Extimacy

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (243)

1. #01

   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.

   Kant takes this 'foreign body' as that which is 'most truly ours', and founds on it the autonomy and freedom of the subject.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.51

   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.

   there is something else, something that belongs neither to the subject nor to the Other, but is 'extimate' to both.

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.70

   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.

   the crucial question is whether we are aware of this 'extimate' and essentially empty point of our being, or whether we try to hide it behind the façade of a Good larger than the good of those affected by our actions.

4. #04

   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.

   See Jacques-Alain Miller, Extimite (unpublished seminar), lecture from 16 April 1986.

5. #05

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.157

   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.

   It is a 'feeling which does not deceive' (Lacan), one which indicates that we have come near to the 'object' (designating the extimate place of our jouissance).

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Law is constituted only in the act of the subject, and that the point of encounter between law and subject is 'extimate' to both — neither simply conscious nor unconscious, but rather the cause of the unconscious (a separated-yet-internal part of the subject's flesh), which is anterior to and foundational for the unconscious itself.

   the point of the encounter between the law and the subject is extimate to both.

7. #07

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

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

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

   See Jacques-Alain Miller, L'Extimite (unpublished seminar), lecture from 8 January 1986.

8. #08

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

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

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

   I experience my own enjoyment (which emerges along with the enjoyment of the other, and is even insociable from it) as strange and hostile.

9. #09

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.275

   Index

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

   extimate in ethics 38, 57

10. #10

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.82

    RETRE ATIN G BEHIND THE GATE > IN VA SION OF PR I VAC Y

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that surveillance capitalism does not threaten subjects by eliminating privacy but rather functions ideologically to deepen their investment in privacy, thereby privatizing subjectivity and severing subjects from the public world on which genuine satisfaction depends; the real counter to capitalist privatization is not defending privacy but recognizing that desire requires the obstacle of the public.

    The subject's essence is always outside of itself and readily visible to the public.

11. #11

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.268

    . THE P SYC HIC C ON STIT U TION OF PR I VATE SPAC E

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several load-bearing theoretical moves: it locates the analyst's function in identification with objet a (rather than the Other), marks the objet a's theoretical advance over the object of desire in Seminar X, and frames symptom-enjoyment as a political strategy of resistance to ideological interpellation, while grounding these claims in readings of Freud, Lacan, Arendt, Marx, and Habermas on the public/private distinction.

    In producing the social subject, extimate causality also leaves a remainder or indeterminacy, so that every subject bears some unspecifiable excess within the social field.

12. #12

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

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

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

    Lacan identifies Vienna qua place of the discovery of the inherently extimate unconscious as, so to speak, the center of the decentered/decentering.

13. #13

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

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

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

    The subject's most intimate inner truth is outside. This is the kernel of the Freudian experience that Lacan highlights in this essay.

14. #14

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.240

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally

    Theoretical move: Through close reading of the 'witty hysteric' dream, Lacan articulates that desire is structurally constituted as the interval between need and demand, that man's desire is the Other's desire, and that the phallus is the privileged signifier of the metonymical lack that sustains this structure — a conclusion illustrated both by hysterical identification and an obsessional clinical case.

    desire is discourse, articulated in the locus of the Other… It is this ex-sistence (Entstellung) of desire in the dream that explains how its desire is masked

15. #15

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

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

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

    this object/Thing is that 'which is closest' to us 'while escaping' us 'more than anything else'.

16. #16

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

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

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

    not as an organ of the body that produces and secretes the libido, but as a void that is crammed with content that is external to it. Such content (signifiers from the Other) accumulates and gets jumbled up in it

17. #17

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.36

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

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

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

18. #18

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.42

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

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

    The abyssal dimension of the Other is reduced to mere tourism of the Unknown.

19. #19

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.46

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

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

    It is in these terms that we should interpret Lacan's neologism 'extimate.' He coins the term precisely in his introduction to the notion of das Ding, intending it to name the paradoxical switch point between what is most interior and 'mine' versus what is completely, even spectacularly, exterior and alien.

20. #20

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

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

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

    Taking account of this radically ex-centric character of the subject prepares us for understanding the indispensable companion to Lacan's dictum about desire as the desire of the Other.

21. #21

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.79

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

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

    The challenge is deciding what this sentence could possibly mean... Isn't the Lacanian real precisely what cannot be revealed?

22. #22

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

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

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

    The paradoxical effect of the symptom is to simultaneously create distance and intimacy. In this symptomatic compromise, we see quite precisely how the figure of Yahweh is divided between his role as an embodiment of the threatening Thing and the largely consoling and calming role as the big Other of the symbolic law.

23. #23

    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.

    what is more of a neighbor to me than this heart within which is that of my jouissance and which I don't dare go near?

24. #24

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

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

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

    who, as Augustine claimed, is closest to us— most absolutely intimate, closer to us than we are to ourselves— and yet who remains massively unknown, the locus of the ultimate mystery.

25. #25

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.188

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

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

    The insideoutness of money foreshadows the notion of 'extimacy' that Lacan associated with the Thing.

26. #26

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

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

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

    the experience of the sacred is centered on a locus of the enigmatic real that is primordially encountered in the fellow human being.

27. #27

    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.

    "extimacy" notion, 37, 179

28. #28

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.127

    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 other's private enjoyment — its smell, its way of talking, its gestures — ceaselessly bombards the subject. This is an assault that occurs all the time in the contemporary social world.

29. #29

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.131

    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 very fact that the other's enjoyment captures our attention demonstrates our intimate — or extimate — relation to it.

30. #30

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.244

    I > 9 > Progress or Value

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the traditional left-right opposition of life vs. death is internally unstable: the left's identification with life (from Marx through Deleuze/Guattari to Hardt/Negri) reproduces a capitalist fantasy of unrestrained productivity, while conservatism and fascism deploy death in the service of making life valuable — both positions failing to reckon with the subject's constitutive alienation from pure enjoyment.

    the problem of the Jew for the Nazi was precisely her or his irreducibility to bare life — the excess of life, the surplus enjoyment, that she or he embodies.

31. #31

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

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

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

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

32. #32

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part31.xhtml_ncx_212"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part31.xhtml_page_0243"></span>***U***

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically maps Lacan's concept of the unconscious, arguing that against biologistic reductions by Freud's followers, the unconscious is irreducibly linguistic, symbolic, and transindividual — structured like a language, constituted as the discourse of the Other, and identical with the determination of the subject by the symbolic order.

    'This exteriority of the symbolic in relation to man is the very notion of the unconscious' (Ec, 469).

33. #33

    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_65"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0083"></span>**extimacy**

    Theoretical move: Extimacy (extimité) is introduced as a Lacanian neologism that deconstructs the inside/outside opposition, showing that the Real, the unconscious, and the Other are structurally both interior and exterior to the subject, with this topology expressed paradigmatically in the Torus and Möbius Strip.

    The resulting neologism, which may be rendered 'extimacy' in English, neatly expresses the way in which psychoanalysis problematises the opposition between inside and outside, between container and contained

34. #34

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_165"></span>**real**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the genealogy and theoretical transformations of Lacan's concept of the Real across his career: from an early ontological absolute opposed to appearance, through its elevation to one of the three fundamental orders in 1953 as that which resists symbolisation absolutely, to its late-Lacan distinction from 'reality'—all while maintaining a constitutive indeterminacy (internal/external, unknowable/rational) that is itself theoretically productive.

    The real is thus both inside and outside (S7, 118; see EXTIMACY) (extimité).

35. #35

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_206"></span>**torus**

    Theoretical move: The torus, as a topological figure, is deployed by Lacan to illustrate two structural features of the subject: its decentred, ex-centric nature, and the collapse of the inside/outside distinction that grounds the concept of extimacy.

    'its peripheral exteriority and its central exteriority constitute only one single region' (E, 105). This illustrates the way that psychoanalysis problematises the distinction between 'inside' and 'outside' (see EXTIMITÉ).

36. #36

    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_17"></span>**alienation**

    Theoretical move: Lacanian alienation is reframed as a constitutive, inescapable structural feature of the subject — rooted in imaginary identification with the counterpart — rather than a contingent accident susceptible to Hegelian/Marxist transcendence or synthesis.

    Lacan coined the term EXTIMACY to designate the nature of this alienation, in which alterity inhabits the innermost core of the subject.

37. #37

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

    <span id="Chapter21.htm_page205"></span>Nomadalgia: The Junior Boys’ *So This is Goodbye*

    Theoretical move: Fisher coins "nomadalgia" (sickness *of* travel, as complement to nostalgia) as a critical concept to theorise the affective condition of permanent displacement in global-digital modernity, reading the Junior Boys' album as its objective correlative and linking this to hauntology and Žižek's figure of the windowless digital monad.

    Sinatra's melancholy was the melancholy of mass (old) media technology – the 'extimacy' of the records facilitated by the phonograph and the microphone, and expressing a peculiarly cosmopolitan and urban sadness.

38. #38

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.245

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

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

    the a, which is defined as something from which the child is separated in a way that is internal to the sphere of his existence.

39. #39

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.324

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

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

    during breastfeeding the breast is part of the individual who is being fed. It is merely stuck onto the mother

40. #40

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.235

    **x** > **XVI BUDDHA'S EYELIDS**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the body's engagement in the signifying chain produces an irreducible remainder — the "pound of flesh" — that cannot be dissolved by phenomenological non-dualism, and uses this structure to contrast the Christian (masochistic identification with the waste-object) against the Buddhist relationship to desire-as-illusion, ultimately grounding the mirror/eye dialectic in the logic of objet petit a as what is cut from the subject rather than projected outward.

    If what is most me lies on the outside, not because I projected it there but because it was cut from me

41. #41

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.57

    BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration anxiety is not the neurotic's ultimate impasse; rather, what the neurotic shrinks from is making his castration into the positive guarantee of the Other's lack — a dialectical move that reframes castration's function and opens analysis beyond Freud's terminus. This is grounded by linking the Unheimliche structurally to the minus-phi position in the diagram, identifying the Heim as the site in the Other beyond the specular image where the subject's desire encounters itself as object.

    man finds his home at a point located in the Other that lies beyond the image from which we are fashioned. This place represents the absence where we stand.

42. #42

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

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

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

    Could one maintain that the voice that guides Socrates is not Socrates himself? The relation between Socrates and his voice is no doubt an enigma.

43. #43

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.105

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes topology as a proper mapping of analytic experience (not merely a metaphor or expository device), and reaffirms that the gaze is not reducible to the eye, using Holbein's anamorphosis as the exemplary case where the gaze appears in a de-subjectivized, uncanny form.

    the gaze was not the eye, except in that flying form in which Holbein has the cheek to show me my own soft watch

44. #44

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.162

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

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the claim that topological thinking—specifically the notion of surfaces that are simultaneously inside and outside—is uniquely necessary for conceptualizing the unconscious, and introduces the object as an 'obturator' (a partial, not merely passive, blocking function) as the key to understanding transference at the correct level.

    it is only these considerations that can provide us with the appropriate image when it is a question of something inside that is also outside

45. #45

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.162

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the topology of the unconscious by arguing that it is structurally inside the subject yet can only be realized outside, in the locus of the Other, and introduces the object as an "obturator" to figure this inside/outside structure—pointing toward the eye as a coming illustration of this topological object.

    it is only these considerations that can provide us with the appropriate image when it is a question of something inside that is also outside

46. #46

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.230

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan explicitly endorses the formulation "Lacan against Hegel," distinguishing his account of the subject—constituted by an exterior field—from Hegel's alienation of self-consciousness, while insisting this is not a philosophical debate but a structural one.

    a subject who has received the definition of being born in, constituted by, and ordered in a field that is exterior to him

47. #47

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.33

    But let us continue .

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Klein bottle as a topological model isomorphic with the Möbius strip's one-sided surface, arguing that this figure concretely illustrates the structural property of the signifier—namely that its inside and outside communicate without abolition of closure—thereby grounding the linguistic relation between signifier and signified (front/back) in topology rather than substance.

