Drive

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (569)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.16

   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."

   analysis ends in another dimension, that of the drive. Hence... before this dimension opens up to the subject, he must first reach and then traverse 'the limit within which, as desire, he is bound'

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.20

   The (Moral-) Pathology of Everyday Life

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kant's concept of the 'pathological' designates not the abnormal but the entire register of normal, drive-motivated action, and that the transition to the ethical requires not gradual refinement but a revolutionary break — a creation ex nihilo — structurally analogous to Lacan's conception of The Act, with the ethical dimension forming a Real-like surplus irreducible to the legal/illegal binary.

   For this compelling force Kant uses the general term Triebfeder, 'drive' or 'incentive'. Anything whatsoever can serve as such a compelling force, from the most basic need to the most elevated and abstract idea

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.27

   The (Moral-) Pathology of Everyday Life

   Theoretical move: Župančič argues that the real problem of Kantian ethics is not the purification of pathological motives but the 'ethical transubstantiation' by which pure form must itself become a materially efficacious drive—and that this conceptual necessity precisely mirrors the Lacanian move from demand to desire via the objet petit a, revealing a structural homology between Kant's 'pure form' and Lacan's surplus-enjoyment/objet petit a.

   Kant is saying that 'form' has to come to occupy the position formerly occupied by 'matter', that form itself has to function as a drive.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.148

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > The case of Don Juan

   Theoretical move: The passage establishes a structural distinction between desire and the drive by reading Valmont (desire) against Don Juan (drive): Valmont perpetually defers satisfaction to maintain the gap of desire, while Don Juan attains satisfaction in each object yet is propelled by the irreducible hole constitutive of the drive itself, which Zupančič links to the not-all and objet petit a.

   Don Juan, on the contrary, finds the gap that constitutes the drive of his actions in satisfaction itself... This is exactly what makes Don Juan a figure of the drive.

5. #05

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.158

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's concept of 'respect' (Achtung) is structurally homologous to Lacan's concept of anxiety: both are 'objective' affects without a cause but with an object (objet petit a), both arise from a 'lack that comes to lack' (le manque vient à manquer), and both mark the subject's encounter with what exceeds the order of representation — thereby aligning Kantian drive theory with Lacanian drive theory avant la lettre.

   anxiety is the way the subject experiences the drive, the surplus-satisfaction produced in its circuit - that part of satisfaction that the drive finds 'beyond' the subject.

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.180

   Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The status of the law > Notes

   Theoretical move: This is a notes/references section listing bibliographic citations for the chapter "The status of the law" — it is non-substantive scholarly apparatus with no independent theoretical argument.

   See Lacan's schema of the drive in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1979, p. 178.

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.247

   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.

   In this later conception, it is the notion of the drive (as that which articulates our relation to enjoyment) that becomes decisive.

8. #08

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.251

   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.

   after the mapping of the subject in relation to the a, the experience of the fundamental fantasy becomes the drive.

9. #09

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.261

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

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "ethics of the Real" is grounded not in finitude but in the infinite's unavoidable parasitism of the finite—identified as jouissance/death drive—and that this opens two distinct figures of the infinite (desire vs. jouissance) corresponding to two paradigms of ethics (classical/Antigone vs. modern/Sygne), a distinction that reframes the death drive as radically indifferent to death rather than oriented toward it.

   Drive's logic is: 'I do not want to do this, but I am nonetheless doing it.' Thus, we have a contrary logic in drive since the subject does not desire to do something, but nonetheless enjoys doing exactly that.

10. #10

    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.

    The 'abyssal realization' we find in the case of Sygne de Coufontaine is not at all of the same order.

11. #11

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.272

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

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section providing scholarly references for the chapter on Sygne and the drive; it is non-substantive theoretical content.

    he later proposed a theory of the drive that differs profoundly from this conceptual horizon.

12. #12

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.274

    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.

    drive ... in relation to desire 1 35-6, 1 42, 23 1, 235, 239, 241-5, 250, 254 for ethical action 1 4-1 6, 34-5, 1 42-3

13. #13

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.58

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Doing not believing**

    Theoretical move: The passage synthesizes Althusser's theory of ideology-as-practice with Lacanian registers (real/imaginary/symbolic) and Žižek's psychoanalytic supplement of fetishistic disavowal, arguing that ideology is not false consciousness or belief but the compulsive, materially embedded performance of social reality—a position that reframes the political problem from enlightenment to the invention of new practices.

    matter, including the chaotic evolving matter of the universe, and drive, the force behind human activity and enjoyment.

14. #14

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the dream's "navel" (its irreducible, unrepresentable core) is homologous to the Lacanian Real, and that aesthetic/creative production (sublimation) is the closest a subject can come to encountering this impossible kernel—while terror, theorized via Lyotard, names the affective-political structure of that encounter with the Real in both psychic and cultural life.

    What we term the culture of the Real is the drive of the dream toward an encounter with its navel

15. #15

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: This passage surveys 19th-century positions on morality and dreams, arguing that immoral dream content reveals suppressed ("undesirable") waking impulses, thereby raising the problem of the Unconscious and the split between waking moral consciousness and the psychic reality disclosed in sleep—a tension that Freud will resolve through the concept of repression.

    Dans mes songes j'y succombe toujours ou pour mieux dire j'agis, par leur impulsion, sans crainte et sans remords.

16. #16

    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) > The adversary

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

    Freud's 'Warheitsdrang'—this would be a drive-like pressure, as in the Drang of the Freudian drive (Trieb), of/to truth (Wahrheit)—is absolutely central to Lacan's reflections.

17. #17

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.26

    [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 various and varying libidinal economies of the members of human societies involve drives and desires strongly individuating between different individuals qua socio-symbolic subjects.

18. #18

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.54

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian unconscious is constitutively Symbolic rather than Imaginary: needs (hunger as paradigm) are sublated into demand and desire through Imaginary-Symbolic mediation, and post-Freudian reduction of analysis to affective/imaginary phenomena distorts Freud's discovery, culminating in a socio-cultural "general infantilization" through scientistic misidentification with the subject supposed to know.

    the drive-sources and drive-pressures of Freudian soma or the needs of the Lacanian body(-in-pieces), the human creature is delivered over at birth to … the authority of certain biological imperatives

19. #19

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

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Abstract

    Theoretical move: Against the imaginary reduction of psychoanalysis to ego-psychology, this passage argues that the unconscious must be understood as the locus of the Other's speech, structured by signifiers via metaphor and metonymy, with the death drive as the key to repetitive speech—and that analytic training requires restoring the symbolic chain rather than reducing analysis to an imaginary dyad.

    the drives and their vicissitudes are not dependent upon real others. Rather, the drive finds, and projects its object, upon a person.

20. #20

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.117

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Defrosting the signifer

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Rabelais' frozen words allegory to establish the symbolic order's primacy and exteriority to the subject as the very definition of the unconscious, then develops this into a critique of Jungian archetypes, Jonesian symbolism, and existential listening practices—ultimately arguing that proper analytic technique consists in attentiveness to the literal, phonemic, polysemous signifier rather than to signification or meaning.

    If there is any instinct left, it is subordinated to language, giving birth to the drive.

21. #21

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

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > The number two is odd

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic dimension irreducibly introduces a third term into the analyst-analysand dyad, making "two" structurally odd (*impair*), and uses this mathematical-structuralist move to critique ego psychology's reduction of drive to instinct, to align psychoanalysis with conjectural sciences, and to expose how the IPA's group dynamics reproduce the imaginary mechanisms of identification Freud himself theorized.

    the drive's surplus... Lacan concludes with an admonishment of and corrective to the 'fortune teller style' of the theory of instincts wrongly attributed to Freud, who developed a theory of the drive (Trieb) and not of the instinct (Instinkt)

22. #22

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.153

    [The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter, being, and the other

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's account of the letter (metaphor/metonymy) constitutes an implicit but sustained response to Heidegger: where Heidegger sees language as the "house of being," Lacan insists that language captures, mutilates, and tortures the subject, making the unconscious the condition of any question of being and symptom/desire the structural correlates of metaphor/metonymy respectively.

    Fort–Da is a metaphor for the operations of the drive and desire more generally.

23. #23

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.176

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques post-Freudian (especially Katan's and Macalpine's) reductions of psychosis to ego-level defence mechanisms and affective projection, arguing that the decisive theoretical failure is the neglect of symbolic structure—specifically the logic of the signifier, the Oedipus complex, and the concept of the big Other—in favour of imaginary, ego-centred frameworks.

    Most discussions on the problem of libido in psychosis are sketchy as they, for example, don't take into account Freud's (1915a: 122–123) distinction between the source, the object and the aim of the drive.

24. #24

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

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Rat Man and Ernst Kris cases to demonstrate that correct analytic interpretation operates through the Symbolic frame (the signifier, the Other, the paternal function) rather than through ego-level defense analysis; the ego-analysts' surface-to-depth model systematically misses desire by subordinating it to drives and defenses, requiring instead a topology that locates desire at the level of speech and the signifier.

    Lacan explicitly conceived the drive (or Trieb) in terms of a signifier

25. #25

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

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > III. Where do we stand regarding transference?

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques reality-benchmarked analytic technique (as exemplified in Lebovici's case) by arguing that confining transference, the drives, and Freudian topographies within the imaginary dyad reduces being to a fact of reality, alienates the subject further, and forecloses the symbolic coordinates where analytic effects properly reside.

    the prevailing understanding of major Freudian constructs like transference, the drives and the two topographies

26. #26

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.261

    [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.

    The emergence of this other satisfaction marks the birth of the drive, which, once it appears, obliterates the status of mere needs, which from here on out are no longer satisfied in a pure or simple fashion.

27. #27

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.265

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Lagache's account of the id's structure reaches an impasse because it ignores the function of the signifier; by re-reading the Freudian paradoxes of the id (unorganized, without negation, silent) through linguistic structure (synchrony/diachrony, the signifier's foundational duplicity, and Bejahung), Lacan shows that lack and negation are constitutive of the id and are the very conditions for the emergence of the subject.

    the very way in which Freud breaks the drives down into their components – 'source, direction, aim, and object' – shows that what is important about them is not so much their energetic and dynamic qualities but rather their structural ones

28. #28

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.270

    [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.

    This discussion of negation is also a discussion of the 'link between defense and drive'... drives always manage to get themselves expressed

29. #29

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

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Truly the most, the most truly

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what is "truly proper" to psychoanalysis—the Freudian unconscious—has been systematically domesticated by Neo-Freudian adaptations, institutional identification, and mimetic transmission, and that reclaiming psychoanalysis requires a "militant" return to what is singular in Freud's concept of the unconscious rather than an imaginary identification with an acceptable image of Freud.

    the shift by those who have come to be referred to as the 'Neo-Freudians'... away from the 'predominance given to the sexual tendencies in human motivations' in favor of 'interpersonal relations, and even of social-psychological dynamics.'

30. #30

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.23

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Worshipful Obsession, Obsessional Worship

    Theoretical move: By reading Freud's 1907 "compromise formation" theory of the obsessional symptom through a Lacanian lens, the passage argues that religious ritual is structurally identical to neurotic symptom-formation: it is simultaneously repressive and gratifying of primitive drives, and this double function—not wish-fulfillment or superego guilt—is the deepest psychoanalytic account of the stubborn attachment underlying religious practice.

    Both obsessive neurosis and religion are centrally concerned with renouncing gratification of the two most elemental drives, aggressive and sexual.

31. #31

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.85

    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.

    The same can be said even more emphatically of sexual desire. Eros is taken to be a great cosmic force that deploys itself in dizzying variety... In the grip of its bewitching power, human beings are mere pawns.

32. #32

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.213

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Notes > Chapter 1

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 1 of Boothby's book, listing scholarly references on Lacanian theory and religion, Freud, Nietzsche, and related works. It is non-substantive in theoretical terms but signals key intertextual engagements.

    The three drives Freud mentions here remind us how grossly inappropriate and misleading was the choice of James Strachey to translate Freud's cardinal notion of Trieb into English as 'instinct.'

33. #33

    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).

    the extremity of symptomatic tensions between competing forces of drive and defense is the most important factor in the subject's passionate attachment to the symptom.

34. #34

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.24

    Acknowledgments > Introduction > Unprotected Sex

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the discovery of the death drive in 1920 renders utopian or reformist psychoanalytic politics (Gross, Reich, Fromm, Marcuse) theoretically untenable, because the death drive introduces an irreducible antagonism internal to the drive itself that cannot be dissolved by lifting social repression or eliminating scarcity — thereby marking the fundamental limit of any Marxist-Freudian synthesis.

    Even before Freud comes up with the death drive, he insists that the sexual drive does not function smoothly but rather is constantly at odds with itself.

35. #35

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.33

    Acknowledgments > Introduction > Interminable Repetition

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that a genuinely emancipatory psychoanalytic politics must abandon the pursuit of the good society and instead identify with the barrier/limit that blocks it, reversing the valence of the death drive from obstacle to constitutive principle of freedom — such that repetition, loss, and the drive become the foundation of political thought rather than problems to be overcome.

    Identification with the limit involves an embrace of the repetition of the drive because it is the obstacle or limit that is the point to which the drive returns.

36. #36

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.68

    I > 2 > I Can Get Satisfaction

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that psychoanalysis is fundamentally an economic theory of the psyche in which the drive always-already produces satisfaction, meaning the analytic intervention is not a cure from dissatisfaction to satisfaction but a quantitative shortening of the circuitous path the subject takes to its inevitable enjoyment — a political critique of capitalism's logic of accumulation follows directly from this.

    The death drive and the repetition that it installs in the subject follow a self-satisfying course. The death drive finds a path to satisfaction or enjoyment despite — or because of — whatever obstacles the external world might erect.

37. #37

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.73

    I > 2 > Th e Secret of the Symptom

    Theoretical move: The symptom is not a barrier to enjoyment but its very source and foundation: psychoanalytic intervention works not by eliminating the symptom but by transforming the subject's relationship to the satisfaction it already obtains through symptomatic disruption, and desire itself is a fundamental misrecognition of the death drive.

    The neurotic mistakes the experience of the death drive for the experience of desire, and psychoanalysis attempts to reveal the drive where the neurotic mistakenly sees desire.

38. #38

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.75

    I > 2 > Capitalism contra the Death Drive

    Theoretical move: Capitalism structurally depends on the misrecognition of drive as desire—sustaining subjects in perpetual dissatisfaction and aligning accumulation with enjoyment—while the death drive, by finding satisfaction in the act of not-getting-the-object, constitutes the inherently anticapitalist beyond of the capitalist subject.

    Giving up hope — and yet continuing on, enjoying continuing on — moves us from desire to the drive. This type of transformation also entails the end of the capitalist subject.

39. #39

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.89

    I > 2 > Miserliness and Excess

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's structural deferral of enjoyment imposes detours on the death drive, producing miserliness in jouissance rather than excess, and that the Freudian economy of the joke reveals an alternative logic—economizing to release excess enjoyment—that capitalism must suppress to function.

    economy in the drive results in an excess of enjoyment through the enjoyment of excess. When subjects eliminate the detours that sidetrack the death drive, they experience this enjoyment of excess.

40. #40

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.98

    I > 3 > Analyzing the Rich

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that class privilege functions as a systematic barrier to enjoyment by demanding repression and producing only a circuitous, unrecognized enjoyment (outrage, disgust), so that psychoanalysis's critique of capitalism is not that it produces too much enjoyment but that it structurally prevents subjects from avowing their own enjoyment—making the psychoanalytic rallying cry "more enjoyment" rather than "less."

    they elongate the path of the drive and thereby deprive the subject of the ability to embrace its own mode of enjoying.

41. #41

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.309

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 1. The Formation of Subjectivity

    Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances the theoretical argument that loss is constitutive of value, subjectivity, and drive, reinterpreting Freud's death drive as the theoretical elaboration of repetition compulsion and positioning Hegel—rather than Nietzsche or Schopenhauer—as Freud's closest philosophical predecessor through the shared recognition of a structural limit (nonknowledge/unconscious desire) within the project of knowledge.

    Freud's dualism is never really dualism but instead his method of conceiving how drives contradict themselves internally and thus derail all monism. It should be properly called dialectics rather than dualism.

42. #42

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.311

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 2. The Economics of the Drive

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section advances several load-bearing theoretical moves: it aligns the drive's structure with a satisfaction that bypasses aim (via Copjec/Lacan), contrasts psychoanalytic identification-with-the-symptom against Marxist elimination-of-the-symptom, links the drive's constancy to capitalism's logic of endless accumulation, and grounds the ego's rivalry-structure in the Imaginary to argue against ego-psychology.

    The drive's 'constancy of thrust,' as Lacan says in Seminar XI, 'forbids any assimilation of the drive to a biological function, which always has a rhythm… It is a constant force'

43. #43

    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_148"></span>**perversion**

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines perversion not as deviant sexual behaviour but as a distinct clinical structure, characterized by the operations of disavowal (in relation to the phallus) and a specific positioning of the subject as object/instrument of the Other's jouissance—inverting the structure of fantasy—and argues this structure is equally complex to neurosis, differing not in richness but in the inverse direction of its structuration.

    Perversion is also a particular way in which the subject situates himself in relation to the drive. In perversion, the subject locates himself as object of the drive, as the means of the other's jouissance

44. #44

    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_154"></span>**preoedipal phase**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reconceives the preoedipal phase not as a dyadic mother-child relation but as an imaginary triangle mediated by the phallus, arguing that psychoanalytic structure requires a minimum of three terms; the intervention of the real drive and then the father as a fourth term disrupt this triangle, and all perversions originate in identifications within it.

    This 'something else' is the first stirring of the drive, which manifests itself in infantile masturbation (S4, 225–6). The intervention of the real organ in this way transforms the imaginary triangle into a deadly game

45. #45

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_55"></span>**drive**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's reworking of Freudian drive theory: by distinguishing drive from instinct, articulating the drive's circuit through three grammatical voices, insisting on the irreducible partiality of drives, and identifying every drive as a death drive, Lacan reframes the drive as a symbolic-cultural construct whose circular aim — not goal — constitutes the only path beyond the pleasure principle.

    the drive is completely removed from the realm of BIOLOGY. The drives differ from biological needs in that they can never be satisfied, and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually round it.

46. #46

    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.

    the objet petit a is circled by the drive (S11, 168), and is seen as the cause of desire just as das Ding is seen as 'the cause of the most fundamental human passion'

47. #47

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_166"></span>**reality principle**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of a "naive conception of the reality principle" subordinates it to the pleasure principle, dissolving the distinction between reality and fantasy and insisting that reality is itself constituted through pleasure rather than being an objective given.

    the ultimate aim of the reality principle is still the satisfaction of the drives

48. #48

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_45"></span>**death drive**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's successive relocations of the death drive—from the imaginary (early remarks linking it to narcissism and preoedipal fusion), to the symbolic (as the engine of repetition in the 1950s), to an aspect immanent in every drive (1964)—marking in each shift a decisive divergence from Freud's biologism.

    'The distinction between the life drive and the death drive is true in as much as it manifests two aspects of the drive' (S11, 257)

49. #49

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_93"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0111"></span>**instinct**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes instinct (a rigid biological concept belonging to animal ethology) from the drive, arguing that human psychology is governed not by instincts but by culturally-determined complexes that compensate for a constitutive biological inadequacy ("vital insufficiency"), making any purely instinctivist account of human behaviour untenable.

    Lacan follows Freud in distinguishing the instincts from the DRIVES, and criticises those who, following Strachey, obscure this distinction by using the same English word ('instinct') to translate both Freud's terms (Instinkt and Trieb)

50. #50

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_135"></span>**object-relations theory**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of object-relations theory targets its reduction of the object to a register of need and satisfaction, its neglect of the symbolic dimension of desire, and its idealization of a perfectly symmetrical dyadic relation, against which Lacan reasserts the triadic Oedipal structure and the irreducibility of symbolic desire.

    Freud defined the object as that in which and through which the drive attains its aim.

51. #51

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part24.xhtml_ncx_127"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part24.xhtml_page_0146"></span>***N***

    Theoretical move: This passage from Evans's dictionary provides canonical Lacanian definitions for five interconnected concepts — Name-of-the-Father, narcissism, nature, need, negation, and neurosis — showing how each is structured around the primacy of the symbolic order over biological/imaginary registers, and how Lacan transforms Freudian clinical categories into structural ones.

    Desire, on the other hand, is a constant force which can never be satisfied, the constant 'pressure' which underlies the drives.

52. #52

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    the MATHEMES of the drive and of fantasy: the subject 'fades' or 'disappears' in the face of demand and in the face of the object

53. #53

    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.

    perversion not simply a brute natural means of discharging the libido, but a highly structured relation to the drives which are already, in themselves, linguistic rather than biological forces

54. #54

    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.

    it is the drives which permit the subject to transgress the pleasure principle, it follows that every drive is a DEATH DRIVE.

55. #55

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_118"></span>**matheme**

    Theoretical move: The matheme is defined as a formal algebraic index of psychoanalytic concepts designed to resist univocal (imaginary) interpretation and enable integral transmission of theory precisely because its meaning remains opaque — it is to be used, not understood.

    the matheme for the drive… and the matheme for fantasy

56. #56

    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_111"></span>**love**

    Theoretical move: Love is constituted as an imaginary, narcissistic, and fundamentally deceptive phenomenon whose relationship to transference, desire, and demand reveals both its structural opposition to and its entanglement with desire — love as metaphor versus desire as metonymy — while simultaneously functioning as an illusory substitute for the absent sexual relation.

    this is what distinguishes it from the order of the drives, in which there is no reciprocity, only pure activity (S11, 200)

57. #57

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part06.xhtml_ncx_5"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part06.xhtml_page_0010"></span>***Preface***

    Theoretical move: This preface is a non-substantive editorial/methodological note by Dylan Evans explaining translation choices (keeping algebraic symbols untranslated, using 'drive' for Trieb) and acknowledging the paradox of writing a dictionary for a thinker whose discourse subverts the fixation of meaning under the signifier.

    rendering Trieb as 'drive' rather than 'instinct'

58. #58

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    2

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the programme of the pleasure principle governs mental life but is structurally incompatible with reality, and surveys the various strategies (intoxication, sublimation, drive-control, isolation, etc.) by which human beings attempt to manage this constitutive tension between the pursuit of happiness and the inevitability of suffering — positioning religion as one palliative among others rather than as a unique answer to the purpose of life.

    Just as the satisfaction of the drives spells happiness, so it is a cause of great suffering if the external world forces us to go without and refuses to satisfy our needs.

59. #59

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    2

    Theoretical move: Freud surveys the available techniques for achieving happiness and avoiding suffering—art, love, beauty, narcissistic withdrawal, religious delusion, neurosis—and concludes that none can fully satisfy the programme imposed by the pleasure principle; the best strategy is a flexible economy of the individual libido rather than any single exclusive technique.

    the extent to which he is able to sublimate his drives will determine where he should lodge his interests

60. #60

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    3

    Theoretical move: Freud advances a structural homology between civilizational development and individual libidinal development, arguing that civilization is built on drive-renunciation (via repression, suppression, and sublimation), that order is a compulsion to repeat modelled on natural regularities, and that the tension between individual freedom and communal restriction is the fundamental, potentially irreconcilable problem of civilization.

    Some of these drives are used up in such a way that in their place something appears that in an individual we describe as a character trait.

61. #61

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    4

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization is founded on two forces—Eros (love/libido) and Ananke (necessity/work)—but that the same civilizing process structurally conflicts with sexuality by diverting libidinal energy into aim-inhibited, sublimated forms, thereby restricting and damaging sexual life as an inherent and not merely contingent consequence.

    the work of civilization has become more and more the business of the menfolk, setting them increasingly difficult tasks and obliging them to sublimate their drives

62. #62

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    5

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization is constitutively threatened by an innate human drive to aggression that is irreducible to socio-economic conditions, and that the commandment to love one's neighbor functions as civilization's ideological demand precisely because it runs counter to this fundamental hostility—thus establishing the antagonism between Eros and aggression as the central engine of cultural development.

    passions that derive from the drives are stronger than reasonable interests

63. #63

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    5

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization's restriction of the aggressive drive generates discontent by redirecting aggression outward toward outsiders, and that the trade-off between instinctual freedom and social security is structurally unavoidable, culminating in the diagnosis of a "psychological misery of the mass" produced by identification-based social bonding without strong individual leadership.

    civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man's sexuality, but also on his aggressivity, we are in a better position to understand why it is so hard for him to feel happy in it.

64. #64

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    6

    Theoretical move: Freud reconstructs the history of his drive theory, arguing that the introduction of the death drive beside Eros is not a rupture but a clarification of a long-developing dualism, and concludes that civilization itself is the arena of the struggle between Eros and the death drive—the life drive's project of binding humanity into ever-larger units against the autonomous, original drive for aggression and destruction.

    the doctrine of the drives is the one that has edged its way forward most laboriously. And yet it was so indispensable to the whole that something had to be put in its place.

65. #65

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    7

    Theoretical move: Freud advances the paradoxical thesis that the superego/conscience is not merely the product of drive-renunciation imposed by external authority, but that drive-renunciation itself dynamically generates conscience, which in turn demands further renunciation — a reversing of the causal relation that explains why virtue intensifies rather than appeases the severity of conscience.

    Every renunciation of the drives now becomes a dynamic source of conscience; every fresh renunciation reinforces its severity and intolerance

66. #66

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    7

    Theoretical move: Freud resolves the apparent contradiction between two accounts of conscience's origin by arguing that the sense of guilt is fundamentally the expression of the ambivalence-conflict between Eros and the Death Drive: whether aggression is acted out (parricide) or suppressed, guilt is inevitable, and civilization's expansion necessarily intensifies this guilt by transferring the Oedipal conflict onto the social mass.

    The effect that the renunciation of the drives has on the conscience is such that any aggression whose satisfaction we forgo is taken over by the super-ego and increases the latter's aggression.

67. #67

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    8

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the sense of guilt—conceived as a topical variety of anxiety and the central cost of civilization—must be theorized through its mostly unconscious operation, its two-layered origin (fear of external then internal authority), and its privileged relationship to aggression rather than erotic drives, with repression converting libidinal elements into symptoms and aggressive components into guilt.

    the conflict of ambivalence between the two primal drives still produces the same effect... when a drive is repressed, its libidinal elements are converted into symptoms and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt.

68. #68

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    8

    Theoretical move: Freud frames civilization's fate as a conflict between Eros and the death/aggression drive, arguing that cultural progress (upright posture, organic repression of smell, sublimation through work) channels but never fully resolves the tension between libidinal binding and destructive drives—leaving the outcome of this struggle genuinely open.

    The contrast that emerges here between the restless expansive tendency of Eros and the generally conservative nature of the drives is striking

69. #69

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    8

    Theoretical move: These footnotes from Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* advance the argument that the Superego's severity is not a direct product of parental strictness but of the subject's own aggression turned inward—shaped by the interplay of drive-frustration and the experience of being loved—while also equating the destructive drive with Mephistopheles and positioning Eros as its adversary.

    libido is involved in the manifestation of every drive, but not everything in this manifestation is libido.

70. #70

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

    <span id="Chapter1.htm_page14"></span>‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’

    Theoretical move: Fisher distinguishes hauntological melancholia—a refusal to yield desire for lost futures—from both left melancholy (disavowed attachment to failure) and postcolonial melancholia (disavowed fantasy of omnipotence), arguing that what haunts us is not a lost past but the 'not yet' of futures that popular modernism promised but never delivered, a spectrality that reproaches capitalist realism's foreclosure of possibility.

    the shift that Brown describes – from a left that confidently assumed the future belonged to it, to a left that makes a virtue of its own incapacity to act – seems to exemplify the transition from desire (which in Lacanian terms is the desire to desire) to drive (an enjoyment through failure).

71. #71

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher · p.81

    <span id="Chapter4.htm_page76"></span>Smiley’s Game: *Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy*

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses the figure of Smiley to theorize a subject driven not by repressed sexuality but by a constitutive lack of interiority — a "chameleon" subjectivity that dissolves into role-playing, making desire, drive, and perversion irreducible to sadomasochism or therapeutic models of repression. The passage pivots on distinguishing Smiley's ascetic renunciation-as-perversity from both repression and sadomasochistic enjoyment.

