Feminine Sexuality

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (203)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.144

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Don Juan's serial seduction is not about variety but about repetition compulsion aimed at extracting Woman-as-such beyond her symbolic roles — a structural impossibility (since 'Woman doesn't exist') whose failure produces the myth's composite shape and reveals that patriarchal society is itself a reaction-formation to the non-existence of Woman, not its cause.

   At the point, we can introduce Lacan's infamous statement that 'Woman [la femme] doesn't exist'. If we are to grasp the feminist impact of this statement, it is important to realize that it is not so much an expression of a patriarchal attitude ... as something which threatens to throw such a society 'out of joint'.

2. #02

   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.

   We can substantiate this reading of 'la femme n'existe pas' by Lacan's remarks in Television

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.202

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

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

   The position of the femme fatale (that is, of the Woman) is that of the exception constitutive of the phallic function, which thus represents the masculine fantasy par excellence.

4. #04

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.107

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

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

   The male was included with the one, the straight, the unchanging, the limited, the right, and the good. The female was lumped with the many, the curved, the changing, the unlimited, the left, and the bad.

5. #05

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.110

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

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

   Such feminine secrets represented the antithesis of conceptual understanding and rational calculation... the philosophical complaint was that they know in aberrant, nonrational ways that must be forcefully rejected.

6. #06

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.172

   I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > Th e Two Forms of the Social Bond

   Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the social bond has two simultaneous logics derived from Lacanian sexuation: a foundational female logic of not-having (universalized exception, shared loss) that underlies every social order, and a male logic of exception/exclusion (friend/enemy distinction) that societies adopt to obscure the traumatic ground of collective sacrifice—with the former constituting the only real enjoyment of the social bond, and the latter generating mere pleasure through the illusion of having.

   Female subjectivity provides enjoyment through what it doesn't have; one enjoys one's loss as a female subject. This type of enjoyment is not exclusionary in the way that the male form of enjoyment is.

7. #07

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

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

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

   The fundamental symbolic deadlock … involves the binary signifier, or the signifier of the feminine. The absence of this signifier prevents the operations of the social order from running smoothly.

8. #08

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.282

   I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > What's Missing in *Th e Da Vinci Code*

   Theoretical move: The passage uses *The Da Vinci Code* as a cultural case study to map two symmetrical ideological failures—fundamentalism and positivism—both of which refuse to sustain the constitutive gap in signification (the missing binary signifier of the feminine), whereas psychoanalysis insists this gap is ontological and irreparable, underwriting the nonexistence of the sexual relationship and the subject's enjoyment.

   Signifying a woman as a mother — which is what both Islamic and Christian fundamentalism work toward — effectively eliminates the gap in the signifying structure that the missing signifier of the feminine marks.

9. #09

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.293

   I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Th e Feminine Signifi er Isn't

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "missing signifier" of the feminine is not an external absence to be filled but an internal torsion within the signifying structure itself; authentic psychoanalytic politics consists not in expanding inclusion but in male subjects identifying with this internal void, thereby revealing that the divide between male and female subjectivity is a division within the subject rather than between subjects.

   Th e task of a psychoanalytic politics involves bringing conceptual location of the feminine — or the missing signifi er — to light.

10. #10

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.350

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 11. The Case of the Missing Signifier

    Theoretical move: This passage's endnotes collectively argue that the missing (binary) signifier is an internal gap within the signifying structure rather than an external absence, and that genuine political transformation requires identification with this internal structural position rather than its replacement—a claim developed through engagements with Hegel, Lacan, Badiou, Derrida, and feminist theory.

    The female position is that of the missing signifier, and it is only through what is missing that politics as such can be envisioned.

11. #11

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    Lacan argues that 'woman does not exist' (Lacan, 1973a:60); the symbolic order contains no signifier for femininity, and hence the feminine position cannot be fully symbolised.

12. #12

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_ncx_214"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_page_0245"></span>***W***

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical development of the concept of "woman" across Freud and Lacan, arguing that Lacan's key move is to displace the question of femininity from a biological or universal essence to a structural position in the symbolic order defined by the logic of the not-all, feminine jouissance beyond the phallus, and woman as symptom of man.

    Lacan's most important contributions to the debate on femininity come, like Freud's, late in his work. In the seminar of 1972–3, Lacan advances the concept of a specifically feminine jouissance which goes 'beyond the phallus'

13. #13

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_179"></span>**semblance**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical evolution of Lacan's concept of *semblant* (semblance) from a classical appearance/essence opposition, through its connection to the imaginary/symbolic distinction, to its mature formulation in the early 1970s where truth is shown to be continuous with—rather than opposed to—appearance, and where objet petit a, love, and jouissance are all theorized in terms of semblance.

    At first Lacan uses the term to refer to such issues as feminine sexuality, which is characterised by a dimension of masquerade.

14. #14

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_182"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0208"></span>**sexual relationship**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically unpacks Lacan's formula 'there is no sexual relationship' as condensing six distinct theoretical points about sexual difference: the mediating role of language, the asymmetry of the symbolic order (one signifier, the phallus), the impossibility of harmony between the sexes, the partiality of the drive's object, the woman's reduction to the mother function, and the opposition of sex to meaning/relation in the real.

