Ethics of Psychoanalysis

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (507)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.8

   Slavoj Zizek

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's reading of Kant reveals a more uncanny Kantian ethics than liberal interpretations allow: the Kantian transcendental subject (empty, decentred) is the Freudian subject of desire, and this entails grounding ethics not in the Good or superego-morality but in desire's non-pathological a priori cause (objet petit a), yielding a 'critique of pure desire' that radicalises Kant's own project.

   Alenka Zupancic's book focuses on the unexpected ethical consequences of this assertion of modern subjectivity, which amount to a radical disjunction between ethics proper and the domain of the Good.

2. #02

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

   Introduction

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

   Lacan does not conclude here that an ethics worthy of the name is thus impossible. On the contrary, he turns ethics (in so far as it concerns the desire of the analyst and the nature of the analytic act) into one of the pivots of psychoanalysis

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.24

   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.

   Thus, Kant concludes, if the expression 'higher faculty of desire' is to be at all meaningful, it can be used only to indicate the fact that pure reason in itself is already practical.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.28

   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.

   it is one of the fundamental aims of this study to show this - this analysis moves too quickly... it will actually be possible to found an ethics on the concept of the drive.

5. #05

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.32

   The (Moral-) Pathology of Everyday Life > Notes

   Theoretical move: This is a notes/references section, providing bibliographic citations and one substantive footnote distinguishing 'symbolic suicide' from actual suicide in relation to the subject and the Other.

   A strictly atheist thought adopts no other perspective than that of 'creationism.' Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge 1992, pp. 260–61.

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.34

   The Subject of Freedom

   Theoretical move: The subject of Kantian practical reason is constituted by a division not between the pathological and the pure/moral, but between the pathological subject and the divided subject itself — with freedom/autonomy as the true alternative to pathological subjectivity, not an ascetic negation of pathos.

   the moral good as opposed to well-being, with the obligations it entails and is susceptible of entailing, that is, the negation of every pathos

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.35

   The Subject of Freedom > What freedom?

   Theoretical move: Against both 'humanist' and 'psychological' accounts of freedom, Zupančič argues that Kantian freedom is grounded not in the subject's inner inclinations but in a 'foreign body' that is paradoxically most truly one's own — a structure she links to alienation, jouissance, and the ethical dimension that will be connected to guilt rather than psychological causality.

   the question of the (specifically ethical) jouissance, and of its domestication in 'love for one's neighbour'

8. #08

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.43

   The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kantian freedom is not located beyond causal determination but emerges precisely within it, at the point where the causal chain fails to close on itself—a "crack in the Other"—and that this structure mirrors Lacan's move of introducing the subject as correlative to the lack in the Other, making guilt (not moral conscience) the paradoxical mode of the subject's participation in freedom.

   The advent of the subject of practical reason coincides with a moment that might be called a moment of 'forced choice'...the forced choice at issue here is none other than the choice of freedom

9. #09

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.48

   The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Kantian subject of practical reason must pass through a moment of radical alienation and impossible choice (the 'excluded choice' of pure determinism) before attaining freedom, and that this structure—where the subject's fundamental disposition (Gesinnung) is itself chosen by a transcendental act of spontaneity that has no meta-foundation—is homologous to the Lacanian insight that the Other of the Other is the subject itself, grounding a 'psychoanalytic postulate of freedom' operative in the analytic cure.

   It is in these terms that we can understand the remarks—or, rather, the questions—with which Lacan begins his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 'I will point out that moral action poses problems for us precisely to the extent that if analysis prepares us for it, it also in the end leaves us standing at the door.'

10. #10

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.52

    The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's transcendental subject occupies the structural position of Lacan's objet petit a — neither phenomenal nor noumenal, extimate to both subject and Other — and that the ethical subject emerges precisely from the coincidence of a lack in the subject (forced choice) and a lack in the Other (no Other of the Other), making freedom the inescapable ground of both freedom and unfreedom.

    it is only at this point that the constitution of the subject as an ethical subject becomes possible.

11. #11

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.55

    The Subject of Freedom > What subject? > Notes

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section listing scholarly references; the only substantive theoretical gesture is note 11's contrast between the structuralist/Althusserian interpellated subject and the psychoanalytic subject as the remainder or failure of interpellation.

    Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge 1992, p. 21.

12. #12

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.56

    The Lie > Kant and 'the right to lie'

    Theoretical move: Zupančič reconstructs the Kant–Constant debate on lying to show that Kant's "absolute" duty of truthfulness is not a mere aberration but a principled philosophical position: truthfulness grounds the very possibility of law and contract, and any exception to it is self-contradictory — a move that clears the ground for a Lacanian reading of the ethics of the Real.

    Among those who consider it an ethical issue, it is clearly an object of loathing and rejection.

13. #13

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.65

    The Lie > Kant and 'the right to lie'

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kant misreads Constant by treating the 'middle principle' as an exception to a rule, whereas Constant's actual point is that in cases of necessity no legal norm applies at all—meaning there is no violation, not a permitted violation. This distinction between an exception to the law and the law's non-application is theoretically crucial for preserving the unconditional character of ethical duty.

    Kant's insistence on the unconditional character of duty acquires its rightful value

14. #14

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.66

    The Lie > The Unconditional

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of Kant's "parable of the gallows" exposes a hidden pathological motive (the good of the neighbour) smuggled into what should be a purely formal moral argument; the passage then aligns Kantian duty with the Lacanian ethics of desire by locating the ultimate limit of pathology in the Other, and grounds the ethical act in the dimension of the Real rather than law or transgression.

    In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan calls attention to this ambiguity. At the end of the chapter 'Love of One's Neighbour' he focuses on the famous example Kant gives in the second Critique: the 'parable of the gallows'.

15. #15

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.73

    The Lie > The Sadeian trap

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "Sadeian trap" arises when a subject hides behind a pre-given, ready-made duty to justify (and disavow responsibility for) the surplus-enjoyment derived from his actions — a perverse structure — and that escaping this trap requires recognizing that the ethical subject is not the agent but the agens of the universal, constituting the Law rather than merely applying it.

    The reason why the subject cannot be effaced from the 'structure' of the ethical... is not the particular, the singular, or the specific, but the universal.

16. #16

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.75

    The Lie > Notes

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section, providing textual citations and block quotations (from Kant, Lacan, and Žižek) that anchor the preceding chapter's argument; it is non-substantive as independent theoretical content but does embed two load-bearing quoted passages—Lacan on desire and Žižek on the categorical imperative.

    In the last analysis, what a subject really feels guilty about when he manifests guilt at bottom always has to do with ... the extent to which he has given ground relative to his desire [ceder sur son desir].

17. #17

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.80

    From the Logic of Illusion to the Postulates > The 'stonny ocean' of illusion

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's transcendental dialectic (the 'logic of illusion') structurally anticipates a Lacanian conception of truth and illusion: truth is not correspondence to an external object but conformity of knowledge with itself (a formal criterion), while dialectical illusion is not a false representation of a real object but an 'object in the place of the lack of an object' — a structure that aligns Kantian transcendental illusion with the Lacanian concept of le semblant.

    he has elevated fidelity to his land (of truth) to the level of the 'ethics of existence'

18. #18

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.88

    From the Logic of Illusion to the Postulates > The passage to the postulates

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's postulates (freedom, immortality of the soul, God) differ structurally from the transcendental ideas by being axiomatic rather than fictional, and that the postulates of immortality and God 'personify' or materialize the two standpoints (understanding and reason) that regulative ideas only formally articulate—making the subject embody the perspective of understanding and God the perspective of reason in relation to the highest good.

    freedom, as indissolubly linked to the moral law, is this very determining ground of the will. Thus, in the Critique of Practical Reason freedom does not have only the function of a postulate, but is also, as a condition of any ethics, a fact, a 'fact of reason'.

19. #19

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

    Good and Evil

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

    Both Sade and Kant attempt to go beyond this logic... What allows us to 'jump over' this hindrance, to continue beyond it, is what Lacan calls fantasy.

20. #20

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.95

    Good and Evil > The logic of suicide

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's texts contain two logics of suicide that map onto two structurally opposed ethical positions: a sacrificial logic that preserves and reinforces the big Other, and a second logic—suicide *via* the Other—that annihilates the symbolic coordinates giving the subject identity, and which paradoxically satisfies all the formal conditions of a pure ethical act, making it indistinguishable from (and thus the perverted double of) Lacan's conception of the Act.

    It is this second perspective that brings Kant's developments closest to Lacan's conception of an ethical act.

21. #21

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.99

    Good and Evil > Degrees of evil

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's concept of "radical evil" is systematically misread when applied to empirical historical events like the Holocaust; it is instead a transcendental-structural concept—the necessary consequence of freedom itself—that explains the possibility of non-ethical conduct, not its empirical magnitude, and that this misreading enables a reductive "ethics of the lesser evil."

    Ethics would thus be reduced to only one function: preventing evil, or at least lessening it. It seems that such an ethics of 'the lesser evil' is justified in its reference to Kant.

22. #22

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.107

    Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that within Kantian ethics, "diabolical evil" and "the highest good" are structurally indistinguishable—both name the formal structure of an accomplished ethical act—and that any genuine act necessarily involves a transgression of the existing symbolic order, such that the difference between good and evil dissolves at the level of the act's structure, a conclusion Kant produced but refused to acknowledge.

    This is why we propose to maintain the concept of the act developed by Kant, and to link it to the thematic of 'overstepping of boundaries', of 'transgression', to the question of evil.

23. #23

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.110

    Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils > The act as 'subjectivation without subject'

    Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Kant's exclusion of 'diabolical evil' and 'highest good' as impossible for human agents stems not from intellectual courage but from a flawed conceptualization that links the Real to the will; following Lacan, she proposes that Acts do occur in reality precisely because jouissance (as the real kernel of the law) operates independently of will, introducing a 'fundamental alienation of the subject in the act' that dissolves the requirement for a holy or diabolical will and grounds ethics in the irreducible split between subject of enunciation and subject of the statement.

    we exclude the possibility of ethics as such or, more precisely, we posit the ethical act as something which is in itself impossible, and exists only in its perpetual failure 'fully' to realize itself.

24. #24

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.115

    Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils > The act as 'subjectivation without subject'

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the successful ethical act does not require abolishing the statement/enunciation split but rather fully discloses it—via the paradox-structure of the liar—such that the subject is not a divided subject but is 'objectified' in the act, passing over to the side of the object (objet petit a), which Lacan calls 'subjectivation without subject'.

    there is no (ethical) act without the subject who is equal to his act

25. #25

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.117

    Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils > Notes

    Theoretical move: This notes section is bibliographic apparatus, but note 23 makes a substantive theoretical move: it articulates Lacan's later reformulation of the subject/enunciation split in terms of the Other/jouissance difference, locating ethical responsibility in the fragment of jouissance that 'grows' from the act rather than in the Other-determined dimension of speech.

    Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge 1992, p. 189.

26. #26

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.119

    The Act and Evil in Literature

    Theoretical move: The passage constructs two paradigmatic figures of ethical failure — the 'Sadeian' (infinite approach to the object of desire, part-by-part) and the 'Don Juanian' (overhasty pursuit, one-by-one) — as the two faces of Kant's theory of the act, using Lacan's reading of Zeno's paradox to show that both fail to close the gap between will and jouissance and thus enter the territory of 'diabolical evil'.

    These 'two faces of Achilles', as we will show, exemplify very well what we developed above as the two aspects of Kant's theory of the act.

27. #27

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.123

    The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont

    Theoretical move: The passage uses the literary case of Valmont and Merteuil in *Les Liaisons dangereuses* to dramatize the Lacanian thesis that there is no sexual relation — that love (identification, the formula of One) and jouissance (always partial, never whole) are fundamentally incompatible — while also arguing that the path to autonomous subjectivity, in eighteenth-century ethical thought, runs through Evil as a deliberate project rather than mere knowledge.

    the path to autonomy leads through Evil, evil as an 'ethical attitude', evil as a project (and not just as 'occasional evil'). Knowledge itself is not enough.

28. #28

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.132

    The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > In letter 70, he puts it like this:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Valmont's conduct toward Madame de Tourvel exemplifies the perverse structure as Lacan conceives it—making the Other enjoy/become a subject—while his eventual betrayal of Merteuil illustrates Lacan's formula of 'giving ground on one's desire' (céder sur son désir), wherein the rhetoric of 'it is not my fault' is itself the purest confession of guilt and the mark of the subject who has abandoned desire for the logic of the superego.

    This point about the law of desire is in keeping with Lacan's comments in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: Something is played out in betrayal if one tolerates it.

29. #29

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.134

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

    Theoretical move: Zupančič reads Molière's Don Juan as an embodiment of "diabolical evil" in the Kantian sense—not as transgression or atheism, but as a principled refusal to repent despite full knowledge of God's existence, which paradoxically hystericizes the big Other (Heaven) and exposes the breakdown of its authority, while also linking Don Juan's logic of conquest to Lacan's not-all (pas-toute).

    What makes Don Juan a figure of diabolical evil is not his debauched life, his sinfulness. The 'diabolical' character of his position - just as in Kant's definition of diabolical evil - springs from the fact that the evil he represents is not simply the opposite of being good

30. #30

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.149

    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.

    We will return to the distinction we have seen at work - between desire and the drive - in the last chapter, where we will link it more explicitly to the Lacanian conception of ethics.

31. #31

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.150

    The Act and Evil in Literature > Notes

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for a chapter on "The Act and Evil in Literature," gathering citations from Lacan, Kierkegaard, Zizek, and others; while non-narrative in form, several notes contain substantive theoretical quotations on partial drive, jouissance, castration/repression, and the Master/Slave dialectic as applied to Don Juan.

    Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge 1992, p. 321.

32. #32

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.153

    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.

    Kant's theory of respect displays, in its own way, the fundamental ambiguities of his ethics, especially his oscillation between two different 'portraits' of the moral law.

33. #33

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.159

    Between the Moral Law and the Superego

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's attempt to supplement the moral law with voice and gaze transforms respect (an a priori, non-pathological feeling) into the superego's law, installing an absolute Other that forecloses the act and pacifies the subject by guaranteeing an inexhaustible lack on the subject's side—a shift that also governs the dialectic of the sublime across the three Critiques.

    We have already argued that a certain inconsistency or incompleteness of the Other (the moral law) is the very kernel of ethics.

34. #34

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

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

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

    The feeling of the sublime, however, consists not only in its indication of the proximity of a Thing (that is threatening to the subject); it is at the same time a way to avoid actually encountering it.

35. #35

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.172

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

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's theory of the sublime can be read as a theory of the logic of fantasy, in which the subject's safe observation of its own annihilation through the 'window of fantasy' reveals the superego structure latent in Kantian ethics — while simultaneously opening the question of whether a non-superego ethics (Lacanian ethics) is conceivable.

    Is it possible to conceive of an ethics that is not subject to the logic of the superego in all its resonances ... We can reply affirmatively, simply by pointing out that this is exactly what Lacan is after with his conception of ethics.

36. #36

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.176

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

    Theoretical move: The moral law in Kant has the structure of an enunciation without a statement—a "half-said"—and is constituted retroactively by the subject's act rather than pre-existing it; this convergence with Lacan's account of desire as the desire of the Other allows Zupančič to distinguish two ethical paths: the superego's pursuit of an Other that knows, versus the act that creates what the Law wants.

    'The law is a law of the unknown' is the fundamental proposition of any ethics worthy of the name.

37. #37

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.187

    Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Some preliminary remarks

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's engagement with tragedy is not a poetization but a first attempt at formalization—myth and tragedy function as instantiations of formal structures analogous to mathemes—and traces a triadic movement (Oedipus→Hamlet→Sygne de Coüfontaine) in which the relationship between knowledge, desire, and guilt is progressively transformed, culminating in a radical destitution of the subject that exceeds classical symbolic debt.

    their subjective position does not correspond to the formula 'desire and guilt' - which, as we shall discover, has important consequences for their ethical status.

38. #38

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.191

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

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

    At several points in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan calls attention to this quibbling of Oedipus and the absence of a reconciliation with his destiny.

39. #39

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.195

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that guilt is constituted by the moment when the desire of the Other becomes the subject's own desire (finding surplus-enjoyment in objective necessity), and that Oedipus escapes guilt precisely because his desire is stolen from him from the outset — he is 'robbed of his desire' and given over to the social order in exchange, a structural theft that distinguishes his tragedy from those of Hamlet, Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra.

    we could invert the Lacanian dictum according to which 'desire is the desire of the Other' by reading it in the opposite direction

40. #40

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.218

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Oedipus' answer to the Sphinx's riddle exemplifies "knowledge as truth" — a word wagered without guarantee from the Other — and that this act is not transgression but an act of creation that founds a new symbolic order, rendering ethics possible as fidelity to an inaugurating event.

    This is the fundamental difference between ethics in the strict sense of the term and the story of Oedipus the King. The latter operates on a terrain that we could call 'pre-ethical'; it renders the advent of ethics possible.

41. #41

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.224

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder

    Theoretical move: The passage introduces Claudel's *The Hostage* as the literary-dramatic material Lacan reads in his seminar *Le transfert* as a contemporary tragedy, setting up Sygne de Coufontaine's final tic — her compulsive, wordless refusal — as the key enigmatic gesture around which the theoretical discussion of enjoyment, sacrifice, and the ethics of psychoanalysis will turn.

    The year after he developed a commentary on Antigone in his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan undertook, in his seminar Le transfert, a reading of contemporary tragedy with a discussion of Paul Claudel's Coufontaine trilogy.

42. #42

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.226

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Ethics and terror

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'terror' as a political-ethical form operates through a forced logic of subjectivation—compelling the subject to choose in a way that simultaneously constitutes and destroys her as subject—revealing a structural homology between radical terror and the ethical Act, and showing that the closest approach to the ethical Act may require the transgression of the universal moral law itself.

    Le transfert deals once again with the 'ethics of psychoanalysis', as is already evident in the fact that Lacan begins his commentary on Claudel with the question of the desire of the analyst.

43. #43

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.232

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Ethics and terror

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Sygne de Coufontaine's 'monstrous' ethical choice—doing one's duty at the price of one's humanity and faith—exemplifies a distinctly modern ethical dimension that begins precisely where conventional duty ends, and that Kantian moral law in its purest form (wanting nothing from the subject) coincides with desire in its pure state, opening a 'hole beyond faith' that is constitutive of modern ethics rather than a deviation from it.

    is the limit that Sygne must cross the limit of ethics itself (thus representing a realm 'beyond ethics'), or is it only beyond that limit - once 'the hole beyond faith' has appeared - that (modern) ethics, properly speaking, begins?

44. #44

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.237

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

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

    When Lacan, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, comments on the commandment 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself', and on Freud's hesitation regarding this subject, he formulates its impasse with essentially the same words as Badiou uses

45. #45

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.242

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

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Sygne's final 'no' is not an afterthought but the necessary telos of her sacrifice: the logic of pure desire, by driving the subject to traverse the fundamental fantasy from within, opens onto the register of enjoyment (jouissance), where the remainder of flesh that refuses sublimation prevents the sublime image from closing over the void it veils.

    Her act (of sacrifice) is not an instance of 'giving up on one's desire' but, rather, one of pure desire... the imperative 'Do not give up on your desire' is linked to the fundamental fantasy of the subject

46. #46

    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.

    This is when ethics comes into play, in the question forced upon us by an encounter with the Real: will I act in conformity to what threw me 'out of joint', will I be ready to reformulate what has hitherto been the foundation of my existence?

47. #47

    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.

    the same year in which Lacan had concluded his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

48. #48

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.262

    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.

    The ethics of the Real is not an ethics of the finite, of finitude. The answer to the religious promise of immortality is not the pathos of the finite; the basis of ethics cannot be an imperative which commands us to endorse our finitude

49. #49

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.264

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

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

    The frame that we are dealing with here is precisely the one discussed by Lacan in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: on the one hand, the field between two deaths as the 'purgatory of desire'; on the other, the point of view of the Last Judgement.

50. #50

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.271

    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.

    we will venture to conclude this 'treatise on ethics' with this hypothesis

51. #51

    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.

    Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge 1992, p. 294.

52. #52

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.131

    N OT G OD BU T AN OTHE R

    Theoretical move: Capitalist modernity creates the structural conditions for genuine freedom by displacing God as a substantial Other, but simultaneously forecloses that freedom by substituting the market as a new tyrannical authority; Kant's moral philosophy—grounding the law in the subject's own self-division rather than any external Other—is identified as the authentic philosophical articulation of modern freedom that capitalism cannot stomach.

    Kant's moral philosophy represents a landmark in the history of philosophy because the moral subject must derive its guidelines from itself rather than from any external source.

53. #53

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.186

    THE V IRT UE S OF IN TE R RUP TION > SLE E PIN G W ITH THE E NE M Y

    Theoretical move: Capitalism is structurally distinguished from traditional societies by its capacity to absorb and even depend upon acts of nonproductivity and refusal; the passage argues that genuine critique of capitalism therefore cannot rest on resistance alone but must reorient subjectivity toward the means (nonproductivity) as an end in itself, thereby exposing and undermining the teleological logic of capitalist productivity from within its own immanent requirements.

    If subjects could be reduced entirely to their actuality and thus to their reproductivity, then they would cease to be political or ethical beings. A focus on the means and on nonproductivity frees us from the teleological force of actuality.

54. #54

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.288

    . A MOR E TOLE R ABLE INFINIT Y > . THE E NDS OF C APITALI SM

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage advances the theoretical argument that capitalism's structure is isomorphic with utilitarian ethics and teleological (final cause) thinking, while psychoanalysis, Spinoza, and Agamben's impotentiality offer resources for resisting capitalism's productivity imperative—locating the subject's desire, not the body, as the true site of power.

    Agamben's emphasis on impotentiality reveals his proximity to psychoanalysis, despite his refusal to avow this proximity.

55. #55

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.28

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

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

    the Lacanian 'ethics of psychoanalysis' calls for analysands to move away from their alienations in and through their egos and, at the same time, towards an embrace of their unconscious subjectivities normally held at arm's length by their egos.

56. #56

    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) > Context

    Theoretical move: This passage is a contextual/editorial introduction to Lacan's 1956 essay on psychoanalytic training, situating its historical significance and its relation to Lacan's later 'Proposition of 9 October 1967' on *la passe*; it is primarily bibliographic and contextual rather than a substantive theoretical argument.

    Lacan's essay concerns the survival of psychoanalysis and the efficacy and ethics of its practice.

57. #57

    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) > IV. How to act with one’s being?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's proper mode of being cannot be derived from technical rules, happiness, or comprehension, but must be grounded in the ethics of desire — specifically the desire of the analyst — and that the analyst's stance toward the analysand's demand (intransitive, without object) is the pivot around which the direction of treatment turns.

    an ethics must be formulated that integrates Freud's conquests concerning desire: one that would place at the forefront the question of the analyst's desire

58. #58

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.232

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > IV. How to act with one’s being?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's function is not to fulfil the analysand's demand but to allow the signifiers bound up with frustration to reappear, thereby distinguishing need, demand, and desire, while also warning against identification-based or "good-for-the-subject" treatments that merely compel repetition or install the superego in place of the analytic relation.

    Although Lacan only touches on the subject here, it is elaborated further in Seminar VII, 'The Ethics of Psychoanalysis'

59. #59

    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) > V. Desire must be taken literally

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's desire operates by refusing to answer at the level of demand, thereby opening a space for the subject to encounter their own truth as construction — grounded in the irremediable lack in the Other — which Lacan identifies as the aim of analysis at this stage of his teaching.

    it is here that Lacan, at this point in his teaching, situates the aim of analysis

60. #60

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.285

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

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

    Hence Lacan's interest in a reconsideration of ethics, since relations to the Other are implicated in any subjective orientation whatsoever

61. #61

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.287

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > IV. Toward an ethics

    Theoretical move: By situating Lacan's commentary on Lagache alongside Kant's dual wonder (starry heavens / moral law within), this passage argues that psychoanalysis enacts a double disenchantment — of nature through science and of morality through the discovery of the Other's voice as the ground of the superego — and that the proper analytic ethics requires confrontation with objet petit a rather than ego-strengthening or the surrender of desire.

    the political secret of moralists to incite the subject to remove something – his stakes from the game of desire… the famous line from Seminar VII is echoed in this paragraph

62. #62

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

    <span id="ch18.xhtml_page_289"></span>[Index](#ch05.xhtml_tocindex-001)

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section (letters O–R) from a scholarly volume on Lacan's Écrits, listing terms and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

    Psychoanalysis: ethics [28], [232]

63. #63

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

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

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

    Lacan introduces *das Ding* in his 1959–60 seminar, *The Ethics of Psychoanalysis*— and he unmistakably signals its central importance.