    Far from being repressed, it's clear that Smiley is *driven* – driven by something which will not allow him to ever recline into happy retirement any more than he could settle into the pleasures of conjugal life.

72. #72

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.136

    **XI**

    Theoretical move: The passage works through Freud's "On Narcissism" to distinguish two distinct functions—Ideal Ego (*Idealich*) and Ego Ideal (*Ichideal*)—arguing that their coexistence in Freud's text is not a confusion but marks two different structural functions; simultaneously, the passage establishes that both narcissistic and anaclitic object choices are imaginary and grounded in identification, and separates sublimation (object-libido process) from idealization (ego-libido process) as theoretically distinct operations.

    the sexual drives are at first employed in the satisfaction of the ego-drives, only becoming autonomous later.

73. #73

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.127

    **X**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses ethological evidence (Lorenz/Tinbergen's releasing mechanisms) to argue that the libidinal drive is structurally centred on the imaginary—on image rather than real partner—thereby grounding the distinction between ego-drives and sexual drives in the Imaginary register, and reframing Freud's two narcissisms as two distinct relations to the image.

    The libidinal drive is centred on the function of the imaginary.

74. #74

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.10

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **OVERTURE TO THE SEMINAR**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's opening move in Seminar I is to frame psychoanalysis as a recovery of meaning and reason within a structure of subjectivity, distinguishing Freud's dialectical method from both scientistic reductionism and systematised dogma, while positioning the analytic situation as a structural formation irreducible to a dyadic encounter.

    The id is not reducible to a pure and objective given, to the drives of the subject.

75. #75

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.243

    **x** > **THE MOUTH AND THE EYE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the oral drive must be re-examined to show that the anxiety-point (located at the level of the mother/Other) and the point of desire (located at the mamma as partial object) are structurally distinct and non-coincident, with the mamma functioning as an 'amboceptive' object internal to the child's own sphere — thereby reframing the castration complex not as a dead end but as misread through an oral reduction that only metaphorically displaces it.

    it is to this oral drive that the etiology behind all the stumbling blocks we face is to be brought back... we ought to uncover at the very level of the oral drive a hint of why it is no more than metaphor here.

76. #76

    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.

    The first of these accepted uses is affect conceived of as constituting, substantially, drive discharge.

77. #77

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.111

    BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

    Theoretical move: The passage reframes Objet petit a not as the intentional object *of* desire (in the phenomenological/Husserlian sense) but as the *cause* of desire that lies *behind* it, prior to any internalization; this reconfiguration is then used to distinguish the structural positions of sadism and masochism as different modes of identification with the object.

    the structural, topological novelty that is required by this function of the object is perfectly tangible in Freud's formulations, especially those regarding the drive.

78. #78

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    BookX Anxiety > **v** > Schema of the effaced trace

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety arises when the constitutive void that preserves desire is filled in by a false response to demand, and that the drive (distinct from instinct) is structured by the cut between barred subject and demand, with partial objects (breast, scybalum) marking the place of this void rather than stages of relational maturation.

    A drive has nothing to do with an instinct... the oral drive is something else. It pertains to the mouth's erotogeneity

79. #79

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.274

    **x** > **THE EVANESCENT PHALLUS**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus's evanescence—its structural failure to conjoin man's and woman's jouissance—is the very mechanism through which castration anxiety is constituted, and that this failure, rather than any ideal of genital fulfilment, is what organizes the subject's relation to the Other, desire, and the death drive.

    we mustn't fail to refer, more than elsewhere, to the structure of the drive as supported by the formula (S O D), that is, by the relationship between desire and demand.

80. #80

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.177

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan insists that the drive cannot be reduced to a biological or organic given (thrust/Drang), and grounds this by returning to Freud's 1915 article to show that 'Trieb' is a fundamental concept (Grundbegriff) comprising four irreducibly distinct terms—Drang, source, object, aim—whose very enumeration reveals the drive's non-natural, constructed character.

    Drive (pulsion) is not thrust (poussee). Trieb is not Drang, if only for the following reason.

81. #81

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

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Freud's grammatical derivation of drive opposites (exhibitionism/voyeurism, sadism/masochism) as conflating grammatical subject/object with real functions, while conceding that through this very game Freud conveys something essential about the drive: what Lacan will call 'the trace of the act.'

    what, by means of this game, he conveys to us about the essence of the drive is what, next time, I will define for you as the trace of the act.

82. #82

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.211

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive, in its turning inside-out through the erogenous zone, always seeks something that responds in the Other; and he prepares to introduce the lamella-myth (via Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium) to articulate the drive's 'false organ' as the only graspable pole in the domain of sexuality.

    the drive, in this turning inside out represented by its pocket, invaginating through the erogenous zone, is given the task of seeking something that, each time, responds in the Other

83. #83

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.288

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

    Theoretical move: Lacan defines hypnosis structurally as the confusion of the ideal signifier (identification) with the objet a, and then uses this definition to articulate the analytic operation as precisely the maintenance of the distance between these two poles — with the analyst's desire functioning to isolate the a and enable a "crossing of the plane of identification" that ultimately transforms the fundamental fantasy into the drive itself, constituting the uncharted "beyond of analysis."

    the experience of the fundamental phantasy becomes the drive. What, then, does he who has passed through the experience of this opaque relation to the origin, to the drive, become?

84. #84

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.214

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: The subject is constituted through its division upon entry into the signifying field of the Other, and this very splitting is what underlies the drive's essential affinity with death and the impossibility of a fully recovered sexual relation at the level of the unconscious.

    I explain the essential affinity of every drive with the zone of death, and reconcile the two sides of the drive—which, at one and the same time, makes present sexuality in the unconscious and represents, in its essence, death.

85. #85

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

    CONTENTS

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

    THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

86. #86

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.195

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that there is no natural developmental or dialectical metamorphosis between partial drives; the passage from one drive to another is produced not by organic maturation but by the intervention of the demand of the Other, with the lost object (objet petit a) serving as the structural cause of drive-circuit incompleteness rather than an originary satisfaction.

    is the circuit of the oral drive continued by the anal drive, which would then be the following stage? Is it a case of dialectical progress being produced out of opposition?

87. #87

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.193

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's three-stage account of the drive circuit (active, reflexive, passive) to argue that the appearance of a new subject — the other — is constitutively produced by the drive's circular course, making the subject not a presupposition but an outcome of the drive's reversal.

    no part of this distance covered can be separated from its outwards-and-back movement, from its fundamental reversion, from the circular character of the path of the drive.

88. #88

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

    Tni SEMINAR OF JACQ[ LACAN, BooK Xl The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Alan Sheridan

    Theoretical move: This passage is a publisher's or editorial blurb summarizing Seminar XI; it is non-substantive framing material with no original theoretical argument.

    namely the unconsuogs, re/vt/lion, the tri tuftenii, and the drin

89. #89

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.210

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan reformulates Freud's drive theory by substituting 'machen' for 'werden' to reveal that the drive's loop is structured around 'making oneself' (se faire) — seeing, heard, sucked — thereby showing that each drive's reflexive turn constitutes the subject while also introducing the voice drive (making oneself heard) as a structural complement to the scopic drive.

    The activity of the drive is concentrated in this making oneself (sefaire), and it is by relating it to the field of the other drives that we may be able to throw some light upon it.

90. #90

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.34

    THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

    Theoretical move: Lacan frames the four fundamental Freudian concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) as requiring a limit-approach analogous to infinitesimal calculus, then grounds the claim that "the unconscious is structured like a language" in Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, arguing that a presubjective, combinatory symbolic order organizes human relations prior to any subject formation.

    the drive is still so difficult to approach—so neglected, one should say—that I do not think I can do more this year than touch upon it after we have dealt with the transference.

91. #91

    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.

    It is the recognition of the drive that enables us to construct, with the greatest certainty, the functioning that I call the functioning of the division of the subject, or alienation.

92. #92

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.186

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the Drang (thrust) of the drive through a topological-mathematical analogy drawn from vector calculus and potential energy fields, arguing that the drive's constancy is defined not by physiological variation but by its relation to a rim-like structure (gap/béance) — what he calls the Quelle — which maintains a constant flux across any surface it subtends.

    What we seem to be dealing with, therefore, in the Drang of the drive is something that is, and is only, connotable in the relation to the Qpelle, in so far as the Qjulle inscribes in the economy of the drive this rim-like structure.

93. #93

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.212

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the lamella as a mythic-theoretical object that names what the sexed being loses in sexuality — an immortal, undivided libidinal substance that precedes and exceeds the subject — thereby displacing Aristophanes' fable in the Symposium with a new psychoanalytic myth about the drive and loss.

    that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal

94. #94

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.179

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the Freudian drive (Trieb) from any biological need or organismic totality, grounding it instead in a topological surface field (the Real-Ich/nervous system) defined by constant force (konstante Kraft) rather than momentary impulse — a move that separates drive from need and opens the terrain of libidinal energy as potential energy.

    the characteristic of the drive is to be a konstante Irafi, a constant force. He cannot conceive of it as a momentane Stosskraft.

95. #95

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.278

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

    Theoretical move: Lacan closes Seminar XI by revisiting its founding question—what order of truth does psychoanalytic praxis engender?—and frames the four fundamental concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) as the grounding that protects the analyst from the charge of imposture, while the formula "I love in you something more than you" crystallises the role of objet petit a in love and its destructive excess.

    the four headings of the unconscious, repetition, the transference and the drive

96. #96

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.289

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's desire—as an unknown x oriented against identification—is the operative force that enables the subject's crossing of the plane of identification, thereby returning the subject to the plane of the drive and the reality of the unconscious; he further situates the voice and the gaze as the two privileged objects (objet a) through which science's encroachment on the human field can be illuminated.

    from the reality of the unconscious, the drive may be made present

97. #97

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.281

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

    Theoretical move: Lacan delimits psychoanalysis's proper terrain by contrasting what it does NOT do (provide erotological technique or new sexual knowledge) with what it does: articulate sexuality exclusively through the drive's passage in the defile of the signifier, constituted within the double movement of alienation and separation—with the objet a as the key isolating concept missing from confused analytic literature.

    Psycho-analysis touches on sexuality only in as much as, in the form of the drive, it manifests itself in the defile of the signifier

98. #98

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.215

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the activity/passivity distinction in drive theory is purely grammatical (an artifice of Freud's articulation), and that each drive stage must be reformulated as an active "making oneself seen/heard," while distinguishing the drive field (pure activity) from the narcissistic field of love (reciprocity); he simultaneously grounds the erogenous zones in the lamella's rim-insertion into bodily orifices as the structural link between libido, the drives, and the unconscious.

    at the level of the drive it is purely grammatical. It is support, artifice, which Freud uses in order to enable us to understand the outward-return movement of the drive.

99. #99

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.183

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Freud's claim that the drive's object is a matter of indifference by introducing objet petit a as the cause of desire that the drive encircles rather than directly satisfies, captured in the untranslatable formula 'la pulsion en fait le tour' — the drive circles/tricks the object without ever reaching it.

    How should one conceive of the object of the drive, so that one can say that, in the drive, whatever it may be, it is indifferent?

100. #100

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

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

     Theoretical move: The partial drive is theorised as the mechanism by which the pleasure principle is forced open, revealing a jouissance beyond homeostasis and introducing an "other reality" that retroactively structures the Real-Ich itself.

     it is in so far as the drive is evidence of the forcing of the pleasure principle that it provides us with evidence that beyond the Real-Ich, another reality intervenes

101. #101

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

     Theoretical move: The partial drive achieves satisfaction not by attaining a biologically defined reproductive aim but through the self-enclosed circuit of its own return to the erogenous zone; the distinction between 'aim' (way taken) and 'goal' (terminal end) is used to redefine drive satisfaction as the loop itself rather than any external terminus.

     The tension is always loop-shaped and cannot be separated from its return to the erogenous zone.

102. #102

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's account of the Lust-Ich and Real-Ich to argue that love is grounded at the level of the Ich (not the drive), and that the partial drives appropriate the fields of pleasure/unpleasure only secondarily — connecting Freudian narcissism to the classical philosophical (Thomistic) theory of love as willing one's own good.

     At this level, there is no trace of drive functions, except those that are not true drives, and which Freud calls in his text the Ichtriebe. The level of the Ich is not that of the drive, and it is there—I would ask you to read the text very attentively—that Freud grounds love.

103. #103

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.196

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the partial drive as a headless subject whose circuit (modeled on Freud's Schub) returns around a rim-object, and argues that the topological unity between the gaps of the drive apparatus and the gaps of the signifying chain is what enables the drive to function within the unconscious—while carefully distinguishing drive structure from perversion.

     something that emerges from a rim, which redoubles its enclosed structure, following a course that returns, and of which nothing else ensures the consistency except the object, as something that must be circumvented.

104. #104

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces a fundamental antinomy between drive and satisfaction, arguing that the neurotic subject paradoxically achieves a form of satisfaction through displeasure, and that analytic intervention is justified precisely at the level of the drive where this paradoxical satisfaction must be rectified.

     the use of the function of the drive has for me no other purpose than to put in question what is meant by satisfaction.

105. #105

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     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: Lacan distinguishes the object of love from the object of desire/drive by locating love in the narcissistic field (Lust/Lust-Ich symmetry) while insisting that the object of desire is not clung to but circled around as its cause — the drive's object — and that desire can also arise "emptily" from prohibition alone.

     the object of desire is the cause of the desire, and this object that is the cause of desire is the object of the drive—that is to say, the object around which the drive turns.

106. #106

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive's essential structure — its circular return to the subject rather than simple object-directedness — is irreducible to love or well-being, and that the subject's realization in the signifier depends on a constitutive gap in its relation to the Other, theorized topologically as the function of the rim.

     in the profound relation of the drive, what is essential is that the movement by which the arrow that sets out towards the target fulfills its function only by really reemerging from it, and returning on to the subject.

107. #107

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.192

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

     Theoretical move: The partial drive is theorised as only partially representing sexuality's biological curve of fulfilment, whose structural movement (outward and back) cannot be reduced to linguistic voicing; sexuality is integrated into the dialectic of desire through partial drives, not through biological pairing, and the drive's telos is death — illustrated via Heraclitus's bow-as-life/death figure.

     the drive represents no doubt, but merely represents, and partially at that, the curve of fulfilment of sexuality in the living being.

108. #108

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.116

     THE LINE AND LIGHT > THE LINE AND LIGHT

     Theoretical move: Lacan theorises painting as an 'Apollonian' operation that does not trap the gaze but rather invites the spectator to lay it down, distinguishing this pacifying function from expressionism, which instead satisfies the demand of the gaze in the drive-sense — thereby establishing a structural distinction within the scopic field between the eye as organ and the gaze as object.

     provides something by way of a certain satisfaction—in the sense in which Freud uses the term in relation to the drive—of a certain satisfaction of what is demanded by the gaze.

109. #109

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.201

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a is never the aim of desire but rather the foundation of identification (or its disavowal), and uses this to pivot toward Freud's analysis of love, establishing that love's fundamentally narcissistic structure is what must be interrogated to understand how the love object can come to function as an object of desire.

     the neutral real is the desexualized real—is not introduced at the level of the drive.

110. #110

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.187

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that erogenous zones function specifically as rims by virtue of the exclusion of adjacent zones, and that when other bodily zones enter the economy of desire they do so through desexualization—most paradigmatically as disgust in hysteria—thereby distinguishing the satisfaction proper to the drive from the broader field of desire.

     But what satisfaction is the central function of the drive intended to produce? It is precisely to the extent that adjoining, connected zones are excluded that others take on their erogenous function and become specific sources for the drive.

111. #111

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

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

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots from the phallic/anamorphic register of vision to the gaze as such — not as a symbol of castration but as a pulsatile, elusive function that any picture traps yet simultaneously causes to disappear at every point of inquiry, establishing the picture as fundamentally a 'trap for the gaze'.

     centres the whole organization of the desires through the framework of the fundamental drives

112. #112

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends the structural (linguistic) account of the unconscious against charges of neglecting sexual dynamics, by re-articulating those dynamics through the topology of the subject/Other division and the partiality of the drive, thereby integrating libidinal force into a structuralist framework rather than opposing it.

     it was on the side of this living being, called to subjectivity, that the drive is essentially manifested.

113. #113

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

     OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

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

     the translation of instinct for Trieb, and instinctual for triebhaft has so many drawbacks... since Trieb and instinct have nothing in common... Trieb gives you a kick in the arse, my friends—quite different from so-called instinct.

114. #114

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.182

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real must be defined as the impossible—not merely as the obstacle to the pleasure principle (Freud's limited formulation) but as constitutive of both fields (pleasure principle and drive alike), and that no object of need can ever satisfy the drive, whose satisfaction is always partial and displaced.

     By snatching at its object, the drive learns in a sense that this is precisely not the way it will be satisfied.

115. #115

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.293

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: This concluding passage makes two theoretical moves: (1) it positions the analyst's desire as a desire for absolute difference — the condition under which limitless love outside the law becomes possible — and (2) it provides a translator's glossary that operationally defines key Lacanian concepts (desire/need/demand, jouissance, the three orders, objet petit a, Name-of-the-Father, knowledge) as relational and context-dependent rather than static definitions.

     Lacan reinstates a distinction, already clear in Freud, between the wholly psychical pulsion (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt), with its 'biological' connotations.

116. #116

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.84

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds repetition not in the actuality of the transference situation but in the constitutive split of the subject in relation to the encounter (tuché), arguing that the real is originally unwelcome and that this split—not adaptive failure—is what analytic experience discovers.

     the veiled meaning, which is the true reality and leads us towards the drive

117. #117

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexuality is not represented as such in the psyche—only its equivalents (activity/passivity) appear there—and therefore the subject must learn from the Other (via the Oedipus complex) what it means to be man or woman; sexuality is established in the psyche through lack, not through any direct biological function.

     the totality of the Sexualstrebung, of the sexual tendency, as it might be conceived as making present in the psyche the function of Fortpflanzung, of reproduction, if this function entered the psyche at all

118. #118

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

     TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

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

     this reality is not so small, for what wakes us is the other reality hidden behind the lack of that which takes the place of representation—this, says Freud is the Trieb

119. #119

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four vicissitudes of the drive—particularly the enigma of sublimation as aim-inhibited yet satisfying—to argue that drive satisfaction is fundamentally decoupled from biological rhythm, kinetic discharge, and aim-attainment, establishing the drive as a constant force whose satisfaction does not require reaching its object.

     The constancy of the thrust forbids any assimilation of the drive to a biological function, which always has a rhythm. The first thing Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that it has no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force.

120. #120

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan defers but acknowledges the economic point of view (energetics, constant force vs. variation) as a valid theoretical concern for understanding the drive, hinting that a reference to energetics in a limited system — where each point is characterized in terms of potential energy — will illuminate the discontinuous combinatory structure of the drive.

     the drive is ultimately destined to the combinatory of the fact of discontinuity, it posits for itself the problem of the contradiction inherent in the energy of the system, which is conceived as a force that is both constant and subject to variation.

121. #121

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.176

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames the drive (Trieb) as the fourth fundamental concept of psychoanalysis, insisting that Freud's specific use of the term constituted a radical conceptual break that is obscured by the term's prior history in psychology, physiology, and physics — a concealment that allows misreadings to invoke drive against Lacan's own doctrine of the unconscious.

     I must—for those who have not been able, for purely practical reasons, to follow my earlier seminars—put forward the fourth concept that I have proposed as essential to the analytic experience—that of drive.

122. #122

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.93

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

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing gaze from vision (the eye), Lacan grounds the scopic drive as a proper drive while arguing it is uniquely non-homologous with other drives precisely because it most completely eludes castration — a claim he attributes to a careful reading of Freud's 'Triebe und Triebschicksale'.

     The split between gaze and vision will enable us, you will see, to add the scopic drive to the list of the drives.

123. #123

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan rereads Freud's account of love and the gesamt Ich to argue that love requires a structural level (the real/economic/biological triad) distinct from the drive, and critically challenges the developmental reading of autoeroticism in Ego Psychology by pointing out that the infant is never indifferent to its perceptual field.

     in order to conceive of love, we must necessarily refer to another sort of structure than that of the drive. He divides this structure into three, three levels—the level of real, the level of the economic and the level of the biological.

124. #124

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.220

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the lack at the heart of the subject's advent by grounding it in a real, biological lack introduced by sexed reproduction and individual death, and replaces Aristophanes' myth of complementary sexual halves with the myth of the lamella — repositioning the libido not as a field of forces but as an unreal organ that embodies the partial drive's essentially death-driven character.

     The libido is the essential organ in understanding the nature of the drive. This organ is unreal.

125. #125

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.190

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

     Theoretical move: Against any holistic or unifying conception of sexuality (love as representative of the total sexual tendency), Lacan reads Freud's drive-text as establishing that the drives are irreducibly partial, governed by an economic factor tied to the Pleasure Principle operating at the level of the Real-Ich (homeostatic nervous system), not by biological reproductive finality.

     the deconstruction of the drive; secondly, the examination of das Lieben, the act of love.

126. #126

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.26

     The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis cannot be defined as a science through hermeneutics, praxis-field, or formula-making alone; instead, its scientific status depends on clarifying the status of its four fundamental Freudian concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) and, crucially, on interrogating the analyst's desire as constitutive of the analytic field itself.

     what conceptual status must we give to four of the terms introduced by Freud as fundamental concepts, namely, the unconscious, repetition, the transference and the drive?

127. #127

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the libido not as a fluid or divisible energy but as an organ — both in the sense of a bodily part and an instrument — thereby displacing hydraulic/economic models and preparing a structural-topological account of the drive and its relation to the subject and the Other.

     The field of the drive: making oneself... seen, heard, sucked, shitted

128. #128

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.260

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps Freud's ego-topology onto a schema of Lust/Unlust fields, arguing that what resists homeostasis is inscribed in the ego as non-ego (fremde Objekt), thereby grounding psychoanalytic clinical tact in an implicit topology of subject and real rather than in naïve scientific realism.

     Freud distinguishes clearly between the level of the Ich, for example in the article on the Triebe, when stressing both that it is manifested as organized

129. #129

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.272

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two forms of identification operative in transference — one anchored in the ego ideal (narcissistic, specular) and one introduced by separation and centred on the objet a as topological object — and argues that it is the signifier's entry into human life that makes sex capable of bringing death into presence, collapsing the life/death drive distinction into a single articulation at the level of the unconscious signification of sex.

     This object supports that which, in the drive, is defined and specified by the fact that the coming into play of the signifier in the life of man enables him to bring out the meaning of sex.

130. #130

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan equates the libido with immortal, irrepressible life subtracted from the sexed being, positioning it as the ground of all partial objects (objets a), and locates the emergence of the subject in the locus of the Other through the logic of the signifier representing a subject for another signifier.

     It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction.

131. #131

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.204

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is constituted through division in the field of the Other, such that only partial drives (never a unified sexual drive) are apprehensible, while love and genitality belong to the Other's field and are structured by the Oedipus complex — meaning the ganze Sexualstrebung is nowhere present in the subject but diffused across culture.

     The drives necessitate us in the sexual order—they come from the heart... love, on the other hand, comes from belly, from the world of yum-yum.

132. #132

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.257

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

     Theoretical move: This is a brief transitional Q&A exchange in which Safouan raises a terminological confusion between the object in the drive and the object in desire; Lacan deflects the question as one of terminology rather than advancing any substantive theoretical argument.

     I always find it difficult to understand the difference between the object in the drive and the object in desire.

133. #133

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.141

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the Freudian unconscious strictly as the effects of speech on the subject at the level of the signifier, explicitly distinguishing it from all pre-Freudian notions (instinct, archaic function, metaphysical unconscious), and aligns the subject of psychoanalysis with the Cartesian subject—while arguing that the Lacanian approach both broadens and refines the ground of that subject's certainty.

     have you ever, for a single moment, the feeling that you are handling the clay of instinct?

134. #134

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.189

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from a polemical dismissal of neo-Freudian adaptational constructions to re-grounding the drive's theory: he argues that transference enacts the reality of the unconscious precisely as sexuality, but questions whether love—its visible surface in the transference—is the privileged or culminating form of that sexuality, thus opening a more radical inquiry into the partial drive.

     Every drive is partial Drive, sex and death

135. #135

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the losange (◇) as a topological algorithm that supports the two operations of alienation and separation, showing it functions as a "rim" that articulates the subject's relation to the Other in both the fantasy matheme ($◇a) and the demand/drive node ($◇D), grounding subjectivity in the dependence on the signifier.

     that radical node in which are conjoined demand and drive, designated by the \$GD [barred S, punch, capital D], which might be called the cry.

136. #136

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Freud's concept of drive (Trieb) as a fundamental fiction rather than a myth or model, arguing that the Grundbegriffe of psychoanalysis must trace their way in the real to be scientifically valid, and begins a deconstruction of the drive's four terms by examining their disjointedness, starting with thrust as tendency to discharge.

     when he, Freud, introduced the drive into science, one was faced with a choice between two possibilities—either this concept would be preserved, or it would be rejected.

137. #137

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.184

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan theorises the drive not as an instinct oriented toward a natural end but as a surrealist 'montage' — an assemblage whose components (Drang, object, aim, source) can be reversed and recombined without any governing finality, thereby radically distinguishing the drive from biological instinct.

     Let me say that if there is anything resembling a drive it is a montage.

138. #138

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.255

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's "Drives and their Vicissitudes" to argue that the emergence of the psychical apparatus is built on a two-stage schema in which an initial homeostatic Ich, defined by indifference to an outside, is subsequently fractured by the distinction between Lust and Unlust—a movement that lays the groundwork for the objet a as the remainder that exceeds equilibrium.

     In his text on the Triebe and the Triebschicksale, the drives and the vicissitudes of the drive

139. #139

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

     CONTENTS

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

     THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

140. #140

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes psychoanalysis from both hermeneutics and alchemy by arguing that its scientific status hinges on the structural role of the analyst's desire and on the foundational conceptual status of Freud's four fundamental concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive), which have been systematically distorted in the analytic literature; the passage thereby frames the central theoretical question of Seminar XI.

     what conceptual status must we give to four of the terms introduced by Freud as fundamental concepts, namely, the unconscious, repetition, the transference and the drive?

141. #141

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the four fundamental Freudian concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) and anchors the unconscious structurally in language, drawing on Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology to argue that a pre-subjective, combinatory symbolic order organizes human relations before any subject emerges—setting up the distinction between the counting subject and the subject who recognizes herself as counting.

     the drive is still so difficult to approach—so neglected, one should say—that I do not think I can do more this year than touch upon it after we have dealt with the transference.

142. #142

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

     OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

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

     the translation of instinct for Trieb, and instinctual for triebhaft has so many drawbacks for the translator... since Trieb and instinct have nothing in common—Trieb gives you a kick in the arse, my friends—quite different from so-called instinct.

143. #143

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

     TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

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

     this reality is not so small, for what wakes us is the other reality hidden behind the lack of that which takes the place of representation—this, says Freud is the Trieb.

144. #144

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.79

     TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes developmental stages not as natural maturational sequences but as organized retroactively around castration anxiety, which acts as a thread that retrospectively orientates all prior moments (weaning, toilet training, etc.) through the logic of the "bad encounter" — i.e., the tuché — making trauma the structuring principle of development rather than its accident.

     The description of the stages, which go to form the libido, must not be referred to some natural process of pseudomaturation, which always remains opaque.

145. #145

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

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

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

     the real finds itself; in the subject, to a very great degree the accomplice of the drive—which we shall come to last

146. #146

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.93

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

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing the gaze from vision (the eye), Lacan argues that the scopic drive can be added to the list of drives, and that it is uniquely non-homologous with other drives insofar as it most completely eludes castration — a claim grounded in a reading of Freud's 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes'.

     we shall see that Freud already places this drive to the fore in Triebe und Triebschicksale ('Instincts and their Vicissitudes'), and shows that it is not homologous with the others.

