Canonical lacan 67 occurrences

Enunciation vs Statement

ELI5

When you say "I lied," there are actually two "I"s: the one mentioned in the sentence, and the real you who is saying the sentence right now — and those two can never fully match up, which is why language always slips and why we can contradict ourselves without knowing it.

Definition

In Lacanian theory, the distinction between enunciation (énonciation) and statement (énoncé) designates two irreducible levels of any speech act: the enunciation is the act of speaking as such — the subject-as-speaker in the very moment of uttering — while the statement (or enunciated) is the propositional content of what is said. The I that appears as a grammatical element within a sentence belongs to the level of the statement, whereas the I who actually produces that sentence — the "true subject of the act of speaking as such" — belongs to the level of enunciation. Crucially, these two levels never coincide: the shifter "I" in discourse designates someone who varies from moment to moment and is constitutively distinct from the enunciating subject who props the message. This permanent non-coincidence is the structural site of the subject's splitting (Spaltung).

Lacan deploys this distinction to dismantle the Cartesian cogito and to ground analytic interpretation. The cogito gains its certainty only at the level of enunciation — it is in the very act of pronouncing "I think" that the subject is momentarily seized — yet the I that appears in the statement is as punctual, as potentially empty, as the "I am lying." The gap between levels is also the condition of possibility for the truth-dimension of interpretation: when the analyst returns the subject's message in inverted form, she operates precisely on the discordance between what the subject says (statement) and the position from which he says it (enunciation). In the context of the Graph of Desire, repression (Verdrängung) is located at this same gap — the elision of the signifier that normally articulates the relation between statement and enunciation — making the distinction not merely linguistic but the very hinge of the unconscious.

Evolution

In the early "return-to-Freud" period (Seminar 3, ~1955–56), Lacan introduces the distinction primarily through a linguistic and grammatical lens. Drawing on Damourette and Pichon's grammar, he shows how the personizing "I" at the level of enunciation persists across relative clauses and subordinate sentences, constituting an asymmetry that cannot be reduced to imaginary intersubjectivity. The big Other is already implicated here as the locus in which speech is constituted: "Underneath everything that is said there is an I who pronounces it. It's within this enunciation that the you appears." The distinction at this stage serves mainly to establish the structural priority of the speaking subject over the grammatical person.

In Seminar 6 (~1958–59, also return-to-freud period), the distinction becomes integrated into the formal architecture of the Graph of Desire. The second level of the graph maps the subject qua speaker — the subject who begins to speak as "I" — and Lacan shows that the shifter I, defined only by its messaging function, is "essentially distinct" from the true subject of the act of speaking. This is not a difference of degree but one of structure: the I of the cogito is a semanteme tied to the code, whereas the enunciating subject is tied only to the messaging act itself. The graph also locates repression precisely at the elision of the signifier articulating the relation between enunciation and statement, so the distinction now explains Verdrängung itself.

By Seminar 11 (~1964, object-a period), the distinction is fully operative as a tool for clinical epistemology. Lacan uses it to reread Descartes and to theorize the analyst's position: interpretation works because the analyst can occupy the dimension of enunciation and return the subject's message in its "true" (inverted) form. The sliding between levels — glissement — is now described as simultaneously "always possible" and a potential stumbling block, i.e., the very condition of truth-effects in analysis. The notion of the minimal, punctual I of the cogito converges with the barred subject ($).

In the secondary literature represented here, Žižek (Less Than Nothing, unspecified period) extends the distinction in a Hegelian-political direction: the gap between enunciated content and position of enunciation becomes the site where universal claims (rights, tolerance, egoism) undermine themselves, and where traumatic truth inscribes itself as the distortion of formal consistency. Žižek pushes the distinction beyond clinical application toward a theory of ideology and aesthetic truthfulness, though the structural logic remains Lacanian.

Key formulations

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.155)

the distinction between the enunciation and the statement is what makes their sliding away (glissement) always possible, and their possible stumbling block.

Lacan's most compressed formulation of the distinction as both the condition of possibility for the truth-dimension of interpretation and the site of the subject's irreducible division.

Seminar VI · Desire and Its InterpretationJacques Lacan · 1958 (p.45)

the shifter I is essentially distinct from what one might call the true subject of the act of speaking as such... It is even what gives the simplest I discourse the appearance of indirect discourse.

This formulation separates the grammatical-code I (statement-level) from the enunciating subject and demonstrates that ordinary discourse already carries an inherent indirection — the structural basis of the split subject.

Seminar III · The PsychosesJacques Lacan · 1955 (p.287)

Underneath everything that is said there is an I who pronounces it. It's within this enunciation that the you appears.

An early, lucid statement establishing that the level of enunciation is structurally prior to the intersubjective 'you' of the statement, grounding the asymmetry between the big Other and imaginary alter-ego.