    Woman cannot function sexually qua woman but only qua mother; 'Woman begins to function in the sexual relationship only as mother'

15. #15

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_141"></span>**other/Other**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes the fundamental Lacanian distinction between the little other (imaginary counterpart/ego-reflection) and the big Other (symbolic order, radical alterity, locus of speech), arguing that the big Other as symbolic order is primary over the big Other as subject, and that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

    The Other is also 'the Other sex'... The Other sex is always WOMAN, for both male and female subjects; 'Man here acts as the relay whereby the woman becomes this Other for herself as she is this Other for him'

16. #16

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.192

    **x** > **XIII APHORISMS ON LOVE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances a series of aphorisms on the love-desire-jouissance relation, arguing that anxiety mediates between desire and jouissance, that sadism and masochism are not reversible but constitute a fourfold structure each concealing the other's true aim, and that "only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire" — with castration functioning as the structural impasse that governs the encounter between the sexes.

    woman lacks nothing. We would be quite wrong to consider Penisneid to be an ultimate term... A clitoris is not simply a smaller penis, it is a part of the penis that corresponds to the corpus cavernosa.

17. #17

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.193

    **x** > **XIII APHORISMS ON LOVE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that while the object a functions equally for women as for men in relation to jouissance, women's relation to desire is structurally simplified relative to men's—a claim deployed here as a transitional pivot toward a future session linking feminine desire to the figure of Don Juan.

    taking an interest in the object as an object of our desire entails far fewer complications for women

18. #18

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.202

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses clinical material and the figure of Don Juan to argue that feminine jouissance is structurally distinct from masculine desire: whereas man's anxiety is tied to the (–φ) and the lost object, woman's relation to jouissance is mediated by the desire of the Other rather than by lack, making her "truer and more real." Women's masochism is consequently reframed as a male fantasy, and the male "imposture" is contrasted with the female "masquerade."

    By and large, woman is much more real and much truer than man, in that she knows the worth of the yardstick of what she is dealing with in desire, in that she takes this route with the greatest peace of mind.

19. #19

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.80

    BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety has a determinate structure — it is always *framed* — and uses this structural claim to reposition both the Unheimliche and the fantasy (via the Wolf Man's dream as window-framed scene) as instances of that framing, while also deploying Ferenczi's notion of the "unmediated interruption" of female genitality to argue that the structural empty place (locus of jouissance) is constitutive of desire prior to any diachronic myth of maturation.

    Those of you who attended our Amsterdam Congress on female sexuality may remember that many things, praiseworthy things, were said there without being effectively linked up and mapped out, for want of that structural register

20. #20

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.277

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

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

    Woman's desire is determined by the question, for her too, of her jouissance. Analytic theory has been telling us from the start that she is not only far closer to jouissance than men are, but also doubly determined.

21. #21

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.238

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

    Theoretical move: Through a sustained engagement with Buddhist iconography (the Kanzeon/Avalokitesvara/Guanyin statues), Lacan argues that the object of desire (objet petit a) emerges precisely at the limit of the three stages (oral, anal, phallic-castration) as something radically separated off, and that castration's function in the object is illuminated by a culturally specific figure that appears as desire's object while remaining indeterminate with respect to sex—thus the mirror, as field of the Other, is the site where the place of the a first appears.

    Holiness with a capital H, practically the most fundamental element in the access point to Bodhi, finds itself embodied in a female form of divinity that has even been identified at the origin with nothing more nor less than the reappearance of the Indian Shakti, the feminine principle of the world, the soul of the world.

22. #22

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

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

    Woman turns out to be superior in the domain of jouissance, on account of her bond with the knot of desire being much looser.

23. #23

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.139

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

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's case of female homosexuality to demonstrate that acting-out is structurally addressed to the Other, that the unconscious desire can operate through lying/fiction, and that Freud's own passage à l'acte (abandoning the case) reveals his inability to think femininity as evasive structure—while also critiquing ego-identification as the goal of analysis by pointing to the unassimilable remainder (objet a) it leaves untouched.

    Don't make out that I'm saying that woman per se is mendacious when I say that femininity is evasive and that there's something of an angle here

24. #24

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.207

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the activity/passivity opposition functions as a metaphor that covers over the unfathomable character of sexual difference, and that sado-masochism is not simply a 'ready money' sexual realization but rather an injection structuring the field of love and desire; he further challenges the notion of 'feminine masochism' as a masculine fantasy rather than a clinical fact.

    As such, the masculine/feminine opposition is never attained. This is sufficient indication of the importance of what is repeated here

25. #25

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.43

    THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: The unconscious is theorized as the locus of a splitting in the subject from which desire emerges via metonymy, while Freud's own unresolved relation to feminine desire (hysteria) is used to illustrate the structural limits of the speaking subject's self-knowledge.

    for him, the question—What does a woman want?—remained unanswered. He never resolved this question

26. #26

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.95

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the concept of tuché (the tychic encounter) to the problem of the gaze by interrogating the philosophical formula 'I see myself seeing myself', arguing that this reflexive structure of consciousness—unlike bodily sensation—fails to ground certainty in the way the Cartesian cogito claims, thus preparing a distinction between vision and the gaze.

    this statement has rich and complex implications in relation to the theme developed in La Jeune Parque, that of femininity—but we haven't got there yet.

27. #27

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.208

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots from the narcissistic field of love (where the Other is structurally absent) to the partial drive's circular movement as the proper mechanism through which the subject attains the dimension of the big Other — distinguishing narcissistic self-love from the drive's heterogeneous, gap-bearing circularity, and using the scopic drive as the exemplary case.

    Strictly speaking, they spring from a term that I have not introduced, but of which one female psycho-analyst has pin-pointed the feminine sexual attitude—the term masquerade.

28. #28

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.43

    THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: The passage situates the unconscious as the site of a split in the subject from which desire emerges via metonymy, and uses Freud's unresolved question about feminine desire ('What does a woman want?') as an illustration of how the encounter with the hysteric oriented Freud's theoretical trajectory despite his personal idealism.

    the question—What does a woman want?—remained unanswered. He never resolved this question

29. #29

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.207

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Freud, argues that the activity/passivity opposition does not map onto masculine/feminine but rather serves as a metaphorical cover for an unfathomable sexual difference; furthermore, the injection of sado-masochism into the sexual relation cannot be taken at face value, and feminine masochism is exposed as a masculine fantasy rather than a natural given.

    the masculine/feminine opposition is never attained... the activity/passivity opposition is poured, moulded, injected... the masculine/feminine relations do not exhaust it.

