates a double function with respect to das Ding: it defensively separates the subject from the Thing (through the big Other, law, grammar, the paternal metaphor) while simultaneously, through its constitutive excess over the signified and its horizon of semantic indeterminacy, reopening pathways toward the Thing — making the signifier both the wall against and the route back to the abyssal Real.

    What if the ultimate function of the Law is not to . . . retain our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor?

44. #44

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

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

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

    the primal 'name' does not merely point to an object-referent but also refers to something unknown, the beyond of the Other-Thing

45. #45

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.69

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier performs a primordial Aufhebung — simultaneously canceling and preserving das Ding — and that this double function (distancing/disclosive, defensive/expressive) makes human subjectivity symptomatic through and through, collapsing the distinction between pathological symptom-formation and the ordinary operation of language.

    The signifier cancels das Ding, distancing the subject from the object, but it also preserves precisely what is canceled, marking it for further cognizing sometime in the future.

46. #46

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.72

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

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

    This second dimension is linked to das Ding and its status as an unknown... Every signifier harbors within itself an appeal to pure lack, to a Thing that is a No-thing.

47. #47

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.77

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?)

    Theoretical move: The passage proposes a Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of religion grounded in *das Ding* as the abyssally unknowable dimension of the Other, arguing that religious experience—paradigmatically prayer—is always an address to this void, and that different religious formations represent varying structural relationships to that abyss.

    the key Lacanian concept of das Ding as the abyssally unknowable dimension of the Other

48. #48

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.80

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

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that archaic Greek religion—its temple architecture, ritual sacrifice, and pantheon—can be read through Lacan's framework as a structural apparatus for staging the Real: the temple encloses the void of the Thing, sacrifice reenacts the birth of the signifier (the "murder of the thing"), and the gods themselves are modes by which the Real is revealed, not simply screened.

    the yawning void of the temple provided a spatial analogue for Dasein's exposure to the presencing event of Being... 'a construction around emptiness that designates the place of the Thing.'

49. #49

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.87

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Agon of Forces

    Theoretical move: By reconstructing the archaic Greek ontology as one of "no things, only forces," Boothby argues that the Greek gods represent more-than-human natural forces arranged in a hierarchical agon, and uses this to ground a Lacanian conception of the big Other as the order of cosmic precincts of power, with fate (moira) as its ultimate, unknowable face.

    Moira, from which nothing escapes, was the archaic face of the unknown par excellence.

50. #50

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.90

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the archaic Greek ontology combines a "primacy of appearances" (truth is readable from surfaces) with an irreducibly unknowable force behind those appearances—identified with Lacan's Real—such that the gods, myth, and ritual function not to solve mystery but to preserve and screen it, anticipating Freud's unconscious.

    multiple embodiments of what Lacan called the unknowable Other-Thing

51. #51

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.94

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

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Greek myth's true function was not proto-scientific explanation but a deliberate aesthetic and ethical opening onto the unknowable Real; by mobilizing Lacan's concept of das Ding and his gloss on mythos, Boothby reframes myth as a form of sublimation that intentionally preserves the inscrutability of the divine rather than resolving it into credible narrative.

    The pure form of the resulting situation was thus a precise analogue of the original situation of das Ding described by Freud: what can be known from the imaginary form of the body gives way to something uncognizable, something about which it is only possible to say, 'Something is there, I know not what.'

52. #52

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

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

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

    If any image could be offered as an embodiment of das Ding, this is it.

53. #53

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

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

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

    The hero invested himself in a commanding imago in order to steel himself in the face of the anxious unknown of the Thing.

54. #54

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.106

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

    Theoretical move: The philosophical revolution initiated by early Greek thinkers (from Thales onward) constitutes a sacrilegious transgression against the mythopoetic ethos by replacing the unknowable sacred void behind appearances with conceptually knowable first principles — a move that Heidegger reads as the "oblivion of Being" and that the passage reframes as the birth of metaphysical dualism and disenchantment. Socrates's condemnation is reread as the guardians of archaic culture punishing this desecration of the sacred unknown, though Socrates's own profession of ignorance gestures back toward the mythopoetic reverence for unknowable depths.

    Socrates represented the pillaging of the divine void of the temple, someone who wanted to light up the sacred darkness that framed everything noble and virtuous.

55. #55

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.108

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

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

    woman appeared to the archaic male mind as representing both the origin of life and also the inevitability of death. Menstrual blood was a source of pollution for precisely this reason, simultaneously the very sap of life and also the horrid index of death.

56. #56

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.112

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Madness of the Philosophers > What Women Know

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that feminine knowledge constitutes a structural threat to both archaic and philosophical Greek culture, and that Jocasta — as the figure who *knows* yet remains silent — is the ultimate embodiment of *das Ding*, the unrepresented abyss of the Real, making her the traumatic locus of the Other's desire that Greek culture could not confront.

    Greek culture was focused overwhelmingly on what Lacan defined as das Ding, the unrepresented abyss of the real.

57. #57

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.113

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

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

    religion can be defined as a culturally mediated relation to the unknown beyond that Lacan called das Ding.

58. #58

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.118

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the transition from Greek polytheism to Abrahamic monotheism marks an intensification of the encounter with das Ding: where pagan myth distributed and mitigated the abyssal real across a plurality of anthropomorphic gods, Yahweh concentrates it into a singular, directly addressing Subject who properly inaugurates the Lacanian big Other.

    The difference between the archaic Greek polytheism and Abrahamic monotheism is here interpreted in terms of a more intimate and correspondingly more intense encounter of the worshipper with das Ding.

59. #59

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.122

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > . . . and Offer Him There as a Sacrifice

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that monotheism's (specifically Judaism's) structural break with paganism lies not merely in the rejection of quid-pro-quo sacrifice but in the concentration of the unknown onto a *single* Other — thereby making religious experience the first explicit encounter with the enigmatic desire of the big Other, with das Ding as its constitutive ground.

    It is a point deeply significant for the continuing thread of our argument about the role of das Ding in the constitution of the religious posture.

60. #60

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.125

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > The Voice from the Burning Bush

    Theoretical move: Lacan's reading of "Eyeh asher eyeh" and the shofar together argue that the Jewish sacred is constituted by the divided subject and the pure voice as objet a: the burning bush declares the non-coincidence of the subject of enunciation with the subject of the enounced, while the shofar embodies das Ding as lost object, making Judaism the religion of the law of language.

    It is a pure sounding of das Ding.

61. #61

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.130

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > The Ten Commandments as the Laws of Speech > The Letters of the Law

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Ten Commandments—especially the prohibitions on idolatry and the Sabbath—enact a Lacanian logic of the signifier: the second commandment demands the elimination of the Imaginary in favour of the Symbolic, while the Sabbath opens the productive gap/void in which pure signifiance supersedes mere signification, and the whole Decalogue thus founds a culture of irreducible interpretive contestation.

    the service of mere utility gives way to something over and beyond the regime of practical necessity

62. #62

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.133

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Laws of the Neighbor

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Decalogue's two tablets both address the subject's constitutive bondage to das Ding—first through the logic of the unnameable Other (Yahweh/signifier) and then through the neighbor-as-Thing—such that the final two commandments (against lying and coveting) crystallize an unavoidable double bind: every enunciation of truth about the Thing is already a lie, and every prohibition of desire is what constitutes and inflames that desire.

    The unifying focus, the real topic of the Decalogue, is nothing other than the subject's relation to das Ding as it is reflected in the problematic of naming.

63. #63

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

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

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

    Jewish monotheism introduces an unprecedented proximity to das Ding. That increased proximity to the Thing is the bottom line of what distinguishes Judaism from pagan polytheism.

64. #64

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.142

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

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's provocative claim that Christianity is "the one true religion" as a pivot to interrogate the relationship between religion, meaning-production, and psychoanalytic concepts: it contrasts Judaism's lack-driven, interpretively open relation to the sacred text (anticipating Lacanian theory of das Ding and the signifier) with Christianity's capacity to "secrete meaning" in response to the real, setting up the theoretical question of what Christianity adds to Lacan's framework that Judaism cannot.

    isn't Judaism the consummate exemplar of Lacan's theory of the unconscious, and particularly of das Ding and its enduring trace in the functioning of language?

65. #65

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

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

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

    the groundbreaking event enacted by the teaching of Jesus is to locate the divine directly and without qualification in the embrace of the neighbor- Thing

66. #66

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.147

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > . . . and Love Thine Enemy

    Theoretical move: By deploying Lacan's concept of the jouissance of the Other alongside das Ding, the passage argues that loving one's neighbor and loving one's enemy are structurally identical challenges: the neighbor's undomesticated jouissance makes the neighbor an enemy, so that Christian love of the enemy constitutes an acceptance of the Other's radical alterity and, reflexively, of one's own.

    By the measure of the unknown jouissance of the Other— by the measure of das Ding— the neighbor is an enemy.

67. #67

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.149

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

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

    enables an opening toward the real of das Ding. As Lacan says of it, 'Mutilation serves here to orientate desire, enabling it to assume precisely this function of index, of something which is realized and which can only articulate itself, express itself, in a symbolic beyond'

68. #68

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.153

    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.

    When the experience of love connects the subject to the dimension of the Thing, the result is a violent shudder of the subject's being.

69. #69

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

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

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

    both Greek paganism and Judaism were centrally engaged with the unknown Thing, but both avoided too direct a confrontation with it.

70. #70

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.157

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

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

    Love, he says, is ultimately 'a way of rediscovering the relationship to das Ding somewhere beyond the law.'

71. #71

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

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

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

    Beneath the obvious differences separating Greek paganism, Hebrew monotheism, and Christianity lies the shared function of stabilizing the subject's relation with das Ding.

72. #72

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

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

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

    worship is fundamentally a posture toward das Ding. At its core, the sense of the sacred arises in relation to the darkness of the unknown.

73. #73

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.178

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > A Broader View?

    Theoretical move: The passage extends Boothby's Lacanian framework for the sacred to non-Western religions, arguing that Hinduism's moksha, Buddhism's sunyata, and Nishitani's Zen phenomenology all instantiate the same fundamental structure: an encounter with the unknowable neighbor-Thing, achieved through the sublimation or dissolution of the ego, confirming religion as the master symptom organized around the irreducible opacity of das Ding.

    some trace of the subject's own ego is raised to the dignity of das Ding. The unknowable ground of one's own being, the way we remain a mystery to ourselves, is taken up into the relation with a supreme Self, the locus of the infinite mystery.

74. #74

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.181

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > A Broader View?

    Theoretical move: By aligning the Kyoto School's Buddhist paradox of "knowing of non-knowing" (docta ignorantia) with Lacan's das Ding as the unknown dimension of the Nebenmensch, the passage argues that the deepest intimacy—with others, with God, with oneself—is constitutively unknowable, making radical unknowing the shared ground of Buddhist and psychoanalytic accounts of the sacred.

    points us back a final time in the direction of the Lacanian notion of das Ding as the unknown dimension of the Nebenmensch.

75. #75

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.182

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

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

    It's hard to imagine a more perfect material embodiment of das Ding.

76. #76

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

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

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

    the key will be to recognize how the unique power of capitalism is based on the phantasmatic equation of money with das Ding. In the culture of capitalism, we can literally say, cash is the Thing.

77. #77

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.194

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Cash Is the Thing! > Producing the Subjects of Ideology

    Theoretical move: The passage extends Althusser's theory of interpellation — which enlists individuals as ideological subjects via an imaginary mirror-structure anchored in an Absolute Other Subject — by arguing that money functions as the contemporary interpellating agency (the "God" of capitalist ideology), filling a gap Althusser left by only illustrating his theory through Christian/feudal religious ideology.

    the omnipotent recruiter, the veritable God that accomplishes interpellation in contemporary society, is money.

78. #78

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.199

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Money God

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that money functions as the true interpellating agency of modern capitalist society—replacing Althusser's divine Big Other with an anonymous, faceless force—by occupying the structural position of das Ding: it colonizes the void of desire so completely that subjects are always-already constituted as 'free' agents before any explicit ideological address, atomizing the social body and foreclosing collective solidarity.

    This is the unique aspect of money's role as a stand-in for das Ding. Our assumption that agreeing to work for a given quantity of money is a free choice by a self-determining subject is ultimately grounded in our own relation to money.

79. #79

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

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

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

    we all worship the same Thing. Or rather, the same No- thing.

80. #80

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

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

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

    The first corresponds to the sense of communion with the maternal embrace— Rolland's 'oceanic feeling'— that becomes destabilized by the experience of the uncognized dimension of the Other's desire, the specter of das Ding.

81. #81

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.205

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the two sides of the religious phenomenon—opening onto das Ding versus symptomatic defense—are gender-relative, mapped onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation: the masculine logic of exception underwrites phallic jouissance and doctrinal/hierarchical religion, while the feminine logic of the non-all underwrites Other jouissance and a radical, kenotic Christianity; this allows a gendered re-reading of das Ding and a reinterpretation of divinity as unknowing, loving, and structurally aligned with the feminine.

    Lacan's notion of the feminine non-all can be read as a gender-linked update of his earlier concept of das Ding. The Thing is the internal excess, the uncanny leftover. Moreover, the Thing is expressly identified with the jouissance of the Other.

82. #82

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

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

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

    Lacan's conception of das Ding positions it as the originary pivot point of ambivalence. On the one hand, we are drawn to the unknown Thing.

83. #83

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.215

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

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

    after its introduction in the seventh seminar the concept of das Ding appears later to be eclipsed by the notion of the objet petit a, explicitly nominated by Lacan in his last years as his most important contribution to psychoanalysis

84. #84

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.220

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

    Theoretical move: This notes passage traces a conceptual evolution in Lacan's use of "the big Other" across two phases of his teaching—from a term pointing toward genuine alterity and unconscious desire to one designating the defensive, meaning-policing function of the symbolic—while linking this shift to the broader move from imaginary to symbolic alienation.

    This first instance of the big Other thus points toward what is truly Other in the interlocutor or in oneself— exactly the sort of unknown dimension that he later comes to call das Ding.

85. #85

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.225

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

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

    The objet a, we might say, is the material trace— in this case, the pure sounding— of something that remains uncannily concealed behind it.

86. #86

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.228

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

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section (endnotes for Part 2) providing citations and brief clarifications supporting the main argument; it is largely non-substantive apparatus, though it contains scattered theoretical anchors linking Lacan, Žižek, Hegel, and Freud to the book's argument about religion, the sacred, and the neighbor.

    Lacan explicitly relates 'rediscovering the relationship to das Ding somewhere beyond the law' to 'something that all religions engage in, all mysticisms'

87. #87

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.232

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

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section providing scholarly citations and brief parenthetical remarks; it contains minimal sustained theoretical argument, though several notes gesture toward substantive theoretical connections (Rumi as Lacanian, religion as symptomatic, das Ding and divinity, sexuation formulas, jouissance and the Other as locus of truth).

    What he calls 'the reality of the unseen' is broadly coincident with my view of the religious impulse in relation to das Ding.

88. #88

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.244

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

    Theoretical move: This is a book index (pages 244–247) listing conceptual terms, proper names, and their page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical passage but reveals the conceptual architecture of Boothby's text by mapping Lacanian concepts (das Ding, objet a, jouissance, sujet supposé savoir, sexuation, etc.) onto comparative religion.

    das Ding (the Thing): and ambivalence, 33–34, 107, 199; and analyst, 50–52; and break with fellow beings, 46; as concept, 24; and death drive, 38; Freud on, 25; and gender, 195–96; and human economy, 182; and Islam, 174, 177; and Jocasta, 102; and Judaism, 132, 163; as lack, 50; and language, 41; and lying, 125–27; and meaning, 63; and money, 178, 179, 180, 189; and mother, 26–29, 35–36; and neurosis, 128; and nonknowing, 171; vs. objet a, 48–50, 205n1, 215n22; and Oedipal theory, 47; Other and, 25, 57–58; and part object, 43; and the religious, 67; ritual mutilation and, 139–41; subject and, 49, 57–58; and subjectivity, 24; and the unknown, 202; virtual character of, 200; and worship, 166

89. #89

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

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

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

    sacred, the: and das Ding, 104; and Lacan's outlook, 69; language and, 104

90. #90

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.248

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

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

    money: and *das Ding*, 178, 179, 180; as God, 185–90; indeterminacy of, 179–81

91. #91

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.129

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > The Ten Commandments as the Laws of Speech

    Theoretical move: Lacan's reading of the Ten Commandments identifies the Hebrew God (YHWH/haShem) as S1—the master signifier without a signified that inaugurates the signifying chain—and argues that the Jewish religion is the sacral institutionalization of objet petit a as the unsymbolizable remainder of every signifier, while contrasting the Greek real/imaginary axis with Judaism's real/symbolic axis as two opposed cultural solutions to the enigma of the real.

    Judaism represents the sacral institutionalization of the fact that the Thing in the Other remains forever beyond our capacities to adequately symbolize it... 'The burning bush was Moses' Thing.'

92. #92

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.19

    Acknowledgments > Introduction > You're No Good

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis poses a fundamental challenge to all emancipatory politics by revealing that the Good is constituted by its own prohibition (das Ding), making antagonism not a resolvable conflict but an internal, constitutive feature of the social order — a position that differentiates Freud from both liberal reconciliation theories and Marx's ultimate vision of overcoming antagonism.

    the Sovereign Good, which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good. Such is the foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by Freud.

93. #93

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.206

    I > Against Knowledge > Too Much Democracy

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that democracy must be reconceived not as a social good but as a lost object—a groundless, excessive enjoyment beyond the capitalist order—so that it can mobilize subjects through sacrifice of interest rather than through rational self-interest, reversing the domestication of democracy by capitalism and aligning it with psychoanalytic emancipation via enjoyment.

    For psychoanalysis, the good — even the impossible good that one can only seek without ever finding — does not exist. The idea of the good functions as a lure for thought.

94. #94

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.245

    I > 9 > Fighting for Death in the Guise of Life

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that American social conservatism's "culture of life" rhetoric is structurally a culture of death: it privileges limit, negation, and the interruption of life's flow as the only source of value, thereby aligning itself—beneath its own stated position—with the death-affirming logic it projects onto its enemies.

    Where modern life operates without value, Christ shows his willingness to die in order to create value.

95. #95

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.303

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > Introduction

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage grounds the book's theoretical argument about enjoyment, repetition, and political emancipation by positioning Lacan's death drive (as repetitive encircling rather than aggression) against Frankfurt School and Reichian attempts to subsume it under Eros/surplus repression, while also contesting Derridean justice-to-come and the ideology of progress as ontological illusions that capitalism exploits.

    the uncanny intimate kernel of one's being, the Thing that is too unbearable to face and that is now found directly in the body of the other

96. #96

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_203"></span>**Thing**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's concept of *das Ding* (the Thing) functions as both the real object beyond symbolisation and the forbidden object of incestuous desire/jouissance, and that this concept serves as the conceptual precursor to *objet petit a*, which inherits and develops its key structural features from 1963 onwards.

    das Ding, which is the thing in its 'dumb reality' (S7, 55), the thing in the real, which is 'the beyond-of-the-signified' (S7, 54).

97. #97

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part20.xhtml_ncx_99"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part20.xhtml_page_0117"></span>***J***

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the conceptual development of jouissance in Lacan's work from a simple Hegelian notion of enjoyment to a complex articulation of the paradoxical "painful pleasure" beyond the pleasure principle, culminating in the distinction between phallic jouissance and the Other (feminine) jouissance, while anchoring the concept in the prohibition inherent to the symbolic order, castration, and the death drive.

    The DEATH DRIVE is the name given to that constant desire in the subject to break through the pleasure principle towards the THING and a certain excess jouissance.

98. #98

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_64"></span>**existence**

    Theoretical move: The passage draws a systematic distinction between two opposed senses of 'existence' in Lacan: existence-in-the-symbolic (what is positively integrated into the signifying chain) versus existence-in-the-real (the impossible, unsymbolisable kernel of the subject), and introduces the neologism 'ex-sistence' to capture the decentred, ex-centric nature of subjectivity as radically Other to itself.

    it is only that which is impossible to symbolise that exists: the impossible Thing at the heart of the subject.

99. #99

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_107"></span>**law**

    Theoretical move: The Law in Lacan is identified with the symbolic order and the law of the signifier (following Lévi-Strauss), and its relationship with desire is dialectical: the law does not merely regulate a pre-given desire but constitutes desire by creating interdiction, making desire essentially the desire to transgress.

    thus maintains the subject at a safe distance from the Thing.

100. #100

     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_197"></span>**Sublimation**

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Lacan's reformulation of Freudian sublimation: rather than redirecting the drive to a non-sexual object, Lacan argues that sublimation changes the object's *position* within the structure of fantasy by elevating it to the dignity of the Thing, thereby grounding sublimation in the symbolic order, ethics, and the death drive rather than in biology or social prohibition alone.

     sublimation relocates an object in the position of the THING. The Lacanian formula for sublimation is thus that 'it raises an object…to the dignity of the Thing' (S7, 112).

101. #101

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_152"></span>**pleasure principle**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's progressive theorization of the pleasure principle from a homeostatic device opposing the death drive to a symbolic law that regulates distance from das Ding and prohibits jouissance—ultimately identifying the pleasure principle with the dominance of the signifier, while exposing the paradox that the symbolic also hosts the repetition compulsion that goes beyond it.

     the pleasure principle is the prohibition of incest, 'that which regulates the distance between the subject and das Ding'

102. #102

     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_200"></span>**Symbolic**

     Theoretical move: The passage defines the Symbolic as the central order in Lacan's tripartite schema, arguing that it constitutes the essentially linguistic, law-governed, and totalising dimension of human subjectivity—irreducible to biology, structuring the Imaginary, and encompassing the Unconscious, the Other, the Death Drive, and Lack—while distinguishing it sharply from Freud's 'symbolism' as fixed bi-univocal meaning.

     The symbolic is both the PLEASURE PRINCIPLE which regulates the distance from the Thing

103. #103

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     3

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

     the house a substitute for the womb – one's first dwelling place, probably still longed for, where one was safe and felt so comfortable

104. #104

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     **Xffl**

     Theoretical move: The Fort/Da game is read as the originary moment where desire becomes human through its entry into language: the symbol's power to negate the thing (the "original murder of the thing") opens the world of negativity, grounds both human discourse and reality, and locates primal masochism at this inaugural negativation; desire thereafter is only ever reintegrated through symbolic nomination, and analytic technique must be understood in terms of freeing speech from its moorings within language.

     the symbol allows this inversion, that is to say cancels the existing thing… this original murder of the thing

105. #105

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     **VI**

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

     for him, what isn't symbolised is reality. This young subject is completely in reality, in the pure state, unconstituted. He is entirely in the undifferentiated.

106. #106

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     **XVII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that intersubjectivity is not grounded in imaginary dyadic relation but in the symbolic function itself: the child's use of language (naming, presence/absence) demonstrates that the symbolic and the real are primary, with the imaginary only becoming accessible retrospectively through adult realisation - thus critiquing object-relations theory (Balint) for missing the constitutive role of the symbolic.

     the possibility of naming, which is both destructive of the thing and allows the passage of the thing onto the symbolic plane

107. #107

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     **m**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that resistance cannot be located simply in the ego or secondary process, but must be understood in relation to the subject's historical discourse — a present synthesis of the past — and that the foundational analytic question is not memory per se but recognition, whose possibility is grounded in the subject's present structuration by socialised time and history.

     Freud defines the pathogenic nucleus as what is being sought, but which repels the discourse - what discourse shuns.

108. #108

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.323

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

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

     it very likely designates the most, as it were, profound object, the ultimate object, the Thing.

109. #109

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.29

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

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

     this theory would be quite admissible for us were it not, at its utmost term, hanging entirely upon the supposition of a Sovereign Good against which, as you know, we already have great objections to make.

110. #110

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.283

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

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

     the object a, which embodies the dead end of desire's access to the Thing

111. #111

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.134

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

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

     it steers towards the Thing, having crossed the barrier of the good — this is a reference to my Seminar on ethics — that is, the barrier of the pleasure principle

112. #112

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.60

     BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

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

     there is indeed something of the order of a that appears at the place above the image i'(a) that I'm designating for you on the blackboard, the place of the Heim which is the locus of the appearance of anxiety.

113. #113

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.287

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

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

     We said that ten pots utterly alike will prove to be individually different, but that the question can arise as to whether, when you put one in the place of the other, the void that is put successively in the heart of each of them is always the same.

114. #114

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

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

     the central field already sketched out in the Seminar on ethics as the field of jouissance.

115. #115

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

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

     desire and law are but one and the same barrier to bar our access to the Thing.

116. #116

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW

     Theoretical move: By reading Freud's Lust-Ich / Unlust distinction through the lens of the pleasure principle and its limits, Lacan shows that the structure of pleasure already anticipates the logic of alienation: Unlust, as the irreducible remainder that bites into the original ego, is the primitive form of the split between subject and Other, and hedonism's reduction of this to a good/evil dyad fails to account for desire.

     Unlust, on the other hand, is what remains unassimilable, irreducible to the pleasure principle. It is out of this, Freud tells us, that the non-ego will be constituted.

117. #117

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

     OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: By showing that the sovereign good can only be located at the level of the law (not pleasure), Lacan argues that the objet petit a—those objects (breast, faeces, gaze, voice) that serve no function—is the pivotal term that introduces the dialectic of the subject of the unconscious, grounding alienation/division of the subject in the recognition of the drive rather than in any dialectic of beneficial objects.

     there is no possible law to be given of what might be the good in objects. The sovereign good, if this confusing term must be retained, can be found again only at the level of the law

118. #118

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.273

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Through the function of objet petit a, the subject achieves separation from the vacillation of being that constitutes alienation; Lacan uses the phenomenon of verbal hallucination—where the subject is immanent in the hallucinatory voice—to reframe the analytic goal not as purification of the percipiens but as the subject's grounding encounter with the object-voice as support.

     Take Socrates. The inflexible purity of Socrates and his atopia are correlative. Intervening, at every moment, there is the demonic voice.