147. #147

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

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

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots from the phallic/anamorphic reading of vision toward a more fundamental function: the gaze as such, distinct from the eye and irreducible to phallic symbolism, with the picture theorised as a 'trap for the gaze' that causes the gaze to vanish at every point one tries to locate it.

     centres the whole organization of the desires through the framework of the fundamental drives

148. #148

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.116

     THE LINE AND LIGHT > THE LINE AND LIGHT

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two modes of painting's relation to the gaze: the 'Apollonian effect' in which the picture invites the spectator to lay down (relinquish) their gaze, offering something to the eye rather than trapping the gaze; versus expressionism, which instead provides drive-satisfaction to the gaze itself. This distinction opens onto the question of the eye as organ in relation to the drive.

     something by way of a certain satisfaction—in the sense in which Freud uses the term in relation to the drive—of a certain satisfaction of what is demanded by the gaze.

149. #149

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.176

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Drive as the fourth fundamental concept of psychoanalysis, arguing that Freud's specific use of 'Trieb' is so novel that it conceals its prior history, and that misappropriations of the term (even against Lacan's own doctrine) stem from treating it as a mere 'radical given' rather than a rigorously theorized concept.

     I must—for those who have not been able, for purely practical reasons, to follow my earlier seminars—put forward the fourth concept that I have proposed as essential to the analytic experience—that of drive.

150. #150

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues against organicist and archaic readings of the drive by returning to Freud's 1915 structural analysis of Trieb, insisting that the drive must be understood as a Grundbegriff (fundamental concept) composed of four distinct terms—not reducible to mere biological thrust or inertia—and that this distinction is precisely what his teaching requires analysts to grasp in order to understand the unconscious.

     Drive (pulsion) is not thrust (poussee). Trieb is not Drang, if only for the following reason.

151. #151

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive, as a Grundbegriff, functions not as a model but as a fundamental fiction (in Bentham's sense), and begins deconstructing Freud's four terms of the drive by examining their disjointed character, starting with thrust as a tendency to discharge tied to the concept of excitation (Reiz).

     the drive belongs to our myths. For my part, I will ignore this term myth—indeed, in the same text, in the first paragraph, Freud uses the word Konvention, convention, which is much closer to what we are talking about and to which I would apply the Benthamite term, fiction

152. #152

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.179

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's Trieb (drive) is categorically distinct from biological need (hunger, thirst) and from momentary impulse-force; it is a constant force (konstante Kraft) operating on a topological surface field anchored in the nervous system (Real-Ich), not in the organism as a whole—a move that separates the drive from any naturalistic or organismic reading.

     It has to be said that, at the very outset, Freud posits, quite categorically, that there is absolutely no question in Trieb of the pressure of a need such as Hunger or Durst, thirst.

153. #153

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four vicissitudes of the drive—particularly the paradox of sublimation as aim-inhibited yet satisfying—to argue that drive satisfaction is structurally decoupled from biological rhythm and from the attainment of any specific aim, establishing the drive's constancy as irreducible to kinetic or biological models.

     The constancy of the thrust forbids any assimilation of the drive to a biological function, which always has a rhythm. The first thing Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that it has no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force.

154. #154

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan identifies a constitutive antinomy between drive and satisfaction: symptoms and neurotic suffering involve a paradoxical satisfaction that fulfils the pleasure principle in a roundabout way, and analytic intervention is justified precisely at the level of the drive, where this satisfaction must be rectified—introducing the category of the impossible as a new dimension of drive-satisfaction.

     Between these two terms—drive and satisfaction—there is set up an extreme antinomy that reminds us that the use of the function of the drive has for me no other purpose than to put in question what is meant by satisfaction.

155. #155

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.182

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines the Real as the impossible — not as the simple negation of the possible, but as that which is structurally separated from the pleasure principle and which no object can satisfy — and uses this to argue that the drive is constitutively unable to find satisfaction in any object of need, making the impossible an essential element of both the field of the drive and the pleasure principle.

     By snatching at its object, the drive learns in a sense that this is precisely not the way it will be satisfied. For if one distinguishes, at the outset of the dialectic of the drive, Xot from Bedürfnis, need from the pressure of the drive—it is precisely because no object of any Xot, need, can satisfy the drive.

156. #156

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's insistence on the object's indifference in the drive compels a radical revision of the breast as object: it must be reconceived not as a nutritive or mnemonic referent but as objet petit a — the cause of desire around which the drive circulates (faire le tour), a formula that captures both the drive's encirclement of the object and its trick of never reaching satisfaction through it.

     How should one conceive of the object of the drive, so that one can say that, in the drive, whatever it may be, it is indifferent?

157. #157

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.184

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive is not a natural instinct oriented toward a biological end but a "montage" in the surrealist sense—a heterogeneous, reversible assemblage of Drang, object, aim, and source, whose very paradoxicality distinguishes it structurally from instinct.

     Let me say that if there is anything resembling a drive it is a montage.

158. #158

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Freud's grammar-based logic of drive opposites (voyeurism/exhibitionism, sadism/masochism) as a confusion of grammatical with real functions, while arguing that Freud's deeper contribution is what the drive reveals about 'the trace of the act' — a concept to be formally defined.

     what, by means of this game, he conveys to us about the essence of the drive is what, next time, I will define for you as the trace of the act.

159. #159

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: The passage poses the question of whether the economic point of view (constant force vs. variation) can be reconciled with Lacan's emphasis on discontinuity in the drive, and Lacan gestures toward energetics—specifically the concept of potential energy in a limited system—as the framework that will address this apparent contradiction.

     the drive is ultimately destined to the combinatory of the fact of discontinuity, it posits for itself the problem of the contradiction inherent in the energy of the system, which is conceived as a force that is both constant and subject to variation.

160. #160

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.186

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the mathematical concept of flux (from vector calculus and potential energy) to argue that the Drang (thrust) of the drive is characterized by a constant maintained across variable rim-like structures — the gap/béance — thereby grounding the drive's constancy topologically rather than physiologically.

     What we seem to be dealing with, therefore, in the Drang of the drive is something that is, and is only, connotable in the relation to the Qpelle, in so far as the Qjulle inscribes in the economy of the drive this rim-like structure.

161. #161

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.187

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that erogenous zones function as rims precisely through the exclusion of adjacent zones, and that whenever non-erogenous zones enter the economy of desire they do so under the sign of desexualization—manifested paradigmatically as disgust in hysteria—distinguishing the satisfaction proper to the drive from the wider circulation of desire.

     But what satisfaction is the central function of the drive intended to produce?

162. #162

     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.

     the introduction of the drive presents I hope that many of you will have been able to refer to this text in the meantime

163. #163

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.192

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

     Theoretical move: The partial drive is constitutively structured by an outward-and-return movement (the "dialectic of the bow") and only partially represents the curve of sexuality in the living being; crucially, sexuality is realized not through biological pairing but through partial drives that pass into the networks of the signifier, binding sexuality to the subject's constitution and, ultimately, to death.

     the drive represents no doubt, but merely represents, and partially at that, the curve of fulfilment of sexuality in the living being.

164. #164

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.193

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's account of the drive's reversibility (active/passive poles) as demonstrating that the drive's circuit is fundamentally circular and that this circularity is what occasions the appearance of a new subject — the Other — not as a pre-existing subject but as an effect produced by the drive completing its round.

     no part of this distance covered can be separated from its outwards-and-back movement, from its fundamental reversion, from the circular character of the path of the drive.

165. #165

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the partial drive's satisfaction consists not in reaching a biological end-goal (reproduction) but in the circular itinerary of the drive itself — the loop that departs from and returns to the erogenous rim — distinguishing 'aim' as path/circuit from 'goal' as terminal end-point, and grounding this in Freud's auto-erotic metaphor of the self-kissing mouth.

     The tension is always loop-shaped and cannot be separated from its return to the erogenous zone.

166. #166

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.196

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive's structure is topologically homologous to the structure of the unconscious: both are organised around a rim/gap that the drive must circumnavigate, with the object (objet petit a) serving as the sole guarantor of consistency, and this shared topology is what allows the drive to function within the unconscious—while insisting that the drive itself is not perversion.

     something that emerges from a rim, which redoubles its enclosed structure, following a course that returns, and of which nothing else ensures the consistency except the object

167. #167

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

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

     Theoretical move: The partial drive's forcing of the pleasure principle is theorized as the mechanism by which a jouissance beyond homeostasis becomes operative, revealing that a second reality (beyond the Real-Ich) retroactively structures the subject's very organization.

     it is in so far as the drive is evidence of the forcing of the pleasure principle that it provides us with evidence that beyond the Real-Ich, another reality intervenes

168. #168

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.201

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is never the aim of desire but rather functions as a pre-subjective foundation or disavowed identification, and uses this to reframe the love object's relationship to desire as resting on equivocation, with love's fundamentally narcissistic structure grounded in the pleasure principle rather than the drive.

     the neutral real is the desexualized real—is not introduced at the level of the drive.

169. #169

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the libido not as a fluid or diffuse energy but as an organ—both a bodily part and an instrument—thereby shifting the conceptual ground from energetics to topology, and uses an analogy (the bladder rather than Plato's cave) to reframe the unconscious away from depth-metaphors.

     The field of the drive: making oneself... seen, heard, sucked, shitted

170. #170

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the totality of the sexual drive (ganze Sexualstrebung) is nowhere apprehensible in the subject — only partial drives appear through the pulsation of the unconscious — while genital sexuality finds its form not in the drive itself but in the field of the Other (Oedipus complex, kinship structures), thereby structurally separating drive from love and from any unified sexuality.

     The drives necessitate us in the sexual order—they come from the heart. To our great surprise, he tells us that love, on the other hand, comes from belly, from the world of yum-yum.

171. #171

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the ego-psychological reading of Freud's "Real-Ich" and autoerotism by showing that the infant is never indifferent to its perceptual field, thereby distinguishing the structure of love (tied to the gesamt Ich and the pleasure principle as a homeostatic surface) from the structure of the drive.

     in order to conceive of love, we must necessarily refer to another sort of structure than that of the drive. He divides this structure into three, three levels

172. #172

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's developmental account of the Lust-Ich and Real-Ich to show that love is grounded at the level of the Ich (ego) rather than the drives, and that this narcissistic structure of love corresponds to the classical philosophical conception (St Thomas's *velle bonum alicui*), with partial drives only secondarily appropriating the ego's object-fields.

     At this level, there is no trace of drive functions, except those that are not true drives, and which Freud calls in his text the Ichtriebe. The level of the Ich is not that of the drive.

173. #173

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.210

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: By replacing Freud's 'werden' with 'machen' in the formulation of the drive, Lacan redefines the drive's loop as a reflexive circuit of "making oneself seen/heard," concentrating its activity in the se faire (making oneself), and uses this to illuminate the partial drives—scopic, invocatory, oral—as each tracing a different structural relation between subject and other.

     The activity of the drive is concentrated in this making oneself (sefaire), and it is by relating it to the field of the other drives that we may be able to throw some light upon it.

174. #174

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive's turning-inside-out movement through the erogenous zone is structured as an appeal that seeks a response in the Other, and that the drive's proper "organ" is not the biological organ but an ungraspable, circumventable false organ — the objet petit a — whose nature he will illuminate via a myth drawn from Plato's Symposium.

     the drive, in this turning inside out represented by its pocket, invaginating through the erogenous zone, is given the task of seeking something that, each time, responds in the Other?

175. #175

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.212

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the lamella as a mythic-biological figure for what the sexed being loses in sexuality — a flattened, immortal, pre-subjective libidinal organ that operates beyond the pleasure principle and exceeds any division — thereby grounding the drive in something irreducible to language while remaining continuous with his claim that the unconscious is made of language.

     something—I will tell you shortly why—that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal

176. #176

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan identifies the libido as immortal, organ-less life subtracted from the living being through sexed reproduction, and argues that all forms of objet a are merely its figures/representatives; he then grounds the subject's emergence in the locus of the Other through the signifier, defining the signifier as that which represents a subject for another signifier—not for another subject.

     It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ

177. #177

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.214

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: The subject is constituted through the emergence of the signifier in the field of the Other, whereby it immediately 'solidifies' into a signifier and is thereby born divided; this splitting is the structural ground for the drive's essential affinity with death and for the libido's relation to the sexual cycle as loss.

     I explain the essential affinity of every drive with the zone of death, and reconcile the two sides of the drive—which, at one and the same time, makes present sexuality in the unconscious and represents, in its essence, death.

178. #178

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the activity/passivity distinction in drive theory is purely grammatical (an artifice Freud uses to articulate the drive's outward-return movement), while the drive's structure is fundamentally active at every stage - each of the three Freudian stages must be replaced by reflexive formulas like 'making oneself seen/heard', linking the lamella, erogenous zones, and partial drives to the unconscious through the opening/closing of its gap.

     at the level of the drive it is purely grammatical. It is support, artifice, which Freud uses in order to enable us to understand the outward-return movement of the drive.

179. #179

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends his structural approach against charges of neglecting sexual dynamics by arguing that the topology of subject/Other division already accounts for drive dynamics, with the partial drive situated on the side of the living being called to subjectivity — thereby integrating sexuality into a structuralist framework rather than opposing the two.

     it was on the side of this living being, called to subjectivity, that the drive is essentially manifested

180. #180

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexuality is not represented as such in the psyche (neither as biological reproduction nor as sexual difference), but only through the partial drive as a representative of lack; consequently, what one must do as man or woman is entirely delegated to the scenario of the Other—the Oedipus complex—and sexuality enters the subject only through the structure of lack.

     Whether it is the drive, the partial drive, that orientates him to it, or whether the partial drive alone is the representative in the psyche of the consequences of sexuality

181. #181

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.220

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject's lack is grounded in a real, prior lack introduced by sexed reproduction and individual death, and substitutes Aristophanes' myth of the complementary sexual other with the myth of the lamella—redefining the libido not as a field of forces but as an unreal organ that embodies the partial drive's fundamentally death-driven character.

     The libido is the essential organ in understanding the nature of the drive.

182. #182

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive's logic — its circular return upon the subject — is irreducible to ambivalence or well-being, and that the subject's realization is produced through a structural gap in its signifying dependence on the Other, grounded topologically in the function of the rim/cut.

     in the profound relation of the drive, what is essential is that the movement by which the arrow that sets out towards the target fulfills its function only by really reemerging from it, and returning on to the subject.

183. #183

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the lozange (losange) as a topological algorithm unifying the two fundamental operations of subject/Other relation—alienation and separation—showing how it functions as the formal support for both the fantasy formula ($<>a) and the demand/drive node ($<>D), with the vel of the lower half marking the first operation (alienation).

     that radical node in which are conjoined demand and drive, designated by the \$GD [barred S, punch, capital D], which might be called the cry.

184. #184

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.255

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

     Theoretical move: The passage reconstructs Freud's two-stage schema of the drive's vicissitudes—beginning with a homeostatic Ich defined by the pleasure/reality principle—to show that ambivalence at the level of love differs structurally from the circular Verkehrung, and that this schema grounds the emergence of the objet a as the first construction of a psychic apparatus.

     the Triebe and the Triebschicksale, the drives and the vicissitudes of the drive

185. #185

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · 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: Lacan argues that ethics fails when grounded in pleasure, and that the Kantian critique of the sovereign good points instead to the Law and desire; it is the recognition of the drive—and specifically of objet petit a as objects that serve no function—that grounds the dialectic of the divided/alienated subject of the unconscious.

     It is the recognition of the drive that enables us to construct, with the greatest certainty, the functioning that I call the functioning of the division of the subject, or alienation.

186. #186

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.257

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

     Theoretical move: This is a brief Q&A exchange where a student expresses confusion about the distinctions between the object in the drive, the object in desire, and the id; Lacan dismisses the difficulty as terminological rather than substantive. The passage is largely non-substantive.

     I always find it difficult to understand the difference between the object in the drive and the object in desire.

187. #187

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     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: Lacan distinguishes the object of desire from the object of love by locating the former as the cause-object (objet petit a) around which the drive circles, while the latter is grounded in narcissistic identification—making the object of love a "good object" addressed to an other, whereas desire is structured by lack and prohibition.

     desire moves around it, in so far as it is agitated in the drive. But all desire is not necessarily agitated in the drive.

188. #188

     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.

     Freud distinguishes clearly between the level of the Ich, for example in the article on the Triebe

189. #189

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.272

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two axes of identification—the ego ideal (narcissistic, sustaining the transference) and the objet a (topological, linked to the drive and separation)—and argues that the life/death drive distinction is valid only insofar as all sexual drives are articulated at the level of unconscious signification, where sex necessarily makes present death as a signifier.

     This object supports that which, in the drive, is defined and specified by the fact that the coming into play of the signifier in the life of man enables him to bring out the meaning of sex.

190. #190

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.278

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar XI by reframing the year's work around the four fundamental concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) as the ground of psychoanalytic practice, and poses the epistemological challenge of psychoanalysis's claim to truth: how can its practitioners be certain they are not impostors? The formula "I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a" crystallises the structural excess that both grounds and destabilises love and practice alike.

     the four headings of the unconscious, repetition, the transference and the drive

191. #191

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.281

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: Lacan delimits psychoanalysis's proper terrain by arguing that it does not operate on sexuality as such but only on sexuality insofar as it manifests in the drive's passage through the signifier, constituting the subject through the double movement of alienation and separation; the objet a is foregrounded as the key conceptual instrument that analytic literature has lacked and that distinguishes genuine analytic work from its confusions.

     it operates very little... in the form of the drive, it manifests itself in the defile of the signifier

192. #192

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.288

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines hypnosis structurally as the confusion of the ideal signifier (identification) with objet petit a, and then distinguishes analytic desire precisely as the operation that maintains the maximal distance between identification and a — thereby positioning the analyst as an "upside-down hypnotist" whose desire separates rather than fuses these poles, culminating in the traversal of fundamental fantasy where fantasy becomes drive.

     after the mapping of the subject in relation to the a, the experience of the fundamental phantasy becomes the drive.

193. #193

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.289

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the training analysis is the only genuine analysis because it requires traversing the full loop of analytic experience (durcharbeiten), and that the analyst's desire—as an unknown x oriented against identification—is what enables the crossing of identification through the separation of the subject, ultimately making the drive present at the level of the unconscious; he further situates voice and gaze as the two privileged objects (objet a) whose modern technological proliferation illuminates the contemporary relation to science.

     The experience of the subject is thus brought back to the plane at which, from the reality of the unconscious, the drive may be made present.

194. #194

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.293

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: This concluding passage of Seminar XI makes two theoretical moves: first, it articulates the analyst's desire as a desire for "absolute difference" that enables a love beyond the law; second, the appended glossary (translator's note) provides operational definitions of Lacan's key concepts—desire/need/demand, the three orders (Imaginary/Symbolic/Real), jouissance, objet petit a, and Name-of-the-Father—framing them as evolving and best understood contextually rather than statically.

     Lacan reinstates a distinction, already clear in Freud, between the wholly psychical pulsion (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt), with its 'biological' connotations.

195. #195

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan rereads Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysteric's desire-to-desire) as demanding a tripartite structural framework—privation, frustration, castration—in which the status of the subject (oscillating between zero and one) must be posited prior to any account of demand, transference, or castration, thereby exposing the conceptual limitations of post-Freudian analytic practice.

     the first form of it is this oral drive through which incorporation takes place

196. #196

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.79

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates to triangulate the voice as objet petit a, the structure of desire (including its link to the impossible), and the syllogism's topological deception, thereby re-framing the death drive not as a wish for death but as the structural condition that articulates desire, identification, demand, and transference around an irreducible gap.

     this exit as spasmodic outside the palpitating gap of the unconscious which, at the major hole around which we have turned today, opens and closes, the very outwards and return trajectory of the drive

197. #197

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.41

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis has mapped out its clinical procedures without genuinely theorising them — transference, identification, the symptom as knot — and that Freud's founding discovery (the Signorelli forgetting) demonstrates that the unconscious operates at the level of signifying material (phonemes), not repressed content, grounding the claim that the subject is primordially determined by language/discourse rather than by any substantial soul or intentional consciousness.

     this confused ......... locus of the tendency, and since it is to this that, in the common philosophy of psychoanalysis, the drive will finally and in an erroneous fashion be brought back

198. #198

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.207

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand), Lacan articulates the drive's circuit as a loop around a gap in the body, where "pure difference" (exquisite/acid fringe of sweetness) functions as the irreducible kernel of desire; the ejaculatory formula Poord'jeli is analysed as a vocal signifier that mimes and masters this circuit, connecting the drive's reversal to the sacred incantatory dimension of the Voice.

     this movement of reversal that is necessary to understand anything whatsoever about the reality of the drive and also, of course, that of desire.

199. #199

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's position is defined by a "logic of desire" grounded in singularity, lack, and the signifier's structure (representing a subject for another signifier), and that the Subject Supposed to Know is not a classificatory knower of universals but one who guides the analysand to the moment of emergence where an unknown signifier retroactively constitutes the subject — demonstrated clinically through Dora's symptoms.

     the error of translating Trieb by instinct, consists precisely in the fact that it would make of the tendency some property... supposed to be inserted into the living thing in so far as it is typical

200. #200

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the analysis of Philip's proper name and fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) to articulate the interweaving of transference, the unconscious, drive, repetition, and the incestuous encounter as the conditions under which a desiring subject emerges from the analytic situation—turning the phonematic transcription of the fantasy into a site where metaphor, metonymy, castration, and the analyst's desire converge.

     the irreducible drive whose representatives undergo the effect of repression, of displacement, and of condensation and finally the constitutive absence of logical relationships and of contradiction at the primary level of the processes of the unconscious

201. #201

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) is legible as the intersection of the proper name, the unconscious signifying chain, transference, and the drive—showing that the analytic encounter is constitutively structured as an "incestuous adventure" in which the analyst's desire and the subject's becoming are articulated through phonematic and metonymic condensation, culminating in the subject's constitution as desiring through the analyst's name.

     the irreducible drive whose representatives undergo the effect of repression, of displacement, and of condensation and finally the constitutive absence of logical relationships and of contradiction at the primary level of the processes of the unconscious.

202. #202

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand) to theorise how the circuit of sense—anchored by pure difference, the gap of the body, and the dehiscence of the other body—produces desire, the drive, and the object voice, culminating in the Shemah prayer as a limit-case where the signifier, jouissance, and the sacred converge around an invocatory formula.

     this movement of reversal that is necessary to understand anything whatsoever about the reality of the drive and also, of course, that of desire.

203. #203

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.41

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis lacks genuine theoretical comprehension of its own experience (transference, identification, symptom), and locates the foundational discovery of the unconscious in Freud's analysis of the Signorelli forgetting — where what disappears is not a repressed content but phonemes, establishing that the unconscious operates at the level of signifying material rather than meaning.

     this confused locus of the tendency, and since it is to this that, in the common philosophy of psychoanalysis, the drive will finally and in an erroneous fashion be brought back

204. #204

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst's position is defined by a logic of desire structured around lack and the singular (not the universal), and that the formula "the signifier represents a subject for another signifier" grounds the analyst's function as Subject Supposed to Know—demonstrated concretely through the symptom-as-signifier in Freud's case of Dora.

     the tendency is specific, and that the error of translating Trieb by instinct, consists precisely in the fact that it would make of the tendency some property, some status, which is supposed to be inserted into the living thing in so far as it is typical

205. #205

     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.

     since the first form of it is this oral drive through which incorporation takes place

206. #206

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.79

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates to articulate the structural relationship between Voice as objet petit a, Desire, Demand, Transference, and the Death Drive, arguing that the syllogism "Socrates is mortal / all men are mortal" is a topological lure whose deceptive diameter maps onto the function of transference as the link between identification, demand, and the indeterminate subject of the unconscious.

     this exit as spasmodic outside the palpitating gap of the unconscious which, at the major hole around which we have turned today, opens and closes, the very outwards and return trajectory of the drive

207. #207

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     **Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan corrects Audouard's misreading of his topology of the scopic drive by insisting that the "plane of the look" cannot project onto the picture plane in a geometrically reciprocal (intersubjective) way, and uses this correction to clarify that the drive's structure is a topological circuit around the o-object (objet petit a), not an optical reciprocity between subject and image.

     the drive is something constructed as Freud has inscribed it for us, and if we try, following what Freud inscribed about the drive, that it is not an instinct, but a montage, a montage between realities of an essentially heterogeneous level

208. #208

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses projective geometry to establish that every perspective structure contains two subject points—not one—and then maps this duality onto the scopic fantasy, identifying the elided "window" (opening/split) as the site of the objet petit a, while illustrating the argument through Velázquez's Las Meninas and distinguishing his reading from Foucault's by centring the inverted canvas as the structurally decisive element.

     if we have sufficiently explored the mechanism of the drive to see that what is happening in it is a return journey from the subject to the subject, provided one grasps that the return is not identical to the outward journey

209. #209

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     III - THE RELATION o TO i(o) AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION AND SPECULARISATION.

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that affect, like the representative of the drive, must be re-categorised as a form of signifier — demonstrated by Freud's progressive specification of Verleugnung alongside Verdrängung — and that this re-categorisation reveals a reduplicated non-identity (Entzweiung) at the heart of the signifier itself, which the Lacanian formula of the signifier representing a subject for another signifier must be extended to accommodate.

     it is not any object whatsoever that is involved in the substitution... an object of the drive, thereforee it is not any object whatsoever

210. #210

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     **Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan corrects a seminar participant's (Audouard's) attempt to reconstruct projective geometry of the gaze, using the error to clarify the topology of the scopic drive: the ground/look-plane cannot project onto the figure-plane along a horizon line but only along the line at infinity of the picture, and the drive's structure must be understood as a topological circuit around the objet petit a, not as an intersubjective reciprocity between two perspectives.

     the drive is something constructed as Freud has inscribed it for us, and if we try, following what Freud inscribed about the drive, that it is not an instinct, but a montage, a montage between realities of an essentially heterogeneous level

211. #211

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses projective geometry to argue that perspective structure necessarily contains two subject-points (not one), and that the elided "window" or opening between them is the structural site of the objet petit a in the scopic field — a topology he then illustrates via Velázquez's Las Meninas, reading the painting's face-down canvas as a figure for the division of the subject and the drive's Möbius-strip circuit.

     if we have sufficiently explored the mechanism of the drive to see that what is happening in it is a return journey from the subject to the subject, provided one grasps that the return is not identical to the outward journey

212. #212

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     III - THE RELATION o TO i(o) AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION AND SPECULARISATION.

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that affect must be granted the status of a signifier — on a par with the drive-representative (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) — by tracing Freud's progressive distinction between Verleugnung (denial, bearing on perception) and Verdrängung (repression, bearing on affect), and then proposes that the signifier itself be redefined to include both registers, thereby grounding a reduplicated Entzweiung (splitting) at the heart of the subject.

     one short-circuits in my opinion the problem of representation which refers to the object of the drive. Freud designates it as eminently substitutable and interchangeable

213. #213

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.74

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Cartesian cogito as a structural foreclosure of being—a "rejection" (Verwerfung) that installs the Other in the place of Being—and uses this to ground the psychoanalytic Id not as a "bad ego" or first-person subject but as the grammatical remainder of discourse once "I" is subtracted, thereby articulating alienation as the rejection of the Other rather than capture by it.

     the very support of what is involved in the drive, namely, the phantasy, should be able to be expressed as follows: Ein Kind ist geschlagen, a child is being beaten.

214. #214

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.128

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > acting-out

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions sublimation as the fourth term in a structural table alongside repetition, passage à l'acte, and acting-out, arguing that sublimation — defined via Freud's *zielgehemmt* — is the conceptual locus for understanding the satisfaction (*Befriedigung*) that underwrites repetition, while simultaneously critiquing ego-psychology's (Hartmann's) energetics framework for inverting and obscuring this problem; he then anchors sublimation's solution in the proposition that the act is a signifier, with the sexual act as the paradigmatic case whose repetition traces the oedipal scene.