30. #30

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.208

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the narcissistic field of love (where the Other cannot be represented) from the circularity of the partial drive, arguing that it is precisely through the drive's circular movement around the objet a that the subject attains the dimension of the big Other — a move that also introduces the concept of 'masquerade' as operating at the symbolic rather than imaginary level.

    the masculine ideal and the feminine ideal are represented in the psyche by something other than this activity/passivity opposition... they spring from a term... the term masquerade.

31. #31

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.321

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

    Theoretical move: Through a psychoanalytic reading of Marguerite Duras's *Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein*, the seminar argues that the subject is constituted in a "perpetual division" between the desire of the Other and the objet petit a (the Gaze), and that the subject can only be grasped "at the zero point of her desire" through the discourse of the other's desire — that is, Lol's subjectivity is structured entirely around a fundamental lack that is both sustained and circulated by the o-object as Gaze.

    the ambiguity, the incoherence, with which there is manifested in the narrative the femininity of Lol... it seems that Lol's sexuality is situated well on this hither side of an oedipal structure, in this relationship to the void

32. #32

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.260

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Leclaire argues that the analyst's position is irreducible—and perhaps inconceivable—because, unlike the logician who must suture discourse by assigning zero to the concept of non-identity-to-itself in order to save Truth, the analyst refuses suture: by remaining attuned to radical (sexual) difference and the non-identical-to-itself, the analyst occupies no fixed place and listens rather than constructs, making the analytic position structurally incompatible with any discourse that closes on truth.

    If one renounces, for a moment, the saving of the Truth, of the Truth with a capital T, what appears? What appears is the radical difference, in other words, the sexual difference, the difference between the sexes.

33. #33

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.244

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject is constituted by its relation to a refused, foreclosed signifier (a "not-knowing"), and that the sexual dyad—whose nature remains fundamentally unknowable—is the radical foundation of all signifying opposition; this grounds Lacan's claim that the subject of the unconscious is precisely the subject who avoids knowledge of sex, linking the structure of the signifier to the biological fact that sex is not reducible to reproduction but is bound to death.

    The masculine and the feminine (le masculin et le feminin)... But we do not know what the masculine and the feminine are. And Freud recognises it and affirms it.

34. #34

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.244

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject is constituted by its relation to a *rejected* signifier (a not-knowing), and that this structure — the signifier representing the subject for another signifier — recapitulates the whole dialectic from Plato's Sophist to the present; further, it grounds the dyadic signifying opposition (Other/One, being/non-being) in the sexual dyad, while insisting that sex itself is radically unknowable and is not primarily a reproductive mechanism but a relationship with death.

    we do not know what the masculine and the feminine are. And Freud recognises it and affirms it.

35. #35

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.321

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

    Theoretical move: The seminar presentation reads Marguerite Duras's novel *Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein* as a clinical-literary staging of the subject's constitution through the desire of the Other and the objet petit a (the gaze), arguing that the subject (Lol) can only be grasped at the zero-point of desire in the discourse of the other, where she is structured by a perpetual division between the desire of the Other and the o-object that drives the fantasy.

    it is tempting to think that Lol, counting for nothing, forgotten by the couple... ceaselessly repeats this experience because this would allow her to articulate for someone else, but especially for herself, her enigmatic femininity.

36. #36

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.161

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Voice as an object has yet to be properly established as a category in clinical thought, then pivots to show why neither Socrates nor Freud produced social critique: in the ancient world, jouissance was 'resolved' by being delegated to slaves, and it was precisely this reserved park of jouissance—not any theoretical lack—that prevented the emergence of science and of the subject; this historical-economic argument positions the problem of jouissance as the hidden thread connecting ancient Greek knowledge-practice to Freudian psychoanalysis.

    the way in which Jones had to sort himself out on the problem of female sexuality in so far as it involves the status of the phallic function

37. #37

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.178

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus and Klein bottle to theorize jouissance as structurally analogous to the symptom, arguing that orgasm is merely one privileged surface-point of jouissance rather than its essence; this allows him to critique "psychoanalytic mysticism" around female orgasm, reframe aphanisis as the fading of the subject (not desire), and follow Jones's account of the father-daughter couple to argue that feminine sexuality resolves into the woman taking the place of the objet petit a.

    he puts us, as regards the woman, since she is the one in question, at the heart of the way in which the subjective impasse can present itself for her.

38. #38

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.270

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the Hegelian master/slave dialectic by arguing that jouissance remains with the slave, not the master, and uses this to reframe castration as the operation that introduces a negative sign onto the phallus—making possible the (always asymmetric) encounter between masculine and feminine jouissance. He then previews the tripartite RSI framework and the 'logic of fantasy' as the conceptual architecture needed to account for the subject's relation to desire, jouissance, and the real.

    How can one forget the profound disparity that exists between feminine jouissance and masculine jouissance! This, indeed, is why in Freud everything is spoken about, activity, passivity... but never masculine-feminine, because this is not a polarity

39. #39

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.259

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the Hegelian master/slave dialectic by locating jouissance on the side of the slave, then uses this inversion to ground a critique of Freudian obscurantism around feminine jouissance, the phallic function as negativity, and the three registers (imaginary/symbolic/real) as orientating instruments for a forthcoming 'logic of phantasy'.

    this problem which is really the one on which analysis has played the role of the most furious obscurantism... when people were speaking about feminine sexuality in Amsterdam. There were some lovely things said!