Seminar VI · Desire and Its InterpretationJacques Lacan · 1958 (p.103)

He presents this other statement to us as an enunciation... the elision of what serves as the signature of the agreement or discordance... between enunciation and the signifier, the relationship between what lies in the statement and what lies in the necessities of enunciation.

Locates repression (Verdrängung) at the very gap between statement and enunciation, showing the distinction is not merely linguistic but the structural site of the unconscious in the Graph of Desire.

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismSlavoj Žižek · 2012 (page unknown)

What we are dealing with here is, of course, the gap between the enunciated content and the subjective position of enunciation.

Žižek's reformulation transplants the Lacanian distinction into a theory of ideology and trauma, where the medium of universal language systematically undermines the particular message — extending the clinical concept toward political critique.

Cited examples

Mme X's sentence 'I'm much more myself. Before, I was a para-me who thought of myself as the true one, and who was absolutely false.' (case_study)

Cited by Seminar III · The PsychosesJacques Lacan · 1955 (p.287). Lacan uses this clinical utterance from an analysand (documented in Damourette and Pichon's grammar) to show how the enunciating 'I' persists through a relative clause while the stated 'I' shifts to 'it' — the same subject pronounces herself both as 'I' (enunciation) and as 'it/she' (statement), dramatizing the non-coincidence between the two levels.

Freud's dream of the dead father ('he did not know he was dead') (literature)

Cited by Seminar VI · Desire and Its InterpretationJacques Lacan · 1958 (p.103). Lacan analyzes how the dreamer presents a statement (the dream's content) as an enunciation — bringing it to analysis precisely so its meaning can be sought beyond the manifest content. The imperfect tense 'he did not know' is inscribed at the first level of the graph's split, and the elision of the signifier articulating enunciation and statement is identified as the mainspring of repression in this dream.

Holocaust survivors' verbal reports and the rape victim's narrative (history)

Cited by Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismSlavoj Žižek · 2012 (page unknown). Žižek argues that the factual unreliability and inconsistency of trauma narratives is their mark of truthfulness: the gap between enunciated content (the confused facts) and the position of enunciation (the traumatized subject) means that formal deficiency in the statement is evidence that the reported content has contaminated the very form of the report.

Nietzsche preaching egoism (via Chesterton) (social_theory)

Cited by Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismSlavoj Žižek · 2012 (page unknown). Chesterton's observation that Nietzsche 'denied egoism simply by preaching it' illustrates how the medium of universal language (the act of enunciation) undermines the particular message (the enunciated content), because to preach an antisocial doctrine is already to address and thus gift it to others.

Tensions

Within the corpus

Whether the enunciation/statement gap is primarily a clinical-structural concept or a broader ideological-political one.

Lacan (Seminar 11): the gap between enunciation and statement is the condition of analytic interpretation — the analyst occupies the dimension of enunciation to return the subject's message in inverted, true form; the split is essentially a clinical and ontological structure of the divided subject. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1, p.155
Žižek (Less Than Nothing): the gap between enunciated content and the position of enunciation is the hinge of ideology critique — it reveals how universal claims (rights, tolerance) are undermined by the particular position from which they are enunciated, and how traumatic truth is inscribed as formal distortion. The gap is a political and aesthetic diagnostic, not primarily a clinical one. — cite: slavoj-zizek-less-than-nothing-hegel-and-the-shadow-of-dialectical-materialism-v, p.null

This tension reflects a broader divergence between Lacan's clinical-structural deployment and Žižek's Hegelian-political extension of the same distinction.

Across frameworks

vs Ego Psychology

Lacanian: For Lacan, the enunciation/statement split means the subject can never be transparent to itself in speech: the I that speaks is structurally distinct from the I spoken about, and this gap is the condition of the unconscious, not a deficiency to be overcome. Analytic work operates precisely on this gap, not by reinforcing ego-coherence.

Ego Psychology: Ego psychology, especially in its American adaptations (Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein), understands the therapeutic goal as strengthening the ego's synthetic and integrative functions — reducing conflict between parts of the psyche and achieving greater coherence between intention, speech, and self-image. The 'strong ego' is precisely one that can speak consistently about itself.

Fault line: Lacan holds that the split between enunciation and statement is constitutive and ineliminable (it is the structure of the speaking being); ego psychology treats incoherence in self-report as a symptom to be resolved through consolidation of the autonomous ego.

vs Humanistic Self Actualization

Lacanian: Lacan insists that no amount of authentic self-expression can close the gap between enunciation and statement: the subject who speaks is always already displaced from what is said, and the 'true self' that humanistic therapy seeks to express is itself an imaginary construct at the level of the statement, not an originary enunciating subject.

Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic and Rogerian approaches posit a 'real self' whose authentic expression is blocked by conditions of worth and defensive distortions. Therapeutic progress is measured by increasing congruence between inner experience and verbal expression — that is, by bringing statement and inner enunciation into alignment.