64. #64

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.95

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

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

    Myth's capacity to evoke wonder in the face of the unknown, which we here call its aesthetic dimension, served to frame its more decisive function, which was ethical.

65. #65

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.98

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

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

    The Homeric ethic positioned the hero in relation to the darkness of the unknown and the abyssal character of existence. Virtue and nobility consisted in comporting oneself courageously in the face of that darkness.

66. #66

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

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

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

    Lacan makes it explicit. At the most fundamental level, the Decalogue addresses the subject's bondage to the Thing in language

67. #67

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.146

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

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

    every time that Freud stops short in horror at the consequences of the commandment to love one's neighbor, we see evoked the presence of that fundamental evil which dwells within this neighbor.

68. #68

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.148

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

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

    The challenge of loving the neighbor consists in accepting the Other's undomesticated jouissance, which inevitably means accepting some portion of one's own.

69. #69

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.154

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

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

    The first rule of being an analyst precisely follows Jesus's teaching: do not judge the analysand, at least in the first meaning of the term... The whole aim and effectiveness of analysis is conscientiously to apply the second meaning of judgment.

70. #70

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

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

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

    embrace with love precisely what makes you anxious in the Other, and (2) revere that very embrace as the entry of the divine into the world.

71. #71

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

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

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

    we also have to acknowledge that Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis and the ethics of Kant are not the same thing.

72. #72

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

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

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

    — Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

73. #73

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.219

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

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

    what we find in the incest law is located as such at the level of the unconscious in relation to das Ding.

74. #74

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

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

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

    Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 82–83.

75. #75

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.226

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

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

    Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 186. … Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 187.

76. #76

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.245

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

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

    Ethics of Psychoanalysis seminar (Lacan): 24, 48, 49, 163, 208nn4–5

77. #77

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

    Acknowledgments > Introduction > You're No Good

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

    Such is the foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by Freud.

78. #78

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.35

    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.

    the implications of the death drive for understanding how the subject enjoys, how the drive relates to social class, how the drive impacts the subject as an ethical being, and how the subject becomes politicized.

79. #79

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.94

    I > 3 > Freedom and Injustice

    Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis offers a distinct critique of capitalism grounded not in justice (as in Marxism) but in freedom: class society deprives subjects of freedom and enjoyment at the level of the unconscious, and psychoanalysis emerges precisely to address the persistence of unfreedom after the Enlightenment's failure to achieve its own ideal.

    psychoanalysis demonstrates how class society itself deprives subjects of freedom. Its criticism of class society is founded on its criticism of capitalism's restriction of freedom.

80. #80

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.118

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Beyond the Demand

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary capitalism has replaced the traditional dialectic of demand and desire (prohibition-based paternal authority) with an imperative to enjoy, producing a subject overwhelmed by the obscene proximity of the enjoying other rather than structured by lack — and that the ethical psychoanalytic response is the embrace of the resulting anxiety.

    The ethical position, for psychoanalysis, necessarily involves the embrace of this anxiety — and this is at once the path to enjoyment.

81. #81

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.125

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Taking a Short Cut

    Theoretical move: Violence directed at the enjoying other is structurally self-defeating and self-sustaining: it does not aim to eliminate the other's enjoyment but to perpetuate it, revealing that anxiety about jouissance can be managed through flight, violence, or—as a third ethical option—embracing anxiety itself.

    one might embrace the experience of anxiety as an ethical and political choice

82. #82

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.129

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Anxiety as Ethics

    Theoretical move: Against Heidegger's anxiety-as-confrontation-with-nothing, McGowan (via Lacan) argues that anxiety is ethical precisely because it arises from the overwhelming presence of the other's jouissance rather than from absence; the genuinely ethical response is to tolerate and endure this anxiety rather than flee it through cynicism or fundamentalism.

    The alternative — the ethical path that psychoanalysis identifies — demands an embrace of the anxiety that stems from the encounter with the enjoying other.

83. #83

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.134

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Whose Enjoyment?

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that anxiety in the face of the Other's enjoyment is not merely an ethical posture but the very mechanism through which subjects access their own enjoyment, since enjoyment is structurally unavailable directly and must be fantasized through the enjoying Other—making the disturbing fantasy-encounter with the real Other ethically superior to both liberal tolerance (which neutralizes otherness) and fascist persecution (which disavows enjoyment while depending on it).

    The ethical position thus involves sustaining the liberal's tolerance within the conservative's encounter with the real other.

84. #84

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.149

    I > Changing the World > Psychoanalytic Success

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic success consists in the subject publicly avowing its fantasy and acting from the "nonsense" of its own enjoyment rather than sacrificing that enjoyment to social authority — thereby exposing the groundlessness of all symbolic authority and opening a path for collective transformation. Hamlet's trajectory from perverse fool to authentic fool is used as the paradigmatic illustration of this move.

    This is the fundamental aim of the psychoanalytic process, and the subject who does this necessarily exposes its fantasy and enjoys in a public way.

85. #85

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.209

    I > Against Knowledge > Too Much Democracy

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

    The political project of psychoanalysis is fundamentally democratic, but it envisions democracy as an excess that we can enjoy, though we cannot reconcile it with our enlightened self-interest. It is not more knowledge that will bring about our emancipation but more enjoyment.

86. #86

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.235

    I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Even the Losers

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis uniquely reveals that enjoyment inheres in the loss of the privileged object rather than in its return, and on this basis proposes a politics of fantasy that does not demand renunciation (as philosophy does) or defer enjoyment to a future image (as Marxism does), but instead transforms the subject's relation to fantasy by embracing loss as the very site of enjoyment.

    Psychoanalysis allows us to rethink the way in which we conceive political activity: not as the triumph of the proper consciousness over the experience of enjoyment but as the embrace of the trauma inherent in real enjoyment.

87. #87

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.253

    I > 9 > Death in Life

    Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis offers a "third way" beyond the life/death binary by locating the death drive as internal to life: the subject is constituted through an originary loss (correlative to the acquisition of the signifier/name), and enjoyment derives not from life or death but from this death-in-life, which also grounds a political position that transcends the Left/Right opposition.

    Like the conservative project, a psychoanalytic political project rejects the mechanical flow of pure life and instead privileges the disruption of that flow. But like leftist politics, it refuses to adhere itself to that which transcends life and limits it from the outside.

88. #88

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.277

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Th e Political Deadlock

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the fundamental political deadlock is constituted by a structurally missing binary signifier (the signifier of the feminine in patriarchal society) whose absence is both the source of injustice and the condition of possibility for politics and justice itself; a properly psychoanalytic politics transforms this deadlock from an obstacle into a point of identification, redefining emancipation as an embrace of the limit rather than its transcendence.

    The ultimate contribution of psychoanalytic thought to politics is its ability to provide a basis for an emancipatory politics of the limit.

89. #89

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.291

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

    Theoretical move: The missing (binary) signifier is not absent from the symbolic structure but present as an absence that constitutes it from within; genuine political engagement therefore requires identification with this structuring absence rather than seeking to fill or eliminate it, inverting the hermeneutic pursuit into a psychoanalytic "finding."

    Fostering this recognition is the essence of a psychoanalytic politics, even though it fails to provide the comfort of the more traditional slogan.

90. #90

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.299

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

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

    Psychoanalytic theory never preaches, and it cannot help us to construct a better society. But it can help us to subtract the illusion of the good from our own society.

91. #91

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.302

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

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

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960

92. #92

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.321

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 4. Sustaining Anxiety

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section traces Lacan's theoretical trajectory from an early Hegelian recognition-based psychoanalysis toward a later framework that integrates destructiveness and jouissance into subjectivity, while also mapping how anxiety, enjoyment, and the enjoying Other function in contemporary consumer society, political violence, and fascism.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960

93. #93

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.347

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 10. The Necessity of Belief

    Theoretical move: This notes section develops several interlocking theoretical claims: that psychoanalysis addresses the trauma of existence that neither God's existence nor nonexistence can resolve; that religion functions to mask social antagonism; that Pascal's wager affirms a point of non-knowledge irreducible to calculation; and that authentic events retroactively restructure the field of probability and meaning.

    Zupančič treats the Kantian ethic as purely formal and thereby empties it of the content that connects it to law... she can claim... 'diabolical evil, the highest evil, is indistinguishable from the highest good'

94. #94

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.114

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Th e Paradox of Recognition

    Theoretical move: Recognition's ethical value is undermined by its constitutive failure: it reduces the subject to a symbolic identity and never reaches the real other (the neighbor); genuine ethics and encounter with the other are grounded not in the sacrifice of enjoyment but in enjoyment itself, since it is the other's singular, untranslatable enjoyment that first constitutes the real other as such.

    Psychoanalysis allows us to see the foundational link that exists between ethics and enjoyment, where other approaches erect a clear divide between the two.

95. #95

    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_88"></span>**id**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Freud's id (das Es/ça) not as primitive biological force but as the symbolic-linguistic dimension of the subject, equating the id with the subject (S) and rewriting Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden' as an ethical injunction toward recognition of one's symbolic determinants rather than ego-expansion.

    arguing instead that the word soll is to be understood as an ethical injunction, so that the aim of analysis is for the ego to submit to the autonomy of the symbolic order

96. #96

    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_198"></span>**Suggestion**

    Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes psychoanalysis from suggestion/hypnosis by arguing that psychoanalysis operates precisely where suggestion fails: by maintaining the distance between identification (I/ego-ideal) and objet petit a, rather than collapsing them as hypnosis does, and by directing the treatment rather than the patient, embracing nonsense over signification, and holding the analyst's knowledge as merely presumed rather than real.

    Suggestion includes the idea of directing the patient towards some ideal or some moral value (see ETHICS). In opposition to this, Lacan reminds analysts that their task is to direct the treatment, not the patient

97. #97

    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_11"></span>**act**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes 'the act' as a distinctively Lacanian ethical concept: only that which is fully assumed—consciously and unconsciously—qualifies as a true act, thereby linking responsibility, unconscious desire, and the death drive into a single ethical framework that distinguishes the act from acting out, passage to the act, and mere behaviour.

    in psychoanalytic treatment the subject is faced with the ethical duty of assuming responsibility even for the *unconscious* desires expressed in his actions.

98. #98

    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_50"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0064"></span>**desire of the analyst**

    Theoretical move: The passage articulates a constitutive ambiguity in Lacan's concept of the desire of the analyst: on one side, it functions as an enigmatic attributed desire that engines the analytic process by sustaining the Che vuoi? question; on the other, it names a properly analytic desire oriented not toward identification or cure but toward 'absolute difference', situating it at the heart of the ethics of psychoanalysis and requiring a training analysis to constitute it.

    It is in the sense of 'a desire proper to the analyst' that Lacan wishes to locate the question of the analyst's desire at the heart of the ethics of psychoanalysis.

99. #99

    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_150"></span>**philosophy**

    Theoretical move: The passage maps the ambivalent relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy in both Freud and Lacan, showing how Lacan simultaneously opposes philosophy's totalising systems (linking it to the Discourse of the Master) and draws extensively on specific philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger—to construct his own theoretical apparatus.

    he discusses this at length both in his seminar on ethics (1959–60) and his essay on 'Kant with Sade' (1962).

100. #100

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_63"></span>**ethics**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's analytic ethic is defined against both traditional (Aristotelian/Kantian) ethics and the normative ethics of ego-psychology, positioning it as an ethic of desire — and later of 'speaking well' — that refuses the Sovereign Good, the pleasure principle, and the 'service of goods' in favour of the subject's fidelity to their desire.

     Lacan asserts that ethical thought 'is at the centre of our work as analysts' (S7, 38), and a whole year of his seminar is devoted to discussing the articulation of ethics and psychoanalysis.

101. #101

     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.

     ideals of 'genital love' are proposed as the goal of treatment. Thus object-relations theory becomes the site of a 'delirious moralism'

102. #102

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_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.

     It is this dimension of shared social values which allows Lacan to tie in the concept of sublimation with his discussion of ethics (see S7, 144).

103. #103

     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_44"></span>**death**

     Theoretical move: Death is a multi-dimensional concept in Lacan, functioning simultaneously as constitutive of the Symbolic order (the symbol murders the thing), as a topological limit (between-two-deaths), as a philosophical inheritance from Hegel and Heidegger, as an analytic stance (the analyst as 'dummy'/dead), and as the structuring question of obsessional neurosis.

     In the seminar of 1959–60, 'The Ethics of Psychoanalysis', Lacan talks about the 'second death'

104. #104

     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_180"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0203"></span>**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.

     VII | 1959-60 | The ethics of psychoanalysis.

105. #105

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     8

     Theoretical move: Freud extends the Eros/death-drive formula from individual psychology to civilization by arguing that civilization develops its own super-ego whose ethical demands (especially "Love thy neighbour") are therapeutically defective for the same reasons as the individual super-ego, and tentatively raises the diagnostic possibility that entire civilizations may be neurotic—while cautioning against mechanical application of psychoanalytic concepts beyond their original sphere.

     Among these, the demands concerned with the mutual relations of human beings are collectively known as ethics. A high value has always been placed on ethics, as though it were expected to perform exceptionally important services. And indeed it does address itself to the subject that is easily recognized as the sorest point in any civilization.

106. #106

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.155

     **x** > **ON A LACK THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO THE SIGNIFIER**

     Theoretical move: The decisive therapeutic factor in analysis is not the content of interpretation but the introduction of the "function of the cut" — the analyst's intervention that allows the subject to grasp herself as a lack, which is irreducible to signification and constitutive of desire and anxiety.

     if there's one thing I've put in question time and time again, then it's the scientific point of view, inasmuch as its aim is always to consider lack as something that can be filled, in stark contrast to the problematic of an experience that includes within it the taking into account of lack as such.

107. #107

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     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.

     I didn't hesitate in one of my previous Seminars to relate its structure to what is specifically homologous in what Kant spelt out as the condition for practising a pure practical reason, a moral will properly speaking.

108. #108

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps the perverse positions of sadism and masochism through the differential concealment of anxiety and the object (objet a), arguing that anxiety is the subject's real leftover and that castration is best understood not as threat but through the structural "falling-away" of the phallus as object—a detumescent object whose loss is more constitutive of desire than its presence.

     this is precisely what I wanted to spell out when I gave my Seminar on ethics by bringing Sade and Kant together and showing you that Sade's essential act of putting the Other to the question goes so far as to simulate... the exigencies of moral law

109. #109

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.318

     **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's impossibilized desire is structurally linked to the fantasy of an Almighty God (ubiquity/omnivoyance), which functions as the Ego Ideal covering over anxiety — such that true atheism, conceived as the dissolution of this fantasy of almightiness, is the analytic task specific to the obsessional structure.

     Plato only told us things that remain very easy to handle within the ethics of jouissance because they have allowed us to trace out the barrier that the Beautiful constitutes at the place of the supreme Good.

110. #110

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.294

     **xx** > **XXI PIAGET'S TAP**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a functions not as the object of desire but as its *cause*, and that this causal function — first legible in the structure of obsessional neurosis — is the primordial "shadow" or metaphor from which the philosophical category of cause derives; grasping the a as cause of desire is what orients the analysis of transference beyond the circle of transference neurosis.

     I mean to transfer this category from the domain that I shall call, with Kant, transcendental aesthetics, over to what I shall call, if you care to endorse this, my transcendental ethics.

111. #111

     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.

     In no way did I say that the satisfaction of orgasm was to be identified with what I defined, in the Seminar on ethics, with regard to the locus of jouissance.

112. #112

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.157

     **x** > **PUNCTUATIONS ON DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage makes the theoretical move of grounding the problem of the analyst's desire in a precise articulation of desire as law and as will-to-jouissance, then pivots to redefine anxiety—against Freud's ego-signal model—as the specific manifestation of the desire of the Other, thereby linking countertransference, the ethics of psychoanalysis, and anxiety under a single structural logic.

     I reread, still in your service, my Seminar on ethics from a few years back... any morality is to be sought out, in its principle and in its origin, on the side of the real.

113. #113

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.55

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious operates through the reduction of experience to pure signifiers, and that the non-commutativity of remembering and repetition reveals that the time-function governing the unconscious is of a logical (signifying) order rather than a temporal one—a claim that grounds repetition as the primary category for understanding unconscious structure.

     a moment when he feels he has the courage to judge and to conclude. This is part of what I have called his ethical witness.

114. #114

     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.

     by situating itself purely and simply in the register of pleasure, ethics fails and why, quite legitimately, Kant objects to it that the sovereign good can in no way be conceived as some small good carried to infinity

115. #115

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of the unconscious as "pre-ontological" — it precedes and resists ontological categorization — thereby linking the structural gap of the unconscious to a 'want-to-be' (manque-à-être) that is irreducible to either being or non-being, and reframing the question of ontology as an ethical rather than metaphysical one.

     The status of the unconscious is ethical. That all theory has to be revised.

116. #116

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.49

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the status of the unconscious is ethical rather than ontic, grounding this claim through Freud's choice of the "burning child" dream as a paradigm case — a dream that opens onto desire, the Real, and the structural entanglement of law, sin, and the Name-of-the-Father, linking Hamlet's ghost to the Oedipus myth.

     I am not being impressionistic when I say that Freud's approach here is ethical... If I am formulating here that the status of the unconscious is ethical, and not ontic

117. #117

     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.

     This is not a definitive ethical position. But, at a certain level, this is how we analysts approach the problem—though we know a little more than others about what is normal and abnormal.

118. #118

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the transference not as a shadow or repetition of past love, but as the living enactment of deception in the present, grounded in the meeting of the analyst's desire and the patient's desire — thereby linking the ethics of analysis to the question of the master/slave dialectic and the desire of the Other.

     Is it not strange, that echo that we found—between the ethic of analysis and the Stoic ethic? What does the Stoic ethic really amount to other than the recognition of the absolute authority of the desire of the Other

119. #119

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.291

     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.

     This is the prime example of the eye-opening effect (disillement) that analysis makes possible in relation to the many efforts, even the most noble ones, of traditional ethics.

120. #120

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     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 argues that the Subject Supposed to Know cannot be fully dismantled even when the analyst is put in question, because the analysand still credits the analyst with a residual infallibility; and that recognition of the good (Socratic/Platonic tradition) is never sufficient to produce action toward it, since jouissance itself imposes a recoil that splits knowing from wanting.

     The Socratic discussion introduced the following theme—that the recognition of the conditions for the good in itself would have something irresistible for man...the most perfect recognition of the conditions of the good will never prevent anyone from dashing into its opposite.

121. #121

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

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

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

     Experience shows us that Kant is more true, and I have proved that his theory of consciousness, when he writes of practical reason, is sustained only by giving a specification of the moral law which, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state

122. #122

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is "pre-ontological" — it resists ontological capture — and links this to the structuring function of lack (manque-à-être / want-to-be), making an ethical rather than ontological status the proper frame for the unconscious as gap.

     The status of the unconscious… is ethical. That all theory has to be revised.

123. #123

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.49

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the status of the unconscious is ethical rather than ontic, using Freud's placement of the 'burning child' dream to show that the unconscious opens onto a beyond—a reality that exceeds the pleasure principle—and links this to the Name-of-the-Father as the structure that couples desire with the law through inherited sin (Hamlet/Oedipus).

     I am not being impressionistic when I say that Freud's approach here is ethical... the status of the unconscious is ethical, and not ontic

124. #124

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.55

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious operates through the reduction of experience to pure signifiers, and that the distinction between remembering and repetition is not temporal but logical — grounded in the non-commutativity proper to the signifying order — thereby subordinating the time-function of analysis to a structural, signifying shaping of the Real.

     a moment to conclude may appear, says Freud—a moment when he feels he has the courage to judge and to conclude. This is part of what I have called his ethical witness.

125. #125

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     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 argues that even when the analyst is put in question or suspected of being a lure, something stops at the limit—an irreducible credit of infallibility is granted to the analyst—and this paradox of trust is used to contest the Socratic/Platonist thesis that recognition of the good is irresistible for man, precisely because jouissance as such provokes a constitutive recoil.

     The Socratic discussion introduced the following theme—that the recognition of the conditions for the good in itself would have something irresistible for man.

126. #126

     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.

     That is why, by situating itself purely and simply in the register of pleasure, ethics fails and why, quite legitimately, Kant objects to it that the sovereign good can in no way be conceived as some small good carried to infinity.

127. #127

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines transference not as a shadow of past love but as an active, present-tense deception whose structure reveals the constitutive link between the analyst's desire and the analysand's desire — a link that Hegel's master/slave dialectic claims to resolve but does not.

     Is it not strange, that echo that we found…between the ethic of analysis and the Stoic ethic? What does the Stoic ethic really amount to other than the recognition of the absolute authority of the desire of the Other

128. #128

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.274

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's proper relation to truth requires a self-dethroning from any collusion with truth, linking Freud's unfinished work on the division of the subject to the prophetic tradition's radical distinction within Jewish history as articulated in Moses and Monotheism.

     we can rely on truth, devote ourselves to it only in so far as we dethrone ourselves from a collusion with truth

129. #129

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hegelian-Marxist historical frameworks cannot account for Nazism's sacrificial logic, which reveals that human desire is fundamentally oriented toward finding evidence of the dark Other's desire in the sacrificial object; only Spinoza's reduction of God to the universality of the signifier offers an escape, but Kant's practical reason is ultimately 'more true' because it shows moral law as pure desire culminating in sacrifice.

     Experience shows us that Kant is more true, and I have proved that his theory of consciousness, when he writes of practical reason, is sustained only by giving a specification of the moral law which, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state

130. #130

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.291

     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.

     This is the prime example of the eye-opening effect (disillement) that analysis makes possible in relation to the many efforts, even the most noble ones, of traditional ethics.

131. #131

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.329

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Marguerite Duras's *Lol V. Stein* as a literary incarnation of the Lacanian object-gaze (*objet petit a*) as the novel's true subject — a detached, exiled, fallen object that sustains all other subjectivity — while Jacques-Alain Miller's summary of Zinberg on American psychoanalysis diagnoses the latter's decline through its reduction of psychoanalysis to an Adaptation-theory and its spread of an "ethical illness" into the social body.

     It is dying from an ethical illness. What is an ethical illness? What is this illness, this ethical illness, of which psychoanalysis in America is dying.

132. #132

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     **Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage enacts a dual theoretical move: first, Lacan anchors the o-object (objet petit a) as the hidden regulator of intersubjective mirage and the cause of desire in ethics; second, via Conrad Stein's intervention, it deploys condensation and displacement—the primary process as Freud articulates it in the Traumdeutung—to analyse the fantasy-formation "Poord'jeli," raising the problem of whether images can be "translated" into language or stand in a fundamentally different relation to it.

     The failure, up to now, of all ethics, and secondarily of all subjective philosophy, to master this mirage, is due to a failure to recognise what it invisibly regulates itself around.

133. #133

     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.

     he is the one to whom there is entrusted the operation of a radical ethical conversion, the one that introduces the subject to the order of desire

134. #134

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     **PRESENTATION BY JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER**

     Theoretical move: Miller defends his concept of suture as a general structural category—not reducible to the analyst's clinical non-suturing practice—by arguing that a sutured discourse is constituted by an apparent chain and a dissimulated chain whose occultation is the condition of discourse, while the signifier is identical to itself precisely insofar as it is constituted at its root by the non-identical to itself (the barred subject/lack).

     with this desire he covers the dimension of the ethics of the psychoanalyst which is stamped by the duty that Leclaire imposes on him of not suturing

135. #135

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.331

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that American psychoanalysis has undergone a pathological inversion by becoming an 'o-object' (objet petit a) of conspicuous display and ideological suture — masking the class struggle under the 'pursuit of happiness' and the promise of adaptation — while true psychoanalysis is defined by assuming the irreparable, i.e. the lack of being, and the properly oriented desire of the analyst.

     the diffusion of psychoanalysis is still not the ethical illness. What ethical illness of psychoanalysis was spread? What illness did it become?

136. #136

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     **PRESENTATION BY JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER**

     Theoretical move: Miller defends his concept of suture as a structural (not merely psychoanalytic) category that describes how a subject is produced in discourse through the articulation of an apparent chain and a dissimulated chain, arguing against Leclaire's reduction of his theoretical discourse to the position of an analysand's speech, and insisting that the signifier's identity is constituted at its root by the non-identical-to-itself, i.e., by lack.

     with this desire he covers the dimension of the ethics of the psychoanalyst which is stamped by the duty that Leclaire imposes on him of not suturing

137. #137

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.329

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Marguerite Duras's *Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein* to demonstrate how the subject can be constituted as a pure object-gaze (objet petit a), an exiled remainder that paradoxically becomes the novel's only true subject; this is then counterposed to the critique of American ego-psychology's reduction of psychoanalysis to adaptation theory, which Lacan frames as an "ethical illness" spreading through the social body.