40. #40

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.165

    **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Augustinian formula *inter urinas et faeces nascimur* to pivot from the subject's corporeal origin to its structural constitution via the o-object, arguing that the subject is not born as a living body but as a subject in relation to the anal and phallic objects—and, crucially, to two further objects that remain undertheorised even in Freud: the gaze and the voice. He then frames the upcoming seminar on the gaze by recommending Foucault's *Les mots et les choses* (the *Las Meninas* chapter) as preparation.

    this article by Jones which is called 'The early development of female sexuality'... You will find also... under the title of Womanliness as masquerade... an excellent article... called Madame Joan Riviere

41. #41

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.278

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is insufficient to ground sexuality unless it is re-articulated as the foundation of desire through the phallic function, and that feminine jouissance is structurally located at the place of the big Other (O), while the minus-phi (−φ) serves as the mediating organ-as-object between male and female jouissance — against any naïve notion of genital maturation or "oblativity" as explanatory.

    What does a woman want? Freud, as Jones put it, had a trait which cannot, all the same, fail to strike

42. #42

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.180

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Jones on female homosexuality, argues that the phallus functions as an unmarked signifier of the loss of jouissance produced by the law, and that femininity is paradoxically constituted through the homosexual's retention of the father-object — with the woman's not-having the phallus raising signification (signifiance) to its highest power, i.e. castration itself.

    For in every homosexual attitude or function, what the woman finds, in place of the object and people say it is in place of the primordial object, is her femininity.

43. #43

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.166

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar uses Jones's 1927 article on female sexuality as a platform to reconceptualise 'aphanisis' as the disappearance of desire, and to reframe the 'unseen man' in female homosexuality as a structural-symbolic operation involving identification and the phallic gaze, distinguishing Jones's proto-structural insights from his failure to organise them rigorously.

    What is there in women which corresponds to the fear of castration in men? What differentiates the development of the homosexual woman from that of the heterosexual woman?

44. #44

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.279

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is insufficient to ground sexuality unless articulated through the phallic function and the (-phi), and that sexual jouissance must be mapped through the structure of the Other — locating feminine jouissance at the place of the Other (O) while exposing "Hegel's error" of placing jouissance on the side of the master.

    What does a woman want? Freud, as Jones put it, had a trait which cannot, all the same, fail to strike

45. #45

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.165

    **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Augustine's 'inter urinas et faeces nascimur' as a statement about the subject's birth rather than the living body, using it to introduce the o-object (objet petit a) — specifically the anal and phallic objects alongside the look and the voice — as constitutive of subjectivity, while situating this against the Cartesian 'I think' and recommending Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas as preparation for the next session on the Gaze.

    this article by Jones that we are going to see today which is called 'The early development of female sexuality' and which appeared in 1927

46. #46

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.130

    **Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's Wager as a more radical formulation of the Cartesian cogito's splitting of the subject, arguing that the subject constituted by the signifier is irreducibly divided between knowledge and truth, and that the fantasy structure revealed by the Wager discloses how the objet petit a functions as the unknown object that sustains this division.

    the woman that someone tried last evening to make depend on a typical essence which is supposed to be that of femininity, a fragile enterprise

47. #47

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.179

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses topology (torus, Klein bottle) to theorise jouissance as structurally coextensive with the body and irreducible to orgasm, and then pivots to Jones's concept of aphanisis and the father-daughter couple to argue that feminine subjective impasse culminates in the woman being forced to occupy the position of objet petit a — a move that exposes what Riviere named womanliness as masquerade.

    She surrenders the paternal object and she preserves her sex. There exist only two possibilities for expressing libido in this situation ... between abandoning her erotic attachment to the father and the abandonment of her femininity.

48. #48

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.161

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the status of the Voice as a psychoanalytic object is still to be established against naive empiricism, and links this problem to the Socratic/modern science distinction: the absence of ancient science (and thus of the unconscious) is explained by the slave's function as the reserved site of jouissance, whose structural resolution was the precondition for modern subjectivity and psychoanalysis.

    the status of the phallic function. Start from the manifest inconsistencies into which his discourse ceaselessly slips... in connection with female sexuality

49. #49

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.180

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan, rereading Jones on female homosexuality, argues that the phallus functions as a signifier of loss at the level of jouissance, and that femininity is constituted precisely through the "unmarked" position — not-having the phallus — which raises the function of signifiance to its highest point and equates the word phallus with castration itself.

    For in every homosexual attitude or function, what the woman finds, in place of the object and people say it is in place of the primordial object, is her femininity.

50. #50

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.259

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Hegelian master/slave dialectic fails to explain social cohesion, whereas Freud's account grounds it in the homosexual bond and the prohibition of feminine jouissance; this leads to a recasting of castration not as prohibition but as the operation by which the phallus receives a negative sign, enabling the (non-)relationship between masculine and feminine jouissance — a problem Lacan frames as requiring a logic of fantasy and introduces through three registers (imaginary/symbolic/real) oriented around negativity and torsion.

    How can one forget the profound disparity that exists between feminine jouissance and masculine jouissance!

51. #51

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.166

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: By tracing Jones's concept of aphanisis and the structural logic of the "unseen man" in female homosexuality, Lacan argues that Jones — despite himself — arrives at structural (symbolic/metaphorical) references that he cannot properly organise, and that what Jones calls aphanisis corresponds clinically to the disappearance of desire, while the "unseen man" scenario turns on a symbolic operation in which the Gaze (the phallic eye of the father) is the true object of the ritual.