    Its inside communicates completely, integrally with its outside. Nevertheless this surface is completely closed.

48. #48

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.46

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Klein bottle as a topological model to demonstrate the structural logic of the subject's relation to signification: the suture between inner and outer spheres reveals how the subject is deceived by the apparent reflexivity of consciousness, and proper names are introduced as a test case showing that signifiers cannot be reduced to mere denotation without meaning.

    the point of the suture between what I could call the outer skin of the interior, and what I could call the inner skin of the exterior.

49. #49

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.57

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan justifies his topological models (Klein bottle, Möbius strip, cross-cap, torus) as the necessary formal apparatus for grasping the subject as a surface, aligning this with Hegel's Phenomenology and its loop of Absolute Knowing, and connecting both to the analytic concept of the Subject Supposed to Know as the structural foundation of transference.

    that which comes from one side, finds itself in inner continuity with the outside of the other side, and that from the other side, in the same way the inside with the outside.

50. #50

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.36

    But let us continue .

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topological construction of the Klein bottle — built step by step from sphere to blastula to inside-out surface — to argue that the Cartesian cogito marks the historical rupture with cosmological (microcosm/macrocosm) thinking, and that psychoanalysis inherits this rupture, revealing the "other scene" (Unheimlich) as the locus where inside and outside are sutured into continuity rather than correspondence.

    Freud's Heimlich, and it is why it is at the same time Unheimlich, is that, it is that thing, this locus, this secret place... This place, which is properly speaking the other scene of action, because it is the one where you see reality

51. #51

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.56

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan justifies his use of topological models (Klein bottle, Möbius strip, torus, cross-cap) as theoretically necessary — not merely illustrative — by arguing that the subject must be conceived as a surface, and that this topological thinking finds its philosophical parallel in Hegel's Phenomenology, whose loop of absolute knowledge illuminates the analytic concept of the subject supposed to know and transference.

    that which comes from one side, finds itself in inner continuity with the outside of the other side, and that from the other side, in the same way the inside with the outside

52. #52

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.173

    **Presentation by Monsieur Oury**

    Theoretical move: Oury argues that the "phonematic gestalt" (Poord'jeli) is not a fantasy but rather the pre-symbolic point of emergence of the speaking subject — the locus from which fantasy and its privileged image arise — while Leclaire's response pivots on distinguishing fantasy-forms by the nature of the Lacanian object (scopic vs. vocal) implied within them.

    an outside which conjoins in itself what we call our intimate thoughts. This language which carries on outside and not in an immaterial fashion

53. #53

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.37

    But let us continue .

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topological construction of the Klein bottle to displace the cosmological microcosm/macrocosm schema, arguing that what Descartes' cogito inaugurates—and what psychoanalysis radicalises—is a suturing that connects inside to outside in a non-orientable way, breaking the pre-established parallelism between subject and world that grounds classical psychology and cosmological thinking.

    Freud's Heimlich, and it is why it is at the same time Unheimlich, is that, it is that thing, this locus, this secret place where you walk the streets in this singular reality

54. #54

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.122

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

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

    The bar of the big O is nothing other than the relationship of exteriority of the subject to the Other, which constitutes this Other as unconscious in so far as the subject does not reach the Other.

55. #55

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.95

    Dr Lacan

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's *Divine Comedy* as a topological witness that anticipates the psychoanalytic function of the objet petit a (as the gaze/look), arguing that the medieval opposition of knowledge and truth (doctrine of the double truth) prefigures the split that modern science inherits, and that the poet—through his projection of cosmological knowledge into the field of "final ends"—inadvertently maps the edge-topology that links the word-in-the-Other to the emergence of the o-object, concretely illustrated by the conjunction of the liar and the counterfeiter in Hell.

    there are found joined together the one who made of the word the support of deception and the one who made counterfeit money

56. #56

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.86

    Madame le Docteur Parisot

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Dragonetti's analysis of Dante's *Divine Comedy*, Lacan deploys the Narcissus myth and the figure of counterfeit money to theorize how the fraudulent (mis)recognition of the image-as-truth constitutes a fundamental structure of conscience and desire: the subject, captivated by its own reflection, mistakes the image of nothing for the real, such that malice (latent falsification) becomes the originary condition of every conscience.

    And Master Adam bears it in himself. He bears it in himself as a void swollen into a dream of the absolute.

57. #57

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.18

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject must be grasped topologically—not as a mere metaphorical "hole in the real" but as constituted through the cut on a surface, whereby the fall of the objet petit a is structurally inseparable from the division of the subject; two-dimensional topology (rather than three-dimensional intuition) is proposed as the privileged formal apparatus for capturing the impossible structure of the subject.

    But altogether essential to delimit this sort of trap-door of exteriority that I am trying to define with regard to the function of the dust-bin in its relationships with writing.

58. #58

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.66

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

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

    a cylinder, with two holes to the two preceding holes which makes four of them, and it is enough for me to stitch them together to make emerge the figure of what is called quite simply in the language of young ladies, a ring.

59. #59

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.18

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that topology—specifically two-dimensional surface theory—provides the structural model for the subject's constitution through the fall of the objet petit a, where the cut on a surface (not a metaphorical void in the real) is what determines the division of the subject; Bejahung/Verneinung, the phallus as attribute, and Stoic *ptosis* are marshalled to show that the subject is the effect of a structural cut, not merely a hole in the real.

    altogether essential to delimit this sort of trap-door of exteriority that I am trying to define with regard to the function of the dust-bin in its relationships with writing.

60. #60

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.95

    Dr Lacan

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's *Divine Comedy* as a privileged site to show how the o-object (the gaze) emerges at the intersection of knowledge and truth within the pre-scientific philosophical tradition, arguing that the medieval doctrine of the double truth anticipates the topological distinction between open and closed sets, and that Dante, qua poet, unconsciously articulates the structure of the o-object—particularly through the mirror of Narcissus—at the very limit between knowledge and truth.

    at the very essence of himself which is to be a liar, he has lost it and that he can no longer rediscover any form of his being except by desiring passionately to rediscover before him the one who led him into his fundamental lie.

61. #61

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.96

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation sharply from both Marxist and idealist-philosophical senses, then develops the Objet petit a as the structural support of the subject's "I am not" — the analyst occupies the position of objet a in the analytic operation, while the breast-as-object exemplifies the fundamentally non-representable, jouissance-laden character of the partial object that supplies for the lack of Selbstbewusstsein.

    it is in the most secret part of myself that there ought to be sought the mainspring of the love of neighbour

62. #62

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.95

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

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the logic of the phantasy by linking alienation (the forced choice between "I do not think" and "I am not") to castration as the primordial marking of the Other: the barred Other (S(Ⓞ)) does not mean the Other is absent but that it is marked—by lack, by castration—which grounds desire through the objet petit a as cause, and against which all sexuality and philosophy defensively operate.

    hell is our image forever fixed in the Other. Which is false. If hell is anywhere, it is in I.

63. #63

    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)?

    It would be necessary to make up the word 'extimate, extime' to designate what is at stake.

64. #64

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.284

    Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan displaces the classical inside/outside opposition—via commodity, money, Berkeley's idealism, and Aristotle's optics—to argue that the scopic field is structured not by a synthesising subject in a darkroom but by the objet petit a as lack/stain, a third term missing from both ancient and modern accounts of vision.

    What is this inside that seems to make what is locked up in it completely enigmatic? Is it not in its way, with respect to what constitutes the money, is it not an inside that is altogether outside, outside of what constitutes the essence of the money?

65. #65

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.68

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968**

    Theoretical move: By applying a Russell's-paradox-style logical operation to the big Other, Lacan demonstrates that the subject—defined as the subset of all signifiers that are not elements of themselves—cannot be universalised: the point where the subject is signified falls necessarily *outside* the Other, establishing the structural impossibility of a universe of discourse.

    what can be the point where it is signified as subject, is a point let us say 'outside' the Other, outside the universe of discourse.

66. #66

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.243

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

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

    it is in so far as the o-object is extimate (extime) and purely in the relationship set up by the establishment of the subject as an effect of the signifier

67. #67

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.316

    Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 14 May 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the subject's structure in the logic of the signifier as self-othering: the signifier can only represent the subject for another signifier, and this irreducible alterity of the signifier to itself constitutes the big Other as necessarily incomplete (holed by objet petit a), while the subject is redefined as "what effaces its tracks," making the trace-effacement the originary operation from which the signifier and language emerge.

    what is meant in its ambiguity by the word strangeness, with its affective note and also its indication of a topological margin

68. #68

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.74

    *[A porter appears]*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Wittgenstein's *Tractatus* to push the question of truth and meta-language to its limit: because any assertion is already self-announcing as true, adding a truth-predicate is superfluous, yet this very superfluity reveals that there is no meta-language — only the desire of the Other, from which all 'blackguardism' (wanting to be the big Other for someone) is deduced.

    Heimlich, unheimlich - everyone has been able, from reading Freud, to remember the ambiguity hidden in this term which, by not being within, and nevertheless evoking it, emphasises precisely everything that is strange.

69. #69

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.80

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > I ASK YOU TO REFUSE WHAT I AM OFFERING YOU.

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formulas of sexuation cannot be read through standard propositional logic (negation, conjunction, disjunction) because the phallic function governs both sexes asymmetrically: the masculine side is structured by a universal ('All x') grounded in an exception ('there exists an x that negates φx'), while the feminine side is 'not-all' within the phallic function, which opens onto a dual, properly feminine jouissance irreducible to phallic jouissance—and it is precisely this asymmetry that marks the non-existence of the sexual relationship.

    this hatred for his wife, to call her by her name…This person, was his wife to the point that she 's'affemait' to such a point

70. #70

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.20

    THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN > Psychology and metapsychology

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's fundamental contribution is the decentring of the subject from the individual—the subject is ex-centric to the ego and to consciousness—and reads this discovery as the culmination of a moralist tradition (La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche) that exposes the deceptive, inauthentic hedonism of the ego, thereby grounding the necessity of Freud's post-1920 metapsychological revision.

    The deceiving God is, in the end, the reintegration of what was rejected, ectopia.

71. #71

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.86

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan theorizes a feminine jouissance that is "beyond the phallus" — experienced but unknowable even to women themselves — and uses mystical testimony (St. Teresa, Hadewijch) as its privileged witness, then links this Other jouissance to the God-face of the big Other and the paternal/castration function, arguing these do not resolve into either one God or two.

    Doesn't this jouissance one experiences and yet knows nothing about put us on the path of ex-sistence?

72. #72

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.32

    **II** > To Jakobson > **What is the signifier?**

    Theoretical move: Lacan defines the signifier as both the cause of jouissance (its material and efficient cause, enabling access to a part of the Other's body) and simultaneously what brings jouissance to a halt (its final cause), thereby grounding the signifier not in Aristotelian physics or Cartesian extended substance but in a new ontological category: 'enjoying substance' (la substance jouissante).

    Lacan uses it to talk about an existence that stands apart, which insists as it were from the outside, something not included on the inside. Rather than being intimate, it is 'extimate.'

73. #73

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.244

    Seminar 12: Wednesday 15 Ma y 1973

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no metalanguage by distinguishing the Symbolic from being, grounding formalisation in the act of saying rather than in ontological subsistence, and then demonstrates how topology—specifically the Borromean knot and the torus—provides the only adequate 'writing' of what cannot be said about the sexual non-relation and the structure of the subject.

    hatred which is what has most relationship with being, what comes closest to it, what I call the to ex-sist (l'exister). Nothing concentrates more this hatred than this expression (dire) where there is situated what I call ex-sistence.

74. #74

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.105

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

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

    the Real, in so far as it ek-sists, namely, the Real as Real, the Real to the power of two.

75. #75

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.142

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 9: Tuesday 8 April 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot's topology — particularly the distinction between ek-sistence (the track/cycle) and the hole — as the operative figure for primordial repression (Urverdrängt), arguing that the difficulty of mentally grasping the knot is itself the trace of an irreducible, foundational repression, and that the inexistence of the sexual relationship is not a failure but the very structure knotted into being.

    the difference is in the passage from the one to the other... a difference of ek-sistence. One ek-sists, heads off into the track until it only encounters simply consistency, and the other, the other, the cycle, is centred on the hole.