Fault line: Humanistic psychology assumes a recoverable correspondence between the experiencing self and honest speech; Lacan holds that the enunciation/statement gap is irreducible and that 'authentic expression' is an imaginary ideal that misrecognizes the constitutive alienation of the speaking subject.

vs Frankfurt School

Lacanian: For Lacan, the gap between enunciation and statement is a formal-structural feature of language itself, not primarily an effect of social distortion or instrumental reason. Ideology operates through this gap, but the gap is not reducible to historical conditions — it belongs to the structure of the signifier and the barred subject.

Frankfurt School: Frankfurt School thinkers (Adorno, Habermas) locate communicative distortion in social and historical conditions — reification, domination, or the pathological colonization of the lifeworld by instrumental rationality. Habermas's ideal speech situation imagines conditions under which enunciation and statement could, in principle, be brought into communicative alignment through undistorted discourse.

Fault line: Lacan holds that the enunciation/statement split is constitutive (not historically produced) and cannot be resolved by better social conditions or ideal communicative norms; the Frankfurt School tends to treat such gaps as historically contingent and, in principle, correctable through emancipatory critique.

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (65)

#01

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **sign**

Theoretical move: Lacan's transformation of Saussure's sign into a primacy-of-the-signifier algorithm, and his selective uptake of Peirce's index, together constitute a double movement: the destruction of the sign as a stable unit and its replacement by a logic of pure signifiers as the structure of the unconscious.

to distinguish between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation
#02

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***T*** > **time**

Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of time constitutes a double break with linear temporality: logical time replaces chronometric time with a dialectical intersubjective structure (tripartite: instant of seeing / time for understanding / moment of concluding), while retroaction and anticipation replace linear developmental sequences with a non-linear psychic temporality in which present, past and future mutually condition one another.

only when the last word of the sentence is uttered do the initial words acquire their full meaning (E, 303)
#03

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **subject suppposed to know**

Theoretical move: The passage elaborates the Subject Supposed to Know as a transferential function—not a person but a position the analyst comes to embody—whose establishment and dissolution structure the entire arc of analytic treatment, while also showing that the function is reversible: the analyst equally institutes the analysand as a subject supposed to know via the fundamental rule of free association.

He is supposed to know that from which no one can escape, as soon as he formulates it—quite simply, signification.
#04

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **shifter**

Theoretical move: Lacan appropriates Jakobson's concept of the shifter, redefining it as an indexical *signifier* (rather than an indexical symbol) to argue that the grammatical split between enunciation and statement is not merely illustrative of the splitting of the subject but is itself constitutive of that split.

This problematises the distinction between enunciation and statement. On the one hand, as a signifier it is clearly part of the statement. On the other hand, as an index it is clearly part of the enunciation.
#05

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***G***

Theoretical move: This passage from Evans's dictionary traces the theoretical development of several key Lacanian concepts—gap, gaze, genital stage, gestalt, and graph of desire—showing how Lacan progressively distinguishes his positions from Freudian ego-psychology, Sartrean phenomenology, and object-relations theory through a consistent emphasis on constitutive division, the non-relation, and the structured duplicity of desire.

The lower chain…is the conscious signifying chain, the level of the statement. The upper chain…is the signifying chain in the unconscious, the level of the ENUNCIATION.
#06

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***C*** > ***cogito***

Theoretical move: Lacan's engagement with the Cartesian cogito performs a double move: it subverts the cogito's equation of subject=ego=consciousness (thereby grounding the critique of ego-psychology) while simultaneously retaining and radicalising the concept of the subject — identifying the subject of the cogito with the subject of the unconscious, and using it to articulate the split between enunciation and statement.

Lacan also uses the cogito to distinguish between the subject of the statement and the subject of the ENUNCIATION (see S11, 138–42; see S17, 180–4)
#07

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **punctuation**

Theoretical move: Punctuation is theorized as the fundamental operation by which the receiver retroactively fixes meaning in the signifying chain; in clinical practice, the analyst's punctuation of the analysand's discourse—through repetition, silence, or session termination—exploits this retroactive structure to reveal unconscious meaning beyond the analysand's intended speech.

the analyst may repeat it in such a way as to bring out the homophony of this phrase with tuer ma mère ('to kill my mother')
#08

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***F*** > **founding speech**

Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of 'founding speech' theorizes how the act of utterance radically transforms both speaker and addressee, constituting the subject not merely symbolically but in their very being — and may simultaneously reveal repressed desire through homophonic wordplay.

the crucial aspect of founding speech is that it not only transforms the other but also transforms the subject (see E, 85)
#09

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***A*** > **algebra**

Theoretical move: Lacan's algebraic formalisation of psychoanalysis is theoretically motivated by three interlinked aims: scientific legitimacy, integral transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge, and the prevention of imaginary (intuitive) understanding in favour of symbolic manipulation — the mathemes and associated symbols thus function as epistemic and pedagogical devices, not mere notation.