     Erik Erikson writes then that he considers the conclusion of analysis in American society as representing an ethical illness. This means of the body social.

138. #138

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.331

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan (via a presenter's reading of Zinberg) diagnoses the "ethical illness" of American psychoanalysis as its transformation into an objet petit a — an object of ostentatious display and adaptation ideology — whose inversion of the analytic aim (assumption of irreparable lack) replaces the desire of the analyst with the pursuit of happiness as social suture; Lacan then defends his own teaching as what preserves a "breathable" theoretical atmosphere against these impasses.

     But the success, the diffusion of psychoanalysis is still not the ethical illness. What ethical illness of psychoanalysis was spread?

139. #139

     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.

     he is the one to whom there is entrusted the operation of a radical ethical conversion, the one that introduces the subject to the order of desire

140. #140

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     **Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames the closed seminar as a site where psychoanalytic teaching must become the principle of an action rather than mere intellectual sustenance, using the o-object (objet petit a) as cause of desire to ground a new ethics of subjective action; meanwhile Stein's commentary on Leclaire's Poord'jeli analysis deploys Freudian condensation/displacement to probe the relationship between unconscious fantasy, the signifier, and the dream-as-rebus.

     It is a matter of knowing for what sort of action this recognition of a new factor in ethics or in subjective philosophy... can serve.

141. #141

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions the analytic experience as requiring the analyst to occupy a Pyrrhonian/sceptical stance toward truth, introduces the Subject Supposed to Know as the patient's trap for the analyst's epistemological drive, and pivots toward Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject's relationship to infinity, the real, and the impossibility of enjoying truth.

     an experience that is properly speaking transcendent with regard to what was expressed up to then in the order of ethics

142. #142

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's poetic structure—particularly the Narcissus/mirror motif and the figure of Beatrice in courtly love—to argue that the objet petit a (o-object) is non-specular: it appears as an image of nothing, and this structure of sublimation (where jouissance is withdrawn) establishes a privileged equilibrium between truth and knowledge that poetic construction can illuminate more directly than psychoanalytic theory alone.

     This privileged structure, I defined the year that I gave my seminar on Ethics. It is that of courtly love in so far as we can locate in it in an outstanding fashion the terms (I) the ego ideal, (o) the o-object, i(o) the image of o, foundation of the ego, and $.

143. #143

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is non-specular — it appears as an image of nothing — and that courtly love (as in Dante's poetic construction) uniquely structures the relationship between the subject, the ego ideal, the o-object, and jouissance, thereby grounding psychoanalytic theory of sublimation in a topological framework.

     This privileged structure, I defined the year that I gave my seminar on Ethics. It is that of courtly love in so far as we can locate in it in an outstanding fashion the terms (I) the ego ideal, (o) the o-object, i(o) the image of o, foundation of the ego, and $.

144. #144

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the analytic situation — where every demand is necessarily disappointed — to critique masochism as a hasty diagnostic label, introduces the analyst as Subject Supposed to Know whose epistemological drive toward truth is itself caught in the law of disappointed demand, and pivots to Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject who must wager on truth while initially renouncing access to it in a Pyrrhonian suspension.

     an experience that is properly speaking transcendent with regard to what was expressed up to then in the order of ethics, we will never be able to take too many precautions to define the paths through which this formula of the relationship of the subject to the desire of the other

145. #145

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-grounds the locus of the Other in the body (as the site where the signifier is originally inscribed), then pivots to argue that jouissance—distinguished from pleasure as its beyond—cannot be derived from Hegelian self-consciousness or dialectics but must be theorised through the structural impossibility of the sexual act, with the signifier's reference found not in thought but in its real effects.

     in something that I named as jouissance. I mean introduced a long time ago and, specifically, in my seminar on Ethics.

146. #146

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.254

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 14 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy is structured like a language (as a grammatically closed sentence), introduces jouissance as a new theoretical term to account for the economy of fantasy, and distinguishes neurotic fantasy (as a closed, inadmissible meaning correlative to alienation's forced choice) from perverse jouissance—articulated through the impasse of the (non-existent/only-existing) sexual act—insisting these are structurally distinct rather than analogically continuous.

     It is not the same for us, thanks to the fact of the inclusion of the Judaic Commandments in our morality.

147. #147

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions jouissance as the central concept linking the failure of the sexual act to subjective constitution, arguing that the signifier's introduction into the real—not thought—gives jouissance its radical analytical value; this requires both a departure from the Hegelian dialectic (where jouissance belongs to the master) and an opening toward the irreducible non-relation at the heart of sexuality.

     in something that I named as jouissance. I mean introduced a long time ago and, specifically, in my seminar on Ethics.

148. #148

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.232

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiomatic principle that "there is no jouissance except that of the body" and argues that the introduction of the subject as an effect of signification necessarily alienates the subject from jouissance — separating body from jouissance — with castration named as the structural mechanism by which jouissance is cancelled in the sexual relation, making any genuine sexual act contingent on this loss.

     I consider that the maintenance of this principle, its affirmation as being absolutely essential, appears to me to have a greater ethical import than that of materialism.

149. #149

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's annex summary argues that the psychoanalytic act is the pivotal moment of passage from analysand to analyst, structurally constituted by the objet petit a, and that this act—which dismisses the very subject it establishes—grounds an ethics of jouissance, exposes the fault in the subject supposed to know, and requires that there is no Other of the Other (no metalanguage) as the condition for a consistent theory of the unconscious.

     That the axiology of psychoanalytic practice proves to be reduced to the sexual contributes to the subversion of the ethics that depends on the inaugural act only because the sexual is shown by negativities of structure... In the ethics inaugurated from the psychoanalytic act, less ethiquette, if you will forgive me...

150. #150

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is structurally grounded in the analyst's prior traversal of analysis, whereby the analyst's *désêtre*—his shedding of the Subject Supposed to Know—positions him as pure support for the objet petit a, and that this logic illuminates the status of every act, distinguishing the Freudian dialectic of enjoyment from both Cartesian and Hegelian suspensions of knowledge.

     'The fruit of the act', here is what seems to give its first measure to ethics. I took it up at one time in commenting on Aristotle's. The Ethics to Nicomachus starts from this: that there is something good at the level of pleasure

151. #151

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Platonic dialogue *Meno* — specifically its theory of reminiscence and the figure of the slave who 'rediscovers' knowledge — to isolate the function he calls the "subject supposed to know" as a structural presupposition of every question about knowledge, linking this to the problem of the analytic act and the unthought end of the training analysis.

     I took on the task of stating throughout a year something which was called The ethics of psychoanalysis. It was, if I remember correctly, the year 1958-59.

152. #152

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's proper function is not mastery of knowledge about sexuality but rather occupancy of the place of the objet petit a—the structural void that conditions desire—and that the analyst's inability to sustain this position drives the institutional fiction of "private life," which insulates analytic hierarchy from the truth of the analyst's own structural impotence.

     the rule for the analyst to escape the vacillation which makes him tip over into a sort of an ethical teaching

153. #153

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act constitutes a structural "tipping over" of the completed analysis: the analysand who has realized himself in castration rotates into the position of the analyst, who must embody the désêtre of the Subject Supposed to Know and offer himself as the little o-object — thus the logic of alienation that initiates analysis is preserved and repeated at a new level, renewing the question of the status of every act.

     'The fruit of the act', here is what seems to give its first measure to ethics. I took it up at one time in commenting on Aristotle's. The *Ethics to Nicomachus* starts from this: that there is something good at the level of pleasure

154. #154

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.81

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan rewrites Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as "Wo $ tat... muss Ich (o) werden" — the analyst must become the waste product (objet a) of the new order they introduce — positing the psychoanalytic act as a saying (dire) that supersedes prior normative frameworks (Aristotle, Kant, religious intention, Hegel's law of the heart, the political act) by making the subject's own dissolution the condition of the act.

     is it not possible to question them again in the same register as the one at which there will culminate today what is outlined in terms of the psychoanalytic act?

155. #155

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar summary argues that the psychoanalytic act—the transition from analysand to analyst—is constituted by and through the objet petit a, such that it enacts a 'subjective dismissal' (destitution of the subject supposed to know) and grounds a new ethics of psychoanalysis organized around the structural negativity of the sexual relation and jouissance rather than norms or sublimation.

     In the ethics inaugurated from the psychoanalytic act, less ethiquette, if you will forgive me, than was ever glimpsed because of starting from the act, logic commands

156. #156

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's *Meno* alongside the analytic act, Lacan argues that the theory of reminiscence — knowledge already in the soul, recoverable through questioning — is the archaic, mythical form of the function he calls the 'subject supposed to know,' which underpins every question about knowledge and is inseparable from the structure of transference and the unformulated end of the training analysis.

     the year I took on the task of stating throughout a year something which was called The ethics of psychoanalysis.

157. #157

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

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

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

     I ought to recall here what I developed at length in a year that I evoked at one of our last encounters under the title of the Ethics of psychoanalysis.

158. #158

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logical structure of the field of the Other — its constitutive incompleteness and the necessary exteriority of the subject-signifier (S2) — to reground the "I" not in being but in the truth-function of speech, showing that the subject can only be represented outside the totality of signifiers, a structure that anticipates his formalization of sexuation via universal/particular quantifiers placed "outside the field."

     as I already remarked in the seminar on Ethics, the one who announced himself in my assertion at least - as 'I am what I is'

159. #159

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.102

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

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

     all of you in so far as you are here, see that we are no longer in this atmosphere because in order to obtain this 'not too much work', we have to make a ferocious effort!

160. #160

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.179

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969

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

     what I thought I had to start from during this putting into question, which had never before been done, of what is involved, on the ethical plane, is a new term.

161. #161

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.226

     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.

     If I took care in my seminar on ethics to give a large place to courtly love, it is because this allowed us to introduce the fact that sublimation concerns the woman in the love relationship at the cost of constituting her at the level of the Thing

162. #162

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.49

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Hysteric underlies both philosophical discourse (Hegel as "the most sublime of hysterics") and analytic experience, and that the structure of psychoanalytic interpretation operates through a logic of the "half-said" — figured as either a riddle (stating without statement) or a quotation (statement invoking authorial authority) — with the analyst functioning as Objet petit a and cause of desire rather than Subject Supposed to Know.

     these two registers, in so far as they partake of the half-said, give the medium - and, as one might say, the ethics - under which interpretation intervenes

163. #163

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.78

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the non-existence of the sexual relationship is the ground from which its supplements (love, phallic jouissance, courtly love) must be theorised, and uses the distinction between reading and understanding—illustrated by commentary on *Le titre de la lettre*—to reframe the Subject Supposed to Know as the very structure of love/transference.

     the year I mentioned last time, that of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, from referring to courtly love.

164. #164

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.61

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is constitutively deficient — it is the "other satisfaction" that language-structured beings cannot fully live up to — and proposes that reality is approached through "apparatuses of jouissance" (language), thereby correcting Freud's pleasure principle and rejecting developmentalist (Lust-Ich/Real-Ich) accounts as mere "hypotheses of mastery."

     In dealing, a long time ago, a very long time ago indeed, with the ethics of psychoanalysis, I began with nothing less than Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

165. #165

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

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

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

     the kernel of what I called Dingy in my seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, namely, the Freudian Thing

166. #166

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.110

     **VII** > 92 Complement

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the distinction between the infinite and the finite to recast the logic of the not-all (pas-toute): in the finite, not-all implies a particular exception, but in the infinite the not-all produces only an indeterminate existence that cannot be constructed—grounding his claim that Woman cannot be written (barred) and that feminine jouissance exceeds the phallic function.

     I will take an ethical notion as my guide. Ethics, as perhaps can be glimpsed by those who heard me speak about it formerly, is closely related to our inhabiting of language

167. #167

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.128

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of metalanguage to pivot toward topology: because the symbolic ex-sists rather than being, and because language can only be transmitted through further language, the matheme/formalization points beyond itself to the Borromean knot as the structural figure that can 'operate' on the first knot—linking writing, jouissance, and the non-rapport of sexuation under a single topological framework.

     as some of you may recall, that is what I began with when I spoke of ethics. Lacan is referring here to Jeremy Bentham's Theory of Fictions... mentioned in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.

168. #168

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.12

     On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > On jouissance

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds Seminar XX's inquiry by defining jouissance as "what serves no purpose," distinguishing it from love (which is always mutual and demands more), positioning the superego as the imperative of jouissance ("Enjoy!"), and asserting that jouissance of the Other's body is not the sign of love — thereby opening the problem of what, beyond necessity or sufficiency, can answer with jouissance.

     I tried to show that analysis does not allow us to remain at the level of what I began with, respectfully of course - namely, Aristotle's ethics.

169. #169

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.96

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances that analytic discourse emerges from scientific discourse precisely to reveal that speaking of love is itself a jouissance, and that the soul—far from being a psychological presupposition—is an effect of love ('hommosexual' elaboration), while feminine jouissance points toward the question of the Other's knowledge, which scientific discourse forces us to think without recourse to any Supreme Being's supposed knowledge of the Good.

     endlessly saying good things leads to Kant where morality shows its true colors. That is what I felt I needed to lay out in an article, 'Kant with Sade' - morality admits that it is Sade.

170. #170

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.92

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

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

     this unmoving sphere from which all movements stem... It is insofar as her jouissance is radically Other that woman has more of a relationship to God than anything that could have been said in speculation in antiquity following the pathway of that which is manifestly articulated only as the good of man.

171. #171

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.67

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual relationship necessarily fails, and that this failure is not incidental but constitutive—the object itself is failure—and uses modal logic (the necessary as "what doesn't stop being written") to show that phallic jouissance is the only jouissance, with the 'other' (feminine) jouissance marking the not-whole that cannot be fully articulated.

     I said that I would rework The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, but that's because I'm drawing it out anew

172. #172

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.217

     J.Lacan-... of this?

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

     I think that it is an ethical notion; ethics, as you may perhaps glimpse... has the closest relationship with our inhabiting of language... ethics, is of the order of gesture.

173. #173

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.162

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural connection between the barred Woman (not-all), the barred Other S(Ø), and Other jouissance, arguing that what ancient metaphysics designated as the Supreme Good (Aristotle's unmoved mover) is in fact a mythical placeholder for the enjoyment of the Other—and that psychoanalysis must dissociate the imaginary small o from the symbolic barred O to accomplish what psychology has failed to do: the splitting that reveals the sexual non-relationship at the foundation of all knowledge.

     not only had I treated it, but that I encouraged you to consult it in order to grasp its impasses... the good of man... the coalition, on the merging of this small o with the capital S of 0 barred

174. #174

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.116

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan revisits Logical Time to show that intersubjective inference is structured around the objet petit a (the third term that reduces the dyad to One + o), then pivots to distinguish sign from signifier, grounding the subject as an effect of the signifier chain; the second seminar session opens by establishing that the speaking being's needs are contaminated by an "other satisfaction" rooted in the unconscious structured like a language, which Lacan links retrospectively to the Ethics of Psychoanalysis and ultimately to the universals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

     in treating of - it is a long time ago, it is a very long time ago, '58 - '59 - The ethics of psychoanalysis, I designated, in short, what I was insisting on by starting from nothing less than Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

175. #175

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

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

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

     what I called Ding in my seminar on The ethics of psychoanalysis

176. #176

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.165

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual non-relationship is irreducible: love operates in a 'hommosexual' (soul-to-soul) register that bypasses sex, courtly love was a historically singular meteor rather than a dialectical synthesis, and the question of woman's enjoyment opens onto whether the barred Other itself knows — with the conclusion that attributing omniscience to the Other (or to God/woman) actually diminishes rather than enriches love.

     The outside-sex (hors-sexe) of this Ethics is manifest to the point that I would like to give it the accent that Maupassant gives it by announcing somewhere this strange term of Horla.

177. #177

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.4

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

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

     I happened not to publish The Ethics of Psychoanalysis... I began to notice that I could, after all, say a little more about it

178. #178

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.141

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that what supplements the absent sexual relationship is not a dyadic fusion but a singular "there is something of the One" — irreducibly solitary — and that love (including transference as love) is the operative name for this supplement; the big Other, far from being abolished, must be reckoned with precisely as the site that mediates between the sexes in the absence of a sexual relationship, a point that also grounds his endorsement of courtly love as a "feint" for the missing relation.

     I did not refuse in the same year that I evoked the last time, of The ethics of psychoanalysis, to refer to courtly love.

179. #179

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.123

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

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

     I said that I would refer to The ethics of psychoanalysis. But since I was drawing it out anew, I could not remain at the point that I am at in it.

180. #180

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.4

     **Introduction**

     Theoretical move: In this opening session, Lacan frames the symptom as belonging to the Real, introduces the question of analytic identity and set-formation (can analysts "make a set"?), and links imbecility in the analytic discourse to the ethics of each discourse — previewing the year's central thesis that non-dupes err by refusing to play the game of a discourse's structure.

     This brings us back to the ethics of each discourse and it is not for nothing that I put forward the term ethics of psychoanalysis.

181. #181

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes sense (double-sens, meaning-effect rooted in the duplicity of the signifier) from meaning (a purely empty knotting of word to word), and uses torus topology to articulate the relations between Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary—arguing that anxiety is the symbolically real, the symptom is the only real thing that preserves sense, and that there is no sexual relationship except incestuous, with castration as the only truth.

     love as I already pointed out in my seminar on Ethics, as courtly love supports it, is only a meaning.

182. #182

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     So then what is this lack?

     Theoretical move: The passage maps a four-moment dialectical circuit of the drive (using music as its privileged illustration) in which the subject's repeated failure to encounter the objet petit a gradually confirms its radical impossibility, ultimately enabling a leap "through the fantasy" toward an ecstatic, desexualised Other jouissance that Lacan identifies with sublimation – and which constitutes the terminal point of the analytic process beyond ordinary surplus-jouissance.

     this poses for us the problem of the ethics of the analyst. Is the analyst precisely not someone from whom one can hear that he hears certain things, is he not, at a given moment, necessarily, by the very structure of the instinctual circuit, in a position of having to make himself a speaker?

183. #183

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VI by re-centering psychoanalytic theory on "desire" against the Object Relations drift toward "object-seeking" libido, arguing that desire—not affect, libido-as-energy, or object-relation—is the fundamental axis of psychoanalytic practice, and anchors this claim in a philosophical genealogy running from Aristotle's ethics of mastery through Spinoza's identification of desire with human essence.

     everything that enters into this moralizing perspective has to do with the register of mastery, with a master's morality, and with that over which the master can achieve mastery...But as concerns desire, things are quite different.

184. #184

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.426

     THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that being is co-extensive with the cut/gap in the signifying chain, and that the subject, constituted as "not one" (barred, split), appears precisely at those gaps in desire — a structural account that displaces both ego-psychological notions of genital maturity and religious/moral frameworks for desire's satisfaction, while insisting on desire as the irreducible proof of the subject's presence.

     On the day of the Last Judgment, won't what we will be able to say about what we have done, in our unique existence, to realize our desire weigh as heavily as what we will have done along the lines ... of doing what is known as the good?

185. #185

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.328

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

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

     from an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.

186. #186

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     **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.

     the good as such - something that has been the eternal object of the philosophical quest in the sphere of ethics, the philosopher's stone of all the moralists - the good is radically denied by Freud.

187. #187

     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.

     We are now in a position to be able to discuss the text of Antigone with a view to finding something other than a lesson in morality.

188. #188

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     **IV**

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

     I am trying to explore with you this year, so as to make you understand its importance for our practice as an ethics.

189. #189

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     **XIV** > The function of the good

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

     Everything in your analytical experience suggests that the notion and finality of the good are problematic for you. Which good are you pursuing precisely as far as your passion is concerned?

190. #190

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.20

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

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

     I will not, in fact, be able to avoid a certain inquiry into historical progress... the question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real.

191. #191

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     **XI** > **XIII**

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

     All the mystery is in that act. It is designed to hide something, namely, that not only does the murder of the father not open the path to jouissance that the presence of the father was supposed to prohibit, but it, in fact, strengthens the prohibition.

192. #192

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

     **XXIII**

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

     What the superego demands has nothing to do with that which we would be right in making the universal rule of our actions; such is the ABC of psychoanalytic truth.

193. #193

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.239

     **XIV** > The function of the good

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

     A radical repudiation of a certain ideal of the good is necessary, if one is to grasp the direction in which our experience is leading.

194. #194

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.191

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

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

     To the extent that a sensitive subject such as ethics is not nowadays separable from what is called ideology, it seems to me appropriate to offer here some clarification of the political meaning of this turning point in ethics for which we, the inheritors of Freud, are responsible.

195. #195

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.51

     **Ill**

     Theoretical move: By reading Freud's 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' closely, Lacan argues that the apparatus described there is fundamentally a topology of subjectivity, and that the principle of repetition is grounded in the constitutive gap between desire's articulation and its satisfaction — the 'refound object' is always missed, rendering specific action structurally incomplete.

     We cannot avoid giving that remark the approbation of the most profound moral experience... that which is realized and satisfying in the fullest of senses, in the moral sense as such.

196. #196

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

     **XIV** > **XIX**

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

     It is not for him a question of a right opposed to a right, but of a wrong opposed to - what? To something else that is represented by Antigone.

197. #197

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.200

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

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

     the perspective of the ethical ends of psychoanalysis, whose significance I am trying to demonstrate here, has to combat. It is something one encounters sooner rather than later.

198. #198

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

     **XIV** > **XX**

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

     She is inhuman. But we shouldn't situate her at the level of the monstrous, for what would that mean from our point of view?

199. #199

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

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

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

     the appearance, articulation, establishment, of a whole moral code, of a whole ethic, a whole way of life, that is called courtly love.

200. #200

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.320

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis is grounded not in the service of goods or traditional moral regulation, but in the question "Have you acted in conformity with your desire?" — a standard derived from the topology of desire that both tragedy and comedy reveal, and which Kant's categorical imperative partially anticipates but fails to complete, leaving a void that psychoanalysis identifies as the place of desire.

     if there is an ethics of psychoanalysis - the question is an open one - it is to the extent that analysis in some way or other, no matter how minimally, offers something that is presented as a measure of our action

201. #201

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

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

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

     ethics and, 107-8

202. #202

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.186

     **XI** > **XIII**

     Theoretical move: The Law and transgression are constitutively bound together as the condition of access to jouissance; without the Law's prohibition, desire loses its driving force. This dialectic is grounded in Freud's myth of the murder of the father, which reveals that God was never anything but the father of the son's mythology — a structure whose inner atheism Hegel already diagnosed as Christianity's own consequence.

     Freud's ideal is an ideal tempered with civility that might be called patriarchal civility, in the full idyllic sense.

203. #203

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     **XIV** > **XX**

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

     This point is extremely important if we want to be clear about Creon's stature. We will see later what he is, that is, like all executioners and tyrants at bottom, a human character. Only the martyrs know neither pity nor fear.

204. #204

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

     **XIV** > **XVI**

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

     in order to demystify the Platonic and the Aristotelian view of the good, indeed of the Supreme Good, and to situate it on the level of the economy of goods... the novelty of what Freud brings to the domain of ethics.

205. #205

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.293

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

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

     the latent, fundamental image of Antigone forms part of your morality, whether you like it or not. That's why it is important to analyze its meaning

206. #206

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     **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.

     We will see what an absolute choice means, a choice that is motivated by no good.

207. #207

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

     **XIV** > The function of the good

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

     We must see right away how crude it is to accept the idea that, in the ethical order itself, everything can be reduced to social constraint.

208. #208

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.308

     **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.

     The question of the Sovereign Good is one that man has asked himself since time immemorial, but the analyst knows that it is a question that is closed. Not only doesn't he have that Sovereign Good that is asked of him, but he also knows there isn't any.

209. #209

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.311

     **XXIII**

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

     I believe I cannot do enough to articulate the limit of the progress I wanted you to make... something that remains obscure in what might be called the moral goals of psychoanalysis.

210. #210

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.266

     **XIV** > **XX**

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

     Creon exists to illustrate a function that we have shown is inherent in the structure of the ethic of tragedy, which is also that of psychoanalysis; he seeks the good.