119. #119

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian unconscious is constitutively a zone of the "unrealized" (not unreal), structured around a fundamental gap — the navel of the dream — and that post-Freudian ego psychology betrayed this dimension by "stitching up" the gap through psychologization; Lacan positions his own return to the signifier as reopening this gap with care, installing the law of the signifier in the locus of cause.

     the navel of the dreams, he writes, to designate their ultimately unknown centre

120. #120

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hegelian-Marxist historiography cannot account for Nazism's sacrificial logic, because sacrifice reveals an irreducible drive to find the desire of the "dark God" in the object of sacrifice; Spinoza's reduction of God to the universality of the signifier offers a rare escape, but Kant's moral law is ultimately truer—and closer to pure desire—for psychoanalytic experience.

     that very desire that culminates in the sacrifice, strictly speaking, of everything that is the object of love in one's human tenderness

121. #121

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions the Freudian unconscious as a zone of the "unrealized" (neither unreal nor dereistic) structured around a constitutive gap—figured by Freud's "navel of the dream"—and argues that post-Freudian analysts (second and third generation) betrayed this dimension by psychologizing theory and suturing the gap, while Lacan himself claims to re-open it by introducing the law of the signifier into the domain of cause.

     the navel of the dreams, he writes, to designate their ultimately unknown centre

122. #122

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

     TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

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

     die Idee einer anderer Lokalität, the idea of another locality, another space, another scene, the between perception and consciousness

123. #123

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.107

     THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anamorphosis—exemplified by Holbein's skull—reveals how the geometral dimension of vision operates not as realistic reproduction but as a trap that captures the subject, disclosing an enigmatic relation between the gaze, desire, and the subject's own nothingness (death).

     It reflects our own nothingness, in the figure of the death's head.

124. #124

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.190

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

     Theoretical move: Against the view that love represents the totality of sexual striving, Lacan follows Freud in arguing that drives are irreducibly partial — linked to an economic factor governed by the pleasure principle at the level of the Real-Ich (conceived as homeostatic nervous-system regulation) — thereby resisting any biologistic reduction of sexuality to reproductive finality.

     das Lieben, the act of love. We shall now approach this second point.

125. #125

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.260

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ordinary language implicitly encodes a topology that psychoanalysts deploy spontaneously, and grounds Freud's distinction between Ich, Lust/Unlust, and the 'foreign body' (fremde Objekt) within that topology — showing how the non-ego is not the vast Real but a specific inscribed negation seated in the lunula between two overlapping fields.

     Non-ego is distinguished as a foreign body, fremde Objekt. It is there, situated in the lunula constituted by the two small Euler-type circles.

126. #126

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Using Munch's *The Scream* as a topological illustration, Lacan argues that silence is not mere absence of speech but the structural correlate of the voice-as-object (objet petit a), such that the scream *causes* silence rather than silence grounding the scream; this models the Möbius/Klein bottle topology of demand, from whose cut the objet petit a falls as remainder—the origin of desire, fantasy, and transference.

     it is at the level of the scream that there appears the Nebenmensch, this neighbour whom I showed should effectively be named in this way, this close neighbour because he is precisely this hollow, this uncrossable hollow marked within ourselves and which we ourselves can scarcely approach

127. #127

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysterical desire-to-desire) as a scaffold to argue that analytic experience cannot be exhausted by demand and transference alone, and that a tripartite structure of privation, frustration, and castration—grounded in a radical materialism of the body as libido—is required to make castration thinkable and to properly situate the subject in relation to the Other.

     what is nourished from what in the body is presented as the most ungraspable part of being, which always refers us to the absent essence of the body

128. #128

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.35

     A - The problem of the suture

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that suture—the logical operation linking lack to the chain of signifiers—is not merely a formal linguistic procedure but requires the bodily, psychoanalytic dimension of the object (objet petit a / partial objects) as mediator between thing and cause; it advances a ternary (triangular) logic over binary structuralist opposition to account for the cutting-up of both signifier and signified, with the phallus as the vanishing term that holds the system together.

     chose (thing) and cause (cause) have a common root, the mediation here being found to pass through the object.

129. #129

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian-Aristotelian reduction of body to homogeneous three-dimensional extension is a fundamental epistemological deception, and proposes that the topological structure of two-dimensional surfaces (sphere, cylinder, torus) with holes—rather than metric spherical space—can provide a non-punctual, non-specular account of the divided subject and its relation to the real.

     It is around this apprehension of extension that thinking about the real, that of being (l'étant) as Mr Heidegger says, was organised. This sphere was the supreme and the final being: the unmoved mover.

130. #130

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.8

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the vase-as-hole (the mustard pot) as a structural model for the symbolic order and the object of science, arguing that the material cause is the hole itself rather than any positive substance, and that science becomes possible precisely when the object is approached as lacking—a move that also grounds the distinction between the signifier's phonematic and logical poles in a new graph.

     That means that he makes the vase around the hole. That what is essential is the hole.

131. #131

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.79

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that truth cannot be sutured by mere logical truth-value (alethes) or empirical reference, and that the o-object (objet petit a) — hidden in the suture of the subject within modern logic — is precisely what reveals the true secret of the connection between truth and knowledge; the projective plane and Möbius strip are then introduced as topological figures adequate to this subject-object structure, against the inadequate spherical cosmology that underlies both idealism and false realism.

     we can perhaps admit the existence of a thing in itself, namely, of a beyond of the final sphere

132. #132

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.8

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the symbolic order in the primacy of the hole (lack/void) over presence, arguing that the object of science, the vase as symbolic creation, and energetics all converge on the same structural point: what matters is not what fills the void but the void itself — a thesis that links the subject of science (Descartes/Frege) to the functioning of the signifier and forecloses any meta-language.

     the Jewish enunciation that God made the world from nothing is properly speaking, as Koyré thinking, taught and wrote, what opened up the path to the object of science

133. #133

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the classical philosophical reduction of the body and the real to three-dimensional homogeneous (spherical) extension is a fundamental deception about the subject and knowledge; by drawing on topology (the sphere, the cut, the hole, the cylinder, the torus), he proposes that a two-dimensional, edge-based topological structure—rather than metric space—is the proper framework for articulating the divided subject and its inscription in the real.

     It is around this apprehension of extension that thinking about the real, that of being (l'étant) as Mr Heidegger says, was organised. This sphere was the supreme and the final being: the unmoved mover.

134. #134

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.35

     A - The problem of the suture

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that suture is not a mere logical operation but is grounded in the body's structure: castration enacts the rupture of signifying concatenation, the phallus (-phi) functions as the vanishing third term in a ternary (rather than binary) structure, and the object mediates the passage from thing to cause — thereby both accomplishing and exposing the suture within signification.

     the identity to oneself has allowed the passage from the thing to the object... we know that chose (thing) and cause (cause) have a common root, the mediation here being found to pass through the object.

135. #135

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.239

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

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots from a critique of structuralism's elision of the subject to a positive claim that the subject's fundamental relation to the body is mediated by objet petit a as the sub-product of the "difficulty of the sexual act," and that the classical alienation-formula ("I am not thinking / I am not") maps onto a "for the Other" structure that regrounds the subject's constitution in that very difficulty.

     I suspect that one of the reasons why psychoanalysts prefer to hold that by putting the Thing, with a capital T, if you wish, that by putting the Thing in the centre, light is thrown on a whole zonal region

136. #136

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.98

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

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

     allows there to be pushed further the critique of what Freud articulates under the name of Sachvorstellungen… representation of things in so far as it is things which are represented.

137. #137

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.76

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 11 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of the subject's division by mapping the Id (as grammatical/thinking structure) against the Unconscious (as non-existence, the 'I am not'), showing how these two fields do not overlap but rather eclipse each other—and that their intersection is mediated by the objet petit a, which emerges as the operator of alienation, while castration is recast as the failure of any Bedeutung to cover sexual difference.

     what is at stake is not the Ding, the unsayable thing, but the perfectly articulated affair

138. #138

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 19: Wednesday 10 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act constitutes the founding impossibility (the "holed One") from which all truth, symptom, and signification emerge, while identifying the big Other not with spirit but with the body as the primary site of inscription — thereby grounding the Symbolic in a Real that cannot be formally proved.

     At the basis of everything that has manifested itself to the world, in this order*, there is only the sexual act.* The other side of my formula: *there is no sexual act*.

139. #139

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.239

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject's constitutive relation to the body is mediated by the sexual act as a fundamental "difficulty," and that objet petit a—as a subjective residue or sub-product of signifying articulation—names the partial, fallen junction between subject and body that grounds the sexual act; this reframes the alienation/vel structure by locating the "I am not thinking / I am not" alternative as the logical form through which the subject encounters the impossibility of the sexual act.

     I suspect that one of the reasons why psychoanalysts prefer to hold that by putting the Thing, with a capital T, if you wish, that by putting the Thing in the centre, light is thrown on a whole zonal region

140. #140

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 22 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that alienation, understood as the elimination of the Other as a closed unified field (i.e., the impossibility of a universe of discourse), is the logical starting point from which he derives the interrelated poles of a structural quadrangle articulated around repetition, the act, the unconscious (Id), and castration - with truth emerging as the emanation from a disconnected field of the Other, made manifest in the symptom.

     The subject is perfectly thingy (chosique). And is the worst kind of thing! The Freudian thing, precisely.

141. #141

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.76

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 11 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural relationship between the Id (Es) and the unconscious as two non-overlapping fields defined by complementary negations ("I am not thinking" and "I am not"), arguing that their mutual eclipsing produces, on one side, the o-object as the truth of alienation's structure, and on the other, castration as the incapacity of any Bedeutung to cover sexual difference—with the drive's grammatical montage (as read through "A Child is Being Beaten") serving as the hinge for this demonstration.

     what is at stake is not the Ding, the unsayable thing, but the perfectly articulated affair, but in so far, in effect, as it supersedes - like Bedeutung - anything whatsoever that may order it.

142. #142

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.81

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the claim that the inconsistency of the Other is what converts all stating into demand, situating the subject's division on the Graph of Desire; he then mobilises Gödel's incompleteness theorems as the logical analogue of castration, and closes by arguing that meaning is a lure veiling language's essential meaninglessness, with surplus-jouissance as the remainder that articulates the subject's relation to castration and enjoyment.

     It is not for nothing that in my first introduction of this pot I signalled that where it plays the part of an accompaniment to death in burial there is put this addition that properly speaking holes it.

143. #143

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious apparatus — grounded in the pleasure principle, repetition, and homeostatic return to perceptual identity — is not a neurophysiological mechanism but a minimal logical structure of signifying articulation (difference and repetition), such that the dream functions as a 'wild interpretation' whose analysis reveals desire precisely at the point where the reconstituted sentence fails as a sentence, not as meaning.

     what its functioning ends up with as constituting its specificity, is the fact that what will be rediscovered about the identical perception inasmuch as what regulates it is repetition

144. #144

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 > Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual relationship cannot be grasped through biological, logical, or identificatory schemas (active/passive, male/female, +/−), and that Freudian logic ultimately reduces sex to the formal mark of castration as constitutive lack; this requires distinguishing the Other (as terrain cleared of enjoyment, site of the unconscious structured like a language) from Das Ding (the intolerable imminence of jouissance/the neighbour), and poses the central question: is the Woman the locus of desire (the Other) or the locus of enjoyment (the Thing)?

     Freud introduces it through the function of the Nebenmensch, this man who is closest, this man who is ambiguous because one does not know how to situate him.

145. #145

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.101

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 January 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's wager and its renunciation of pleasures as a pivot to historicize the displacement from hedonistic ethics (grounded in a natural sovereign good) to modern capitalist morality, arguing that Freud's pleasure principle operates not as the ancient hedone but as a subterranean regulatory mechanism — a tempering force in the underground — which reframes how psychoanalysis must situate pleasure and the objet petit a.

     the distinction between Wohl, das Wohl, there where one feels good, and das Gute, the good, in so far as Kant distinguishes them. It is quite clear that this is one of the core points of what I earlier called the break.

146. #146

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan retroactively illuminates the trajectory of Seminar VII (Ethics of Psychoanalysis) from his 1969 vantage point, arguing that the Freud event grounds ethics in the Real—approached through the conjoint Symbolic/Imaginary—and that "truth has the structure of fiction" (via Bentham's theory of fictions) is the essential starting point for any psychoanalytic ethics, correlating the pleasure principle with the function of the unconscious.

     what I announced from the beginning is that, through the Freud event, what has been brought to light, the key point, the centre of the ethics is nothing other than what I supported at that time by the final term of these three references

147. #147

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 > Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of a sexual signifier means Woman is irreducibly unknown, accessible only through representatives of representation (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz); sublimation is then theorised as the objet petit a functioning as what "tickles das Ding from the inside," linking drive topology (edge-structure, vacuole) to the production of art and courtly love.

     what is important is what I am putting forward, that something here resembles the Thing... the Thing, for its part, is undoubtedly not sexed. This is probably what allows us to make love with her

148. #148

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.77

     *Lacan writes on the board: "L 'achose"*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that 'l'achose' (the thing-as-absent) can only be approached through writing (l'écrit), not speech, because the thing's place is always marked by the absence of the o-object (castration), and topology—exemplified by the Graph of Desire—is irreducibly a written form that the spoken word cannot substitute for.

     it is enough to say that the thing (la chose) can only be written as l'achose as I have just written it on the board, which means that it is absent there where it holds its place.

149. #149

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     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.

     What I wrote, can be read [...] And when you re-read it, you notice that I am not talking about the Thing, because you cannot talk about it, talk about it. I make it speak itself. The Thing in question states: Me, the truth, I speak.

150. #150

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.35

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the occasion of speaking "to the wall" at Sainte-Anne to develop a structural argument about repetition (which requires a third, not merely a second), tying it to Nachträglichkeit, the Christian Trinity as a model of belief/self-grounding, Plato's cave as a proto-structuralist theory of the object and the origin of language in resonance, and jouissance as what the wall itself occasions.

     everything that has been bequeathed to us, bequeathed by a tradition that is called philosophical, puts the void in a very special place.

151. #151

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     XII > The dream., of Irma's injection

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Irma dream to demonstrate that the dream's manifest content—read as a text, not as psychological expression—operates across imaginary and symbolic registers simultaneously, and that desire in the dream oscillates between preconscious and unconscious levels, with the horrifying vision of flesh/formlessness marking the point where anxiety erupts as the Real beneath the imaginary scene.

     the flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face... the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless

152. #152

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     XVIII

     Theoretical move: By reading Poe's M. Valdemar alongside Oedipus at Colonus and Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan argues that life is fundamentally a detour toward death, that desire emerges only at the joint of speech/symbolism, and that the phenomena of wit, dream, and psychopathology all inhabit the vacillating level of speech where the subject's being is at stake.

     behind the drama of the passage into existence, we find nothing besides life conjoined to death. That is where the Freudian dialectic leads us.

153. #153

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     XII > The dream of Irma's injection ( conclusion)

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dream of Irma's injection is not merely an analysable object but Freud's own speech enacting his discovery, and uses this to stage the distinction between imaginary, real, and symbolic registers—culminating in a critique of ego-regression in favour of a 'spectral decomposition' of the ego as a series of imaginary identifications.

     the abyss of the feminine organ from which all life emerges, this gulf of the mouth, in which everything is swallowed up...the essential object which isn't an object any longer

154. #154

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.50

     **II** > Love and the signifier

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is characterized by contingency rather than eternity, and that this contingency (figured through creationism, the *ex nihilo*, and the Copernican/Newtonian revolution) grounds his central claim that love compensates for the absence of the sexual relationship — a relation only accessible through the function of the phallus as that which is articulated on the basis of absence. The "revolution" Lacan values is not a change of center but the shift from "it turns" to "it falls," marking the real subversion of the signified's routine.

     isn't what is at stake in creationism a creation on the basis of nothing - thus on the basis of the signifier?

155. #155

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.109

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that knowledge is grounded in the Other as a locus of the signifier, and that its true nature lies in the identity between the jouissance of its acquisition and its exercise — not in exchange value but in use — while the analyst, by placing objet petit a in the place of semblance, is uniquely positioned to investigate truth as knowledge; this culminates in a meditation on the not-all, the Other's not-knowing, and the link between jealouissance, the gaze, and das Ding as the kernel of the neighbor.

     on the basis of the kernel of what I called Dingy in my seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, namely, the Freudian Thing, in other words, the very neighbor (prochain) Freud refuses to love beyond certain limits.

156. #156

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.98

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes analytic discourse from both Aristotelian cosmology and scientific discourse by locating the speaking being's reality at the level of fantasy and the unconscious, then pivots to the question of feminine jouissance and its relation to the Other, arguing that woman—like man—is subjected to an Other that may or may not "know" the jouissance she experiences beyond the phallic game.

     this immense bric-a-brac, this cluttered storeroom with which he has to make do, which assuredly makes a soul of him

157. #157

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     **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.

     In effect, a discourse like analytic discourse aims at meaning... that meaning is based on semblance (ce sens est du semblant).

158. #158

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan links the objet petit a as a semblance of being to a primordial scene of jealous enjoyment (jalouissance) drawn from Augustine, positioning it as the first substitutive enjoyment that founds desire through metonymy and demand addressed to the Other, and closes on the question of whether having the object a is the same as being it — a question he refers to "The Meaning of the Phallus."

     from this core of what I called Ding in my seminar on The ethics of psychoanalysis; the Freudian thing, in other words, the very neighbour whom Freud sets his face against loving beyond certain limits

159. #159

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.143

     Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that feminine sexuality is constituted by the not-all (pas-toute) in relation to the phallic function, producing a supplementary jouissance beyond the phallus, while grounding this in the claim that castration is the condition of possibility for male enjoyment of the woman's body, and opposing an ontology of 'being of significance' (signifiance) to any ontology grounded in thinking or enjoyment of being.

     what in Aristotle is precisely called the obstacle, enstasis...what Aristotle is seeking, and what opened the path to everything that he subsequently drew along after him, is what this enjoyment of being is.

160. #160

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.6

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XX by grounding the impossibility of the sexual relation in the structural gap between jouissance (phallic enjoyissance) and love: love aims at making One but can only produce narcissistic identification, while enjoyment of the Other's body is neither necessary nor sufficient as a response to love, with the Not-all (pas-toute) marking woman's asymmetrical position relative to phallic jouissance.

     to return to an examination of what is involved in this being, of this sovereign good posited there as object of contemplation and on which it was believed an ethic could be edified.

161. #161

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.125

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that reality is approached through "systems of enjoyment" coextensive with language, that the sexual relationship fails in two ways (male/all and female/not-all), and that the object (objet petit a) is constitutively defined by failure — failure being the essence of the object and the only way the sexual relationship is "realized."

     I said that if there was something that had cleared the air a little after all... immediately after Aristotle. I said that if there was something that had cleared the air

162. #162

     Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     **Two lines of numbers**

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops a topology of the Real grounded in writing, arguing that (1) the Real is only accessible through writing as artifice, (2) the torus—unlike the sphere—introduces a structural asymmetry and equivocation between inside/outside and hole/rod that models the living body and sexuality, and (3) the Borromean knot's necessary alternation formalizes the non-relation, with zero as hole and one as consistency providing an arithmetic analogue for chain-topology.

     it is from the moment that there is a confusion between this Real that we are indeed led to call 'thing', there is an equivocation between this Real and language

163. #163

     Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.6

     **Seminar I: Wednesday 15 November 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens his final seminar by positioning psychoanalysis as an irrefutable practice of equivocation (not a science), grounding this in the non-existence of the sexual relationship, the inadequation of the Symbolic to the Real, and the analyst's function as rhetor — then transitions to topological exploration of the Borromean knot and torus as structural models for the RSI (Real-Symbolic-Imaginary) articulation.

     what I called 'the Freudian Thing', was that words mould themselves onto things: but it is a fact, the fact is that it does not happen... the adequation of the Symbolic only makes things phantastically.

164. #164

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.179

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that oral eroticisation, anorexia, and the infant's first symbolic reversals are all grounded in the primacy of the symbolic order over any real object: the child's power over maternal almightiness is exercised not through action but through the symbolic manipulation of the 'nothing,' and the infant cry is constitutively a call addressed within a pre-existing symbolic system rather than a signal of need.

     It's not a nicht essen, but a nichts essen. This point is indispensable if one is to understand the phenomenology of anorexia.

165. #165

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.274

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues against Jones's naturalistic account of the phallic phase by insisting that the phallus is only conceivable as the signifier of lack — the signifier of the distance between demand and desire — and that entry into femininity requires inscription in the signifying dialectic of exchange (as theorized by Lévi-Strauss), not a return to a primitively given female position; the child's entry into this same dialectic is conditioned by the mother's desire, itself signified by the phallus she lacks.

     he retains something in them that is much more than their value, for their value is precisely what can be exchanged. From the moment he reduces these objects to pure signifiers even as he clings to them as objects of his desire.

166. #166

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (II)**

     Theoretical move: Lacan recasts male homosexuality not as an inverted Oedipus but as a triangulated identificatory solution: the child identifies with the mother's position (the one who holds the key to the law/phallus) precisely because the father's excessive love reveals his suspected castration, producing a structure in which the mother holds the fantasmatic paternal phallus—making the homosexual's structure triadic, not dual.

     what it is about the organ of a woman that stops them is precisely that, in many cases, it is presumed to have ingested the phallus of the father, and that what is dreaded in penetration is precisely an encounter with this phallus.

167. #167

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.40

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian forgetting of "Signorelli" and the Witz "famillionaire" share the same signifying topology — both operate through the intersection of metonymic decomposition (the combinatory axis) and metaphorical substitution (the substitutive axis) — and uses this structural homology to distinguish carefully between substitution and metaphor, and between *Unterdrückung* and *Verdrängung* as two different modes of repression.

     The absolute Herr, death. The word moves on, fades away, withdraws, is repelled, and is, strictly speaking, unterdruckt.

168. #168

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that metaphor produces a new signified by substituting an unexpected signifier, and that this metaphorical operation always veils/unveils death — the constitutive absence at the heart of language — through the structural function of the phallus as the missing signifier subtracted from the chain of speech, making desire the metonymy of being and castration the inevitable consequence of the subject's capture in speech.

     he revealed what lies beyond the prohibitions that constitute the law of language

169. #169

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.106

     **VII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation must be understood as the imaginary colonization of the field of das Ding, where fantasy elements ($ ◇ a) overlay the subject at the very point of das Ding; the gap between the narcissistically structured object and das Ding is precisely where the problem of sublimation is situated, and this gap is historically refracted through the shift from ancient emphasis on the drive to modern emphasis on the object.

     at the heart of man's destiny is the Ding, the causa, which I described the other day as analogous to that which is designated by Kant as at the horizon of his Practical Reason

170. #170

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.325

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the ethical thesis that the only genuine form of guilt is "having given ground relative to one's desire," grounding this in the structural relationship between the subject, the signifier, and an irreducible "keeping of accounts" that persists across moral, religious, and political frameworks; this is illustrated through Antigone, Philoctetes, and a reading of the film *Never on Sunday*.

     The reason why there is human desire, that the field can exist, depends on the assumption that everything real that happens may be accounted for somewhere.

171. #171

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     **VII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's doctrine of the libido (against Jung's cosmological misreading) to establish Das Ding as the structural obstacle around which the subject must navigate on the path of pleasure, arguing that sublimation cannot be reduced to direct drive-satisfaction or collective approval because it always involves an antinomy—a reaction formation—that reveals the fundamental incompatibility between the drive and any Sovereign Good.

     That is Das Ding insofar as, if he is to follow the path of his pleasure, man must go around it.

172. #172

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.257

     **XIV** > **XIX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan locates the ethical and aesthetic force of Antigone in the liminal zone between life and death (the 'second death'), arguing that it is precisely there that desire is both reflected and refracted to produce the effect of beauty — a zone Hegel's dialectical reading of reconciliation entirely misses, and which requires a rigorous analysis of signifiers rather than a moralising or aesthetic reduction.

     since its excitement is not refracted but reflected, rejected, it knows it to be most real. But there is no longer any object.

173. #173

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.54

     **IV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces *das Ding* as the irreducible kernel within Freud's reality principle that resists symbolization, arguing that *Sache* (the thing coupled to the word, belonging to the preconscious/symbolic order) must be distinguished from *das Ding* (the opaque, exterior real that the reality principle paradoxically isolates the subject from), and that repression operates on signifiers rather than on things-as-objects.

     Das Ding is found somewhere else... What one finds in das Ding is the true secret. For the reality principle has a secret that... is paradoxical.

174. #174

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     **XIV** > The function of the good

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic conception of the good cannot be reduced to the hedonist tradition because Freud's pleasure principle—read through the Entwurf up to Beyond the Pleasure Principle—introduces a dimension of memory/facilitation/repetition that rivals and exceeds satisfaction, thereby grounding ethics in the subject's relation to desire rather than in utility or the natural good.

     It is bound up with that prohibition, that reservation, that we explored specifically last year when I spoke to you about desire and its interpretation.

175. #175

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

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

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

     Bentham's effort is located in the dialectic of the relationship of language to the real so as to situate the good - pleasure in this case... on the side of the real.

176. #176

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.182

     **XI** > **XIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo to argue that the primordial murder of the father does not open the path to jouissance but paradoxically strengthens its prohibition — a structural asymmetry in which the transfer of jouissance to prohibition always increases the superego's cruelty, while the reverse passage (toward uninhibited jouissance) generates its own obstacles, revealing the fundamental fault at the origin of moral law.

     the burning bush was Moses's Thing, and leave it there. In any case, we still have to calculate the consequences of that revelation.

177. #177

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.318

     **XXIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the Oedipus complex's decline and superego formation by distinguishing three registers of the father (real/castrating, imaginary/privating, symbolic/dead) and the corresponding mourning work, arguing that the superego ultimately expresses hatred toward the imaginary father-God who "handled things badly," while the paternal function is always and only the Name-of-the-Father — the dead father as myth — and desire is constituted through a necessary crossing of limits.

     the object of his love, who is, of course, misrecognized by him

178. #178

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.237

     **XIV** > The function of the good

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the domain of the good is not reducible to utilitarian use-value but is fundamentally structured by power—the capacity to deprive others—which erects the first barrier against desire; jouissance introduces a surplus that splits the good from mere utility, and the depriving agent is revealed to be an imaginary function (the little other), not a real one.

     What can there be behind this? What in spite of that can he continue to desire? - I say 'in spite of that' because from that moment on we know less and less about it.