    What is there in women which corresponds to the fear of castration in men? What differentiates the development of the homosexual woman from that of the heterosexual woman? These are two questions that Ernest Jones asks himself

52. #52

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.244

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act installs the subject precisely at the disjunction between body and jouissance: the body of the woman becomes the metaphor for masculine jouissance, while the phallus (distinguished from the penis) functions as the symbol of a withdrawn jouissance that underlies social exchange — yet this structural arrangement leaves feminine jouissance unresolved and adrift, mirroring the slave's displaced jouissance in the Hegelian master/slave dialectic.

    Every psychoanalyst knows it! They do not necessarily know how to say it, but they know it! They know it in any case by the following. The fact is that, men or women, they have not yet been capable of articulating the slightest thing that holds up on the subject of feminine jouissance!

53. #53

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.270

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic interpretation cannot be reduced to mere "discourse-effect" (suggestion) without a constitutive relation to truth; and that desire, being a sub-product of demand and essentially lack, must be rigorously distinguished from jouissance (erection/auto-erotic jouissance) in order to correctly situate unconscious desire's relation to the sexual act and to feminine desire.

    one is absolutely condemned to understand nothing of everything that we say about feminine desire … if one does not start from the following, which - on the plane of jouissance - fundamentally differentiates the two partners

54. #54

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.144

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and creation are structurally tied to identification with the feminine position—specifically to the logic of the "gift of what one does not have"—while masculine jouissance is defined by the fainting/aphanisis of the subject at the phallic moment, which in turn grounds the illusory "pure subjectivity" of the knowing subject and the denial of castration that constitutes idealist thinking.

    she, for her part, loses nothing in it, since she only puts into it what she does not have and that, literally, she creates it.

55. #55

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.184

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates in the structural lack inaugurated by the castration complex, which reverses subjective enjoyment into objectal libido — irreducible to narcissistic libido — and that the objet petit a is the product ('waste-product') of the operation of language on the One/Other dyad, serving as the cornerstone for rethinking logic, the subject, and the analytic act.

    the woman does not have to make the same sacrifice, since it is already attributed to her, at the beginning... it is precisely in so far as she does not have the phallus that the woman can take on its value.

56. #56

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.209

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism, neurotic rejection, and the sexual act cannot be understood through moralistic or pleasure-based frameworks but require a rigorous logical articulation of the subject's structural position; the sexual act necessarily implies a third element (the Other, the phallus, the mother) that prevents any simple dyadic union, and feminine jouissance remains irreducible to what psychoanalytic theory has so far been able to articulate.

    this leaves so completely to one side the category of femininity … 'What does a woman want?'. Which comes back to saying: 'What is it to be a woman?'

57. #57

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.221

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual act is structured around a constitutive gap—the castration complex—such that jouissance beyond the pleasure principle is only oriented negatively, through the suspense (detumescence/castration) of the phallic organ; there is no phallic object, only its absence, which is the very condition of possibility for the sexual act, and feminine jouissance can only be oriented from this same reference point of castration.

    There is here, undoubtedly, a first point that is very interesting to put right in the forefront, as an introduction to any question that may be posed about what is involved in what is called feminine sexuality. When what is at stake is precisely her jouissance.

58. #58

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.143

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

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

    It is because she does not have the phallus that the woman's gift takes on a privileged value as regards the individual (l'être) and is called love, which is - as I have defined it - the gift of what one does not have

59. #59

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.248

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

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

    To pose oneself the question of feminine jouissance, well then, this is already to open the door of all perverse acts.

60. #60

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.174

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of 'jouissance-value' as the structural analogue of exchange-value in the Marxist commodity form, arguing that castration is the subtraction of penile jouissance that produces woman as the 'object of jouissance'—thereby rewriting the Lévi-Straussian exchange of women and the psychoanalytic theory of castration through a unified logic of value.

    Perhaps everything that is indicated to us about feminine sexuality - in which moreover, in conformity with eternal experience, a role is played that is eminently one of masquerade… she disposes of her own jouissance in a way that totally escapes this ideological grasp.

61. #61

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.270

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic interpretation is only non-suggestive insofar as it maintains a relation to truth, and that this same truth-structure reveals desire as constitutively unsatisfied — a subproduct of demand rather than a physiological phenomenon — while distinguishing desire from jouissance (erection as auto-erotic jouissance) to clarify the asymmetry between masculine and feminine sexual positions.

    one is absolutely condemned to understand nothing of everything that we say about feminine desire … if one does not start from the following, which - on the plane of jouissance - fundamentally differentiates the two partners.

62. #62

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.221

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual act cannot be grounded in the pleasure principle or in any imaginary phallic object; rather, jouissance-beyond is structurally evoked by detumescence as its negative limit, and castration means precisely that there is no phallic object — which is the condition of possibility, not the obstacle, for the sexual act. Feminine jouissance can only orient itself through the same castration reference-point as masculine jouissance, making the 'sexual relation' constitutively non-existent except as good intention.

    There is here, undoubtedly, a first point that is very interesting to put right in the forefront, as an introduction to any question that may be posed about what is involved in what is called feminine sexuality. When what is at stake is precisely her jouissance.

63. #63

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.174

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of 'jouissance-value' as structurally homologous to exchange-value in Marx's commodity analysis, arguing that castration operates as the subtraction of penile jouissance that transforms woman into the 'object of jouissance' (the homme-elle), thereby grounding the sexual act in a logic of value equivalence that founds the social/symbolic order.

    Perhaps everything that is indicated to us about feminine sexuality - in which moreover, in conformity with eternal experience, a role is played that is eminently one of masquerade.

64. #64

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.248

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

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

    To pose oneself the question of feminine jouissance, well then, this is already to open the door of all perverse acts.