E = the statement e = the enunciation
#10

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **split**

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

speech divides the subject of the ENUNCIATION from the subject of the statement
#11

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***E*** > **ego**

Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's theory of the ego as an imaginary, paranoiac formation produced by the mirror stage and grounded in méconnaissance, positioning it against Ego Psychology's rehabilitation of the ego as centre of the subject and ally of psychoanalytic treatment, while also resolving (or privileging) Freud's own internal contradiction between narcissistic and structural-model accounts of the ego.

in 1960, Lacan refers to the je as a SHIFTER, which designates but does not signify the subject of the enunciation (E, 298).
#12

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***C*** > **Communication**

Theoretical move: Lacan redefines communication against standard linguistic models by showing that in psychoanalytic speech the sender is always simultaneously a receiver, and that the analyst's interpretive work returns the analysand's own message in its inverted, unconscious form — making intentionality exceed consciousness.

SPEECH is revealed to possess an intentionality that goes beyond conscious purpose
#13

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **Subject**

Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical genealogy of Lacan's concept of the 'subject', arguing that it is irreducibly distinct from the ego, constituted through language and the symbolic order, essentially split, and identified with the Cartesian cogito reread as the subject of the unconscious rather than self-conscious agency.

He distinguishes the subject of the statement from the subject of the ENUNCIATION to show that because the subject is essentially a speaking being (parlêtre), he is inescapably divided, castrated, SPLIT.
#14

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***L*** > **linguistics**

Theoretical move: Lacan's engagement with linguistics is neither a straightforward application nor a faithful borrowing: he selectively imports Saussurean and Jakobsonian concepts (signifier, metaphor/metonymy, enunciation/statement) and deliberately modifies them for psychoanalytic ends—coining 'linguistérie' to mark this irreducible difference between linguistics and psychoanalysis.

Other concepts which Lacan takes from linguistics are those of the SHIFTER, and the distinction between the statement and the ENUNCIATION
#15

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***L*** > **letter**

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

the analyst must read the analysand's speech as if it were a text, 'taking it literally' (prendre à la lettre)
#16

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***E*** > **enunciation**

Theoretical move: The enunciation/statement distinction is deployed to locate the subject of the unconscious: the enunciation, as the unconscious dimension of speech, reveals that the source of language is the Other rather than the ego, and that the subject is split between the level of the statement (the 'I' as signifier) and the level of enunciation (the 'I' as index of the speaking subject).

When linguistic production is analysed as an individual act performed by a particular speaker at a specific time/place, and in a specific situation, it is referred to as an enunciation
#17

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **psychology**

Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's progressive dissociation of psychoanalysis from psychology: psychology is reduced to ethology/behaviourism and shown to be built on illusions (unity, wholeness, nature), while psychoanalysis alone, by uncovering the linguistic basis of subjectivity and the split subject, escapes those illusions and constitutes a genuinely human science.

'the Freudian enunciation has nothing to do with psychology' (S17, 144)
#18

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***I*** > **inversion**

Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's concept of 'inversion' from Freud's designation of homosexuality through to its properly Lacanian sense as a structural property of the specular image and imaginary phenomena, culminating in the claim that analytic communication is defined by the sender receiving his own message in inverted form — and that both senses are unified in Lacan's reading of Leonardo da Vinci via Schema L.

Lacan's definition of analytic communication in which the sender receives his own message in an inverted form
#19

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **Seminar**

Theoretical move: This passage is a bibliographic and historical entry on Lacan's Seminar, tracing its institutional history, the oral-to-written transmission problem, and providing a complete chronological index of all twenty-seven annual seminars — functioning as reference material rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

Lacan's insistence that speech is the only medium of psychoanalysis (E, 40)
#20

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***D*** > **desire**

Theoretical move: This passage establishes Desire as the central concept of Lacanian theory by distinguishing it rigorously from Need and Demand, grounding it in the Hegelian-Kojèvian framework of mutual recognition, and defining it structurally as a relation to Lack caused by Objet petit a rather than a relation to any satisfiable object.

'It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire, whatever it is, is recognised in the full sense of the term' (S1, 183).
#21

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

Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

Theoretical move: Fisher uses Tricky's artistic practice as a case study for theorising the split subject and the voice as an object: Tricky's gender-sliding, spectral vocal production, and class consciousness collectively demonstrate how the voice, far from guaranteeing presence and identity, indexes a fundamental splitting of the subject that is also its creative precondition.

he also induces women to sing from what seems to be a male perspective… It is an art of splitting which is also an art of doubling.
#22

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.155

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

Theoretical move: By mapping the Cartesian cogito onto the distinction between enunciation and statement, Lacan argues that the analyst's position—returning the subject's message in inverted (true) form—reveals that the 'I think' acquires its certainty only at the level of enunciation, yet is as minimally punctual and potentially meaningless as the 'I am lying,' thus grounding analytic interpretation in the dimension of truth.

the distinction between the enunciation and the statement is what makes their sliding away (glissement) always possible, and their possible stumbling block.
#23

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.287

**XXII**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other must be understood as a *locus* — the site in which speech and the speaking subject are constituted — rather than as a symmetrical alter-ego or existentialist "thou," and uses grammatical evidence (personization across relative clauses) alongside the Schreber case to demonstrate that the asymmetry between I and you, and the structural priority of the big Other, precede and condition any imaginary intersubjectivity.