     Zielgehemmt, and it is precisely here that the word is well made to detain us … what we gargle with this so called 'object' of the blessed genital drive, is precisely what can without any inconvenience be extracted, totally inhibited, absent

215. #215

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.180

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden ratio (φ) as a mathematical support to argue that sublimation cannot close the gap between even and odd power series—between the sexes—thereby demonstrating that there is no sexual relation at the level of the signifier, and condemning the psychoanalytic myth of primary narcissism/fusion as the foundation of libidinal economy.

     the operation of what is realised on the path of the sexual drive, under the name of sublimation

216. #216

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.75

     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.

     it is traced out, that it is a montage - an outline, a grammatical montage whose inversions, reversals, complexities, are not ordered otherwise then by the application of diverse reversals (Verkehrung)

217. #217

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic knowledge "passes into the real" via the same mechanism as Verwerfung (foreclosure): what is rejected in the symbolic reappears in the real. He then grounds this in a rigorous reading of Freudian repetition (Wiederholungszwang), demonstrating that repetition is irreducible to the pleasure principle, necessarily entails a lost object, and constitutes the subject through a retroactive, non-reflexive logical structure rather than a simple return to sameness.

     we see there arising, arising as impossible, the principle of rediscovery. The simple approach of clinical experience had already suggested to Freud the discovery and the function of the fact that there is, in the metabolism of drives, this function of the lost object as such.

218. #218

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 1 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden number (φ, "small o") and the mathematics of the mean and extreme ratio to theorise the sexual relation: the subject enters genital union as a "product" (objet petit a), and the irreducible remainder generated by the division of the subject by the Other (the small o that cannot be eliminated) both limits jouissance and founds the "phantom of the gift" that constitutes feminine love.

     The whole schema which supports, fantastically, the idea of discharge, in what is involved in instinctual (pulsionnelles) tensions, is in reality supported by this schema, where one sees there being imposed this limit to jouissance

219. #219

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

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

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

     your thoughts may go immediately onto the path of the drive that is called - that is wrongly called! - sadomasochistic, but which is all the same, nevertheless, with scoptophilia, the only term that Freud uses as a pivot when he has properly to define the drive.

220. #220

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from methodological self-reflection on the subject's implication in psychoanalytic field-theory to the conceptual forging of "the psychoanalytic act," arguing that analytic theory systematically effaces the cut-structure of the sexual act, and that neither libertarian ideology nor the genital-stage ideal resolves the structural deficit (castration, guilt) inscribed in sexuality; this sets up the question of whether hatred, not tenderness, can co-constitute the sexual act.

     To structure that, at the level of the drive as such, is not easy.

221. #221

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.164

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 16: Wednesday 12 April 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure—the fact that the subject is an effect of language—must be the founding premise of psychoanalysis, just as Marx had to expose the latent structural difference within the equation of value before political economy could become rigorous; and he culminates this argument with the provocative thesis that "there is no sexual act," positioning the unconscious as speaking *about* sexuality through metaphor and metonymy rather than expressing a libidinal drive-force like Eros.

     it is when the demand keeps quiet that the drive begins

222. #222

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic theory systematically effaces the structural character of the sexual act as a *cut* (an act in the strong sense), substituting a discourse of relational adequacy ('genital stage', 'tenderness') that evades the irreducible discordance and failure built into that act; he introduces the 'psychoanalytic act' as a distinct concept requiring its own structural formalization, in contrast to—and as a corrective upon—the sexual act it takes as its reference point.

     To structure that, at the level of the drive as such, is not easy.

223. #223

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.249

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that jouissance is constitutively separated from the body, and that this separation is the structural ground on which both the perverse act (which directly questions jouissance via the objet petit a) and the neurotic act (which merely sustains desire) must be rigorously distinguished; masochism is proposed as the exemplary perverse structure that lets us make this distinction.

     Do I simply need to begin to indicate something about it, so that your thoughts may go immediately onto the path of the drive that is called - that is wrongly called! - sadomasochistic, but which is all the same, nevertheless, with scoptophilia, the only term that Freud uses as a pivot when he has properly to define the drive.

224. #224

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.85

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito, read through the lens of alienation, reveals that the "I am" is grounded not in a thinking subject but in the grammatical structure of language itself—the fallen Other—such that unconscious thinking (the Es/dream-work) follows a logic structured like a language, not a sovereign ego, and this is confirmed by Freud's analysis of dream-work as the grammatical articulation of the drive.

     when Freud wants to articulate the drive, he cannot do other than pass by way of grammatical structure, which alone gives its complete and ordered field to what, in fact, comes to dominate when Freud speaks about the drive

225. #225

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.180

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden number (φ) as a mathematical support to argue that sublimation cannot achieve a perfect 'One' or sexual relation—a gap always remains between even and odd power series—and then leverages this to attack the psychoanalytic myth of primary narcissism and the 'unitive' fantasy, asserting that the subject is 'measured by sex' as by a unit, not fused with it, and that no analytic sense can be given to 'masculine' or 'feminine' as signifiers.

     what is realised on the path of the sexual drive, under the name of sublimation

226. #226

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.75

     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.

     it is a montage - an outline, a grammatical montage whose inversions, reversals, complexities, are not ordered otherwise then by the application of diverse reversals (Verkehrung), of partial and chosen negations

227. #227

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.74

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito founds the subject as an empty set through the evasion of Being, and that this Verwerfung (foreclosure) of Being—reappearing in the Real—is the structural basis of alienation; the resultant "I am not" opens onto Freud's Id (Es), which Lacan re-articulates not as a person but as everything in the logical-grammatical structure of discourse that is not-I, grounding the drive's fantasy in that impersonal remainder.

     the very support of what is involved in the drive, namely, the phantasy, should be able to be expressed as follows: Ein Kind ist geschlagen

228. #228

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.128

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > acting-out

     Theoretical move: Lacan installs sublimation as the fourth term of a structural quartet (alongside repetition, passage à l'acte, and acting-out), arguing that sublimation names the locus of fundamental satisfaction (Befriedigung) internal to repetition, and that the act is constitutively signifying—a repeating signifier that establishes and restructures the subject, with the sexual act exemplifying this structure by repeating the Oedipal scene.

     what we gargle with this so called 'object' of the blessed genital drive, is precisely what can without any inconvenience be extracted, totally inhibited, absent, in what nevertheless belongs to the sexual drive, without it losing anything of its capacity as Befriedigung.

229. #229

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.164

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 16: Wednesday 12 April 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is a structural effect of language — not a psychological substance — and that the unconscious, far from "speaking sexuality" in the manner of a life-instinct, speaks *about* sexuality by producing partial objects in relations of metaphor and metonymy to it; the climactic theoretical move is the assertion that "there is no sexual act," grounding the entire argument in the constitutive impossibility of the sexual relation.

     When I wrote the formula of the drive - on the top right of the graph - as S barred diamond of capital D (the demand): it is when the demand keeps quiet that the drive begins.

230. #230

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.215

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject is constituted precisely by the gap between the field of the One and the field of the Other (the unconscious), such that the subject is always a structural degree below its body; this topological account displaces both Eros-as-unity fantasies and Cartesian soul/body dualism, and repositions objet petit a (small o) as the incommensurable origin from which all questions of measure arise.

     the notion of Eros, in the form that I recently railed against as being the force which is supposed to unite by an irresistible attraction all the cells and the organs that our sack of skin gathers together; a conception that is at least mystical

231. #231

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.238

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a semi-autobiographical digression on surrealism, Sartre, and student militancy to frame a critique of ideology-critique as self-defeating repetition, then pivots to position sublimation—especially courtly love—as the more productive terrain before gesturing toward the drive-level account of sublimation (the bell/grelot figure) and the broader subversion of the function of knowledge that psychoanalysis enables.

     another phase of sublimation that I began the last time, the one that is at the level of the drive and which, alas, concerns us much more

232. #232

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unquestioned presupposition of the Subject Supposed to Know—the assumption that knowledge is already organized somewhere—is the hidden theological core of idealism, and that psychoanalytic practice remains trapped in this idealism so long as it uncritically employs spatial metaphors (inside/outside, projection/introjection) derived from the camera-obscura model of representation.

     what is called differently, confusedly, affects, instincts, drives. All of that is inside.

233. #233

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.204

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that jouissance functions as an absolute Real, and that it is hysteria—not androcentric theory—that logically unveils the structure of desire as lack-of-the-One; the drive already implies knowledge, but this knowledge is marked by a constitutive lie (proton pseudos), forcing the displacement from sign to signifier as the properly psychoanalytic move beyond metaphysics.

     we come back to the drive. It is no doubt mythological, as Freud himself wrote. But what is not so, is the supposition that a subject is satisfied by it.

234. #234

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.199

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic knowledge is constitutively related to—yet irreducible to—sexual knowledge: the drives are "montages" oriented toward satisfaction within a horizon that is the sexual, but the sexual act itself does not exist in any structural sense, and analytic knowledge is not a technique but a mode of "knowing how to be with it" (savoir y être) that reveals how one is always already in the sexual field without knowing it—a dupery that benefits no one and implicates all fields of knowledge.

     it discovered what in other registers is called the means of production, of what? Of a satisfaction. It discovered that there was something articulatable and articulated, something that I pinpointed, that I exposed as montages… that it calls the drives.

235. #235

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     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.

     The drive, in a word, just by itself, designates the conjunction of logic and corporeality... in the drive there intervenes what is called in topology an edge structuré

236. #236

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.247

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > Seminar 16: Wednesday 26 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the o-object is fundamentally an extimate topological structure that functions as the locus of captured enjoyment within the field of the Other, and that the pervert's clinical function is precisely to fill the hole that this structure opens in the Other—making him, paradoxically, a "defender of the faith" rather than a contemner of the partner.

     Freud to all appearances, should articulate what, in these fundamental drives, is involved in the montage of the source, of the pressure, of the object, of the end, of the Ziel, with the help of the scoptophilic and sadomasochistic drives.

237. #237

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.215

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation, as Freud formulates it, is a mode of drive satisfaction that operates *with* the drive (mit dem Trieb) rather than through repression, and that its satisfaction is achieved precisely by being goal-inhibited (zielgehemmt) — eliding the sexual goal while still satisfying the drive. This pivot is used to distinguish sublimation structurally from repression and to set up the question of what exactly is satisfied when the drive bypasses its sexual goal. The passage also stages a critical dialogue with Deleuze's appropriation of Lacanian concepts, particularly around the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.

     the drive will find itself satisfying what? This is today what is in question, very precisely because of the fact that it is inhibited as regards the goal, that it elides what is involved in the sexual goal.

238. #238

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK XVII** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 26 November 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XVII by introducing the Four Discourses as a formal apparatus derived from a quarter-turn operation on the algebraic chain (S1, S2, $, a), and articulates the foundational claim that 'knowledge is the enjoyment of the Other', linking repetition, the lost object, and the death drive to the structural limits of the subject within discourse.

     Let us just note the very ambiguity that the word Trieb has taken on in psychoanalytic stupidity, instead of people applying themselves to grasping how this category of the word Trieb is articulated.

239. #239

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.127

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses mathematical logic (Boole, Frege, Cantor) to argue that Truth can only "half-say" itself — that 0 is not the negation of 1 but the mark of a constitutive lack, such that the impossibility of reaching 2 from 0 and 1 formally mirrors the impossibility of the sexual relationship and the inaccessibility of the Real; the analyst's position as semblance of Objet petit a grounds a non-initiatory knowledge of truth that is structural, not esoteric.

     the catalogue of it, precisely starting from analytic discourse in the quite finite list of the drives. Its finitude is connected to the impossibility that is demonstrated in the veritable questioning of the sexual relationship as such.

240. #240

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.77

     VI

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the seminar discussion of Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' to argue that the compulsion to repeat—and the death instinct Freud derives from it—exceeds and cannot be reduced to the pleasure/homeostasis principle, thereby positioning the unconscious as irreducible to ego-psychology's therapeutic optimism and raising the question of whether psychoanalysis is a humanism.

     the life-preserving instincts lead to death... the death instinct leads to a return to the elements

241. #241

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.104

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's methodological text "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" to argue that psychoanalytic conceptualisation is not empiricist in any naive sense but proceeds through iterative, convention-like abstractions that are progressively refined through their relation to observed material — thereby positioning Freud as a rigorous philosopher of science despite common dismissals.

     Look up the article 'Instincts and their vicissitudes'.

242. #242

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

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

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

     regulating the pulsation between the drives [pulsions] internal to the organism, and the manifestations of research outside

243. #243

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > Introduction to the Entwurf > O. MANNO N I: After GaliIeo, though.

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes 'drive' (pulsion) from 'instinct' to frame the object relation not as a direct ego-world bond but as always already mediated by a narcissistic imaginary relation to the other, making the mirror-stage formation of the ego the primary condition for any objectification, and opens this toward psychosomatics via the scopic organ.

     A conventional basic concept of this kind, which at the moment is still somewhat obscure but which is indispensable to us in psychology, is that of an 'instinct', in other words: drive.

244. #244

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.35

     II > O. MANNONI: I entirely agree.

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

     There is a profound difference between the pleasure principle and something else which differentiates itself off from it. like these two English terms which can render the word 'besoin' - need and drive.

245. #245

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.106

     THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > Introduction to the Entwurf > (Dr Perrier arrives.)

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosomatic phenomena belong to the register of the Real—not the object relation or narcissism—by distinguishing the narcissistic structure (which frames neurosis through ego-other reciprocity) from the properly autoerotic/intra-organic investments that lie beyond conceptual elaboration, and proposes the Real as the precise term for what psychosomatic relations engage.

     you thought they were closer to the immense reserve of excitations of which Freud gives us a picture when he talks about internal instincts.

246. #246

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is the substance of thought and that its irreducible gap from language—marked by the cry "that's not it"—demonstrates that structure and jouissance are co-constitutive, grounding the non-existence of the sexual relationship; Christianity and Aristotle serve as foils to show how philosophical and theological traditions have covered over this gap with the fantasy of knowledge and soul.

     I call la dérive to translate Trieb, the drift of jouissance

247. #247

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     J.Lacan-... of this? > **Seminar 11 : Wednesday 8 May 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance (enjoyment) constitutes the substance of thinking and is irreducibly linked to the inertia of language, such that the sexual relationship remains inexistent and unthinkable — a gap named the Other — and all cultural, religious, and philosophical formations (including Christianity's baroque obscenity and Aristotle's active intellect) are so many failed attempts to make enjoyment adequate to the sexual relationship, with castration as the only price of any apparent satisfaction.

     communion in his presence is incorporation, oral drive, with which the spouse of Christ, the Church as she is called, is very well content, having nothing to expect from a copulation.

248. #248

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 10: Tuesday 15 April 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot is not a model or representation but the Real itself — its topological structure (where breaking one element unknots all others) grounds the concepts of the unconscious as Real, the non-existence of the sexual relationship, and hainamoration, while the signifier is redefined as that which makes a hole, linking the Symbolic to the Real through knotting.

     far from being able to be content with an obscure reference to instinct, as people persist in translating the word Trieb into English

249. #249

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.51

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 3: Tuesday 14 January 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Borromean knot topology as the minimal structure of existence (ek-sistence), arguing that Freud's Oedipus complex functions as a fourth term (psychical reality) needed to knot the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real because Freud lacked the three-ring Borromean solution; analysis itself operates by making the Real surmount the Symbolic at two crossing points, rendering the fourth term (Oedipus complex / Name-of-the-Father) superfluous.

     he niggled out everything that is involved in drives in the body as being centred around the passage from one orifice to an other.

250. #250

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 > There you are!

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the Borromean knot as the first genuine philosophical writing—a "logic of sacks and cords"—and uses Joyce's anomalous relationship to his own body (body-as-foreign, affect that "drains away" like a fruit skin) to theorise a specific ego-function that writing fulfils when the normal bodily imaginary fails, distinguishing this from the Freudian Unconscious as ignorance of the body.

     what signifies death for the somatic support has just as much place in the drives that stem from what I have just called life of language. The drives in question stem from a relationship to the body.

251. #251

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.11

     Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean Knot must be understood as a tetradic (four-ring) structure in which the sinthome serves as the fourth element linking the otherwise separate Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real; the Oedipus complex is recast as a symptom/sinthome, and the father's name is itself a sinthome, with Joyce's art exemplifying how artifice can work upon and through the symptom via equivocation in the signifier.

     They imagine to themselves that there are drives, even indeed when they are willing not to translate drive by instinct. They cannot get it into their heads that drives are the echo in the body of the fact that there is a saying.

252. #252

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.66

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**

     Theoretical move: Through a game-theoretic allegory (Bozef/king chess positions), the passage argues that the subject's total dispossession before an omniscient Other (Absolute Knowing at R3) forces the emergence of the repressed signifier S2 into the Real—constituting aphanisis/fading—and that the only exit from this petrified position is a single word ("it is you," S(Ø)) which, rather than merely keeping one's word, *sustains* speech as an act anchored in the subject's desire, making the pass (passe) the topological test of whether enunciation corresponds to enunciating.

     which is written on the graph – this also designates the drive, I am not going to talk about that now - $◊D.

253. #253

     Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.8

     **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.

     the drive is something which is supported only by being named and by being named in a way that is as I might say farfetched, namely, which presupposes that every drive, in the name of something which is found to exist in the child, that every drive is sexual

254. #254

     Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.20

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 20 December 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both analytic speech and analytic intervention are fundamentally acts of writing/equivocation rather than saying, and develops a topological identification of fantasy with the torus within the Borromean knot structure, mapping three coupled pairs (drive–inhibition, pleasure principle–unconscious, Real–fantasy) onto a 'six-fold torus'; simultaneously, he reframes the end of analysis as recognising what one is captive of (the sinthome), and characterises science, history, and psychoanalysis itself as forms of poetry rooted in fantasy.

     There is a couple: drive – inhibition. Let us take for example this one, drive – inhibition.

255. #255

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.87

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the psychotic's relation to reality from that of the normal subject by showing that what is at stake in psychosis is not belief in the reality of hallucinations but an unshakeable *certainty* that phenomena concern the subject — a certainty that is structurally prior to and independent of reality-testing, and which must be understood through the symbolic frame (L Schema) rather than reduced to normal mechanisms like projection.

     There are certain ways of using categories such as the unconscious, the drive, the pre-oedipal relation, and defense that consist in drawing none of the authentic consequences that they imply

256. #256

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.119

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental distinction between neurosis and psychosis lies in the register where the repressed returns: in neurosis it returns *in loco* within the symbolic order (under a mask), while in psychosis it returns *in altero* in the imaginary (without a mask) — and that post-Freudian ego-psychology's reduction of psychosis to ego-defense mechanisms systematically obscures this economic and topographical distinction.

     Psychosis is no longer interpreted on the basis of the complex economy of the dynamics of the drives, but on the basis of procedures used by the ego to escape from various requirements, to defend itself against the drives.

257. #257

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.12

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-7-0"></span>INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates Seminar IV by arguing that the Object Relations school's reduction of analytic experience to a dual subject-object relation (line a-a') is theoretically inadequate: against this, he retrieves Freud's own notion of the object as a *lost* and re-found object, constitutively marked by repetition and irreducible tension, which requires the full complexity of the L-Schema (subject/Other/imaginary axis) rather than a simple dyadic rectification.

     Freud indicates that it is grasped along the path of a search for the lost object. This object that corresponds to an advanced stage in the maturation of instincts is the object of the first weaning, found again.

258. #258

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.57

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces a tripartite schema (castration/frustration/privation) to critique the "harmonic" object-relations conception of frustration dominant in post-Freudian analysis, arguing that frustration must be understood through the asymmetric interplay of symbolic, imaginary, and real registers rather than as a quantitative deficit in a natural complementarity between infant and mother.

     The object of the drive is that [...] through which the drive is able to achieve its aim. It is the most variable aspect of a drive, not originally connected with it, but merely appropriated by it on grounds of suitability to provide satisfaction.

259. #259

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.220

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > ON THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the castration complex emerges as the necessary structural resolution to an impasse created when the child's real drive (the stirring of the real penis) disrupts the imaginary phallic luring game with the mother; the symbolic father's intervention re-orders what was an unresolvable imaginary deadlock, while the phobia (Little Hans) functions as a substitute signifier for the absent paternal term.

     Can't you see that right when there appears in the child, in the form of a drive in the most elementary sense of the term, this thing that stirs the real penis

260. #260

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.74

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the object-relations school (Marty, Fain, Bouvet) for reducing the analytic situation to a real dyadic relationship aimed at collapsing imaginary distance, thereby foreclosing the symbolic dimension of speech and the Other — and shows that this technical orientation produces paradoxical perverse reactions, particularly in obsessional cases. Against this, he reaffirms that the symbolic (S-A) and imaginary (a-a') axes must be held in their mutual, crossing functioning, with the paternal function and Oedipus complex as the fourth term that re-situates the preoedipal imaginary triad.

     Between a subject, whether or not he is on the couch, and the external object that is the analyst, there can in principle be established and manifested only what is called the primitive drive relationship

261. #261

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-7-0"></span>INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Lacan contrasts his own structural account of the subject—grounded in the tension between pleasure principle and reality principle, the mirror stage, and the primacy of the unconscious—with the object-relations and ego-psychology tradition (traced through Abraham, 1924) that reduces analytic experience to ego-adaptation, subject-object reciprocity, and the ideal of a "genital" normalisation, arguing that this reduction is fundamentally foreign to Freud's point of departure.

     the subject's drive tendency as such, is to be satisfied in an unreal realisation, in an hallucinatory realisation

262. #262

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.285

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is seized by the autonomous play of the signifier — not by drives or affects — and uses the case of Little Hans to show that phobia/myth functions as a structural solution to an impossible symbolic impasse; he then anchors this in Freud's Witz to demonstrate that condensation at the level of the signifier is the constitutive mechanism of both wit and symptomatic production.

     It might correspond to some need or other, to some function or other, but surely not to anything that might at any moment be justified by a drive, by an impulse, by a particular emotional movement that would be transposed here to find plain expression.

263. #263

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.43

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Id (Es) is not a brute physical or energic reality but is organized and articulated like a signifier, thereby reframing the analytic notion of libido as a purely abstract measure (akin to energy) that operates at the level of the imaginary, and situating the body image and clinical objects (phobia, fetish) within the signifier/signified relation rather than within developmental-stage object theory.

     We tend to regard the Es as an agency that bears the strongest relation to the drive tendencies, the instincts and libido.

264. #264

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.439

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic interpretation must be grounded in a two-circuit schema (symbolic and imaginary) in which the subject's articulation of need passes through the Other, and that this structure requires a "Other of the Other" — a meta-symbolic function — to account for how the subject can symbolize the locus of speech itself; this reframes debates about castration, penis envy, and aggressiveness within a broader topology of desire.

     the intersection of the tendency - the drive, if you wish, insofar as it represents an individualized need - with the signifying chain into which it has to be articulated.

265. #265

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     **FANTASY, BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's 'A Child is Being Beaten' to argue that the drive never appears nakedly in perversion but only as a signifying element, thereby collapsing the classical neurosis/perversion opposition and subordinating both to the logic of the signifying chain and repression; the primitive beating fantasy is further situated within a pre-Oedipal triangular structure that anticipates the Name-of-the-Father.

     The drive does appear here, but it only ever appears here partially. It appears in something which, in comparison with the instinct, is a detached element, strictly speaking a sign and, one can even say, a signifier of the instinct.

266. #266

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.377

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the privileged signifier that designates the overall effects of the signifier on the signified, and that desire—structured as the desire of the Other—is the key axis around which both hysterical and obsessional clinical structures are organized, with the Splitting of the Subject (Spaltung) as the structural condition making the unconscious possible.

     The line on which the drive, the tendency as such, is inscribed and the place assigned to the capital Phi in the beyond-demand coincide here by virtue of the structural necessity.

267. #267

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.222

     FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes perversion not as a category of instinct or tendency but as a signifying structure, arguing that the object in perversion is a "metonymic object" — produced by the sliding of signification beneath the signifying chain — and that the phallus names the imaginary pole that anchors the subject's radical identification with this always-fleeing object.

     This encourages us to talk about the drive in quite another domain than that of tendencies pure and simple.

268. #268

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.423

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of his schema—distinguishing the line of articulated demand from the upper horizon of the demand for love—to argue that desire is structurally located in the intermediary zone between need and that horizon, always structured by the Other; he then critiques a clinical case where reduction to a dyadic, two-person (homosexual transference) framework systematically misses the symbolic/phallic elements visible in the dream material.

     Hence the rarity of the term 'instinct' in Freud - it's always a question of the drive, Trieb, the technical term we give to this desire insofar as speech isolates it, fragments it and places it in this problematic and disjointed relationship to its aim

269. #269

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

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

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

     We get the clear sense that the image of the phallus goes to the very heart of the term 'pulsion' [drive], which we use to translate the German term 'Trieb' into French.

270. #270

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.163

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the standard "environmentalist" approach to paternal deficiency is structurally inadequate because it conflates the father's empirical presence/absence with his normativizing function in the complex; the proper analysis requires distinguishing the father's real, imaginary, and symbolic registers of intervention, particularly through the Oedipus complex's dual structure (direct and inverted) where castration operates first on the imaginary level before reaching the symbolic.

     Do we have to bring the emergence of the genital drive in and say that, in the first instance, he prohibits its real satisfaction?... it's a question of prohibition by the father with respect to the real drive.

271. #271

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the illusory object cannot be adequately theorized through the imaginary alone but only through its function as a signifying element within a signifying chain — the mirror stage installs a double movement (imaginary identification with the body-image vs. symbolic identification along the ego-ideal axis) whose structural schema is necessary to distinguish identification from idealization, illusion from image, and to account for perversion, fetishism, and psychosis without reducing them to instinctual or genetic regression.

     perversion was purely and simply the drive coming to the surface - that is to say, the contrary of neurosis

272. #272

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.458

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus achieves its privileged status as master signifier of the unconscious not through anatomical primacy but through its metaphorical passage into the signifying chain via the paternal metaphor; in psychosis, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father prevents this metaphorical effect, leaving the Other's desire unsymbolized and causing the 'it speaks' of the unconscious to erupt in the Real as hallucination, while in obsessional neurosis the Other's desire is actively disavowed (Verneinung) rather than left unsymbolized.

     The drive, as such, is precisely the manipulable expression of concepts that are valid for us, and which express the subject's dependence in relation to a certain signifier.

273. #273

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.264

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reviews the Freud-Jones debate on female sexuality to argue that the phallus functions not as a natural drive object but as a signifier — and, pivotally, that in the little girl's Oedipal relations the phallus operates as a fetish rather than a phobic object, a distinction that advances his own structural account beyond both Freud's biologism and Jones's naturalist counter-argument.

     the phallic phase of the little girl rests, according to him, on a drive whose natural supports he demonstrates in two elements

274. #274

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.22

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

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

     the drive, inasmuch as it is the non-coordination of the needs, even if only temporary

275. #275

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.379

     THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental fantasy ($ ◇ a) provides desire's minimal supporting structure by articulating, synchronically rather than diachronically, how the subject must pay the price of castration—giving up a real element (objet a) to serve as a signifier—precisely because the subject cannot designate itself within the Other's discourse (the unconscious). This move directly opposes ego-psychology's conflation of object-maturation with drive-maturation, exposing it as a confusion between the object of knowledge and the object of desire.

     It is owing to a confusion between these two notions that analysts have been so easily led to posit a correspondence between a certain constituting of the object and a certain maturing of the drive.

276. #276

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.498

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation — defined as the form into which desire flows, reducible to the pure play of the signifier — and perversion together constitute a dialectical circuit that resists social normalization, and that the analyst's function is to occupy the position of desire's midwife by maintaining the "cut" as the privileged mode of psychoanalytic intervention.

     the drive, far from being equatable with the substance of sexual relations, is this very form... the drive can ultimately be reduced to the pure play of the signifier.

277. #277

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.62

     THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (representative of the representation) is strictly equivalent to the signifier, establishing that what is properly unconscious is a signifying element — not affect, sensation, or feeling — and uses Freud's dream of the dead father to demonstrate that dream-interpretation proceeds via the insertion of missing signifiers into the dream-text, not via wishful thinking or affective content.

     what we call Triebregung must be taken as an objective concept... an isolated fragment of reality that we conceptualize as having its own active impact.

278. #278

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.490

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has deviated from Freud by subordinating desire to object-relations and moralizing normalization; against this, he insists that desire must be theorized as irreducible subjectivity constituted through the signifying chain, whereby drives are decomposed and separated from their sources — making desire a mapping of the subject with respect to the Other's desire, not a vital impulse.