179. #179

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.189

     **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's engagement with the commandment to love one's neighbor (from *Civilization and Its Discontents*) as the pivot for a meditation on the death of God, the Name-of-the-Father, and the political/ethical consequences of Freud's demystification of the paternal function, arguing that the "truth about truth" must be approached step by step rather than through metaphysical pretension.

     whose Thing, speaking from the burning bush, affirmed himself to be a special God - not the only God, note, but a special God

180. #180

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     **XI** > **XIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two interlocking theoretical moves: (1) it critiques Sperber's sexual-origin theory of language by insisting that the metaphorical spread of sexual signifiers proves not a reduction of meaning to sexual roots but rather that an "emptiness" or gap — the form of the female organ — is the privileged pole around which metaphorical play of the signifier is organised; (2) it pivots to Freud's treatment of the paternal function in religious experience, arguing that religious knowledge (Moses, the Name of the Father) belongs within the analytic field of inquiry precisely because all knowledge emerges against a background of ignorance.

     what is essential in the development of our experience and in Freud's doctrine may be conceived, that is to say, that sexual symbolism in the ordinary sense of the word may polarize at its point of origin the metaphorical play of the signifier.

181. #181

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     **XIV** > **XVI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade's cosmological argument for crime and a reading of Freud's death drive to establish that the drive is not a natural instinct toward equilibrium (entropy) but a historically articulated, signifier-dependent will to destruction and creation ex nihilo — a "creationist sublimation" that points to Das Ding as the foundational beyond of the signifying chain, and that sublimation (exemplified by courtly love) locates its object in this same place of being-as-signifier.

     It points to the site that I designate alternatively as impassable or as the site of the Thing. Freud evokes there his sublimation concerning the death instinct insofar as that sublimation is fundamentally creationist.

182. #182

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.262

     **XIV** > **XIX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Goethe's reading of Antigone against Hegel's to argue that the play's conflict is not a clash of symmetrical legal principles but an asymmetry between Creon's desire-driven transgression (wanting to inflict a "second death" beyond his rights) and something else represented by Antigone—a passion yet to be named—while the scandalous justification speech is rehabilitated as the key to defining Antigone's aim.

     you associated it with my famous Thing, which in this instance is some disgusting object that has been caught by a net in the sea.

183. #183

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     **XIV** > **XV** > The *jouissance* of transgression

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the barrier to jouissance and the resistance to the commandment "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" are one and the same thing, not opposites — thereby locating the paradox of jouissance at the intersection of the Law, the death of God, the superego's aggression, and the imaginary identification with the other that grounds altruism.

     What is the goal jouissance seeks if it has to find support in transgression to reach it?

184. #184

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.272

     **XIV** > **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's close reading of Sophocles' *Antigone* argues that the play's central organizing term *Atè* — the limit that human life can only briefly cross — structures Antigone's desire as an orientation toward the beyond of the human, making her not monstrous but the embodiment of desire aimed past the boundary of civilization, with the surrounding drama functioning not as action but as a temporal "subsidence" that reveals the irreducible relation of the tragic hero to the dimension of truth.

     One does or does not approach Atè, and when one approaches it, it is because of something that is linked to a beginning and a chain of events, namely, that of the misfortune of the Labdacides family.

185. #185

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.134

     **IX** > On creation *ex nihilo*

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the claim that courtly love (the Lady as representative of das Ding) is the purest historical instance of sublimation, and that this construction can be grasped analytically only once the Freudian drive (Trieb) is understood as a fundamental ontological — not merely psychological — response to the crisis of the dead Father/Creator.

     You will see in detail how it was possible to give an object, which in this case is called the Lady, the value of representing the Thing.

186. #186

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     **V**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes das Ding from Vorstellungen/Sachvorstellungen by positioning it as the primordial, absent, and unsymbolizable Thing that governs the gravitational field of unconscious representations, while using Freud's Verneinung/Verdrängung/Verwerfung triad to map different levels of negation onto the structure of discourse, ultimately grounding the Reality Principle and superego in the relation to das Ding and the Other of the Other.

     As far as das Ding is concerned, that is something else. Das Ding is a primordial function which is located at the level of the initial establishment of the gravitation of the unconscious Vorstellungen.

187. #187

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.349

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index passage from Seminar VII listing key terms and page references; it is non-substantive but maps the conceptual architecture of the seminar, cross-referencing entries such as sublimation, Das Ding, signifier, subject, second death, service of goods, and sovereign good.

     Ding as Other of, 52,71 distance between Ding and, 69,73,105 Ding and, 95,99, 115, 117, 126, 129, 131,134, 158

188. #188

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that courtly love, like Surrealist 'amour fou', both emerge as cultural formations around Das Ding (the Thing): the signifier creates a place for the Thing, and what appears to be objective chance or 'madness of love' is structurally the irruption of the real in the place vacated by rational or causal order.

     it is once again in the place of the Thing that Breton has the madness of love emerge.

189. #189

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.277

     **XIV** > **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan completes his close reading of Sophocles' *Antigone*, tracing how the play's dramatic escalation — through the chorus's hymn to mankind, the punishment decree, the appearance of Tiresias, the hymn to Dionysus, and the catastrophic finale — consistently orbits the limit-concept of *Ate*, and how the Greek term *ïmeros enargês* (desire made visible) names the specific quality of desire that erupts at the moment of Antigone's condemnation, linking the ethical stakes of the tragedy to the broader Lacanian analysis of desire and the beautiful.

     It is around this image of the limit that the whole play turns.

190. #190

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.345

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index page from Seminar VII, non-substantive in theoretical content but reflecting the conceptual terrain of the seminar through its entries.

     Ding and, 83-84, 186

191. #191

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     **XIV** > **XVI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in approaching the central field of Das Ding (radical desire), two barriers stand between the subject and destruction: first, the good (linked to pleasure and utility), and second—closer to the center—beauty, which both arrests and points toward absolute destruction, making the beautiful structurally nearer to evil than to the good.

     the true barrier that holds the subject back in front of the unspeakable field of radical desire that is the field of absolute destruction, of destruction beyond putrefaction

192. #192

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.294

     **XIV** > **XXI** > **SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes his reading of Antigone by situating its ethical force at the intersection of the second death, language, synchrony/diachrony (via Lévi-Strauss), and the beauty-effect produced by the hero's proximity to Ate, then pivots to Kant's analytic of the beautiful and sublime as the necessary conceptual bridge for his ongoing topological argument.

     he situates the hero in a sphere where death encroaches on life, in his relationship, that is, to what I have been calling the second death here.

193. #193

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.246

     **XIV** > **XVIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the field "beyond the good principle" is delimited on one side by the beautiful (which suspends desire rather than fulfilling it) and on the other by pain/masochism, and that neither side exhausts that field; it pivots toward Antigone as the exemplary case of an absolute, non-good-motivated choice, while grounding the whole inquiry in the relationship between the human being, the signifier, and the death drive.

     One finds at this frontier another crossing point, which enables us to locate precisely an element of the field of the beyond-the-good principle. That element, as I have said, is the beautiful.

194. #194

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     **XIV** > The function of the good

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject originates as the elision of a signifier in the signifying chain—i.e., as constitutive forgetting—and uses this to ground an account of the good that refuses to reduce reality to a mere corrective of the pleasure principle, insisting instead that reality is produced through pleasure and that goods (exemplified by cloth/textile as a signifier) are structured from the beginning as signifiers, not natural objects of need.

     it has to do with making, with the production ex nihilo I spoke to you about last time.

195. #195

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.309

     **XIV** > **XXII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a theory of the beautiful as the signifier of a limit-point between life and death, situating it alongside a shame-function (Aidōs) as barriers to jouissance, before concluding that analysis ends not at the Sovereign Good but at the experienced desire of the analyst — a desire that cannot desire the impossible — and that drive arises as the effect of the signifier's mark on need.

     it is possible to achieve for a single moment in this act something which enables one human being to be for another in the place that is both living and dead of the Thing

196. #196

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.313

     **XXIII**

     Theoretical move: The true goal of psychoanalysis—especially training analysis—is not psychological normalization or the 'service of goods' (happiness, comfort, social adjustment) but a confrontation with the fundamental human condition of *Hilflosigkeit* (helplessness/distress) and the relation to desire and death, as exemplified by the figures of Oedipus and Lear; to promise happiness is a form of fraud, and the analytic end must pass through absolute disarray rather than bourgeois comfort.

     he has been duped, tricked by reason of the fact that he achieved happiness. Beyond the sphere of the service of goods and in spite of the complete success of this service, he enters into the zone in which he pursues his desire.

197. #197

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     **XIV** > **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads *Antigone* through the lens of Aristotle's hamartia and Kantian practical reason to argue that Creon's error is the unlimited pursuit of the good, and uses the conjunction of beauty and the Sadean fantasy of indestructible suffering to define the "limit of the second death" as the structural boundary that both tragedy and psychoanalysis must locate — a limit that Christianity displaces onto the image of the crucifixion.

     The limit involved, the limit that it is essential to situate if a certain phenomenon is to emerge through reflection, is something I have called the phenomenon of the beautiful, it is something I have begun to define as the limit of the second death.

198. #198

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.41

     **II**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's apparatus of the pleasure/reality principles is not a psychology but an ethics, and that the structural necessity of language (the cry as sign) to render unconscious processes conscious demonstrates that the unconscious has no other structure than the structure of language — a claim grounded in a close reading of the Entwurf's distinction between identity of perception and identity of thought.

     without the cry that it elicits, we would only have the most confused notion of an unpleasant object, a notion that would indeed fail to detach it from the context of which it would simply be the evil center

199. #199

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     **IX** > On creation *ex nihilo*

     Theoretical move: The vase as fabricated signifier enacts creation *ex nihilo* by introducing emptiness/void into the real, and this structure — the signifier hollowing out a gap in the real — is coextensive with Das Ding as the central problem of ethics, sublimation, and the question of evil.

     if you consider the vase from the point of view I first proposed, as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the center of the real that is called the Thing

200. #200

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.210

     **XIV** > **XV** > The *jouissance* of transgression

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade's work to argue that the literary experiment of transgression reveals the structure of jouissance as approach to an unbearable centre, and introduces two theoretical terms: the part object (as the logic of Sade's social law) and the indestructibility of the Other in fantasy — ultimately connecting the Sadistic relation to the structure of obsessional neurosis.

     The real problem is something else. It is nothing else but the response of a being, whether reader or writer, at the approach to a center of incandescence or an absolute zero that is physically unbearable.

201. #201

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     **Ill**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's foundational texts—especially the *Entwurf*—are grounded not in psychology but in ethics, and that the opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle must be understood as an ethical (not merely psychological) problem, with the *Nebenmensch* (the Other as speaking subject) as the hinge through which satisfaction and reality are constituted for the subject.

     Pleasure in the human economy is only ever articulated in a certain relationship to this point, which is no doubt always left empty, enigmatic

202. #202

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that courtly love operates as a structural technology of sublimation that installs an artificial vacuole—an emptied, depersonalized object (das Ding)—at the center of signification, thereby organizing desire through inaccessibility and privation rather than mystical or historical derivation; this structural analysis then pivots to the ethics of eroticism, connecting the courtly logic of foreplay (Vorlust) and detour to the psychic economy as something irreducible to the pleasure principle.

     the poetry of courtly love, in effect, tends to locate in the place of the Thing certain discontents of the culture.

203. #203

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     **IX** > **X**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Das Ding from Hegelian mediation by insisting on its irreducible, non-dialectizable character—locating it at the limit of signification where the pleasure principle itself functions as the dominance of the signifier—and uses anamorphosis as the paradigm of sublimation: not a recovery of the Thing but a formal pointing toward a void that only language, by its artifice, can encircle.

     I am certainly talking about something. But I am, of course, talking operationally, with reference to the place that it occupies in a certain logical stage of our thought and of our conceptualization, with reference to its function in what concerns us.

204. #204

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.341

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index section (pages 340-344) of Seminar VII, listing key terms, proper names, and page references with no independent theoretical argument; it is non-substantive filler but maps the conceptual terrain of the seminar.

     Ding, 43-70,253 ... as emptiness, 129-30 ... ethics and, 103,104,105 ... as extimacy, 139 ... Law and, 83-84,186 ... sublimation and, 95,99,115,117,126,129,131,134,158

205. #205

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.212

     **XIV** > **XV** > *The Death Drive According to Bernfeld*

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames Freud's death drive as itself a sublimation projected beyond the barrier where the object-as-jouissance is inaccessible, and uses Bernfeld's failed energetic theory of the drive as a productive aporia that reveals the ethical-subjective dimension within which Freud's thought actually moves.

     that barrier beyond which the analytical Thing is to be found, the place where brakes are applied, where the inaccessibility of the object as object of jouissance is organized.

206. #206

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.76

     **V**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding—identified with the mother as the primordial forbidden object—is both the structural ground of the prohibition of incest and the constitutive condition of speech and the pleasure principle itself; the Ten Commandments are reread as the preconscious articulation of this distance from the Thing, and Freud's doctrine is presented as the overturning of any Sovereign Good.

     the desire for the mother cannot be satisfied because it is the end, the terminal point, the abolition of the whole world of demand, which is the one that at its deepest level structures man's unconscious

207. #207

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kant's moral fable to expose the limits of the reality/pleasure principle as a criterion for ethics, arguing that sublimation and perversion both open onto a different register of morality oriented by das Ding (the place of desire), and re-grounds sublimation theoretically by distinguishing it from symptomatic repression through the drive's capacity to find its aim elsewhere without signifying substitution.

     Kleinian theory depends on its having situated the mythic body of the mother at the central place of das Ding.

208. #208

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **XIV** > **XV** > The *jouissance* of transgression

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade as a limit-figure who, in his theory (if not his fantasy), points toward the genuine space of the neighbor as irreducibly other — beyond imaginary capture by the fellow-man — and thereby illuminates the structure of jouissance, transgression, and the ethical problem of loving one's neighbor as oneself.

     one doesn't see in the image, beyond the capture of the image, the emptiness of God to be discovered. It is perhaps man's plenitude, but it is also there that God leaves him with emptiness.

209. #209

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     **II**

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the object-level opposition of fiction/knowable vs. appetite/unknowable to the subject-level opposition, arguing that the pleasure principle presents the good as the substance of subjective activity, while the reality principle — following Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* — refuses any identification of adequacy to reality with a specific good, leaving the substratum of subjective reality as an unresolved question mark.

     how does one qualify the substratum of reality of subjective activity?

210. #210

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     **XIV** > **XIX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Aristotle's concept of catharsis through a Freudian-Lacanian framework, arguing that tragedy — and specifically Antigone's image — reveals the structure of desire: the fascination produced by Antigone's beauty purges the imaginary by operating at the limit between two symbolic fields, thus showing catharsis to be not mere abreaction but a purgation of the imaginary order through the intervention of a singular image.

     what we have articulated on the subject of the proper place of desire in the economy of the Freudian Thing.

211. #211

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.98

     **VII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces sublimation as the positive, "other side" of the psychoanalytic critique of ethics, arguing that the plasticity and displacement-structure of the drives (*Triebe*) — irreducible to instinct and governed by the play of signifiers — is the necessary starting point for any theory of sublimation, while simultaneously exposing the paradoxical cruelty of the moral conscience as a parasite fed by the very satisfactions it demands.

     For the Instinkt is not far from the field of das Ding in relation to which I invite you to recenter this year the way in which the problems around us are posed.

212. #212

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.110

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes *das Ding* as the excluded interior of the psychic organization — an operational but irreducibly opaque field that lies beyond the signifying chain and the pleasure principle, and whose ethical significance distinguishes Freudian metapsychology from both Hegelian philosophy of the state and affect-based psychology.

     What is involved is that excluded interior which, in the terminology of the Entwurf is thus excluded in the interior... This Ding, whose place and significance I have tried to make you feel, is absolutely essential as far as Freud's thought is concerned.

213. #213

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.171

     **XI** > **XII** > **A critique of Bernfeld** > **A CURIOUS CASE OF SUBLIMATION**

     Theoretical move: By reading Arnaud Daniel's scatological poem within courtly love, Lacan demonstrates that sublimation does not require the disappearance of the sexual object but instead involves the construction of a refined symbolic apparatus around a cruel, empty Thing — the Lady's very crudity is what unveils Das Ding at the heart of sublimation.

     the emptiness of a thing in all its crudity, a thing that reveals itself in its nudity to be the thing, her thing, the one that is to be found at her very heart in its cruel emptiness.

214. #214

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the history of art—from cave painting through anamorphosis—as an extended metaphor for sublimation, arguing that art's true end is not imitation but the encircling and rendering present/absent of the Thing (Das Ding), and that the Oedipal/paternal myth (including Freud's Moses) functions as the founding mythic support for sublimation's possibility within the ethics of psychoanalysis.

     what we described as the central place, as the intimate exteriority or 'extimacy,' that is the Thing, will help us to shed light on the question or mystery that remains for those who are interested in prehistoric art, namely, its site as such.

215. #215

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.127

     **IX** > On creation *ex nihilo*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of sublimation grounded in the topological function of Das Ding: the Thing is that which "in the real suffers from the signifier," is constitutively veiled, and is represented—never directly encountered—by the created object, whose paradigmatic form is the potter's vase, a void-around-which that enacts creation ex nihilo.

     the Thing is that which in the real, the primordial real, I will say, suffers from the signifier

216. #216

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     **XIV** > **XVIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the world of goods structured around the ego ideal and ideal ego necessarily produces a catastrophic demand that exceeds it, and that only practices like the potlatch—the ritual destruction of goods—bear witness to the possibility of disciplining desire outside the dialectic of competition and conflict; this insight is linked to the contemporary threat of collective annihilation as a structural, not merely accidental, consequence of the discourse of science.

     What is beyond this barrier? Don't forget that if we know there is a barrier and that there is a beyond, we know nothing about what lies beyond.

217. #217

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.279

     **XIV** > **XXI** > **Antigone between two deaths**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the defining characteristic of Sophoclean heroes is not simply solitude but a structural position "between life and death" — the race-is-run stance — and uses this to show how Antigone's image rises up through a tragic anamorphosis that exposes the gap between nature and culture, the imaginary and the symbolic, against which humanist thought dissolves.

     it is because man mistakes evil for the good, because something beyond the limits of Atè has become Antigone's good, namely, a good that is different from everyone else's

218. #218

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.288

     **XIV** > **XXI** > **Antigone between two deaths**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Antigone's position is not grounded in divine law or ethical content but in the pure ontological affirmation that language freezes being into an ineffaceable singularity—her brother *is* what he is, independent of any predicates—and that this linguistic 'being' constitutes the radical limit (*Atè*) she embodies, distinguishing her from Creon's mere *hamartia*.

     That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached.

219. #219

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Decalogue—especially the commandments against lying and coveting—structurally reveals the dialectical relationship between desire and the Law: the Law does not merely prohibit desire but constitutes and inflames it, so that das Ding, as the primordial lost correlative of speech, is only accessible through (and as the excess produced by) the Law's interdiction, a logic Lacan demonstrates by substituting 'Thing' for 'sin' in Paul's Epistle to the Romans.

     it is a question of something whose value resides in the fact that none of these objects exists without having the closest possible relationship to that in which the human being can rest as if it were die Trude, das Ding not insofar as it is his good, but insofar as it is the good in which he may find rest.

220. #220

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     **II**

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the foundational thesis of Seminar VII: the moral law, structured by the Symbolic, is the agency through which the Real is actualized; and psychoanalytic ethics must be distinguished from all prior ethics (exemplified by Aristotle) by seeking a particular, hidden truth in the subject rather than conformity to a universal order or Sovereign Good.

     the problematic character of that which Freud posits under the term reality... It leads us into a special area, that of psychic reality, which presents itself to us with the problematic character of a previously unequaled order.

221. #221

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **IX** > **X**

     Theoretical move: Lacan organizes sublimation around Das Ding (the Thing) as a constitutive emptiness, then maps the three Freudian mechanisms—Verdrängung, Verschiebung, and Verwerfung—onto art, religion, and science respectively, arguing that science's foreclosure of the Thing causes it to reappear in the Real, while courtly love is positioned as the paradigmatic case of sublimation in art.

     This Thing, all forms of which created by man belong to the sphere of sublimation, this Thing will always be represented by emptiness, precisely because it cannot be represented by anything else

222. #222

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.66

     **V**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs Freud's *Entwurf* around *das Ding* as the original lost object that structures the entire movement of *Vorstellungen* under the pleasure principle, while establishing that the unconscious is organized according to the laws of condensation/displacement (metaphor/metonymy), and that access to thought processes requires their mediation through word-representations (*Wort-Vorstellungen*) in preconsciousness — thereby grounding the ethics of psychoanalysis in the constitutive distance from *das Ding*.

     das Ding is something that presents and isolates itself as the strange feature around which the whole movement of the Vorstellung turns

223. #223

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.60

     **IV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan explicates Freud's *Entwurf* and Letter 52 to establish that *Das Ding* (the *Nebenmensch* as irreducible alien core) is the primordial outside around which the subject's entire economy of desire is oriented, and that the lost object — structurally unfindable — is what drives the subject's search for satisfaction; simultaneously, the signifying structure interposing between perception and consciousness is what constitutes the unconscious as such.

     The Ding is the element that is initially isolated by the subject in his experience of the Nebenmensch as being by its very nature alien, Fremde.

224. #224

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Kantian ethics and Sadian ethics are structural mirrors of each other—both arrive at *das Ding* by eliminating all pathological (affective) reference from the moral law—and that this convergence reveals the fundamental relationship between the moral law, desire, and the Real, with pain as the sole sentient correlative of pure practical reason.

     We are thus faced here with a question, that is to say, the question of the relationship to das Ding.

225. #225

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.61

     **IV**

     Theoretical move: By reading das Ding as the 'beyond-of-the-signified' — the absolute, prehistoric Other that can only be missed, never reached — Lacan grounds the clinical structures of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia in differential relations to this primordial lost object, and then opens the path toward a Kantian ethics where das Ding is replaced by the pure signifying system of the moral law.

     Das Ding, as the absolute Other of the subject, that one is supposed to find again. It is to be found at the most as something missed.

226. #226

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bernfeld's ego-psychological account of sublimation (which grounds it in pre-given *Ichziele*) in order to pose the real problem: how a social consensus can originate a structural function like the poetic, and then demonstrates that courtly love is the paradigm case — a historically emergent, signifier-driven construction of the Lady as sublimated object that reshapes the entire economy of desire and social exchange.

     What needs to be justified is not simply the secondary benefits that individuals might derive from their works, but the originary possibility of a function like the poetic function in the form of a structure within a social consensus

227. #227

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.330

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar VII by consolidating the ethics of psychoanalysis around the injunction not to give ground relative to one's desire, articulating the relationship between jouissance, sublimation, and the 'service of goods' through the figures of the hero, the saint, and tragic catharsis, and ends by locating modern science as the unconscious refuge of human desire.

     That's the object, the good, that one pays for the satisfaction of one's desire.

228. #228

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.120

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the defining formula of sublimation — "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing" — as the key to understanding how the drive finds satisfaction beyond its aim, and he illustrates this via courtly love and a concrete fable of collecting, arguing that sublimation reveals the relationship of the drive to das Ding as distinct from any imaginary object.

     the most general formula that I can give you of sublimation is the following: it raises an object — and I don't mind the suggestion of a play on words in the term I use — to the dignity of the Thing.

229. #229

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.166

     **XI** > **XII** > **A critique of Bernfeld**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bernfeld's account of sublimation as dependent on a synchrony with repression and the Ich/Libidoziele distinction, arguing instead that sublimation must be articulated around das Ding — a primordial, non-object — which precedes the ego's aims and anchors the properly Freudian ethics/aesthetics Lacan is developing throughout Seminar VII.

     the term I use in the effort to articulate sublimation in relation to what we have to deal with, das Ding, or what I call the Thing, refers to a decisive place around which the definition of sublimation must be articulated - even before I was born, and, obviously, therefore, before the Ichziele

230. #230

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that *das Ding* occupies a paradoxical topological position—excluded yet central—and that the subject's entire relation to the good (Wohl), the pleasure principle, repetition, and the reality principle is organized around this primordial excluded exterior; ethics proper begins only beyond these structural coordinates, at the point where the unconscious lie (proton pseudos) marks the subject's constitutive inability to directly approach das Ding.

     das Ding is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded. That is to say, in reality das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as the prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget

231. #231

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

     Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* and *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*, argues that jouissance remains forbidden even after the death of God, and that the commandment to love one's neighbor is ethically explosive precisely because the neighbor harbors the same "fundamental evil"—the same proximity to das Ding—that I harbour in myself; altruism and utilitarianism are exposed as frauds that allow us to avoid confronting the malignant jouissance at the heart of the ethical problem, which only Sade (and Kant) begin to articulate honestly.

     that of my jouissance and which I don't dare go near? For as soon as I go near it… there rises up the unfathomable aggressivity… which in the very place of the vanished Law adds its weight to that which prevents me from crossing a certain frontier at the limit of the Thing.

232. #232

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.199

     **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that Kant's moral calculus collapses once jouissance—understood as implicitly bound to evil and death—is substituted for pleasure in the ethical equation: the moral law then serves as a support for jouissance rather than its constraint, revealing that the law of the good can only operate through evil, and that the ethical subject is torn between a duty of truth that preserves the place of jouissance and a resignation to the good that extinguishes it.

     Must I go toward my duty of truth insofar as it preserves the authentic place of my jouissance, even if it is empty?

233. #233

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     **II**

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

     The Wunsch does not have the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of laws - even if it is universal that this particularity is to be found in every human being.

234. #234

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > And a bit further on she continues:

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's blind Pensée as an incarnation of the partial object of desire — specifically as a figure that, through her blindness, escapes the scopic economy (seeing-oneself-seen) and instead operates through the structure of the voice and speech, which cannot be heard hearing itself except in hallucination; this leads to the claim that castration alone separates absolute desire from natural desire, and that the sublime object of desire functions as a substitute for das Ding.

     She is surely the sublime object - the sublime object insofar as I indicated its position to you last year as a substitute for the Thing. As you realized at the time, the nature of the Thing would not be so different from the nature of Woman

235. #235

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.140

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S* > <span id="page-136-0"></span>**EXIT FROM THE ULTRA-W ORLD**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Diotima's speech in the Symposium as staging a fundamental slippage between two functions of beauty—beauty as a veil over the desire for death (between-two-deaths) and beauty as the metonymic object of desire—arguing that this movement illustrates the metonymic structure of desire itself, while also pointing toward what is missed when Plato is read as reducing Eros to narcissistic self-perfection (identification with the ideal ego).

     beauty is the mode of a kind of giving birth... It is the painful escape route of all that is mortal toward what it aspires to: immortality. Diotima's whole speech articulates the function of beauty as being first and foremost an illusion, a fundamental mirage.