76. #76

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.93

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 6: Tuesday 18 February 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes ek-sistence as the Real dimension of the Borromean Knot, uses this to articulate the triadic RSI structure as an "infernal trinity," and pivots to redefine the symptom—against both Hegelian repetition (via Kierkegaard) and Marxian social analysis—as the particular way each speaking being (parlêtre) enjoys their unconscious.

    ek-sistence belongs to this field, which is, as I might say, supposed by the rupture itself

77. #77

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.86

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 6: Tuesday 18 February 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the Borromean knot as the primary topological operator of his theory, arguing that its three constitutive dimensions—consistency, hole, and ek-sistence—correspond respectively to the Imaginary, Real, and Symbolic; the passage works through errors in flattening the knot to demonstrate that mathematical/geometric intuition is rooted in the cord (material consistency) and that the straight line as infinity is itself a ring, implicating the knot structure throughout.

    I would really be very, very grateful to these people who certainly in the sense that I understand it, ek-sist

78. #78

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.9

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 1: Tuesday 10 December 1974**

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XXII by arguing that the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary only acquire a "common measure" — i.e., can be said to be genuinely three — through the Borromean knot, which provides the minimal topological structure (requiring three as its minimum) that holds them together; this displaces Freud's spatial-geometrical (sack) topology in favour of a knot-based topology, and identifies the Imaginary as grounded in the body, the Symbolic in equivocation/writing, and the Real as strictly unthinkable.

    it ek-sists, but only in the sense that I am writing this term ek-sistence, by writing it differently than is usually done. It sists perhaps, but we do not know where.

79. #79

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.151

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 9: Tuesday 8 April 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues, via topological analysis of orientation, that the Borromean knot is not intrinsically orientated, but that as soon as one of its three rings is specified (coloured, or rendered non-orientatable by being treated as an infinite straight line), two distinct orientated Borromean knots necessarily emerge — a result that bears on the structural irreducibility of dextro- vs. laevo-gyratory gyres and, implicitly, on the sexuation of topological space in his clinical theory.

    There is neither external nor internal with the simple reference to these spatial way of saying, put into three dimensions

80. #80

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 5: Tuesday 11 February 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot provides the model for a "Real meaning effect" in analytic interpretation: by homogenising the three registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) as equally consistent and showing their non-chain knotting, he repositions the analytic saying (*dire*) as what makes a knot—not mere word-use—while introducing "ek-sistence" as the Real correlate of the knotted Imaginary.

    in principle it only has a relationship of exteriority. I say in principle, because that is why it is there, flattened out.

81. #81

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.132

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean Knot—understood through the topology of the torus—displaces the insoluble question of objectivity and grounds the three consistencies (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) as irreducible, such that their triple points generate meaning, phallic jouissance, and the Name-of-the-Father respectively; identification is then reformulated as three distinct operations corresponding to the three registers of the knot's real Other.

    the Real of the knot and this conjunction of domains, the one that is inscribed, that I inscribed here earlier on the board to give weight to meaning

82. #82

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.29

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan pivots the Borromean knot from a topological figure to a methodological foundation, arguing that the knot's three-fold structure (Symbolic/Imaginary/Real) captures the subject as constitutively divided by language, which operates not as an organ or message but by making a hole in the Real — thereby placing psychoanalysis in opposition to both science's objectivism and Chomsky's organicist linguistics.

    ex-sistence, written as I write it ex-sistence, which for its part belongs to the Real which is its fundamental character

83. #83

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.45

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday! 6 December 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the Borromean knot topology to distribute the three registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) as structurally equivalent yet functionally differentiated supports—assigning consistency to the Imaginary, the hole to the Symbolic, and ex-sistence to the Real—and argues that a fourth term (the sinthome) is always required to prop up the subject, which the minimum Borromean chain of four demonstrates.

    it knocks, it operates very specially in something which is the order of limitation. The two others, from the moment that they are knotted in a Borromean way, the two others resist it.

84. #84

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.57

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot is the proper topological support for "first truths" about the Real, which is founded precisely by excluding meaning; and that the speaking being's (parlêtre's) only consistency is bodily/imaginary, while the knot — not the cord — is what properly ex-sists, grounding both truth and the analyst's responsibility in know-how (savoir-faire) rather than in any Other of the Other.

    the knot is all that ex-sists in the proper sense of the term, as I write it, is all that properly speaking exists.

85. #85

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.52

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday! 6 December 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the Borromean knot of three (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) constitutes the minimal support of the subject — and is itself the structure of paranoid psychosis — while the Sinthome emerges as a necessary fourth term that knots the three rings when they would otherwise come apart, with phallic jouissance located at the conjunction of the Symbolic and the Real, and meaning at the conjunction of the Symbolic and the Imaginary.

    the three rings participate in the Imaginary as consistency, in the Symbolic as hole, and in the Real as ex-sisting to them.

86. #86

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.22

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 14 December 1976**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological operation of turning the Symbolic torus inside-out—analogous to what psychoanalysis performs on the unconscious—produces a fundamentally different arrangement than the Borromean knot: the Symbolic comes to totally envelop the Real and Imaginary, raising a structural problem about what a completed analysis actually does to the subject's organization of the three registers.

    the highlighting, as envelopment, of what is inside is something that is not without relevance to psychoanalysis...psychoanalysis is attached to putting outside what is inside, namely, the unconscious

87. #87

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.266

    **XX**

    Theoretical move: By distinguishing the little other (imaginary) from the absolute Other (symbolic/linguistic), and drawing an analogy between medieval ecstatic love theory and psychotic structure, Lacan argues that psychosis is constituted by an inability to respond to the interpellation of the Other, producing a love relation that abolishes the subject and reduces the Other to a pure signifier emptied of meaning.

    There is a good reason for this, which is that this Other lies entirely within itself, Freud says, but at the same time entirely outside itself.

88. #88

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.289

    **XXII** > **2**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a linguistic analysis of the second person pronoun ('you') to demonstrate that the superego operates as a foreign-body signifier rather than a dialectical law, and that the foundational function of speech—mission or mandate—is what generates the subject's latent question about its own being, with the 'you' as quilting point between address and subjectivity.

    the you is present as a foreign body... it's never on the side of the superego - it's always the ego that loses its bearings... while the you remains the possessor of things.

89. #89

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.156

    **X** > **On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle**

    Theoretical move: By tracking the gradations between the bellowing-miracle (pure signifier without meaning) and the call for help (meaning without genuine subjecthood), Lacan argues that in psychosis the unconscious signifier is situated as externally real rather than internally repressed — pointing toward the structural difference between Verwerfung (Foreclosure) and Verdrängung (Repression) as two distinct modes of subjective localization of the signifier.

    It appears to be external to the subject, but it's another exteriority than the one that is evoked when hallucination and delusion are presented to us as a disturbance of reality, since the subject remains attached to it through an erotic fixation.

90. #90

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.106

    **VII** > **1**

    Theoretical move: By moving from the clinical case of Dora's hysteria through a theory of narcissism to ethological examples (the stickleback), Lacan argues that the Mirror Stage constitutes the ego as an alienating, foreign image that structurally inscribes an aggressive tension ("either me or the other") into all imaginary relations—and that this same logic differentiates hysteria from psychosis via the criterion of language disturbance rather than persecution-like content.

    He is always both inside and outside, which is why any purely imaginary equilibrium with the other always bears the mark of a fundamental instability.

91. #91

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.261

    **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as the master signifier of desire for both sexes — not as a biological organ but as the structural marker of the gap between need and desire introduced by the signifying order — and that the Kleinian error lies in reducing the primordial dialectic to a specular, dyadic mother-child relation, thereby foreclosing the constitutive third term (the father) and the Other's desire.

    To complement the Kleinian dialectic, it is necessary to introduce this notion that for the subject the outside is already given, not as something that is projected out from the subject's inside, out of his drives, but as the place or the locus in which the Other's desire is located, and where the subject has to go to encounter it.

92. #92

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.97

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object of desire is not the correlate of need but what props the subject up at the moment of his disappearance behind the signifier; deploying the Graph of Desire, Lacan situates 'desire' between the alienating appeal to the Other and the dimension of the unsaid, using Freud's 'dead father' dream to show how statement and enunciation articulate desire's structural role in the subject's existence.

    what is propped up by this object is precisely what the subject cannot reveal even to himself. It is something that is at the cusp of the greatest secret.

93. #93

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211

    **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.

    he locates in the fantasm the content of the most intimate part of himself, which we have called the neighbor, or in other words the metipsemus?

94. #94

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

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

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

    as extimacy, 139

95. #95

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.206

    **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.

    that which is most myself in myself, that which is at the heart of myself, and beyond me, insofar as the self stops at the level of those walls to which one can apply a label

96. #96

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

    **XI**

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

    the intimate exteriority or 'extimacy,' that is the Thing

97. #97

    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.

    something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me, something that on the level of the unconscious only a representation can represent

98. #98

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.305

    *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic object (objet petit a) is specifically the object of castration — distinguished from objects of privation or frustration — and demonstrates this through topological analysis of the cross-cap, showing that the object of desire only rejoins its intimacy by a centrifugal (outside-in) path, structurally irreducible to Aristotelian logic's object of privation.

    The object defined as our object, the object which forms the world of desire only rejoins its intimacy by a centrifugal path.

99. #99

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.310

    *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

    Theoretical move: In this closing session of the seminar, Lacan consolidates the year's teaching by articulating the structural difference between i(o) and o (the specular image and the object), grounding desire in the phantasy formula $◊a, identifying the desirer as always already implicated in the object of desire via the "Che vuoi?", and situating castration's object as the very object of analytic science—while using Blanchot's prose and the hysteric's relation to the Other's desire as literary and clinical anchors.

    It was not yet terrifying, it was on the contrary an almost agreeable moment… he perceived the whole strangeness that there was in being observed by a word as if by a living being.

100. #100

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     *Seminar 13*: *Wednesday 14 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: By mapping desire and demand onto two interlocking tori, Lacan demonstrates that the subject's inside and outside spaces are topologically identical, and that the object of desire emerges precisely from the Other's structural inability to respond to demand — the Other is "not without" power, and this negation grounds the absolute conditionality of desire.

     these two spaces: the inside and the outside, from the moment that we refuse to give them any substance other than a topological one, are the same.

101. #101

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.191

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: Through sustained topological demonstration using the torus, spread-out torus, inverted eight, and cross-cap, Lacan argues that the asymmetry between the two fundamental circles (of desire and demand) cannot be grounded in the torus's own surface structure, and that this irreducible asymmetry—always escaping formalization—is precisely what makes the toric topology productive for psychoanalytic modeling of the subject's relation to the Other.

     What we see once again being manifested, is this something which is introduced by this very simple signifier which I first brought to you of the interior eight, namely the possibility of an inside field as being still homogeneous with the outside field.

102. #102

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.23

     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.

     Doesn't Freud seem to you to be more applicable than our philosophical tradition as regards conducting oneself correctly in relation to this extremity of intimacy that is at the same time excluded internality?

103. #103

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.79

     <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts > The Negative Dialectics of the Individual and Society > Negative Social Cognitive Neuroscience

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theoretical pivot: it mobilises social cognitive neuroscience (Bowlby, Winnicott, Lieberman) to displace individualism and then radicalises those findings through a psychoanalytic-pessimist lens, arguing that what neuroscience calls "social need" is better understood as constitutive, unfillable lack—a traumatic social pain that is not a need to be satisfied but the very substance of subjectivity and sociality.

     I am the other in me, a thought of them, the reflection and attunement to the other. I am a ripped piece of the social body… Substantially I am nothing else except for the longing for the other.