     The signifying chain disconnects pressure from everything that defines it and situates it as life-sustaining, rendering it separable from everything that assures its living consistency.

279. #279

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.408

     CUT AND FANTASY

     Theoretical move: This passage systematically works through the upper level of the Graph of Desire to show how fantasy functions as an imaginary prop that substitutes for the unattainable articulation of the subject as subject of the unconscious—bridging the gap between the barred subject's encounter with demand and the insufficiency of the Other's guarantee of truth.

     Now, isn't that something we are familiar with from the structure of the drive? In this fable, we find identification relative to others, negation, refusal to articulate, and defense, which are as consistent with the drive as are two sides of the same coin.

280. #280

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.107

     **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.

     the object aimed at on the horizon of the instinct... in antiquity the emphasis was on the instinct itself, whereas we place it on the object.

281. #281

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     **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.

     Everything that has to do with the Triebe raises the question of plasticity and of limits.

282. #282

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     **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.

     the inappropriate use that is made of this word in the usual translation into French of Triebregung, namely, 'émoi pulsionnel,' 'instinctual excitement.'

283. #283

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.220

     **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.

     The drive as such, insofar as it is then a destruction drive, has to be beyond the instinct to return to the state of equilibrium of the inanimate sphere.

284. #284

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **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.

     It is something that Freud considers in his psychology of the drive, for the Trieb can in no way be limited to a psychological notion. It is an absolutely fundamental ontological notion.

285. #285

     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.

     see also drives ...as satisfaction of drive, 209

286. #286

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.247

     **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.

     references to the aesthetic register... are correlative of something that makes its presence felt at that moment, and that belongs to the register of a destructive drive.

287. #287

     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.

     If the instinct is the effect of the mark of the signifier on needs, their transformation as an effect of the signifier into something fragmented and panic-stricken that we call the drive, what can such a definition of distance mean?

288. #288

     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.

     drives, 87-100,144 ... aim of, 110, 111 ... jouissance as satisfaction of, 209 ... pleasure principle as realm of, 96 ... sublimation and, 110,238

289. #289

     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.

     Bernfeld and his collaborator Freitelberg, thought up on the subject of the meaning of the drive, so as to try to give it its fullest extension in the scientific context of the time.

290. #290

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **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.

     Sublimation, Freud tells us, involves a certain form of satisfaction of the Triebe... the Trieb is deflected from what he calls its Ziel, its aim.

291. #291

     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.

     The Trieb must be translated insofar as possible with some ambiguity, and I like sometimes to say dérive in French, 'drift.'

292. #292

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     **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 DRIVE, AN ONTOLOGICAL NOTION

293. #293

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     **XIV** > **XVI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian discovery of desire—irreducible to need or reason—exposes the structural insufficiency of both Hegelian and Marxist accounts of human self-realization, and that jouissance, as the satisfaction of a drive (not a need), constitutes the inaccessible yet central problem of the ethics of psychoanalysis.

     the drive as such is something extremely complex for anyone who considers it conscientiously and tries to understand Freud's articulation of it. It isn't to be reduced to the complexity of the instinct as understood in the broadest sense

294. #294

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.302

     **XIV** > **XXII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's ethical task is inseparable from the question of desire's realization—which can only be posed from the standpoint of a "Last Judgment"—and that sublimation, properly understood via the metonymic structure of the drive and the signifier, is not a new object but the change of object as such, grounding the subject's access to its own relationship with death.

     If the drive allows the change of object, it is because it is already deeply marked by the articulation of the signifier. In the graph of desire that I gave you, the instinct is situated at the level of the unconscious articulation of a signifying series and is for this reason constituted as fundamental alienation.

295. #295

     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.

     the Zielablenkung side of the Strebung, of the Trieb or drive, and the fact that that takes place in a domain which is that of the object libido

296. #296

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.119

     **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 satisfaction of the Trieb is, then, paradoxical, since it seems to occur elsewhere than where its aim is.

297. #297

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.168

     **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.

     either the ego is strong… Or the ego instincts are threatened and have to call for the assistance furnished by the drives, to the extent, that is, that they can escape recuperation.

298. #298

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.421

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter VII - The** *A topia* **of Eros: Agathon**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes providing bibliographic and terminological clarifications for Seminar VIII; it contains no original theoretical argumentation.

     Poussée (pressure) is the usual French translation of Freud's Drang, one of the four components of the drive

299. #299

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.197

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-192-0"></span>**A CRITIQUE OF CO UNTERTRANSFERENCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is first encountered as the Other's unconscious, which reframes the countertransference debate: analytic apathy is not grounded in the analyst's thorough self-analysis (reduction of unconscious blind spots) but in the analyst being possessed by a desire stronger than other desires—a transformed economy of desire specific to the analytic position.

     the serious mistake of identifying the unconscious as such with the total powers of the Lebenstriebe [life drives]

300. #300

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.374

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Freud's economic account of anxiety-as-signal by mapping it onto the fantasy formula ($◇a): anxiety is produced when cathexis is transferred from little a to the barred subject's place (S), and its essential characteristic is not flight but Erwartung—the radical mode by which the subject maintains its relationship to desire even when the object is absent or unbearable.

     The ego withdraws the preconscious cathexis from the Triebrepräsentanz - that is, from what, in the drive, is a representative - a representative that must be repressed.

301. #301

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.410

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's desire is structured around a fundamental mourning — the recognition that no object (objet petit a) is of greater value than any other — and that this insight, shared with Socrates, connects melancholia, fantasy, the ego-ideal, and the ethics of love into a single topological point where desire meets its limit.

     the path is traced out for you by Freud when he indicates that, already in normal mourning, the drive that the subject turns against himself could well be an aggressive drive toward the object

302. #302

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the oral and anal stages must be understood through the structural distinction between need, demand, and desire—where desire emerges as a gap or negation irreducible to need's satisfaction—and uses the anal stage to demolish the myth of "oblativity," revealing that anal desire is constituted by the subject's identification with the excremental object (objet a) and its symbolic evacuation, which grounds the obsessional's fundamental fantasy.

     what of sexuality and the infamous sadistic drive that, thanks to a dash, is conjugated to the term 'anal,' as if it were quite simply self-evident?

303. #303

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.443

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XXVII - Mourning the Loss of the Analyst**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes to Seminar VIII, Chapter XXVII, providing philological, intertextual, and editorial clarifications; it contains no substantive theoretical argument of its own, though several notes gesture toward Lacanian concepts (barred signifier, fantasy, desire, the analyst as object) in passing cross-references.

     Triebregungen (drive movements, stirrings, or flickerings) strikes me as odd in this context, where Lacan seems to be providing a German term for the French attraits (attractions or charms).

304. #304

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must be understood not as natural harmony or ethical perfection but as occupying the empty place of the missing signifier (Φ), being the barred subject in the very locus where the patient expects knowledge — so that fantasy, as the final register of transference, can be entered and the object *a* discerned.

     fantasy is the only equivalent of the drive-related discovery by which it is possible for the subject to designate the place of the answer - the S(A) that he expects from transference.

305. #305

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.293

     *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.

     This drive which makes itself felt from within the body, these schemas entirely structured from these topological prevalencies, it is only on this that there is agreement

306. #306

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.110

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the unary trait's role in constituting the subject to the logic of privation, arguing that the "minus one" (the subject's non-identity with the unary trait) is the structural condition for lack in the Real, and that this founds the connection between the signifier, narcissism of small differences, and the sexual drive's privileged function in subjectivity.

     the solidarity of the status of the subject qua bound to this unary trait with the fact that the subject is constituted in his structure where the sexual drive has its privileged function among all the afferents of the body.

307. #307

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.244

     *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 22*: *Wednesday 30 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: By mapping the torus topologically, Lacan formalises the structural inversion between the subject's demand/object and the Other's demand/object, deriving from this the differential structure of obsessional and hysterical neurosis, and showing that the neurotic's impasse consists in pursuing objet a through the specular image i(o) rather than acceding to it directly.

     what you find on the contrary is \$ cut of D and that these elements of the signifying treasury at the stage of enunciating, I am teaching you to recognise them, are what is called the Trieb, the drive

308. #308

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     *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.

     everything that I teach you about the drive is precisely that it is not to be confused with this mythical self, that it has nothing to do with what has been made of it from a Jungian perspective

309. #309

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.108

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

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

     what becomes in the weightless state of a sexual drive which is used to manifesting itself by appearing to go against

310. #310

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.151

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus (and introduces the cross-cap) to formalise the dialectical relationship between Demand and desire in the subject, showing how the torus's privileged circle—encompassing both the generating circle (Demand) and the inner circle (metonymical desire)—allows him to locate objet petit a and the phallus as structural measures of the subject's relation to desire, while insisting that identification is strictly a dimension of the subject and not of drive or image.

     Why, if one does not dot the i's, should one not say that the drive identifies itself and that an image identifies itself? Nothing can correctly be said to identify itself

311. #311

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Jones's concept of 'aphanisis' misidentifies the source of anxiety in the castration complex by conflating the disappearance of desire with repression; true anxiety is always about the object that desire dissimulates (the void at the heart of demand), not about desire's disappearance—and this misrecognition occludes the decisive function of the phallus as the instrument mediating desire's relation to the big Other.

     the void included at the heart of the demand, namely of the beyond of the pleasure principle, of that which makes of the demand its eternal repetition, namely of what constitutes the drive.

312. #312

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.47

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 6*: *Wednesday 20 December 1961* > Where is the subject in all of that?

     Theoretical move: Lacan locates the subject neither in vital immanence nor in the pure signifying operation, but in the articulation *between* these two poles — and uses the case of Little Hans (the crumpled giraffe dream) as an exemplary figure of this in-between status, before pivoting to the proper name as the paradigmatic signifier through which a subject constitutes his minimal anchoring of being.

     this vital immanence which you may too readily confuse, I still think, despite all my warnings, with the function of the drive

313. #313

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.57

     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.

     Trieb [drive], a primary and eminently enigmatic notion in Freud's theory, tripped over the form and formulation of the death instinct, scandalizing his disciples.

314. #314

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     Translator's Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a translator's notes section providing bibliographic references, terminological clarifications, and contextual annotations for Lacan's "Triumph of Religion" text; it contains no original theoretical argumentation.

     Lacan often uses tendance (tendency) instead of pulsion (drive), especially in his early work.

315. #315

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.130

     <span id="page-126-0"></span>Human Animal, Positive Psychology, and Trauma: A Conversation Between Alenka Zupancič and Julie Reshe ̌

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the human animal's constitutive lack is not a deviation from a complete Nature but the very proof that Nature (with a capital N, as harmonious totality) does not exist; the subject emerges as the point where nature's own inconsistency becomes 'for itself', and lack and surplus-jouissance are topologically inseparable rather than opposites.

     Drive is always both, the negativity and the surplus that can only emerge at the place of this negativity and keeps emerging at the place of this minus.

316. #316

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.134

     <span id="page-126-0"></span>Human Animal, Positive Psychology, and Trauma: A Conversation Between Alenka Zupancič and Julie Reshe ̌

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the social imperative of happiness, undergirded by a superego logic, produces misery rather than well-being; and that the death drive—understood not as a dualistic counterpart to Eros but as an ontological negativity that the social order perpetually reinvents rather than resolves—is more fundamental than the pleasure principle, while anxiety is reframed as a signal of the Real rather than a mere negative affect to be eliminated.

     it's the superego that wants pleasure, but there is something more primordial than the superego, which is the death drive and drive as such in Lacanian interpretation.

317. #317

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.86

     The voice and the drive > His Master's Voice, His Master's Ear

     Theoretical move: Dolar uses the HMV logo as a theoretical parable: the voice-as-object (acousmatic voice) operates as a Lacanian drive-montage that simultaneously structures authority/obedience, deceives via a trompe-l'oreille analogous to trompe-l'œil, and exposes the speaking subject to the power of the Other's ear — thereby showing the voice's irreducible asymmetry with vision and its constitutive role in psychosis and subjective interiority.

     And this is precisely how Lacan describes the drive—as a montage, something contrived, not grounded in some natural order or instinct; a montage without finality, seeming to have neither head nor tail, like a surrealist collage.

318. #318

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.139

     The voice and the drive > The voice and the letter

     Theoretical move: Dolar uses Freud's well-known ambivalence toward music as a pivot to argue that the voice operates across three registers in Freud's texts (fantasy, desire, drive), and that the key fault-line in the Freudian corpus is between an unconscious that "speaks" (structured like a language) and drives that are constitutively mute — with the death drive as the silent, invisible shadow subtending the "clamor" of Eros.

     the stage is suddenly held in sway by heroes of another kind, the drives, and their remarkable feature is that they are silent, stumm, mute, says Freud. They don't speak at all, they go about their business in silence

319. #319

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.196

     Silence > The dog

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialization of the mouth converges with Freud's drive theory, and that both lines — voice and food — meet in the objet petit a; Kafka's "ultimate science" of freedom is then identified retroactively as psychoanalysis, the science capable of taking this intersection as its object.

     The Freudian name for this deterritorialization is the drive (if nothing else, it has the advantage of sparing us that terrible tongue-twister, but its aim is the same).

320. #320

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.104

     The voice and the drive > The voice of reason

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice operates as the operator enabling a transition from the ethics of desire to the ethics of the drive, and that Heidegger's phenomenology of the call of conscience—a pure, aphonic voice that convokes Dasein to Being—illuminates the structural function of voice as extimate alterity, while simultaneously exposing the metaphysical illusion of positing voice as a pure, prelinguistic origin.

     the voice of (unconscious) reason in its persistence is perhaps not what would protect us from the irrationality of the drives but, quite the contrary, the lever which impels desire to the drive.

321. #321

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.101

     The voice and the drive > The voice of reason

     Theoretical move: By tracing the "voice of reason" across Kant, Freud, and Lacan, Dolar argues that the power of reason is paradoxically grounded in a voice whose origin escapes consciousness, and that this voice structurally coincides with unconscious desire—culminating in Lacan's identification of the Kantian categorical imperative with pure desire, and repositioning the ego (not the unconscious) as the true locus of irrationality.

     Freud pits reason against the life of the drives (Triebleben) and opposes the two in a permanent conflict. The power of the drives seems to require no explanation; it appears to be self-evident, since drives are by definition forces exerting pressure.

322. #322

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.205

     Notes > Chapter 3 The "Physics" of the Voice

     Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus advances several interlocking theoretical arguments: the drive's aim/goal distinction (via Lacan) explains why the oral drive circles an eternally lacking object rather than reaching satisfaction; the acousmatic voice is shown to be structurally tied to phantomology when seen/heard fail to coincide; and the trompe-l'œil/lure distinction illuminates how deception operates at the level of the sign rather than verisimilitude.

     The aim is the way taken... If the drive may be satisfied without attaining what... would be the satisfaction of its end..., it is because... its aim is simply this return into circuit.

323. #323

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.208

     Notes > Chapter 4 The Ethics of the Voice

     Theoretical move: These notes to "The Ethics of the Voice" develop the structural homology between the superego's categorical imperative and the Kantian moral law, trace the voice's ethical function across Rousseau, Kant, Freud, and Lacan, and culminate in the claim that the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father returns in the Real precisely as the voice in psychosis.

     the question of the power of reason emerges in the Critique of Practical Reason in the guise of Triebfeder, the driving force of reason (and we should note the peculiar tie with Trieb, the Freudian drive)

324. #324

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.81

     The voice and the drive

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice, as objet petit a, occupies the paradoxical topological intersection of language and the body that belongs to neither, and that this position is what makes the voice the object of the drive rather than of desire — the drive's "aim" (the voice as by-product) is satisfied on the way to the "goal" (meaning), precisely because the voice is a non-dialectical, aphonic remainder that resists signification.

     the drive, Freud dixit, is silent—insofar as it turns around the object voice, it is a voice that does not speak, and it is not at all structured like a language.

325. #325

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.171

     Silence

     Theoretical move: The analyst's silence does not simply oppose lalangue but is its structural flip side: by creating a void in which the analysand's speech resonates through the loop of the Other, silence dispossesses the voice, returning the message of desire as the voice of the drive, and this trajectory—from subject-supposed-to-know through fantasy to the object voice—is the path of analysis itself, culminating in la passe.

     the message of desire is returned as the voice of the drive.

326. #326

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.215

     Chapter 6 Freud's Voices

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section for Chapters 6 and 7, but it contains substantive theoretical moves: linking Dream-Work to Wish-Fulfillment, articulating the Drive's mythological status, connecting the fundamental fantasy to the drive, and theorizing the Voice and Objet petit a as the eternally lacking object that circumvents oral satisfaction, while also noting the structural role of the Matheme against phonological structuralism.

     The theory of the drives is so to say our mythology. Drives are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly.

327. #327

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.166

     Silence

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that silence must be theorized across Lacan's three registers—symbolic (silence as structural differential element), imaginary (silence as supposed plenitude), and real (silence as the mute insistence of the drives)—and that the analyst's silence is not merely an absence of speech but an act that homologizes the silence of the drives, making it the operative lever of analytic practice.

     the silence of the drives is closely connected to the silence of the analyst... the drives present a nature denatured... the consequence of the assumption of the symbolic order.

328. #328

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

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

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

     Freud's text is incomprehensible if one confounds instinct with drive

329. #329

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.220

     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.

     sex is to be grasped not on the terrain of culture but on the terrain of the drives, which—despite the fact that they have no existence outside culture—are not cultural. They are, instead, the other of culture

330. #330

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.207

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, first, that film noir's visual techniques and the femme fatale figure both function as failed symbolic defenses against the drive/jouissance; and second, pivoting to Butler's Gender Trouble, that the sex-as-substance vs. sex-as-signification binary is inadequate because it smuggles in an imaginary (complementary) conception of sexual difference, which Lacanian sexuation can displace.

     The drive is not indifferent to symbolic intervention, which is available in film noir on two different levels.

331. #331

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.197

     Detour through the Drive > The Voice and the Voice-Over

     Theoretical move: Against the standard reading that the film noir voice-over signals the hero's limited knowledge, Copjec argues that the voice-over's excess over commentary indexes a surplus jouissance — a private enjoyment adhering in the act of speech itself — and that the "grain of the voice" (following Barthes rather than Bonitzer) functions as a transferential X that eroticizes the voice, preserving particularity and desire rather than marking mere epistemic failure.

     We will continue to argue instead that the aspect of this period that most concerns the development of noir is the perceptible ascendancy of drive over desire.

332. #332

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.204

     Locked RoomILonely Room

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir's characteristic "lonely room" architecture — depopulated, emptied of desire and interpretability — is the spatial correlative of the drive's displacement of the big Other: where classical detection produces an infinite interpretable space (the locked room), noir produces a space of pure being, where the intrusion of objet petit a (the grain of the voice, private jouissance) into the phenomenal public field depletes rather than enriches social reality, and the hero's choice of jouissance over the signifying network yields a satisfying "nothing."

     Every disguise turns out to be futile within a space defined by the drive, where what is at stake is making one's private being seen.

333. #333

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.268

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing bibliographic citations and brief theoretical asides; it is largely non-substantive, though several notes touch on suture, the logic of the signifier, voice, drive, and democracy as symbolic mutation.

     Jacques-Alain Miller's unpublished 1987–88 seminar, 'Ce qui fait insigne,' provides the most complete analysis to date of Lacan's distinction between desire and drive.

334. #334

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.192

     Detour through the Drive

     Theoretical move: The shift from classical detective fiction to film noir is reinterpreted not as a narrative identification of hero with criminal but as a topological transition between two orders—desire (sense, the signifier, the fort/da game as lack) and drive (being, jouissance, repetition-as-satisfaction)—which Copjec maps onto a broader historical transition from an Oedipal order of desire to a contemporary order of drive in which jouissance is socially commanded rather than privately protected.

     the inversion that defines the shift from classical detection to film noir is to be understood not in terms of identification but in terms of the choice between sense and being, or-in the dialect of psychoanalysis between desire and drive.

335. #335

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     Detour through the Drive > The Voice and the Voice-Over

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that when desire gives way to drive, the intimate core of being—jouissance—ceases to be merely supposed and becomes exposed at the surface of speech, yet without becoming phenomenal or communicable; this topological shift is then applied to film noir, where the voice-over materializes the subject's irreducible absence from the diegetic reality it narrates.

     What's involved in the drive, Lacan tells us, is a making oneself heard or making oneself seen; that is to say, the intimate core of our being, no longer sheltered by sense, ceases to be supposed and suddenly becomes exposed.

336. #336

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs terminological clarification, tracing the evolution of Freud's drive nomenclature from the ego/sexual drive opposition through narcissistic libido to the final antithesis of Eros (life drives) and death drives, while also noting translation controversies (Standard Edition bowdlerizations) and situating Freud's speculations within a broader intellectual genealogy (Spielrein, Ferenczi, Plato, Upanishads).

     We derived our knowledge of 'sexual drives' from their relationship to the sexes and to the reproductive function... the sexual drive transformed itself in our scheme of things into Eros

337. #337

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the Ego Ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishing it sharply from sublimation, and identifies conscience as the psychic agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—an agency whose regressive form reappears in paranoid self-scrutiny delusions and whose normal operation underlies dream censorship.

     libidinal drive-impulses are subject to the fate of pathogenic repression when they come into conflict with the individual's cultural and ethical notions.

338. #338

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the compulsion to repeat reveals a universal conservative character of all drives — the tendency to restore a prior state — and from this derives the thesis that the ultimate goal of all life is death (return to the inorganic), redefining the death drive not as a force opposed to life but as the deepest logic of organic striving itself.

     all drives seek to restore a prior state

339. #339

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Freud uses the metapsychological model of the living vesicle and its protective barrier to argue that consciousness arises *instead of* a memory trace (a function of the Pcpt-Cs system's surface position), and that trauma is defined precisely as the breaking-through of this barrier, which suspends the pleasure principle and forces the apparatus to bind/annex the invading quanta of excitation.

     given their type of intensity and other qualitative characteristics (possibly also their amplitude), the excitations coming from within are going to be better suited to the modus operandi of the system

340. #340

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     X

     Theoretical move: Freud identifies the structural imperfection of the psychic apparatus — the ego/id differentiation — as the third psychological factor in the causation of neurosis: because the ego is constitutively entangled with the id, it cannot neutralise internal drive-danger without restricting itself and paying the price of symptom-formation.

     the ego cannot protect itself against the dangers posed by its own inner drives as effectively as it can against a threat posed by external reality.

341. #341

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud advances the structural-dynamic thesis that the psyche's tripartite division (id, ego, superego) must be articulated with the dualism of Eros and the death drive, and introduces the concept of a displaceable, desexualized narcissistic libido as the energetic medium that links drive-fusion/de-fusion to the pleasure principle and to the indifferent displacements characteristic of the primary process.

     we need to distinguish two types of drives, one of which – the sexual drives, or Eros – is far more conspicuous, and far more accessible to our knowledge and understanding

342. #342

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and the Id

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego is a corporeal surface-projection of the id, shaped by the reality principle and perceptual systems, and that the conventional mapping of 'higher' psychic functions onto consciousness is fundamentally overturned by the analytic discovery of unconscious guilt and unconscious self-criticism.

     Perception plays the same role for the ego that the drives are required to play in the id.

343. #343

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical analysis of Little Hans's horse phobia and the Wolf-man's wolf phobia, Freud argues that symptom-formation in neurosis is constituted not merely by repression of a single drive-impulse but by the simultaneous repression of two opposed impulses (hostile aggression and passive affection toward the father), with displacement onto an animal surrogate as the structural mechanism that transforms a comprehensible emotional reaction into a true neurosis, and with regression serving as an alternative or supplementary defense to repression proper.

     the two drive-impulses involved – sadistic aggression towards the father, and passive affection for him – constitute a duo of opposites.

344. #344

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud reframes the conceptual architecture of defence, repression, anxiety, and trauma by: (1) demoting 'repression' to a sub-category of a broadened concept of 'defence'; (2) constructing a developmental sequence from trauma through danger-situation to anxiety-as-signal; and (3) showing that the distinction between objective and neurotic fear dissolves once the drive is recognized as an internal danger that mirrors external helplessness.

     Neurotic fear is fear of a danger that we do not know. Thus we first have to work out what that neurotic danger consists in; and psychoanalysis has shown us that it is a danger posed by the drives.

345. #345

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

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

     The new and remarkable fact… is that the compulsion to repeat also brings back experiences from the past that contain no potential for pleasure whatever, and which even at the time cannot have constituted gratification, not even in respect of drive-impulses that were only subsequently repressed.

346. #346

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the repetition compulsion inherent in drives is not necessarily in conflict with the pleasure principle but operates alongside it, and that the pleasure principle itself is ultimately subordinate to the death drive's tendency to restore the inorganic quiescence - with the annexation of drive-impulses (secondary process) functioning as a preparatory service to both pleasure and final dissolution.

     if it really is such a universal characteristic of drives to seek to restore a prior state, we should not be surprised that so many processes in the psyche take place quite independently of the pleasure principle.

347. #347

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud develops the theory of narcissism by tracing libido distribution across organic illness, hypochondria, sleep, and love-object choice, arguing that ego-libido and object-libido are structurally parallel and that primary narcissism is universal, grounding the compulsion to love others in the pathogenic effects of excessive libidinal build-up in the ego.

     Just as the transference neuroses have enabled us to trace the libidinal drive-impulses, so, too, dementia praecox and paranoia will afford us insight into the psychology of the ego.

348. #348

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes the pleasure principle as the governing tendency of psychic processes—defined economically as tension-reduction—while simultaneously delimiting its dominion by introducing the reality principle and repression as the two primary sources of unpleasure that override or subvert it, thereby opening the question of whether still further constraints on the pleasure principle must be sought.

     Almost all the energy that fills the psychic apparatus stems from its innate drive-impulses, but not all of these are granted access to the same phases of development.

349. #349

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's and editorial notes for a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Freud's writings, clarifying translation choices for key Freudian terms (Angst, Trauer, Triebrepräsentanz, Inhalte, etc.) and cross-referencing other Freudian texts; it is paratextual apparatus rather than theoretical argumentation.

     Freud's own coinage Triebrepräsentanz, which reflects his hypothesis that drives as such inhere in the soma, and are accordingly only 'represented' rather than actually present within the psyche

350. #350

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the super-ego/ego-ideal is the structural heir to the Oedipus complex, formed through identification with the repressed paternal obstacle, and constitutes the psychical site of conscience, morality, and religion—thereby answering the charge that psychoanalysis neglects man's 'higher' nature by locating that higher presence in the ego-ideal's phylogenetically inherited structure.

     The abundant communication between the ego-ideal and these Ucs drive-impulses serves to explain the puzzling fact that the ideal itself can remain largely unconscious

351. #351

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety in phobias and obsessional neurosis is fundamentally a signal-affect generated by the ego in response to a danger situation ultimately reducible to castration, and that symptoms are produced not to avoid anxiety per se but to avoid the underlying danger situation that anxiety signals; this requires reconciling the dual-drive theory with the libido-organization stages by treating drives as always mixed rather than pure.

     we practically never find ourselves dealing with pure, unalloyed drive-impulses, but invariably with combinations of both kinds of drives in varying proportions.

352. #352

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation by contrasting conversion hysteria (which largely confines its defence to repression) with obsessional neurosis (where libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase, superego harshness, and reaction-formations constitute a distinct and more elaborate defence structure), proposing that the castration complex drives both and that the difference lies in constitutional/temporal factors affecting the genital organisation of the libido.

     The metapsychological explanation of regression appears to me to lie in a 'de-mergence' of drives, in the elimination of those erotic components that supervened at the beginning of the genital phase.

353. #353

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud defends the libido theory's explanatory validity against Jung's claim that it fails with dementia praecox, arguing that the ego-drive/sexual-drive antagonism remains the most productive hypothesis for psychoanalytic work, even while acknowledging its biological rather than purely psychological grounding.

     the hypothesis of separate ego drives and sexual drives, i.e. the libido theory, is essentially biologically based, and is grounded scarcely at all in psychology

354. #354

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud consolidates his dualistic drive theory by aligning life/death drives with biological anabolism/catabolism, traces the evolution of libido theory from ego/sexual drive opposition through narcissism to the identification of Eros as the universal binding force, and accounts for sadism as a death drive expelled from the ego that becomes an auxiliary of the sexual function — all while insisting that this dualism cannot be collapsed into Jung's monism.