Underneath everything that is said there is an / who pronounces it. It's within this enunciation that the you appears.
#24

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.45

FURTHER EXPLANATION

Theoretical move: At the second level of the Graph of Desire, the subject-as-speaker is constituted through the "Che vuoi?" of the Other, which reveals that the subject does not know the message returning to him from his demand; the only true answer to that question is the Phallus as the signifier of the subject's relation to the signifier, but to articulate this answer the subject disappears — generating the threat of castration — and desire is situated precisely in the gap between code and message on this second level.

the shifter I is essentially distinct from what one might call the true subject of the act of speaking as such... It is even what gives the simplest I discourse the appearance of indirect discourse.
#25

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.103

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

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's dream of the dead father through the Graph of Desire to show that the mainspring of Verdrängung (repression) is not the suppression of a discovered content but the elision of a pure signifier (selon/nach), and that the formula of fantasy ($◇a) emerges as the structure by which the barred subject props itself against annihilation through identificatory fixation on the imaginary other.

He presents this other statement to us as an enunciation... the elision of what serves as the signature of the agreement or discordance... between enunciation and the signifier, the relationship between what lies in the statement and what lies in the necessities of enunciation.
#26

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.157

A month later: > Lalangue

Theoretical move: The passage argues that *lalangue* names the irreducible surplus of phonic materiality over meaning in language, and that this surplus—rather than being aestheticized as poetic effect—is the very site where unconscious desire is constituted retroactively; interpretation's aim is therefore not to supply meaning but to reduce signifiers to their non-sense, revealing desire as the fold of language itself rather than its hidden content.

To be brief: hearing is after meaning, the signification which can be linguistically spelled out; listening is, rather, being on the lookout for sense, something that announces itself in the voice beyond meaning.
#27

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

Silence > Ulysses

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

They were going through the motions of singing; he was going through the motions of not hearing their silence.
#28

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.131

The voice and the drive > The voice and the letter

Theoretical move: The voice occupies the structural position of sovereignty (inside/outside the law simultaneously), functioning as a permanent threat of a "state of emergency" within the symbolic order; this topology extends to psychoanalysis, where the analyst's silence incarnates the object voice as a pure enunciation compelling the subject's response—making the voice the pivot of transference and of political, ethical, and linguistic subjectification alike.

the non-sonorous voice of pure enunciation, the enunciation without a statement: the enunciation to which one has to supply the statement, the political statement in response to that voice
#29

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.105

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 call asserts nothing, gives no information about the world-events, has nothing to tell... 'Nothing' gets called to this Self, but it has been summoned to itself
#30

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.32

A Voice and Nothing More > The voice and the signifier

Theoretical move: By systematically working through three empirical modes of vocal excess (accent, intonation, timbre), Dolar shows that none of them fully captures the voice as such; he then reframes the voice as coinciding with the process of enunciation itself — the invisible string that holds the signifying chain together and sustains the subject — thereby opening the question of the object voice as irreducible to any material or linguistic description.

we could perhaps come closer to our goal if we conceived of it as coinciding with the very process of enunciation: it epitomizes something that cannot be found anywhere in the statement, in the spoken speech and its string of signifiers
#31

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.100

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.

The Kantian voice of reason is closely linked to the enigma of the subject of enunciation of the moral law—and here we rejoin the line of the voice as pure enunciation. Who is it that addresses us in the second person and admonishes us
#32

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.119

The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego > Viva voce

Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice functions as the constitutive internal exterior of logos across key Ideological State Apparatuses (church, court, university, elections), showing that written law, sacred scripture, institutional knowledge, and democratic will can only be enacted and made performative when assumed by a living voice—a structural topology that is not archaic residue but the very mechanism by which symbolic/legal acts acquire their force.