211. #211

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     **II**

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

     I can't help thinking that Freud... is transposing here the properly ethical articulation of the problem on to a hypothetical, mechanistic point of view.

212. #212

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

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

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

     The example of the mustard pot and the vase allows us to introduce that around which the central problem of the Thing has revolved, to the extent that it is the central problem of ethics

213. #213

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

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

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

     literary badness here is perhaps the guarantee of the very badness or mauvaisité... that is the object of our investigation.

214. #214

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.15

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ethics of psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to psychogenesis, sociogenesis, or any of the three dominant analytical ideals (genital love, authenticity, non-dependence), but must be grounded in the autonomy of the signifier and the law of discourse—most sharply condensed in Freud's 'Wo es war, soll Ich werden'—and measured against the full tradition of ethical thought, including Aristotle's ethics of habit.

     the ethics of analysis - for there is one - involves effacement, setting aside, withdrawal, indeed, the absence of a dimension that one only has to mention in order to realize how much separates us from all ethical thought that preceded us.

215. #215

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     **Ill**

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

     Contrary to received opinion, I believe that the opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle or between the primary process and the secondary process concerns not so much the sphere of psychology as that of ethics properly speaking.

216. #216

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     **XI**

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

     it is here that the ethical function of eroticism enters into play. Freudianism is in brief nothing but a perpetual allusion to the fecundity of eroticism in ethics, but it doesn't formulate it as such.

217. #217

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     **IX** > **X**

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

     We are concerned here with the Freudian experience as an ethics, which is to say, at its most essential level, since it directs us towards a therapeutic form of action that, whether we like it or not, is included in the register or in the terms of an ethics.

218. #218

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.342

     **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.

     ethics and, 103,104,105 ... Freud's denial of Sovereign Good ... evolution of ethics, 11, 12-14

219. #219

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     **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.

     the deeper dimension of analytical thought, work and technique that I am calling ethics... the natural phenomenon of the instinct in entropy to be taken up at the level of the person... insofar as the latter as a whole is situated in an ethical dimension.

220. #220

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.292

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Antigone's beauty functions as a blinding screen that prevents direct apprehension of the death drive she incarnates; situated between two deaths, her complaint (κομμός) and her identification with Niobe reveal her as the pure embodiment of the desire of death, rooted in the criminal desire of the mother, which she perpetuates by guarding the being of the criminal (Atè) against all social mediation.

     Between the two of them, Antigone chooses to be purely and simply the guardian of the being of the criminal as such.

221. #221

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.79

     **V**

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

     the step taken by Freud at the level of the pleasure principle is to show us that there is no Sovereign Good - that the Sovereign Good, which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good. Such is the foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by Freud.

222. #222

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.116

     **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.

     It is after all as a function of the problem of ethics that we have to judge sublimation; it creates socially recognized values.

223. #223

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

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

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

     the ethical stance consists in realizing to the most extreme point this assimilation to absolute evil... To love him, to love him as myself, is necessarily to move toward some cruelty.

224. #224

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

     **II**

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

     ethical thinkers have at all times not been able to avoid trying to identify these two terms, which are after all fundamentally antithetical, namely, pleasure and the good.

225. #225

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.252

     **XIV** > **XIX**

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

     Antigone is a tragedy, and tragedy is in the forefront of our experiences as analysts... tragedy is at the root of our experience, as the key word 'catharsis' implies.

226. #226

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     **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.

     seeking what to teach you and how, on the subject that we are navigating towards under the title of the ethics of psychoanalysis.

227. #227

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.310

     **XIV** > **XXII**

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must not collapse the distance between analyst and analysand into imaginary fusion; such a collapse (figured as the "joiner" fantasy) leads to psychosis or perversion, and points toward the ethics of analysis being grounded in sublimation and the sublime rather than imaginary incorporation.

     it is the desire to draw closer to the point of being joined to the one who is in his charge. One can only say of such an aspiration that it is pathetic in its naivete.

228. #228

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     **VIII**

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

     what we are trying to point to there is precisely that which each and every one of us has to deal with in the least operational of ways... I am concerned with the ethics of psychoanalysis, and I can't at the same time discuss Hegelian ethics. But I do want to point out that they are not the same.

229. #229

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.151

     **XI**

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

     you might almost structure around this anamorphosis the ideas I am sketching out for you on the subject of the ethics of psychoanalysis. It is something that is wholly founded on the forbidden reference that Freud encountered at the terminal point of what in his thought one might call the Oedipus myth.

230. #230

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.128

     **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 notion of creation with all it implies... is central, not only for our theme of the motive of sublimation, but also that of ethics in its broadest sense.

231. #231

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

     **XIV** > **XVIII**

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

     our question has a meaning that you would do well to remember has a terrifying relevance

232. #232

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282

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

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

     We consider ourselves to be at the end of the vein of humanist thought … man is in the process of splitting apart … the images rise up that turn out to be the most fascinating of that whole period of history which can be dubbed humanist.

233. #233

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

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

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

     Antigone's position represents the radical limit that affirms the unique value of his being without reference to any content, to whatever good or evil Polynices may have done.

234. #234

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.92

     **VI**

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

     Freud's discovery - the ethics of psychoanalysis - does it leave us clinging to that dialectic? We will have to explore that which, over the centuries, human beings have succeeded in elaborating that transgresses the Law.

235. #235

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     **II**

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

     the ethical question of our practice is intimately related to one that we have been in a position to glimpse for some time

236. #236

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     **IX** > **X**

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

     We only have essentially the documentary testimony of art, but we still feel today the ethical ramifications.

237. #237

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     **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.

     I am trying with all the means at my disposal, which are simply those of experience, to make the ethical dimension of psychoanalysis come alive before you.

238. #238

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

     **V**

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

     it is important to articulate it so as to bring out the originality, the revolution in thought, that was the effect of the Freudian experience in the field of ethics.

239. #239

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     **VI**

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

     My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.

240. #240

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.300

     **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.

     the direction I have been taking you in this year, the point to which I have suggested you follow me, namely, there where the question of exploring the general ethical consequences involved in Freud's opening up of the relationship to the unconscious is raised.

241. #241

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     **IV**

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

     it is conceivable that it is as a pure signifying system, as a universal maxim, as that which is the most lacking in a relationship to the individual, that the features of das Ding must be presented. It is here that, along with Kant, we must see the focal point, aim and convergence, according to which an action that we will qualify as moral will present itself.

242. #242

     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.

     Freud's reference to the fact that the operations of sublimation are always ethically, culturally, and socially valorized. This criterion, external to psychoanalysis, certainly creates a difficulty

243. #243

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

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

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

     the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one's desire.

244. #244

     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.

     It is, I assume, clear to you all that what I am concerned with this year is situated somewhere between a Freudian ethics and a Freudian aesthetics.

245. #245

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

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that *das Ding* occupies a paradoxical topological position—excluded yet central—and that the subject's entire relation to the good (Wohl), the pleasure principle, repetition, and the reality principle is organized around this primordial excluded exterior; ethics proper begins only beyond these structural coordinates, at the point where the unconscious lie (proton pseudos) marks the subject's constitutive inability to directly approach das Ding.

     It is impossible for us to make any progress in this seminar relative to the questions posed by the ethics of psychoanalysis if you do not have this book as a reference point.

246. #246

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.10

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VII by framing the ethics of psychoanalysis as irreducible to moralism or the naturalist liberation of desire: the 'attraction of transgression' — running from Freud's murder-of-the-father myth through the death drive — constitutes the properly psychoanalytic entry-point into ethics, one that cannot be dissolved by taming perverse jouissance or reducing guilt.

     I announced that the title of my seminar this year was The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.

247. #247

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.193

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* and *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*, argues that jouissance remains forbidden even after the death of God, and that the commandment to love one's neighbor is ethically explosive precisely because the neighbor harbors the same "fundamental evil"—the same proximity to das Ding—that I harbour in myself; altruism and utilitarianism are exposed as frauds that allow us to avoid confronting the malignant jouissance at the heart of the ethical problem, which only Sade (and Kant) begin to articulate honestly.

     Civilization and Its Discontents concerns the effort to rethink the problem of evil once one acknowledges that it is radically altered by the absence of God.

248. #248

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.199

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that Kant's moral calculus collapses once jouissance—understood as implicitly bound to evil and death—is substituted for pleasure in the ethical equation: the moral law then serves as a support for jouissance rather than its constraint, revealing that the law of the good can only operate through evil, and that the ethical subject is torn between a duty of truth that preserves the place of jouissance and a resignation to the good that extinguishes it.

     I who stand here right now and bear witness to the idea that there is no law of the good except in evil and through evil

249. #249

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     **II**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the true backbone of Freud's thought is not a developmental/genetic schema (the child-as-father-of-the-man trope, historically located in English Romanticism) but the fundamental opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, the latter functioning not as mere equilibrium but as a corrective apparatus against the psychic apparatus's radical inadequation—its natural tendency toward hallucinatory satisfaction rather than need-satisfaction.

     But is that the whole of our discovery, is that the whole of our morality? That attenuation, that exposure to the light of day, that discovery of the thought of desire, of the truth of that thought?

250. #250

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S* > <span id="page-136-0"></span>**EXIT FROM THE ULTRA-W ORLD**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Diotima's speech in the Symposium as staging a fundamental slippage between two functions of beauty—beauty as a veil over the desire for death (between-two-deaths) and beauty as the metonymic object of desire—arguing that this movement illustrates the metonymic structure of desire itself, while also pointing toward what is missed when Plato is read as reducing Eros to narcissistic self-perfection (identification with the ideal ego).

     what she leads us toward, is already sketched out in the question she asks... concerning which I ask you to recall my Seminar last year on ethics.

251. #251

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.111

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the topology of desire in the death drive and the "between-two-deaths," arguing that Freud's discovery of the unconscious is not reducible to the content of the Oedipus myth but to its structural form—"he did not know"—which inscribes the subject's desire in a signifying chain beyond consciousness, beyond adaptation, and in permanent tension with individual life.

     I am trying to ground with you the basic topology of desire, its interpretation, and - in short - its rational ethics.

252. #252

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.252

     **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** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces capital Φ as the unique symbol that occupies the place of the missing signifier — not because any signifier is literally absent from the battery, but because the dimension of questioning opens a subjective gap where the signifier's own foundation becomes ungraspable, making Φ indispensable for understanding how the castration complex operates on the mainspring of transference.

     As I told you last year in my classes on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, this conception dates back to the beginning of the Romantic period

253. #253

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.22

     **Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan draws a structural parallel between Socrates and Freud as figures who "served Eros in order to make use of him," arguing that this shared practice — and the radical atopia it produces with respect to the social order — is the true precondition of transference and the analytic encounter, which necessarily suspends intersubjectivity rather than deepening it.

     you must in no way, whether premeditated or permanent, posit as the primary aim of your action your patient's own good — supposed or otherwise — but rather his eros.

254. #254

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.93

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates — his *atopia*, his daemon, his relation to truth and death — to theorize a pre-subjective, discourse-grounded dimension of truth and the Real, drawing a genealogy from pre-Socratic philosophy through Plato's *Symposium* in order to illuminate what is demanded of the analyst: a situatedness-nowhere analogous to Socrates' own unsituable position.

     This is the very term I had to bring out last year in my discussion of ethics, and that I called 'the Thing.'

255. #255

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.412

     **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.

     regarding anyone, you can raise the question whether desire is totally destructive. With anyone, you can try to determine how far you will dare to go in questioning a being — at the risk to yourself of disappearing.

256. #256

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Claudel's Sygne de Coûfontaine to push beyond the ethical limit marked by Antigone's beauty — the "between two deaths" — arguing that Sygne's sacrifice, which ends in an absolute refusal of meaning (the "no"), goes beyond ancient tragedy's evil-God function and beyond beauty itself, indexing a new form of human tragedy organized around a desire adjacent only to the reference of Sade.

     indicated that the limit of this domain, the limit of the second death, is designated and also veiled by what I called the phenomenon of beauty

257. #257

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.72

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *PAUSANIAS*

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pausanias's speech in the *Symposium* as a "psychology of the rich" — an ethics of love structured entirely around the valuation, investment, and capitalization of the beloved as a good — and uses this reading to argue that any ethics which reduces love to outward signs of value inevitably produces illusion, thereby distancing Plato himself from Pausanias's position.

     Pausanias' speech is curiously presented to us as an example of the fact that there is, in love in Antiquity, some kind of glorification of the moral quest. Even before we get to the end of his speech we notice that it clearly shows the error of any ethics that latches only onto what one might call outward signs of value.

258. #258

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     **Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic relationship is not reducible to a neutral "situation" but is constituted by a high-degree sublimation of libidinal investment, making love — not well-being — the proper telos of analysis; he thus announces a return to the philosophical tradition on love (via Plato's Symposium) to supply what psychoanalytic literature has entirely neglected.

     If you were willing to grant what I said last year, you know that it is outdated.

259. #259

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

     Theoretical move: By reading the scandalous comportment of the gods of Antiquity through the concept of âgalma, Lacan argues that divine love (eros/agape) structures the deceptive, mutually-luring relation between Socrates and Alcibiades, and that this same structure—from the unconscious toward the subject ascending to the core object—governs the psychoanalytic dialectic of love.

     For here things go further than anything. Divine debauchery disguises itself as human virtue. When I say that nothing stops the Greek gods, I mean that they go so far as to make a mockery of even what is best.

260. #260

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *Phaedrus*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of Phaedrus' speech in the Symposium to argue that the succession of eulogies traces a fundamental topology of love's impossibility, and introduces a theological framework (the gods belong to the Real) to situate Eros within the tripartite RSI schema, while the myth of Orpheus anchors the distinction between the fantasmatic object and the Other's being.

     what I formulated for you last year as what delimits the zone of tragedy - namely, the between-two-deaths.

261. #261

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.18

     **Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VIII by situating transference not within an intersubjective framework but within a constitutive disparity, tracing its origin back to love (the Breuer/Anna O. encounter), and connecting it to the prior year's ethical reflection — especially the rejection of the Sovereign Good (Plato's Schwärmerei), the function of beauty as a barrier to the death drive, and the 'between-two-deaths' — in order to establish Socrates' secret knowledge of love as the hidden key to understanding transference.

     Last year I endeavored to explain to you... the creationist structure of the human ethos as such, that is, the ex nihilo that subsists at its core, constituting 'the core of our being,' to borrow Freud's expression (Kern unseres Wesen).

262. #262

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Agathon's speech in the Symposium is a deliberately ironic, "macaronic" discourse in which the tragic poet reveals love as what is radically unclassifiable and always inopportune — always lagging behind — and that this comic-tragic ambivalence is structurally necessary: in the Christian context, love fills the void left by the inexorable fatal oracle and the commandment of the second death, which can no longer be sustained.

     Owing to the Christian context, [the idea that one has an] ultimate destiny is purged [vidé], as are the closed and incomprehensible nature of the fatal oracle and the inexpressibility of the commandment as regards the second death.

263. #263

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.289

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from critiquing reductive accounts of desire to introducing Claudel's trilogy as a contemporary tragedy that, like Antigone, pushes the subject to the limit of the "second death" — here uniquely demanding that the heroine sacrifice not merely life but her very being, the sacred pact constituting her identity, going *beyond* the limits Antigone reached.

     we thus find ourselves carried, by what I am provisionally calling a contemporary tragedy, to the limits of the 'second death,' the death that I taught you about last year when we discussed Antigone

264. #264

     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.

     if this is what I told you throughout the whole year of the seminar on Ethics

265. #265

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the structural distinction between love and desire: love is a natural, hydraulic force grounded in narcissistic libido, whereas desire is constituted by lack—specifically the lack of the phallus in the other—and can never coincide with love without collapsing into narcissism. This distinction grounds the clinic of hysteria and obsession and is anchored retrospectively in Plato's Symposium as the founding articulation of the subject of desire.

     this also connects up with what I accentuated last year as being the point always aimed at by the ethics of the passions, which is to bring about... this conjunction regarding which it is a question of knowing whether precisely it is not structurally impossible

266. #266

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.309

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan articulates the objet petit a as a topological-ontological operator: it is the object of castration that, by its enucleation from the cross-cap, transforms the imaginary sphere into a Möbius surface, thereby constituting the subject's world while marking the irreducible hole at the centre of desire and the Other's desire—a 'acosmic point' that underlies every metaphor, every symptom, and the anxiety of confronting what the Other desires of the subject.

     I am talking about Maurice Blanchot whose deat sentence was for me for a long time the surest confirmation of what I was saying for a whole year in the seminar on Ethics about the second death.

267. #267

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.3

     *Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar IX by arguing that identification must be approached not through the imaginary relation to the other but through the logical problem of identity (A = A), and that the subject is constituted not by any self-present cogito but solely through the existence of the signifier and its effects — a thesis which frames the entire year's inquiry.

     This is known to those who formerly listened to my seminar on Ethics, the one in which I exactly approached the function of this barrier of beauty.

268. #268

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.146

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "reality of desire" is constituted through the dimension of the hidden and the structural weakness of the Other as guarantor of truth; this dialectic is traced through hysteric and obsessional modes of evading capture, and culminates in the claim that ethical behaviour—and the irreducibility of the castration complex at analysis's end—can only be understood by mapping desire's function in relation to the Other.

     nothing, not a step of our ethical behaviour can be sustained without an exact mapping out of the function of desire... Here is the ethical balance properly speaking.

269. #269

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Symposium's agalma — what Alcibiades seeks at the heart of Socrates — to argue that the object of desire is ultimately the Other's desire itself (the pure eron), and that the phallus functions as the punctual, organising point that connects the barred subject ($) to the object (o) in the fundamental fantasy, while also introducing the third Freudian mode of identification as constituted through desire at the locus of the big Other.

     the Sadian one, namely the one that I had occasion to spell out previously, for you, with you, in the seminar on ethics, in so far as, being the realisation of an inner experience... it is by insulting nature that Sade tries to define the essence of human desire

270. #270

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962* > *Seminar 11*: *Wednesday 28 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions desire as an unsurpassable "truth function" at the heart of analytic practice, articulates the Death Drive and Life Drive (Eros/libido) as structured around the signifier and the phallus, and uses the Kantian critique of pure reason—especially its categories, pure intuition, and the synthetic function—as an analogy to illuminate the relationship between subjectivity, the body, and desire, while invoking the Kant/Sade parallel to show that desire exceeds all pathological (comfort/need) determinations.

     it is only by rectifying our perspective on desire that we can maintain analytic technique in its primary function...a truth function

271. #271

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's ethics cannot be reduced to utilitarianism or humanism because its core is the structuring function of the Name-of-the-Father as prohibition of jouissance, a mechanism legible in St. Paul's account of the law and sin, and whose truth Freud traces through the Oedipus complex, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism to a Judeo-Christian ontological tradition that grounds the subject in discourse rather than in biology.

     morality. The latter consists primarily- as Freud saw and articulated, and he never changed his tune regarding it... in the frustration of a jouissance that is posited by an apparently greedy law.

272. #272

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.90

     It is a philosophical problem.

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his analytical project from philosophy by grounding the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary as three functional "ropes" that keep analytic practice rigorous, not as philosophical propositions — and defends the "Kant with Sade" article as a genuine theoretical intervention that went unrecognized.

     I attempt to determine what an analyst can learn from, to sketch out what the function of the analyst implies by way of a rigorous conceptual apparatus, and to indicate the guardrail one must hold onto so as not to overstep one's function as an analyst.

273. #273

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's investigation of narcissism and the mirror stage reveals that self-love is always love of an imaginary other, and that the unconscious—structured like language—marks the place where the subject is split from the Thing (Das Ding), making any ethics grounded in ego-psychology or object relations insufficient for the demands of scientific modernity.

     We see here the decisive importance of the discourse of the so-called physical sciences and of something that raises the question of an ethics which can measure up to an era like ours.

274. #274

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     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.

     I have raised before you the question that is at the very heart of Freud's practice… Is it in order to know in what way his desire could be grasped?

275. #275

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.12

     I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freudian desire—properly understood as the "true intention" of an unconscious discourse structured like a signifying chain—poses genuinely new problems for moral philosophy, positioning psychoanalysis as a more adequate ethics than either Ego Psychology's adaptive finalism or traditional philosophy of good intentions.

     My teaching this year is thus focused explicitly on a theme that is generally avoided: the ethical impact of psychoanalysis, of the morals that psychoanalysis can suggest, presuppose, or contain, and of the step forward psychoanalysis would perhaps allow us to take - how audacious! - in the moral realm.

276. #276

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions Freud's ethics as irreducible to any morality of the sovereign good, honesty, or utility: the good cannot be represented, guilt is rooted in the unconscious and tied to a structural (not individual) crime, and desire—articulated through language including its negations—constitutes the very "want-to-be" that marks the subject, making the unconscious not a zone without logic but the very source of negation.

     As regards the sovereign good, Freud's position is that pleasure is not it. Nor is it what morality refuses. Freud indicates that the good does not exist and that the sovereign good cannot be represented.

277. #277

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.10

     Lecture Announcement

     Theoretical move: This lecture announcement frames Lacan's ethics seminars as a challenge to normalization in analytic practice and to religious monopoly on morality, positioning Freud's articulation of the unconscious as capable of grounding an ethics that goes beyond hedonism, altruism, and phenomenological critique — centering Das Ding and the Name of the Father as the structural pivots of desire and moral law.

     Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

278. #278

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.101

     <span id="page-92-0"></span>The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive—understood as a drive toward loss, self-destruction, and repetition of originary absence—is the foundational structure of both subjectivity and sociality, with sacrifice, love, and political bonds all grounded in shared nothingness rather than positive satisfaction; the emancipated subject is thus one who avows hopelessness rather than seeking untainted enjoyment.

     The sacrifce, in this view, is an actual ethical act because it's self-sacrifce... Once you have a self-interest in sacrifce, it's not the sacrifce. It's not the emptiness.

279. #279

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.143

     <span id="page-138-0"></span>Epilogue: No Salvation

     Theoretical move: The epilogue proposes "negative psychoanalysis" as a practice that refuses salvation, expertise, and positive consolation, remaining faithful to the negative insight that nothing can save us—a self-cancelling praxis that mirrors the constitutive rupture of the subject and the social bond itself.

     It would not refute its negativity and would itself remain negative. It wouldn't act like conventional psychoanalysis, which, in practice, runs counter to the negative insight.

280. #280

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the Copernican revolution in metaphysics—making objects conform to our faculties of cognition rather than vice versa—simultaneously limits speculative reason to phenomena while opening a practical domain for freedom, morality, and belief; the critique's "negative" restriction of knowledge is thus positively enabling for practical reason and ethics.

     morality does not require the speculative cognition of liberty; it is enough that I can think it, that its conception involves no contradiction

281. #281

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Ideal of the Summum Bonum as a Determining Ground of the Ultimate End of Pure Reason. > 1. WHAT CAN I KNOW? 2. WHAT OUGHT I TO DO? 3. WHAT MAY I HOPE?

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the unity of ends in a moral world (regnum gratiae) grounds teleological unity in nature, making practical reason — not speculative reason — the foundation for the idea of a supreme good and a Primal Being; moral theology must remain immanent, warning against the transcendent misuse that would derive moral laws from the divine will rather than reason's own legislation.

     the supreme good. Hence the investigation of nature receives a teleological direction, and becomes, in its widest extension, physico-theology.

282. #282

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION IX. Of the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason with regard to the Cosmological Ideas.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the same subject can be understood under two distinct modes of causality — an empirical character (as phenomenon, governed by natural necessity) and an intelligible character (as thing-in-itself, outside time and free from causal determination) — thereby resolving the cosmological antinomy between nature and freedom without contradiction, and grounding the practical concept of the moral 'ought' in reason's spontaneous causality.

     The words I ought express a species of necessity, and imply a connection with grounds which nature does not and cannot present to the mind of man.

283. #283

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

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

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that reason demands systematic unity ('architectonic') as the condition of genuine science, distinguishing technical (empirical) from architectonical (a priori) unity, and within this framework differentiates historical from rational cognition, philosophy from mathematics, and the scholastic from the cosmical conception of philosophy—culminating in the claim that moral philosophy occupies the apex of the legislative system of pure reason.

     This ultimate end is the destination of man, and the philosophy which relates to it is termed moral philosophy. The superior position occupied by moral philosophy, above all other spheres for the operations of reason.

284. #284

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Ideal of the Summum Bonum as a Determining Ground of the Ultimate End of Pure Reason. > 1. WHAT CAN I KNOW? 2. WHAT OUGHT I TO DO? 3. WHAT MAY I HOPE?