     Our departure point was the great antithesis of life drives and death drives. Object-love itself shows us a second such polarity – that of love (affection) and hate (aggression).

355. #355

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that in obsessional neurosis the regression of the libido doubly exacerbates the conflict between ego, id, and super-ego: it forces erotic impulses into aggressive forms, enabling the super-ego to punish the ego for drives the ego cannot consciously recognise as its own, and symptom-formation gradually shifts from defense to surrogate gratification until the ego reaches paralysis of will.

     the aggressive drive-impulse... these symptoms represent the gratification of masochistic drive-impulses, which the regression process has likewise served to reinforce.

356. #356

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of translator/editor footnotes to Freud's "The Ego and the Id," clarifying terminological and conceptual issues around das Ich/das Es, the bodily ego, the id as libidinal reservoir, the Oedipus complex, and related matters — it is primarily philological and exegetical rather than advancing an independent theoretical argument.

     [Triebentmischung. In inventing this important term, Freud borrowed from chemistry: entmischen is the standard German word for 'dissociate', i.e. 'To separate the elements of (a compound)']

357. #357

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud tests and ultimately preserves the death drive hypothesis against biological evidence (Weismann, Woodruff, Maupas et al.), arguing that even if natural death is a late morphological acquisition, the *processes* driving toward death could be operative from the very beginning of organic life, masked by life-preserving forces — the biological debate is inconclusive but does not refute the dynamic theory of drives.

     We for our part focused not on living matter itself but on the forces at work within it, and this led us to identify two different kinds of drives: those that seek to guide life towards death; and others, the sexual drives, that continually seek and achieve the renewal of life.

358. #358

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's structural dependence on the superego reveals how sublimation and identification produce a de-mergence of drives, unleashing the death drive within the superego and making morality itself a lethal product of psychic catabolism; fear of death and consciential fear are thus retraced to castration fear as their core.

     Eros and the death drive do battle within it; we have already seen the various means that the two sets of drives deploy in their fight with each other.

359. #359

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     X

     Theoretical move: Freud critiques Adler's and Rank's accounts of neurotic susceptibility, ultimately arguing that neurosis is determined not by any single cause but by quantitative ratios among biological, phylogenetic, and psychological factors—with repression, the compulsion to repeat, and the ego/id conflict as the core psychoanalytic mechanisms.

     the demands asserted by the drives in infantile sexuality are treated by the ego as dangers and duly warded off, with the result that the later sexual impulses of puberty... are at risk of succumbing to the attraction of the paradigmatic impulses of infancy

360. #360

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Translator's Preface

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Standard Edition's systematic mistranslations and bowdlerizations of Freud have ideologically transformed his work from a daring, open-ended inquiry into a dogmatic corpus, and that new translations must restore both his precise meanings and his stylistic voice.

     it was easy, too, to discard 'instinct' and 'satisfaction' as translations of Trieb and Befriedigung, and to use 'drive' and 'gratification' in their place

361. #361

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud uses traumatic neurosis and the fort/da game to establish that certain psychic phenomena — repetition of painful experiences in dreams and play — cannot be explained by the pleasure principle alone, pointing toward tendencies "beyond" the pleasure principle that are more primal and independent of it.

     It was associated with the child's immense cultural achievement in successfully abnegating his drives (that is, abnegating the gratification thereof) by allowing his mother to go away

362. #362

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud differentiates three distinct reactions to object-loss—fear, pain, and sorrow—by grounding the distinction in cathexis economics: pain is explained as narcissistic cathexis transferred to object-cathexis, while fear is a signal reaction to the danger of loss and sorrow is triggered by the reality-test's demand to withdraw cathexis from the lost object.

     penetrates the apparatus forming the protective barrier, and then produces just the same effect as if it were a continuous stimulus emanating from the drives

363. #363

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud refines his metapsychology of repression by arguing that (1) the ego deploys a signal of unpleasure—not a mere transformation of drive-energy—to inhibit id-processes, and (2) fear is reproduced from primal traumatic memory-traces rather than generated anew, thereby relocating anxiety from the id to the ego and distinguishing primal from secondary repression.

     what happens to drive-impulses activated within the id that seek gratification as their goal?

364. #364

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that masochism exemplifies a primary death drive turned back on the ego, while sexual drives serve as life-preserving counter-forces oriented toward reunification; the chapter concludes with a methodological self-critique acknowledging the speculative and figurative character of drive theory, framing the entire edifice as provisional hypothesis rather than empirical certainty.

     For it traces a drive back to the need to restore a prior state… the assertion that drives are regressive in nature is also based on the observation of facts, namely those manifest in the compulsion to repeat

365. #365

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This is an editorial notes section providing translator/editor commentary on Freud's terminology and cross-references between texts; the substantive theoretical content is minimal, confined to note 53 (on repression and the fate of drive-impulses) and note 74 (on masochism and the death drive in phobias).

     the drive whose demands the ego so fearfully shrinks from gratifying is probably a masochistic one, namely the destruction drive directed against the subject's own person.

366. #366

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's encounter with lost objects produces identification as a structural residue, and that the dissolution of the Oedipus complex specifically generates the super-ego/ego-ideal as a precipitate of those identifications — establishing the super-ego as an internal agency that actively opposes the rest of the ego and is constitutively linked to sublimation, narcissism, and bisexuality.

     whether this transformation cannot perhaps affect the destiny of the drives in other ways too, for instance by bringing about a de-mergence of the various drives that are interfused with one another.

367. #367

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud dismantles the notion of an inherent "drive towards perfection" by reducing it to the structural tension produced by repression, and repositions sexual drives (Eros) as the true life-drives that oppose the death drive, introducing a rhythmic antagonism at the heart of organic life rather than a teleological development.

     The drives that take charge of the destiny of these organic elements that outlive the larger entity... constitute the group termed sexual drives.

368. #368

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the analyst's central technical task is to contain the patient's compulsion to repeat within the transference as a controlled "playground," transforming acting-out into memory and ultimately into a workable transference neurosis; the decisive therapeutic change comes not from identifying resistance but from working through it—a phase that distinguishes analysis from suggestion-based therapy.

     new, more deep-seated drive-impulses – still nascent rather than fully established – can emerge as repetition

369. #369

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud constructs the concept of primary narcissism by tracing it through three convergent sources—clinical perversion, schizophrenic withdrawal, and child/primitive omnipotence of thought—and uses it to justify the theoretical separation of ego-libido from object-libido and sexual drives from ego drives, while defending psychoanalysis as an empirical rather than speculative science.

     the separation of the libido into one that pertains to the ego, and one that becomes attached to objects, is a necessary corollary of a primary hypothesis that differentiated between sexual drives and ego drives

370. #370

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that sublimation operates through the ego's desexualization of id-libido, which paradoxically places the ego in the service of the death drive against Eros; and that secondary narcissism is constituted by this withdrawal and internalization of object-libido, while the death drive's silence amidst life's clamour is only held in check by Eros's disruptive demands.

     Again and again, we find that the drive-impulses that we are capable of monitoring turn out to derive from Eros... we are driven to the supposition that the death drives very largely remain silent.

371. #371

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IX

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that symptom-formation is not directly tied to anxiety but is mediated by the 'danger situation': symptoms are created to extricate the ego from danger, with anxiety serving as the minimal signal that triggers this defensive process, while the persistence of archaic danger situations—rather than the drives themselves—is what distinguishes neurosis from normal development.

     a situation arises, analogous to birth, in which the ego finds itself helpless in the face of ever-increasing demands asserted by the drives – the first and most primal of all the fear-determinants.

372. #372

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud refines and taxonomizes the mechanisms of repression and resistance, distinguishing five types of resistance from three psychic agencies (ego, id, superego), and revises his theory of anxiety away from direct libido-transformation toward an ego-signal theory grounded in the paradigmatic danger situation of birth.

     It is thus the continuous nature of the drive that makes it necessary for the ego to devote itself unceasingly to its defence campaign in order to ensure its success.

373. #373

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Freud revises his earlier metapsychological claim that repression converts libido into fear, arguing instead—on the basis of comparative analysis of Little Hans and the Wolf-man—that castration anxiety in the ego is the *motor* that drives repression, not its product; this inversion reconstitutes the causal relationship between anxiety and repression.

     it believed I was giving more than a mere description: I thought I had identified a metapsychological process consisting in a direct conversion of libido into fear

374. #374

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego-id and ego-superego relationships are not binary oppositions but dynamic, partially overlapping organizations; the symptom's "exterritoriality" from the ego-organization initiates a secondary defensive battle in which the ego oscillates between reconciliation (incorporating the symptom) and renewed repression, with secondary illness-gain reinforcing the symptom's fixation and generating analytic resistance.

     it is the symptom that causes the problem: as the fully fledged surrogate and offshoot of the repressed impulse it carries on playing the latter's role, again and again renewing its bid for gratification

375. #375

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

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > Desiring Fortune

     Theoretical move: By routing Descartes's critique of fortune through Hegel's critique of eudemonistic ethics, the passage argues that Aristotelianism illegitimately universalizes natural causality into the realm of freedom, and that the fatalist corrective consists in recognizing the *absolute impossibility* of luck—thereby dissolving hope and its constitutive error of treating unknowable outcomes as merely contingently possible.

     The drives guide the will to certain ends and are therefore positive. Yet they are also negative because each drive, conceptually understood, excludes all others.

376. #376

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

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > <span id="unp-ruda-0017.xhtml_p141" class="page"></span>Atta Choice! Countering the Presence of an Illusion

     Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Freudian psychoanalysis installs a forced choice for psychical determinism over free will—a choice predetermined by determinism itself—revealing that the belief in psychical freedom is a culturally produced illusion (wishful reversal) that repression sustains, while true rationalist-materialist universalism requires accepting full psychical causality, including the cracks and ruptures the unconscious introduces into apparent causality.

     to deprive [man] of an instinctual satisfaction [Triebbefriedigung] and replace it by reasonable arguments [Vernunftgründe]

377. #377

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.160

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Anatomy Is Destiny I: The Fate of the Genitals

     Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Freud's "Anatomy is destiny" is not biological determinism but a retroactive logic: it is culture and repression that transform the meaningless anatomical placement of the genitals into an inescapable fate, such that repression and the return of the repressed coincide, making cultural progress itself the source of irreducible conflict.

     Something in the nature of the sexual drive itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction.

378. #378

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

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Driven Destiny Makes a Voice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian drive *is* destiny (Triebschicksale = tautology), because drives are the constant, inescapable force that determines the subject from within, and the four modes of drive-destiny (reversal, turning against the self, repression, sublimation) are defense formations that never abolish what they defend against—meaning psychoanalysis is a rationalist theory of psychical determinism that collapses the distinction between fate and will.

     Freud starts by introducing the Grundbegriff, the fundamental concept of the drive, as a constant force from which one cannot flee, as it compels us from the inside.

379. #379

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.44

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen* > *The Call of Character*

     Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes two faces of surplus drive-energy (undeadness): one that locks the subject into hegemonic symbolic investitures (the "vampire") and one that ruptures sociality and summons the subject to its singular jouissance (the "daimon/miracle"), arguing that psychoanalytic practice is precisely the site where the latter can be cultivated by attending to the eccentric, unsaid, and idiosyncratic pulse of the signifier.

     he finds himself wedged between both of these faces of the drive: the repetitive and insatiable (symptomatic) drive of his scholarly ambitions and the (liberating) 'dark drive' that breaks the spell of these ambitions.

380. #380

     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, then the subject who pursues its desire to its outmost limit by necessity catches up with the drive (ultimately, the death drive)

381. #381

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

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny*

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

     our jouissance, although being the part of our constitution that is generally thought to escape social hegemonies, can become strongly devoted to these very hegemonies . . . it can in turn become channeled into unconscious fantasies

382. #382

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.135

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Singularity as a Social Phenomenon*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity is not an asocial eruption of the real but a social phenomenon produced by creatively linking the sinthome (the inexorable real in the subject) with the signifier, such that the rebellious energies of the real become the very engine of symbolic innovation—and this reconciles the apparent opposition between Lacanian, Foucauldian, and Derridean accounts of symbolic subversion.

     pioneering forms of meaning production are a way to infuse the 'dead' signifier with the 'undead' energies of the drive so as to keep the symbolic moving forward.

383. #383

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.239

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *4. The Possibility of the Impossible*

     Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes) works through the parallels and tensions between Lacanian singularity and Badiou's truth-event, arguing that both posit a subject of truth as a fissure in the symbolic order defined by its radical break with social situatedness, while also examining the paradoxical relationship between the subject's agency and the contingency of the event via Žižek, Zupančič, and Santner.

     Lacan associates singularity with the 'truth' of the subject's desire (as it intertwines with the drive)

384. #384

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.22

     *Introduction* > *What Sublimation Can Do*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity should be located not only in acts of symbolic rupture (subjective destitution) but also in the creative reformulation of symbolic systems from within, positioning the interface between the Symbolic and the Real — exemplified by sublimation and Joyce's sinthome — as the proper site of both singularity and resistance.

     the equally unpredictable drive energies and unconscious directives that galvanize the subject's psychic 'destiny'

385. #385

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.15

     *Introduction* > *The "Perseverance in Being"*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity—understood as the "perseverance in being" that resists conceptual/social capture—must be located at the level of the Lacanian real (drive energies), and that the dominant post-Lacanian reading of singularity as "subjective destitution" (radical break with the symbolic) is theoretically insufficient because it universalises alienation and cannot distinguish constitutive from circumstantial forms of it.

     it destabilizes the subject on the level of its bodily 'perseverance'—on the level of what one might, in more Lacanian terms, describe as the drive energies of the real.

386. #386

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.75

     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.

     Lacan transitioned from theorizing the conditions under which the subject can recognize the 'truth' of its desire to trying to understand the conditions under which it can forgo desire... for the sake of the drive (which represents a site of singularity that is deeply antithetical to the Other).

387. #387

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.237

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *3. The Ethics of the Act*

     Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical architecture of the chapter by elaborating the sinthome as the singular limit of analysis beyond interpretation, articulating the act as an annihilating break with fantasy and the future, and positioning the ethics of psychoanalysis around the injunction to act in conformity with desire rather than serve the 'service of goods'.

     Lacan's increasing interest in the drive does not mean that desire loses its importance... there is no way to approach the drive except through desire.

388. #388

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.234

     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.

     this destiny includes 'inhuman' elements in the sense that it is fueled by drive energies that have not been fully 'humanized.' Yet… these energies are no longer purely nonhuman either

389. #389

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.67

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er* > *The Analyst as Daimon*

     Theoretical move: Analysis functions as an "interpellation beyond ideological interpellation" by repositioning the analyst as the enigmatic cause of desire, replacing fantasmatic fixations with a transferential relation that reorganizes the analysand's existential orientation and opens new possibilities of singularity.

     analysis gradually converts the congealed 'too muchness' of the subject's drive energies—its habitual allegiance to symbolic sites of authority—into forms of meaning

390. #390

     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.

     It consumes and to some extent disciplines the drives that circle the Thing, shielding us from its more devouring aspects

391. #391

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.70

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er* > *The Possibility for New Possibilities*

     Theoretical move: Lacanian analysis is theorized as a process that dismantles fantasy-generated fixity—the unconscious reproduction of the Other's desire as one's own—and converts symptomatic repetition into a more fluid, singular capacity for desire, where the goal is not happiness but the tolerance of anxiety and the opening of new existential possibilities.

     fantasies that seek to artificially contain the surplus of the drives make us defensive . . . their disbanding represents a revitalizing upsurge of fresh energy

392. #392

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.28

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny*

     Theoretical move: The repetition compulsion is theorized as a structural binding mechanism that converts the unmanageable pressure of jouissance into the more stable organization of desire and symptomatic fixation, making it simultaneously a trap and a protective shield that grounds subjective continuity and singularity.

     transforming the uncontrollable urgency of the drives to the more mediated discomfort of symptomatic fixations.

393. #393

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.54

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *Validity in Excess of Meaning*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other's desire functions through a "validity in excess of meaning" — a surplus that exceeds rational comprehension — which binds subjects to institutions not through explicit juridical demands but through visceral, unconscious citation of authority, generating anxiety that curves the subject's everyday space and drives the desperate Che vuoi? toward an Other that is itself incapable of accounting for its own desire.

     the social occupies our drives—and the repetition compulsion that, through the fixations of desire, communicates the insistence of these drives—even when they seem to elude its grip.

394. #394

     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.

     repetition offers the drive the peculiar pleasure of never attaining its object (the Thing), which is why, as Lacan posits, its satisfaction occurs 'elsewhere than where its aim is'

395. #395

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.271

     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.

     drives and, 2 social prohibition and drive, 19 sociohistorical context of drive, 19 drive destiny, 41

396. #396

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.247

     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.

     if the drive may attain its satisfaction without attaining its 'end,' it is because 'its aim is simply this return into circuit'

397. #397

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.90

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

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

     the subject of desire yields to the subject of the drive because the repetition of the same old pattern is no longer a feasible option

398. #398

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

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

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

     the event releases drive energies that have been stored in (individually or socially) symptomatic ways of living; it disperses the congealed surplus agitation or overanimation that haunts the subject.

399. #399

     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."

     the fundamental fantasy resists analysis so effectively, it is because it operates on the level of the drive.

400. #400

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.14

     *Introduction*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian subjectivity involves a tripartite negotiation of symbolic, imaginary, and real registers, and proposes "singularity" as a concept specifically aligned with the real — a non-symbolizable surplus of being that exceeds all social categories and persists beyond the subject's symbolic and imaginary supports, distinguished from both subjectivity (symbolic) and personality (imaginary).

     singularity expresses something about the specificity of the subject's basic life-orientation on the level of the drives and unconscious desire

401. #401

     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 drive is a 'fundamental ontological notion' connected to 'a crisis of consciousness'

402. #402

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.34

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *The "Undeadness" of the Drives*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity is constitutively aligned with the excess jouissance of the drives and the death drive, such that what makes a subject irreplaceable is not a positive personality attribute but a non-relational "undeadness" — a dense core that resists symbolic and imaginary assimilation and links the subject to the deadly yet indestructible pulsation of the drives.

     Singularity thus relates to those parts of the drive that manage to ooze through the sieve of the various systems of organization that are designed to stabilize human life.

403. #403

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.194

     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.

     This encounter fixes Polyneces—like every subject is fixed—into a specific drive destiny, which is why it gives rise to something more entrenched, more fundamental, than Polyneces's symbolic identity.

404. #404

     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.

     drive and, 16–19

405. #405

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.30

     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.

     the drive conveys the pulse of the bodily real, whereas desire, while obviously still connected to the body, is a function of the signifier and, as such, twice removed from the Thing

406. #406

     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.

     It forces the drive into the mold of the pleasure principle so that the boundary of manageable excitation is not exceeded

407. #407

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.42

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that transcendent experiences function as a counter-interpellation that breaks the hypnotic hold of sociosymbolic investments, thereby releasing congealed drive energies and opening access to subjective singularity — situating this claim at the intersection of Lacanian Real, Santner's theology-inflected post-Lacanian theory, and Althusserian interpellation.

     Santner's assertion that subjective singularity surfaces at those 'miraculous' moments when the subject manages to push aside the edifice of its sociosymbolic investments so as to release the drive energies that have become congealed in such investments

408. #408

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.205

     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.

     the enigma of the other—the enigma that both arouses and baffles us—expresses the other's wholly idiosyncratic way of living out (the real of) its drives

409. #409

     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.

     desire (animated by the drives) chases these morsels with a relentless ('undead') intensity.

410. #410

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 7**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 7, listing scholarly sources cited in the chapter's argument about statistics, noir film, suture, voice, and drive. The only substantive theoretical content appears in note 16, which argues that Jakobson's differential phonology exhibits the same logic of suture as Frege's, and in note 28, which deploys the drive/defense-against-drive distinction to clarify the theory of film noir.

     the absence of chiaroscuro lighting and deep focus cannot automatically disqualify a film from inclusion in the noir catalogue, since this list of films must obviously include those that demonstrate little or no defense against the drive as well as those that build an elaborate defense.

411. #411

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.46

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

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

     Freud's text is incomprehensible if one confounds instinct with drive, or—in a distinction made by Lacan, who finds it latent in Freud's work—if one confounds the first and the second death.

412. #412

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.209

     **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.

     sex is to be grasped not on the terrain of culture but on the terrain of the drives, which—despite the fact that they have no existence outside culture—are not cultural. They are, instead, the other of culture and, as such, are not susceptible to its manipulations.

413. #413

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.197

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Lethal Jouissance and the Femme Fatale**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir's visual techniques (deep-focus, chiaroscuro) and the figure of the femme fatale both function as symbolic defenses against the drive—ersatz substitutes for a genuinely operative symbolic order—and that the femme fatale specifically embodies a contract by which the noir hero surrenders jouissance to an external double, a delegation that proves lethal rather than stabilising because she hoards rather than screens enjoyment.

     the drive is not indifferent to symbolic intervention, which is available in film noir on two different levels

414. #414

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.182

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Detour through the Drive**

     Theoretical move: The shift from classical detective fiction to film noir is theoretically recast not as a narrative inversion of identification but as a structural choice between desire (sense, language, lack) and drive (being, jouissance), homologized through Freud's fort/da game and mapped onto a broader historical transition from an Oedipal order of desire to a contemporary order of commanded jouissance with political consequences.

     the inversion that defines the shift from classical detection to film noir is to be understood not in terms of identification but in terms of the choice between sense and being, or—in the dialect of psychoanalysis—between desire and drive.

415. #415

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.190

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Voice and the Voice-Over**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the "grain of the voice" operates as a structural limit that collapses universal sense and installs the listener in a relation of transference/desire toward an unknown X; when desire gives way to drive, this private beyond is no longer hidden but exposed as a void—jouissance surfacing within the phenomenal field without becoming phenomenal—a move that explains the film noir voice-over's materialization of the narrator's irreducible absence from diegetic reality.

     When desire gives way to drive, this private beyond no longer remains hidden. What's involved in the drive, Lacan tells us, is a making oneself heard or making oneself seen

416. #416

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.192

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Locked Room/Lonely Room**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir enacts a structural shift from the "locked room" of classical detection (governed by a benevolent-impotent Other that conceals and yields meaning) to the "lonely room" (governed by the drive), where the intrusion of the non-phenomenal private realm—the object a, the grain of the voice—into public space registers not as plenitude but as a depletion of phenomenal reality, so that noir's characteristic emptiness is the positive mark of jouissance overrunning the signifying network.

     Every disguise turns out to be futile within a space defined by the drive, where what is at stake is making one's private being seen.

417. #417

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.186

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Voice and the Voice-Over**

     Theoretical move: Copjec contests standard film noir criticism's equation of the voice-over's "grain" with epistemological failure or masculine malaise, arguing instead that the voice-over marks a radical heterogeneity between speech and image driven by the primacy of jouissance (drive) over desire—a structural excess that refuses reduction to either commentary or social particularity, and which Barthes's "grain of the voice" captures more precisely than Bonitzer's "body of the voice."

     We will continue to argue instead that the aspect of this period that most concerns the development of noir is the perceptible ascendancy of drive over desire.

418. #418

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.281

     <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.

     Freud conceives the drives at the limen between the psychical and the somatic, the threshold between that portion of the body's pulsional energies that is prepared for discharge by virtue of being attached to determinate representations and an unrepresented excess of psychically untamed energies.

419. #419

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.9

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > To Recall Freud's Witch

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes the Death Drive as the most contested and rejected concept in Freud's metapsychology, then argues that rehabilitating it—by reconceiving the grand opposition between Eros and death down to the microincrements of psychical operation—is the central theoretical task of the book.

     Our investigation must fulfill Freud's intention to conceive of the entirety of psychical processes in terms of the grand opposition between Eros and death.

420. #420

     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.

     By virtue of its paradoxical constitution the objet a can only be described topologically as the perpetually absent locus around which the drives revolve.

421. #421

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.15

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > The Lacanian Return to Freud

     Theoretical move: Boothby poses the central tension of his project: Lacan's "return to Freud" appears to replace Freudian energetics with the algebra of the signifier, yet he argues this apparent betrayal is possible precisely because Freud's own metapsychology contains a latent content that only Lacanian concepts can bring to light.

     the concept of psychical energy and the drive theory that springs from it form the conceptual spine of Freud's metapsychology

422. #422

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.5

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > To Recall Freud's Witch

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freudian metapsychology is coextensive with psychoanalytic theory as such, and that its central—if problematic—pillar is the concept of psychical energy, which undergirds everything from displacement and condensation to repression, narcissism, and the dual drive theory; the repeated attacks on metapsychology are therefore nothing less than attacks on the theoretical foundation of psychoanalysis itself.

     the concept of psychical energy underlay Freud's notion of the instincts or drives and thus formed the foundation of his most daring theoretical construction: the supposition of the two primordial drives of life and death.

423. #423

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

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

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

     it is impossible to refer back to a primitive state... in which the force of the drive has not been always already stamped by the influence of symbolization.

424. #424

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.251

     <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* > "You don't love me . . . you just don't give a shit."

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a—exemplified by the anal object—is not a natural object but is constituted through the demand of the Other, which "colonizes" the body's orifices and transforms biological functions into denaturalized libidinal strivings; drive development across stages is thus not natural maturation but a migration of the objet a driven by the Other's demand.

     Lacan's reinterpretation of the oral and anal stages shows clearly how the drive in the human being emerges in the context of natural functions of suckling and defecating but only by deflecting those functions into new and denaturalized strivings.

425. #425

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.120

     <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 > Circulation in the Psychical Apparatus

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's imaginary-symbolic distinction can be recast as a theory of "circulation" within the psychical apparatus, where clinical structures (neurosis, psychosis) represent specific breakdowns or arrests in this dialectical interplay, and where analytic work consists in repunctuating discourse to restore proper circulation between the two registers.

     the need for another mode of functioning intervenes in the event that flight from the stimulus is impossible. This circumstance arises primarily in the case of endogenous stimuli originating from the interior of the organism itself—what Freud will later call the energy of the drives.

426. #426

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <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

     Theoretical move: The passage maps the structural arc of the argument: Freud's thought is organized by a dualistic logic (figure/ground, positionality/dispositionality, Eros/Death) that must provisionally be pursued before being superseded by triadic and quadrilateral structures in subsequent chapters.

     its culminating expression in the primal drives of Eros and Death

427. #427

     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 from Boothby's "Freud as Philosopher" (2001), listing concepts and proper names with their page references. It performs no theoretical argumentation but maps the book's conceptual terrain.

     Drive (Trieb), Freud's concept of 137–38, 147, 214, 282, 293, 297–98

428. #428

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.258

     <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 identifying the gaze with objet petit a and locating it in a triadic, topological structure that pre-exists and constitutes the field of the visible, Boothby argues that the Lacanian gaze is not a competing look but the dispositional horizon of consciousness itself—the desire of the Other that frames all positional awareness—with distinct political and clinical consequences in mass psychology versus analytic transference.

     the objet a is not the aim of the drive but rather the perpetually eccentric point around which the drive revolves.

429. #429

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.293

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 5. Freudian “Materialism” and the Transcendence of Desire

     Theoretical move: The Lacanian doctrine of the phallus as master signifier, together with the contradictory nature of objet a (split between the imaginary and symbolic registers), explains how the unconscious simultaneously orients desire beyond all imaging and remains tied to the imaginary body — thus Freud's "materialism" is not biological determinism but an account of how natural need is dislocated into drive and desire through the orbit of objet a, making desire structurally "useless" and open to an indefinite range of objects.

     The flow of 'energy' becomes 'drive' when impulses originating in the pressure of natural needs are drawn into the orbit of the objet a.

430. #430

     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 space of the drives is opened up in the distance between the object and the Thing.