236. #236

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.111

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the topology of desire in the death drive and the "between-two-deaths," arguing that Freud's discovery of the unconscious is not reducible to the content of the Oedipus myth but to its structural form—"he did not know"—which inscribes the subject's desire in a signifying chain beyond consciousness, beyond adaptation, and in permanent tension with individual life.

     The 'between-two-deaths' - which is not so difficult to grasp, because it simply means that, for humankind, the two borders related to death do not overlap - grew out of this topology over the course of the last year.

237. #237

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > <span id="page-31-0"></span>**SET A N D CHARACTERS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of Greek love (erastes/eromenos) as a purified pedagogical model for theorizing the lover as desiring subject and the beloved as possessing something the lover lacks, thereby grounding the psychoanalytic concepts of desire, transference, and love in a single dialectical framework; simultaneously, he insists that homosexuality remains a perversion regardless of its cultural sublimation, and introduces the axiom that "love is giving what you don't have."

     desire qua desire for something else. We arrived at this by analyzing the effects of language on the subject.

238. #238

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.93

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates — his *atopia*, his daemon, his relation to truth and death — to theorize a pre-subjective, discourse-grounded dimension of truth and the Real, drawing a genealogy from pre-Socratic philosophy through Plato's *Symposium* in order to illuminate what is demanded of the analyst: a situatedness-nowhere analogous to Socrates' own unsituable position.

     This is the very term I had to bring out last year in my discussion of ethics, and that I called 'the Thing.' It is not *die Sache*, an affair, [but rather *das Ding]* — you can understand the latter, if you prefer, as the main concern *[la grande affaire]* or ultimate reality.

239. #239

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.97

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium to locate the origin of a specifically modern, narcissistic conception of love—the fantasy of fusion with a lost half—distinguishing it from both Christian mystical love and Socratic/Platonic eros, while also theorizing transference as the structural effect of Plato's own fantasy asserting itself across historical contexts.

     What Plato wants, in any case, is the Thing, to pragma.

240. #240

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.420

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter VI - Deriding the Sphere: Aristophanes**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Chapter VI of Seminar VIII, providing philological, bibliographic, and contextual annotations on the seminar text; it contains no original theoretical argumentation.

     Lacan contrasted die Sache with das Ding in Seminar VII, during the class given December 9, 1959.

241. #241

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S*

     Theoretical move: By reading Diotima's myth of Love's parentage (Poros/Aporia) through the formula "love is giving what you don't have," Lacan argues that Love belongs to the intermediate domain of doxa rather than episteme, and that the demonic/daemonic order is the precursor to the symbolic register of the unconscious—what was once attributed to gods is now reclaimed as the subject's own messages authenticated through the symbolic.

     love belongs to a zone, to a form of affair, thing, pragma, or praxis that is at the same level and of the same quality as doxa.

242. #242

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Claudel's Sygne de Coûfontaine to push beyond the ethical limit marked by Antigone's beauty — the "between two deaths" — arguing that Sygne's sacrifice, which ends in an absolute refusal of meaning (the "no"), goes beyond ancient tragedy's evil-God function and beyond beauty itself, indexing a new form of human tragedy organized around a desire adjacent only to the reference of Sade.

     this locus is outstripped by going - not as people say in a kind of refrain - beyond good and evil, which is a fine formulation by which to obscure what is at stake, but beyond beauty, strictly speaking

243. #243

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     **Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic relationship is not reducible to a neutral "situation" but is constituted by a high-degree sublimation of libidinal investment, making love — not well-being — the proper telos of analysis; he thus announces a return to the philosophical tradition on love (via Plato's Symposium) to supply what psychoanalytic literature has entirely neglected.

     I am not there, in the final analysis, for a person's own good, but in order that he love.

244. #244

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

     Theoretical move: By reading the scandalous comportment of the gods of Antiquity through the concept of âgalma, Lacan argues that divine love (eros/agape) structures the deceptive, mutually-luring relation between Socrates and Alcibiades, and that this same structure—from the unconscious toward the subject ascending to the core object—governs the psychoanalytic dialectic of love.

     a pure manifestation of an essence that remained completely hidden, whose enigma was entirely below the surface. Hence the daemonic incarnation of their scandalous exploits.

245. #245

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     **Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VIII by situating transference not within an intersubjective framework but within a constitutive disparity, tracing its origin back to love (the Breuer/Anna O. encounter), and connecting it to the prior year's ethical reflection — especially the rejection of the Sovereign Good (Plato's Schwärmerei), the function of beauty as a barrier to the death drive, and the 'between-two-deaths' — in order to establish Socrates' secret knowledge of love as the hidden key to understanding transference.

     the impenetrable void... Plato's Schwärmerei consists in having projected the idea of the Sovereign Good onto the impenetrable void.

246. #246

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Agathon's speech in the Symposium is a deliberately ironic, "macaronic" discourse in which the tragic poet reveals love as what is radically unclassifiable and always inopportune — always lagging behind — and that this comic-tragic ambivalence is structurally necessary: in the Christian context, love fills the void left by the inexorable fatal oracle and the commandment of the second death, which can no longer be sustained.

     the closed and incomprehensible nature of the fatal oracle and the inexpressibility of the commandment as regards the second death. It is inasmuch as this commandment can no longer be sustained... that love appears. Love takes their place, filling up this emptiness.

247. #247

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.289

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from critiquing reductive accounts of desire to introducing Claudel's trilogy as a contemporary tragedy that, like Antigone, pushes the subject to the limit of the "second death" — here uniquely demanding that the heroine sacrifice not merely life but her very being, the sacred pact constituting her identity, going *beyond* the limits Antigone reached.

     not simply her reasons for living but something in which she recognizes her very being

248. #248

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan positions the logic of desire—articulated through the fantasy matheme ($◇a) and the topology of the subject's relation to the object—as the necessary supplement to Lévi-Straussian structuralism, while simultaneously arguing that the three clinical structures (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are each 'normal' expressions of the three constitutive terms of desire, and that misreading drive as biological agency is the foundational error of ego-psychology/American psychoanalysis.

     To take at first as object the first form of identification would have been to engage our whole discourse on identification in the problems of Totem and Taboo, the work which for Freud was, one could well say, what one could call die Sache selbst, the thing itself

249. #249

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from a critique of psychoanalytic congress discourse to articulate the structural relationship between anxiety, desire, jouissance, and the Other: the prohibition of jouissance (its Aufhebung) is the supporting plane on which desire is constituted, the Other is the metaphor of this prohibition, and anxiety must be understood through the desire of the Other rather than as the jouissance of a mythical self—a move that corrects both Jones's aphanisis and a Jungian-inflected misreading of the drive.

     the distance that separates the Other from the thing... the relationship between anxiety and the desire of the Other... the Other with a big 0 is. The thing in short elided, reduced to its place

250. #250

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.72

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

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

     this truth towards which Descartes advances with a conquering stride is indeed that of the thing, and this leads us to what? To emptying the world to the extent of no longer leaving anything of it except this void which is called extension.

251. #251

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.309

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan articulates the objet petit a as a topological-ontological operator: it is the object of castration that, by its enucleation from the cross-cap, transforms the imaginary sphere into a Möbius surface, thereby constituting the subject's world while marking the irreducible hole at the centre of desire and the Other's desire—a 'acosmic point' that underlies every metaphor, every symptom, and the anxiety of confronting what the Other desires of the subject.

     we come here to pose the question of its relationship to the thing, not the sacred one, but what I described to you as das Ding

252. #252

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.3

     *Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar IX by arguing that identification must be approached not through the imaginary relation to the other but through the logical problem of identity (A = A), and that the subject is constituted not by any self-present cogito but solely through the existence of the signifier and its effects — a thesis which frames the entire year's inquiry.

     this is known to those who formerly listened to my seminar on Ethics, the one in which I exactly approached the function of this barrier of beauty under the form of the agony which the thing (la chose) requires of us for us to join it.

253. #253

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.129

     *Seminar 13*: *Wednesday 14 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The neurotic's defining feature is the desire to know — specifically to reverse the effacing of the thing by the signifier and recover the real that preceded signification — and this structure, rather than social maladjustment, gives neurosis its theoretical authority; meanwhile, sublimation is reframed as a paradoxical detour through signification by which jouissance is obtained without repression.

     in jouissance the medium that intervenes, the medium through which access is given to its essence which can only be - as I showed you - the thing, that this medium also can be nothing but a signifier.

254. #254

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage traces how the subject constitutes itself through the unary trait and the non-response of the Other, rewriting Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as a formula of the One's advent, and then uses Sade to demonstrate that the object of desire is structurally dependent on the Other's silence—culminating in the Sadian drive toward annihilating signifying power as the logical extreme of this dialectic.

     the subject himself in the final analysis is destined for the thing, but his law, more exactly his fatum is this path that he can only describe by passing through the Other

255. #255

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's ethics cannot be reduced to utilitarianism or humanism because its core is the structuring function of the Name-of-the-Father as prohibition of jouissance, a mechanism legible in St. Paul's account of the law and sin, and whose truth Freud traces through the Oedipus complex, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism to a Judeo-Christian ontological tradition that grounds the subject in discourse rather than in biology.

     As for what I myself have called the Freudian Thing, about which I will speak to you tomorrow evening, it is first of all Freud's Thing- namely, something that is diametrically opposed to intention-desire.

256. #256

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's investigation of narcissism and the mirror stage reveals that self-love is always love of an imaginary other, and that the unconscious—structured like language—marks the place where the subject is split from the Thing (Das Ding), making any ethics grounded in ego-psychology or object relations insufficient for the demands of scientific modernity.

     this Thing is no object and could not be one, in that its end arises as a correlate of a hypothetical subject only insofar as this subject disappears or vanishes - the subject fades but does not end - beneath the signifying structure.

257. #257

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the ego-psychological reduction of desire to libidinal object-relations (oral/anal/genital stages), arguing instead that desire has no proper object but only the Thing as its impossible horizon, and that the commandment to love one's neighbour exposes the irreducible ambivalence (love/hatred) that makes any ethics of psychoanalysis inseparable from sublimation, the death drive, and the laws of speech that encircle das Ding.

     Desire has no object, if not… the accidental one… that happens to manage to signify… the confines of the Thing - in other words, of this nothing around which all human passion tightens its spasm with a shorter or longer modulation.

258. #258

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions Freud's ethics as irreducible to any morality of the sovereign good, honesty, or utility: the good cannot be represented, guilt is rooted in the unconscious and tied to a structural (not individual) crime, and desire—articulated through language including its negations—constitutes the very "want-to-be" that marks the subject, making the unconscious not a zone without logic but the very source of negation.

     Freud indicates that the good does not exist and that the sovereign good cannot be represented.

259. #259

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.11

     Lecture Announcement

     Theoretical move: This lecture announcement frames Lacan's ethics seminars as a challenge to normalization in analytic practice and to religious monopoly on morality, positioning Freud's articulation of the unconscious as capable of grounding an ethics that goes beyond hedonism, altruism, and phenomenological critique — centering Das Ding and the Name of the Father as the structural pivots of desire and moral law.

     spiritual men to resituate the Thing around which desire's nostalgia revolves.

260. #260

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.12

     <span id="page-8-0"></span>Introduction: Welcome to Hell

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychotherapeutic "positive orientation" of contemporary society constitutes a collective disavowal of a foundational inner negativity or deadness, and that psychoanalysis — despite Freud's self-distinction from religion's consolation function — largely replicates religion's salvational logic by promising deliverance from suffering rather than confronting the constitutive negativity of existence.

     you touched the black matter that constitutes the heart of existence

261. #261

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.25

     <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity

     Theoretical move: From a "negative psychoanalytic-existential" standpoint, the subject's innermost core is constitutive non-being: identity and life-narrative are compensatory illusions masking a foundational void, while existence itself is structured as repetition compulsion—a serial re-encounter with one's own non-existence, wound, and trauma.

     At the core of the subject, in her very innermost heart, is her annihilation and death.

262. #262

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.99

     <span id="page-92-0"></span>The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive—understood as a drive toward loss, self-destruction, and repetition of originary absence—is the foundational structure of both subjectivity and sociality, with sacrifice, love, and political bonds all grounded in shared nothingness rather than positive satisfaction; the emancipated subject is thus one who avows hopelessness rather than seeking untainted enjoyment.

     For a positive outlook, there are objects out there, things for us to enjoy, and they are satisfying. But for psychoanalysis, you have to create the thing. It's through sacrifce that we actually create an absence and give ourselves something to enjoy.

263. #263

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > SECTION II. Of Time.

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes that space and time are pure forms of sensible intuition—not properties of things in themselves—thereby grounding the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition while strictly delimiting the sphere of valid knowledge to phenomena; this transcendental idealism is contrasted against both the Newtonian (substantivist) and Leibnizian (empiricist-relational) positions, both of which fail to secure the apodeictic certainty of mathematics.

     What may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves and without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility is quite unknown to us.

264. #264

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > APPENDIX. > REMARK ON THE AMPHIBOLY OF THE CONCEPTIONS OF REFLECTION.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the transcendental object (noumenon) marks only the limit of sensuous intuition — a structurally empty space that neither experience nor pure understanding can fill — and that misapplying the understanding beyond its proper field (making objects conform to concepts rather than concepts to intuitions) is the root error of transcendental illusion; the passage closes by systematically dividing the concept of 'nothing' according to the categories.

     the cause of a phenomenon (consequently not itself a phenomenon), and which cannot be thought either as a quantity or as reality, or as substance

265. #265

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Ideal of the Summum Bonum as a Determining Ground of the Ultimate End of Pure Reason. > 1. WHAT CAN I KNOW? 2. WHAT OUGHT I TO DO? 3. WHAT MAY I HOPE?

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the unity of ends in a moral world (regnum gratiae) grounds teleological unity in nature, making practical reason — not speculative reason — the foundation for the idea of a supreme good and a Primal Being; moral theology must remain immanent, warning against the transcendent misuse that would derive moral laws from the divine will rather than reason's own legislation.

     a conception of the Divine Being was arrived at, which we now hold to be the correct one, not because speculative reason convinces us of its correctness, but because it accords with the moral principles of reason

266. #266

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Transcendental Ideal (Prototypon Trancendentale).

     Theoretical move: Kant establishes the Transcendental Ideal (ens realissimum) as the necessary but purely regulative idea of reason—the sum-total of all reality functioning as the a priori condition for the complete determination of every possible thing—while warning that hypostatizing this ideal into an actually existing Supreme Being constitutes an illegitimate dialectical illusion.

     If, therefore, a transcendental substratum lies at the foundation of the complete determination of things—a substratum which is to form the fund from which all possible predicates of things are to be supplied, this substratum cannot be anything else than the idea of a sum-total of reality.

267. #267

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION IX. Of the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason with regard to the Cosmological Ideas.

     Theoretical move: Kant resolves the first two cosmological antinomies by converting the dialectical (constitutive) principle of reason into a regulative one: the empirical regress in the series of conditions proceeds not in infinitum (which would presuppose a given infinite totality) but in indefinitum, because the world of sense is never given as a complete whole but only through the regress itself.

     no experience of an absolute limit, and consequently no experience of a condition, which is itself absolutely unconditioned, is discoverable

268. #268

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION VI. Transcendental Idealism as the Key to the Solution of Pure Cosmological Dialectic.

     Theoretical move: Kant deploys Transcendental Idealism as the resolution of cosmological antinomies by establishing that phenomena are mere representations whose reality is exhausted within the bounds of possible experience, such that the "transcendental object" functions only as an unknowable non-sensuous correlate of sensibility—not as a thing in itself accessible independently of experience.

     we may, at the same time, term the non-sensuous cause of phenomena the transcendental object—but merely as a mental correlate to sensibility, considered as a receptivity

269. #269

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Ideal of the Summum Bonum as a Determining Ground of the Ultimate End of Pure Reason. > 1. WHAT CAN I KNOW? 2. WHAT OUGHT I TO DO? 3. WHAT MAY I HOPE?

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the three questions of pure reason—what can I know, what ought I to do, what may I hope—converge on a moral theology in which the necessary connection between moral worthiness and happiness can only be grounded in the postulate of a supreme rational cause (God) and a future life, making the 'ideal of the summum bonum' a practically necessary idea of reason rather than a speculative one.

     that law, assuming such to exist, which has no other motive than the worthiness of being happy, I term a moral or ethical law

270. #270

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION IX. Of the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason with regard to the Cosmological Ideas.

     Theoretical move: Kant resolves the Fourth Antinomy by distinguishing the dynamical from the mathematical regress: an intelligible, necessary being can serve as the non-empirical ground of phenomenal contingency without forming a member of the empirical series, thus the regulative principle of reason governs phenomena while leaving open—without proving—a transcendental ground beyond them. This move also marks the threshold at which cosmological ideas become transcendent, compelling the transition to rational theology.

     the existence of phenomena, always conditioned and never self-subsistent, requires us to look for an object different from phenomena—an intelligible object, with which all contingency must cease

271. #271

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > CHAPTER III Of the Ground of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the pure categories of the understanding have no legitimate transcendental use beyond possible experience: without a corresponding sensuous intuition, the categories are empty forms of thought incapable of determining any object, and the concept of the noumenon must therefore be understood only in a negative, limitative sense—as a boundary-marker for sensible cognition rather than a positive domain of intelligible objects.

     things in themselves, which lie beyond its province, are called noumena for the very purpose of indicating that this cognition does not extend its application to all that the understanding thinks.

272. #272

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.185

     Silence > The mouse

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kafkan "strategy of art"—exemplified by Josephine's voice as a minimal, ready-made gap within the law—inevitably defeats itself: the very institutionalization of the exception reinserts it into the symbolic order, closing the gap it opened and confirming that art's transcendence is always domesticated back into a social function.

     'to elevate an object to the dignity of the Thing' (Lacan 1992, p. 112). Josephine herself may well be convinced that her voice is very special, but it cannot be told apart from any other.

273. #273

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.150

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > Breast-Feeding and Freedom

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern subject's definition as free necessarily generates anxiety by including the Real within the Symbolic as a negation (the indestructible double), and that the proper response is not to interpret anxiety as demand but to sustain the object a as the unspeakable support of freedom—illustrated negatively by Frankenstein's reduction of the monster's desire to a demand.

     the object cause of desire that lends things their only value, their desirability-the subject is condemned to wander in pursuit of one thing after another, without any hope of freedom

274. #274

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.221

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues for a "total incompatibility" between Butler's constructivist account of sex and the psychoanalytic position: sex, defined by the law of the drives, cannot be deconstructed or culturally re-signified because the drives are the irreducible Other of culture, and the impossibility they introduce into language is precisely what necessitates repetition and forecloses voluntarism.

     it is the deadlock of language's conflict with itself that produces this experience of the inexperienceable (which can neither be remembered nor spoken)

275. #275

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.217

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that sex is not an incomplete or unstable meaning (as Butler's historicist/deconstructionist position holds) but the structural impossibility of completing meaning—the internal failure of signification itself—and that this makes sexual difference a Real rather than Symbolic difference, unlike race or class, while grounding a conception of the subject as radically unknowable and thus the only guarantee against racism.

     When we speak of language's failure with respect to sex, we speak not of its falling short of a prediscursive object but of its falling into contradiction with itself. Sex coincides with this failure.

276. #276

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.167

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's theory of disciplinary power is fundamentally incomplete because it lacks a psychoanalytic account of jouissance: the "mild and provident" ideal father (Name of the Father) does not simply neutralize power but installs interdiction of jouissance as its operative principle, which drives the escalation of surveillance and ultimately precipitates the return of totalitarianism as the primal father's revenge — a structural trajectory Foucault cannot see because he expelled psychoanalysis from his framework.

     In forbidding excess enjoyment, they appear to be its only obstacle; the subject/prisoner is thus free to dream of their removal and of the bounty of pleasure that will then be his.

277. #277

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.104

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

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

     What is crucial for psychoanalysis is not the reciprocity of individual subjects... but the nonreciprocal relation between the subject and its sublime, inaccessible Thing; that is, that part of the subject that exceeds the subject, its repressed desire.

278. #278

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.134

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety

     Theoretical move: Anxiety, understood as a signal of the overproximity of object a rather than of lack, is structurally equivalent to the Gothic vampire figure; the symbolic order defends against the Real through negation, doubt, and repetition rather than interpretation, and psychoanalysis founds itself precisely on the rigorous registration of its own inability to know the Real - a 'belief without belief' that is not skepticism.

     psychoanalysis 'raises ' the unconscious and the woman's desire 'to the dignity of the Thing.'

279. #279

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *Christianity as a/theistic*

     Theoretical move: Rollins argues that Christianity harbors an irreducible "a/theistic" structure: because all beliefs necessarily fall short of the divine (Hyper-presence), authentic faith must simultaneously affirm and negate its own content, producing a productive tension that is neither agnosticism nor synthesis but the condition of faith itself—a move supported by the apophatic tradition from Pseudo-Dionysius to Anselm.

     it has the form of a definition but actually ascribes no positive essence to the divine: it does not say that God is the greatest conceivable being but rather that a greater than God cannot be thought.

280. #280

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *The God-shaped hole*

     Theoretical move: The passage reframes the "God-shaped hole" concept by opposing the traditional view that humans share a universal religious longing with Camus's figure of quiescent anti-theism — a position that dissolves both theism and atheism by treating the religious question itself as meaningless, not merely unanswerable.

     beneath the surface of daily life we all share a fundamental religious longing to which the only legitimate response is a relationship with Jesus.

281. #281

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *The Bible and conceptual idolatry*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bible itself enacts a structural resistance to conceptual idolatry through the irreducible plurality and contradiction of its divine descriptions, combined with a theological insistence on God's unrepresentability — such that revelation always occurs through concealment, and no single ideological or systematic reading can legitimately colonize the text or the divine.

     God who is beyond all finding out... Moses is protected from the death that would result if he were to catch sight of the face of God

282. #282

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *Beyond ‘God’*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that idolatry consists not in a false claim of connection with God but in a false claim of adequate understanding of God, and uses Eckhart's prayer as a pivot to articulate the irreducible gap between any conceptual definition of God and the divine reality it attempts to name — a gap that implicates the subject's self-image in every theological claim.

     we must recognize the extent to which these reflections fall short of that which they attempt to define and always reflect something of the one who makes the claims

283. #283

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > The secret

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-philosophical pivot: rather than choosing between Wittgenstein's injunction to silence and the evangelical imperative to speak of God, Rollins synthesizes them via the Christian mystical tradition into an "a/theological" stance where the unspeakable is precisely what compels speech, framing this as a rediscovery rather than an innovation.

     the mystic approached God as a secret which one was compelled to share, yet which retained its secrecy

284. #284

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Desire for transformation and transformative\

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious desire is never satisfied by its object (God as hypernonymous/hyperabsent) but is instead *constituted* by that object — making the seeking itself the finding, and transformative desire the very medium of transformation rather than a preliminary stage before it.

     Because God, as hypernonymous, can never be made utterly present, desire is never satisfied in God.

285. #285

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Corpus Christi*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological move that displaces propositional truth (orthodoxy) in favour of transformative, relational truth (orthopraxis), arguing that the encounter with God occurs in and through the body of the neighbour—a claim enacted liturgically through parable, Sufi poetry, and Holocaust testimony, all of which converge on the Lacanian-resonant dissolution of a self-enclosed 'I' as the condition of genuine encounter.

     she could translate and distribute the Word of God to the people... Without hesitation the woman used all the money she had gathered to feed the hungry and rebuild lost homes.

286. #286

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *The saying of nothing*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic theological discourse operates as a "powerless" or apophatic speech-act that does not colonize the divine with logos but instead creates a sacred clearing in which the divine can address the subject — inverting the evangelistic model from answer-provision to question-opening, and theorizing language as the medium through which its own limits are enacted.

     we use words in order to tear through them and glimpse at what lies beneath … The desire to say nothing, to create sacred space, opens up the most beautiful type of language available.

287. #287

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

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

     before the unapproachable flames of the divine, these images are but ash

288. #288

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’* > *Background to the service*

     Theoretical move: Rollins argues that the theological weight of the crucifixion is only accessible when it is severed from the immediate comfort of the resurrection—the "closed tomb" as a testing-ground for faith stripped of economic return—thereby reframing the Easter singularity not as a consoling unity but as a site of irreducible decision and gift.

     the true horror of the cross allows no such shelter, for if considered in itself, it signals the seeming abandonment of God by God and the possible victory of an all-embracing nihilism.

289. #289

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Ethics and love*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love exceeds and fulfils ethics by functioning as a radical surplus beyond rule-following, and that scripture should be read as an open, ever-renewed encounter rather than a closed ethical rulebook - a theological critique of foundationalist ethics in favour of a "law of love" as the only genuine foundation.

     Far from teaching an ethical system, this was the very approach that Jesus critiqued when he called the Pharisees whitewashed tombs: clean on the outside but rotting on the inside.

290. #290

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a practical-theological argument that epistemic humility before God ("we are all heretics") is not a failure but a liberating recognition, staging this through liturgical performance that embodies the claim that authentic Christian subjectivity is constituted by acknowledged limitation rather than doctrinal mastery.

     God ought to be conceived of as that which is greater than conception… 'God', rather than being a straightforward concept, is thus a term that stands in the place of the one whom we love but cannot grasp.

291. #291

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *Iconic God-talk*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that an "iconic" approach to God-talk — in contrast to idolatry or humanistic irrelevance — preserves transcendence within immanence: the icon is the site where the divine is simultaneously revealed and hidden, and this logic is illustrated by distinguishing lust/indifference from love, where the beloved's face functions as an icon because it both manifests and conceals the other who gazes back.

     the face of our beloved is both revealed and hidden

292. #292

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Nourished by our hunger*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a structural inversion of the classical "God-shaped hole" motif: rather than lack preceding and awaiting fulfillment, the void is constituted *by* the encounter with God — making absence itself the positive form of presence, and desire the evidence of having found rather than the sign of not yet finding.

     the void left by God is not unlike a type of black hole, full of something that cannot be seen

293. #293

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that divine revelation operates through a third mode beyond anonymity and adequacy — "hypernymity" — in which God's superabundant presence overwhelms understanding and is experienced as absence, such that desire/longing for God is itself the sign of God's (hyper)presence rather than God's absence.

     each revelation is so luminous that it cannot be reduced to the horizon of our sight. In this way the revelation of God is like a veil which both reveals and conceals the one whom we love.