104. #104

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > THEOREM. > PROOF

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the determination of inner temporal experience is only possible through the immediate consciousness of external things, thereby inverting idealism's priority of inner over outer experience; he further grounds necessity strictly in causal relations among phenomena, not in the existence of substances, and limits possibility to the domain of possible experience.

     internal experience is itself possible only mediately and through external experience

105. #105

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > CHAPTER III Of the Ground of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the pure categories of the understanding have no legitimate transcendental use beyond possible experience: without a corresponding sensuous intuition, the categories are empty forms of thought incapable of determining any object, and the concept of the noumenon must therefore be understood only in a negative, limitative sense—as a boundary-marker for sensible cognition rather than a positive domain of intelligible objects.

     it is not limited by, but rather limits, sensibility, by giving the name of noumena to things, not considered as phenomena, but as things in themselves. But it at the same time prescribes limits to itself, for it confesses itself unable to cognize these by means of the categories

106. #106

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.89

     The voice and the drive > His Master's Voice, His Master's Ear

     Theoretical move: Dolar uses the HMV logo as a theoretical parable: the voice-as-object (acousmatic voice) operates as a Lacanian drive-montage that simultaneously structures authority/obedience, deceives via a trompe-l'oreille analogous to trompe-l'œil, and exposes the speaking subject to the power of the Other's ear — thereby showing the voice's irreducible asymmetry with vision and its constitutive role in psychosis and subjective interiority.

     What is exposed, of course, is not some interior nature...rather, it is an interior which is itself the result of the signifying cut, its product, its cumbersome remainder, an interior created by the intervention of the structure.

107. #107

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.176

     Silence

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice occupies a structurally privileged position at the point of exception within the law: it epitomizes "validity beyond meaning" (Geltung ohne Bedeutung), functioning as the non-universal partial object that captures desire and holds the subject in thrall, thereby linking Lacan's topological account of subject/Other desire (via the torus) to Kafka's literary figures of bare life and sovereignty, and to Agamben's inclusive exclusion.

     the inside is inherently fused to the outside… the one passes into the other in a curved space where they can be neither opposed nor collapsed

108. #108

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.65

     chapter 2 > Shofar

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object voice — paradigmatically embodied in the shofar — is not simply opposed to logos but is its hidden support: the paternal voice that founds the Law is structurally identical to the "other" voice it ostensibly persecutes, and both are organized around an ineradicable lack (S(A/)) that links voice, jouissance, femininity, and the impossible foundation of the Other. The voice is further theorized as the missing link between bodies and languages, connecting Lacanian object-theory to Badiou's ontology.

     they are both the same; that there are not two voices, but only the object voice which cleaves and bars the other in an ineradicable 'extimacy.'

109. #109

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.116

     The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego

     Theoretical move: By drawing on Agamben's analogy between phone/logos and zoe/bios, Dolar argues that the voice occupies the topology of extimacy — it is neither simply exterior to speech nor a pre-cultural remnant, but a product of logos itself that is simultaneously included and excluded, haunting language at its core.

     the topology of extimacy, the simultaneous inclusion/exclusion, which retains the excluded at its core

110. #110

     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.

     It is an 'atopical voice,' the intersection of the inner and the outer.

111. #111

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

     The voice and the drive > The voice of reason

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice operates as the operator enabling a transition from the ethics of desire to the ethics of the drive, and that Heidegger's phenomenology of the call of conscience—a pure, aphonic voice that convokes Dasein to Being—illuminates the structural function of voice as extimate alterity, while simultaneously exposing the metaphysical illusion of positing voice as a pure, prelinguistic origin.

     the internal externality, the expropriated intimacy, the extimacy—the excellent Lacanian word for the uncanny

112. #112

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.31

     A Voice and Nothing More > The voice and the signifier

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

     The impersonal voice, the mechanically produced voice (answering machines, computer voices, and so on) always has a touch of the uncanny

113. #113

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

     The voice and the drive > The voice of reason

     Theoretical move: By tracing the "voice of reason" across Kant, Freud, and Lacan, Dolar argues that the power of reason is paradoxically grounded in a voice whose origin escapes consciousness, and that this voice structurally coincides with unconscious desire—culminating in Lacan's identification of the Kantian categorical imperative with pure desire, and repositioning the ego (not the unconscious) as the true locus of irrationality.

     it speaks to us from a place that is unattainable for the subject, although it is the very locus of the subject's autonomy...it is an atopical voice addressing us from inside, the interior atopos.

114. #114

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.112

     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.

     this divine transcendent law was at the same time placed at the most intimate kernel of the subject... The voice comes from the Other, but this is the Other within.

115. #115

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.141

     The voice and the drive > The click

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice functions as a traumatic kernel at the origin of fantasy, specifically the primal scene fantasy: a contingent, inexplicable sound (the 'click') short-circuits inner and outer, revealing an excess of jouissance in the Other that simultaneously constitutes the subject's own enigma, so that subjectivation is grounded not in language structure but in a pre-linguistic sonorous object.

     the strange loop, the tie between inner and outer, the short circuit between the external contingency and the intimate, the curious match of the click and the inner sexual arousal.

116. #116

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.82

     The voice and the drive

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice, as objet petit a, occupies the paradoxical topological intersection of language and the body that belongs to neither, and that this position is what makes the voice the object of the drive rather than of desire — the drive's "aim" (the voice as by-product) is satisfied on the way to the "goal" (meaning), precisely because the voice is a non-dialectical, aphonic remainder that resists signification.

     the circle of language and the circle of the body, their intersection being extimate to both.

117. #117

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.91

     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.

     they are the very operators of the division into an exterior and an interior, while in themselves they do not belong to either, they are placed in the zone of overlapping, the crossing, the extimate.

118. #118

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.51

     chapter 2 > Voice and presence

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the object voice, far from grounding a "metaphysics of presence" (as Derrida's deconstruction of phonocentrism might imply), introduces an irreducible rupture at the core of narcissistic self-presence: the voice is not the transparent medium of auto-affection but harbors an alien, Real kernel—the object voice—that makes the subject possible only through an impossible relation to what cannot be present.

     at the very core of narcissism lies an alien kernel which narcissistic satisfaction may well attempt to disguise, but which continually threatens to undermine it from the inside

119. #119

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.25

     Read My Desire

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that taking desire literally—in Lacan's sense—means acknowledging that desire registers itself *negatively* in speech and is therefore inarticulate; historicism's refusal of repression and desire produces a self-enclosed, "realtight" social reality that forecloses the exteriority constitutive of the social, thereby enabling populist identitarianism.

     Disregarding desire, one constructs a reality that is realtight, that is no longer self-external.

120. #120

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.38

     Orthopsycbism

     Theoretical move: By reading Bachelard's "orthopsychism" against the panoptic model, Copjec shows that objective self-surveillance necessarily produces a split (rather than transparent) subject haunted by deception—and uses this to pivot to Lacan's gaze as a marker of the subject's culpability and splitting, rather than mere visibility.

     the subject is external to itself, exists in a relation of 'extimacy' (Lacan's word) with itself that causes the subject to appear to itself as culpable, as guilty of hiding something.

121. #121

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.144

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > The Drying Up of the Breast

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "barred room" in Gothic fiction functions as an extimate object—an element that constructs the set (the house) by negating it rather than condensing it—and uses this to distinguish two registers of absence: signified absence (structured within a differential network, yielding sense) versus uncanny presence (pure existence without sense), defining anxiety as the affect aroused by existence stripped of signification.

     The barred room is an extimate object, the most horrible part of the house not because it is a distillation of all its horrifying features but because it is without feature, the point where the house negates itself.

122. #122

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.266

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego > Chapter l

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing bibliographic citations and brief theoretical asides; it is largely non-substantive, though several notes touch on suture, the logic of the signifier, voice, drive, and democracy as symbolic mutation.

     In his unpublished seminar 'Extimite,' (1985–1986), Jacques-Alain Miller also stresses the relation between Cartesianism and democracy as he simultaneously sketches out their affiliation with psychoanalysis.

123. #123

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.281

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Chapter S

     Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (pages 281-283) listing topics, authors, and concepts with page references; it is non-substantive filler with no theoretical argument.

     Surveillance Bachelard on, 28 29 and extimacy, 27 and Foucault, 157 and gaze, 42

124. #124

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     Detour through the Drive > The Voice and the Voice-Over

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that when desire gives way to drive, the intimate core of being—jouissance—ceases to be merely supposed and becomes exposed at the surface of speech, yet without becoming phenomenal or communicable; this topological shift is then applied to film noir, where the voice-over materializes the subject's irreducible absence from the diegetic reality it narrates.

     The intimate kernel of our being is susceptible neither in its hidden nor in its exposed form to 'objective' knowledge; in exposing itself, it does not seek to communicate itself.

125. #125

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.139

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > The Drying Up of the Breast

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that vampirism figures the collapse of fantasy's support of desire—the "drying up of the breast" as objet petit a—when the extimate object loses its proper distance and returns as an uncanny double endowed with surplus jouissance, threatening the subject's constitutive lack; this structure is traced across breast-feeding advocacy, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and La Jetée.

     These Freudian objects are, then, not only rejected from but also internal to the subject. In brief, they are extimate, which means they are in us that which is not us.

126. #126

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.261

     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.

     Derived from the term extimite, used by Jacques-Alain Miller to describe the internal but nonintimate relation between the subject and its repressed desire.

127. #127

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.109

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

     Theoretical move: Against Ferguson's reading of the sublime as escape from utilitarian claustrophobia, Copjec (following Freud/Lacan) argues that utilitarianism itself is constituted by the flight from the superego's obscene law and from repressed desire, such that the colonial fantasy of the veiled Other functions as utilitarianism's own symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the surplus jouissance it structurally denies.

     the aesthetics/ethics of the sublime relation of the subject to an 'extimate' object that is in the subject, yet more than the subject

128. #128

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego-id and ego-superego relationships are not binary oppositions but dynamic, partially overlapping organizations; the symptom's "exterritoriality" from the ego-organization initiates a secondary defensive battle in which the ego oscillates between reconciliation (incorporating the symptom) and renewed repression, with secondary illness-gain reinforcing the symptom's fixation and generating analytic resistance.

     once the process has been turned into a symptom by the repression, it henceforth carries on its existence outside the ego-organization, and independently of it. And this same privilege of what we might term 'exterritoriality'

129. #129

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *The saying of nothing*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic theological discourse operates as a "powerless" or apophatic speech-act that does not colonize the divine with logos but instead creates a sacred clearing in which the divine can address the subject — inverting the evangelistic model from answer-provision to question-opening, and theorizing language as the medium through which its own limits are enacted.

     The religious individual tears out all the idolatrous ideas that have impregnated the womb of his or her being, becoming like Mary, so that the Christ-event can be conceived within him or her.

130. #130

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *Doubt as virtue*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious doubt, far from undermining faith, is the very condition that makes authentic decision and genuine love possible — only in the space of undecidability can a truly free, non-self-interested commitment be made, which Rollins figures through the concept of a "Holy Saturday experience."

     this is not a threatening darkness which conceals an enemy but rather is the intimate darkness within which we embrace our faith.

131. #131

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Prodigal*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that divine revelation operates through a third mode beyond anonymity and adequacy — "hypernymity" — in which God's superabundant presence overwhelms understanding and is experienced as absence, such that desire/longing for God is itself the sign of God's (hyper)presence rather than God's absence.

     the Hyper-presence of God is experienced by the religious participant as a type of absence, for our minds are unable to make the God who is there intelligible to us.

132. #132

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

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > God the Extimate

     Theoretical move: By following Descartes's logic of thinking the unthinkable (God as lack of lack, infinite will), the passage argues that freedom can only be encountered when one is forced to do what one cannot do — making freedom structurally analogous to the Real: it vanishes the moment it is predicated on the subject, and can only be thought as that which cannot be thought.

     we are forced to think of God as that which we cannot think

133. #133

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.66

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > God the Extimate

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Descartes's concept of God operates as an *extimate* cause — an external determination that inhabits the innermost kernel of thought — and that this structure collapses the inside/outside dualism: God is not a natural capacity within us nor a mere external fortune, but an undecidable necessity/contingency that is the condition of all eternal truths, making fatalism the precondition of genuine thought about freedom.

     my freedom is determined by something that is external to me but occurs within my innermost kernel. God is what determines my inside from the outside, an outside that at the same time is different from the outside of nature. By affirming God's providence, I get rid of the idea that there is anything within me... that could remain untouched by God, who is extimate.