431. #431

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.282

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "return to Freud" is not a Oedipal critique but a structural recovery that reveals the inner coherence of Freudian metapsychology, and that the Freudian-Lacanian subject is constituted by an irremediable gap and a double ground of representation (imaginary/symbolic) that situates psychoanalysis at the intersection of phenomenology and structuralism.

     the theory of instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness

432. #432

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.137

     <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_p134" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 134. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Formative Power of the Image

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian Imaginary—centered on the unifying power of the mirror-stage gestalt—is the indispensable complement to the Symbolic, and that it is precisely this imaginary function (the organism's detachment from instinct via perceptual form) that explains the constancy, variability, and "perverse" character of the human drive as distinct from animal instinct.

     What differentiates the Freudian Trieb from any animal behavior is its detachment from biological need and from any naturally designated object of satisfaction… the libidinal drive is centered on the function of the imaginary

433. #433

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.145

     <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_p141" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 141. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Imaginary Alienation

     Theoretical move: Imaginary alienation is constitutive of the ego itself—not merely a social effect—because the mirror-stage form positively excludes pulsional energies and splits the subject from its own desire; the Symbolic (speech, the signifier) is what mediates and partially counters this primary self-alienation, repositioning Freud's ego/id dichotomy as an ego/subject split grounded in the signifier rather than in vitalist biology.

     Lacan thus claims that the imaginary ego 'turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger, even though it should correspond to a natural maturation'

434. #434

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.147

     <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_p141" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 141. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Imaginary Alienation

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan's concept of the Real functions as a rigorous reformulation of Freud's energetic metaphor (libido/drive), positing the Real as a primitively excluded remainder of imaginary partitioning that can only be encountered obliquely—through anxiety and the disintegration of imaginary coherence—and that the lamelle concretizes this excluded real as the undifferentiated life-drive that haunts the subject after ego-formation.

     The problem is one of knowing how to refer to the reality of the drives before they are symbolically represented. 'If, for lack of representation, [the Trieb] is not there,' asks Lacan, 'what is this Trieb?'

435. #435

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.232

     The Writing on the Wall

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's concept of idle talk (Gerede) and Freud's illustration of everyday discourse in the dream of Irma's injection are historically and theoretically convergent, and that Lacan's theorization of "empty speech" / "full speech" represents the fullest synthesis of both, constituting a psychoanalytic account of everyday talk.

     It posits this constitution as authentically human and objectifies [the human being] with his 'drives' [Triebhaftigkeit]

436. #436

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.137

     part iii

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

     Harpagon's avarice comes to life before our eyes as 'drive' only because of, and through, its automatic repetition. Outside it, or in itself, it is nothing.

437. #437

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.63

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Against the contemporary "metaphysics of finitude" (which closes off the human within its limits), Zupančič argues that comedy enacts a "physics of the infinite" by demonstrating that human finitude is always already a *failed* finitude—a finitude with a structural hole—whose Lacanian name is objet petit a, and whose topology is best rendered by the Möbius strip: immanence that generates an other side without ever crossing to it.

     especially the drive, with its always excessive, 'surplus' nature—necessarily complicate the story of accepting one's finitude, since they introduce (or point to) a fundamental *contradiction in this finitude itself.*

438. #438

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.176

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

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

     The primarily repressed marker or representative of the drive is something that has never been conscious, and has never been part of any subjective experience, but constitutes its ground.

439. #439

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.229

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comedy is essentially the "genre of the copula" — the signifying articulation of the missing link between life and the Symbolic — and that the phallus, appearing in comedy as a partial object rather than merely a signifier, materialises this constitutive contradiction; comedy's "realism" is thus the realism of the Real of desire and drive, not the reality principle.

     *l'increvable désir* could in fact be a good definition of the drive

440. #440

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

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of translator's notes and editorial annotations to Freud's "The Ego and the Id," clarifying key terminological and conceptual issues including the Ego/Id distinction, the bodily ego, identification, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, and drive de-merging — but does not itself advance a theoretical argument beyond philological and translational clarification.

     [Triebentmischung. In inventing this important term, Freud borrowed from chemistry: entmischen is the standard German word for 'dissociate'

441. #441

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

     II

     Theoretical move: By moving from traumatic neurosis (and the compulsive return of its dreams) to the fort/da game, Freud establishes that repetition of unpleasurable experience cannot be fully accounted for by the pleasure principle, thereby opening the conceptual space for drives that are 'more primal than and independent of' the pleasure principle — i.e., the Beyond.

     It was associated with the child's immense cultural achievement in successfully abnegating his drives (that is, abnegating the gratification thereof) by allowing his mother to go away without his making a great fuss.

442. #442

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

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances the thesis that all drives are fundamentally conservative—oriented toward restoring a prior, inorganic state—thereby identifying the compulsion to repeat as a universal property of organic life and deriving the formula "the goal of all life is death," which redefines self-preservation drives as mere partial detours on the path to death rather than genuine forces of progress.

     A drive might accordingly be seen as a powerful tendency inherent in every living organism to restore a prior state, which prior state the organism was compelled to relinquish due to the disruptive influence of external forces

443. #443

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

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's precarious position between id, super-ego, and external world is structured by a dynamic of drive de-mergence: sublimation and identification unleash destructive drives within the super-ego, turning morality itself into a product of the death drive's catabolism, while castration fear is identified as the nuclear core of all anxiety (consciential, fear of death, neurotic).

     Eros and the death drive do battle within it; we have already seen the various means that the two sets of drives deploy in their fight with each other.

444. #444

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

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that in obsessional neurosis, regression of the libido to an aggressive-sadistic organization produces a doubly exacerbated conflict: the superego becomes hyper-severe while erotic impulses emerge as repellent destructive tendencies, ultimately leading to a paralysis of ego will as symptoms progressively serve gratification rather than defense.

     The hyper-severe super-ego insists even more emphatically on the suppression of this sexuality because of the fact that it has assumed such repellent forms.

445. #445

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

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes the theoretical necessity of a primary narcissism by tracing the concept from its clinical origins through schizophrenia, childhood, and "primitive" thought, thereby justifying the differentiation of ego-libido from object-libido and grounding psychoanalysis in empirical observation rather than speculative theory.

     Given the complete lack of any guiding theory of drives, it is legitimate, not to say imperative, first to take a hypothesis of some kind and test it thoroughly and rigorously until it either fails, or proves valid.

446. #446

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

     X

     Theoretical move: Freud identifies the ego/id differentiation as a structural vulnerability of the psychic apparatus: because the ego is "intimately bound up with the id," it cannot defend against internal drive-dangers as effectively as external ones, and is forced to accept symptom-formation as the cost of obstructing the drive — thereby generating neurosis.

     it can fight off the danger posed by a drive only by restricting its own organization and accepting symptom-formation as the price it has to pay for obstructing the drive.

447. #447

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

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud revises and taxonomizes the concept of resistance (distinguishing five types from three sources: ego, id, superego) and reformulates the theory of anxiety/fear, shifting from direct libido-transformation to an ego-signal model grounded in danger situations, thereby refining the structural account of repression, counter-cathexis, and working-through.

     the resistance of the id... makes the 'working-through' process necessary

448. #448

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

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes inhibition as a restriction of ego function—distinguished from symptom by being a process *within* the ego rather than acting upon it—and identifies two mechanisms: avoidance of conflict with the id (via excessive eroticization of organs) and avoidance of conflict with the superego (self-punishment), alongside an energic-economic account of generalized inhibition.

     The most common disruption affecting the eating function is lack of interest in food due to withdrawal of libido.

449. #449

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

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety in phobias and obsessional neurosis is fundamentally a signal-reaction by the ego to the danger of castration (or its derivatives), and that symptoms are produced not to avoid fear itself but to avoid the danger situation that fear signals — a clarification that also forces a revision of drive theory by acknowledging that drives never appear in pure form but always in mixtures of Eros and the destruction drive.

     we practically never find ourselves dealing with pure, unalloyed drive-impulses, but invariably with combinations of both kinds of drives in varying proportions.

450. #450

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

     Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the compulsion to repeat, rather than being simply suppressed, must be harnessed via the transference as a controlled "playground" that converts acting-out into remembering; the working-through of resistances — not mere identification of them — is the decisive therapeutic operation that distinguishes psychoanalysis from suggestion.

     it is only by directly experiencing it in this way that the patient becomes truly convinced of its existence and power… Only when the resistance is at its most intense can one manage in co-operation with the patient to detect the repressed drive-impulses that sustain the resistance

451. #451

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

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the sexual drives (Eros/life-drives) are conservative forces that restore and prolong life by opposing the death drive's drive toward dissolution, while dismissing any innate "drive toward perfection" in favour of explaining cultural striving as the result of repression and the irresolvable tension it produces.

     The drives that take charge of the destiny of these organic elements that outlive the larger entity... constitute the group termed sexual drives.

452. #452

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

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's sublimation of object-libido into ego-libido constitutes secondary narcissism and operates paradoxically against Eros by desexualizing it, while the death drive's relative silence means life's noise comes primarily from Eros and its ongoing battle with the pleasure principle—a configuration that ultimately vindicates the fundamental dualism of drives.

     the drive-impulses that we are capable of monitoring turn out to derive from Eros... we have no alternative, we are driven to the supposition that the death drives very largely remain silent

453. #453

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

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud tests his death drive hypothesis against biological science, finding partial but ultimately inconclusive support from Weismann's soma/germ-plasm distinction, and concludes that even if the physical manifestations of death are a late evolutionary acquisition, the underlying drive-processes oriented toward death could be operative from the very beginning of organic life—thus preserving the conceptual distinction between death drives and life/sexual drives.

     we focused not on living matter itself but on the forces at work within it, and this led us to identify two different kinds of drives: those that seek to guide life towards death; and others, the sexual drives, that continually seek and achieve the renewal of life.

454. #454

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

     IV

     Theoretical move: Through close analysis of Little Hans's horse phobia and the Wolf-man's wolf phobia, Freud argues that symptom-formation in neurosis involves not merely repression of a single drive-impulse but the simultaneous repression of two opposed impulses (sadistic aggression toward the father and passive affection for him), with displacement—not reaction-formation—as the operative mechanism, and that regression can serve as an alternative or supplement to repression in warding off disagreeable drive-impulses.

     thus whereas we began by tracking down the repression of just one drive, we find ourselves having to acknowledge that two such processes run in tandem with each other; the two drive-impulses involved – sadistic aggression towards the father, and passive affection for him – constitute a duo of opposites.

455. #455

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

     The Ego and the Id

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes the ego as a corporeal, surface-projection entity derived from the id through contact with the external world, substituting the reality principle for the pleasure principle — and then undermines the intuitive equation of 'higher psychic functions = conscious' by showing that self-criticism, conscience, and guilt can all operate unconsciously, radically complicating the topography.

     Perception plays the same role for the ego that the drives are required to play in the id.

456. #456

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

     The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's identifications with lost objects—culminating in the Oedipus complex's resolution—produce a differentiated agency within the ego (the super-ego/ego-ideal), and that this mechanism of converting object-libido into narcissistic libido via identification is the general pathway for sublimation and character formation.

     whether this transformation cannot perhaps affect the destiny of the drives in other ways too, for instance by bringing about a de-mergence of the various drives that are interfused with one another.

457. #457

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

     III

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

     it is a question, of course, of the action of drives that were supposed to lead to gratification. However, the patient's experience of the fact that then, too, they brought unpleasure instead of gratification makes not a scrap of difference: the action is repeated regardless.

458. #458

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

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This is an editorial notes section for a volume of Freud's writings, providing translator's glosses, cross-references, and one substantive Freudian note (note 53) on the fate of repressed drive-impulses and another (note 74) linking masochism to the death drive in phobias. The passage is predominantly bibliographic/apparatus but contains some theoretical content.

     the fate of the repressed drive-impulse... The original drive-impulse was certainly inhibited and deflected from its goal by the repression process.

459. #459

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

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section traces the conceptual evolution of Freud's drive theory from the sexual/ego drive opposition through narcissism and Eros to the final life drive/death drive antithesis, while also documenting translation controversies (Standard Edition bowdlerizations) and cross-cultural precursors to Platonic myth.

     All these efforts, like those in the present text, bear witness to the urgent need to bring to the theory of drives the clarity that has so far proved elusive.

460. #460

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

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego-id distinction is relational rather than absolute — the ego is the organized portion of the id — and uses this to explain how repression generates symptoms that achieve 'exterritoriality' from the ego-organization, initiating a secondary defensive battle in which the ego oscillates between incorporating the symptom and continuing to repress it, a dynamic reinforced by secondary illness-gain.

     the drive-impulse that is due to be repressed remains completely isolated... the symptom is there and can't be got rid of... again and again renewing its bid for gratification

461. #461

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

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes narcissism as a structural feature of libido theory by triangulating three pathways—organic illness, hypochondria/paraphrenia, and love-life—to argue that ego-libido and object-libido are dynamically interconvertible, that primary narcissism is universal, and that the compulsion to invest in objects arises from a pathogenic surplus of ego-libido.

     the libidinal drive-impulses

462. #462

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

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud simultaneously consolidates and qualifies the death drive hypothesis by: (1) recasting primary masochism as evidence for it; (2) invoking the Nirvana principle as the psyche's dominant tendency toward tension-reduction; (3) using Plato's Aristophanes myth to ground Eros in a regressive drive to restore a prior state of unity; and (4) candidly acknowledging the speculative, figurative, and ultimately uncertain character of the entire theoretical edifice.

     For it traces a drive back to the need to restore a prior state.

463. #463

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

     Translator's Preface

     Theoretical move: The Translator's Preface argues that the Standard Edition's systematic mistranslations, bowdlerizations, and stylistic obfuscations have distorted Freud's original theoretical voice and concepts, making new translations not merely desirable but theoretically necessary—particularly because dominant English terminology has itself shaped how Freudian concepts (drive, pleasure principle, superego, etc.) are understood globally.

     It was easy, too, to discard 'instinct' and 'satisfaction' as translations of Trieb and Befriedigung, and to use 'drive' and 'gratification' in their place.

464. #464

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

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud reintroduces 'defence' as the general category for all ego-protective techniques against drive demands, subsumes 'repression' as one specific mechanism, and then elaborates anxiety/fear as a signal anticipating traumatic helplessness — establishing a structural sequence: fear → danger → helplessness (trauma) that grounds the distinction between objective and neurotic fear.

     Neurotic fear is fear of a danger that we do not know. Thus we first have to work out what that neurotic danger consists in; and psychoanalysis has shown us that it is a danger posed by the drives.

465. #465

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

     IX

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that symptoms are not simply equivalent to fear but are formations that interpose a "danger situation" between anxiety and drive-pressure, functioning to extricate the ego from danger; this reframes the relationship between anxiety, symptom-formation, and defence, while ultimately confronting the unresolved question of why some fear-determinants are never relinquished and neurosis persists.

     a situation arises, analogous to birth, in which the ego finds itself helpless in the face of ever-increasing demands asserted by the drives – the first and most primal of all the fear-determinants.

466. #466

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

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes the pleasure principle as the foundational regulatory mechanism of psychic life, then immediately qualifies its sovereignty by introducing the reality principle and repression as two distinct forces that inhibit or subvert it, thereby framing the theoretical problem that will necessitate positing something beyond the pleasure principle.

     Almost all the energy that fills the psychic apparatus stems from its innate drive-impulses, but not all of these are granted access to the same phases of development.

467. #467

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

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's and editorial notes on Freud's terminology (Angst, Trauer, Triebrepräsentanz, Inhalte, etc.), offering philological and conceptual commentary on translation choices in the Standard Edition — it is non-substantive as theoretical argument but contains minor conceptual clarifications about the Ego, Superego, Id, drives, anxiety, and repetition.

     Freud's own coinage Triebrepräsentanz, which reflects his hypothesis that drives as such inhere in the soma, and are accordingly only 'represented' rather than actually present within the psyche

468. #468

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

     X

     Theoretical move: Freud critiques Adler's organ-inferiority theory and Rank's birth-trauma theory as insufficient explanations for neurosis, then advances his own account: the compulsion to repeat fixates the ego on outdated danger situations via repression, and the etiology of neurosis is overdetermined by three interacting factors—biological (helplessness), phylogenetic (sexual latency), and psychological (repression)—none of which alone constitutes the "ultimate cause."

     the pathogenic significance of this factor is clearly demonstrated by the fact that most of the demands asserted by the drives in infantile sexuality are treated by the ego as dangers and duly warded off

469. #469

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

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a dualistic drive theory by aligning biological distinctions (anabolism/catabolism, soma/germ-plasm) with the life drive / death drive polarity, tracing the evolution of libido theory from ego/sexual drive antithesis to narcissistic libido, and arguing that sadism represents a death drive expelled from the ego that becomes an auxiliary of the sexual function—insisting against Jung's monism that a genuine dualism of Eros and death drive remains irreducible.

     Everyone posited as many drives or 'basic drives' as they liked, and played around with them rather as the ancient Greek philosophers did with their four elements.

470. #470

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

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud defends the libido theory's biological grounding and its methodological priority in psychoanalytic work against Jung's claim that its failure to explain dementia praecox (schizophrenia) invalidates it for the neuroses, insisting the antagonism between ego drives and sexual drives remains the productive working hypothesis derived from analysis of transference neuroses.

     the hypothesis of separate ego drives and sexual drives, i.e. the libido theory, is essentially biologically based, and is grounded scarcely at all in psychology.

471. #471

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

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the repetition-compulsion of drives is not necessarily in conflict with the pleasure principle but rather precedes and prepares for its dominion; the pleasure principle is reframed as a tendency subservient to the deeper drive toward dissolution of excitation (the death drive), while the distinction between primary/secondary processes and annexed/non-annexed cathexis illuminates the graduated taming of pleasure over psychic development.

     if it really is such a universal characteristic of drives to seek to restore a prior state, we should not be surprised that so many processes in the psyche take place quite independently of the pleasure principle.

472. #472

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

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud reformulates the mechanics of repression by reconceiving the ego's power over the id as deriving from its signal of unpleasure (not automatic affect-transformation), and re-situates the origin of anxiety in reproduced memory-traces of primal traumatic experiences rather than in converted drive-energy, while correcting a prior over-emphasis on the ego's weakness relative to the id.

     the drive-impulse contrived to come through in surrogate form – but a severely stunted, displaced, inhibited one. Furthermore there is no hint of gratification about this surrogate.

473. #473

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

     IV

     Theoretical move: Freud reverses his earlier metapsychological thesis by arguing, on the basis of comparative analysis of Little Hans and the Wolf-Man, that castration anxiety in the ego *causes* repression rather than resulting from it — fear is prior to repression, not its product — while acknowledging an unresolved contradiction with evidence from the 'actual neuroses' where disrupted libido does appear to generate anxiety.

     it did not seem rash to suppose that disruptions of this kind have the effect of converting the libido into fear… I thought I had identified a metapsychological process consisting in a direct conversion of libido into fear.

474. #474

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

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud reframes anxiety as an ego-generated signal rather than a product of automatic economic discharge, and systematically maps a developmental sequence of danger situations (birth trauma → object-loss → castration → super-ego) that underlie distinct neurotic structures, while revising his earlier libido-transformation theory of anxiety.

     fear arises directly out of libido; in other words, in the face of excessive tension caused by unmet needs a state of helplessness is induced in the ego

475. #475

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

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the ego-ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishes it sharply from sublimation, and then derives the superego/conscience as the agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—thereby also accounting for paranoid self-scrutiny, dream censorship, and the role of narcissistic libido in self-feeling.

     libidinal drive-impulses are subject to the fate of pathogenic repression when they come into conflict with the individual's cultural and ethical notions

476. #476

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

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation in conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis, arguing that the distinguishing mechanism of obsessional neurosis is libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase (driven by the castration complex against the Oedipus complex), accompanied by drive de-mergence, a uniquely harsh superego, and reaction-formations in the ego — contrasting with hysteria's simpler reliance on repression alone.

     The metapsychological explanation of regression appears to me to lie in a 'de-mergence' of drives, in the elimination of those erotic components that supervened at the beginning of the genital phase

477. #477

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

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud recapitulates his dualistic drive theory (Eros vs. death drive), articulates their fusion and de-mergence as the dynamic mechanism underlying libidinal regression, ambivalence, and neurotic phenomena, and introduces the concept of a displaceable, desexualized narcissistic libido that operates as a qualitatively indifferent energy serving the pleasure principle across both ego and id.

     On this view, we need to distinguish two types of drives, one of which – the sexual drives, or Eros – is far more conspicuous, and far more accessible to our knowledge and understanding.

478. #478

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.292

     **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 argues that ontology requires a pre-ontological register of "less-than-nothing" (den) distinct from both Nothing and Something, and uses the Klein bottle topology and the Higgs field paradox to demonstrate that Void/Nothing is not the ground but itself an achievement requiring energetic expenditure — thereby establishing a materialist distinction between two vacuums (false/true) that is strictly homologous to the Lacanian distinction between the death drive's circular movement and nirvana, and between den and objet a.

     the Möbius strip whose circular movement functions as a drive; so where does this circular movement draw its energy from, why doesn't it collapse into its abyss and reach the immobility of a kind of nirvana?

479. #479

     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.

     drives are not secondarily sublimated, drive is as such a form of sublimation

480. #480

     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.

     simple thirst is transformed into eroticized oral drive where the aim of drinking or sucking is no longer quenching thirst but the repeated pleasurable experience of sucking itself

481. #481

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.439

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that in every parallax gap (production/representation, drive/desire, lalangue/language) true materialism requires asserting the primacy of the *second* term—the gap, representation, desire, language—because the supposedly "more basic" first term only functions against the background of the lack opened by the second; and he maps four modes of relating to language (praxis, lalangue, science, and the radical cut of philosophy/poetry/mysticism), concluding that the Klein bottle, not the cross-cap or quilting point, is the appropriate topological model for subjectivization.

     drive is the substantial productivity of our psychic life, but the circular movement of drive can only function against the background of the loss that structures desire

482. #482

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.150

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "Absolute Knowing" names a redoubled not-knowing in which ontological incompleteness is displaced into reality itself, and that this logic—exemplified by the Lacanian "subject of the unconscious" structured as a Kierkegaardian apostle—entails rejecting the human/animal exception as the origin of sexual deadlock: the rupture of sexuality is pre-human, constitutive of nature as such, with humanity merely the site where this constitutive gap "appears as such."

     the excess/disturbance that brings about the transformation of instinct into drive, the denaturalization of instinct into drive

483. #483

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.347

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

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

     it is no longer the instinctual drive to reproduce, but a drive that gets thwarted as to its natural goal (reproduction) and thereby explodes into an infinite, properly meta-physical, passion

484. #484

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing alphabetical entries from H–I with page-reference hyperlinks to various chapters; it performs no theoretical argument of its own.

     instinct–drive distinction [here](#theorem_ii_sex_as_our_brush_with_the_absolute.xhtml_IDX-1012)

485. #485

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section (partial alphabetical listing B–C) from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, providing page/location references with no theoretical argument.

     circularity drive [here](#scholium_41_language_lalangue.xhtml_IDX-304)

486. #486

     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.

     scattered around the desert of the symbolic Other, there are always some leftovers, oases of enjoyment, so-called 'erogenous zones', fragments still penetrated with enjoyment - and it is precisely these remnants to which Freudian drive is tied: it circulates, it pulses around them.

487. #487

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology cannot be fully grasped through discourse analysis (interpellation/symbolic identification) alone; its ultimate support is a pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment structured in fantasy, and therefore ideology critique must be supplemented by a logic of enjoyment that 'traverses' social fantasy and identifies with the symptom — demonstrated through the case of anti-Semitism, where 'the Jew' functions as a fetish embodying the structural impossibility of 'Society'.

     'beyond fantasy' we find only drive, its pulsation around the sinthome

488. #488

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.224

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Woolf's novels stage a Hegelo-Lacanian ontology in which subjectivity is constituted by irreducible negativity and the interruptive structure of memory, contra Deleuze's notion of Becoming as anti-memory; Clarissa's "flowers of darkness" and Septimus's dissolution together demonstrate that the evacuation of subjective lack (the Deleuzean line of flight) leads not to liberation but to the dead end of pure drive, stripping the subject of the productive reflexivity that iterability and temporal disparity make possible.

     a subject of drive, which is Freud's name for immortal persistence, 'going on.'

489. #489

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.192

     Who Cares? > The Human Object

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive — demonstrated through the Wolf Man's somatic symptom — escapes both correlationism and speculative realism by positing a strange materiality that "enjoys without thinking," locating the Freudian body as the inscription of drive upon organism, and positioning sexuality as the ontological lapse that anchors jouissance irreducibly in materiality without reducing it to mere physicality.

     the drive is not a speculative hypothesis but a fact of psychoanalytic experience... the drive evades this trap by revealing a strange materiality that does not think but nevertheless enjoys.

490. #490

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.158

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: By reading Lacan and Deleuze together, the passage argues that the death drive is not a principle of destruction but the site of originary affirmation, and that repetition is not a response to a pre-existing traumatic original but the very mechanism that produces its own excess — with a constitutive split at its heart that parallels the Lacanian distinction between the void around which drives circulate and their partial figures.

     In Lacan, a similar inherent split could be established between two levels of the drive: drives as involved in all kinds of partial satisfactions… and the drive as purely disruptive pulsating negativity that propels them.

491. #491

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.53

     Mladen Dolar > What's the Matter?

     Theoretical move: Against both naturalist-scientific materialism ("there are only bodies") and (post)structuralist culturalism ("there are only languages"), Dolar argues that the truly materialist position locates the Real at their impossible interface—the point where the symbolic cuts into the body—and that the objet a names precisely what is irreducible to either term, requiring a third axiom: "there are only bodies and languages, except that there is the objet a."

     Hence the drives that Freud posits as the representatives of the somatic in the psychic, the interface of the two.

492. #492

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.174

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze diverge precisely where they are closest—on repetition—because for Lacan emancipation is not achieved by the centrifugal force of difference/repetition itself (Deleuze), but requires the production of a new signifier (S1) from within the analytic discourse, a signifier that names the foundational "hole" and thereby shifts the subject's relation to the signifying order.

     The new signifier is the algorithm that disorients the drive by cutting off the well-established routes of its satisfaction.

493. #493

     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.

     one that interprets him as the extimate, excremental materiality of the drive

494. #494

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.49

     Mladen Dolar > Freud's Materialism

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Freud's departure from scientific materialism is not a rejection but a radicalization of it: by pushing mechanism, determinism, monism, reductionism, and scientism to their outermost consequences, psychoanalysis discovers a crack or inner break within each—a 'less than nothing' that persists without ontological substance—thereby converging, by an entirely different route, with Hegel's 'substance is subject.'

     There is a deviation in the very concept of the drive which, to put it in a nutshell, cannot be grasped as independent of its deviation.

495. #495

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.246

     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*.

     a pursuit that, again, perfectly illustrates the logic of the (death) drive

496. #496

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.231

     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.

     its 'leaving' is simply a figure for drive, that which moves us asymptotically toward originary loss.

497. #497

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

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive is indifferent to repression rather than opposed to it, and that only a new signifier (and its subjectivation) — not drive-force — can effect real separation within the drive; this opens the space of a "Lacanian politics" grounded in the reactivation of the gap of the unconscious.

     By itself, the drive does not work against repression (which retroactively works on repetition).

498. #498

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.190

     Who Cares? > The Human Object

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic account of sexuality as an ontological negativity—instantiated in the drive, fantasy, and the body as distinct from the organism—provides a properly materialist ethics that new materialism cannot supply, because it grounds freedom, difference, and ethical creativity in the constitutive gap at the core of human being rather than in a "flat ontology" that nullifies human peculiarity.

     the energy of the drive is the energy of the organism. It is a materiality which has been repurposed for decidedly inorganic aims, dis-ordered by the imposition of the signifier that splits the living being along the pole of desire

499. #499

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.193

     Who Cares? > The Human Object > The Master and the Pervert

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis is positioned as the necessary ethical corrective to new materialism's symptomatic attachment to the jouissance it ostensibly critiques: rather than speculating beyond consciousness, psychoanalysis works from within to expose the human's non-coincidence with itself, grounding a genuine ethics of singularity against both correlationism and its critics.

     that is inscribed by the meandering energy of the drives, that indexes the difference between the body and the organism

500. #500

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.135

     ,'\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

     Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus develops the theoretical architecture of the chapter on *Mulholland Drive*, deploying Lacanian concepts—desire as caused rather than aimed, fantasy as constitutive of temporality and reality, the failure of the sexual relation, and sexuation—to argue that Lynch's film stages the fantasmatic structure of subjectivity against Kantian and Hegelian epistemologies.

     desire moves around it, in so far as it is agitated in the drive.