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the three questions of pure reason—what can I know, what ought I to do, what may I hope—converge on a moral theology in which the necessary connection between moral worthiness and happiness can only be grounded in the postulate of a supreme rational cause (God) and a future life, making the 'ideal of the summum bonum' a practically necessary idea of reason rather than a speculative one.

     Happiness alone is, in the view of reason, far from being the complete good. Reason does not approve of it (however much inclination may desire it), except as united with desert.

285. #285

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION I. Of the Ultimate End of the Pure Use of Reason.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the three transcendental ideas of pure reason (freedom, immortality, God) have no constitutive speculative use but converge on a single practical-moral interest, thereby subordinating the entire speculative enterprise to the question of what we ought to do — reason's ultimate vocation is moral, not theoretical.

     the ultimate intention of nature, in the constitution of our reason, has been directed to the moral alone

286. #286

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.94

     The voice and the drive > The voice of the daemon

     Theoretical move: By tracing the "voice of conscience" from Socrates' daemon through Rousseau's Savoy vicar, Dolar argues that the supposedly pure inner voice — positioned as the ground of morality beyond logos — is structurally tied to the big Other: the apotreptic, negative function of the divine inner voice always requires an external authority (Teacher, daemon, God) to authenticate it, so the ideal of autonomous self-authorization secretly reproduces heteronomy.

     the voice pertains to the moral law as opposed to the positive written laws of the community; the voice is sustained by 'the unwritten law.'

287. #287

     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 heroism of desire would have to be abandoned for another principle, tentatively 'from desire to drive.'

288. #288

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.103

     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 ethics, as promulgated by Lacan in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, is the ethics of insistence on desire, of desire as an uncompromising insistence. Hence the notorious maxim of this ethics: not to give way on one's desire: ne pas céder sur son désir.

289. #289

     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 moral law, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state... the only thing which one can be guilty of is of having given ground relative to one's desire

290. #290

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.109

     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.

     The difference between the ethical voice and the superego runs between the voice of pure enunciation and the fat voice.

291. #291

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.92

     The voice and the drive > His Master's Voice, His Master's Ear

     Theoretical move: The voice, as object of the drive, operates through a constitutive asymmetry of incorporation and expulsion that makes it extimate—belonging to neither interior nor exterior—and this same structural topology grounds the intimate connection between voice and conscience that has animated the ethical tradition.

     Is ethics about hearing voices? Given the link between conscience and consciousness (both are modes of con-scio), is consciousness about hearing voices?

292. #292

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.147

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > Breast-Feeding and Freedom

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern subject's definition as free necessarily generates anxiety by including the Real within the Symbolic as a negation (the indestructible double), and that the proper response is not to interpret anxiety as demand but to sustain the object a as the unspeakable support of freedom—illustrated negatively by Frankenstein's reduction of the monster's desire to a demand.

     As Lacan pointed out in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, it is Kant's conception of the beautiful that writes this impossibility most eloquently.

293. #293

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.95

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that utilitarianism's equation of use with pleasure—and its corollary that pleasure is usable—is the hidden engine of functionalism's imperialism and social despotism; against this, Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis intervenes by positing a subject constituted by a 'beyond the pleasure principle' (the death drive), making pleasure structurally unavailable as an index of the good and thereby exposing the utilitarian subject as a fiction of zero-resistance manipulability.

     One of the virtues of Lacan's seminar on ethics is that it allows us to see Bentham's charge as an instance of the kettle calling the despot black.

294. #294

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.247

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamical sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share the same logic of the limit/exception (foreclosure of existential judgment), and uses this alignment to call for a new, alternative ethics proper to women—an "ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited"—beyond the superego's logic of exception.

     the field of ethics has too long been theorized in terms of this particular superegoic logic of exception or limit. It is now time to devote some thought to developing an ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited, that is, an ethics proper to the woman.

295. #295

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.108

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis corrects both Kantian ethics and utilitarianism by reinstating the superego as the hidden enunciator of the moral law, thereby restoring the division of the subject that Kant's erasure of the enunciating instance threatens to abolish—and exposing how the disavowal of this division underwrites the violence latent in utilitarian happiness-maximization.

     Why does psychoanalysis insist on exposing the cruel enunciator, the sadistic superego, who speaks the moral law? Because it wishes to demonstrate the ethical necessity of hearing the otherness of this voice and of maintaining our distance from it.

296. #296

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.102

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis fundamentally opposes utilitarianism's ethics by grounding moral law not in reciprocity and shared pleasure but in the nonreciprocal relation between the subject and its inaccessible Thing—demonstrating that repressed desire is the cause, not the consequence, of the law, and that true freedom consists in acting contrary to self-interest, even unto death.

     The sole moral maxim of psychoanalysis is this: do not surrender your internal conflict, your division.

297. #297

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.255

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego > Chapter l

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section (bibliographic apparatus) for a chapter on lethal jouissance, the femme fatale, and sexual difference; it contains no independent theoretical argument, only citations and brief editorial glosses.

     Lacan's fullest discussion of the creation ex nihilo of the subject can be found in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.

298. #298

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.260

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego > Chapter l

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of scholarly endnotes and bibliographic references for multiple chapters, providing citations and brief contextual glosses rather than advancing any single theoretical argument. It is non-substantive as a theoretical unit, though several notes touch on key Lacanian concepts (extimacy, anxiety, ethics, suture, the real) in passing.

     In Lacan's seminar, utilitarianism is treated not as a minor and somewhat quaint English philosophy concerned merely with the distribution of goods but as the clearest articulation of a revolution in ethics that unseated Aristotelian ethics in the nineteenth century.

299. #299

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *The end of ideology*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "critique of ideology" inaugurated by Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud radically destabilizes any claim to neutral, objective knowledge of God or world, but that both the conservative (retreat to naïveté) and liberal (ethical Christianity without God) ecclesial responses falsely assume this critique is incompatible with meaningful faith.

     those who claim that we must bite the bullet and forge a new Christianity from the carcass of the old, a Christianity that is concerned with developing an ethical way of life based on the teachings of Jesus while rejecting the question of God as an irrelevant abstraction

300. #300

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Corpus Christi*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological move that displaces propositional truth (orthodoxy) in favour of transformative, relational truth (orthopraxis), arguing that the encounter with God occurs in and through the body of the neighbour—a claim enacted liturgically through parable, Sufi poetry, and Holocaust testimony, all of which converge on the Lacanian-resonant dissolution of a self-enclosed 'I' as the condition of genuine encounter.

     we must seek to live and believe in a way that offers healing, liberation and love to the world, all the while acknowledging that the manner of doing this cannot be worked out fully in advance.

301. #301

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *The prejudice of love*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ethical reading of scripture cannot be neutral or objective; instead, it advances the concept of a "prejudice of love" as the properly theological hermeneutic, positioning the tension between exegesis and eisegesis as the authentic mode of faithful interpretation and thereby displacing modernistic, foundationalist ethics.

     The term 'ethics' refers to an approach to moral situations in which we work out how we ought to act by deriving ideas from a foundation given by reason and/or revelation.

302. #302

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Prosperity*

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a liturgical parody of prosperity theology and self-centred faith to enact a critique of orthopraxis versus orthodoxy: authentic faith is demonstrated not through correct doctrine, Bible-reading, or worship practices, but through transformative action oriented toward the neighbour — a theological move that deploys the logic of transgression to expose ideological religion as a fetishistic crutch that substitutes symbolic performance for genuine ethical engagement.

     The court is indifferent towards your Bible reading and church attendance; it has no concern for worship with words and a pen... We exist for those who would lay down that brush, and their life, in a Christlike endeavour to create such a world.

303. #303

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Ethics and love*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love exceeds and fulfils ethics by functioning as a radical surplus beyond rule-following, and that scripture should be read as an open, ever-renewed encounter rather than a closed ethical rulebook - a theological critique of foundationalist ethics in favour of a "law of love" as the only genuine foundation.

     Here we can see the heart of the Christian critique of ethics at work. 'Ethics', as we have already mentioned, is a word used to describe a foundational approach to moral questions which uses a set of principles (derived from reason and/or revelation) in order to work out what to do in any given situation.

304. #304

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Judas*

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys a liturgical/performative critique of self-legitimating religion, arguing that genuine faith requires radical self-critique — a "self-lacerating" identification with the betrayer (Judas) rather than the righteous — and that this prophetic, self-subverting structure is internal to authentic Christian discourse itself.

     genuine faith is not some weapon that shields us from the storms of life while pronouncing judgement upon others… it is a weapon that both shields and lacerates the one who wields it

305. #305

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Faith and works*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love is a self-grounding, unjustifiable law that dissolves the faith/works binary: genuine love cannot be compelled, rewarded, or argued for, and therefore any "work" arising from love is already faith, rendering works-based salvation incoherent.

     love is the law that has no law, the way that knows no 'should'. Love is the law that tells us when to subvert the law, when to obey the law and when to break with laws

306. #306

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Letting go*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a theological argument that authentic Christian practice requires ego-dissolution rather than correct belief or moral effort, drawing on Eckhart's mystical kenosis to argue that the subject must empty itself so that divine love can flow through it — positioning self-surrender as the condition of possibility for ethical transformation.

     the love that would embrace our enemies, that gives until it hurts and then gives more, the love that gives with the right hand while hiding its gift from the left

307. #307

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

     Predestination as Emancipation > Letting God be . . . (Good)

     Theoretical move: The passage expounds Erasmus's position in the free will debate against Luther: by introducing a gradated theory of grace, human-divine cooperationism, and a distinction between antecedent and consequent necessity, Erasmus attempts to preserve both God's omnipotence and human freedom, framing the debate as ultimately revolving around the proper causality of grace and freedom — and positioning Luther's absolute necessity as a politically dangerous, anti-humanist excess.

     Without freedom the whole religious realm would collapse: with no grace, responsibility, sin, and commandments, God would simply be playing dirty games with us.

308. #308

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.153

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *The Allure of False Objects*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the imaginary components of the objet a function as decoys that eclipse das Ding, and that sublimation—the uniquely human capacity to create meaning from lack—can be perverted into a destructive accumulation of false objects, generating an ethical obligation to distinguish between objects that carry the Thing's echo and mere lures.

     we have a pressing ethical obligation to pay attention to the difference between objects that contain an echo of the Thing and the various lures that drown out this echo

309. #309

     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.

     I would say that it is merely the most radical expression of Lacanian ethics, for Lacan is by no means saying that the only way to become an ethical agent is to destroy oneself

310. #310

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.123

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *. . . To Forcing the Act*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, via Zupančič, that forcing the Real to appear as a direct ethical goal collapses into terror and a simulacrum of ethics, and that a genuine ethics of the act must distinguish between the terror inherent in the encounter with the Real and terror as a deliberate strategy—a distinction that also cautions against the nihilistic privileging of destruction found in certain readings of the death drive.

     trying to compel the act or the event to take place expresses an 'obscure desire for catastrophe' that no longer has anything to do with ethics

311. #311

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.36

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *The Stain of Infi nity*

     Theoretical move: Jouissance is theorized not as an ideal to be pursued but as an inescapable "stain" that infinitizes the finite from within, making any ethics grounded solely on finitude disingenuous; this parasitism of jouissance connects the lamella-like undeadness of the subject to the infinity associated with Das Ding, the death drive, and the sublime.

     Zupančič, discussing Lacanian ethics, expresses the matter as follows: The answer to the religious promise of immortality is not the pathos of the finite; the basis of ethics cannot be an imperative which commands us to endorse our finitude

312. #312

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.104

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Temptation to Give Up*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to a truth-event is structurally threatened by the Symbolic order's ideological valorization of utilitarian balance, which pathologizes the very excess and imbalance that genuine subjective commitment requires — making betrayal of the event the socially 'healthy' option.

     our collective world more or less by definition undermines the subject's fidelity because it actively coaxes it towards utilitarian goals (the 'service of goods')

313. #313

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.240

     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.

     return to the 'service of goods' [service des biens]

314. #314

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.210

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Towards Universalist Ethics*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuine universalist ethics must bypass particular identity categories by grounding itself in singularity rather than collective substance: only the singular subject who refuses identitarian particularity can participate in the universal, while fidelity to particularist "simulacra" (e.g., National Socialism) produces totalizing violence rather than liberating truth.

     Such an ethic is 'ethical' precisely insofar as it raises singularity to the realm of the universal.

315. #315

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.18

     *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.

     prominent Lacanians, such as Žižek and Lee Edelman, have advocated the latter as a kind of culmination of Lacanian ethics

316. #316

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.118

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the standard alignment of Lacan with revolutionary politics (Žižek's "inassimilable real") is an oversimplification, and that the later Lacan—better captured by Badiou—reconceptualizes the real as nameable and reweavable into the symbolic, thereby opening space for incremental as well as revolutionary political and ethical action grounded in subjective singularity.

     the only 'real' ethics is an ethics of the real whereby the subject refuses to cede on its desire even when this means destroying either itself or its social environment.

317. #317

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.74

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Sinthome as a Site of Singularity*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's late shift from symptom to sinthome marks a theoretical transition from the subject of lack (structured by desire and the symbolic order) to a subject of singularity grounded in jouissance—where identification with the sinthome, as an irreducible kernel of real that resists symbolization, becomes the terminal aim of analysis.

     the goal of analysis becomes to enable the subject to own up to its sinthome, to 'assume' the disruptive kernel of the real that lends its character a degree of distinctiveness beyond its symbolic calling.

318. #318

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.207

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Critique of Multiculturalism*

     Theoretical move: Post-Lacanian ethics, drawing on the Real dimension of the other, mounts a structural critique of multiculturalism: far from respecting genuine difference, multiculturalism tolerates only a domesticated version of the other, thereby serving the logic of global capitalism and repeating a colonial imperative to assimilate.

     has led post-Lacanian thinkers to reorient ethics from the politics of multicultural tolerance to ideals of universal justice

319. #319

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.238

     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'.

     Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you

320. #320

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.93

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Fraying of Social Ideals*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that social trauma and oppression fray the symbolic anchoring points (points de capiton) that suture the subject to collective ideals, and that the Lacanian act—by temporarily demolishing these quilting points—can break the repetition compulsion imposed by oppressive signifiers, opening a space for singular desire and counterhegem­onic possibility beyond the normative symbolic order.

     This is one way in which the subject arrives at the Lacanian ethical act.

321. #321

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.235

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

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

     Speaking against the idea that analysis ends 'with the position of comfort,' Lacan asserts… the true termination of an analysis… in the end confront the one who undergoes it with the reality of the human condition

322. #322

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.190

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Narcissism as an Ethical Failure*

     Theoretical move: Narcissistic desire constitutes an ethical failure precisely because it forecloses the unknowability of the other, which Lacanian ethics requires one to confront as the Real dimension of the other — including its traumatic jouissance — rather than reducing the other to a reassuring imaginary or symbolic likeness.

     Lacanian ethics demands us to confront what is most alarmingly 'inhuman' ('undead') about the other; it asks us to accept the other not only as our own likeness, but also as the grotesque Thing that cannot be assimilated into our symbolic or imaginary networks of meaning.

323. #323

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.161

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and the act constitute two distinct but complementary ethical orientations within Lacanian ethics—both are modes of fidelity to the Thing—thus correcting the tendency to privilege the act as the sole or supreme form of Lacanian ethical praxis, and reframing "not ceding on one's desire" as a matter of keeping desire alive rather than pursuing destructive jouissance to its limit.

     it is difficult to interpret his 'ethics of psychoanalysis,' of not ceding on one's desire, solely as a function of diving into the deadly jouissance of the real

324. #324

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.166

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Banalization of the World*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that both the "passion for the Real" (which strips symbolic formations of value) and poststructuralist nihilism (which denies any transcendent real) are mirror-image failures that produce the same "banalization of the world" under the dictatorship of the reality principle—and that the ethics of sublimation requires holding the sublime within signification rather than beyond it.

     both betray the ethics of sublimation

325. #325

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.84

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *Antigone's Act of Defi ance*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical status of a Lacanian act depends not merely on its self-destructiveness or transgressive form but on the subject position of its agent (the disempowered) and its orientation toward the Thing/lack; it uses Antigone to demonstrate that genuine singularity, the refusal to cede on one's desire, is what distinguishes the ethical act from its simulacrum.

     We have, once again, reached the core of Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis, of 'not ceding on one's desire.'

326. #326

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.114

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Lures of Power*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's two "lures of power"—reifying the void and absolutizing truth—are countered by the structural incompleteness of naming, and that this incompleteness aligns Badiou with Lacan's insistence on an unbridgeable gap between the Real and its symbolization, while also positioning sublimation ethics as a superior framework for both personal and social transformation.

     If I have devoted the second half of this book to an examination of Lacan's 'ethics of sublimation,' it is because I believe that this ethics offers a sophisticated theory of both personal and social transformation.

327. #327

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.168

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Crisis of Sublimation*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a "crisis of sublimation" — the weakening of the sublimatory force to produce distance from the reality principle — collapses the gap between ideology and reality, making the status quo appear natural and inevitable; genuine ethics, by contrast, consists in preserving access to the infinite/the Thing against this foreclosure.

     Zupančič insists that Lacanian ethics 'is not an ethics of the finite, of finitude'

328. #328

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.81

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Will to Begin Again*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's account of the act holds an irreducible tension: while the act is a suicidal, non-teleological encounter with the death drive that annihilates the subject as social agent, it simultaneously harbours a transformative potential — a "will to begin again" — that can reconstitute subjectivity and even catalyse social change, a dimension often eclipsed in post-Lacanian readings.

     A real-life example of such an ethical act might be the refusal of Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus or the resolution of Mohamed Bouazizi to set himself on fire for the sake of his cause.

329. #329

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.26

     1. *The Singularity of Being*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that trauma and its unconscious repetition—rather than deliberate self-cultivation—constitute the singular ground of subjectivity, thereby reorienting psychoanalysis away from Aristotelian character-formation and Cartesian rational certainty toward a subject defined by what remains involuntarily unknown and repeated.

     In the opening chapter of his famous seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan draws a contrast between Aristotle's 'science of character' and psychoanalysis.

330. #330

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.76

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Act of Subjective Destitution*

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a critical engagement with Edelman's queer-theoretical appropriation of the Lacanian act of subjective destitution and sinthome, arguing that his alignment of queer subjectivity with pure negativity and the death drive forecloses transformative political action; against Edelman, the author proposes that the future is not a suturing of lack but the condition for its ongoing, open-ended translation into new signification.

     the sinthomosexual 'stands for the wholly impossible ethical act.' By personifying 'intelligibility's internal limit,' this subject boldly situates its 'ethical register outside the recognizably human'

331. #331

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.122

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *From "Divine" Violence . . .*

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's valorization of "divine violence" by arguing that it collapses the necessary tension between transgressing and affirming normative limits, and risks "forcing the encounter with the Real" — a move that forecloses the context-specific political work of symbolization in favor of an absolute ethical act.

     their acts of violence are, consequently, located "'beyond good and evil,' in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical"

332. #332

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.160

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Professor D's Shoes*

     Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of sublimation establishes that the Real/Thing is only accessible *through* mundane objects and representations—not despite them—such that jouissance is attained via the semblances of the world rather than by aiming directly at the Thing; this vindicates the continuation of desire over any transcendent or death-driven "beyond," and refutes the nihilism that results from rigidly separating the Thing from worldly things.

     not ceding on one's desire is not only a matter of holding onto the truth of one's desire, but also of making sure that this desire does not dissipate under the utilitarian pressures of life

333. #333

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.206

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The "Faceless" Face*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely post-Lacanian ethics must reckon with the non-symbolizable, nonrelational surplus (jouissance) of the other rather than retreating to the "dazzling epiphany" of the face as a fetishistic totality; the Muselmann is deployed as the limit case that exposes this ethical demand at its most traumatic.

     the stakes of post-Lacanian ethics as follows: 'After the slaughters of WWII, the Shoah, the gulag... the notion of neighbor has lost its innocence'

334. #334

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.162

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Debt of Desire*

     Theoretical move: The ethics of sublimation is grounded in a "debt of desire" to the signifier that constitutes subjectivity, and its ethical force lies in maintaining an open-ended, mobile orientation toward the lost Thing — resisting the symptomatic congealing of the repetition compulsion into narcissistic fixation — so that the variability of the object is welcomed rather than suppressed.

     The ethics of sublimation shares a basic similarity with the ethics of the act, namely that, like the latter, it pursues the thread of desire—follows the echo of the Thing—even when doing so means going against the 'service of goods'

335. #335

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.198

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Value of Idealization*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic love requires holding the beloved's banal and sublime aspects in productive tension simultaneously, and that sublimation in love can be a truth-bearing gesture—one that reveals latent dimensions of the other's being—rather than a mere narcissistic distortion, provided we do not collapse the gap between the beloved and the Thing.

     it—like the ethics of sublimation—honors the Thing's echo, it cuts through the lures of narcissism in order to attain 'real' satisfaction

336. #336

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.88

     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.

     Lacanian ethics asks, 'Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you'... Ethics, from this perspective, is less a matter of negotiating relationships between subjects than of the subject's altered relationships to its own desire.

337. #337

     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 subject's ethical fortitude—its capacity to maintain the truth-process in the long run (its 'fidelity to fidelity,' as it were)—demands the willingness to 'submit the perseverance of what is known to a duration peculiar to the not-known'

338. #338

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.172

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Other vs. the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of sublimation reveals a productive distinction between two levels of the Other—the tyrannical demands of authority figures versus the symbolic order as a generative structure of meaning-production—and that the very alienation imposed by the signifier is the condition of possibility for creativity, love, and singularity, rather than an irremediable wound to be mourned.

     Lacan's theory of sublimation demonstrates that even though we are never free of social norms, we are not entirely determined by them either.

339. #339

     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 act of subjective destitution is the ethical act par excellence. Although this is not my preferred reading of Lacan, I want to show that there is an internal logic to it.

340. #340

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.164

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Beyond the Reality Principle*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation constitutes an ethics grounded in fidelity to das Ding rather than the reality principle: by admitting traces of the real into the symbolic, sublimation punctures the seamlessness of social reality and opens a space for the reinvention of values beyond the hegemonic 'common good', a move Badiou's truth-event is shown to parallel.

     it institutes a set of ethical criteria that give the subject pause whenever it is asked to betray the Thing's echo

341. #341

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.213

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Third of Justice*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that post-Lacanian ethics (via Žižek) corrects the Levinasian privileging of the face-to-face encounter by resurrecting the impersonal "Third" as the proper seat of justice, establishing a structural incompatibility between love (which singularizes a privileged One) and justice (which must remain blind to the particular face), grounding ethics in universality rather than in the affective pull of the other's face.

     This failing is what Lacanian ethics attempts to rectify by resurrecting the Third as a seat of disinterested justice.

342. #342

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.186

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Paralysis of Desire*

     Theoretical move: Narcissistic love arrests sublimation's ethical-innovative force by converting the object into a static emblem of self-completion, and it does so through a domesticated relation to the objet a — deploying it as a predictable screen that protects the subject from the jouissance (and terror) of the Thing itself, revealing the repetition compulsion as a rigid crystallization of desire's language.

     sublimation's ethical (innovative) force—the force that rides the open-ended thrust of desire

343. #343

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.176

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Upside of Anxiety*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety and singularity are structurally linked through the surplus energies of the Real, and that sublimation functions as Lacan's more rigorous answer to Heidegger's existential authenticity: it binds anxiety by welcoming jouissance without being engulfed by it, making anxiety a precondition of creativity rather than a pathology to be eliminated.

     breakdowns in 'normal' psychic functioning can serve as portals to innovation, opening up, on the private level, the possibility of the 'impossible' that Badiou's truth-event is meant to release on the collective level.

344. #344

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.220

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Victim vs. the Immortal*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the universalist rhetoric of Badiou and Žižek fails on its own terms: by privileging a disembodied "immortal subject" over the material realities of social victimization, it covertly re-instates a hierarchy of humanness that blames the victimized for their condition, thereby enacting the very hegemonic power it purports to oppose.

     an ethics cannot stay properly ethical unless it sustains this immortal dimension… 'if we equate Man with the simple reality of his living being, we are inevitably pushed to a conclusion quite opposite'

345. #345

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.62

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The "Truth" of Desire*

     Theoretical move: Against reductive readings that cast Lacan as a defender of hegemonic law, this passage argues that Lacanian analysis aims not at social adaptation but at releasing the singularity of the subject's desire from beneath the Other's oppressive signifiers—and that refusing to cede on one's desire constitutes both the clinical goal and a form of political resistance.

     the only thing of which one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one's desire

346. #346

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.193

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Other as Irreplaceable*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love at its most fundamental attaches not to the symbolic qualities or historical identity of the beloved but to the irreplaceable singularity inaugurated by the encounter with language itself — a dimension that exceeds and resists the structuring of the symbolic order, illustrated through Lacan's reading of Antigone's love for Polyneces.