65. #65

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.143

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the mathematical structure of the golden ratio (objet petit a as mean and extreme ratio) to theorize sexual difference and genital satisfaction: the irreducible remainder (small o / objet petit a) produced in the subject's confrontation with the maternal unity of "one flesh" is what structures jouissance, phallus, and love as the gift of what one does not have — with detumescence as the illusory elimination of remainder, and feminine love as causa sui arising from giving what one lacks.

    It is because she does not have the phallus that the woman's gift takes on a privileged value … In a love relationship, the woman finds a jouissance that is, as one might say, of the order precisely of causa sui

66. #66

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.244

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual act is constitutively structured by the disjunction between body and jouissance, with the subject emerging precisely at that gap; the woman's body functions as a metaphor for masculine jouissance, while the phallus (distinct from the penis) marks the withdrawal of jouissance into exchange value — yet feminine jouissance remains radically unresolved and adrift, beyond any structural accounting.

    Every psychoanalyst knows it! They do not necessarily know how to say it, but they know it! They know it in any case by the following. The fact is that, men or women, they have not yet been capable of articulating the slightest thing that holds up on the subject of feminine jouissance!

67. #67

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.144

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and the illusion of pure subjectivity are gendered formations: feminine jouissance creates through lack (the vanishing phallus), while masculine jouissance generates the delusion of pure knowing by taking the 'minus something' of castration for zero—making the 'subject of knowledge' a male forgery founded on the denial of castration.

    it is always through identification to the woman that sublimation produces the appearance of a creation... strictly linked to the gift of feminine love, in so far as it creates this vanishing object

68. #68

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.181

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

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

    There is not the slightest way, I am saying … it is *impossible* to give a sense, I mean an analytic sense, to the terms *masculine* and *feminine*.

69. #69

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.184

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates from the lack instituted by the castration complex, which produces an irreversible reversal: jouissance becomes objectal (not narcissistic), the phallus functions as the unit marking the distance between Objet petit a and sex, and the o-object itself is revealed as the product of the operation of language — the "metaphorical child" of the One and the Other, born as refuse from inaugural repetition, and the foundational starting-point for rethinking logic and the analytic act.

    it is precisely in so far as she does not have the phallus that the woman can take on its value.

70. #70

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.174

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the paradox that "man and woman have nothing to do with one another" as a strictly logical consequence of psychoanalytic doctrine—not a naturalist scandal—while simultaneously arguing that the psychoanalytic act culminates in the analysand rejecting the analyst as objet petit a (the "o-object"), a formulation he notes has gone entirely uncontested.

    she believes she loves him, this is even what dominates... we know very well that what really dominates, is that she desires him. That is even the reason why she believes she loves him.

71. #71

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.184

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **MEETING of 15 May 1968**

    Theoretical move: Against the backdrop of the May 1968 uprising, Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic failure to articulate the relation between desire and knowledge — and between the sexes — has left a structural vacuum filled by demonstrably false Reichian energetics, and that the Objet petit a (figured here as the paving-stone vs. the tear-gas grenade) names exactly the structural dynamic at stake in the student revolt.

    analysts do not testify to absolutely anything… on this subject of the relationships of one sex to another… anybody can say anything he wants… It is exactly, of course, as if psychoanalysts had never said anything about it.

72. #72

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.181

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **8 and 15 May 1968:** Notes

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the May 1968 student insurrection not as mere unruliness but as a structural phenomenon in which the relations between desire and knowledge are at stake, and argues that psychoanalysts bear a specific responsibility to these events precisely because psychoanalysis grounds the transmission of knowledge on lack and inadequacy—a responsibility they systematically evade.

    what they can say from an experience of language involving the relations of one sex to the other, is not simply passed over in silence

73. #73

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.176

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

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

    What is forced on her is in the structure, the one that designates her, in the subjective dramatisation of the sexual act, that forces on her the function of the little o-object

74. #74

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.176

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's proper function is not to be a subject of knowledge but to occupy the structural place of the objet petit a — the third term that conditions desire and determines what is at stake in the sexual act — and that the analyst's failure to sustain this position drives him to substitute fictional knowledge, institutional hierarchy, and the fiction of "private life" for genuine analytic discourse.

    What is forced on her is in the structure, the one that designates her, in the subjective dramatisation of the sexual act, that forces on her the function of the little o-object.

75. #75

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.185

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **MEETING of 15 May 1968**

    Theoretical move: In the context of the May 1968 events, Lacan argues that psychoanalysts bear a structural responsibility toward the uprisings because the events fundamentally concern the relationship between desire and knowledge — a nexus that is properly psychoanalytic — and that Reich's theory of sexuality is formally contradicted by analytic experience, leaving the field of sexual relations theoretically unoccupied and open to anyone.

    articles on the accession of women to the functions of the priesthood, in which there were discussed a certain number of categories, that of the relationships of the man and of the woman. It is exactly, of course, as if psychoanalysts had never said anything about it.

76. #76

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.382

    Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

    Theoretical move: The hysteric is structurally constituted as a psychoanalysand because she already embodies the 'subject supposed to know' in her flesh, making the cut that separates this supposition from the unconscious structure (master/woman) the pivotal operation of analytic treatment; in parallel, the obsessional's relation to the master reveals that his desire is constitutively impossible.

    the correlate of death is at stake in what the hysteric tackles about what is involved in being a woman.

77. #77

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.327

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as the "missing signifier" because sexual enjoyment (jouissance) is radically foreclosed from symbolization and can only reappear in the real; the castration complex, illustrated through the case of Little Hans, marks the precise joint between the imaginary and symbolic where this structural lack is registered, with the phobia functioning as a symptomatic "paper tiger" that mediates the subject's intolerable anxiety before the phallic mother.

    feminine enjoyment has remained, as I have pointed out to you, also still at the state of an enigma in analytic theory.