501. #501

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.109

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **Fantasized Temporality**

     Theoretical move: Fantasy's theoretical function is inverted from common assumption: rather than allowing escape from temporality, fantasy *constructs* temporality as a respite from the atemporal, repetitive logic of desire/drive; Mulholland Drive dramatizes this by splitting into a world of desire (atemporal, drive-governed) and a world of fantasy (temporally coherent, narratively structured).

     As a subject of desire without any fantasmatic supplement, Diane experiences only the repetition of the drive.

502. #502

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.215

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster clarifies several technical concepts—S(A) as signifier of the barred/lacking Other, sublimation, subjectivity vs. subjectivization, sexuation structures as strict contradictories—while defending Lacan's theoretical innovations against feminist and structuralist misreadings.

     Obsession could be offhandedly characterized as the category wherein the drives are utterly and completely desexualized (thought alone, perhaps, remaining sexualized).

503. #503

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.139

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > *Masculine!F eminine-Signifier!Signifierness*

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that sexual difference is grounded in a structural asymmetry between masculine and feminine modes of alienation in language: men are defined by the signifier of desire (Φ) and take the object (a) as partner, while women are defined by "signifierness" (the being of the signifier beyond signification) and take the phallus and S(Ⱥ) as partners—a dissymmetry so radical it forecloses any writable sexual relationship.

     This subjection of the drives corresponds to a certain Freudian form of sublimation, the one wherein the real is drained off into the symbolic, jouissance being transferred to the Other.

504. #504

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.207

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > Metaphor and the Precipitation of Subjectivity

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing bibliographic references and brief clarificatory remarks on Lacanian concepts including Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, primal repression, the drive-language relation, S1/S2, and the beyond of castration; it is largely non-substantive as a theoretical text but contains several load-bearing conceptual notes.

     Lacan stresses that the drive is not unrelated to language: unlike 'instinct,' drives are, in some sense, embedded in language.

505. #505

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.194

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a glossary of Lacanian mathemes and symbols (barred S, object a, S1, S2, the Other, barred A, S(/A), phallus, phallic function, logical quantifiers, lozenge, fantasy formula, drive formula), followed by non-substantive acknowledgements pages.

     S 0 D- Matherne for drives (often referred to as "instincts" in translations of Freud's work) that involves the subject in relation to demand (not need or desire).

506. #506

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.93

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Subject as Signified*

     Theoretical move: Fink redefines Lacanian castration as the subject's alienation-in and separation-from the Other (not biological threat), and articulates how the barred subject is constituted as a sedimentation of meanings via the retroactive relation between S2 and the master signifier S1 (equated with the Name-of-the-Father), with the traversal of fantasy marking the path beyond neurosis.

     Lacan proposes that we equate these representatives with signifiers, words standing in for drives (i.e., acting as the representatives of drives) at the ideational level.

507. #507

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.188

     <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > <span id="page-183-0"></span>Stalking the Cause

     Theoretical move: By retranscribing Schema L as Chain L using a parenthetical/binary formalism, Fink shows how object a emerges as a structural remainder—the *caput mortuum* of the signifying chain—thereby demonstiting that object a's causal function with respect to desire is inscribed in the very topology of the symbolic chain rather than being a supplementary concept added from outside.

     The γ-a alternation in the middle of the network... could perhaps be equated with the drive as it turns itself inside out... Lacan mentions, for example, that drives are such that an incorporative drive... can flip-flop into a fear of being devoured (he likens this to the turning inside out of a glove and to the two never ultimately distinct 'sides' of a Mobius strip).

508. #508

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.63

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Against the contemporary "metaphysics of finitude" that makes finitude a Master-Signifier closing off the infinite, Zupančič argues that comedy enacts a "physics of the infinite" grounded in the Lacanian insight that human finitude is always-already a *failed finitude* — a finitude with a constitutive hole — whose materiality is objet petit a, and whose topology is best captured by the Möbius strip as the figure of immanent transcendence.

     Already desire in its radical negativity—but especially the drive, with its always excessive, 'surplus' nature—necessarily complicate the story of accepting one's finitude, since they introduce (or point to) a fundamental contradiction in this finitude itself.

509. #509

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.137

     part iii

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

     the comic can be a very good introduction to the psychoanalytic notion of the drive: the bottom line of both is that repetition *is* life—or, perhaps more precisely, that life is the inherent gap opened up by repetition itself

510. #510

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.229

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks

     Theoretical move: Comedy is theorized as the genre of the copula—the site where the missing link between life and the signifier is made to appear—and the phallus is identified as the privileged signifier of this copula, one that appears in comedy not as signifier but as partial object, materializing the contradictions of the Symbolic. The 'realism' of comedy is then relocated from the reality principle to the Real of desire/drive as an irreducible incongruence within human existence.

     l'increvable désir could in fact be a good definition of the drive

511. #511

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.176

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

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

     What is primarily repressed is not the drive itself, or the affect, or its representation, but the subject's marker of this representation.

512. #512

     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.

     What if we read Hölderlin's shift as a shift from desire to drive? 'Vigilance' is the vigilance for partial objects around which drives circulate.

513. #513

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.245

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

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

     the Real of a drive whose injunction cannot be avoided (which is why Lacan says that the status of a drive is ethical)

514. #514

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.296

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Biopolitical Parallax

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that late capitalism's shift from desire to demand (and from Oedipal to post-Oedipal subjectivity) converges with biopolitical control as two faces of the University Discourse; the correct psychoanalytic response is not conservative re-Oedipalization but a full assumption of the Other's nonexistence, enabling a demand no longer addressed to the Other — a mode that coincides with the drive.

     what one should focus on, rather, is demand as a way to drive; that is to say, what one needs is a demand no longer addressed to the Other

515. #515

     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.

     animal coupling gets caught in the self-referential vicious circle of drive, in the protracted repetition of its failure to reach the impossible Thing

516. #516

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.63

     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: By reading Marx's account of capital's self-movement through Hegel's substance-to-subject passage and Lacan's desire/drive distinction, Žižek argues that capitalism operates at three levels—subjective experience, objective exploitation, and an "objective deception" (the unconscious fantasy of self-generating capital)—and that the shift from desire to drive requires distinguishing objet petit a as lost object (desire) from objet petit a as loss itself (drive), while redefining the death drive as an excess of life rather than a thrust toward annihilation.

     Drive inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic, level: drive is that which propels the whole capitalist machinery, it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction.

517. #517

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.121

     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.

     This disgust at Life is a disgust at drive at its purest.

518. #518

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.386

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > Introduction: Dialectical Materialism at the Gates

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the parallax concept as both a structural and political category—defining revolutionary utopia as the abolition of the parallax gap, and mobilizing Hegelian dialectics (U-P-I contradiction, singularity, Absolute as Subject-Object) alongside Badiouian materialist dialectics to articulate the logic of truth, drive, and universality against liberal "democratic materialism."

     Thus drive emerges as a strategy to profit from the very failure to reach the goal of desire.

519. #519

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.11

     introduction

     Theoretical move: Žižek introduces "parallax" as the master concept for an irreducible gap within the One itself, arguing that this gap—manifested across quantum physics, neurobiology, ontological difference, the Lacanian Real, desire/drive, and the unconscious—displaces the New Age polarity of opposites and structures a tripartite (philosophical/scientific/political) materialist ontology, while simultaneously grounding the constitutive "homelessness" of philosophy and the paradox of universal singularity against Hegelian mediation.

     the moment he changes his attitude, starting to find pleasure in just repeating the failed task, squeezing the object which, again and again, eludes him, he shifts from desire to drive

520. #520

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.87

     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.

     a kind of bodily gesture of (self-)mutilation, the introduction of a minimal torsion, of the curved space of drive, of the void around which a drive circulates.

521. #521

     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 is not a universal thrust (toward the incestuous Thing) braked and broken up, it is this brake itself, a brake on instinct—its "stuckness."

522. #522

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.16

     introduction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a "minimal difference" (the non-coincidence of the One with itself) underlies apparent dualisms, and deploys the Lacanian enunciation/statement split and the Hegelian concept of concrete universality—illustrated through a mock-Hegelian dialectic of sexuality—to demonstrate how confronting a universal with its "unbearable" particular example reveals the tacit prohibitions sustaining symbolic universes.

     Jean Laplanche argued that masturbation-with-fantasy is the elementary, zero-level, form of the properly human drive as opposed to the animal instinct.

523. #523

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.405

     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.

     Along the same lines, Lacan claims that drive is an ethical category.

524. #524

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.173

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward a New Science of Appearances

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian, Freudian, and Marxian "demystifications" share a common structure: they reveal not a hidden reality behind appearances but a split *within* appearance itself—between "the way things really appear to us" and "the way they appear to appear to us"—and that this ontological structure (paralleled in quantum physics) is more radical than any naturalist or perspectivist account of subjectivity.

     capitalism is grounded in the Real of a certain quasitheological impersonal 'drive,' the drive to reproduce and grow, to expand and accumulate profit.

525. #525

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.126

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Too Much Life!

     Theoretical move: The passage redefines the human-animal distinction not as one between man and beast but as an *inherent* difference within the human itself: between the human and the "inhuman excess" of drive that is constituted by the body's colonization by the symbolic order through the sinthome. The properly human task is then a Christological-sublimatory one—transforming the modality of this excess rather than suppressing it.

     is not the 'theological' dimension without which, for Benjamin, revolution cannot win, the very dimension of the excess of drive, of its 'toomuchness'?

526. #526

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.169

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

     Theoretical move: Žižek reframes the modern "humiliation" narrative (Copernicus-Darwin-Freud) by arguing that twentieth-century thought does not simply continue desublimating reduction but paradoxically rehabilitates appearance/Event as irreducible to positive Being—and that the true materialist wager is not reductionism but the capacity to explain mind, consciousness, and sexuality precisely where idealism fails, with Badiou's Event-logic shown to be structurally homologous to the Hegelian non-All.

     sexuality itself, sexual drives pertaining to the human animal, cannot be accounted for in evolutionary terms

527. #527

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.195

     **The Overlapping Worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Tarkovsky's "cinema of intersection" achieves its distinctive effect by dramatically separating the worlds of desire and fantasy only to reveal their fundamental identity—that the objet petit a remains constant across both registers—thereby exposing the traumatic proximity of the gaze and dissolving the illusion of difference that sustains ordinary desiring subjectivity. This move is theorized as simultaneously Hegelian (identity-in-difference) and Lacanian (the drive's monotony beneath desire's metonymy).

     we instead continue to circulate around the same object, never moving forward, never advancing out of the path of this circular drive. Even though our object of desire obviously changes, our objet petit a—the object motivating our desire—does not. The metonymy of desire is but a mask for the monotony of the drive.

528. #528

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.85

     **Desire and Not Showing Enough**

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes a theoretical distinction between the "cinema of desire" and the "cinema of fantasy" by arguing that film's structural proclivity toward presence (the overpresence of the image) works against desire, which depends on absence—yet narrative form necessarily deploys absence (via suyzhet/fabula gaps) to engine spectator desire, making the cinema of desire a subversion of film's inherent medium rather than its natural expression.

     the objet petit a offers the subject the satisfaction that comes from simply being a desiring subject and following the path of the drive

529. #529

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.236

     29 > **9. Desire and Not Showing Enough**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists primarily of footnote apparatus for two chapters, deploying the desire/drive distinction as an organizing theoretical axis for a cinema-of-desire vs. cinema-of-fantasy framework, and citing key sources (Metz, Barthes, Brooks, Bazin, Kracauer) to position desire as intrinsic to cinematic narrative movement.

     When the subject experiences the path of desire as an end in itself rather than as a way of seeking something beyond that path, the subject moves into the drive.

530. #530

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.88

     <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.

     The object of drive is, by definition, a double object: there is the object that is supposed to satisfy the drive (and at which the drive aims), but there is also this very satisfaction that should itself be conceived in terms of an object (satisfaction as object).

531. #531

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.183

     <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.

     what is involved in the drive as different from desire is not so much a time difference as a 'time warp'... According to Lacan, the drive appears as something that 'has neither head nor tail,' as a montage.

532. #532

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.49

     **Name of the Father**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs two related theoretical moves: first, it defines the Name-of-the-Father as a signifier/metaphor that installs the symbolic order of desire and lack via the Oedipus complex; second, it grounds narcissism in Freud's drive theory, showing how drive vicissitudes (scopophilia, sadism/masochism) are structurally dependent on the narcissistic organization of the ego.

     the active scopophilic [drive] develops from this, by leaving narcissism behind. The passive scopophilic [drive], on the contrary, holds fast to the narcissistic object.

533. #533

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.52

     **Neurosis** > **Oedipus Complex** > *objet a*

     Theoretical move: The passage systematically theorizes the *objet petit a* as the object-cause of desire — constitutively absent, irreducible to signification, and functioning as the remainder/gap that both inaugurates subjectivity through loss and sustains desire by perpetually eluding satisfaction, thereby distinguishing it sharply from any empirical object of desire.

     There is, according to Lacan, a form of the *objet petit a* that corresponds to each of our drives. The gaze is the *objet petit a* of the scopic drive...parallel to the breast in the oral drive, the feces in the anal drive, and the voice in what Lacan calls the 'invocatory' drive.

534. #534

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.72

     **The Real** > **Signifier**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier's entry into the subject inaugurates a structural loss that transforms need into desire mediated by absence, constitutes the subject as split from any satisfying object, and — shifting registers — establishes that singularity emerges not from particular identity but through universality's violence on particularity, while speculative identity names the subject's recognition of itself in radical otherness.

     part of the body detaches itself as a result of the body's submission to the signifier...this detached body part becomes the libido, the source of drive in the subject.

535. #535

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.19

     **Demand** > **Drive**

     Theoretical move: The passage constructs a composite theoretical account of the Freudian/Lacanian drive by distinguishing its structural components (pressure, aim, object, source), separating it from instinct/need, and establishing its paradoxical logic: the drive is never satisfied by reaching its object but finds satisfaction in its own circular, repetitive movement—making every drive simultaneously sexual and a death drive.

     The goal is the final destination, while the aim is what we intend to do, i.e., the way itself. Lacan's point is that the real purpose of the drive is not its goal (full satisfaction) but its aim: the drive's ultimate aim is simply to reproduce itself as drive, to return to its circular path

536. #536

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.33

     **Fantasy** > **Gaze**

     Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the Lacanian gaze not as subjective mastery over the visual field but as the objet petit a within that field—the point where the subject's unconscious desire distorts what is seen, implicating the subject in the very scene from which it imagines itself safely distant, and thereby exposing the unnatural, ideologically constituted character of apparent visual neutrality.

     The only satisfaction available to the subject consists in following the path (which psychoanalysis calls the drive) through which it encircles the privileged object.

537. #537

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.82

     **Surplus-***jouissance*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary chunk that defines and illustrates multiple Lacanian and related theoretical concepts — Surplus-jouissance, Surplus Repression, Structuralism, Symbolic Castration, Symbolic Identity, Symbolic Order, and Symptom — each entry doing distinct theoretical work: homologizing Marx's surplus-labour with Lacan's surplus-jouissance via the entropic Real; distinguishing the Symbolic from the Imaginary and Real orders; and articulating the symptom's double function as both repressive and gratificatory.

     the repetition of the symptom serves to repress the drive, but simultaneously functions at least partly to gratify it.

538. #538

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.93

     **Vicissitude**

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys Freud's taxonomy of drive vicissitudes — reversal into its opposite (change of aim or content), turning round upon the self, repression, and sublimation — as modes of defence against the drive, with the theoretical pivot being the distinction between transformation of *aim* versus transformation of *object* or *content*. The second half of the passage is a non-substantive bibliography of sources.

     Bearing in mind that there are motive forces which work against a [drive's] being carried through in an unmodified form, we may also regard these vicissitudes as modes of defence against the [drives].

539. #539

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.69

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

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

     The satisfaction of a [drive] which is under repression would be quite possible, and further, that in every instance such a satisfaction would be pleasurable in itself; but it would be irreconcilable with other claims and intentions.

540. #540

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.17

     **Contradiction** > **Displacement**

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys Freud's account of displacement as the core mechanism of anxiety hysteria (phobia formation): repression fails to eliminate unpleasure, so the libidinal cathexis is displaced onto a substitute idea, which then becomes the pivot of an escalating system of anticathexes, avoidances, and projections — showing how displacement, repression, and anxiety articulate with one another across three progressive phases.

     With each increase of the drive's excitation the protecting rampart around the substitutive idea must be shifted a little further outwards.

541. #541

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.85

     **Transference** > **Unconscious**

     Theoretical move: The passage constructs a multi-layered theoretical account of the Unconscious by moving from Freud's topographical and economic descriptions (timelessness, exemption from contradiction, primary process) through Lacan's reformulation of the unconscious as structured by and dependent on the Other/language, to contemporary arguments (McGowan, Zupančič) that the unconscious is the site of ontological negativity, genuine freedom, and desire that exceeds conscious will.

     The nucleus of the Ucs. consists of the drive's representatives which seek to discharge their cathexis; that is to say, it consists of wishful impulses.

542. #542

     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 kind of desire that approaches the drive—and therefore sublimates jouissance—rather than imitates the Other's desire gives the subject a degree of 'real' satisfaction.

543. #543

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible](#contents.xhtml_ch12) > Hopelessness and Jouissance: Repetition and Lack

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's "courage of hopelessness" is not despair but a politically radical form of hope grounded in the psychoanalytic structure of repetition (drive) and jouissance: by locating crisis and lack in the present rather than deferring them to the future, the subject is forced to act, unleashing unactualized potential that can rupture the established symbolic coordinates of the possible.

     drive operates as 'repetition without teleology.' The purposelessness of jouissance carries with it the potential to introduce what cannot be made sensible within the established symbolic coordinates.

544. #544

     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.

     the antinormative subject of the drive, who is capable of a rebellious ethical act of defying this desire

545. #545

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

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

     Theoretical move: The passage mounts a systematic critique of Žižek's reading of Lacan, arguing that his central ethical axiom "Do not give up on your desire!" is a fundamental misreading of Seminar VII, and that his use of Antigone as a paradigm for contingent, concrete-universal socio-political transformation is undermined both by internal inconsistencies and by a close reading of Sophocles' text.

     Žižek oscillates here between situating this autonomy in Antigone's embodiment of a pure signifier, which would take her desire in the direction of the drive

546. #546

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.233

     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.

     what is 'beyond the pleasure principle' is enjoyment itself, it is drive as such.

547. #547

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.295

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible](#contents.xhtml_ch12) > Potentiality, Otherwise, and Muñoz

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's politics of hopelessness and Muñoz's queer utopianism converge on a shared political direction—the "otherwise" or "potential"—by distinguishing drive-based jouissance (which enacts loss itself) from desire-based hope (which pursues the lost object), and showing that repetition as jouissance keeps radical potential open by thwarting symbolic closure rather than cementing fantasy.

     jouissance—as the satisfaction produced by the drive's tracing of lack—makes impossible.

548. #548

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

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

     Theoretical move: The passage (by Robert Pippin, critiquing Žižek's Hegel) argues that Žižek's Schellingian-Lacanian reading of Hegel—grounding subjectivity in an ontological "gap" or "rupture" in being—misreads the German Idealist tradition, which is better understood through Kant's apperception thesis: subjectivity is not a negative-ontological void but a self-conscious, norm-governed activity where action just *is* consciousness of action, requiring no appeal to a pre-transcendental gap or drive.

     the idea of a 'pre-transcendental gap or rupture (the Freudian name for which is the drive)'

549. #549

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.284

     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 resolves this endless movement of desire by way of elevating the endless circulation around a lost object into a source of satisfaction. Drive is a circular movement, caught in its closed cycle

550. #550

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.103

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

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's use of "negation of negation" and "pure drive beyond fantasy" as un-Hegelian residues of positivist metaphysics, arguing through readings of Coetzee's *Disgrace* and Hitchcock's *Vertigo* that genuine Hegelian mediation dissolves the fantasy frame without positing an excess or remainder beyond dialectics, and that ideological distortion (not ontological remainder) explains why subjects cannot traverse their fantasies.

     the idea of 'pure' drives (or 'pure' anything) belongs in the Hegelian zoo mentioned before. David's gesture means he remains the subject of whatever drives he has, not subject to them.

551. #551

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.273

     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 have not entered 'the modality of pure drive,' for we are still able to walk down the street without getting arrested.

552. #552

     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.

     desire as such already a certain yielding, a kind of compromise formation, a metonymic displacement, retreat, a defense against intractable drive?

553. #553

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.292

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible](#contents.xhtml_ch12) > Present Hopelessness/Present Satisfaction

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the apparent contradiction between Žižek's politics of hopelessness and McGowan's advocacy for present satisfaction is resolved by foregrounding constitutive loss as the condition of jouissance: pleasures are ideologically conservative only when they function as salves for loss, but become potentially radical when their necessary relation to loss—repeated in drive rather than concealed by desire—is inhabited.

     This position is foregrounded by Žižek's emphasis on the political implications of drive over desire.

554. #554

     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.

     the drive is not the persisting attachment to the lost object, but the repeating enactment of the loss as such—the object of the drive is not a lost object, but loss itself as an object.

555. #555

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.176

     [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > **WHAT UNIVERSALITY HAS INSTEAD OF AN ENEMY**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that emancipatory universality is distinguished from identitarian politics not by the absence of struggle but by the absence of an *enemy*—its opponents are always potential converts—and that Freud's own theory of the drive and desire, properly read, provides the psychoanalytic ground for social equality that Freud himself failed to recognize when he reduced inequality to natural difference.

     Freud conceives of the subject's drive as a result of the collision between nature and culture, 'a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic.'

556. #556

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan

     [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > **A NEW FORM OF OBEDIENCE**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism inaugurates a historically novel form of obedience in which the structuring principle reproduces itself unconsciously through subjects' pursuit of private particular interest, making self-deception not merely useful but structurally necessary—and thereby rendering insistence on particularity the new mode of conformism rather than resistance.

     capital is actually using them to satisfy its own drive.

557. #557

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.113

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the death drive involves two distinct splits—the genesis of surplus satisfaction from organic need, and a constitutive negativity (inbuilt lack of being) around which the drive circulates—and that satisfaction/enjoyment is not the goal but the *means* of the drive, whose true aim is the repetition of negativity; this reframes the death drive not as a return to the inanimate but as the opening of alternative paths to death beyond those immanent in the organism.

     we must keep in mind that with the drive we are actually dealing with two different splits (or 'deviations'), not just one.

558. #558

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.38

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Platonov's fictional Anti-Sexus device to demonstrate that enjoyment and the Other are irreducibly co-implicated (each is "in" the other), making the non-relation not an absence of relation but a constitutive bias or curvature of discursive space—and thereby refuting both the revolutionary fantasy of liberating humanity from sexuality and the liberal-democratic ideology of neutral pluralism.

     In order to properly conceptualize the drive as something that escapes the active/passive opposition, Lacan proposes a formula that introduces something active at the very heart of passivity, and vice versa.

559. #559

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.11

     What Is Sex? > <span id="page-9-0"></span>Introduction

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sublimation demonstrates that satisfaction in non-sexual activity is identical to—not a substitute for—sexual satisfaction, which forces a properly philosophical and ontological re-examination of what sex *is*; sex is reframed not as a content but as a structural contradiction immanent to reality itself, making it the privileged "position" from which psychoanalysis theorizes the real.

     sublimation is satisfaction of the drive, without repression

560. #560

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.50

     Contradictions that Matter > <span id="page-43-0"></span>Sex or Gender?

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacan's Real is irreducible to Butler's performative ontology because the emergence of the signifying order is coextensive with a constitutive gap (a "minus one"), and it is precisely at this place of the missing signifier that surplus-enjoyment arises — making sexuality not a being beyond the symbolic but the contradictory effect of the symbolic's own structural impossibility, which is what is lost when "sex" is translated into "gender."

     the 'vital' phenomena mentioned above (the libido or jouissance, the drive, the sexualized body) in their out-of-jointness with the symbolic.

561. #561

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.120

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze share a common theoretical move: rejecting the pleasure principle as primary and affirming the primacy of the death drive, which they reconceptualise not as a tendency toward destruction but as the transcendental/ontological condition of repetition itself—a faceless negativity or "crack" that is irreducible to either life or death, and which constitutes rather than follows from the surplus excess and repression it generates.

     every drive is virtually a death drive

562. #562

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.137

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

     Theoretical move: Against Deleuze's thesis that repetition itself selects/expels difference through centrifugal force, Zupančič-via-Lacan argues that only the production of a new signifier (S1) — generated from the subject's enjoyment-in-talking within analytic discourse — can effect a genuine separation at the heart of the drive's repetition, thereby triggering a new subjectivation that repression alone cannot accomplish.

     The new signifier is the algorithm that disorients the drive by cutting off the well-established routes of its satisfaction.

563. #563

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.101

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > Human, Animal

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that jouissance/the drive is neither simply animal instinct nor the marker of human exception, but rather the point at which nature's own inherent impossibility gets articulated as such — making the human being not an exception to the animal but the 'question mark' to the very consistency of the Animal, and by extension the point at which the incomplete ontological constitution of reality becomes visible.

     what Freud discovered and named Trieb is not 'instinct' in the sense in which we usually speak of 'animal instincts'…Yet on the other hand, we also risk missing the point if we simply say that drive is something completely different…

564. #564

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.97

     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.

     the concept of the drive (and of its object) is not simply a concept of the deviation from a natural need, but something that casts a new and surprising light on the nature of human need as such

565. #565

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.19

     It's Getting Strange in Here … > Where Do Adults Come From?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that what makes enjoyment "sexual" is not its continuity with adult sexuality or its entanglement with partial drives per se, but its constitutive entanglement with the unconscious as a structural negativity arriving from the Other—such that sexuality is not first present and then repressed, but appears *only* as repressed, making the unconscious and sexuality ontologically co-extensive.

     so-called 'genital sexual organization' is far from being primordial. It involves a unification of the originally heterogeneous, dispersed, always-already compound sexual drive, composed of different partial drives.

566. #566

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.54

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via a close reading of Freud and Lacan, that sexual difference does not arise from the existence of two sexes but from the non-existence of the "second sex"—a constitutive ontological deficit—and traces Lacan's shift from locating "pure loss" on the side of the body (early work) to locating it within the signifying order itself (late work), showing that surplus-enjoyment emerges at the place of a missing signifier ("with-without"), which is also the origin of sexual division.

     The sexual drive is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object's attractions

567. #567

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.109

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

     Theoretical move: Zupančič reconstructs Freud's trajectory in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"—from the monism of the death drive, through the Eros/Thanatos dualism, to a monism of sexual drives—in order to show that the Lacanian death drive is not a separate drive but the inherent negativity (the gap/void) around which every partial drive circulates, with objet petit a functioning as the "crust" that sticks to this void and makes repetition possible.

     the notion of the drive (Trieb) proper, which is a much more interesting and complex notion, involving a split, repetition, surplus satisfaction and constant pressure.

568. #568

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.104

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Freud's original death drive concept is structurally identical to the pleasure principle (both tending toward homeostatic reduction of tension), and that the genuinely psychoanalytic—Lacanian—concept of the death drive must be constructed against the grain of Freud's own text, located not in the return to the inanimate but in the insistence on tension; she further proposes that life itself lacks ontological ground and is best understood as an accidental disturbance of the inanimate, making the death drive an "ontological fatigue" rather than a combative instinct.

     The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct (Trieb) came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state.

569. #569

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.28

     It's Getting Strange in Here … > Christianity and Polymorphous Perversity

     Theoretical move: The non-existence of the sexual relation is not a mere absence but constitutive of the Real itself; partial drives and their satisfactions are not a positive residue left after the fantasy's subtraction, but are intrinsically formed by the negativity of non-relation—the lack does not supplement the drives from outside but structures them from within.

     The fantasy (and imperative) of the relation comes from (within) the very structuring of the drives.