294. #294

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’* > *Service description*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-liturgical argument that genuine faith requires dwelling in radical uncertainty (Holy Saturday) rather than instrumentalizing God for existential security — faith forged in the void of divine absence transcends reward/punishment logic, enacting a form of desire that is unconditional and non-transactional.

     Holy Saturday ridicules the idea that the feeling of God's absence is reserved for those who are irreligious, for in reality it is only the religious individual who can really know this absence.

295. #295

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a liturgical enactment of the shift from orthodoxy as propositional belief to orthodoxy as transformative practice, using the Advent/Incarnation narrative to theorize how the subject must empty itself (undergo a kind of ego-death) to become a dwelling-place for truth, structuring this through the homology between Mary's womb and the subject's receptive void.

     Only when it is the pearl that you desire are you rich. For then the pearl will possess you, not you the pearl.

296. #296

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Religion and the absence of God*

     Theoretical move: Rollins deploys a Derridean law/justice analogy to argue that Christianity is structurally self-deconstructing: just as the law testifies to but can never embody justice, religious tradition testifies to but can never make present a God who is Wholly Other, thereby affirming religion's necessity while simultaneously announcing its redundancy.

     justice is not present to us, it exerts a power over us, for it is the power of this absence which causes us to attempt to transform the law and improve democracy.

297. #297

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.34

     Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p34" class="page"></span>Affirm and Declare: Predestination!

     Theoretical move: By reading Luther's anti-Erasmus argument through a Lacanian-Hegelian lens, Ruda shows that the doctrine of predestination functions as a 'forced choice' that abolishes free will precisely to open the space for genuine faith: the very structure of 'no Other of the Other' (no cause behind God's cause) and the gap between revealed God and hidden God enact a logic homologous to Lacanian alienation and the Real, reframing predestination as an emancipatory, anti-perverse position.

     He conflates the name of the thing with the thing itself.

298. #298

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.182

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Love Object as Refound*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimatory love—paradigmatically courtly love—elevates the love object to the dignity of the Thing precisely by installing it as an interchangeable narcissistic image rather than a singular being; the objet a functions as the "remainder of the real" that condenses the Thing into a refound lost object, explaining why desire solidifies around a particular object with irresistible but unnameable intensity.

     the more seamlessly the love object is conflated with the Thing, the less of its singularity of being is allowed to shine through.

299. #299

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.152

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *The Allure of False Objects*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the imaginary components of the objet a function as decoys that eclipse das Ding, and that sublimation—the uniquely human capacity to create meaning from lack—can be perverted into a destructive accumulation of false objects, generating an ethical obligation to distinguish between objects that carry the Thing's echo and mere lures.

     the imaginary components of the objet a can function as shimmering lures that eclipse the aura of the Thing, seducing us to look for satisfaction in entirely illusory directions

300. #300

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.85

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *Getting Satisfaction*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical act (not ceding on one's desire) is the logical point where desire converges with the drive, specifically the death drive, because pursuing desire to its limit necessarily catches up with the drive's proximity to the Thing; this convergence explains why subjective destitution is the radical but not the only expression of Lacanian ethics, and why desire—as the metonymy of being—must be honored to avoid self-betrayal and the contempt that follows from backing away toward the pleasure principle's endless deferral.

     what sets the drive apart from desire is its closer proximity to the Thing

301. #301

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.36

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *The Stain of Infi nity*

     Theoretical move: Jouissance is theorized not as an ideal to be pursued but as an inescapable "stain" that infinitizes the finite from within, making any ethics grounded solely on finitude disingenuous; this parasitism of jouissance connects the lamella-like undeadness of the subject to the infinity associated with Das Ding, the death drive, and the sublime.

     It is the (fantasized) loss of the Thing that initiates our quest for something 'other' than our daily lives.

302. #302

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.74

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Sinthome as a Site of Singularity*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's late shift from symptom to sinthome marks a theoretical transition from the subject of lack (structured by desire and the symbolic order) to a subject of singularity grounded in jouissance—where identification with the sinthome, as an irreducible kernel of real that resists symbolization, becomes the terminal aim of analysis.

     the subject opts to identify with these fixations—with its always highly specific way of circling the Thing—because it realizes that they impart a paradoxical kind of 'self-sameness' to its being.

303. #303

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.140

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation—the elevation of mundane objects to the dignity of the Thing—is structurally grounded in the constitutive lack introduced by the signifier: it is precisely because the Thing resists symbolization that the subject becomes an inexhaustible creature of signification and creative capacity, with lack and the possibility of filling it arising simultaneously.

     it is because we are haunted by the sadness of having lost the Thing that we are driven to try to reincarnate it through our various efforts to make meaning.

304. #304

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.91

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Fraying of Social Ideals*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that social trauma and oppression fray the symbolic anchoring points (points de capiton) that suture the subject to collective ideals, and that the Lacanian act—by temporarily demolishing these quilting points—can break the repetition compulsion imposed by oppressive signifiers, opening a space for singular desire and counterhegem­onic possibility beyond the normative symbolic order.

     trauma that cannot be mediated by symbolization…threatens to thrust the subject into pure 'thingness'

305. #305

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.235

     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.

     Not only doesn't he have that Sovereign Good that is asked of him, but he also knows that there isn't any

306. #306

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.227

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *In Defense of Empathy* > *The* Ressentiment *of the Powerful*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the anti-victim universalism of Badiou and Žižek conceals a ressentiment of the powerful—a reversal of Nietzschean ressentiment by which dominant subjects begrudge the jouissance of suffering attributed to marginalized others—and that their universalism is incomplete because it arbitrarily excludes racial, sexual, and postcolonial subjects while admitting the proletariat.

     my covetousness 'is not addressed to anything that I might desire but to a thing that is my neighbor's Thing'

307. #307

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.190

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Narcissism as an Ethical Failure*

     Theoretical move: Narcissistic desire constitutes an ethical failure precisely because it forecloses the unknowability of the other, which Lacanian ethics requires one to confront as the Real dimension of the other — including its traumatic jouissance — rather than reducing the other to a reassuring imaginary or symbolic likeness.

     the other not only as our own likeness, but also as the grotesque Thing that cannot be assimilated into our symbolic or imaginary networks of meaning

308. #308

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.161

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and the act constitute two distinct but complementary ethical orientations within Lacanian ethics—both are modes of fidelity to the Thing—thus correcting the tendency to privilege the act as the sole or supreme form of Lacanian ethical praxis, and reframing "not ceding on one's desire" as a matter of keeping desire alive rather than pursuing destructive jouissance to its limit.

     refusing to close the gap between the Thing and things

309. #309

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.166

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Banalization of the World*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that both the "passion for the Real" (which strips symbolic formations of value) and poststructuralist nihilism (which denies any transcendent real) are mirror-image failures that produce the same "banalization of the world" under the dictatorship of the reality principle—and that the ethics of sublimation requires holding the sublime within signification rather than beyond it.

     Those who uphold this view rail against the notion that there could be anything in the world that is capable of giving us a little slice of the Thing

310. #310

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.84

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *Antigone's Act of Defi ance*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical status of a Lacanian act depends not merely on its self-destructiveness or transgressive form but on the subject position of its agent (the disempowered) and its orientation toward the Thing/lack; it uses Antigone to demonstrate that genuine singularity, the refusal to cede on one's desire, is what distinguishes the ethical act from its simulacrum.

     what distinguishes the hero from her less noble compatriots is her willingness to directly confront the lack (or 'nothingness') at the heart of her 'being.'

311. #311

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.253

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *Conclusion: The Other as Face*

     Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical apparatus of the chapter's argument about the neighbor/Other, drawing on Lacan, Žižek, Levinas, and Badiou to negotiate the tension between singularity, universality, and the traumatic jouissance of the Other as the ethical crux of love and politics.

     The neighbor (Nebenmensch) as the Thing means that, beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of a monstrous Thing that cannot be 'gentrified'

312. #312

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.150

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *"Deviant" Satisfactions*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and symptom formation share a common structural root—both are responses to excess jouissance circling the Thing—but are distinguished by their relationship to the signifier; sublimation mobilizes the signifier to produce singular creativity, while the symptom marks the signifier's failure to contain the drives. Sublimation is thus theorized as the privileged site of singularity's social inscription, capable of revising the repertoire of satisfactions even against normative interpellation.

     if sublimation, as Lacan claims, populates 'the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes' (1960, 99), and if the contours of this imaginary expansion are always distinctive

313. #313

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.168

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Crisis of Sublimation*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a "crisis of sublimation" — the weakening of the sublimatory force to produce distance from the reality principle — collapses the gap between ideology and reality, making the status quo appear natural and inevitable; genuine ethics, by contrast, consists in preserving access to the infinite/the Thing against this foreclosure.

     sublimation invites us to see the world from a different point of view—one that admits the sublime echo of the Thing

314. #314

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.252

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *8. The Sublimity of Love*

     Theoretical move: This notes section develops a series of theoretical positions linking Das Ding, lost object, courtly love, and the enigma of the Other's desire to show how love operates as a vehicle for the subject's approach to the Thing—always fleetingly—and how love's interpellation can momentarily suspend ordinary socio-symbolic identification.

     Lacan asserts, 'Das Ding has, in effect, to be identified with the Wieder zu finden, the impulse to find again that for Freud establishes the orientation of the human subject to the object.'

315. #315

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.148

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity*

     Theoretical move: Repetition is reframed not as a violation of the pleasure principle but as its virulent expression and, more provocatively, as the very vehicle of sublimation and creativity: the drive's constitutive failure to reach its object (the Thing) generates the "radical diversity" that makes creative variation possible, so that repetition and sublimation are structurally co-implicated rather than opposed.

     If the Thing is the knot (the not des Lebens) around which the drive (and, again, desire from a greater distance) circulates, repetition manages this incessant circulation.

316. #316

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.272

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a back-matter index listing key concepts, names, and page references from a book on Lacanian psychoanalysis and ethics; it is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argument but maps the conceptual terrain of the work.

     the Thing, 17 desire and, 18 new objects resurrecting, 169 drives and, 18 drive versus desire, 72 ethics, and proximity to, 152

317. #317

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.77

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Act of Subjective Destitution*

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a critical engagement with Edelman's queer-theoretical appropriation of the Lacanian act of subjective destitution and sinthome, arguing that his alignment of queer subjectivity with pure negativity and the death drive forecloses transformative political action; against Edelman, the author proposes that the future is not a suturing of lack but the condition for its ongoing, open-ended translation into new signification.

     For Edelman, there is an intrinsic connection between our hopeless quest to recover an imaginary state of plenitude (to attain the Thing) and our quest to find fulfillment in the future.

318. #318

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.156

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Professor D's Shoes*

     Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of sublimation establishes that the Real/Thing is only accessible *through* mundane objects and representations—not despite them—such that jouissance is attained via the semblances of the world rather than by aiming directly at the Thing; this vindicates the continuation of desire over any transcendent or death-driven "beyond," and refutes the nihilism that results from rigidly separating the Thing from worldly things.

     to the extent that we discover little specks of the Thing in mundane objects and representations (matchboxes, Cézanne's apples, etc.), we make the sublime present within the fabric of ordinary life

319. #319

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.206

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The "Faceless" Face*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely post-Lacanian ethics must reckon with the non-symbolizable, nonrelational surplus (jouissance) of the other rather than retreating to the "dazzling epiphany" of the face as a fetishistic totality; the Muselmann is deployed as the limit case that exposes this ethical demand at its most traumatic.

     brings us in contact with what is 'most objectlike, most thinglike about the other' so that we are forced to witness the pure materiality, or inertness, of the other's being

320. #320

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.162

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Debt of Desire*

     Theoretical move: The ethics of sublimation is grounded in a "debt of desire" to the signifier that constitutes subjectivity, and its ethical force lies in maintaining an open-ended, mobile orientation toward the lost Thing — resisting the symptomatic congealing of the repetition compulsion into narcissistic fixation — so that the variability of the object is welcomed rather than suppressed.

     a singular sublimatory track, singular constellation of desire, through which we strive to reincarnate the lost Thing

321. #321

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.246

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *6. The Dignity of the Thing*

     Theoretical move: This passage, comprising endnotes to a chapter on sublimity and love, develops the theoretical relationship between Das Ding, sublimation, the drive, jouissance, and the Real, arguing that aesthetic and sublimatory processes mediate our proximity to the Thing while the drive's satisfaction lies in its perpetual circling rather than attainment.

     the vase from the point of view I first proposed, as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the center of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness . . . presents itself as nihil, as nothing

322. #322

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.145

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart* > *Cézanne's Apples*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation works not by imitating objects but by allowing the dignity of Das Ding to resonate within tangible, even banal objects; the very bar from the Thing that constitutes symbolic existence is what makes manageable, partial jouissance possible through substitute objects.

     art's endgame is much more interesting, namely to allow something of the Thing's dignity to float to the surface.

323. #323

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.198

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Value of Idealization*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic love requires holding the beloved's banal and sublime aspects in productive tension simultaneously, and that sublimation in love can be a truth-bearing gesture—one that reveals latent dimensions of the other's being—rather than a mere narcissistic distortion, provided we do not collapse the gap between the beloved and the Thing.

     as long as we do not confuse the beloved with the Thing, as long as we manage to keep his banal and sublime aspects in productive tension

324. #324

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.267

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is an index from a book chapter, listing topics, concepts, and proper names with page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical passage—no argument is advanced—but it maps the conceptual terrain of the book, including Lacanian concepts such as jouissance, sinthome, objet a, the real, sublimation, and singularity.

     the Thing, sublimation and subject, 129–30 / the Thing, imagined, 128–29 / the Thing and, 17 / romantic, the Thing and, 168–69

325. #325

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.141

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that human subjectivity is constituted by the structural inaccessibility of Das Ding, whose fundamental veiling compels sublimation as an ongoing substitutive encirclement; drawing on Kristeva, it further theorises that symbolic subjectivity is a defence against melancholia, and that depression marks the failure of sublimation—a collapse back into proximity with the Thing and a consequent loss of signifying capacity.

     the Thing the primordial (non)object that, fantasmatically, promises us unadulterated jouissance—was never 'actually' lost.

326. #326

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.172

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Other vs. the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of sublimation reveals a productive distinction between two levels of the Other—the tyrannical demands of authority figures versus the symbolic order as a generative structure of meaning-production—and that the very alienation imposed by the signifier is the condition of possibility for creativity, love, and singularity, rather than an irremediable wound to be mourned.

     sublimation always fails to attain its aim (or only attains it because it fails to attain its goal, the Thing-in-itself)

327. #327

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.72

     3. *The Ethics of the Act*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "fundamental fantasy" operates at the level of the drive rather than desire, and thus resists the signifier-based talking cure; approaching it triggers aphanisis and the collapse of symbolic identity, generating a nexus between satisfaction and destruction that some critics (Žižek, Edelman) valorize as the liberatory "act of subjective destitution."

     not only do they both pursue the same Thing (das Ding), but there is a point of overlap between them.

328. #328

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.195

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"*

     Theoretical move: Love, as a form of sublimation, does not dissolve the sublime dimension of the beloved but rather makes it 'appear' within everyday life by preserving the constitutive gap between the banal and the sublime object—the beloved is always 'split' between what 'is' and what is 'more than,' and it is this non-coincidence that generates surplus satisfaction and keeps love in motion.

     loving the other as he comes implies that we accept that he is at once 'himself' and 'more than' himself… the faintest echo of the Thing

329. #329

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.164

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Beyond the Reality Principle*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation constitutes an ethics grounded in fidelity to das Ding rather than the reality principle: by admitting traces of the real into the symbolic, sublimation punctures the seamlessness of social reality and opens a space for the reinvention of values beyond the hegemonic 'common good', a move Badiou's truth-event is shown to parallel.

     There is another register of morality that takes its direction from that which is to be found on the level of das Ding; it is the register that makes the subject hesitate when he is on the point of bearing false witness against das Ding, that is to say, the place of desire

330. #330

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.186

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Paralysis of Desire*

     Theoretical move: Narcissistic love arrests sublimation's ethical-innovative force by converting the object into a static emblem of self-completion, and it does so through a domesticated relation to the objet a — deploying it as a predictable screen that protects the subject from the jouissance (and terror) of the Thing itself, revealing the repetition compulsion as a rigid crystallization of desire's language.

     circling the Thing serves as a valuable platform for our sublimatory capacity to accentuate new facets of the world

331. #331

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.32

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *The Crisis of Consciousness*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire functions as a defense that maintains a productive distance from jouissance (which the subject is constitutionally incapable of managing), while the drive's surplus enjoyment perpetually destabilizes the subject from within — making the drive a fundamental ontological notion that deepens the crisis of consciousness beyond what Freud's unconscious or Lacan's early linguistic theory alone could account for.

     The object is, quite simply, never the 'real' thing, the sublime Thing of unmediated jouissance.

332. #332

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.244

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > 8. Here is one example:

     Theoretical move: The passage, drawn from endnotes, argues that the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real are each structurally necessary components of bearable human coexistence: the Symbolic Third mediates between subjects and the monstrous Real Thing, the Imaginary enables identification with the other, and the Real supplies the dynamism of singular passion—while also elaborating the sinthome as a meaning-producing enigma that is opaque, poetic, and irreducible to ultimate signification.

     the other whom we encounter is not only the imaginary semblant, but also the elusive absolute Other of the Real Thing with whom no reciprocal exchange is possible

333. #333

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.63

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The "Truth" of Desire*

     Theoretical move: Against reductive readings that cast Lacan as a defender of hegemonic law, this passage argues that Lacanian analysis aims not at social adaptation but at releasing the singularity of the subject's desire from beneath the Other's oppressive signifiers—and that refusing to cede on one's desire constitutes both the clinical goal and a form of political resistance.

     the purpose of analysis . . . is to enable the subject to confront 'the reality of the human condition' . . . Lacan links this 'human condition' to anguish, distress, and psychic disarray, suggesting that the purpose of analysis is to reconcile the subject to the realization that there is no ultimate cure, remedy, or salvation, no 'Sovereign Good'

334. #334

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.193

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Other as Irreplaceable*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love at its most fundamental attaches not to the symbolic qualities or historical identity of the beloved but to the irreplaceable singularity inaugurated by the encounter with language itself — a dimension that exceeds and resists the structuring of the symbolic order, illustrated through Lacan's reading of Antigone's love for Polyneces.

     love that ignites our longing for the Thing is invariably a mistake—that it is merely an illusion that we should strive to overcome as quickly as possible.

335. #335

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.97

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Subject of Truth*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's truth-event — arising from the void (the Lacanian real) of a situation — transforms an ordinary "some-one" into a singular, universal subject of truth (an "immortal"), and maps this structure onto Lacanian concepts of the act, the real, jouissance, and singularity to theorize how the impossible encounter with the real generates unprecedented subjective and ethical possibilities.

     even though the real as such remains impossible (e.g., unmediated jouissance, the Thing)

336. #336

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.143

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart* > *The* Erscheinung *of the Matchbox*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized not merely as artistic practice but as a universal human operation: by elevating an ordinary object (the matchbox) to the dignity of the Thing, sublimation allows a trace of Das Ding—and of forbidden jouissance—to materialize within everyday life, even though the elevated object remains a substitute that can never deliver the Thing-in-itself.

     the collector found his motive in this form of apprehension that concerns less the match box than the Thing that subsists in a match box.

337. #337

     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.

     the ultimate aim of the repetition compulsion is invariably das Ding. The particularity of the compulsion arises from the fact that each subject experiences the loss of das Ding differently.

338. #338

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.263

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (pages 262–263) listing concepts, proper names, and page references; it is non-substantive as continuous theoretical argument but indexes key Lacanian concepts deployed throughout the work.

     das Ding, 17, 139–40

339. #339

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.184

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

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

     an authentic interpersonal connection is the last thing that the subject of narcissistic desire wants, for such a connection makes it difficult for him or her to maintain the image of the beloved as an accurate replica of the Thing.

340. #340

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.173

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Balancing the Symbolic and the Real*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a productive ethics of sublimation requires maintaining a precarious equilibrium between the Symbolic and the Real: too little Real yields existential blandness and betrays desire's singularity, while too much Real overwhelms the subject with jouissance; sublimation is the privileged mode of negotiating this tension, and its residue persists to reshape collective symbolic reality.

     desires that remain faithful to the Thing, for such desires promote our singularity by maintaining a robust relationship to jouissance (which by definition captures something of the Thing's echo).

341. #341

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.223

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *In Defense of Empathy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against the post-Lacanian and Badiouian reduction of all interpersonal empathy to colonialist bad faith or structural impossibility, contending instead that the irreducible opacity of the Other as Thing does not preclude partial, meaningful human connection—and that the wholesale vilification of empathy may itself conceal intellectual lethargy rather than ethical rigor.

     the fact that the other as 'inhuman' Thing inevitably derails our attempts to relate to it on a 'human' level does not mean that no human bond is possible

342. #342

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.250

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *7. The Ethics of Sublimation*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized as an encounter with the Real that exceeds the reality principle, creating space for "impossible" objects; meanwhile, the contemporary sublimatory crisis is diagnosed as the collapse of even the symbolic debt that previously motivated subjects, since the Other now openly acknowledges its own lack of ultimate guarantee (the Other of the Other is absent).

     To raise an object to the dignity of the Thing is not to idealize it, but, rather, to 'realize' it, that is, to make it function as a stand-in for the Real

343. #343

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.29

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *Desire, Drive, Jouissance*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and the drive are structurally co-implicated rather than opposed: both aim at das Ding as their shared (non)object, but the drive is closer to the bodily real while desire is twice-removed via the signifier. Crucially, even the drive is already quasi-social, shaped by the signifiers of the Other, so the desire/drive distinction is one of relative proximity to the Thing—not nature versus culture.

     both desire and the drive ultimately aim at the same object, namely das Ding, or the Thing, as a site of primordial deprivation

344. #344

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.147

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart* > *Sublimation and the Pleasure Principle*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized as the instrument by which the death drive's push toward the Thing is deflected into desire regulated by the pleasure principle: by inserting the signifier between subject and Thing and redirecting drive toward objet a, sublimation makes satisfaction possible while preserving the subject from the annihilating proximity of jouissance, thereby constituting the structural "destiny" of the subject's psychic life.

     the Thing as the object at which the drive (as well as, from a greater distance, desire) aims is what determines the trajectory of our quest for satisfaction

345. #345

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.199

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Love's Innovative Energy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love's "innovative energy" derives from its structural orientation toward the Thing—the sublime kernel that desire perpetually circles without attaining—and pivots to a concluding framing of Lacanian ethics as a post-Levinasian problematic: where Levinas grounds ethics in the face's appeal, Lacan splits the other's face into culturally intelligible attributes and the anxiety-producing strangeness of das Ding, reorienting ethical concern from pluralistic tolerance to the encounter with the "inhuman" other and a resurgence of universalist ethics.

     every meaningful relationship—every relationship that remains alive to the echo of the Thing—adds new layers to the constellation of our desire, thereby diversifying our character.

346. #346

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.187

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Overproximity of the Object*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sublime love-object's overproximity to the Thing triggers anxiety and a defensive resort to fantasy: fantasy's function is to tame the Real dimension of the other by rendering it safely familiar, but in doing so it risks obliterating the very singularity that makes the other desirable.

     whenever the subject draws too close to the object, it is filled by an unmanageable degree of anxiety that keeps it from 'crossing a certain frontier at the limit of the Thing'

347. #347

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.178

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Lacan with Dr. Phil*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity, though risking conflation with self-help authenticity, is distinguished by existential bewilderment rather than self-possession; and that the opacity of the subject (its being riven by the unconscious/drive/repetition) does not license ethical abdication but instead demands a heightened, self-reflexive accountability toward others that goes beyond Butler's ethics of forgiveness.

     what happens if my efforts to remain loyal to the echo of the Thing make it impossible for others to do the same?

348. #348

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.191

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Call and Response of Love*

     Theoretical move: Love is theorized as a privileged form of sublimation in which the love object functions as the sublime object *par excellence*—the site where Das Ding is most forcefully evoked—and the call-and-response structure of love is shown to release singularity beyond ideological interpellation, making love simultaneously a truth-event, a locus of freedom, and the container of jouissance.

     the love object has the power to evoke the Thing for us... those who, however fantasmatically, usher us to its vicinity

349. #349

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.204

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Other as "Evil"*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a properly Lacanian ethics requires risking one's symbolic and imaginary supports to endure the other's singular, potentially "evil" jouissance — a demand that goes beyond inter-subjective empathy or moral prudence, and that finds partial (but insufficient) precedent in Levinas's notion of the face as absolute singularity.

     even our symbolic and imaginary fortifications can never completely erase the other as Thing, as the 'inhuman partner' of excess jouissance that threatens to overpower the intelligible coordinates of our existence.

350. #350

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.181

     8. *The Sublimity of Love*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that romantic love is the paradigmatic site where the lost Thing exerts its greatest force: the beloved object functions as a sublime morsel of the real that promises unmediated jouissance, and the idiosyncratic "language of desire" born from primordial loss can either imprison the subject in narcissistic repetition or open onto genuine love and interpersonal generosity depending on whether the subject holds desire alive or forecloses it.

     the Thing is never as powerful—as likely to enliven and exhilarate us—as when we fall in love. After all, there is nothing in the world that carries the echo of the missing Thing as convincingly as the person we love.

351. #351

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.123

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a occupies a paradoxical double position—it is both the real itself and the symbolic's positivized failure to reach the real—and uses this logic to distinguish psychoanalysis (which registers its own limits as the condition of truth) from historicism/skepticism (which forecloses the real by filling every gap with causal-cultural chains), while reading Frankenstein's monster as the paradigmatic modern subject: structurally constituted by the failure/lack of knowledge rather than by any positive invention.

     psychoanalysis 'raises' the unconscious and the woman's desire 'to the dignity of the Thing.' It is in its refusal to interpret them that psychoanalysis maintains them

352. #352

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

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

     What is crucial for psychoanalysis is not the reciprocity of individual subjects in their relations to a contingent realm of things but the nonreciprocal relation between the subject and its sublime, inaccessible Thing.