134. #134

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

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Driven Destiny Makes a Voice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian drive *is* destiny (Triebschicksale = tautology), because drives are the constant, inescapable force that determines the subject from within, and the four modes of drive-destiny (reversal, turning against the self, repression, sublimation) are defense formations that never abolish what they defend against—meaning psychoanalysis is a rationalist theory of psychical determinism that collapses the distinction between fate and will.

     it is precisely that which seems external and alien to me (destiny) that determines the center of my being. I find within myself something that is not myself

135. #135

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.52

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny*

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as fate-defining precisely because it gives the repetition compulsion its content, sutures the subject's lack, fills the gaps of the big Other, and thereby embeds jouissance within normative ideological structures—dissolving fantasy is therefore recast as a rare existential act of rewriting psychic destiny and reclaiming singularity.

     A lack is encountered by the subject in the Other, in the very intimation that the Other makes to him by his discourse . . . the lack of the Other—the place where the energies of the real fissure the Other's symbolic edifice

136. #136

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.100

     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.

     they represent the underprivileged 'stain' (in the Lacanian/Žižekian sense) that perpetuates social 'privilege' as one of the defining characteristics of the dominant ideology

137. #137

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.202

     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.

     there is the specter of the other as Thing, as an anxiety-producing and menacing stranger… the other who comes too close, who is disconcerting because of its consuming overproximity.

138. #138

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.260

     <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 8**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 8, listing scholarly references (Kant, Butler, Freud, Lacan, Žižek, Lyotard, etc.) without advancing a theoretical argument of its own.

     Jacques-Alain Miller develops this Lacanian distinction between inconsistency and incompleteness in relation to sexual difference in his unpublished seminar 'Extimité' (1985–86).

139. #139

     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.

     Jacques-Alain Miller, in his unpublished seminar on 'Extimité' (1985–1986), developed the term extimité, which appears only a few times in Lacan, into a central theoretical concept.

140. #140

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Introduction: Structures Don’t March in the Streets**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the Death Drive and the Pleasure Principle are not co-present rival forces but stand in a transcendental/empirical relationship — the former is the condition of possibility for the latter — and extends this structural logic to insist that desire, as the non-coincidence of appearance and being, is irreducible to historicist accounts that collapse being into surface appearance.

     the pockets of empty, inarticulable desire that bear the burden of proof of society's externality to itself

141. #141

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.227

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **The Female Side: Mathematical Failure**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's "not-all" with respect to Woman must be read as an indefinite judgment (following Kant's mathematical antinomies), not as an external limitation: Woman's non-existence within the symbolic is not a denial of her ex-sistence but an internal limit constitutive of reason itself, and this structure—where no metalanguage can anchor a judgment of existence—culminates in Woman as the product of lalangue, a symbolic without an Other.

     it is precisely because she is totally, that is, limitlessly inscribed within the symbolic that she is in some sense wholly outside it

142. #142

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Fantasy and Fetish**

     Theoretical move: Copjec inverts Ferguson's reading by arguing that utilitarianism does not flee *toward* the sublime but rather *from* the superego's obscene law; the utilitarian erasure of interior lack and repressed desire produces claustrophobia, decays the symbolic/auratic relation, and necessarily generates a fantasmatic colonial Other (the veiled subject) as its symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the jouissance it structurally denies.

     the aesthetics/ethics of the sublime relation of the subject to an 'extimate' object that is in the subject, yet more than the subject.

143. #143

     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 6**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive notes/references section for Chapter 6, listing bibliographic citations and brief clarifying glosses; the only theoretically notable gestures are: Copjec's gloss on "intersubjective" as non-psychological, her acknowledgement of Lefort's theorisation of democracy as a "mutation of the symbolic order," her note on Dora's demand for a master as a key move in Freud/hysteria, and her citation of Lacan's distinction between the primal and Oedipal father.

     In his unpublished seminar 'Extimité,' (1985–1986), Jacques-Alain Miller also stresses the relation between Cartesianism and democracy as he simultaneously sketches out their affiliation with psychoanalysis.

144. #144

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.133

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_page127"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_pg127" class="pagebreak" title="127"></span></span>**The Drying Up of the Breast**

     Theoretical move: Copjec uses the spatial logic of the Gothic forbidden room—simultaneously surplus and deficit, inside and outside—to define anxiety as an affect aroused by pure existence without sense: where signification fails to assign position in a differential network, bare "thereness" persists as the uncanny.

     The barred room is an extimate object, the most horrible part of the house—not because it is a distillation of all its horrifying features but because it is without feature, the point where the house negates itself.

145. #145

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.129

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_page127"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_pg127" class="pagebreak" title="127"></span></span>**The Drying Up of the Breast**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that vampirism and the uncanny are structurally indexed to the collapse of the fantasy relation to the partial object (objet petit a): when the extimate object loses its status as object-cause of desire and is encountered at zero distance, anxiety replaces desire, the fantasy structure collapses, and jouissance floods in—a logic illustrated through breast-feeding discourse, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and Marker's La Jetée.

     These Freudian objects are, then, not only rejected from but also internal to the subject. In brief, they are extimate, which means they are in us that which is not us.

146. #146

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.27

     **The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan** > **Orthopsychism**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Bachelard's concept of "orthopsychism"—the subject's objective, institutional self-surveillance—produces a split rather than unified subject, but ultimately fails as a psychoanalytic alternative to panopticism because it preserves a self-correcting (psychologistic) subject; the passage pivots to Lacan's gaze, which marks not visibility but culpability—the inculpation and splitting of the subject by the signifying apparatus.

     it is the very act of surveillance—which makes clear the fact that the subject is external to itself, exists in a relation of 'extimacy' (Lacan's word) with itself—that causes the subject to appear to itself as culpable

147. #147

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.234

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **The Male Side: Dynamical Failure**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's sexuation formulas desubstantialize sex by showing that masculine existence is grounded in a negative judgment that excludes the real object (guaranteeing objectivity while keeping being inaccessible), and that the sexual relation fails doubly—by prohibition (masculine side) and impossibility (feminine side)—so that men and women cannot form complementary universes and every claim to positive sexual identity is imposture or masquerade.

     the object is excluded from perceptions, but not simply, since it now functions as that which is 'in them more than them'

148. #148

     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 4**

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

     Derived from the term extimité, used by Jacques-Alain Miller to describe the internal but nonintimate relation between the subject and its repressed desire.

149. #149

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.243

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > The Object-Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *objet petit a* is the "object-cause" of desire: a primordially lost, liminal object that is simultaneously imaginary, symbolic, and real yet belongs to none, and whose retroactive ceding—not subtraction from a pre-formed subject—constitutes the desiring subject itself, such that desire paradoxically originates only in and through the loss of its object.

     It is perhaps most with the objet a in mind that Lacan coined the phrase 'extimate.' It is something of the subject's own, indeed, the most intimate part, yet it always appears elsewhere, outside the subject and eluding its grasp.

150. #150

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.49

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > Heidegger: The Disposition of Being

     Theoretical move: By tracing Heidegger's analysis of the thing (jug, fourfold, mirror-play) and the co-originary structure of concealment/disclosure (aletheia/lethe), the passage argues that nihilation is not an act of subjective consciousness (contra Sartre) but occurs essentially in Being itself—a move that situates the negative/void as ontologically primordial rather than phenomenologically derived, preparing a Lacanian reading of lack and the Real.

     The thing is what it is by virtue of the world in which it is placed. The world is gathered and sustained in the thing.

151. #151

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.214

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Thing or No-thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* is not merely Freud's technical term for the unknowable kernel of perception, but the Real core inhabiting the very heart of the Imaginary, thereby redefining the imaginary as the power of the veil (appearance over emptiness) and sublimation as the art of making das Ding simultaneously present and absent — with 'extimacy' as the structural name for this paradox.

     The dimension of the Thing is 'extimacy,' the dimension of something called up in the heart of intimate proximity yet continually slipping away, continually withdrawing.

152. #152

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span id="Index.xhtml_p323" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 323. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Index

     Theoretical move: This is a partial index (letter "E") from Boothby's book; it is non-substantive bibliographic apparatus listing page references for concepts and proper names, with no theoretical argument advanced in the passage itself.

     Extimacy 214, 243

153. #153

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.122

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Revelation as rupture

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christian revelation is structurally constituted by rupture — epistemological, experiential, and existential — and that Matthew's genealogy of Jesus formally enacts this logic: Jesus is simultaneously inscribed within and tears apart the Jewish tradition, making revelation not a fulfilment but a parallactic break internal to the tradition itself.

     the event of God is presented here as arising from, yet not contained within, the tabernacles of our traditions.

154. #154

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter003.html_page_49"></span>The biblical parallax

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bible has a "parallactical structure" — analogous to the wave/particle duality of light — whereby the divine source is never directly captured by its textual manifestations but is instead indicated by the contradictions, fractures, and excesses within the narrative itself, making any totalising reading impossible.

     the believer testifies to the Scriptures as infused with a presence that dwells both in the midst and in excess of the text

155. #155

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.53

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > From the void without to the void within

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the eschatological kingdom is not a future arrival but a spectral presence already "to come" within the present — an interior void that ruptures the text, the beloved, and the world from within rather than from without — and uses this structure to reframe theological transcendence as radical immanence.

     For Hegel, however, this mystery was not something that lay beyond the world but rather penetrated it: the mystery was not 'out there' but rather had set its tent up among us.

156. #156

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.65

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Indirectly approaching the Word

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to Scripture demands a "radical hermeneutics" that refuses to reduce the Word to propositional content or factual claims, positing instead that the Word is encountered as a life-transforming event that dwells within but exceeds the words — analogous to subjectivity exceeding the flesh — and that genuine faith requires wrestling with, and even betraying, the literal text to reach a deeper truth.

     The flesh is both our means of encountering the other and the barrier that prevents full exposure to the other's subjectivity... The exteriority of the other's flesh acts as a type of semi-permeable membrane that allows a type of partial access to the subjectivity of the other.

157. #157

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.119

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Conversion as birth

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious truth (specifically Christian conversion) operates at the level of subjective transformation rather than objective propositional content, such that God is encountered not as a present object but as an immanent-yet-absent source that can only be 'experienced' as absence by those already transformed — making truth irreducibly tied to the subject rather than reducible to verifiable claims.

     a tradition that affirms a presence that is absent, dwelling deeply in the 'now here' and yet experienced or understood as 'nowhere.'

158. #158

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.71

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Lilith and the naming of God

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the apocryphal Lilith legend as a theological-mythological resource to argue that what resists naming and domestication by language and reason is precisely what carries the deepest truth of faith — anticipating a theology 'beyond belief' in which the Real/divine escapes symbolic capture.

     it is hinted at within its pages via her ghostly, nuclear shadow… we can perceive this shadow if we pay attention to a hairline fracture within the creation account

159. #159

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.57

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The biblical wHole

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "Word of God" is not identical with the biblical text but is the traumatic Event that produces the constitutive gap/wound within the text; rather than patching over this wound through either fundamentalist unity or liberal pluralism, a properly theological reading must hold the irreducible antagonism open as the very site of Revelation.

     the Word of God can be described as that dark core around which the words of the text find their orbit, the unspeakable Source within the text that cannot be reduced to the words themselves but that breathes life into them.

160. #160

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Reception without conception

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that God's name in the Hebrew Bible functions not as a noun (essence) but as a verb (event/happening), instantiating a mode of divine presence that is received without being conceived — a "presence beyond presence" that resists objectification, naming, and understanding while remaining immanently operative in acts of love and liberation.

     God is here presented neither as reducible to the status of other objects, nor as outside the world and eternally distant from it, but rather as one who is received by us without ever being directly conceived by us.