The most technical depositions by experts have to be read aloud by them, and only the voice transforms them from mere constative statements into performatives.
#33

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.212

Notes > Chapter 5 The Politics of the Voice

Theoretical move: These endnotes to Chapter 5 develop a set of theoretical positions on the voice as a political instrument: Hegel's monarch neutralizes the exception through signature (the senseless letter) rather than voice, Agamben's biopolitical logic of inclusion-by-exclusion frames the sacred/sacrificial, and Lacan's reading of Nazism as sacrifice to obscure gods is critiqued as inadequate to the problem of the Holocaust.

the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience
#34

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.37

A Voice and Nothing More > The linguistics of the non-voice

Theoretical move: The passage argues that ostensibly "presymbolic" or "presignifying" vocal phenomena—coughing, hiccups, babbling, and the scream—are not external to the symbolic structure but are always already captured by it; their very non-signifying character makes them the zero-point of signification and the minimal condition of possibility for the signifier as such. Simultaneously, the scream's transformation into appeal enacts the passage from need to desire via the structure of address to the Other.

It is the bearer of an enunciation to which no discernible statement can be ascribed, it represents the pure process of enunciation before the infant is capable of any statement.
#35

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.108

The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice occupies an irreducible ambiguous position between the ethical and the perverse: the ethical voice is pure enunciation without statement (demanding the subject supply the statement/act), while the superego is a "fat voice" that fills this void with positive content, guilt, and transgressive enjoyment — yet neither exhausts the voice, which always marks a void in both the subject and the Other. The chapter then opens onto the political dimension by following Aristotle's division between mere voice (phone) and speech (logos) as the foundation of the political.

in the domain of ethics we have to confront enunciation without a statement. This is the crucial point, the touchstone of morality: the voice is enunciation, and we have to supply the statement ourselves.
#36

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.124

The voice and the drive > The antipolitics of the voice

Theoretical move: The passage theorizes two opposed political uses of the voice against the letter: (1) a ritual/complementary division-of-labor in which the voice enacts and seals the letter's authority, and (2) an authoritarian-totalitarian use in which the voice supplants the letter — with fascism and Stalinism representing structurally inverse forms of this second mode, the former centred on the charismatic, law-suspending voice and the latter on the self-effacing subordination of voice to the letter-as-Big-Other.

the master as the source of funny voices, side by side with the invisible interpreter in charge of the meaning
#37

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.24

A Voice and Nothing More > The voice and the signifier

Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice, as the material support of speech, functions as a "vanishing mediator" that disappears into meaning, and that the structural-linguistic gesture of phonology is precisely the annihilation of the voice as substance—yet this operation always produces an irreducible remainder that cannot be subsumed into the signifier, establishing the voice as the non-signifying leftover of signification.

The voice is something which points toward meaning... it is a sound which appears to be endowed in itself with the will to 'say something,' with an inner intentionality.
#38

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

**Notes** > **Chapter 4**

Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 4, providing scholarly citations and brief glosses for key theoretical moves in the chapter, including references to Lacan's "Kant with Sade," extimacy, enunciation vs. statement, fetishism, and perversion — but doing no primary theoretical work itself.

Emile Benveniste's distinction between histoire and discours underlies Lacan's urgings that the discursive nature of the moral imperative must not be overlooked.
#39

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.427

The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 2: objet petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism > 6The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie It

Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances the argument that ideological formations (anti-Semitism, the Decalogue, totalitarian power) require a fantasmatic obscene supplement, and that the structure of castration paradoxically entails losing castration itself as surplus-enjoyment; several notes further develop the structural logic of the Master-Signifier and the irreducibility of symbolic identity to private psychic content.

This stupidity bears witness to the limit of the reference to the subjective position of enunciation as the ultimate measure of the truth of a proposition.
#40

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.170

Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

Theoretical move: The passage argues that a truly radical materialism must be non-reductionist—not "everything is matter" but "there is nothing which is not matter"—which, via Lacan's formulas of sexuation (the not-All), opens space for immaterial phenomena to have a specific positive nonbeing; and that the Badiouian Event must be understood not as a Beyond of Being but as the very curvature/non-self-coincidence of Being itself, which Žižek aligns with the parallax gap and the logic of the non-All.

the very position of enunciation of the subject whose mind 'reflects' matter
#41

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.112

The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Comedy of Incarnation

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the standard critique of fetishism (which reduces the fetish to a contingent object filling an empty structural place) misses the "Hegelian performative" dimension whereby the big Other's empty place is constitutively correlated with an excessive partial object — castration names not merely the gap between element and empty place, but the very emergence of that place through a cut; this logic extends to a critique of the philosophy of finitude (including a Lacanian variant), which is countered by the obscene immortality of objet petit a / death drive as the true materialist infinite.

What makes the joke a bad joke is the pure symmetry of the reversal—the underlying claim of the first graffiti ('God is dead. Signed by [obviously living] Nietzsche') is turned around into a statement which implies: 'Nietzsche is dead, while I am still alive. God.'
#42

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.364

The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Over the Rainbow Coalition!

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the apparent antagonism between liberal multiculturalism and conservative-populist fundamentalism is ideological mystification: populist fundamentalists are the symptomatic truth of liberal hypocrisy, and the real enemy shared by both is capitalism's logic of expanding demand—which conservatives disavow by blaming "human nature" rather than capitalism itself. The radical Left must therefore traverse the culture-war frame and seek unlikely allies across the rainbow coalition.