78. #78

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.379

    Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structures of hysteria and obsessional neurosis by mapping each onto a foundational "model" (woman/master) and showing how each neurotic subject installs a Subject Supposed to Know in place of that model's constitutive ignorance, while grounding the whole analysis in the set-theoretic logic of the Other and the o-object.

    the hysteric for the woman - not that the hysteric is for all that obligatorily a woman... - in the same way, the hysteric, her model, is what I am now going to state in that what is involved in the model in which the woman establishes this thing that is much more central.

79. #79

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.222

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

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

    one does not know what a woman is. Unknown in the box, except, thank God, through representations... If the Woman in her essence is something, and we know nothing about it, she is just as repressed by women as by men

80. #80

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.70

    *[A porter appears]*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment (jouissance) is constitutively grounded in loss/entropy, and that this structural gap—formalized as surplus-jouissance (Mehrlust)—is what drives knowledge as a means of enjoyment, necessitating the Four Discourses as its articulation; simultaneously, truth is identified not with full-saying but with half-saying, its essence being the concealed fact of castration/impotence, which redefines the analyst's position and the analytic act.

    It is not by chance that women are less enclosed than their partners in this cycle of discourses. Man, the male, the virile one, as we know him, is a creation of discourse... The same cannot be said of the woman.

81. #81

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.89

    *[A porter appears]*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language uses subjects rather than being used by them — enjoyment is the motor of discourse — and that truth stands in a sisterly relation to forbidden enjoyment, a relation legible only from within the discourse of the Hysteric. He frames this against Sade's theoretical masochism (the second death), Freud's discourse on the unconscious as self-speaking knowledge, and a sustained critique of Ego Psychology as a regression to the discourse of the Master.

    Freud sometimes slips away, abandons us. He abandons the question around feminine enjoyment.

82. #82

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.32

    **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 January 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that woman occupies the structural position of truth for man precisely because she holds knowledge of the disjunction between jouissance and semblance; this truth — usually domesticated under the label "castration complex" — is what the whole formation of masculine subjectivity is organised to evade, and Lacan links this structure to a broader critique of capitalist discourse via the discourse of the master.

    no one other than the woman knows better what is disjunctive between enjoyment and the semblance, because she is the presence of this something that she knows

83. #83

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.136

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that writing is equivalent to jouissance within the discourse of the analyst, and that the non-inscribability of the sexual relationship is the fundamental failure at the heart of language—a failure that the letter (as in Poe's purloined letter) stages by feminising those under its shadow and by making truth structurally dependent on fiction.

    it is very explicitly by studying the letter as such, in so far as it has a feminising effect... this letter is indeed that of the woman

84. #84

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth operates structurally through its refusal—when truth "chains itself" it yields nothing to the analyst, and this impasse is indexed to the non-existence of the sexual relationship, which forecloses any natural or destined union between man and woman, leaving desire and demand irreducibly open.

    The woman does not exist - that she exists is the dream of a woman, and it is the dream from which Don Juan emerged

85. #85

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.11

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus is the signified of sexual discourse (not the signifier), that transsexualism and the common error both mistake the signifier for the organ, and that the non-existence of the sexual relationship requires a new logic built on the 'not-all', existence/quantification, and modality rather than naturalist or Aristotelian categories.

    the homosexual, written here in the feminine, who can sustain the sexual discourse in total security... they do not run the risk of taking the phallus for a signifier

86. #86

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.89

    Seminar **6:** Wednesday **8** March 1972

    Theoretical move: Lacan develops the formulas of sexuation—specifically the not-all (pas toute) and the logic of the at-least-one exception—to articulate woman's mode of presence as "between centre and absence," a jouissance that exceeds the phallic function without negating it, while diagnosing Hegelian dialectics and Marxist discourse as structurally blind to the surplus-jouissance drawn from the real of the Master's discourse.

    I think that no one will say that what I am stating about the phallic function arises from a failure to recognise what is involved in feminine enjoyment.

87. #87

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.13

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that there is no sexual relationship in the speaking being—not as mere wordplay, but as a structural impossibility grounded in the constitutive failure of jouissance and the irreducibility of lack at the centre of sexuality—while positioning the psychoanalyst's knowledge as the knowledge of impotence, distinct from both scientific and religious discourses.

    division for what is involved in feminine enjoyment.

88. #88

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.75

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the entry of language into the speaking being structurally voids the "second sex" (the Other as *heteros*), making sexual difference not a natural binary but a topological-linguistic problem: there is no sexual relationship because "the Other" is the very locus that language empties of being, and universals like "Man" and "Woman" are linguistic constructs required by language itself, not grounded in animal copulation.

    There is no second sex from the moment that language comes into function.

89. #89

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.212

    B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > The Purloined Letter > M. GUENINCHAULT: The letter.

    Theoretical move: The Purloined Letter demonstrates that a letter (signifier) exists only in the dimension of truth, not reality — it cannot be found by those who believe only in the real/force (the police), while those who think symbolically can locate it; furthermore, possession of the letter structurally feminizes its holder and ultimately, a letter always reaches its destination, defining subjects by their position in the symbolic chain rather than any real qualities.

    Not only has he become feminised through his possession of the letter, but the letter... even makes him forget the essential.

90. #90

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.99

    **VII** > A love letter *(une lettre d'amour)* > **Does the Other know?**

    Theoretical move: Through a detour via Empedocles (as cited by Aristotle and used by Freud), Lacan argues that love and hate are inseparable: a God who knows no hatred equally knows no love, and a man who believes a woman confuses him with God (i.e., with what she enjoys) thereby loves less—because there is no love without hate. This establishes a structural co-dependency of love and hate against any idealization of pure love.

    the more a man can believe a woman confuses him with God, in other words, what she enjoys, the less he hates… the less he loves

91. #91

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.108

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

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

    if libido is only masculine, it is only from where the dear woman is whole, in other words, from the place from which man sees her, that the dear woman can have an unconscious.