161. #161

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.183

     <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: Rollins argues that all theological speech is irreducibly distorted, and that the honest admission of this distortion ("orthodox heresy") is epistemically and ethically superior to the dogmatic claim to accurate God-talk ("heresy of orthodoxy"); the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy is thereby redrawn as a distinction between two kinds of heresy.

     what they are attempting to destroy is not external to them but rather lies embedded deep within them

162. #162

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.85

     <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 desire is not prior to and satisfied by the arrival of the beloved, but is retroactively born and sustained by the beloved's presence, because presence always entails a simultaneous withdrawal—a structure applied theologically to the Incarnation as a deepening rather than dissipation of divine mystery.

     when the one we love arrives, we experience this person simultaneously as one who is still to come, not despite their presence but because of it. The presence of our beloved testifies to our beloved's absence.

163. #163

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.234

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: The passage elaborates two registers of symbolic castration—enjoyment and meaning—by drawing on Plato's account of sexuality as organism-within-organism (the genealogy of hysteria and the phallic 'conjunction of high and low'), and on Žižek's formulation of the phallus as insignia/mask that introduces a constitutive gap between the subject's immediate being and its symbolic mandate.

     The concept of castration involves two registers of separation and of the exteriority of the interior.

164. #164

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.28

     part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Hegel's account of comedy in the Phenomenology—specifically the "noumenological" movement whereby Absolute Spirit must come to know itself—to argue that what Hegel and Lacan share is a structural insight: genuine transformation requires not only a change in the subject's consciousness but a shift in the external Symbolic/Other in which the subject's unconscious is materialized, and this "short circuit" between the lack in the subject and the lack in the Other is the properly comic (and analytic) dimension of experience.

     a short circuit of internal and external, not an elimination of the one or the other

165. #165

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.50

     part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comedy enacts the speculative Hegelian passage from abstract to concrete universality: not by representing the universal through the individual, but by forcing the universal to relate to itself, thereby generating the subject as the gap within substance—a movement she aligns with Lacanian representation and illustrates through Lubitsch and Chaplin.

     the universal itself is precisely as idiotic as its concrete and individual appearance. The universal that does not go through this process is not a true universal, but a mere general abstraction.

166. #166

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.44

     part i

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

     the latter does not figure as the other side of what is 'universally acceptable,' but as its most intimate kernel which is made, by Borat, to explode right before our very eyes

167. #167

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.203

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič redefines Lacanian castration not as mere lack/amputation but as the structural coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir) that constitutes enjoyment's relative autonomy and detachability — and derives from this the comic form as the radicalization of the human norm, where comic characters are not subjects opposed to structure but "subjectivized points of the structure itself" running wild.

     Castration is not simply an amputation of enjoyment, but precisely its emergence in the form of an appendix, that is, in the form of something that belongs to the subject in an essential, yet not immediate way; something that belongs to the subject via a necessary interval.

168. #168

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.322

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a <span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-138"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2118"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2519"></span>Snout

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Badiou's "positivism of Truth-Event" by insisting that the Death Drive—understood as radical (self-relating) negativity rather than any ontic positivity—is the primordial opening that makes an Event possible, and that sexuality (as the site of this void) cannot be reduced to the order of Being but is already a "brush with the Absolute" that love merely supplements, not elevates.

     something is missing in this description of a sphere: what we called its "snout," a twisted protuberance or tube which links it to its outside.

169. #169

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.373

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The All-Too-Close In-Itself](#contents.xhtml_ahd25)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian subject's fear of the In-itself as external/transcendent must be displaced by the Hegelian move of internalizing that exteriority: Absolute Knowing is not omniscience but the transposition of the obstacle to knowing into the heart of the subject itself, and this shift is isomorphic with the move from the masculine (exception-based) to the feminine (non-all) position in Lacan's formulas of sexuation, where the In-itself is legible only as the cut or stain inscribed within phenomenal reality rather than beyond it.

     there is another side of thought within thought itself—not an unknowable absolute but a secret (or unknown) knowing at the heart of knowing.

170. #170

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.124

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

     Theoretical move: The passage enacts the Hegelian move from epistemological deadlock to ontological impossibility, arguing that the subject's constitutive failure to symbolize itself, the Other's opacity to itself, and sexuality's irreducible excess all converge on the same structure: reality is non-all, and the obstacle to knowledge IS the thing-in-itself. The enigma OF the other must become the enigma IN the other, grounding universality not in shared content but in shared failure.

     the relocation of the transcendent In-itself into the very heart of my Self: I am myself the impenetrable core that I encounter in the guise of absolute Otherness.

171. #171

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.244

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [Suture Redoubled](#contents.xhtml_ahd15)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian barred subject inverts the standard (cinematic) suture theory: rather than the subject being merely an illusory stand-in for an absent external cause, the externality of the generative process itself only ex-sists insofar as the subject's constitutive gesture is already present within it — suture is thus logically prior to (not derivative of) the split between subjective and objective levels it bridges.

     Such a convoluted space in which external limit is simultaneously internal is what Lacan aims at in his persistent reference to torus and other variations of the Möbius-strip-like structures in which the relationship between inside and outside is inverted.

172. #172

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

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables

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

     the Klein bottle has no inside or outside, and it can be physically realized only in a four-dimensional space since it must pass through itself without the presence of a hole

173. #173

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.314

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Dark Tower of Suture

     Theoretical move: Using Stephen King's *The Dark Tower* as a "naive" illustration, Žižek argues that every reality requires a suturing element (point de capiton) that is foreign to it yet holds it together, and that this structure necessarily generates a split into at least two worlds — meaning reality is always minimally doubled, never singular.

     our 'civilized' reality is held together by an element (the Dark Tower) which is foreign to it and functions as the bridge, the point of passage, to another, non-civilized dark world

174. #174

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.38

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [Reality and Its Transcendental Supplement](#contents.xhtml_ahd2)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that neither evolutionary naturalism, correlationism, object-oriented ontology, New Materialism, nor Derridean deconstruction can account for the 'arche-transcendental' cut through which subjectivity explodes into the Real; the properly Lacanian move is to locate the In-itself not outside the subject but as a split *within* the subject—the subject as impossible object (objet a), the 'fossil directly created as lost.'

     the problem is to think the real INSIDE the subject, the hard core of the real in the very heart of the subject, its ex-timate center

175. #175

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.344

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

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

     the radical negativity which threatens to destabilize every identity is inscribed into its very core... the obstacle is immanent, not external

176. #176

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that misrecognition has a positive ontological dimension—it is not merely an obstacle to truth but the condition of possibility for both the subject's consistency and the existence of certain entities (e.g., the unconscious letter, enjoyment); this logic culminates in the claim that the Symptom as Real is an irreducible kernel that resists symbolization and cannot be dissolved by making meaning.

     precisely as excluded from the Other, we are already part of its game

177. #177

     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.

     Lacan coined a neologism for it: l'extimite- external intimacy, which served as a title for one of Jacques-Alain Miller's Seminars.

178. #178

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Sinthome (exemplified by Amfortas's externalized wound) designates a paradoxical element that is both destructive and constitutive of the subject's ontological consistency; this structure is then mapped onto the Enlightenment project itself, where the obscene superego enjoyment is shown to be not a residue but the necessary obverse of the formal moral Law, such that renunciation of 'pathological' content itself produces surplus-jouissance.

     it is as if the child's wound from 'A Country Doctor' has externalized itself, becoming a separate object, gaining independent existence or - to use Lacan's style - ex-sistence.

179. #179

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The subject is not a questioning force but an "answer of the Real" — the void produced when the Other's question exposes the ex-timate traumatic kernel (objet petit a / das Ding); this hystericization is constitutive of the subject, while interpellation/subjectivation functions as an attempt to evade this kernel through identification. Žižek further deploys Hitchcock's object-typology to distinguish the MacGuffin, the circulating real-object (objet petit a), and the phallic object, showing how the Real must irrupt to establish the symbolic structure.

     which is radically interior and at the same time already exterior and for which Lacan coined a new word, extime.

180. #180

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.222

     Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Woolf's novels stage a Hegelo-Lacanian ontology in which subjectivity is constituted by irreducible negativity and the interruptive structure of memory, contra Deleuze's notion of Becoming as anti-memory; Clarissa's "flowers of darkness" and Septimus's dissolution together demonstrate that the evacuation of subjective lack (the Deleuzean line of flight) leads not to liberation but to the dead end of pure drive, stripping the subject of the productive reflexivity that iterability and temporal disparity make possible.

     the reinscription of exteriority that is subjectivity

181. #181

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.192

     Who Cares? > The Human Object

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive — demonstrated through the Wolf Man's somatic symptom — escapes both correlationism and speculative realism by positing a strange materiality that "enjoys without thinking," locating the Freudian body as the inscription of drive upon organism, and positioning sexuality as the ontological lapse that anchors jouissance irreducibly in materiality without reducing it to mere physicality.

     The spring of this enjoying substance is the intimate exteriority of the unconscious

182. #182

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

     Correlationism or Causation?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Harman's attempt to solve the problem of object-to-object contact — by having objects register the contradiction between another object's relational surface and non-relational core — inadvertently imports a Lacanian structure, where the object-in-itself is constitutively split by an internal contradiction it cannot resolve.

     a core non-relational object sequestered from (but 'somehow' in contact with) its surface traits

183. #183

     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.

     Subject as Object: Lacan and the Extimacy of Sublimation

184. #184

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.21

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

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

     the subject is divided between its appearance and the void at the core of its being… an 'extimate' object which stands for the dimension of 'death drive'

185. #185

     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.

     Though she doesn't use the Lacanian language of extimacy, Sharon Cameron . . . interprets this very same passage as an account of the 'birth' of the Pequod's demonic fourth mate, Fedallah . . . 'that part of [Ahab] which exists outside of himself.'

186. #186

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.219

     Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

     Theoretical move: Against new materialist (Deleuzean) ontologies of Becoming that dissolve the subject into immanent flux and promise plenitude, the passage argues from a Lacanian-Hegelian standpoint that ontological incompleteness—the barred, split subject—is irreducible and is in fact the condition of possibility for freedom, joy, and genuine subjectivity; a close reading of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is deployed to show that Deleuze's ventriloquism of Woolf suppresses the very void of subjectivity her text stages.

     This is the Hegelian paradox of the inner as it twists inside the outer, the Lacanian extimacy (extimaté) of the immanent reinscribed into immanence.

187. #187

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.245

     Russell Sbriglia

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian *objet petit a* as an extimate object—simultaneously inside and outside the subject—reveals that subjectivity is constitutively split and hystericized, and that this logic of sublimation (where "thing-power" is itself the product of the subject's anamorphic distortion) undermines new materialist "flat ontology" by showing that there is no vibrant matter (*a*) without the subject, just as there is no subject without *a*.

     the objet petit a is something that is 'strange to me, although it is at the heart of me,' an 'intimate exteriority' for which he coined the neologism 'extimacy.'

188. #188

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.206

     Correlationism or Causation?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Harman's object-oriented ontology, in attempting to avoid both immanent and external causation, reproduces the very problem it seeks to solve by inventing "allure" — a mysterious causal mechanism borrowed (and misread) from Husserl's phenomenological horizon — and that this impasse points toward a solution already available in Lacan.

     He tries to get around this problem by suggesting that the non-relational core of the object produces a force ('allure') that brings into existence surface features ('notes') which then provide the connection between surface and depth.

189. #189

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.262

     Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing key terms, proper names, and cross-references from a book on Hegel, Lacan, and materialism; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

     extimate, 20, 200–206

190. #190

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.111

     Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian gap between the phenomenal and noumenal is not a limitation to be overcome (as Fichte and Schelling attempt via intellectual intuition) but is itself the condition of freedom and the key to the Hegelian move: Hegel transposes this gap *into* the Absolute itself, so that Being is constitutively incomplete and "subject" names this crack in Being—a move structurally parallel to conceiving Understanding without its Beyond as Reason itself.

     the 'I' exists only as ex-sisting, at a distance from the 'thing' that it is.