     Antigone's position 'represents the radical limit that affirms the unique value of his being without reference to any content, to whatever good or evil Polyneces may have done'

347. #347

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.97

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Subject of Truth*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's truth-event — arising from the void (the Lacanian real) of a situation — transforms an ordinary "some-one" into a singular, universal subject of truth (an "immortal"), and maps this structure onto Lacanian concepts of the act, the real, jouissance, and singularity to theorize how the impossible encounter with the real generates unprecedented subjective and ethical possibilities.

     the encounter with the real—say, the ethical act—has the power to transform not only our self-perception, but also the structure of the world

348. #348

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.243

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *5. The Jouissance of the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: This passage (a notes section) deploys Žižek's and Zupančič's arguments to develop the theoretical claim that the Real's internal contamination of the Symbolic ensures the big Other's constitutive incompleteness, while also staging the political-ethical deadlock that follows from Lacanian theory when it confronts questions of action, revolutionary violence, and the Kant-Sade nexus.

     whether Kantian ethics is the theory of an ethical configuration or a 'user's guide' to ethical practice. If we choose the latter, we are necessarily led towards Sade's position

349. #349

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.218

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Whose Multiculturalism?*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's and Žižek's universalist critiques of identity politics and multiculturalism are themselves enactments of institutionalized marginalization, enabled by a Foucauldian power/knowledge system that suppresses entire fields of inquiry, and that sophisticated multiculturalism—building coalitions across differences—may be the closest approximation to genuine universalism.

     exactly the problem that universalist ethics cannot seem to resolve, namely the stubborn persistence of institutionalized structures of marginalization

350. #350

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.173

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Balancing the Symbolic and the Real*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a productive ethics of sublimation requires maintaining a precarious equilibrium between the Symbolic and the Real: too little Real yields existential blandness and betrays desire's singularity, while too much Real overwhelms the subject with jouissance; sublimation is the privileged mode of negotiating this tension, and its residue persists to reshape collective symbolic reality.

     This is why it is important to pursue desires that remain faithful to the Thing, for such desires promote our singularity by maintaining a robust relationship to jouissance

351. #351

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.224

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *In Defense of Empathy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against the post-Lacanian and Badiouian reduction of all interpersonal empathy to colonialist bad faith or structural impossibility, contending instead that the irreducible opacity of the Other as Thing does not preclude partial, meaningful human connection—and that the wholesale vilification of empathy may itself conceal intellectual lethargy rather than ethical rigor.

     the ridiculing of empathy that tends to characterize post-Lacanian ethics conceals an unwillingness to make an effort, a kind of intellectual lethargy that gives up in the face of obstacles (the opacity of the other)

352. #352

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.201

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Love's Innovative Energy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love's "innovative energy" derives from its structural orientation toward the Thing—the sublime kernel that desire perpetually circles without attaining—and pivots to a concluding framing of Lacanian ethics as a post-Levinasian problematic: where Levinas grounds ethics in the face's appeal, Lacan splits the other's face into culturally intelligible attributes and the anxiety-producing strangeness of das Ding, reorienting ethical concern from pluralistic tolerance to the encounter with the "inhuman" other and a resurgence of universalist ethics.

     Throughout this book, I have offered different ways to read Lacanian ethics, gradually working my way from the ethical act to the ethics of sublimation.

353. #353

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.107

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Event vs. the Simulacrum*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's ethic of fidelity to the truth-event is both a radicalization of Lacanian ethics (transposing "do not cede on your desire" into a persevering devotion to the event) and a point of divergence from Žižek's Lacanian critique, which holds that naming the event inevitably re-sutures its disruptiveness back into the symbolic order, whereas for Badiou naming is the very mechanism by which the impossible becomes possible.

     Badiou links the subject's ethical consistency, its fidelity to truth, to the Lacanian injunction to not cede on one's desire... Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis, of not giving ground on one's desire, provides Badiou with a general blueprint for his ethic of truths.

354. #354

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.178

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Lacan with Dr. Phil*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity, though risking conflation with self-help authenticity, is distinguished by existential bewilderment rather than self-possession; and that the opacity of the subject (its being riven by the unconscious/drive/repetition) does not license ethical abdication but instead demands a heightened, self-reflexive accountability toward others that goes beyond Butler's ethics of forgiveness.

     what is the relationship between Lacanian ethics and more normative considerations about justice?

355. #355

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.96

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible*

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Badiou's theory of truth-events onto Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that Badiou reconceptualises the Lacanian act and ethics of psychoanalysis by making the social/collective transformation that is only a byproduct in Lacan constitutively necessary to the event itself, thereby shifting the subject's fidelity to rupture from a 'private' experience to a premise of collective change.

     His 'ethic of truths'—which draws its inspiration from Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis—is centered on the problematic of the subject's fidelity to the rupture represented by the truth-event.

356. #356

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.215

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *But Still . . .*

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Badiou's and Žižek's neo-Marxist universalism by arguing that their attempt to situate universality within event-specific "voids" fails to escape hegemonic power differentials, since the naming of the void itself remains a site of contested authority that systematically excludes feminist, anti-racist, and queer struggles.

     'The only genuine ethics is of truths in the plural—or, more precisely, the only ethics is of processes of truth, of the labour that brings some truths into the world. . . . Ethics does not exist. There is only the ethic-of'

357. #357

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.191

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Call and Response of Love*

     Theoretical move: Love is theorized as a privileged form of sublimation in which the love object functions as the sublime object *par excellence*—the site where Das Ding is most forcefully evoked—and the call-and-response structure of love is shown to release singularity beyond ideological interpellation, making love simultaneously a truth-event, a locus of freedom, and the container of jouissance.

     Although it is an ethical failure to confuse the love object with the Thing, pretending that the two have nothing to do with each other would deprive love of its power to electrify us

358. #358

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.204

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Other as "Evil"*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a properly Lacanian ethics requires risking one's symbolic and imaginary supports to endure the other's singular, potentially "evil" jouissance — a demand that goes beyond inter-subjective empathy or moral prudence, and that finds partial (but insufficient) precedent in Levinas's notion of the face as absolute singularity.

     Lacanian ethics is less interested in the 'morality' of our actions than it is in our capacity to endure the unconscious psychic intensities that get activated by the other's jouissance

359. #359

     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.

     This is yet another way to understand Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis, for it links our capacity to perceive the value of certain objects with our readiness to keep our desire alive.

360. #360

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.237

     <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 5**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 5, providing bibliographic citations and brief clarifying glosses for claims made in the chapter body. It is largely non-substantive but contains several theoretically load-bearing footnotes connecting anxiety, extimacy, consciousness, negation, and desire to specific Lacanian sources.

     these commandments have no other aim than to hold you at a distance from the incestuous relation with your mother; they are as a whole the positivization of this interdiction—this is the point made by Lacan in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

361. #361

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle**

     Theoretical move: By tracing French psychiatry's concept of mental automatism through the mind/machine boundary problem, Copjec argues that the structural gap in utilitarian self-definition reveals why the psychoanalytic ethics of the Superego and the Lost Object—premised on non-reciprocal, unconditional prohibition—must replace the utilitarian model of reciprocity, pleasure-reward, and intersubjective exchange as the foundation of moral law.

     The sole moral maxim of psychoanalysis is this: do not surrender your internal conflict, your division.

362. #362

     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 2**

     Theoretical move: This endnotes section for Chapter 2 develops the theoretical argument that the gaze arises from linguistic rather than voyeuristic/fetishistic assumptions, that the cinema is better understood through the concept of the "nonspecularizable" than through the mirror/screen analogy, and that a properly Lacanian account of the subject requires distinguishing the unreturned gaze from imaginary identification and aggressivity.

     This article relies, it appears, on Lacan's work in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis... and the unpublished seminar on anxiety

363. #363

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.136

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > **Breast-Feeding and Freedom**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Enlightenment definition of the free subject necessarily generates anxiety by installing a real "double" (objet petit a) within the symbolic, and that the Kantian aesthetics of the beautiful writes the impossibility of "saying it all," thereby protecting the subject's freedom; the reduction of rights to demands (as in the horizontal/historicist model) eliminates desire and the object-cause of freedom, as illustrated by Frankenstein's catastrophic literalism toward the monster's cry.

     As Lacan pointed out in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, it is Kant's conception of the beautiful that writes this impossibility most eloquently.

364. #364

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.98

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle**

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis radicalizes Kant's ethical subject by insisting that the moral law is always enunciated by a superegoic Other whose sadistic enjoyment is concealed when the marks of enunciation are erased; restoring this division of the subject is itself an ethical necessity, and its disavowal generates the violent aggressions disguised as utilitarian benevolence.

     Why does psychoanalysis insist on exposing the cruel enunciator, the sadistic superego, who speaks the moral law? Because it wishes to demonstrate the ethical necessity of hearing the otherness of this voice and of maintaining our distance from it.

365. #365

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.87

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Guilty versus Useful Pleasures**

     Theoretical move: Copjec uses Lacan's seminar to argue that the psychoanalytic subject is not a utilitarian zero (fully manipulable by pleasure) but a minus-one — radically separated from what it wants — and that this structural lack obligates psychoanalysis to ground ethics in the death drive and the superego rather than the pleasure principle.

     This obliges psychoanalysis to reformulate its ethics on the basis of another principle, that of the death drive.

366. #366

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.248

     <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 4**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 4, providing footnotes and citations for sources on Clérambault, utilitarianism, automatism, and related topics; it contains no independent theoretical argument but does cite Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis and flag utilitarianism as a revolution in ethics unseating Aristotelian ethics.

     In Lacan's seminar, utilitarianism is treated not as a minor and somewhat quaint English philosophy concerned merely with the distribution of goods but as the clearest articulation of a revolution in ethics that unseated Aristotelian ethics in the nineteenth century.

367. #367

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.84

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Guilty versus Useful Pleasures**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that utilitarianism's conversion of a descriptive claim (use is pleasurable) into a prescriptive one (pleasure must be maximized as duty) is the hidden motor of both architectural functionalism's "extensibility" and colonialism's "civilizing mission," and that Lacan's seminar on ethics exposes this maneuver as a despotism rooted in the belief that pleasure is fully usable—rendering man infinitely manageable.

     One of the virtues of Lacan's seminar on ethics is that it allows us to see Bentham's charge as an instance of the kettle calling the despot black.

368. #368

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.187

     **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."

     The problematic of duty or responsibility that obliges the hero to make sense of his world is, as has often been noted, as central to film noir as it is to existentialism.

369. #369

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.244

     <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 3**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 3, providing scholarly references and brief clarificatory asides on sources cited in the main argument, including Freud, Lacan, Bergson, Aristotle, Derrida, and others. It is primarily bibliographic and non-substantive, though a few notes carry minor theoretical glosses.

     Lacan's fullest discussion of the creation ex nihilo of the subject can be found in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.

370. #370

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **Sexual Difference and the Superego**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamically sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share a common logic of the limit/exception—wherein a terrifying force is posited as possible but not existent, converting the father into an impossible Real—and concludes by calling for a new ethics grounded in the "not-all" logic proper to feminine sexuation, rather than the superegoic logic of exception.

     It is now time to devote some thought to developing an ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited, that is, an ethics proper to the woman.

371. #371

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.265

     **WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs an autobiographical-clinical reflection on grief as a defense structure: guilt functions as a protective screen against the deeper wound of pure loss, and only when that defense is progressively dismantled through analysis does the subject encounter the more fundamental Real of absence—a move that maps directly onto psychoanalytic concepts of defense, the lost object, and the ethics of mourning.

     death is the ultimate catastrophe of love. Death is the most implacable of love's wounds. The deepest agony of death is love's inability to touch and be touched by what it loves.

372. #372

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.215

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Thing or No-thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation reveals the drive's true nature precisely because it aims not at the imaginary object but at das Ding (the primordially lost object), and that the non-equivalence of object and Thing is what opens the space beyond the pleasure principle, grounds the Oedipus complex's function, and inverts the Freudian moral law by identifying the Sovereign Good with the forbidden mother-Thing.

     Well now, the step taken by Freud at the level of the pleasure principle is to show us that there is no Sovereign Good—that the Sovereign Good, which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good. Such is the foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by Freud.

373. #373

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.248

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > The Object-Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sacrifice functions to anchor the Other's desire in the symbolic by ceding the real object (objet a), and that this ceding is the very condition of subjective desire — the subject must give up the object in order not to give up on desire, with the two moments of ceding being exactly complementary rather than contradictory.

     'From an analytic point of view the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having ceded (of having given ground or compromised) relative to one's desire' (S.VII, 319).

374. #374

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.28

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Abraham and absolute fidelity

     Theoretical move: By aligning Abraham and Judas as structurally parallel figures—both divinely chosen for a murderous act, both renouncing an intimate—the passage argues that the distinction between betrayer and faithful servant collapses into a difference of perceived motive rather than actual deed, thereby reframing betrayal as a possible mode of absolute fidelity.

     despite his deep love for Isaac and his sense of correct ethical conduct he was prepared to murder his own son for the sake of the divine command... suspending the ethical for the religious.

375. #375

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.25

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Carrying the cross

     Theoretical move: The passage makes the theoretical move of redefining betrayal as the highest form of fidelity: true faith requires the sacrifice not of the self but of one's religion itself, so that a "religion without religion" may emerge — a dialectical inversion where destruction of the beloved object is the condition of its authentic continuation.

     to destroy what we love for the sake of what we love—to be the most faithful of betrayers

376. #376

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.161

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Communities that embrace the miracle

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christian truth is not a propositional content but an experiential transformation ("miracle") analogous to rebirth, and on this basis proposes reordering ecclesial community around belonging and shared ritual rather than belief-first structures — a move that repositions truth as an approach (demanding liberation/healing) rather than a fixed doctrinal content.

     the truth that Christianity affirms does not impact these discussions in terms of content but rather in terms of approach, demanding that the conclusions we come to bring liberation and healing

377. #377

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter008.html_page_45"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic love operates as a structural excess beyond the law — not as an ethical system that calculates duty but as a force that always already surpasses what the law can command — and pairs this with a parable in which aesthetic appearance (beauty) functions as a concealment that neutralises the symbolic content of a prophetic message.

     What if Jesus was not offering his followers an ethical system to follow, but rather was inviting them to enter into a life of love that transcends ethics, a life of liberty that dwells beyond religious laws?

378. #378

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.15

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-ethical pivot: by collapsing the distinction between Christ and his corporate body (the Church), it makes the community of believers the site where Christ is either manifested or distorted; then, through a parable, it argues that embodied acts of love and solidarity *are* the translation of the Word—that is, that ethical praxis precedes and exceeds textual transmission as a mode of signification.

     the severity of the plague required that she set this sacred call to one side in order to help with the emergency.

379. #379

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter032.html_page_176"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical act is self-justifying (its own reward), and that unconditional gift-giving retroactively creates the conditions for its own justification — a logic illustrated parabolically and then extended to a second tale where the heretic's final act exposes the universal guilt of his accusers by demanding an innocent executioner.

     what if the ethical act is in itself its own reward? Is this not how we should approach the selfless existence of the first brother, seeing him as engaged in a rewarding life that needed no external validation?

380. #380

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.69

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that institutionalized religious practice functions as a "safety valve" that reproduces the very social order it purports to resist — a logic illustrated through The Matrix and Bonhoeffer's theology — and that authentic faith requires total worldly immersion rather than the consolation of a designated religious sphere; the accompanying parable then dramatizes the tension between ethics-without-guarantee and faith instrumentalized for personal salvation.

     we have followed the ways taught to us by Christ. We pursued his ways faithfully even though it cost us dearly, and we remained resolute despite the belief that death had defeated him and would one day defeat us also.

381. #381

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.42

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage makes a theological-pastoral argument by deploying Levinas's saying/said distinction to claim that genuine truth of faith operates at the level of performative presence (the saying) rather than propositional content (the said), and then illustrates — via a parable — how any fixed codification of a transformative ethical injunction betrays its spirit by converting it back into a new law.

     it is offensive to offer reasons for the horror (such as a divine test or punishment). Here the response of the faithful is not to be found in the offering of a theodicy but in drawing alongside those who suffer

382. #382

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.146

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine forgiveness is unconditional and precedes repentance rather than following it, deploying a theological-deconstructive reading of the Prodigal Son parable to distinguish an "impossible" gift-logic from the economic/conditional logic that normally masquerades as forgiveness.

     What if repentance is not the necessary condition for forgiveness but rather the freely given response to it?

383. #383

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.98

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage develops a theological argument that the ethical demand of God is immanent to worldly acts of love and solidarity with the suffering—not transcendent authority—and then enacts this via the parable of Judas, whose betrayal is reframed as a destined, self-sacrificial mission necessary for redemption, inverting the usual moral condemnation of the act.

     For in the Bible the face of a helpless, suffering child has a greater call on us than any institution or heavenly voice. It is in the face of the suffering child or the flesh of a tortured man that the ethical demand of God is written.

384. #384

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.154

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage makes a theological-ethical argument that genuine reconciliation transcends the transactional logic of exchange (apology accepted/rejected), enacting a form of love that dissolves the demand for symmetrical accounting—paralleling the claim that true faith-wealth is love rather than accumulation, thereby critiquing both prosperity theology and moralistic debt-repayment models of forgiveness.

     Yet the true wealth of faith does not lie with things that can rust and corrode... The true treasure of faith begins and ends with love.

385. #385

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.9

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses parabolic fiction to collapse the inner/outer distinction in faith, arguing that authentic belief is legible only through embodied, subversive action, and that the fictional 'alternative universe' functions as a mirror that reveals the reader's actual ideological universe.

     I reject the inner/outer distinction in which one can fool oneself into thinking that private beliefs are somehow more important or reflective of one's essence than public actions.

386. #386

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.29

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage advances two interlocking theoretical moves: first, it articulates an "impossible hospitality" as an unconditional gift that structurally exceeds every conditional exchange, using the figure of the welcomed demon to mark the limit-point of the ethical; second, it re-reads the parable of the Pearl of Great Price to argue that the object's "true value" is only accessible through a renunciation of value-logic itself — i.e., desire must give up its attachment to the object's exchange-value in order to encounter the object as such.

     To welcome the demon, in whatever form the demon takes, is all but impossible. But through our trying to show hospitality to the demon at our door, the demon may well be transformed by the grace that is shown.

387. #387

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.167

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love is the irreducible ground of all theological, ethical, and political structures, and that these structures become oppressive when severed from that ground; the parable then enacts an epistemological pivot—subjective transformation trumps institutional or empirical verification of miraculous reality.

     For the law is made for people; people are not made for the law. Without love political and ethical systems can become oppressive and unyielding.

388. #388

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.89

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses parabolic thought experiments to probe whether faith is intrinsically rewarding or instrumentally oriented toward external rewards, then pivots to a narrative inversion in which humanity, on Judgment Day, pronounces judgment *on God* rather than receiving it — reversing the standard eschatological structure and raising the question of divine accountability.

     whether faith is focused on external rewards or whether it is embraced as its own reward... if our encounter with the source of our faith *is* the treasure that Christianity offers (rather than that which can lead to treasure)

389. #389

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.97

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys a parable to argue that authentic faith requires active defiance of divine command when that command contradicts the ethical demand already inscribed in the Other's face — staging the paradox that fidelity to God is achieved through disobedience to God, and that lukewarm compliance is the real heresy.

     I defy you precisely in order to remain faithful to you.

390. #390

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.143

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the divine logic of the kingdom of God inverts worldly power structures: God is encountered not at the apex of a celestial hierarchy but in weakness and lowliness (the Incarnation, the hungry stranger, the imprisoned), and this paradoxical powerlessness constitutes a revolutionary force more potent than worldly strength. A retelling of the Prodigal Son is introduced as a narrative vehicle for this theological inversion.

     God is not encountered as the highest being in the chain of beings but rather in the lowest and most humble of things. This powerlessness and weakness constitute the otherworldly power of the kingdom

391. #391

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter031.html_page_170"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage makes a theological pivot distinguishing a "miracle of faith" as an inner, subjective transformation — irreducible to empirical verification or physical spectacle — from miracle as an observable event in the physical world, thereby grounding the miraculous in a change in the subject's mode of existence rather than in the external Real.

     he had given up everything to live what turned out to be a torturous life of hardship... his surprise was a joyous one. He turned to his brother, smiled deeply, and said, 'Today my joy is finally complete'

392. #392

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.233

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > Part III: Conceptualizations

     Theoretical move: This endnotes section deploys a cluster of theoretical references to anchor concepts developed in the main text: it explicitly invokes the Lacanian distinction between tuche and automaton (the real vs. the return of signs/pleasure principle), gestures toward the ethical necessity of the proletarian revolution as distinct from historical determinism, and touches on Deleuzian repetition-difference, all in a footnote apparatus that does genuine theoretical work.

     the necessity of the proletarian revolution is ethical.

393. #393

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.236

     . Compare:

     Theoretical move: This passage is largely non-substantive, comprising endnotes, a comparative footnote on Agnes Heller's theory of comedy (relating it to an "existential tension" between social/cultural and genetic a prioris), a brief Lacanian citation on the isolatability of phallic jouissance, and a full bibliography. No major theoretical move is advanced beyond bibliographic and comparative context.

     See, for example, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), p.

394. #394

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.168

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Days of the Living Dead](#contents.xhtml_ahd11)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian formula "there is no big Other" must be taken in its strongest ontological sense—not merely that the symbolic order exists only as a virtual fiction, but that it cannot even cohere as a fiction due to immanent antagonisms—and that this non-existence of the big Other is the very condition for the subject, while simultaneously exposing guilt and jouissance as structurally co-constitutive in conditions of permissiveness.

     we can see now why 'il n'y a pas de grand Autre' also brings us to the very core of the ethical problematic: what it excludes is the idea that somewhere … there must be a standard which allows us to take measure of our acts

395. #395

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.425

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that an "empty ritual" — one whose traditional content is lost and whose artificiality is fully acknowledged — can be more authentically operative than an immersive, "authentic" one, and uses this case to construct a four-term Greimasian matrix of ethical gestures organized around the axes of negative/positive and ritual/non-ritualized act, while also distinguishing hegemonic false universality from the authentic universality embodied by those excluded from the hegemonic order.

     Our four examples… provide the matrix of four basic ethical gestures which can be arranged into a Greimasian semiotic square along the double axis of negative versus positive and ritual versus non-ritualized contingent act.

396. #396

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.391

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [The Protestant Freedom](#contents.xhtml_ahd26)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that true freedom paradoxically coincides with necessity—through a dialectical reading of Luther's Protestantism and Lacan's objet a, Žižek contends that radical freedom emerges not from unconstrained choice but from the unbearable situation of predestination where one must choose without knowing which choice is predetermined, thereby collapsing the opposition between freedom and determinism.

     Luther realized that a love that sought no reward was more willing to serve the helpless, the powerless, the poor, and the oppressed, since their cause offered the least prospect of personal gain.

397. #397

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.69

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel > [Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ahd5)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the constitutive gap between the phenomenal and the noumenal in Kant is not a limitation but the positive condition of freedom and ethical subjectivity; freedom exists only "in between" the two domains, and the Hegelian Real is precisely this gap itself—rather than the inaccessible noumenal Thing of the Kantian Real—making the Kantian transcendental turn the founding move of philosophy as such.

     This fear is ultimately ethical: the closure of the gap between appearance and reality would deprive us of our freedom and thus of our ethical dignity.

398. #398

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.409

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic ethical action—whether Karen's autonomous withdrawal, Morck's self-sacrificial compassion, or the post-tribulationist "impure" believer—requires abandoning the safety of a big Other and confronting the Real in its senseless indifference; only a "Christian atheist" who acts without divine guarantee can be truly and unconditionally ethical, with Christianity's core being the only consequent atheism and atheists the only true believers.

     Her final walk is not a performance for others intended to impress them, to signal to them how she despises them, but an autonomous act, a non-pathological decision in Kant's sense … what motivates her is not any secret sexual economy but pure ethical stance, 'duty for the sake of duty.'