353. #353

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.207

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that sex must be understood as the structural impossibility of completing meaning—the Real failure of language with itself—rather than as an incomplete or unstable signification (Butler), and that only this Kantian/psychoanalytic definition of sex as radically unknowable preserves the subject's sovereignty and protects against the voluntarism and calculability that underwrite racism and homogenization.

     in confusing a rule of language with a description of the Thing-in-itself, in this case with sex. But this is misleading, for it seems to imply that sex is something that is beyond language… We can follow Kant on this point only if we add the proviso that we understand the Thing-in-itself to mean nothing but the impossibility of thinking—articulating—it.

354. #354

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.61

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

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

     the subject is cut off from that essential thing that would complete it.

355. #355

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.85

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Guilty versus Useful Pleasures**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that utilitarianism's conversion of a descriptive claim (use is pleasurable) into a prescriptive one (pleasure must be maximized as duty) is the hidden motor of both architectural functionalism's "extensibility" and colonialism's "civilizing mission," and that Lacan's seminar on ethics exposes this maneuver as a despotism rooted in the belief that pleasure is fully usable—rendering man infinitely manageable.

     Lacan's seminar on ethics allows us to see at work beneath utilitarianism's proposition that use is pleasurable a second proposition: pleasure is usable.

356. #356

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.287

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan's concept of the Real is the decisive retrieval of Freudian metapsychology, translating the energetic remainder that escapes psychical representation into the register of the unrepresentable Other and das Ding, and that the objet a constitutes Lacan's unique theoretical contribution—the 'dispositional object'—which has no analogue in any contemporary philosophy of the unthought ground of thought.

     The real is the dimension of das Ding, of what is in the other more than the other.

357. #357

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span id="Index.xhtml_p323" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 323. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Index

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage (letters H–K) from Boothby's *Freud as Philosopher*, listing names and concepts with page references. No theoretical argument is advanced.

     and the Thing 208, 263

358. #358

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.101

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > <span id="ch2.xhtml_p99" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 99. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Specimen Dream of Psychoanalysis

     Theoretical move: By reading Freud's 'Irma's Injection' dream through Lacan's Seminar II, Boothby argues that the dream's two nodal moments—the horrifying vision of Irma's throat (encounter with the Real) and the chemical formula of trimethylamine (master signifier)—enact the movement from imaginary dissolution to symbolic resolution, revealing the unconscious as the domain of the signifier's power rather than ego-wish fulfillment.

     the primitive object par excellence, [at once] the abyss of the feminine organ from which all life emerges, this gulf of the mouth in which everything is swallowed up, and no less the image of death in which everything comes to its end.

359. #359

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.255

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Between the Look and the Gaze

     Theoretical move: By contrasting Lacan's triadic structure of the gaze (subject / visual object / gaze as third locus) with Sartre's dyadic "look," Boothby argues that the objet a operates as an invisible third term within the scopic drive, functioning precisely through its unattainability to perpetually re-energize visual desire rather than satisfying it.

     Behind this threatening gaze lurks the question of das Ding... The attractiveness of the cover-girl object is substituted for the monstrous presence of the Thing.

360. #360

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.244

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > The Object-Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *objet petit a* is the "object-cause" of desire: a primordially lost, liminal object that is simultaneously imaginary, symbolic, and real yet belongs to none, and whose retroactive ceding—not subtraction from a pre-formed subject—constitutes the desiring subject itself, such that desire paradoxically originates only in and through the loss of its object.

     Like the Freudian Thing of which it is a kind of descendent or successor, the objet a is spun off from the process of representation as an unassimilable 'something-or-other,' a locus of unthinkability.

361. #361

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.47

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > Heidegger: The Disposition of Being

     Theoretical move: Boothby reads Heidegger's existential analytic—particularly the concepts of being-in-the-world, ready-to-hand, worldhood, and anxiety—as a philosophically deepened version of the gestalt figure-ground structure and the 'dispositional field,' arguing that the unthematized horizon of Dasein's involvements constitutes an unconscious ground structurally analogous to, but more radical than, Husserlian background consciousness, and that inauthenticity consists in the repression of this essential openness in favor of reified presence-at-hand.

     What is most interesting and original in Heidegger's view is the way in which his analysis is built around the notion of intimate relations between thing and world... the world and its mystery are made present in the thing.

362. #362

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.185

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Toward a Lacanian Theory of Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that sacrifice's general function is to establish the operation of the signifier: it pivots between the imaginary and the symbolic by enacting a violation of bodily wholeness (castration logic) that simultaneously founds a system of signifiers, the law of exchange, and the big Other — thereby integrating prior anthropological theories of sacrifice into a single Lacanian account.

     the incommensurablity that results, that is, from the fact that the signifier substitutes only the barest trace of sound or scrawl for the presence of the thing itself

363. #363

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.271

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Why One and One Make Four

     Theoretical move: By mapping gestalt concepts (figure/ground) onto the Schema R and contrasting it with Schema L, Boothby argues that symbolic castration is the process of "demotivation" that opens the real between the imaginary axis (m-i) and the symbolically mediated axis (I-M), distinguishing the fuller picture of the Oedipus complex from the neurotic, analytic situation mapped by Schema L.

     the locus of the primitive object, the Thing (I and M)... the aim is to open the real under the influence of the signifying function with the result of bringing the subject into a new relation both to the Thing and to the ego ideal.

364. #364

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.49

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > Heidegger: The Disposition of Being

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

     The being of the jug is determined by the way in which its sides and bottom are wrapped around a central emptiness. The jug harbors a nothing.

365. #365

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.222

     <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 > <span id="ch4.xhtml_p216" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 216. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Speaking of the Thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that access to *das Ding* is constituted through linguistic competence—specifically "positional articulation"—and that this is the deepest form of Nachträglichkeit: language retroactively restructures human perception itself. Hegel's dialectic of the implicit/explicit (an sich/für sich) and his account of the arbitrary linguistic sign are marshalled to show how naming liberates the Thing from perceptual intuition, anticipating Saussure and preparing the ground for a structuralist resolution.

     the process that opens relation to das Ding—the process we have called positional articulation—is fundamentally the achievement of linguistic competence.

366. #366

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.280

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > How the Real World Became a Phantasy

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a is the structural condition of both love and reality-testing: it is the paradoxical lost object that simultaneously grounds erotic desire (as what the beloved signifies but does not possess) and the sense of reality (as the constitutive lack that prevents absolute certainty), thereby recasting the Freudian reality principle in genuinely radical terms against ego-psychological adaptation models.

     the reality principle ultimately concerns the real in his sense of the term as the unknowable, even impossible, kernel of the Thing... the sense of reality is grounded on the experience of the object in its relation to the Thing.

367. #367

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.210

     <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 > Thing or No-thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* is not merely Freud's technical term for the unknowable kernel of perception, but the Real core inhabiting the very heart of the Imaginary, thereby redefining the imaginary as the power of the veil (appearance over emptiness) and sublimation as the art of making das Ding simultaneously present and absent — with 'extimacy' as the structural name for this paradox.

     The Thing is an utterly virtual outline that marks the site of a failure of identity between memory and perception… what makes future cognition possible is the very locus of the Thing that marks its present impossibility.

368. #368

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.155

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > The Agency of Death in the Signifier

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian death drive has two complementary faces—the pressure of the Real against the Imaginary and the agency of the Symbolic—and that both operate by dissolving the alienating coherence of the imaginary ego, thereby opening the subject to jouissance either through violence or through symbolically mediated exchange.

     the symbol is tied to death, first, because it implies the absence of the thing it represents... 'the word is the murder of the thing.'

369. #369

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.216

     <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 > <span id="ch4.xhtml_p216" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 216. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Speaking of the Thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding is accessible only through language, and that the signifier's binary (presence/absence) structure is what enables it to "represent the unrepresented" — functioning as Vorstellungsrepräsentanz — thereby opening a dimension of constitutive absence in perception that orients speech toward das Ding as its primordial, indeterminate horizon.

     "Das Ding," he says, "is that which I call the beyond-of-the-signified" (S.VII, 54).

370. #370

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.179

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > <span id="ch3.xhtml_p175" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 175. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Psychoanalysis and the Theory of Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a Lacanian perspective can bridge the anthropological divide between violent (immolatory) and non-violent (votive) forms of sacrifice, and that psychoanalysis—particularly via the death drive—offers a unifying framework for understanding ritual killing as a constitutive moment of human subjectivity; a survey of anthropological theories (Smith, Tylor, Hubert/Mauss, Bataille) prepares the ground for this Lacanian intervention.

     sacrifice 'destroys that which it consecrates,' it does so to ensure 'the return of the thing to the intimate order.'

371. #371

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.228

     <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.

     we will be able to show both how we can read 'Freud with Jakobson,' revealing the deep correspondence between Freud's concept of das Ding and the insights of linguistics

372. #372

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.215

     <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 > Thing or No-thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation reveals the drive's true nature precisely because it aims not at the imaginary object but at das Ding (the primordially lost object), and that the non-equivalence of object and Thing is what opens the space beyond the pleasure principle, grounds the Oedipus complex's function, and inverts the Freudian moral law by identifying the Sovereign Good with the forbidden mother-Thing.

     The Thing toward which sublimation moves is the most prehistoric object, the primordially lost object.

373. #373

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.235

     <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 > 2. The dynamics of opposition that operate variously on the vocal-physiological level of differential features and on the semantic level of morphemes are stabilized in relation to one another by the fact that the phonemes constitute an ordered system.

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phoneme's bundling of differential features generates a "pure readiness-for-meaning" — an indeterminate semantic pressure that is the structural condition of linguistic signification and, crucially, the relation to the Freudian Thing (Das Ding); this readiness-for-meaning is rooted in the felt necessity of binary opposition at the phonological level, passed up into the system of language and freed from any particular coupling.

     Such readiness-for-meaning is precisely the relation to the Freudian Thing that we have been looking for.

374. #374

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's *objet a* emerges from the intersection of image and word opened by linguistic retroaction (*Nachträglichkeit*), functioning as the remainder of *das Ding* after symbolization—a locus of indeterminacy linked to bodily structures yet beyond all signifying, thereby generalizing Freud's theory of deferred action into a constitutive feature of subjectivity itself.

     Lacan locates in the negative space of das Ding the impenetrable nucleus of what is most unknowable in the Other, the enigma of the Other's desire.

375. #375

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.330

     <span id="Index.xhtml_p323" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 323. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Index

     Theoretical move: This is a back-of-book index from Boothby's "Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan" (2001), listing concepts and page references from S through V. It is a navigational aid and contains no substantive theoretical argument.

     Thing (das Ding 204, 223, 228–32, 241–42, 244 246–47, 255–56, 262–65, 271–72, 276, 279–80, 287

376. #376

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > Heidegger: The Disposition of Being

     Theoretical move: Heidegger's concept of authenticity is redefined through the primordial encounter with the nothing: Dasein's openness to being is only possible via anxiety before nothingness, and this structure — beings appearing only against the backdrop of a primordial absence — is positioned as a philosophical precursor to Lacan's logic of lack.

     The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Da-sein for the first time before beings as such.

377. #377

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.263

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Why One and One Make Four

     Theoretical move: By mapping the *objet a* across Schema L, Schema R, the Gestalt figure/ground distinction, and the Greimasian semiotic square, Boothby argues that the *objet a* is not a positional object but an "objectality" function that emerges from the structural tension between das Ding (maternal) and the paternal Law (symbolic order), a tension whose topology is best captured by Schema R rather than Schema L.

     the Thing locates precisely what is most Other about the other. It provides a first orientation to what Lacan calls 'the big Other'... There is a correspondence between das Ding and das Es.

378. #378

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.231

     <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 > 1. Like the Freudian Thing, the phoneme organizes a level of structure that transcends the form of the body-schema.

     Theoretical move: By mapping Jakobson's phoneme as a Hegelian Aufhebung between body-relative differential features and the open semantic field, Boothby argues that the phoneme is structurally homologous to Freud's Das Ding: both mark the threshold where cognition launches beyond the body-schema into an unassimilable remainder, making the phoneme "the gateway to the Thing."

     It is at this point that the function of the phoneme can be linked with Freud's concept of the Thing. As Freud describes it, the Thing is not merely a failure of identity between memory and perception.

379. #379

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.248

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > The Object-Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sacrifice functions to anchor the Other's desire in the symbolic by ceding the real object (objet a), and that this ceding is the very condition of subjective desire — the subject must give up the object in order not to give up on desire, with the two moments of ceding being exactly complementary rather than contradictory.

     Sacrifice serves to bring the desire of the other out of the real, out of the monstrous domain of das Ding, and to anchor it in a symbolic order.

380. #380

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.47

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Second naïveté

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a "second naïveté" — a post-critical return to devotional engagement with sacred texts — is the proper mode of accessing the primordial transforming Event (the Real) that overdetermines scriptural language, insofar as that Event remains irreducible to any propositional, academic, or descriptive capture, including within the text itself.

     the God who grasps us is never grasped (in text, thinking, or experience).

381. #381

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.120

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Revelation as rupture

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christian revelation is structurally constituted by rupture — epistemological, experiential, and existential — and that Matthew's genealogy of Jesus formally enacts this logic: Jesus is simultaneously inscribed within and tears apart the Jewish tradition, making revelation not a fulfilment but a parallactic break internal to the tradition itself.

     God as that which dwells beyond our ability to objectify… God's Word as hinted at as an inaccessible wound within, but not of, Scripture.

382. #382

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter004.html_page_73"></span>Naming God

     Theoretical move: The passage introduces the Kabbalistic tradition of divine naming as a theological problem: the secret name of God is theorized not as an arbitrary signifier but as a word capable of capturing the very essence of the divine, thereby staging the tension between signifier and essence as a question of language's power over the Real.

     a name that, if discovered, would enable the possessor to harness divine power

383. #383

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter003.html_page_49"></span>The biblical parallax

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bible has a "parallactical structure" — analogous to the wave/particle duality of light — whereby the divine source is never directly captured by its textual manifestations but is instead indicated by the contradictions, fractures, and excesses within the narrative itself, making any totalising reading impossible.

     The 'true' description of God seems to lie always just beyond the reach of our grasp. The final 'word' is always frustratingly elusive, dwelling just beyond the horizon of our thought.

384. #384

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Beyond believe, behave, belong

     Theoretical move: The passage argues for inverting the standard Christian order of belief→behavior→belonging into belonging→behavior→belief, grounding this reversal in a radically subjective, unlocalizable 'miracle' of transformation; it draws on a Hebraic model of communal ritual and interpretive wrestling to contend that authoritative, objectified belief actually undermines truth, and recruits Pascal's Wager to show that entering communal practice is the proper site for the miracle of faith rather than doctrinal assent.

     a miracle takes place at a radically subjective level that cannot be objectified or analyzed… How one names this miracle, or even if one wishes to baptize it with any name, is irrelevant. What matters is the occurrence.

385. #385

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter004.html_page_78"></span>The theological naming of God

     Theoretical move: The passage traces how Augustine's identification of the Hebrew "I AM" with Greek philosophical Being, consolidated by Duns Scotus's doctrine of univocity of being, established a theological tradition in which God is rendered as an object of thought whose essence can be directly named and rationally comprehended — a move the author sets up to critique in favour of a non-objectifying, post-encounter theological language.

     Such reflections meant that God, as a being, could be rendered into something of thought. For when God is thought of as a being, albeit as the highest being, the great I AM, God is implicitly thought of as an object that may be contemplated.

386. #386

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.53

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > From the void without to the void within

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the eschatological kingdom is not a future arrival but a spectral presence already "to come" within the present — an interior void that ruptures the text, the beloved, and the world from within rather than from without — and uses this structure to reframe theological transcendence as radical immanence.

     the key to understanding the idea of transcendence within Christianity, a term that describes a way of breaking the here/elsewhere dichotomy of near and far through the idea of an immanence so deep and impenetrable that it cannot be approached.

387. #387

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The faith in christ and the faith of christ

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the tension between the faith *of* Christ (pre-dogmatic, living source) and faith *in* Christ (doctrinal affirmation) is constitutive of Christianity itself, and that this "constrictive" particularity is not a limitation but the very condition of access to the transcendent - the narrow particular site is a privileged opening, not a closure.

     a Christian seeks to be embraced by the living source emanating from Jesus—that deep, living faith that existed before the existence of Christology

388. #388

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.123

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > An irreligious religion

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic religious fidelity requires a perpetual "faithful betrayal" — God as Real exceeds every conceptual, symbolic, or propositional capture, so that true worship is always a response to an irreducible excess that ruptures any naming or systematisation, including Christianity itself.

     God as beyond understanding and yet affirmed in a lived knowledge that cannot be reduced to propositional knowing... God is known in the withdrawing of God

389. #389

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.57

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The biblical wHole

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "Word of God" is not identical with the biblical text but is the traumatic Event that produces the constitutive gap/wound within the text; rather than patching over this wound through either fundamentalist unity or liberal pluralism, a properly theological reading must hold the irreducible antagonism open as the very site of Revelation.

     the Word of God can be described as that dark core around which the words of the text find their orbit, the unspeakable Source within the text that cannot be reduced to the words themselves

390. #390

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.25

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Carrying the cross

     Theoretical move: The passage makes the theoretical move of redefining betrayal as the highest form of fidelity: true faith requires the sacrifice not of the self but of one's religion itself, so that a "religion without religion" may emerge — a dialectical inversion where destruction of the beloved object is the condition of its authentic continuation.

     the cross we are called to carry is not for us at all... is really for another—a cross for us to crucify what we love

391. #391

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.115

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The truth of faith

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christian truth operates as an event/happening that cannot be objectified or reduced to intellectual affirmation — analogous to 'life' and 'light' which condition experience without themselves being experienceable — thereby distinguishing participatory, undergone truth from propositional or empirical fact.

     God is not a problem to be solved but rather a mystery to participate in... it is testified to in the midst of our engagement with the world rather than caught by treating it as an object in our world

392. #392

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter004.html_page_66"></span>Truth as object

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Western philosophy has bequeathed a dominant conception of truth as "truth as object" — truth as whatever shows itself to a distanced subject for contemplation — and that both Christian apologetics and its critics (Logical Positivism, New Atheism) share this same onto-epistemological framework, which the passage positions as philosophically, religiously, and biblically inadequate.

     The elusive and foreign nature of this Word makes it difficult for us to let it speak its truth on its own terms.

393. #393

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.44

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Modern inerrancy

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that modern biblical inerrancy and historical criticism share the same rationalist epistemological ground, making fundamentalism a distinctly modern phenomenon that paradoxically compromises more than pre-modern inerrancy; against both, the author proposes a "religious register" of reading that brackets factual questions to engage a spectral presence beneath the text's antagonisms.

     a spectral presence that lies beneath the various antagonisms that mark the text

394. #394

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Reception without conception

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that God's name in the Hebrew Bible functions not as a noun (essence) but as a verb (event/happening), instantiating a mode of divine presence that is received without being conceived — a "presence beyond presence" that resists objectification, naming, and understanding while remaining immanently operative in acts of love and liberation.

     God is here presented as dwelling beyond human grasp, outside human manipulation, and utterly transcendent to our categories of understanding.

395. #395

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The contemporary church

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against a theology of God as a knowable being whose revealed side can be protected and deepened, pivoting instead toward a "radical cut" introduced by the Incarnation that ensures even the revealed side of God remains concealed — a move that reframes theological unknowing not as a limit of human cognition but as intrinsic to divine revelation itself.

     This cut of radical unknowing ensures that even what is revealed remains concealed. It ensures that the opening of God into the world remains an ineffable mystery in its very occurrence.

396. #396

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.34

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a paradoxical logic of faith in which direct pursuit of reward evacuates the authenticity of sacrifice, while genuine renunciation—giving up desire for the reward itself—is the only path through which wealth (or consolation) is indirectly discovered; this is illustrated through two parables: the pearl of great price and the figure of the blacksmith who offers presence rather than theodicy.

     selling everything that we possessed in order to own a priceless pearl... we would not be able to purchase food or pay for shelter. We would be destitute.

397. #397

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.14

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-ethical pivot: by collapsing the distinction between Christ and his corporate body (the Church), it makes the community of believers the site where Christ is either manifested or distorted; then, through a parable, it argues that embodied acts of love and solidarity *are* the translation of the Word—that is, that ethical praxis precedes and exceeds textual transmission as a mode of signification.

     the vision that God had planted deep in her heart

398. #398

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.31

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage advances two interlocking theoretical moves: first, it articulates an "impossible hospitality" as an unconditional gift that structurally exceeds every conditional exchange, using the figure of the welcomed demon to mark the limit-point of the ethical; second, it re-reads the parable of the Pearl of Great Price to argue that the object's "true value" is only accessible through a renunciation of value-logic itself — i.e., desire must give up its attachment to the object's exchange-value in order to encounter the object as such.

     the pearl has no value if all you seek is its value. But if you renounce the value of the pearl and give up everything simply because you are captivated by its beauty, then, and only then, will you discover its true value.

399. #399

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.167

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love is the irreducible ground of all theological, ethical, and political structures, and that these structures become oppressive when severed from that ground; the parable then enacts an epistemological pivot—subjective transformation trumps institutional or empirical verification of miraculous reality.

     This story simply seeks to remind us that the source of all our attempts to work out what must be done in the world should be love.

400. #400

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.89

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses parabolic thought experiments to probe whether faith is intrinsically rewarding or instrumentally oriented toward external rewards, then pivots to a narrative inversion in which humanity, on Judgment Day, pronounces judgment *on God* rather than receiving it — reversing the standard eschatological structure and raising the question of divine accountability.

     our encounter with the source of our faith *is* the treasure that Christianity offers

401. #401

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter019.html_page_107"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely universal atheism — one that rejects all possible concepts of God in advance — is not opposed to but is rather the most rigorous expression of the Judeo-Christian apophatic tradition, because God, as that which utterly transcends all conceptual capture, demands the rejection of every idolatrous objectification; the second parable then dramatizes this logic by showing that alignment with "God" cannot be instrumentalized by any power, since God's involvement structurally sides with the oppressed.

     God is rather approached as the ineffable source that is received but never conceived. God is thus not approached as an object, but rather encountered as an absolute subject who transforms our relationship with all objects.

402. #402

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.237

     The Writing on the Wall > **No Matter**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's dream of Irma's injection to argue that the nonsensical speech of Dr. M. ("no matter" / *macht nichts*) functions as an instance of Heideggerian everyday discourse (*alltägliche Rede*) that simultaneously voices and covers over anxiety about being-towards-death, thereby protecting Freud's professional identity while gesturing toward a constitutive void or *Nichts*.

     no matter' calls attention to a void, an emptiness, a nonentity, a nothing— in short, a *Nichts*— that is uniquely, if insignificantly, addressed to Freud himself

403. #403

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.224

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Fearless Flight**

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Heidegger's communicative-existential continuum between average everydayness and authentic existence, then pivots to show how *alltägliche Rede* and the mood of anxiety open circuitous, non-linear routes to authentic existence by disclosing the world's groundlessness rather than by deliberate philosophical traversal.

     Nothing which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious.

404. #404

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.242

     The Writing on the Wall > **No Matter** > *Mene¯, Mene¯, Teke¯ l, Upharsin*

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's re-analysis of Freud's dream of Irma's injection as a structural pivot from imaginary ego-object dialogue to a traumatic encounter with the Real, using the biblical *Mene, Tekel, Peres* as an interpretive parallel to show how the dream stages the decentering of the subject in relation to the ego and the decomposition of imaginary identifications.

     the fl esh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the secretory glands par excellence, the fl esh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of the mystery, the fl esh in as much as it is suffering, is formless

405. #405

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.228

     Ancient Figures of Speech > **Fearless Flight** > **"It Was Really Nothing"**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's *alltägliche Rede* ("everyday discourse") occupies a theoretical space irreducible to idle talk (*Gerede*): in the anxious utterance "it was really nothing," the speaker inadvertently gives authentic expression to the nothingness of being-towards-death, so that everyday discourse simultaneously covers over and discloses the anxiety it attempts to flee — a deterritorialized mode of speech that bridges average everydayness and authentic existence.

     it was truly, genuinely, authentically nothing that he just experienced, and it is precisely this nothingness that now finds unambiguous expression in his speech

406. #406

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.112

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the comic object functions as the material subsistence of the symbolic Other's suspension, identifying it with objet petit a as a paradoxical "effect-cause" rather than a mere effect, and distinguishes genuine comedy (which produces the Thing as objectified surplus) from derision (which veils the Thing's comedy by prematurely exhibiting its obscene underside). She then extends this to Marivaux, where the comic mechanism operates through pure structural difference rather than surplus-object.

     If we formulated this in terms of das Ding, the pivotal yet inaccessible point of a given symbolic universe, we could say that in comedy, the Thing does not remain simply transcendent.

407. #407

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.19

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

     Theoretical move: Against assemblage theory's logic of exteriority and contingent combination, Žižek argues for a Hegelian-Marxist position: the "desire-for-assemblage" reveals that universality (in the form of constitutive antagonism/negativity) is already immanent to each element, so that elements strive for assemblage not to form a larger whole but to actualize their own contradictory identity — making totality the dialectical completion of differential structure, not its rival.

     for Bruno Latour, politics should become material, a Dingpolitik revolving around things and issues of concern, rather than around values and beliefs.

408. #408

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.158

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Absolute—whether figured as posthuman singularity, communist productivity, or perfect beauty—is constitutively dependent on the obstacle (finitude, mortality, sexuality, contradiction) that seems to prevent its full actualization; the objet petit a logic shows that removing the obstacle simultaneously destroys what the obstacle was obstacle to, so the Absolute persists only as a virtual vanishing point within failure, not beyond it.

     the Absolute persists as the virtual point of perfection in our finitude, as that X we always fail to reach, but when we get over the limitation of our finitude we also lose the Absolute itself

409. #409

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.322

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a <span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-138"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2118"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2519"></span>Snout

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Badiou's "positivism of Truth-Event" by insisting that the Death Drive—understood as radical (self-relating) negativity rather than any ontic positivity—is the primordial opening that makes an Event possible, and that sexuality (as the site of this void) cannot be reduced to the order of Being but is already a "brush with the Absolute" that love merely supplements, not elevates.