191. #191

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.27

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

     Theoretical move: This introductory survey passage maps the theoretical terrain of a collection's second section on Lacan and psychoanalytic materialism, demonstrating how each chapter uses Lacanian concepts (objet petit a, death drive, extimacy, sublimation, the barred subject) to critique rival materialisms (Deleuzian, new materialist, object-oriented) and assert the irreducibility of the subject and the Real.

     insofar as Harman's allure constitutes a search for an 'extimate' cause, a relation of non-relationality... it unwittingly shifts him into Lacanian territory, thereby reinscribing subjectivity at the heart of his putatively flat, desubjectivized ontology

192. #192

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.269

     Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index section of an academic book on Hegel, Lacan, and materialism; it is non-substantive reference material listing topics and page numbers rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

     extimacy, 202, 203, 211, 237, 246n53

193. #193

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.213

     The Search for a Möbius Topology and Extimate Causality

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) unwittingly presupposes the very Lacanian framework it tries to circumvent: the "object-in-itself" it posits is nothing other than the Real of the cut (objet petit a), which functions simultaneously as object-cause and void of desire, thereby demonstrating that a dialectical materialist account of objet a—with its Möbius topology and extimate causality—supersedes OOO's subject-less ontology.

     Harman's desire for extimate causality, unbeknownst to himself, has brought him within reach of a dialectical materialist conception of objet a.

194. #194

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.193

     Who Cares? > The Human Object > The Master and the Pervert

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis is positioned as the necessary ethical corrective to new materialism's symptomatic attachment to the jouissance it ostensibly critiques: rather than speculating beyond consciousness, psychoanalysis works from within to expose the human's non-coincidence with itself, grounding a genuine ethics of singularity against both correlationism and its critics.

     psychoanalysis concerns and is concerned with a difference which is the condition of possibility for an ethical relation to what lies on the other side of consciousness

195. #195

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.210

     The Search for a Möbius Topology and Extimate Causality

     Theoretical move: By theorizing "extimate causality" through Lacanian non-orientable topology (Möbius), the passage argues that both subject and objet a emerge from the same formal negation—a cut that is simultaneously internal and external—thereby dissolving the OOO impasse between relational dissolution and objectal isolation, and showing that self-inconsistency (non-self-coincidence) is the ontological condition of identity itself.

     the formal negation is a special kind of cause, what we can call the 'extimate cause,' using Lacan's neologism (extimacy) to indicate the essential presence of an externality for identity.

196. #196

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.216

     The Search for a Möbius Topology and Extimate Causality > Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for a chapter on Möbius topology and extimate causality; it is non-substantive in itself, but several footnotes perform brief theoretical moves—notably connecting extimacy to the empty set, non-orientable topology, and the critique of Object-Oriented Ontology.

     The empty set is not only the container of the elements of the set, but also must be included as an element internal to the set as well. So, the empty set is 'extimate,' as described below.

197. #197

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.48

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Voices Unhinged > Inside Is Outside

     Theoretical move: The figure of Baron Harkonnen functions as the necessary obverse of classical Hollywood fantasy: by removing symbolic prohibition, the fantasy that grants access to total enjoyment must also produce an unrestrained obscene enjoyer, making visible the excess that normative fantasy disavows. Lynch's refusal to restrain this depiction forces the spectator to confront the obscenity integral to their own enjoyment.

     the diseased parts of the Baron's skin are points at which his skin no longer covers the inside of his body. Through the diseases, the Baron's insides bubble to the surface, suggesting that his body exists without the limits that define the typical body.

198. #198

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.21

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The** Impossible David Lynch

     Theoretical move: Lynch's cinema achieves a distinctively Hegelian-Lacanian effect by separating the realms of desire and fantasy, immersing the spectator completely in the fantasmatic world until its traumatic underside is revealed, thereby enacting speculative identity (self-recognition in absolute otherness) and forcing an encounter with the Real as the impossible within the symbolic order.

     the cinema is no longer an escape without any connection to the outside world, nor is it a reality unto itself. Instead, it is the reverse side of that outside world—the fantasmatic underside that holds the truth of the latter.

199. #199

     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.

     one finds the outside within the inside, the infinite within the finite

200. #200

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.127

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > ² . The Integration of the Impossible Objeet in rhe Elephant Man > 3. Dune ond the Poth to Solvotion

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several theoretical moves: it deploys Lacanian sexual antagonism as the primary social antagonism underlying Hollywood ideological narrative; it argues that voice-over narration's gaps testify to truth rather than obscure it; and it identifies feminine/mystical enjoyment as an authentic connection with the infinite, elevating Other Jouissance to the level of mysticism.

     The heart plug, installed in every citizen of the Harkonnen society, suggests the proximity between inside and outside. With one tug, all of a sudden the inside of one's body will flush out.

201. #201

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.89

     ,'\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.

     The film makes even more evident this extimate quality of the Mystery Man through a manipulation of sound.

202. #202

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.68

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Publicized Privacy

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that in *Wild at Heart*, Lynch formally dismantles the opposition between private romantic fantasy and the violent external world, demonstrating instead that Sailor and Lula's fantasy life actively constitutes and mirrors the social disorder surrounding them—rather than offering refuge from it.

     Spool's presence in the narrative suggests that others have access to this same private language... it indicates that Sailor and Lula's private fantasy life has seeped into the public world.

203. #203

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.50

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Voices Unhinged > The Worms and the Spice

     Theoretical move: By reading the spice in Lynch's *Dune* as *das Ding*, McGowan argues that the film uniquely depicts—rather than merely promises—total (feminine) jouissance, showing how the Thing's presence within the fantasmatic world collapses the constitutive exclusion that founds social reality, and thereby reveals the identity of ultimate enjoyment and ultimate horror.

     something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me, something that on the level of the unconscious only a representation can represent.

204. #204

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.130

     <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > *The Formulas of Sexuation*

     Theoretical move: Fink expounds Lacan's formulas of sexuation from Seminar XX, arguing that masculine structure is constituted by universal phallic determination grounded in the exception of a foreclosed primal father, while feminine structure is constituted by the 'not-all' — an incompleteness with respect to the phallic function that opens onto an Other jouissance whose status is ex-sistence rather than existence within the symbolic order.

     he is what Lacan, back in the 1950s, might have qualified as 'extimate': excluded from within.

205. #205

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.115

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-113-0"></span>**The Freudian Thing**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's object (a) is a direct theoretical translation of Freud's *das Ding*: by rendering Freudian neurons as signifiers and facilitations as signifying links, Lacan shows that the Thing is what remains isolated from the signifying chain yet is circled by it — the unsignifiable kernel within the Other that constitutes the subject as a defense against it, and whose differing primal affects (disgust vs. being-overwhelmed) provide structural diagnostic criteria distinguishing hysteria from obsession.

     das Ding appears as the unsignified and unsignifiable object within the Other (or 'Other-complex') — in the Other yet more than or beyond the Other

206. #206

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.30

     <span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > **The Unconscious**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious is constituted by the Other's discourse—a chain of signifiers obeying language-like rules—such that what appears as the subject's innermost desire is in fact the desire of the Other, rendering the very notion of a self-transparent, sovereign subject untenable.

     albeit internalized, they remain foreign bodies in a sense… so foreign, so estranged, so cut off from subjectivity that an individual would choose to take his or her life in order to be rid of such a foreign presence.

207. #207

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.142

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > <span id="page-140-0"></span>**Existence and Ex-sistence**

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing 'existence' (what can be said) from 'ex-sistence' (what can only be written, standing apart from the symbolic), Fink argues that the Other jouissance and objet petit a ex-sist in a way that renders Lacan's libidinal economy irreducibly open and untotalizable, foreclosing any complementarity between phallic and Other jouissance.

     something not included on the inside, something which, rather than being intimate, is 'extimate.'

208. #208

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.233

     <span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**

     Theoretical move: This is the index of Bruce Fink's *The Lacanian Subject*, listing key concepts, proper names, and page references — a non-substantive navigational apparatus with no original theoretical argumentation.

     Extimacy, 122

209. #209

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.202

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > The Creative Function of the Word

     Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus consolidates several key Lacanian theoretical commitments: the Real as without gap or fissure, reality as fantasy-laden and symbolically constituted, extimacy as the logic of internal exclusion structuring the subject's relation to its object, and the signifier's irreducible surplus beyond itself.

     the object being that which is excluded, but on the inside, in a sense (it is what is most intimate, but at the same time ejected out of oneself, hence extimate; it is thus exterior while remaining terribly intimate, and interior though remaining utterly foreign).

210. #210

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.28

     part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Hegel's treatment of comedy in the *Phenomenology* as a lens to argue that genuine subjective change requires not merely the subject's self-knowledge but a corresponding shift in the external Symbolic (the "Other"), and that this double movement—where lack in the subject must coincide with lack in the Other—is shared by both Hegel and Lacan, with transference as its analytic condition.

     This is a short circuit of internal and external, not an elimination of the one or the other. For this short circuit or local overlapping of the two to occur, work on the subject, as an internal work on consciousness, is not enough; work on the Other is also needed.

211. #211

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.44

     part i

     Theoretical move: Župančič reads Hegel's account of comedy as the site where substance undergoes its own alienation and thereby becomes subject, such that comedy is not the undermining of the universal by the concrete but the universal's own self-movement — a theoretical move that reframes the comic as producing concrete universality rather than merely exposing its limits.

     the latter does not figure as the other side of what is 'universally acceptable,' but as its most intimate kernel which is made, by Borat, to explode right before our very eyes.

212. #212

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.234

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys two registers of symbolic castration — enjoyment and meaning — using Plato's Timaeus to illuminate the paradoxical exteriority of sexuality to the organism, and Žižek's account of the phallus-as-insignia to show that symbolic castration is not symbolic-as-metaphorical but the constitutive gap opened by assumption of a symbolic mandate.

     the concept of castration involves two registers of separation and of the exteriority of the interior

213. #213

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.128

     part iii

     Theoretical move: Žižančič argues that Bergson's formula of the comic (the mechanical encrusted on the living) is both too broad and philosophically pre-loaded with an aprioristic dualism; the truly radical move is to locate the "mechanical" not as one of two independent poles but as the very *relationship* between any two poles, and further, that comic imitation reveals automatism as the site of singularity rather than its absence.

     it is precisely in this 'exterior' automatism that we are most 'ourselves' (and not that we cease to be ourselves)

214. #214

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.190

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan > Return to Comedy

     Theoretical move: Comedy is distinguished from tragedy not as its repetition but as a structurally prior form of repetition: where tragedy sublimates the Real impasse into a singular subjective destiny (repetition in disguise), comedy enacts a "mechanical," textual repetition of Master-Signifiers that externalizes the Real as an object, reactivating the very ground of subjectivity in the present rather than representing it through an unfolding destiny.

     unlike tragic heroes, who seem to carry this singular object within themselves, comic characters carry it outside themselves, so that it (more or less independently of their will and actions) hangs onto them.

215. #215

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.203

     (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacanian castration is not merely an operator of lack but the structural coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir) that constitutes enjoyment as an "encrusted" appendix with relative autonomy — and that comedy, unlike tragedy, stages this constitutive dislocation of enjoyment at the level of structure itself rather than through individual existential destiny.

     enjoyment... belongs to us as constitutively dislocated. It belongs to us as something that is—to use Bergson's terms—literally encrusted upon our organism and our lives.

216. #216

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.365

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Robert Schumann as a Theorist of Ideology

     Theoretical move: By reading Schumann's "Humoresque" as a structure of absent melody sustained by its unplayed virtual voice, Žižek argues that ideology operates analogously: explicit ideological text is always sustained by an unspoken obscene supplement, and genuine critique of ideology ("moving the underground") must intervene in this obscene virtual layer rather than merely engaging the explicit symbolic Law.

     the true Other of liberal democracy is not its fundamentalist enemy, but its own disavowed underside, its own obscene supplement.

217. #217

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.367

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Welcome to the Desert of the American Subculture

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Abu Ghraib tortures were neither isolated criminal acts nor directly ordered, but rather the necessary obscene underside of official ideology — a "Code Red" transgression that is the constitutive supplement to public values of democracy and dignity, revealing how Power systematically generates and requires its own excess.