399. #399

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.181

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Cracks in Circular Time](#contents.xhtml_ahd12)

     Theoretical move: By reading two films (*The Discovery* and *Arrival*) through the opposition of linear vs. circular time, Žižek argues that Repetition is not mere playful re-enactment but is ethically motivated by a past failure, and that the only exit from the loop is an act of self-erasure—saving the other at the cost of never having met them—while *Arrival* inverts the formula by making the "flashback" a flash-forward, thus subverting the Hollywood couple-production narrative.

     Repetition … is thus not a process of playfully re-enacting the past but the activity set in motion by an ethical failure. The need to repeat disappears once the past failure is corrected

400. #400

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.216

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Seven Deadly Sins

     Theoretical move: Žižek maps the seven deadly sins onto a structural grid (Self/Other axis, three triads) and identifies acedia/sloth as the paradigmatic unethical attitude in the Lacanian sense—a compromise on desire (céder sur son désir)—arguing that the only truly ethical act is one that does not sacrifice desire even at the cost of death.

     What acedia ultimately betrays is thus desire itself—acedia is unethical in Lacan's sense of a compromise on desire, of céder sur son désir.

401. #401

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's "Kant with Sade" reverses the common reading: Sade is the closet Kantian, not vice versa, because jouissance—like the moral law—operates beyond the pleasure principle and beyond pathological self-interest. This homology between drive/desire and the ethical act grounds a "critique of pure desire" that re-reads the Kantian sublime as immanent to sexuality itself, identifying feminine jouissance with the mathematical sublime's non-all structure and masculine sexuality with the dynamic sublime's constitutive exception.

     the focus of Lacan's interest rather resides in the paradoxical reversal by means of which desire itself (i.e., acting upon one's desire, not compromising it) can no longer be grounded in any 'pathological' interests or motivations and thus meets the criteria of the Kantian ethical act

402. #402

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.387

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus!

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the triple anniversary of Marxist milestones in 2017 (Marx's Capital, the October Revolution, the Shanghai Commune) reveals an unresolved problem in Communist emancipatory politics, and proposes that Protestantism — rather than this Marxist lineage — may supply the coordinates for an ethics adequate to an 'unorientable space' and to the subject's constitutive entrapment (Plato's cave).

     Perhaps it is still the reference to Protestantism which provides the coordinates for an ethics that fits the unorientable space, an ethics for a subject caught into Plato's cave.

403. #403

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.187

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Cracks in Circular Time](#contents.xhtml_ahd12)

     Theoretical move: By reading the film *Arrival* through the opposition of circular (heptapod) and linear (human) temporality, Žižek argues that the circle of time is always-already an ellipse structured around a disavowed cut, and that the act of "willing the inevitable" is not empty but ontologically necessary—the finite, sexualized subject's capacity to intervene with a decision is what the holistic Other lacks and needs, making temporal finitude superior to atemporal plenitude.

     One should therefore resist the temptation to see in Louise's choice some kind of ethical grandeur (in the sense that she heroically chose the future although she was aware of its terrible outcome): what she does is an extremely selfish act

404. #404

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.393

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [The Protestant Freedom](#contents.xhtml_ahd26)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that freedom and universal truth are accessible only through the irreducible position of enunciation (the subject's horizon), not by abstracting from subjectivity toward an objective view; and that the Protestant subject, as barred/empty subject ($), embodies this by being sacrifice itself rather than offering sacrifice in exchange—collapsing the logic of exchange into an identity of giving and getting.

     psychoanalysis makes me even more responsible than traditional morality, it makes me responsible even for what is beyond my (conscious) control.

405. #405

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that true ethical universality requires a militant, partisan stance rather than neutral tolerance, and that the excess of subjectivity (Hegel's "night of the world") is the condition of redemption rather than the source of evil — evil properly resides in the "ontologization" of excess into a global cosmic order. This is illustrated through a reading of *The Children's Hour*, where the structure of false appearance reveals that truth has the structure of a fiction, and that an authentic ethical act consists in breaking out of the closed social space rather than seeking reconciliation within it.

     Perhaps the crucial ethical task today is to break the vicious cycle of these two positions, fundamentalist and liberal

406. #406

     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.

     the maxim of psychoanalytic ethics as formulated by Lacan ('not to give way on one's desire') coincides with the closing moment of the psychoanalytic process, the 'going through the fantasy'

407. #407

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Hegel's critique of Kant's Sublime is not a regression to metaphysics but a radicalization: by subtracting the transcendent presupposition of the Thing-in-itself, Hegel shows that the experience of radical negativity IS the Thing itself, so that the sublime object no longer points beyond representation but fills the void left by the Thing's non-existence - a logic culminating in the 'infinite judgement' ('the Spirit is a bone') where an utterly contingent, miserable object embodies absolute negativity.

     Lacan's determination of the sublime object in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 'an object raised to the level of the (impossible-real) Thing'

408. #408

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek traces three periods of Lacan's teaching on the death drive to show how, in the third period, das Ding as the 'extimate' traumatic kernel within the symbolic order redefines the death drive as the possibility of 'second death' — the radical annihilation of the symbolic universe itself — and links this to Benjamin's Theses as the unique point where Marxist historiography touches this non-historical kernel.

     starting from the late 1950S (the Seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis), it is, in contrast, the symbolic order itself which is identified with the pleasure principle

409. #409

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek opposes Stalinist "evolutionary idealism" (grounded in the big Other of history as teleological accountant) to a "creationist materialism" derived from Benjamin and Lacan, showing that the death drive, retroactive signification, and the logic of objet petit a underpin both Benjamin's revolutionary rupture and the Stalinist Communist's "sublime body between the two deaths"; he further distinguishes the classical Master's performative legitimation from the totalitarian Leader's circular self-legitimation through the non-existent "People," arriving at a Lacanian definition of democracy as the structural emptiness of the place of power.

     In his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan pointed out how the ideology of evolutionism always implies a belief in a Supreme Good

410. #410

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as a double operation: it answers the unbearable gap of the Other's desire ('Che vuoi?') by filling the void with an imaginary scenario, while simultaneously constructing the very coordinates that make desire possible; this structure illuminates hysteria as failed interpellation, anti-Semitism as racist fantasy, Christianity vs. Judaism as contrasting strategies for 'gentrifying' the desire of the Other, and sainthood/Antigone as ethical positions of not giving way on one's desire.

     Lacan enables us to recognize in all three the same ethical position, that of 'not giving way on one's desire'. That is why all three of them provoke the same 'che vuoi?'

411. #411

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology operates not at the level of false consciousness (knowledge) but as an unconscious fantasy structuring social reality itself — a "fetishistic inversion" that persists even under cynical distance — and supports this with a Lacanian account of belief as radically exterior and materialized in social practice rather than interior and psychological.

     In his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan speaks of the role of the Chorus in classical tragedy

412. #412

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the classical ideology-critique model (false consciousness, "they do not know it but they are doing it") is insufficient against cynical reason; the deeper, untouched level of ideology is that of ideological fantasy, which operates not in knowing but in doing—subjects are "fetishists in practice, not in theory"—so that the illusion is inscribed in social reality itself, not merely in consciousness.

     We can see why Lacan, in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, distances himself from the liberating gesture of saying finally that 'the emperor has no clothes'.

413. #413

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek aligns Benjamin's concept of Eingedenken—the revolutionary "tiger's leap into the past"—with Lacanian repetition and the logic of the signifier's synchrony, arguing that the monad's arrest of historical movement is a suspension of signification that enables a retroactive "redemption" of failed past revolutions; this logic is then shown to converge problematically with a Stalinist "perspective of the Last Judgement."

     Here we have the fundamental idea of this 'perspective of the Last Judgement' (the expression is Lacan's, from his Seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis)

414. #414

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.31

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek > Notes

     Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical scaffolding of the introduction by documenting the critique of historicism/cultural materialism and new materialism through the lens of Lacanian concepts (objet petit a, desire, the Real, the subject), establishing that both movements fail to account for the ahistorical traumatic kernel and the subject's position of enunciation.

     For Lacan's notion of the 'second death,' see his reading of Antigone in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960

415. #415

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.34

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek > Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section anchors several key theoretical moves in the introduction: the non-substantial, beingless subject (manque à être), the relationship between subject and objet petit a as a cut/gap structured like a Möbius strip (fantasy formula), the critique of neovitalist/object-oriented ontology via Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism, and Lacan's alignment of his project with dialectical materialism against nominalism.

     See Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 135, 140... Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 118.

416. #416

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.243

     Russell Sbriglia

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian sublime—understood as the Idea's immanence to the phenomenal as pure negativity—converges with Lacanian sublimation (elevating an object to the dignity of the Thing via anamorphosis/objet petit a), and uses this convergence to reread Ahab's transcendentalism in Moby Dick as a fetishistic disavowal of the nothingness of the Ideal rather than a genuine pursuit of the transcendent.

     As Lacan defines it in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, sublimation is the process whereby an object is 'elevated to the dignity of the Thing.'

417. #417

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.181

     Who Cares?

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis must be positioned against new materialism not to defend anthropocentrism but to supply what new materialism lacks: a theorization of the Real as the consequence of castration (not a pre-discursive thing-in-itself), and of sexuality as an "ontological lapse" that marks the specificity of human being without grounding a hierarchy—thereby enabling an ethics of the nonhuman other that new materialism's own "democracy of objects" forecloses.

     the possibility of a relation between the human and its nonhuman others... a properly psychoanalytic materialism that can address the trouble with correlationism without, however, abnegating the ontological peculiarity of the human.

418. #418

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

     Russell Sbriglia > Notes

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

     Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 71, 139 . . . See chapter 11 of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 'Courtly Love as Anamorphosis.'

419. #419

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.186

     Who Cares? > The Human Object

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis is positioned not as an escape from correlationism but as its radical subversion: by replacing the Kantian unity of apperception with the imaginary misrecognition of the ego and grounding the subject in the unconscious rather than consciousness, Lacan exposes desire, fantasy, and jouissance as what secretly drive both Kantian rationality and moral law—demonstrating that castration (the traumatic encounter with the signifier) is the specifically human mark, irreducible to new materialism's ontologies of actual entities.

     psychoanalysis is built upon a concern for a facet of the human that correlates to no existing object... This is the core of the Freudian discovery and the hinge upon which Lacan's articulation of the ethics, and therefore the practice, of psychoanalysis turns.

420. #420

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.187

     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.

     Because the ethics of psychoanalysis activates the subject's fundamental disquietude with regard to its position within any ideological context, it invites, or demands, new and ever-renewing modes of relating to, caring for, and encountering difference.

421. #421

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.194

     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.

     The ethics of psychoanalysis enjoins a steadfast commitment to the discovery of the always singular way in which the human, each instance of the human, is not coincident with itself.

422. #422

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.85

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **Accepting the Ring**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Laura Palmer's ethical act in *Fire Walk with Me* consists in embracing the death drive (figured by the ring's circular absence) against phallic authority (figured by BOB/the letter), and that this act—possible only once Laura acknowledges the lack in the Other—constitutes the film's privileged ethical position, one the spectator is invited to share.

     In the instant of her impossible identification with the death drive, she achieves the ethical position that the film itself privileges.

423. #423

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.117

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **Going AII the Way in Fantasy**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fantasy and desire are structurally opposed but mutually sustaining: the subject's retreat from desire into fantasy ultimately opens onto the traumatic Real, and Lynch's *Mulholland Drive* is exemplary precisely because it follows fantasy's logic all the way to this silence, thereby exposing the constitutive loss that generates subjectivity.

     as Lacan emphasizes in his seminar on ethics (Seminar VII), the superego marks the point at which the subject abandons the ethical position and gives ground relative to her desire

424. #424

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.76

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Contradidory Status of l auro Polmer**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's *Fire Walk with Me* reveals the speculative identity of the virgin/whore fantasy couple, showing that fantasy's enjoyment depends on the silent co-presence of its opposite, and that this recognition—ordinarily foreclosed by patriarchal ideology—opens the possibility of an ethical subjectivity.

     it marks the possibility of an ethical subjectivity.

425. #425

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.137

     ,'\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 > Conclusion: The Ethics of Fantasy

     Theoretical move: The passage works through competing ethical frameworks—Lacan's desire-based ethics, Žižek's drive-based ethics, and Kant's freedom-through-law ethics—to argue that Lynch's films enact a Hegelian speculative identity between the realms of desire/theoretical reason and fantasy/practical reason, a synthesis that Kant himself failed to reach but Fichte and Hegel accomplished.

     Lacan conceives of ethics in terms of the relation that one adopts toward one's desire. As Lacan sees it, by refusing to give ground relative to one's desire, one sustains an ethical position

426. #426

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.119

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **CONCLUSION** The Ethics ofFantasy

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that fantasy has an ethical dimension—not as escapism but as the very site of freedom—by mapping Kant's two Critiques onto Lynch's filmmaking: the first Critique's anti-fantasmatic stance gives way, as does Lynch's early ambivalence, to a Kantian practical reason whose moral law identifies fantasy as the locus of autonomy that exceeds the symbolic order and makes the ethical act possible.

     few have explicidy coneeived of an ethics of fantasy... only Kant clarifies the direct link between fantasy and ethics that guides Lynch's filmmaking.

427. #427

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.103

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **Fontosy ond Humiliotion**

     Theoretical move: Fantasy's ethical dimension lies not in its retreat from the Other but in the humiliation it compels: by externalizing one's innermost subjectivity, the fantasizing subject is exposed to the Other's look, and fully embracing rather than retreating from this exposure constitutes the genuine ethical act.

     It is Alvin's embrace of this experience that transforms him into an ethical figure, and his ethical act does not remain isolated but changes his world.

428. #428

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.42

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Other** Side **of Fontosy** > **The Normal and the Abnormal**

     Theoretical move: By staging the full realization of fantasy in *The Elephant Man*, McGowan argues that Lynch reveals fantasy's constitutive cost: the impossible object is produced by desire's own structuring lack, so its realization dissolves both the object and the desiring subject, demanding an ethical speculative identification with the monstrous other rather than a safe humanitarian distance.

     If one watches The Elephant Man and experiences one's speculative identity with Merrick, one accomplishes an ethical act.

429. #429

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.90

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Enduring the Desire of the Other > The Entrence of the Superego

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the superego is the psychical internalization of the law that arises precisely from the subject's sacrifice of desire: the more desire is surrendered, the stronger the superego's command to surrender more, trapping the subject in the dialectic of law and desire rather than opening onto an ethics of desire — illustrated through Lynch's Lost Highway, where Fred's abandonment of desire energizes the Mystery Man as superego-figure.

     Morality always comes down to—and this is why Lacan contrasts it with an ethics of desire—the command to sacrifice the object because the object's ambiguity is what keeps pushing desire forward.

430. #430

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.105

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Private Fantasy as Public Ethic

     Theoretical move: Full commitment to one's own fantasmatic enjoyment transforms the perceived public world from threatening to welcoming, thereby serving as the condition for an ethics that overcomes paranoia; the passage argues that envy of the Other's enjoyment is itself a displaced mode of enjoyment that arises precisely when the subject has abandoned its own fantasy.

     Only the authentically enjoying subject can avoid the paranoia rampant today and become an exemplar of contemporary ethics.

431. #431

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.134

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 4. Fantasizing the Father in *Blue Velvet* > R. The Ethics of Fantasizing in *The 5traight* 5tory

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, through footnotes to McGowan's analysis of Lynch's *The Straight Story*, that fantasy's ethical dimension lies in full commitment to it even unto trauma, and that desire in its pure form is the pain of existing; furthermore, fantasy typically produces paranoia by attributing loss to an external cause, but Alvin's fantasy escapes paranoia through the quantitative intensity of his commitment rather than any structural difference.

     Immersing oneself in fantasy and thereby exposing oneself to possible humiliation is the ethical position that figures prominently in the films of Wim Wenders.

432. #432

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.125

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > ² . The Integration of the Impossible Objeet in rhe Elephant Man

     Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes to a chapter on *The Elephant Man*) advances two key theoretical moves: (1) it revises the Lacanian account of jouissance by arguing that enjoyment is internal to the law rather than requiring transgression, marking a development from Seminar VII to Seminar XX; and (2) it distinguishes objet petit a (constitutive absence) from das Ding (sublime Thing) to argue that Merrick functions as an impossible object rather than a sublime presence, while deploying the Hegelian Beautiful Soul to critique the speculative identity of noble and base attitudes toward Merrick.

     This is what Lacan did not yet see in Seminar VII, where he sees transgression as the sole path to enjoyment.

433. #433

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.88

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **Alienation, Separation, and the Traversing of Fantasy in the Analytic Setting**

     Theoretical move: The analytic setting operationalizes alienation and separation as clinical techniques: the analyst's enigmatic desire disrupts the analysand's fantasy ($ ◇ a), while the Freudian injunction "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" frames the Lacanian subject as ethically tasked with subjectifying the otherness of primal repression — making the subject appear where the drive/Other once dominated.

     It is for this reason that we can say that the Lacanian subject is ethically motivated, based as it is on this Freudian injunction so often repeated in Lacan's work.

434. #434

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.17

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: This passage is a preface/road map for the book, outlining its scope, methodology, and interpretive stance—it is non-substantive theoretical content, serving primarily as an editorial and navigational frame rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

     psychoanalytic ethics in Seminar VII or of transference in Seminar VIII

435. #435

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.120

     <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **Castration**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of castration is re-theorised as a structural loss of jouissance — not an anatomical threat — that is transferred to and circulates in the Other (as language, knowledge, market, law), and this structure of lack/loss is shown to be homologous across the economic, linguistic, kinship, and political registers.

     Such a notion is central to Lacan's reading of Freud in Seminar VII, for example.

436. #436

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.166

     <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **The Ethics of Lacanian Psychoanalysis**

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis is constitutively a praxis of jouissance rather than a pragmatic social therapy, and that its proper teaching discourse is the hysteric's discourse—one that perpetually challenges authority and resists systematization—while also staging a methodological argument about the peculiar temporal logic required to read Lacan, against the American academic demand for immediate critical mastery.

     the ethical limits of psychoanalysis coincide with the limits of its practice.

437. #437

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.67

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **Beyond the Split Subject**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the split subject is not Lacan's final word on subjectivity: beyond alienation (the split itself), there is a further movement — separation — in which a subject of the unconscious momentarily arises by assuming responsibility for the unconscious, grounding an ethical dimension in Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden."

     Lacan claims that 'one is always responsible for one's position as subject.' His concept of the subject thus has an ethical component that finds its founding principle in Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.'

438. #438

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.45

     <span id="page-42-0"></span>The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Real is not simply temporally prior to language but is constitutively defined as that which resists or has not yet been symbolized; the Symbolic's "cutting into" the Real produces Reality (existence), while the Real itself only "ex-sists" outside language — a distinction with direct ethical and clinical consequences for Lacanian versus other psychoanalytic practice.

     it is an analyst's job to intervene in the patient's real, not in the patient's view of reality.

439. #439

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.233

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > Part III: Conceptualizations

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of endnotes/footnotes for a chapter, citing sources and making brief clarificatory remarks on concepts such as the necessity of proletarian revolution (as ethical rather than historic), the relationship between repetition and difference (contra Deleuze), and Lacan's distinction between tuche and automaton in relation to the real and the pleasure principle. The theoretical work is subsidiary and referential rather than sustained argument.

     the necessity of the proletarian revolution is ethical.

440. #440

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.236

     . Compare:

     Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it consists of closing footnotes (including two Lacan citations on the phallus and jouissance, a comparative note on Agnes Heller's account of comedy, and a full bibliography), with no new theoretical argument developed.

     See, for example, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), p. .

441. #441

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.195

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary techno-scientific developments—brain-machine interfaces, digital virtualization, and posthumanist projects—threaten the very gap of finitude that, for Kant and Freud alike, grounds human creativity and the Symbolic order; Žižek mobilizes Lacan's "point of the apocalypse" (saturation of the Symbolic by the Real of jouissance) as the theoretical framework for diagnosing this threat, and then tests Nietzsche's eternal return against it to expose the limits of both Nietzschean and posthumanist thought.

     In his Ethics seminar, Lacan invokes the 'point of the apocalypse,' the impossible saturation of the Symbolic by the Real of jouissance

442. #442

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.104

     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.

     I cannot resist the temptation to perceive Anakin's insistence as a properly ethical stance, similar to that of Mozart's Don Giovanni, who refuses the Stone Guest's last-minute offer of salvation.

443. #443

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.206

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine freedom is not the absence of causal determination but the retroactive capacity to choose which causes determine us — a "positing of presuppositions" structure that links Bergsonian retroactive possibility, Kantian self-determination, Hegelian Setzung der Voraussetzungen, and Varela's autopoiesis into a single temporal-ontological loop.

     'Ethics,' at its most elementary, stands for the courage to accept this responsibility.

444. #444

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.77

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > A Boy Meets the Lady

     Theoretical move: By reading Mrs. Robinson (and analogous figures like Julia in Brideshead Revisited) as ethical subjects rather than corrupt seducers, Žižek argues that an apparent prohibition sustaining promiscuity—keeping one person "pure" through one's own corruption—constitutes a genuine ethical act, thereby instantiating the dialectical structure of concrete universality where the particular sacrifice secretly upholds the universal.

     far from being a simple dissolute vulgar middle-aged housewife, Mrs. Robinson is the only true ethical figure in the film

445. #445

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.134

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

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the "parallax view" as a structural principle—no common denominator can resolve the split between incommensurable perspectives (First World/Third World, Milly/Densher/Kate)—and uses this to argue that genuine ethical acts consist not in symbolic reconciliation or hysterical clinging to fantasy, but in a traversal of fantasy that breaks the deadlock from within, as exemplified by Kate's refusal in James and Paul's self-sacrifice in Iñárritu.

     Milly's death is thus, in Lacan's very precise sense, an ethical death, a death died in accordance with desire.

446. #446

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.407

     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 passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing citations and brief elaborations on various topics (Hegelian dialectics, Christian theology, psychoanalysis, biogenetics, digital technology), containing no sustained theoretical argument of its own but several embedded conceptual gestures including a Lacanian reference to truth vs. knowledge and a Hegelian point about historical dimension of notions.

     Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, ), p. .

447. #447

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.145

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

     Theoretical move: By reading Henry James's *The Golden Bowl* and *The Wings of the Dove* through a Lacanian lens, Žižek argues that the network of protective lies ultimately serves to maintain the big Other's ignorance—keeping up social appearances—and that this "ethics of the unspoken" constitutes a false ethics, while "female masochism" is unmasked as a male fantasy rather than an attribute of feminine nature.

     The final dénouement of The Golden Bowl offers no solution proper, no act that would tear the web of lies apart, or, in Lacanian terms, would disclose the big Other's nonexistence.

448. #448

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.190

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > When the God Comes Around

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the identification of the sovereign Good with *das Ding* requires a parallax logic rather than a simple opposition, and extends this parallax structure to theology: the God of Love and the God of cruel justice are one and the same viewed from different perspectives, while Luther's excremental identity of man unlocks the properly Christian meaning of Incarnation as God's real identification with the excremental Real — a move unavailable to either Orthodox imitation-logic or Catholic symbolic-exchange.

     When, in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan claims that the 'sovereign Good is das Ding'

449. #449

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.90

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Traps of Pure Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's account of the fall from innocence to sin must be supplemented by a Schellingian-Lacanian correction: Prohibition does not disturb primordial repose but resolves a prior, more terrifying deadlock created by primordial self-contraction (sinthome), yielding a three-stage sequence of anxieties that grounds a properly materialist theory of subjectivity and ethical engagement.

     Is the only true ethical stance, therefore, acceptance of this paradox and its challenge?

450. #450

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.141

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

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

     she chooses losing Densher and money. This choice is possible only within an atheist perspective, it is the sign of a properly atheist ethics.

451. #451

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.333

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'free choice' is always already a meta-choice whose conditions are ideologically pre-structured, and uses the Amish rumspringa as a model for how academic 'radical' distance from the state functions as a reproductive mechanism of hegemony rather than genuine resistance; against Critchley's ethics-first localism, Žižek proposes a parallax shift that reveals 'resistance' as feeding the power-machine, and authentic revolution as a 'Must' rather than an 'ought.'

     Critchley is therefore logical in his assertion of the primacy of the Ethical over the Political: the ultimate motivating force... is the experience of injustice, of the ethical unacceptability of the state of things.

452. #452

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.84

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian > Die Versagung

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses Lacan's reading of Claudel's *The Hostage* and James's *The Portrait of a Lady* to argue that the feminine "No" (Versagung) is not a signifying negation grounded in the paternal "No," but a bodily, excremental gesture of pure loss that enacts separation from the Symbolic—prefiguring the sinthome—and that this "No as such" (form without content) is the hidden materialist core linking Kierkegaard's infinite resignation to Hegelian speculative identity.