     Lacan defines sublimation as "the elevation of an object to the level of the (impossible-real, i.e., absolute) Thing"

410. #410

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.62

     **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_p57" class="pagebreak" title="57"></span>The Margin of Radical Uncertainty](#contents.xhtml_ahd4)

     Theoretical move: Sexuality is formally defined by the structural impossibility of its goal, such that the drive sustains itself through repeated failure rather than satisfaction; this logic of impossibility—anchored in das Ding—is what distinguishes the human from the animal, and hysteria is identified as the elementary human modality of installing this point of impossibility as absolute jouissance.

     the rise of a new point of impossibility designated by Freud and Lacan as das Ding, the impossible-real ultimate point of reference of desire

411. #411

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **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 > [<span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_p259" class="pagebreak" title="259"></span>A Snout in Plato’s Cave](#contents.xhtml_ahd18)

     Theoretical move: By reinterpreting Plato's cave through topology (Möbius strip, Klein bottle) and the Lacanian Real, Žižek argues that the Self is a fragile surface between two outsides, that authentic emancipation requires a dialectics of master and volunteer structurally homologous to the analytic relation, and that capitalist "freedom" and emancipatory "servitude" are two inversions of the same Möbius-strip reversal of freedom/servitude.

     The pyramid is thus confirmed to be a gigantic Ding in the Heideggerian sense, a massive form enveloping the void which is its true 'object.'

412. #412

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.67

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

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

     what would happen to us if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, to the Ding an sich

413. #413

     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.

     Nothing (void) is the mirror (screen) through which less-than-nothing appears as something, through which pre-ontological chaos appears as ontic entities.

414. #414

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.116

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's "Kant with Sade" reverses the common reading: Sade is the closet Kantian, not vice versa, because jouissance—like the moral law—operates beyond the pleasure principle and beyond pathological self-interest. This homology between drive/desire and the ethical act grounds a "critique of pure desire" that re-reads the Kantian sublime as immanent to sexuality itself, identifying feminine jouissance with the mathematical sublime's non-all structure and masculine sexuality with the dynamic sublime's constitutive exception.

     the sublime sexual Thing (the noumenal sexual In-itself, to put it in Kant's terms) is not accessible directly, it can only be circumscribed as the absent focal point of the repeated attempts to get it

415. #415

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.111

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kant's mathematical/dynamic antinomies and the two modes of the Sublime (mathematical/dynamic) structurally mirror Lacan's formulas of sexuation, and proposes correcting Kant by relocating sexual difference *inside* the Sublime itself rather than between the Sublime and the Beautiful — sex is constitutively sublime because failure and attachment to an impossible-real Thing are definitive of human sexual experience.

     failure and attachment to an impossible-real Thing are constitutive of human sexual experience

416. #416

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.266

     **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 > [<span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_p259" class="pagebreak" title="259"></span>A Snout in Plato’s Cave](#contents.xhtml_ahd18)

     Theoretical move: The Klein bottle's topology—specifically its "snout" as the subject's inscription in reality—is used to argue that the subject is not merely a fiction generated by objective neuronal processes (contra Metzinger) but the very convolution through which the Real observes itself; the Splitting of the Subject ($) and Objet petit a are shown to be two aspects of the same topological feature seen from inside and outside respectively.

     the point is not to penetrate 'true' external reality beyond the curved wall but to take into account how our 'objective' view of reality is already subjectivized, how it functions as the view from the standpoint of the impossible/monstrous Thing

417. #417

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.447

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_42_prokofievs_travels.xhtml_IDX-1802"></span>Prokofiev’s Travels

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Prokofiev and Shostakovich as aesthetic case studies to argue that the Sublime in music operates through the gap between form/content and that artistic integrity is measured not by the success of transcendence but by the formal traces of its failure—the blocked emergence of an inner "Thing"—while Shostakovich's formal mutations register historical trauma (Leninism into Stalinism) at a structural rather than hermeneutic level.

     this ironic stance is just the falsely-bright obverse of the failure of Prokofiev's constant struggle to bring the 'Thing from Inner Space' (the 'something within') out

418. #418

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.18

     **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: Žižek argues that Absolute Knowing is not a revelation of hidden content but a "redoubling of the gap"—the gap separating subject from the Thing is transposed into the Thing itself—and defends this move against Pippin's critique by insisting that unity (the One) is a retroactive effect of division rather than its presupposition, a structure he calls "absolute recoil," which he then differentiates from Meillassoux's speculative-materialist ontologization of contingency.

     just a purely topological transposition of the gap that separates me from the Thing into the Thing itself

419. #419

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.171

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Days of the Living Dead](#contents.xhtml_ahd11)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that digitalization does not threaten humanist subjectivity but rather the decentered Freudian subject: it risks collapsing the symbolic big Other into a really-existing machine, thereby abolishing the constitutive gap (alienation/separation, counterfactuality, primordial repression) that makes subjectivity possible—while the "paranoid" structure of digital control is nonetheless pathological because the digital Other is immanently stupid and cannot register the purely virtual dimension of the Freudian unconscious.

     Can a computer write a love letter which—through its very failures, confusions, and oscillations—encircles the Woman-Thing as the impossible object?

420. #420

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Truth is not a hidden surplus beyond appearance but erupts traumatically within appearance itself, and that the Kantian fear of error (keeping the Thing-in-itself at a distance from phenomena) conceals a deeper fear of Truth—a structure homologous to obsessional neurosis; Hegel's Mozartian move dissolves this economy by showing the supersensible is 'appearance qua appearance', while the Lacanian object (objet petit a / das Ding) inherits this logic: place precedes positivity, and sublimity is a structural effect, not an intrinsic quality.

     a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das Ding, the impossible-real object of desire. The sublime object is 'an object elevated to the level of das Ding'

421. #421

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian subject is constituted as a void—the failure point of symbolic representation—and distinguishes this from post-structuralist subjectivation; it then maps this structure onto the Hegelian 'negation of the negation,' showing that epistemological contradictions (inability to define Society, the Rabinovitch joke) are not obstacles to truth but its very index, so that the antagonistic kernel of a Thing-in-itself is inseparable from our failed access to it.

     the 'Thing-in-itself' is already mutilated, split, marked by a radical lack, structured around an antagonistic kernel.

422. #422

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is not the scene of desire's satisfaction but its constitutive frame and simultaneously a defence against the raw desire of the Other; the completed Graph of Desire maps the structural impossibility between the Symbolic order and jouissance, where the lack in the Other enables Separation (de-alienation) and drives are tied to remnant erogenous zones that survive the signifier's evacuation of enjoyment.

     fantasy is a construction enabling us to seek maternal substitutes, but at the same time a screen shielding us from getting too close to the maternal Thing - keeping us at a distance from it.

423. #423

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Hegel's critique of Kant's Sublime is not a regression to metaphysics but a radicalization: by subtracting the transcendent presupposition of the Thing-in-itself, Hegel shows that the experience of radical negativity IS the Thing itself, so that the sublime object no longer points beyond representation but fills the void left by the Thing's non-existence - a logic culminating in the 'infinite judgement' ('the Spirit is a bone') where an utterly contingent, miserable object embodies absolute negativity.

     it anticipates Lacan's determination of the sublime object in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 'an object raised to the level of the (impossible-real) Thing'

424. #424

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

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

     This place 'between the two deaths', a place of sublime beauty as well as terrifying monsters, is the site of das Ding, of the real-traumatic kernel in the midst of symbolic order.

425. #425

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the Lacanian Real is defined by a *coincidentia oppositorum*: it is simultaneously the hard kernel that resists symbolization AND a pure chimerical void produced by symbolization itself, and this paradoxical structure is mapped through a series of antinomies (fullness/lack, contingency/logical consistency, presupposed/posed) that align with Hegelian dialectics — particularly the identity of Being and Nothingness — while also grounding Schelling's notion of an atemporal unconscious choice as a structural analogue of the Real.

     Another example, perhaps closer to the Lacanian Real, would be Hegel's criticism of Kant's Thing-in-itself [das Ding-an-sich]. Hegel tries to show how this … transcending entity, is effectively a pure 'Thing-of-Thought'

426. #426

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that 'going through the fantasy' reveals the subject as the void/lack in the Other—not a hidden substantial Essence—and that appearance deceives precisely by pretending to deceive (dissimulating dissimulation). This is then mapped onto the Hegelian substance/subject distinction, exemplified through Stalinist and Yugoslav ideological deception, before pivoting to the Kantian Beauty/Sublimity dialectic as a matrix for reading Greek, Jewish, and Christian religion.

     becomes impossible to accomplish as soon as it finds itself occupying the impossible place of das Ding and begins to embody the sublime object of desire

427. #427

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Sinthome (exemplified by Amfortas's externalized wound) designates a paradoxical element that is both destructive and constitutive of the subject's ontological consistency; this structure is then mapped onto the Enlightenment project itself, where the obscene superego enjoyment is shown to be not a residue but the necessary obverse of the formal moral Law, such that renunciation of 'pathological' content itself produces surplus-jouissance.

     The cave on the desert planet into which the space travellers enter when the computer registers signs of life in it, and where the polyp-like parasite sticks on to Hurt's face, has the status of the pre-symbolic Thing - that is, of the maternal body, of the living substance of enjoyment.

428. #428

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek opposes Stalinist "evolutionary idealism" (grounded in the big Other of history as teleological accountant) to a "creationist materialism" derived from Benjamin and Lacan, showing that the death drive, retroactive signification, and the logic of objet petit a underpin both Benjamin's revolutionary rupture and the Stalinist Communist's "sublime body between the two deaths"; he further distinguishes the classical Master's performative legitimation from the totalitarian Leader's circular self-legitimation through the non-existent "People," arriving at a Lacanian definition of democracy as the structural emptiness of the place of power.

     the ideology of evolutionism always implies a belief in a Supreme Good, in a final Goal of evolution which guides its course from the very beginning

429. #429

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The subject is not a questioning force but an "answer of the Real" — the void produced when the Other's question exposes the ex-timate traumatic kernel (objet petit a / das Ding); this hystericization is constitutive of the subject, while interpellation/subjectivation functions as an attempt to evade this kernel through identification. Žižek further deploys Hitchcock's object-typology to distinguish the MacGuffin, the circulating real-object (objet petit a), and the phallic object, showing how the Real must irrupt to establish the symbolic structure.

     The question as such creates shame because it aims at my innermost, intimate kernel called by Freud Kern unseres Wesens and by Lacan das Ding: at that strange body in my interior which is 'in me more than me'

430. #430

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek traces Lacan's theoretical development from symptom as symbolic/coded message to symptom as sinthome—the real kernel of enjoyment that is the subject's only ontological substance—arguing that this universalization of symptom (paired with a universalization of foreclosure) is Lacan's answer to the philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing.

     The Titanic is a Thing in the Lacanian sense: the material leftover, the materialization of the terrifying, impossible jouissance.

431. #431

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.34

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek > Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section anchors several key theoretical moves in the introduction: the non-substantial, beingless subject (manque à être), the relationship between subject and objet petit a as a cut/gap structured like a Möbius strip (fantasy formula), the critique of neovitalist/object-oriented ontology via Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism, and Lacan's alignment of his project with dialectical materialism against nominalism.

     See Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 135, 140.

432. #432

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.244

     Russell Sbriglia

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian sublime—understood as the Idea's immanence to the phenomenal as pure negativity—converges with Lacanian sublimation (elevating an object to the dignity of the Thing via anamorphosis/objet petit a), and uses this convergence to reread Ahab's transcendentalism in Moby Dick as a fetishistic disavowal of the nothingness of the Ideal rather than a genuine pursuit of the transcendent.

     Ahab elevates Moby Dick to the dignity of the Thing, 'deliriously transfer[ing] the idea' of an 'intangible malignity'—an evil reason—onto him

433. #433

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.21

     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.

     What Lacan says of the Thing (*das Ding*) in Seminar VII… is true of the subject as well: the subject is 'that which in the Real . . . suffers from the signifier'

434. #434

     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.

     Lacan's use of the term 'Thing' is intended to invoke both the Kantian Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) and the Freudian Thing (das Ding), the impossible-incestuous object.

435. #435

     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*.

     'fills out the empty place of the Thing as the void, as the pure Nothing of absolute negativity.'

436. #436

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.203

     Correlationism or Causation?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Harman's object-oriented ontology, in attempting to avoid both immanent and external causation, reproduces the very problem it seeks to solve by inventing "allure" — a mysterious causal mechanism borrowed (and misread) from Husserl's phenomenological horizon — and that this impasse points toward a solution already available in Lacan.

     a core of absolute non-relationality and a surface of relational features, capable of interaction

437. #437

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.263

     Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing key terms, proper names, and cross-references from a book on Hegel, Lacan, and materialism; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

     das Ding. See Thing

438. #438

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.276

     Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is a book index (pages 276–277) listing terms and proper names with page references; it contains no substantive theoretical argument of its own.

     Thing (das Ding), 14, 21, 95, 105, 108, 119, 222, 241n4, 245n40, 231–33, 234, 235–36, 237, 238, 241n4, 245n40

439. #439

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.112

     Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian gap between the phenomenal and noumenal is not a limitation to be overcome (as Fichte and Schelling attempt via intellectual intuition) but is itself the condition of freedom and the key to the Hegelian move: Hegel transposes this gap *into* the Absolute itself, so that Being is constitutively incomplete and "subject" names this crack in Being—a move structurally parallel to conceiving Understanding without its Beyond as Reason itself.

     what would happen to us if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, to the Ding an sich

440. #440

     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.

     his elevation of 'a dumb thing'... to the dignity of the Thing

441. #441

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.249

     Russell Sbriglia > Notes

     Theoretical move: This is a scholarly endnotes section providing bibliographic and argumentative scaffolding for a chapter on Melville, the sublime, and the Hegel-Lacan nexus; it is non-substantive in itself but indexes several load-bearing theoretical concepts (the sublime, fetishistic disavowal, das Ding, Appearance/Suprasensible) as they operate across Kant, Hegel, Žižek, and Lacan.

     Miller, in attempting to provide a specifically American example of the Lacanian notion of Woman as Thing (das Ding), makes the following remarks: 'If I try to illustrate the Lady, the inhuman partner, by drawing upon [American] mythology, what do I come across? Moby Dick'

442. #442

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.230

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

     Theoretical move: Against Deleuze's affirmative ontology of Becoming as positive flux without lack, the passage argues—through a Hegelo-Lacanian reading of Woolf's *Mrs Dalloway*—that subjectivity is constituted by an irreducible structural lack, and that this very lack (figured as absence, the void, *das Ding*, *objet a*) is what generates multiplicity, desire, and the intensity of lived experience rather than cancelling them.

     suicide is just an attempt to reach the Thing, *das Ding*. Septimus believes that in killing himself he can close the loop of subjectivity and thereby possess the in-itself.

443. #443

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.213

     The Search for a Möbius Topology and Extimate Causality

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) unwittingly presupposes the very Lacanian framework it tries to circumvent: the "object-in-itself" it posits is nothing other than the Real of the cut (objet petit a), which functions simultaneously as object-cause and void of desire, thereby demonstrating that a dialectical materialist account of objet a—with its Möbius topology and extimate causality—supersedes OOO's subject-less ontology.

     The object-in-itself is nothing—nothing more nor less than the cut that precipitates the object from the thing.

444. #444

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.198

     Correlationism or Causation?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Harman's object-oriented ontology (OOO) covertly recapitulates the Lacanian Imaginary operation—transforming an epistemological impossibility into an ontological property of the object—and that, properly understood, Harman's project is less about defeating "correlationism" than about solving the problem of non-relational causation, a problem that Lacan's objet petit a is better equipped to address.

     philosophy has for too long bracketed the object-in-itself as an epistemological impossibility… the Kantian epistemological insight—our failure to know the object—into an ontological fact

445. #445

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.210

     The Search for a Möbius Topology and Extimate Causality

     Theoretical move: By theorizing "extimate causality" through Lacanian non-orientable topology (Möbius), the passage argues that both subject and objet a emerge from the same formal negation—a cut that is simultaneously internal and external—thereby dissolving the OOO impasse between relational dissolution and objectal isolation, and showing that self-inconsistency (non-self-coincidence) is the ontological condition of identity itself.

     Such an entity is the Ding an sich... The extimate cause answers to Harman's purposes by avoiding the twin perils of immanent and external causation. It generates objects out of the Ding an sich.

446. #446

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.18

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

     Theoretical move: Against new materialisms and realist ontologies, the passage argues for a Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism in which the subject—understood as the void of absolute negativity and identified with the Lacanian objet petit a—is not one object among others but constitutes the very hole in reality, such that "the hole in reality is the subject," and material reality is properly characterized as "non-all" rather than a fully constituted whole.

     the In-itself inscribes itself precisely into the subjective excess, the subjective gap or inconsistency, that opens up a hole in reality.

447. #447

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.127

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > ² . The Integration of the Impossible Objeet in rhe Elephant Man > 3. Dune ond the Poth to Solvotion

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several theoretical moves: it deploys Lacanian sexual antagonism as the primary social antagonism underlying Hollywood ideological narrative; it argues that voice-over narration's gaps testify to truth rather than obscure it; and it identifies feminine/mystical enjoyment as an authentic connection with the infinite, elevating Other Jouissance to the level of mysticism.

     Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, transo Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 71.

448. #448

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.139

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 9, Navigating Mulholland Orive , David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is a book index — a non-substantive back-matter section listing proper names, film titles, and key theoretical concepts with page references. It contains no original theoretical argument.

     and das ¡ng, 82-84, 234n

449. #449

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.58

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Unleoshed Desire

     Theoretical move: The collapse of the idealized father-figure in *Blue Velvet* ruptures the fantasy structure and creates an opening for desire, figured by the detached ear and Dorothy's apartment as a void; Dorothy's "pure desire" — desiring nothing — is shown to be the constitutive absence around which male fantasy (and subjectivity itself) orbits, making her not the site of fantasy's success but of its failure.

     she threatens the men that pursue her because she reveals the void upon which all subjectivity is based.

450. #450

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.125

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > ² . The Integration of the Impossible Objeet in rhe Elephant Man

     Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes to a chapter on *The Elephant Man*) advances two key theoretical moves: (1) it revises the Lacanian account of jouissance by arguing that enjoyment is internal to the law rather than requiring transgression, marking a development from Seminar VII to Seminar XX; and (2) it distinguishes objet petit a (constitutive absence) from das Ding (sublime Thing) to argue that Merrick functions as an impossible object rather than a sublime presence, while deploying the Hegelian Beautiful Soul to critique the speculative identity of noble and base attitudes toward Merrick.

     he is not das Ding, the Thing embodying the ultimate enjoyment. The sublime Thing is an inescapable presence in the visual field, whereas the objet petit a is a constitutive absence.

451. #451

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.50

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Voices Unhinged > The Worms and the Spice

     Theoretical move: By reading the spice in Lynch's *Dune* as *das Ding*, McGowan argues that the film uniquely depicts—rather than merely promises—total (feminine) jouissance, showing how the Thing's presence within the fantasmatic world collapses the constitutive exclusion that founds social reality, and thereby reveals the identity of ultimate enjoyment and ultimate horror.

     In the world of Dune the spice functions as what Lacan calls das Ding, the maternal Thing, the substance of pure enjoyment.

452. #452

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.105

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > *Imaginary Objects, Imaginary Relations*

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's early theorisation of the ego as imaginary object (*a*), showing how imaginary relations (love/identification and hate/rivalry) operate through the logic of same/different, and contrasts this with the later emergence of the real object cause of desire (objet petit a), while situating countertransference as an inescapably imaginary phenomenon that the analyst must set aside.

     It is not until Seminar VII, where Lacan explores *das Ding,* Seminar VIII where he isolates *agalma* in Plato's *Symposium,* and Seminar IX that Lacan begins to conceptualize a wholly different kind of object: a real object, cause of desire.

453. #453

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.113

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-111-0"></span>**Lost Objects**

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's "lost object" is a radical transformation of Freud's concept: whereas Freud's object is merely re-found after a first encounter, Lacan's object (a) is constituted retroactively as always-already lost—never having existed as such—and is defined as the leftover of symbolization that resists capture, functioning as the remainder of an impossible primal subject-object unity.

     Experience has taught that it is important not only for a thing [ein Ding] (an object which affords satisfaction) to possess the property of being 'good'

454. #454

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.134

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that S(A)—the signifier of the lack in the Other—functions as Woman's second "partner" in the sexuation table, and that its meaning has shifted in Lacan's work from a symbolic designator of the Other's desire to a real-register signifier of a primordial loss; this asymmetry grounds two distinct paths beyond neurosis (desire/masculine vs. sublimation/feminine) and implies that feminine subjectivity is constituted through an encounter with jouissance rather than through subjection to a master signifier.

     a kind of Lacanian sublimation whereby an ordinary object is elevated to the status of the Thing (see Seminar VII)

455. #455

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.115

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-113-0"></span>**The Freudian Thing**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's object (a) is a direct theoretical translation of Freud's *das Ding*: by rendering Freudian neurons as signifiers and facilitations as signifying links, Lacan shows that the Thing is what remains isolated from the signifying chain yet is circled by it — the unsignifiable kernel within the Other that constitutes the subject as a defense against it, and whose differing primal affects (disgust vs. being-overwhelmed) provide structural diagnostic criteria distinguishing hysteria from obsession.

     Das Ding is from the outset what I call the nonsignified [or beyond-of-the-signified: hors-signifie]. The subject keeps his distance from this nonsignified and from an affective relation to it, constituting himself in a type of relation, characterized by primal affect, that is prior to any and all repression

456. #456

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.103

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: Fink establishes Objet petit a as Lacan's most significant and polyvalent contribution to psychoanalysis, cataloguing its many avatars and situating it across the registers of the imaginary, symbolic, and real as a prerequisite for systematic exposition in the chapter ahead.

     the Freudian Thing

457. #457

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.112

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > *Real Objects, Encounters with the Real*

     Theoretical move: Desire has no object in the conventional sense but only a cause — object (a) — which is real, unspecularizable, and resistant to symbolization; the passage argues that what elicits desire is the Other's desire as manifested in partial objects (gaze, voice), not the companion or the demand, and that the therapeutic challenge is to dialectize this real cause and disturb the fundamental fantasy organized around it.

     they have a Thing-like quality, requiring the subject to come back to them over and over again.

458. #458

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table of contents for "The Lacanian Subject" by Bruce Fink; it is non-substantive and contains no theoretical argument, only chapter and section headings.

     The Freudian Thing

459. #459

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.233

     <span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**

     Theoretical move: This is the index of Bruce Fink's *The Lacanian Subject*, listing key concepts, proper names, and page references — a non-substantive navigational apparatus with no original theoretical argumentation.

     Freud, S.: … das Ding, 95, 115

460. #460

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.112

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the comic object (as surplus-object) is not merely a humorous treatment of the symbolic Other but the material condition for any retroactive effect of the phenomenal order on its own transcendental coordinates; she further distinguishes genuine comedy from derision by showing that derision protects the sacred mystery of the symbolic structure whereas comedy produces das Ding as an objectified surplus, and introduces Marivaux as the figure who replaces surplus-objects with pure difference as the mechanism of comic suspension.

     if we formulated this in terms of das Ding, the pivotal yet inaccessible point of a given symbolic universe, we could say that in comedy, the Thing does not remain simply transcendent... It is produced on the stage in an objectified, material form, as object-symptom of a given situation.

461. #461

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.165

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Pick Up Your Cave!

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's cave allegory through Hegel, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and cognitive neuroscience, Žižek argues that the 'true Real' is not substantial reality behind appearances but rather the irreducible gap between modes of appearance itself—a parallax gap that culminates in the absolute split between the lived experience of selfhood and the 'nothing' of the open skull.

     the very irreducibility of the appearance to its substantial support, its 'autonomy' with regard to it, engenders a Thing of its own, the true 'real Thing.'

462. #462

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.161

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Burned by the Sun

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Hölderlin's "eccentric path" and the Thermidorian problem to argue that the gap between utopian aspiration and sober actuality cannot be resolved by narrative mediation alone; the true Hegelian move—reading this gap as Concrete Universality itself—requires displacing the bipolar structure (narrative vs. dissolution) with a triple structure, reread via the drive, and ultimately locating the parallax tension between poetico-mystical and political relating to the Thing as the irreducible truth of emancipatory politics.

     the direct exposure to 'fire from heaven' (the ecstatic throwing oneself into the lethal bliss of the divine Thing)

463. #463

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.274

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Ontic Errance, Ontological Truth

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's philosophy of finitude constitutes an "ontology of provisory existence" that structurally mirrors Cartesian provisional morality, but that Heidegger's great political temptation—and error—was to collapse the irreducible parallax gap between ontological truth and ontic order, leading to an illegitimate displacement from individual being-toward-death to communal sacrificial fate.

     exposed to an overwhelming Thing; far from limiting him, this exposure is the very ground of the emergence of the universe of meaning

464. #464

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.150

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Burned by the Sun

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject of the unconscious has the structure of a Kierkegaardian apostle—a pure formal function of impersonal Truth rather than an expression of ego or id—and that the "Thing from Inner Space" (which modern art strains toward beyond the pleasure principle) is not the Kantian Thing-in-itself but rather the site of the direct inscription of subjectivity into reality, emerging through fantasy-staging of what is "actually" a rational phenomenon.

     the struggle to portray it, is the proper 'object' of art... far from being a simple descendant of the Kantian Thing-in-itself, the Freudian 'Thing from the Inner Space' is its inherent opposite

465. #465

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.23

     The Kantian Parallax

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

     This is how Karatani reads the Kantian notion of the Ding an sich (the Thing-in-itself, beyond phenomena): this Thing is not simply a transcendental entity beyond our grasp, but something that is discernible only via the irreducibly antinomic character of our experience of reality.