     The Abu Ghraib tortures are thus to be located in the series of obscene underground practices that sustain an ideological edifice.

218. #218

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.9

     introduction

     Theoretical move: Žižek introduces the concept of the "parallax gap" as the theoretical core of dialectical materialism, arguing that the irreducible non-relation between two incommensurable perspectives (e.g., revolutionary politics and art, historical and dialectical materialism) is not an obstacle to dialectics but its very engine, and that this gap must be inscribed back into the particular itself rather than resolved by a higher synthesis.

     the gap between the individual and the 'impersonal' social dimension is to be inscribed back within the individual himself

219. #219

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.86

     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.

     we pass from the big Other to the small other, from A to a, the A's 'ex-timate' core/stain

220. #220

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.259

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew mystifies constitutive social antagonism by displacing it onto an external limit, and that Milner's "Jewish exception" logic inadvertently reproduces this displacement; the properly Lacanian response is a "not-all" Europe in which everyone becomes an exception (objet petit a), dissolving the need for a constitutive Other — and he extends this critique to Jacques-Alain Miller's therapeutic-political proposal, which he reads as a socially conservative "compassionate cushion" that profits from the disarray of identifications rather than challenging the anonymous systems that produce it.

     The State of Israel thus, in effect, functions as the small a of the US big A, the ex-timate core of tradition that serves as the mythic point of reference of the chaotic non-All of the USA.

221. #221

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.388

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 1The Subject, This "Inwardly Circumcised Jew"

     Theoretical move: This notes section makes several concentrated theoretical moves: it maps the three meanings of "subject" onto the RSI triad; it redefines Lacan's anti-philosophy as an infinite (Kantian) judgment rather than a simple negation of philosophy; it traces the shift in Lacan's conception of the Real from extimate Thing to inherent inconsistency of the Symbolic; and it reads Messiaen's musical structure as isomorphic with Lacan's four discourse-elements, thereby illustrating the elementary signifying structure.

     Lacan's thought moves from the 'internal externality'—the famous 'ex-timacy'—of the Real qua Thing to the Symbolic

222. #222

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.295

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward the Theory of the Stalinist Musical

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Stalinism's obscene underside (revealed by Eisenstein) and its public face (the kolkhoz musical) together expose a fundamental Hegelian dialectical law whereby historical tasks are accomplished by their apparent opposites, and that the utopian space opened by the Communist breakthrough—even in its Stalinist deformation—cannot be reduced to a symmetrical equivalent of Fascism, because Communism uniquely sustains the very critical standpoint from which its own failures can be measured.

     That is the true greatness of Eisenstein: that he detected (and depicted) the fundamental shift in the status of political violence, from the 'Leninist' liberating outburst of destructive energy to the 'Stalinist' obscene underside of the Law.

223. #223

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.122

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Too Much Life!

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that shame, castration, and the "undead" lamella are not opposed but structurally co-produced: the noncastrated remainder (lamella/objet petit a) is not what escapes castration but precisely what castration generates as its own surplus, collapsing the distinction between lack and excess into a Möbius-strip parallax.

     located in the very heart of my body and at the same time uncontrollable, like a kind of parasite, a foreign intruder

224. #224

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.206

     **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.

     The historical object disrupts the present in this fashion—causing A to drop her glass—because it belongs to the present in an extimate way. To put it in the terms of Lacan, the past represents what is in the present more than the present.

225. #225

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.60

     5

     Theoretical move: Kubrick's apparent "coldness" is reframed as the direct staging of fantasy's own structural coldness: by stripping affect away, his films expose the obscene jouissance that secretly underlies symbolic authority, thereby undermining ideology's claim to neutrality.

     the obscene enjoyment that always accompanies the exercise of power... remains invisible throughout most of our everyday experience. This authority presents itself as neutral and even compassionate, and this guise prevents us from questioning the exercise of symbolic power.

226. #226

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.61

     5

     Theoretical move: Kubrick's films expose the obscene enjoyment structurally embedded in symbolic authority itself—not as the fault of particular subjects—and this fantasmatic revelation serves the subject's freedom by dissolving ideological investment in that authority.

     we see the obscene underside of symbolic authority in the very way that authority figures enact their authority.

227. #227

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.23

     **Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze** > **The Gaze as Object** > **Desiring Elsewhere**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the early Lacanian film theory tradition misreads Lacan by conflating desire with a Nietzschean/Foucaultian will to mastery; the properly Lacanian gaze is not the vehicle of mastery but an objet petit a—a point of traumatic, unassimilable enjoyment in the Other that causes desire precisely by remaining out of reach, thereby reorienting film theory from the imaginary look to the real gaze.

     It is, to paraphrase Lacan, in the Other more than the Other.

228. #228

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.20

     The Shortest Shadow

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Nietzschean event has the structure of a "time loop" in which the subject who declares the event is constituted retroactively by it—the event is immanent to its own declaration—and that this constitutive splitting ("One became Two") is not a synthesis or mystical transformation but the minimal, topological difference (the "edge") that names the nonrelationship between two incommensurable terms, a logic Zupančič explicitly aligns with Lacan's formula of the sexual non-rapport.

     the 'coming from us' is what requires domestication; the self-emanation of this call accounts for its unsettling, uncanny nature.

229. #229

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.115

     <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.

     I can stand where I stand only because an intimate part of me stands on the other side, outside 'me,' with the objects.

230. #230

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.59

     **Object Relations Psychoanalysis**

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two interlocking theoretical moves: (1) it critiques Object Relations Psychoanalysis for treating the lost object as empirically contingent rather than ontologically constitutive, contrasting Fairbairn's 'paradise lost' with Freud's priority of loss; (2) it elaborates the big Other as the symbolic order that mediates desire, whose constitutive non-existence is the very condition of both freedom and capitalist ideology's grip on the subject.

     albeit internalized they remain foreign bodies in a sense...so cut off from subjectivity that an individual would choose to take his or her life in order to be rid of such a presence.

231. #231

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.325

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's das Ding, properly understood as a locus of pure lack encountered in the Other rather than in self-referential Dasein-anxiety, is distinguished from Heidegger precisely by extimacy; integrating objet a with das Ding produces not theoretical closure but a coherent account of the impossibility of ultimate theoretical coherence.

     The problem is not unnerving intimacy but unavoidable extimacy. The Lacanian subject is emphatically not whole.

232. #232

     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.

     The relation between the mother and the unknown Thing parallels the relation Freud later charts between the Heimlich and the Unheimlich. The strange and unsettling is capable of rising up in the very heart of what is familiar.

233. #233

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.329

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>} > Notes

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two related theoretical moves: first, it reframes Lacan's claim that anxiety "is not without an object" by positioning objet a as merely the entry point into the void of das Ding (rather than the terminal object of anxiety); second, it draws a speculative parallel between Heidegger's later concept of Ereignis and Lacan's extimacy, suggesting a convergence beyond Heidegger's early subjectivism.

     The emphasis on *Ereignis* in his later work can intriguingly be read as implying something very like what Lacan called *extimacy*.

234. #234

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.324

     Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *objet a* and *das Ding* form a two-fold ontic-ontological dynamic: the *objet a* functions as the obstinate objective clue (the ontic "odd feature") that opens onto the abyssal void of *das Ding* (the ontological Real), thereby reversing Žižek's own formulation; and that *das Ding*, linked to the mother's inscrutable desire and mediated by the Name of the Father / signifier, is ultimately "extimate" — the Thing in the Other mirrors an unthinkable excess within the subject itself.

     It is this ontological reversion that Lacan calls the dynamic of the 'extimate.' The Thing in the Other is ultimately inseparable from the 'Thing' in oneself.

235. #235

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Boothby](#contents.xhtml_ch14a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Boothby's reversal of the ontic/ontological assignments of *objet a* and *das Ding*: *objet a* is ontological (as object-cause of desire that structures reality through subtraction), while *das Ding* exceeds the entire ontic-ontological distinction as a "trans-ontological" trace of what the ontic was before disclosure — and this logic extends to the subject itself, which is ultimately also a supposition rather than a positive given.

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

236. #236

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.10

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > The Jester’s Epistemic Stance

     Theoretical move: Žižek's reformulation of the death drive as the eternal core of subjectivity—finding jouissance in failure and repetition rather than success—grounds his critique of ideology, which operates not through false consciousness but through fantasmatic enjoyment that sustains social authority; the political act of over-conformity to the public letter of the law, refusing its obscene underside, is presented as the path to breaking ideology's hold.

     Fantasies are an 'ex'timate (not an 'in'timate) socially constructed phenomenon. As such they form the borderline between subject/individual and object/community

237. #237

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

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a critical engagement with Žižek's account of sexuation, arguing that while sexual difference names the incompleteness/trauma constitutive of the subject, Žižek's formalism fails to theorize the body as the extimate site where the signifier's cut produces a split—a gap Butler exploits via social constructivism and which Tomsič's account of the signifier as bodily cut helps to address. The central theoretical pivot is whether the antinomies of sexuation, as the Real of the subject's incompleteness, can ground emancipatory politics without presupposing a binary heterosexual structure.

     This extimate status of sex, however, does not justify why we need to maintain these two positions of difference.

238. #238

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.22

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

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Žižek's failure to articulate a linkage between objet a and das Ding is not mere oversight but may signal a deeper conceptual commitment, and proposes that the two concepts form an essential couplet—each unintelligible without the other—anchored by Lacan's remark in Seminar XVI that objet a "tickles das Ding from the inside."

     objet a 'is what tickles das Ding from the inside'

239. #239

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.216

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: Bou Ali reconstructs Žižek's theory of the subject as a non-ontological point of negativity that is extimate to symbolic structure, correlative to the objet a as object-cause of desire, and grounded in the retroactive (Nachträglichkeit) constitution of the Real as cause—arguing further that this account of subjectivity is inseparable from Lacanian sexuation, read against both Hegelian dialectics and Kantian antinomies.

     a topological account that can represent the extimate status of the subject to structure. The object-cause is neither inside nor outside symbolic structure; it is extimate to structure and requires a topological model to cognize it.

240. #240

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.58

     [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > <span id="chapter1.xhtml_pg_54" aria-label="54" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>**THE LURE OF THE PARTICULAR**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the left's epistemological retreat to particularism—most visible in Laclau and Butler—is politically self-defeating, because universality is not derived from the accumulation of particulars but is constitutive of particularity itself; only a universal that is prior to and lacking in each particular can ground emancipatory collective politics.

     The universal is not a foreign outsider but an intimate point at which each particular finds itself lacking.

241. #241

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.39

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

     Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Platonov's fictional Anti-Sexus device to demonstrate that enjoyment and the Other are irreducibly co-implicated (each is "in" the other), making the non-relation not an absence of relation but a constitutive bias or curvature of discursive space—and thereby refuting both the revolutionary fantasy of liberating humanity from sexuality and the liberal-democratic ideology of neutral pluralism.

     There is no enjoyment without the Other, because all enjoyment originates at the place of the Other (as the locus of the signifiers). Our innermost enjoyment can occur only at that 'extimate' place.

242. #242

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.38

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the antagonism between signifier and enjoyment, and between the Other and jouissance, arises not from heterogeneous origins but from their co-origination in the same locus; the Other and enjoyment are 'extimately' related such that any attempt to purify one of the other rediscovers what was expelled at the very heart of the purified term, producing a structural twist rather than a symmetrical relation.

     The Other and enjoyment are 'extimately' related.

243. #243

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.92

     Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-81-0"></span>Realism in Psychoanalysis

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian Real resolves the correlationist dilemma (Meillassoux) not by absolutizing contingency but by positing a speculative identity of the absolute and becoming: through a contingent but real cut/break (the emergence of the signifier), physical reality becomes independent and timeless, while the subject names the discontinuity at the core of every scientific breakthrough—a dimension of truth that science forgets but psychoanalysis keeps alive via the unconscious.

     it is independent, yet it becomes such only at the very moment of its discursive 'creation'