     While men sacrifice themselves for a Thing (country, freedom, honor), only women are able to sacrifice themselves for nothing. (Or: men are moral, while only women are properly ethical.)

453. #453

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.358

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek proposes a fourth, materialist reading of the crucifixion (God repaying his own debt to humanity) to expose the theological truth concealed by the three standard versions, and argues that only a comprehensive materialism—not liberal tolerance or religious fundamentalism—can sustain a genuinely ascetic, militant ethics capable of judging fundamentalism on its own terms.

     it is paradoxically only a comprehensive materialism which is able to sustain a truly ascetic militant ethical stance

454. #454

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.402

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote apparatus for a chapter on Henry James, but it does substantive theoretical work by: (1) deploying the Lacanian triad of objects (objet petit a, S of barred A, big Phi) to map three types of Hitchcockian narrative objects found in James; and (2) critically noting James's failure to fully confront the ethical claim of revolutionary radicalism, contrasting this with Hegel's acknowledgment that the 'rabble' (Pöbel) is justified in its unconditional demands on society.

     he was unable fully to confront the ethical claim on society that sustains revolutionary radicalism

455. #455

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.92

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Traps of Pure Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that accepting guilt is a flight from anxiety that signals a compromise of desire, and that the true "Fall" is not transgression but the withdrawal into heteronomous Law—a move that generates the very desire to transgress it, so that the more one obeys the Law the more guilty one becomes, because obedience is itself a defense against the desire to sin.

     'Fall' is the very renunciation of my radical ethical autonomy: it occurs when I take refuge in a heteronomous Law

456. #456

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.52

     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 Hegelian subject is not a substantial self that undergoes dispossession but IS the void that emerges through that dispossession—a retroactive, self-positing structure—and uses this to mediate between Kantian autonomy and Hegelian ethical substance via the Lacanian logic of the Not-all, showing that irreducible contingency in ethics is the very condition of genuine responsibility and act.

     what ontology is the ethical dimension proper possible without being reduced to an epiphenomenon... it is misleading to ask how we can overcome the gap that separates Being from Ought

457. #457

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.97

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's *Ethics* seminar represents a deadlock—not a triumph—because it cannot clearly distinguish pure desire from immersion in primordial jouissance ("passion for the Real"); the resolution lies in the move from desire to drive, while the broader argument shows that Bataille's premodern dialectic of Law/transgression is superseded by the Kantian insight that the absolute excess is the Law itself, a move Lacan only partially executes.

     far from being the seminar of Lacan, his Ethics of Psychoanalysis is, rather, the point of deadlock at which Lacan comes dangerously close to the standard version of the 'passion for the Real.'

458. #458

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.96

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian ethical revolution—which displaces all external authority onto autonomous self-limitation—makes the "Sadeian perversion" not Kant's hidden truth but rather his *symptom*: Sade emerges precisely from Kant's failure to follow his own breakthrough to the end, and the only genuine resolution of the hysteric's demand for a Master is the analytic position of subjective destitution.

     For Lacan, the Kantian overcoming of the 'dialectic' of Law and desire—as well as the concomitant 'obliteration of the space for inherent transgression'—is a point of no return in the history of ethics

459. #459

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.105

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses the Darth Vader/Anakin figure to argue that the subject in the strict philosophical sense is constituted not by a human face but by an "excessive" ethical commitment that founds rather than corrupts the Good, and that the spectral Voice is the privileged medium of this inhuman subjectivity; this is further extended into a provocation about theology and materialism.

     is not the origin of our ethical commitment precisely our 'excessive' care and attachment, our readiness to break the balance of the ordinary flow of life, and to put everything at stake for the Cause to which we adhere?

460. #460

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.94

     11

     Theoretical move: Desire is structurally constituted by the impossibility of the objet petit a and is irreducible to the social order that produces it; ideology requires fantasy as a supplement to stabilize desire's inherent radicality, and the ethics of psychoanalysis—refusing to give ground relative to one's desire—demands embracing lack as constitutive rather than seeking its fantasmatic elimination, a stance the cinema of desire uniquely enables.

     'The only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one's desire.' Giving ground relative to one's desire involves failing to accept the impossible dimension of the objet petit a.

461. #461

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan

     29 > **18. The Politics of the Cinema of Integration**

     Theoretical move: The passage challenges the standard Lacanian cultural-theory move that aligns fantasy with ideological capture and desire with ethical resistance, arguing instead that fantasy itself can be a site of ideological contestation — making the desire/fantasy interaction, rather than a binary choice between them, the proper object of political analysis.

     desire with an ethical resistance to this manipulation

462. #462

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.215

     **Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing**

     Theoretical move: Fantasy, unlike pure desire (which remains confined to the level of the signifier and thereby insulates the subject from the real other), exposes the subject to the real other by making it vulnerable—and this vulnerability constitutes the ethical dimension of fantasy that the cinema of intersection (Wenders) uniquely reveals.

     This vulnerability represents an ethical position insofar as it allows the subject to take the otherness of the other into account.

463. #463

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.207

     **Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Resnais's *L'Année dernière à Marienbad* does not simply thematize the unknowability of the historical object but instead reconfigures our relationship to it: the impossible historical object exists in the present in a fantasmatic form, and its intrusion into the present (via radical cuts) is an extimate disruption that implicates the subject in the constitution of history itself, thereby opening onto an ethical response.

     In envisioning this possibility, Resnais glimpses an ethical response to history that the cinema of intersection exposes for us.

464. #464

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.239

     29 > **11. The Politics of Cinematic Desire**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is constituted through irreducible failure and impossibility—the lost object can never be recovered—and distinguishes Lacanian desire from Hegelian desire-for-recognition, while showing how the Nouvelle Vague films (Truffaut, Godard, Varda) formally enact this logic by frustrating the spectator's fantasmatic expectations.

     it is easy to see the affinity between Lacan's ethic of psychoanalysis and Sartrean existentialism... For Lacan, psychoanalysis existentializes the subject, forcing the subject to embrace its actual existential situation without the illusory guarantees of the big Other.

465. #465

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.76

     **Michael Mann and the Ethics of Excess**

     Theoretical move: Mann's heroes demonstrate that fantasy functions as an alibi for an excessive devotion to duty rather than duty serving fantasy, and this structure of excess—visible through the gaze—constitutes the ground of an ethical subjectivity that places the subject at odds with the symbolic order.

     The key to taking up an ethical position lies in identifying fully with this excess and thereby disregarding the entire field of representation and the dictates of the symbolic order.

466. #466

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.210

     **Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing**

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is reframed not as an ethical evasion of the other but as the very condition of an authentic ethical encounter: by imagining the threatening real dimension of the other, the fantasizing subject simultaneously exposes its own real kernel to the other's gaze, making fantasy the site where desire's safe distance collapses and genuine vulnerability becomes possible. Wenders's cinema of intersection stages this structure by juxtaposing worlds of desire and fantasy.

     Fantasy's unique ability to access the real dimension of the other and to expose the real dimension of the subject allows it to play a part in the domain of ethics.

467. #467

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.235

     29 > **6. Spike Lee's Fantasmatic Explosions**

     Theoretical move: This footnote-heavy passage advances the theoretical argument that racist ideology operates at the level of fantasy (jouissance attributed to the Other), that Lee's formal excess targets this fantasmatic racism whereas Haggis's realism misses it, and that Mann's male heroes instantiate a Kantian ethics of excess structurally tied to the phallic exception.

     Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 80.

468. #468

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.257

     29 > **27. Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past**

     Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus advances two theoretical moves: (1) it deploys the concepts of fantasy, desire, and the Subject Supposed to Know to analyze Resnais's treatment of historical memory and trauma; and (2) it introduces shame as structurally tied to the concealment-gesture of fantasizing, extending the ethics of fantasy into Wenders's filmmaking.

     28. Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing

469. #469

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.71

     **Michael Mann and the Ethics of Excess**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Michael Mann's films use fantasmatic cinematic excess to make visible the Kantian ethical subject — one whose freedom and subjectivity emerge precisely through an unconditional, excessive devotion to duty that refuses symbolic identity, aligning enjoyment with duty rather than with the satisfactions the symbolic order offers.

     Mann's films highlight it as a source for ethical action. By showing us the link between excess and ethical action, they reveal the precise nature of ethical action itself.

470. #470

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.234

     29 > **5. The Coldness of Kubrick**

     Theoretical move: This is a footnotes/endnotes section for a chapter on Kubrick, containing bibliographic references and discursive annotations. The only substantive theoretical moves are: a defence of the erotic logic of coldness in *Eyes Wide Shut* (note 5), and a claim that HAL's perversity in *2001* flows from the structural contradictions inhering in symbolic authority (note 7).

     Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960

471. #471

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.99

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič identifies two distinct Nietzschean conceptions of truth: one that identifies truth with the Real (as inaccessible, dangerous force requiring dynamical 'dilution'), and another grounded in perspectivity (a structural/topological disjunction where truth is internal to its situation) — arguing that conflating or choosing between them misreads both the passion for the Real at work in each and the specific way nuance functions in each configuration.

     This is also what places truth in the field of ethics, as is clear in the second of the passages quoted above (where truth is considered not as an epistemological category, but as a matter of courage—'error is not blindness, error is cowardice . . .').

472. #472

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.170

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič articulates a Nietzschean "double affirmation" (amor fati as affirmation of both necessity and contingency) and then pivots to Lacan's claim that love-as-sublimation humanises jouissance by making it condescend to desire, using the logic of comedy—where the Real appears as a minimal difference between two semblances rather than behind appearances—as the structural model for this movement.

     Lacan's canonic definition of sublimation from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis implies precisely the opposite movement, that of ascension (that sublimation raises, or elevates, an object to the dignity of the Thing).

473. #473

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.157

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: By reading the Zeno paradox of Achilles and the tortoise through Lacan's sexuation, Zupančič argues that masculine and feminine positions represent two structurally different relations to the Other and to Nothingness—metonymic pursuit versus immanent internal split—and then extends this to Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil," showing that Nothingness is not a transcendent void beyond the good/evil pair but its inner organizing structure, thereby redefining nihilism as capture between good and evil rather than their surpassing.

     we are precisely on the ground governed by truth as an ethical (more than an epistemological) imperative, the ground where courage is needed, and the strength of a spirit is measured by how much truth it can tolerate.

474. #474

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.192

     <span id="page-186-0"></span>Notes > Part I: Nietzsche the Metapsychologist

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Part I of Zupančič's book, providing scholarly citations to Lacan, Nietzsche, Freud, Badiou, and others. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument in itself, though several notes gesture toward theoretical moves (e.g., Lacan on God and the dit/dire, the shift from Discourse of the Master to Discourse of the University, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis).

     Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 107... p. 109... p. 112... p. 99.

475. #475

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.175

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the comic paradigm—unlike the tragic/sublime—constitutes the proper structural analogue of love: both work through a "parallel montage" of two semblances whose non-coincidence produces the Real as a gap-become-object, rather than incorporating the Real as an inaccessible Thing circled by sublime friction. Love's miracle is preserving transcendence within accessibility, not sublimating the banal into the inaccessible.

     In his analysis of Antigone, Lacan insists upon this dimension; he insists that Antigone's ethical act produces this aesthetic effect of blinding splendor.

476. #476

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.83

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is redefined not as a turning-away from drives but as the creation of a space in which what is excluded by the reality principle—objects elevated to the dignity of the Thing—can be valued; this space is identified as the very gap that prevents reality from coinciding with itself (the Real), whose closure produces a Superego imperative of enjoyment rather than liberation.

     Here are two passages from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis that highlight this problem

477. #477

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.113

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the fundamental problem of knowledge and perspectivity is not the subject's partial point of view but the structural disjunction between the gaze (as object inscribed within the thing itself) and the viewpoint, such that the subject is constitutively 'ex-centered' — a part of the subject always already falls out onto the side of objects — and subjectivization is the possible (not necessary) consequence of encountering this expelled, fallen part.

     It is useful to recall a crucial point made by Lacan in his commentary on Antigone in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis. This very blinding splendor or shine—the light that is too strong, and thus forces us to look away from it—is itself the ultimate mask.

478. #478

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.78

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that modern "hedonism" is structurally grounded in the ascetic ideal (passive nihilism), and pivots to the Lacanian concept of sublimation—understood as the creation of new values by "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing"—to show that what Kant dismisses as mere pathological desire can carry the same structure as moral duty, thereby reframing the ethics of desire against Kantian moralism.

     In his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan insists that the question of sublimation must be considered as a 'problem of ethics.'

479. #479

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.24

     **Demand** > **Drive** > **Enjoyment/***Jouissance*

     Theoretical move: Jouissance is theorized as a structural excess irreducible to the pleasure principle—a paradoxical satisfaction-in-dissatisfaction that inextricably binds pleasure and pain, is constituted in relation to the symbolic limit (rather than merely through its transgression), and marks the subject's foundational disconnection from the symbolic order, functioning as the only measure of human freedom.

     This is what Lacan did not yet see in Seminar VII, where he sees transgression as the sole path to enjoyment. He says there, 'Without a transgression there is no access to jouissance'...The problem with this formulation stems from the external opposition Lacan posits between law and enjoyment.

480. #480

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek with Derrida

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek and Derrida converge on the ethical injunction to love the "real" neighbor (the refugee as monstrous, anxiety-producing other), while Žižek's Marxist critique surpasses liberal-deconstructive approaches by insisting that capitalism's malfunctions (including refugee crises) are structurally necessary rather than accidental disturbances amenable to cosmetic reform.

     To consider refugees as real neighbors is not to dehistoricize or ontologize their condition… 'Love thy neighbor' takes up the difficult—even traumatizing—task of identifying with society's/globalism's desubjectivized others

481. #481

     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.

     Lacan's commentary on desire as the foundation of the ethics of psychoanalysis only makes sense if we accept the notion that he operates with two different conceptions of desire

482. #482

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>} > Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section for a chapter on Lacan's das Ding provides a scholarly apparatus that triangulates das Ding across multiple Lacan seminars, Freud's Standard Edition, Hegel's Jena Lectures, and Heidegger, while also proposing theoretical extensions: that das Ding inhabits both subject and Other (rewriting the fantasy formula as $ a <>), that the Subject Supposed to Know functions to cover over das Ding, and that the Heimlich/Unheimlich parallels the mother/Thing relation.

     it is to remind us of the primordial and primary character of this intuition in our experience at the level of ethics that this year I am calling a certain zone of reference 'the Thing'

483. #483

     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.

     sublimation—and therefore the ethics of psychoanalysis—is a matter of raising a mundane object to 'the dignity of the Thing.'

484. #484

     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.

     Lacan insists that it is the subject's inexorable fate to *always* give up on his or her desire and that this structure of self-betrayal is fundamentally inscribed into the subject's destiny.

485. #485

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.277

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Salvaging Our Dignity

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek, the passage argues that the objet petit a—by arresting the infinite sliding of the signifier and fixing the subject to its fundamental fantasy—is an ethical force that salvages the subject's dignity and individuality, positioning the ethics of psychoanalysis as an ethics of desire faithful to das Ding rather than to the master's morality or the Other's desire.

     the ethics of psychoanalysis is an ethics of desire, of faithfulness to the Thing as the arbitrator of the kind of desire that is related to jouissance (rather than the Other's desire or the master's morality).

486. #486

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.188

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek *contra* Levinas

     Theoretical move: Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics argues that the "face" of the other is always already symbolically mediated and therefore politically domesticated; against Levinas's ethical alterity, Žižek proposes the neighbor as the embodiment of the Lacanian Real—a traumatic, inhuman Thing that short-circuits the particular to produce genuine universality and grounds a more radical anti-racist politics.

     The biblical injunction might be better characterized as an 'anti-ethics' to the extent that it radically deviates from a humanist orientation.

487. #487

     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.

     in positing that the ethics of psychoanalysis is an ethics of not giving ground on one's desire, he refers to the kind of desire that animates the subject by allowing it to tap into the reservoir of energy that jouissance represents

488. #488

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Nobus](#contents.xhtml_ch10a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kant's ethical ambiguity—between freedom as traumatic Real and freedom as asymptotically unattainable—mirrors the Sadean confusion about "second death," and both are resolved by the Hegelian-Lacanian move of grasping Substance as Subject (i.e., recognising that radical negativity/death drive is already the zero-level of reality, not a terminal destruction to be achieved).

     in the seminar that follows the seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis (where he reads Antigone), Lacan provides a detailed reading of Claudel's Sygne de Coûfontaine

489. #489

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.253

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs scholarly philological critique of Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade," documenting systematic misattributions, citation errors, and misreadings across Žižek's corpus while tracking the precise textual sources in Sade, Lacan's Seminar VII, and related literature for concepts such as the second death, desire, alienation/separation, and the quadripartite structure of Lacanian theory.

     See Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII, 210–17… Lacan first mentions the notion of the second death three weeks after his initial discussion of the system of Pope Pius VI… the first session of his commentary on Antigone.

490. #490

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.250

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly endnotes section for a chapter on Žižek's interpretation of Lacan's "Kant with Sade," providing bibliographic citations for key arguments about the Kant-Sade relationship, Lacan's ethics, desire, and perversion — it is primarily reference material but indexes the theoretical terrain of the chapter.

     Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992).

491. #491

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's position on the refugee crisis is best understood not as Eurocentric conditional hospitality but as a resistance to the "double blackmail" of pure heterophilia vs. pure heterophobia, and that Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics of alterity actually converges with Derrida's own deconstruction of pure alterity as ideological fantasy—though Žižek misses this convergence by lumping Derrida with Levinas.

     When (re)politicized and redefined, this command takes the form of an invaluable corrective to 'today's "new reign of ethics,"' to a depoliticized ethical sentimentalism or pious ethics of difference

492. #492

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.240

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

     Theoretical move: Nobus argues that Lacan's "Kant with Sade" constitutes the impossible-yet-central nucleus of Žižek's entire intellectual project, and that a rigorous critique of Žižek must reconstruct the coherence of his scattered readings of that essay through a centripetal force mirroring the centrifugal force required to read Lacan's text itself.

     this should not surprise anyone who has read Lacan's (eminently readable) Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, in which the detailed commentary of Antigone follows his 'primal' association of Kant and Sade.

493. #493

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

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > The Dignity of the Thing

     Theoretical move: Against Žižek's insistence on an unbridgeable chasm between the Thing and worldly objects, the passage argues that sublimation—raising a mundane object to the dignity of the Thing—is not mere idealization but a genuine "realization" of the real within reality, and that "not giving way on desire" means choosing the singularity of one's jouissance/sinthome rather than automatically switching to the register of the drive.

     In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan offers two examples of what it means to raise a mundane object to the dignity of the Thing

494. #494

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.242

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade" as a three-ring itinerary, arguing that Žižek's key theoretical contribution is to foreground the more implicit and disturbing second principle—that Kant is the truth of Sade (Sade as closet Kantian)—over the better-known first principle (Sade as the truth of Kant), and connects this to the concept of the "second death" as a condition for radical creation ex nihilo.

     Lacan first adumbrates the libertine pontiff's vision in Chapter 16 of his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, whereby he underscores his Holiness's ultimate wish to secure a more absolute form of destruction

495. #495

     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 argues that Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade" is incomplete: while Žižek identifies two reasons for the impurity of Sadean jouissance, Lacan's text advances four deeper observations about the fundamental bankruptcy of libertine ideology, and crucially, Lacan accepts the deadlock between alienation and separation as inescapable, whereas Žižek transforms it into a contingency to be resolved through a reconceptualization of the ethical act.

     the key paradigm for this new ethical act that breaks the vicious cycle of Kant and Sade is Antigone... The hinge between the first and the second circle is thereby to be found in the motto, 'Do not give up on your desire!'

496. #496

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.222

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of subjectivity, while providing a powerful diagnosis of capitalist modernity through the lens of the death drive, constitutive negativity, and commodity fetishism, remains insufficiently concrete for emancipatory politics because it lacks an account of the determinate social forms of capitalism and a theory of how the incomplete, anxious subject can become a revolutionary agent — a gap that neither Lacan nor Marx alone can fill.

     There are two implications that develop from Žižek's corpus: 1) an ethics of psychoanalysis (rather than a politics of psychoanalysis) grounded in 2) an act that concretizes the actuality of freedom

497. #497

     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.

     Rethinking the ethical potential of desire entails making a case for the centrality of sublimation in Lacanian theory.

498. #498

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.154

     Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > Žižek’s Psyche

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology operates by harnessing the psyche's capacity for repression and self-destruction, functioning most effectively when subjects mistake ideological experience for authentic feeling (via disavowal); and that Žižek's ideology critique—exemplified through the *They Live* allegory—constitutes a form of existentialist choice demanding a psychic, rather than merely economic, revolution.

     what would the most ethical act be at that point? To commit suicide... Or possibly to make the existential choice to live with, and make decisions based on, this knowledge.

499. #499

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

     Žižek Responds! > [<span class="grey">INDEX</span>](#contents.xhtml_end1)

     Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage listing proper names and Lacanian sub-concepts with their page/anchor references across the volume; it is non-substantive and performs no theoretical argument.

     ethics of desire [here](#10_reading_the_illegible_on_ieks_interpretation_of_lacan.xhtml_IDX-674), [here](#11_raising_a_mundane_object_to_the_dignity_of_the_thing_.xhtml_IDX-675)

500. #500

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.279

     Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Conclusion

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of desire—grounded in the lost Thing—explains the idiosyncratic, counterproductive, and socially defiant dimensions of desire that ideology critique (à la Žižek) cannot account for, because such desire exceeds the logic of the Other's desire and resists instrumentalization by capitalist-neoliberal imperatives.

     Lacan's commentary on the ethics of desire—on the importance of the Thing in guiding our desire to the point of giving us our destiny

501. #501

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.191

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Racializing the Palestinian Other

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Levinas's ethics of the face substantializes the Other in a way that, when applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict, ideologically neutralizes concrete racialized suffering; Žižek's counter-move is to insist that true emancipatory ethics must pass through "objective violence" and structural analysis, suspending the dyadic face-to-face encounter in favor of attending to the other's others.

     The true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one of choosing against the face, for the third.

502. #502

     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.

     ethics is aligned with the drive whereas desire, despite Lacan's insistence that the ethics of psychoanalysis is a matter of not giving ground on one's desire, stands in direct opposition to ethics.

503. #503

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues, against Žižek's ontological/ontic assignment, that das Ding is purely ontological (the originary opening of the human relation to being-as-such) while objet petit a is the ontic element that opens onto an ontological horizon—and that the two form an essential couplet rather than independent concepts, with objet a "tickling das Ding from the inside."

     In the lectures on Ethics, Lacan theorized that sublimation is achieved when 'the object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing.'

504. #504

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

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage critically documents a chain of misreadings by Žižek (and others) of Lacan's Seminar VII ethics: the central error is attributing to Lacan the imperative "Do not give up on your desire!" when Lacan's actual formulation concerns guilt as arising from having given up on one's desire—a paradox, not an imperative. Secondary misreadings of Antigone's ἄτη, her desire, and related textual inaccuracies are catalogued.

     the only thing one can be guilty of is having given up on one's desire.

505. #505

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.93

     [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **HOW TO MISRECOGNIZE A CATASTROPHE**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the predominant theoretical interpretation of Nazism and Stalinism as crimes of universality is a fundamental misrecognition: Nazism was in fact grounded in an ontology of particular difference, and Stalinism in a particularized distortion of the universal, meaning that the post-war theoretical "ethical turn" toward respecting particular identity—exemplified by Adorno—has paradoxically undermined emancipatory universalist politics and ceded political ground to the Right.

     the misinterpretation of Nazism and Stalinism as crimes of the universal has the effect of depoliticizing them. Once they become instances of universalist overreach, the sensible response turns out to be an ethical rather than a political one

506. #506

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.95

     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.

     if we do something right, but do it out of fear, including fear of God, we act as human animals, not as ethical subjects. To qualify as ethical subjects, it is not enough that we conform to the moral law

507. #507

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     ‘There’s no central exchange’

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalism's systemic character creates an irresolvable ethical impasse — individual responsibility is deflected by corporate structure, yet structure is only invoked to shield individuals from punishment — and that this impasse reveals not merely a dissimulation but a constitutive lack in capitalism: the absence of any agency capable of regulating impersonal, subject-less Capital itself.

     it is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is the temptation of the ethical