466. #466

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.252

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Language of Seduction, the Seduction of Language

     Theoretical move: Drawing on Geoffrey Miller's evolutionary account of fitness indicators and Steven Pinker's "short circuit" of pleasure, Žižek argues that the human animal's symbolic explosion does not merely sexualize non-sexual activities but sexualizes sexuality itself—sexual activity becomes genuinely sexual only when it is caught in the self-referential circuit of drive, the repetitive failure to reach the impossible Thing; the utility-function of any human capacity is always secondary to its "wasteful" display function.

     the protracted repetition of its failure to reach the impossible Thing

467. #467

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.156

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Burned by the Sun

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the parallax structure—a purely formal minimal difference that inscribes the subject's gaze into the perceived object—is the shared logic of aesthetics (Richter, Pizarnik, Kalevala), psychoanalytic topology (objet petit a, death drive, sublimation), and political philosophy (Hegel's 'compromise' with post-Thermidorian reality vs. Hölderlin's Beautiful Soul), thereby grounding the concept of 'Good as the absence of Evil' and of creative silence in a unified parallactic ontology.

     the Thing is the very X that occurs between 'Might I say' and 'Would I be allowed to ask,' between 'What kind of man' and 'What sort of fellow.'

468. #468

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.118

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

     Theoretical move: Odradek (Kafka's figure) is read as the lamella—jouissance embodied as immortal, purposeless, inhuman-human excess outside symbolic/paternal order—and this logic is extended to bureaucracy as the secular form of the divine Thing, and to the Alien series as a figuration of pure drive that capitalism exploits and sacralizes.

     There are different figurations of the Thing-jouissance—an immortal (or, more precisely, undead) excess—in Kafka's work.

469. #469

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.190

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > When the God Comes Around

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the identification of the sovereign Good with *das Ding* requires a parallax logic rather than a simple opposition, and extends this parallax structure to theology: the God of Love and the God of cruel justice are one and the same viewed from different perspectives, while Luther's excremental identity of man unlocks the properly Christian meaning of Incarnation as God's real identification with the excremental Real — a move unavailable to either Orthodox imitation-logic or Catholic symbolic-exchange.

     the 'sovereign Good is das Ding,' this identification of the highest Good with the evil Thing can be properly understood only as involving a parallax shift

470. #470

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.116

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that both Levinas and Adorno fail to account for the truly "inhuman" dimension of subjectivity—exemplified by the Muselmann—which cannot be subsumed under any ethical or normative frame; Žižek uses Agamben's Muselmann, the L Schema, and Kafka's Odradek to articulate a "neighbor" as monstrous, impenetrable Thing that exceeds Levinasian face-ethics and demands a radically different conceptualization of the human/inhuman boundary.

     the neighbor as the bearer of a monstrous Otherness, this properly inhuman neighbor

471. #471

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.284

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Gelassenheit? No, Thanks!

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nazism was a pseudo-event (désêtre) while Stalinist Communism, despite its horrors, remained inherently related to an authentic Truth-Event (the October Revolution), making Stalinist "irrationality" a displaced return of genuine revolutionary negativity rather than mere nihilism—and uses this distinction to reframe Heidegger's complicity with Nazism and his failure to attribute "inner greatness" to Soviet Communism.

     what Heidegger says in an interview published after his death (that he is not convinced that democracy is the most appropriate political form for the essence of today's technology): the Nazi total mobilization is more appropriate to the essence of technology

472. #472

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.84

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses Lacan's reading of Claudel's *The Hostage* and James's *The Portrait of a Lady* to argue that the feminine "No" (Versagung) is not a signifying negation grounded in the paternal "No," but a bodily, excremental gesture of pure loss that enacts separation from the Symbolic—prefiguring the sinthome—and that this "No as such" (form without content) is the hidden materialist core linking Kierkegaard's infinite resignation to Hegelian speculative identity.

     While men sacrifice themselves for a Thing (country, freedom, honor), only women are able to sacrifice themselves for nothing.

473. #473

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.65

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy > ". . . ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore"

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that drive must be rigorously distinguished from desire: drive is not an infinite longing for the lost Thing that gets stuck on a partial object, but is itself the very fixation, the self-propelling loop of repetition that finds satisfaction in failure and endless circulation around the void. This distinction is then leveraged to reframe the debate between Lacan and Badiou on negativity and the Act, and to identify the curved structure of drive with Hegelian self-consciousness understood as a non-psychological, impersonal agency of registration — the big Other.

     drive does not strive toward impossible fullness and, being forced to renounce it, gets stuck onto a partial object as its remainder

474. #474

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.402

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote apparatus for a chapter on Henry James, but it does substantive theoretical work by: (1) deploying the Lacanian triad of objects (objet petit a, S of barred A, big Phi) to map three types of Hitchcockian narrative objects found in James; and (2) critically noting James's failure to fully confront the ethical claim of revolutionary radicalism, contrasting this with Hegel's acknowledgment that the 'rabble' (Pöbel) is justified in its unconditional demands on society.

     the third Hitchcockian object, the traumatic impossible Thing which threatens to swallow the subject, like the 'beast in the jungle'

475. #475

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.403

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James > 3The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances several interlocking theoretical moves: it articulates drive as an ethical/metaphysical category distinguishable from instinct; critically probes Badiou's four truth-procedures (science, art, politics, love) by exposing their hidden asymmetry (three plus one); and raises the question of whether every order of Being is the disavowal of a founding Event, linking Badiou's event-theory to Lacanian notions of the Real and inscription.

     the three modes of coping with the traumatic-excessive Thing in me which is my genius

476. #476

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.82

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses Kierkegaard's theology as the limit-point of idealism to stage a materialist inversion: whereas idealism projects closure onto a transcendent God correlative to an "open" ontology, materialism holds that the "All" is itself non-All and contingent; Kierkegaard's desubstantialized God and his structure of "infinite resignation" (Versagung) are then read as a secretly Lacanian operation in which the sacrificial loss of everything yields not a reward but the loss of the Cause-Thing itself.

     'God' is the name for the Absolute Other against which we can measure the thorough contingency of reality—as such, it cannot be conceived as any kind of Substance, as the Supreme Thing.

477. #477

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.98

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's *Ethics* seminar represents a deadlock—not a triumph—because it cannot clearly distinguish pure desire from immersion in primordial jouissance ("passion for the Real"); the resolution lies in the move from desire to drive, while the broader argument shows that Bataille's premodern dialectic of Law/transgression is superseded by the Kantian insight that the absolute excess is the Law itself, a move Lacan only partially executes.

     there is no substantial Thing-jouissance beyond the Symbolic

478. #478

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.388

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 1The Subject, This "Inwardly Circumcised Jew"

     Theoretical move: This notes section makes several concentrated theoretical moves: it maps the three meanings of "subject" onto the RSI triad; it redefines Lacan's anti-philosophy as an infinite (Kantian) judgment rather than a simple negation of philosophy; it traces the shift in Lacan's conception of the Real from extimate Thing to inherent inconsistency of the Symbolic; and it reads Messiaen's musical structure as isomorphic with Lacan's four discourse-elements, thereby illustrating the elementary signifying structure.

     from the 'internal externality'—the famous 'ex-timacy'—of the Real qua Thing to the Symbolic (the Real as the inaccessible traumatic core around which symbolic formations circulate)

479. #479

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.50

     **The Politics of Cinematic Fantasy**

     Theoretical move: Fantasy operates as a necessary supplement to ideology, compensating for ideology's constitutive incompleteness at the level of the signifier; but cinema's publicization of fantasy can also expose the obscene surplus-enjoyment that ideology depends on yet cannot avow, giving fantasy a double political valence—both conservative and subversive.

     Fantasy provides the illusion of an absolute origin that we cannot go beyond.

480. #480

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.57

     5

     Theoretical move: Kubrick's apparent "coldness" is reframed as the direct staging of fantasy's own structural coldness: by stripping affect away, his films expose the obscene jouissance that secretly underlies symbolic authority, thereby undermining ideology's claim to neutrality.

     our relationship to the ineffable and unapproachable maternal Thing that appears to embody the ultimate enjoyment

481. #481

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.133

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via Nietzsche, that nihilism results not from negativity per se but from its insertion into the truth/appearance topology, which collapses the structural gap sustaining desire; she then maps this onto Lacanian concepts (desire, jouissance, the Real) and proposes a non-dialectical "double affirmation" as the only way out of nihilism.

     she attempts to isolate or distill from food the 'thing in food more than food' (i.e. the mysterious surplus or difference between the satisfaction of a need and the 'other satisfaction')

482. #482

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.171

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič articulates a Nietzschean "double affirmation" (amor fati as affirmation of both necessity and contingency) and then pivots to Lacan's claim that love-as-sublimation humanises jouissance by making it condescend to desire, using the logic of comedy—where the Real appears as a minimal difference between two semblances rather than behind appearances—as the structural model for this movement.

     how does the comic paradigm situate the Real in relation to das Ding?

483. #483

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.155

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: By reading the Zeno paradox of Achilles and the tortoise through Lacan's sexuation, Zupančič argues that masculine and feminine positions represent two structurally different relations to the Other and to Nothingness—metonymic pursuit versus immanent internal split—and then extends this to Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil," showing that Nothingness is not a transcendent void beyond the good/evil pair but its inner organizing structure, thereby redefining nihilism as capture between good and evil rather than their surpassing.

     Lacan's point is that there are walls or defenses that humanity has erected as shields against the central field of das Ding (connoted as evil): the first protective barrier is the good; the second is the beautiful or the sublime.

484. #484

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.160

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil" means transgressing Nothingness as the structuring centre of moral dialectics—not abolishing negativity but relocating it from an external, unattainable limit to an internal, minimal difference—and that this move (illustrated via Lacan's Achilles/tortoise reading and Malevich's Suprematism) inaugurates a logic where truth is inherent to appearance, and where necessity is experienced as grounded in contingency rather than in purposive will.

     Nothing is no longer the unattainable Thing (always beyond our reach) that we are after, dictating our steps with its very unattainability.

485. #485

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.124

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth in Lacan (and Nietzsche) is neither correspondence nor hidden essence but "the staging of the Real by means of the Symbolic" — a conception in which truth "aims at" the Real without being identical to it, illustrated through the play-within-the-play structure in Hamlet; simultaneously, the dialectics of desire/will always already presupposes a "willing nothingness" as its internal condition, with the objet petit a functioning as a stand-in for the void.

     this change is marked by the passage from the concept of das Ding to the concept of objet petit a

486. #486

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.87

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sublimation is not a surrogate for drive-satisfaction but *is* drive-satisfaction, and that the Real is located in the interval between the object of satisfaction and satisfaction-as-object; collapsing this gap in either direction (fetishism or Don Juan's hyper-realization) generates the superego injunction to enjoy. She then pivots to Nietzsche's figure of the "middle" (noon/midday) as a non-synthetic beyond that parallels this Lacanian logic of constitutive duality.

     although he believes that (as a result of his renunciation of enjoyment) all enjoyment is now the property of the Thing... the subject, waking him from his dream (but also awakening him to the Real of his own desire and enjoyment)

487. #487

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.178

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the comic paradigm—unlike the tragic/sublime—constitutes the proper structural analogue of love: both work through a "parallel montage" of two semblances whose non-coincidence produces the Real as a gap-become-object, rather than incorporating the Real as an inaccessible Thing circled by sublime friction. Love's miracle is preserving transcendence within accessibility, not sublimating the banal into the inaccessible.

     One moves directly toward the Thing, and finds oneself with a 'ridiculous' object. Yet the dimension of the Thing is not simply abolished; it remains on the horizon thanks to the sense of failure that accompanies this direct passage to the Thing.

488. #488

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.184

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love, conceived as drive rather than desire, operates through a "time warp" logic in which the impossible Real happens rather than remaining structurally inaccessible; this enables love to "humanize jouissance" through a sublimation-as-desublimation that dislocates the sublime object from its source of enjoyment, thereby making jouissance itself an object of desire.

     The first concept is the one he develops in relation to the notion of desire, the one defined in terms of 'raising an object to the dignity of the Thing.'

489. #489

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.83

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is redefined not as a turning-away from drives but as the creation of a space in which what is excluded by the reality principle—objects elevated to the dignity of the Thing—can be valued; this space is identified as the very gap that prevents reality from coinciding with itself (the Real), whose closure produces a Superego imperative of enjoyment rather than liberation.

     what sublimation allows us to value or to appreciate is never the Thing (das Ding) itself, but always some more or less banal, everyday object, a quotidian object elevated to the dignity of the Thing (and an object that also somehow always masks the Thing as the central void)

490. #490

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.114

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the fundamental problem of knowledge and perspectivity is not the subject's partial point of view but the structural disjunction between the gaze (as object inscribed within the thing itself) and the viewpoint, such that the subject is constitutively 'ex-centered' — a part of the subject always already falls out onto the side of objects — and subjectivization is the possible (not necessary) consequence of encountering this expelled, fallen part.

     Is it not, rather, that the Thing that Oedipus finds in his search for knowledge is nothing other than Oedipus himself—that is, his own gaze?

491. #491

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.80

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that modern "hedonism" is structurally grounded in the ascetic ideal (passive nihilism), and pivots to the Lacanian concept of sublimation—understood as the creation of new values by "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing"—to show that what Kant dismisses as mere pathological desire can carry the same structure as moral duty, thereby reframing the ethics of desire against Kantian moralism.

     sublimation, defined by Lacan as that which 'raises an object to the dignity of the Thing.' If 'to spend the night with the desired Lady' has for the subject some other meaning than that of simply experiencing some carnal pleasure—if he recognizes in this act his Thing, the 'transcendental condition of his desire'

492. #492

     Theory Keywords · Various

     **Contradiction** > **Das Ding**

     Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes Das Ding as the inaccessible core of the mother's desire (an ominous unknown) from objet petit a, contrasting the Thing as an inescapable sublime presence in the visual field against objet petit a as a constitutive absence irreducible to that field.

     It is the inaccessible core of the mother's desire that Lacan names das Ding.

493. #493

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.51

     **Neurosis** > **Oedipus Complex**

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots from Freud's account of the Oedipus complex as structured around castration threat and paternal rivalry, to Lacan's reframing of it as a symbolic triangular structure in which the primary enigma is not the father's prohibition but the mother's own opaque desire—recasting the mother as a terrifying, sphinx-like abyss rather than a figure of security.

     The figure of the mother rears up as a fearful and monstrous specter, the unsettling abyss of a gigantic question mark.

494. #494

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.66

     **The Real**

     Theoretical move: The passage constructs a multi-dimensional account of the Lacanian Real as neither a pre-existing thing-in-itself nor a deeper truth behind appearances, but as the structural impossibility immanent to the symbolic order itself—the gap, antagonism, or point of failure that prevents any symbolic totalization, traumatizes both subject and big Other, and paradoxically grounds the subject's freedom from ideological subjection.

     the Real is not the abyss of the Thing that forever eludes our grasp, and on account of which every symbolization of the real is partial and inappropriate; it is, rather, that invisible obstacle, that distorting screen

495. #495

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek with Derrida

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek and Derrida converge on the ethical injunction to love the "real" neighbor (the refugee as monstrous, anxiety-producing other), while Žižek's Marxist critique surpasses liberal-deconstructive approaches by insisting that capitalism's malfunctions (including refugee crises) are structurally necessary rather than accidental disturbances amenable to cosmetic reform.

     the real neighbor, the neighbor as a 'monstrous Thing'—unaltered or domesticated by the symbolic order

496. #496

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

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Sublimation, Jouissance, and “Real” Satisfaction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against collapsing desire into the drive (as Žižek does), contending instead that a second, non-alienated form of desire—one that approaches but does not merge with the drive—is the basis of Lacanian ethics and provides the subject with "real," partial satisfaction through sublimation acting as a shield that transmits tolerable doses of jouissance.

     the drive and desire pursue the objet a as an emissary of the Thing… Both circle the Thing without attaining it.

497. #497

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.325

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's das Ding, properly understood as a locus of pure lack encountered in the Other rather than in self-referential Dasein-anxiety, is distinguished from Heidegger precisely by extimacy; integrating objet a with das Ding produces not theoretical closure but a coherent account of the impossibility of ultimate theoretical coherence.

     The key point is that the Thing is not a thing at all. As Lacan says of it, 'the Thing is also the Non-Thing.' Das Ding has no objective existence whatsoever.

498. #498

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>} > Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section for a chapter on Lacan's das Ding provides a scholarly apparatus that triangulates das Ding across multiple Lacan seminars, Freud's Standard Edition, Hegel's Jena Lectures, and Heidegger, while also proposing theoretical extensions: that das Ding inhabits both subject and Other (rewriting the fantasy formula as $ a <>), that the Subject Supposed to Know functions to cover over das Ding, and that the Heimlich/Unheimlich parallels the mother/Thing relation.

     Is there anything that poses a question which is more present, more pressing, more absorbing, more disruptive, more nauseating, more calculated to thrust everything that takes place before us into the abyss or void than that face of Harpo Marx

499. #499

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.20

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table-of-contents-style summary of contributed chapters in an edited volume responding to Žižek; it maps the theoretical terrain each contributor covers but makes no single theoretical argument of its own, functioning as an editorial overview rather than a substantive intervention.

     raising a mundane object to 'the dignity of the Thing.' That is, she illustrates the ethical potential of the kind of defiant desire that manages to capture traces of the jouissance of the real.

500. #500

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.277

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Salvaging Our Dignity

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek, the passage argues that the objet petit a—by arresting the infinite sliding of the signifier and fixing the subject to its fundamental fantasy—is an ethical force that salvages the subject's dignity and individuality, positioning the ethics of psychoanalysis as an ethics of desire faithful to das Ding rather than to the master's morality or the Other's desire.

     There is another register of morality that takes its direction from that which is to be found on the level of das Ding; it is the register that makes the subject hesitate when he is on the point of bearing false witness against das Ding, that is to say, the place of desire.

501. #501

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.229

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends the Lacanian notion of sexual difference against Butler's historicist critique by arguing that "primordial repression" (Ur-Verdrängung) is not a trans-historical a priori but a retroactively posited presupposition of any social space, and that the gap between form and content must be reflected back into content itself — a move that grounds his concept of "inherent transgression" as the structural supplement that constitutes rather than merely polices the public sphere.

     the elevation of a rather common biological fact to the level of an impossible Thing.

502. #502

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sublimation, repression, and jouissance are structurally inseparable—desublimation is always already repressive, primordial repression constitutes rather than suppresses its content, and castration and the death drive are two faces of the same parallax structure rather than opposing forces—thereby refuting any emancipatory vision premised on overcoming repression or positing a new Master Signifier as sufficient.

     sublimation elevates an ordinary worldly object to the level of the impossible Thing—this is how sublimation sexualizes an ordinary object.

503. #503

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.329

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>} > Notes

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two related theoretical moves: first, it reframes Lacan's claim that anxiety "is not without an object" by positioning objet a as merely the entry point into the void of das Ding (rather than the terminal object of anxiety); second, it draws a speculative parallel between Heidegger's later concept of Ereignis and Lacan's extimacy, suggesting a convergence beyond Heidegger's early subjectivism.

     the *objet a* is merely the point of entrée into the void of *das Ding*.

504. #504

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.321

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *objet a* and *das Ding* form a two-fold ontic-ontological dynamic: the *objet a* functions as the obstinate objective clue (the ontic "odd feature") that opens onto the abyssal void of *das Ding* (the ontological Real), thereby reversing Žižek's own formulation; and that *das Ding*, linked to the mother's inscrutable desire and mediated by the Name of the Father / signifier, is ultimately "extimate" — the Thing in the Other mirrors an unthinkable excess within the subject itself.

     The question of das Ding is still attached to whatever is open, lacking, or gaping at the center of our desire.

505. #505

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.332

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Boothby](#contents.xhtml_ch14a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Boothby's reversal of the ontic/ontological assignments of *objet a* and *das Ding*: *objet a* is ontological (as object-cause of desire that structures reality through subtraction), while *das Ding* exceeds the entire ontic-ontological distinction as a "trans-ontological" trace of what the ontic was before disclosure — and this logic extends to the subject itself, which is ultimately also a supposition rather than a positive given.

     the Thing is not just 'a locus of pure lack' but also a locus of pure excess, of something that is neither ontic reality nor ontological horizon within which this reality appears, the excess over the entire ontological-ontic domain.

506. #506

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.188

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek *contra* Levinas

     Theoretical move: Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics argues that the "face" of the other is always already symbolically mediated and therefore politically domesticated; against Levinas's ethical alterity, Žižek proposes the neighbor as the embodiment of the Lacanian Real—a traumatic, inhuman Thing that short-circuits the particular to produce genuine universality and grounds a more radical anti-racist politics.

     to love and respect your neighbor … does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua traumatic Thing.

507. #507

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.282

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Ruti](#contents.xhtml_ch11a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek rejects Ruti's prioritization of desire over drive (and her reading of sublimation as 'taming' of the Thing into objet a), arguing instead that desire and drive are co-dependent parallax terms—neither more primordial—both being reactions to the same irreducible gap, while also insisting that 'desire of the Other' must be read at imaginary, symbolic, and real levels, and that lack is the lack in the Other itself, not merely the subject's own.

     drive is fixated on the impossible Thing around which it circulates, while a is the cause of desire which endlessly eludes the subject's grasp

508. #508

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.253

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs scholarly philological critique of Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade," documenting systematic misattributions, citation errors, and misreadings across Žižek's corpus while tracking the precise textual sources in Sade, Lacan's Seminar VII, and related literature for concepts such as the second death, desire, alienation/separation, and the quadripartite structure of Lacanian theory.

     Lacan first mentions the notion of the second death three weeks after his initial discussion of the system of Pope Pius VI… during his seminar session of May 25, 1960, which is also the first session of his commentary on Antigone. See Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII, 248.

509. #509

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

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > The Dignity of the Thing

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek's insistence on an unbridgeable chasm between the Thing and worldly objects, the passage argues that sublimation—raising a mundane object to the dignity of the Thing—is not mere idealization but a genuine "realization" of the real within reality, and that "not giving way on desire" means choosing the singularity of one's jouissance/sinthome rather than automatically switching to the register of the drive.

     we possess the capacity to raise mundane objects to the dignity of the Thing; we possess the sublimatory capacity to (extraordinarily selectively) imbue certain people, ideals, and principles with a special significance

510. #510

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.242

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade" as a three-ring itinerary, arguing that Žižek's key theoretical contribution is to foreground the more implicit and disturbing second principle—that Kant is the truth of Sade (Sade as closet Kantian)—over the better-known first principle (Sade as the truth of Kant), and connects this to the concept of the "second death" as a condition for radical creation ex nihilo.

     What Sade's Pope Pius VI aspires to accomplish is a much more radical annihilation, which breaks the endless alternation between life and death

511. #511

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

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > A Case for Sublimation

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek's reading that desire is merely a compromise formation and a retreat from the drive, the passage argues that sublimation constitutes the "shared space" where desire can appropriate jouissance through the objet a — not in its mortifying/uncanny dimension but in its sublime dimension — thereby opening a more affirmative Lacanian ethics grounded in desire rather than the destructive act.

     raising a mundane object to the 'dignity of the Thing'

512. #512

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.22

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

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Žižek's failure to articulate a linkage between objet a and das Ding is not mere oversight but may signal a deeper conceptual commitment, and proposes that the two concepts form an essential couplet—each unintelligible without the other—anchored by Lacan's remark in Seminar XVI that objet a "tickles das Ding from the inside."

     das Ding, the unknown Thing in the Other

513. #513

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.279

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Conclusion

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of desire—grounded in the lost Thing—explains the idiosyncratic, counterproductive, and socially defiant dimensions of desire that ideology critique (à la Žižek) cannot account for, because such desire exceeds the logic of the Other's desire and resists instrumentalization by capitalist-neoliberal imperatives.

     Lacan's theory of desire as a residue of the lost Thing sheds some light on such counterproductive attachments by illustrating the psychic mechanisms that render some relational ties, however damaging, virtually unbreakable.

514. #514

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

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11)

     Theoretical move: Mari Ruti challenges Žižek's categorical elevation of drive over desire by arguing that his distinction is too strongly drawn: desire is not intrinsically normative, and the ethical act requires an object of desire to arrest jouissance and motivate action—something a self-enclosed drive, by its circular structure, cannot supply alone.

     desire idiotically pursues objects as substitutes for the originary non-object, the Thing, that the subject fantasizes having lost

515. #515

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues, against Žižek's ontological/ontic assignment, that das Ding is purely ontological (the originary opening of the human relation to being-as-such) while objet petit a is the ontic element that opens onto an ontological horizon—and that the two form an essential couplet rather than independent concepts, with objet a "tickling das Ding from the inside."

     Das Ding, he said, 'is a primordial function which is located at the level of the initial establishment of the gravitation of the unconscious Vorstellungen.'

516. #516

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

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage critically documents a chain of misreadings by Žižek (and others) of Lacan's Seminar VII ethics: the central error is attributing to Lacan the imperative "Do not give up on your desire!" when Lacan's actual formulation concerns guilt as arising from having given up on one's desire—a paradox, not an imperative. Secondary misreadings of Antigone's ἄτη, her desire, and related textual inaccuracies are catalogued.

     Lacan steers away from all suggestions that Sophocles' heroine is really acting autonomously, according to her own law. See, for example, Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII, 273.

517. #517

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.96

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Human, Animal

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "human animal" is not a half-animal plus something else, but a half-finished animal whose structural incompleteness (lack within animality itself) is the very site from which jouissance — rather than Heidegger's being-toward-death — opens the specifically human dimension; jouissance is thus recast as the ontological condition of possibility for human finitude, not merely a deviation from natural need.

     inventing/producing 'humanity' on and around this void (around the nonexistence of the Animal), without eliminating it or filling it out

518. #518

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.118

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Trauma outside Experience

     Theoretical move: By engaging Brassier's reading of Freud, Zupančič argues that the trauma driving repetition-compulsion is not a repressed experience but constitutively outside experience—a primordial "aboriginal death" that preconditions organic individuation and the very possibility of the pleasure principle, thereby requiring a distinction between the death drive as such and the empirical compulsion to repeat.

     life has nowhere to return to except that which it never had, yet nevertheless lost. That is to say: life has nowhere to return to except that with the lack of which (as built in) it has come to life.

519. #519

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

     Theoretical move: Fisher introduces 'capitalist realism' as a historically specific ideological condition—deeper than postmodernism—in which capitalism's totality forecloses the imaginability of any alternative, rendering cultural and political exhaustion not a mood but a structural feature of late-capitalist subjectivity.

     Capital, they argue, is the 'unnamable Thing', the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies 'warded off in advance'.