Recall Lacan's definition of successful communication: in it, I get back from the other my own message in its inverted—that is, true—form. Is this not what is happening to today's liberals?
#43

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.247

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 subject is that X which is added to the designated content by means of the act of its self-referential designation... the Lacanian 'subject of the enunciation'
#44

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.101

The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

Theoretical move: The passage advances a Greimasian structural analysis of the analyst's position relative to Christ, Teacher, and Scientist, arguing that both Christ and the analyst *are* rather than merely *perform* their function — one through ontological being, the other through transference. This is extended into a broader Schellingian/Hegelian thesis that Evil is the actualization of a Ground that should remain potential, illustrated through the *Star Wars* saga's failure to dramatize how excessive attachment to Good generates Evil.

the scientist and the analyst speak, it is irrelevant what they 'actually do or are,' while the teacher and Christ have to enact what they claim to be
#45

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.139

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

Theoretical move: Žižek reads the final scene of Henry James's *The Wings of the Dove* as a demonstration of how the intersubjective status of knowledge (knowing that the Other knows) restructures libidinal economy, and how Densher's "test" enacts a deceptive formal/informal dialectic aimed at deceiving the big Other—presenting a forced choice as freedom while the object-letter functions as a proto-Hitchcockian materialization of intersubjective tension.

the stakes of the cat-and-mouse game between Kate and Densher in this passage are very precise: they concern the delicate interplay between a formal (explicit) symbolic act and an implicit act of consenting (of accepting by 'doing nothing formal').
#46

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.108

The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Comedy of Incarnation

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "Comedy of Incarnation" discloses the deepest logic of Hegelian dialectics: the parallax gap between God and man (Universal and Singular) is not sublated but transposed inward, so that Christ's direct coincidence of divinity and miserable humanity enacts the Hegelian move from abstract to concrete universality, where appearance emerges from the gap within the Real itself rather than from a hidden essence behind it.

there is an objective irony in Pontius Pilate's 'Ecce homo!', when he presents Christ to the enraged mob: its meaning is not 'Look at this miserable tortured creature!'... but, rather, 'Here is God himself!'
#47

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.227

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

Theoretical move: By reading Damasio's neuroscience of consciousness through the lens of Fichte's Anstoss and Lacan's "answer of the Real," Žižek argues that the subject is not a substance but a self-generating narrative process, and that consciousness involves a constitutive parallax gap between inside and outside that cannot be closed from either side alone.

I not only know, I feel that I know (that it is I who knows); I not only perceive an object, I am aware of myself perceiving it; I not only act, I feel that it is I who acts. I do not relate to (interact with) only an object: I relate to this relating 'as such.'
#48

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.27

The Kantian Parallax

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian parallax — the gap between phenomenal and noumenal — must be re-read as constitutive of reality itself rather than merely epistemological, which is the precise move Hegel makes: not overcoming the Kantian division but asserting it "as such," thereby revealing that the Real is not a substantial hard core but a purely parallactic gap between perspectives whose "substance" is the antagonism that distorts every symbolization.

the dimension of the Kantian 'transcendental' can sustain itself only in a fragile balance between the said and the unsaid, through producing something the full consequences of which we refuse to articulate
#49

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.119

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.

'Institution' at its most elementary is this minimal reification of meaning which allows me to say: 'Independently of what you intended to say, your speech actually meant this!'
#50

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.353

The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > The Ignorance of the Chicken

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the true stake of both psychoanalytic treatment and ideological critique is not changing the subject's conscious knowledge but transforming what the subject presupposes the big Other to know — a split that is internal to the subject itself — thereby demonstrating that fetishistic disavowal, commodity fetishism, and ideological belief all operate through displacement of belief onto an Other who is presumed not to know.

Descartes put it... 'Very many are not aware of what it is that they really believe; for, as the act of mind by which a thing is believed is different from that by which we know that we believe it, the one act is often found without the other.'
#51

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."

it is crucial to move from true propositions to the truth itself which speaks.
#52

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.210

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

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

its source is the self-referentiality of knowledge
#53

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.178

Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Resistances to Disenchantment

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that neither the transcendental-philosophical defense of subjectivity nor the accommodationist strategy of finding neuronal correlates for psychoanalytic concepts constitutes an adequate response to the challenge of brain sciences; instead, psychoanalysis must locate itself within the brain sciences' own inherent silences and impossibilities, identifying the "absent Cause" of cognitivist accounts as the Freudian death drive / German Idealist self-relating negativity. Along the way, he maps four positions on consciousness through a Greimasian square and proposes a Badiouian framing of consciousness-emergence as Event.

even when science has fully objectified our thought... the subject will still have to subjectivize this fact, assume it, integrate it into his or her universe of meaning
#54

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.47

The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "truth" of ideology lies in its universal form rather than its fantasmatic support, and that genuine subjectivity is constituted by a structural gap or noncoincidence-with-itself — a void that is not filled by particular content but is itself a stand-in for a missing particular — thereby linking the Hegelian dialectic of Subject/Substance to Lacanian aphanisis and the three-level triad of Universal-Particular-Individual.

whenever a subject 'posits' a meaning (a project), the truth of this gesture escapes him and persists in another locus, from which it undermines his project
#55

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.282

Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Gelassenheit? No, Thanks!

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Heidegger's apparent opposition between "decisionist" active will and passive Gelassenheit is a symptomal torsion-point revealing their deep complicity, and extends this diagnosis to Nietzsche's ethico-political antinomy (militarism vs. peace), resolving both by showing that the Real is not an inaccessible Thing but the gap/antagonism that makes perspectives incommensurable—a solution structurally opposed to the "Oriental" Gelassenheit, which is ultimately indifference, in contrast to the violent, subject-splitting love proper to Christian/revolutionary engagement.

the contrast to the 'Oriental' one can also be put in the terms of Lacan's distinction between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciation: if, in the 'Oriental' solution, my engagement leaves intact the inner peace of the very position (of enunciation) from which I act
#56

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.12

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.

he criticized it as a positive ontological entity—but he implicitly fully endorsed it as the 'position of the enunciated,' the one which speaks from radical self-doubting
#57

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.341

The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Human Rights versus the Rights of the Inhuman

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the depoliticization of Human Rights traps both liberal humanitarianism and radical biopolitical critique in the same ontological deadlock, and proposes "Bartleby politics"—a withdrawal into passivity as the genuinely aggressive first act that clears space for real political change—as the way out.

A reference to Lacan's formula of communication (in which the sender gets back from the receiver–addressee his own message in its inverted—that is, true—form) is absolutely relevant
#58

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.15

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.

Our everyday academic experience provides a nice example of the Lacanian difference between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciation.
#59

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.404

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.

functions here as a simple split between enunciated and enunciation, as if Visconti, in the highest mode of prudish puritanical revolutionaries, publicly condemns what he personally enjoys
#60

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.357

The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism?

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that fundamentalism is defined by the immediate identification with fantasy (becoming the "dupe of one's fantasy") which forecloses the enigma of the Other's desire; this structural analysis is then extended to show that liberal multiculturalism's tolerant repression of passion produces the same segregationist logic it claims to oppose, leaving aggressive secularism and fundamentalist passion as mirror-image dead ends.

immediately after seeing it, deeply moved, he muttered: 'It is as it was!'—and this statement was quickly withdrawn by official Vatican spokesmen. A glimpse into the Pope's spontaneous reaction was thus quickly replaced by the 'official' neutral stance
#61

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.20

The Tickling Object

Theoretical move: Žižek introduces the "parallax object" as the key to understanding the subject-object relation: the objet petit a is identified as the pure parallax object and cause of the parallax gap, a minimal difference that is itself an object, irreducible to any symbolic grasp — and this structure is shown to pervade narrative form (Fitzgerald), psychoanalytic experience, and the ontology of the subject's gaze.

such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality
#62

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.192

Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the postideological "desublimated" call of jouissance short-circuits the symbolic mediation constitutive of the Other's jouissance, so that the apparent opposition between pure autistic jouissance (drugs, virtual sex) and the jouissance of the Other (language, narrative, remembrance) secretly converges in the Hegelian infinite judgment: the passion for the Real and the passion for semblance are two sides of the same phenomenon.

this excitement which resides in speech itself is jouissance féminine
#63

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.

an Event is self-relating, it includes itself—its own nomination among its components
#64

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.221

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

Theoretical move: Žižek uses Metzinger's neurophenomenological account of selfhood (the "cave," "red arrow," and "total flight simulator" metaphors) to sharpen the Lacanian distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated, arguing that Metzinger's two imprecisions—failing to distinguish those two subjects, and failing to distinguish generative opacity from the inherent symbolic opacity of phenomenal experience—are structurally linked: the second, properly symbolic opacity is the opacity of the subject of the enunciation itself.

Metzinger introduces a distinction that is very close to Lacan's distinction between the 'subject of the enunciation' and the 'subject of the enunciated.'
#65

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.201

Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Danger? What Danger?

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the standard warnings about biogenetic/technological "danger" (Heidegger, Fukuyama, Habermas) are caught in a perspective fallacy—measuring the posthuman future by present standards of meaning—while a Lacanian inversion reveals that cognitivist self-objectivization causes anxiety not by foreclosing freedom but by confronting us with the abyss of our freedom and the radical contingency of consciousness.

although, in terms of its enunciated content, it 'objectivizes' us—it has the opposite effect in terms of the implied position of enunciation: it confronts us with the abyss of our freedom