92. #92

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.20

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that feminine sexuality is constituted by a logical "one by one" (une par une) structure that derives from the Other rather than from bodily substance, making sexual jouissance "compact" and the feminine sexed being "not-whole"—a claim illustrated through the Don Juan myth and grounded in a topology that refuses any reference to being or substance.

    If woman were not not-whole - if, in her body, she were not not-whole as sexed being - none of that would hold true.

93. #93

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

    **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes a structural articulation between writing, jouissance, and the Real: what is written encodes the conditions of jouissance, the Other must be barred (S(Ø)) because it is founded on the One-missing, and mathematization alone can reach a Real that is not fantasy — identified ultimately as the mystery of the speaking body and the unconscious.

    being, as she is, the Other, since she can only be said to be Other - that woman offers it to man in the guise of object a

94. #94

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.112

    **VII** > 92 Complement

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

    When I say that woman is not-whole and that that is why I cannot say Woman, it is precisely because I raise the question of a jouissance that, with respect to everything that can be used in the function Ox, is in the realm of the infinite.

95. #95

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.7

    On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > **PREFACE**

    Theoretical move: This is a translator's preface by Bruce Fink to Seminar XX, making no substantive theoretical argument; it addresses translation methodology, the problem of misrepresentation of Lacan by secondary commentators, and the challenges of rendering Lacan's polyvalent French into English.

    I have not deliberately tried to vindicate my own previously published interpretation of Lacan's view of sexual difference in this translation

96. #96

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.84

    **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.

    The plausibility of what I am claiming here - namely, that woman knows nothing of this jouissance - is underscored by the fact that in all the time people have been begging them... to try to tell us, not a word!

97. #97

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

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

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

    whether the question of what she knows about it can be raised... whether this term knows anything. For it is in this respect that she herself is subjugated (sujette) to the Other, just as much as man.

98. #98

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.94

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

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

    But it turns out that women too are in soulove (amoureuses), in other words, that they soulove the soul. What can that soul be that they soulove in their partner, who is nevertheless homo to the hilt, from which they cannot get away?

99. #99

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.81

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the sexuation formulas by arguing that woman's structural not-wholeness with respect to the phallic function entails a supplementary jouissance irreducible to phallic jouissance, while simultaneously grounding 'being' not in ontology but in the jouissance of the body marked by signifierness—thereby opposing his project to both philosophical idealism and vulgar materialism.

    I still have a half hour to try to thrust you... into how things stand at woman's pole... being not-whole, she has a supplementary jouissance compared to what the phallic function designates by way of jouissance.

100. #100

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.90

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

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

     What I am working on this year is what Freud expressly left aside: Was will das Weib? 'What does woman want?' Freud claims that there is only masculine libido. What does that mean if not that a field that certainly is not negligible is thus ignored.

101. #101

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

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

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

     our colleagues, the lady analysts, do not tell us . . . the whole story! (pas tout!). They haven't contributed one iota to the question of feminine sexuality.

102. #102

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.260

     (3) Naturally since I made a small mistake

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot topology to ground the asymmetry between the One and the Other (woman as "less One"), arguing that mathematisation alone accesses the Real—defined as the mystery of the speaking body and the unconscious—while distinguishing the Real from both fantasy and traditional reality.

     is it not by conjoining this a-sexed 0 with what she has in terms of more enjoying at being the Other, of being only able to be said Other, that the woman offers it under the species of the small o-object.

103. #103

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.272

     Seminar 13: Wednesday 26 Jun e 1973

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject is constituted by the signifier (as hypothesis necessary to lalangue), that love is grounded in a subject-to-subject relation of unconscious knowledges, and that the sexual non-relation is modalized through the logic of necessity/contingency (ceasing/not ceasing to be written), with love as the illusory passage from contingency to necessity.

     mad I would say on the other in so far as what is at stake, is the enigmatic way in which there is posited this enjoyment of the Other as such

104. #104

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.159

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

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

     The woman has a relationship, a relationship with this S of 0 barred - S(0) - on the one hand - and it is already in this respect that she is reduplicated, that she is not-all since on the other hand she can have this relationship with this capital Φ

105. #105

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 ..**

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural asymmetry between the masculine (phallic) universal—grounded in the paternal exception (∃x.¬Φx)—and the feminine not-all (∄x.¬Φx), arguing that both the father function and the "virgin function" constitute existence in an eccentric, decoupled position with respect to the phallic function Φ, such that their radical incommensurability is what grounds the inexistence of the sexual relationship.

     she is situated between zero and one, Between centre and absence and not numerable. She can in no way be hooked on to the One of ∃x.Φx

106. #106

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.186

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's discourse is uniquely positioned to examine the truth of knowledge by placing the objet petit a in the place of semblance; he then develops a theory of knowledge as grounded in the Other (as locus of the signifier), where knowledge must be 'paid for' through use/enjoyment rather than exchange, and where the Letter reproduces without reproducing the same being—culminating in the claim that the Other's structural not-knowing constitutes the not-all, linking feminine sexuality, unconscious, and castration.

     if desire, libido is only masculine, well then the dear woman, it is precisely only through this that she is all (toute). Namely, from where the man sees her and only from there, that she can have an unconscious

107. #107

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.147

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

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

     it is what is involved on the side of the woman...she is ranked under the banner of women some speaking being or other, it is starting from the fact that it is only grounded by being not-all

108. #108

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 ..**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural asymmetry between masculine and feminine sides of sexuation means that woman is neither One nor Other but occupies an undecidable relation to the barred Other, grounding man's imaginary construction of woman as the signifier of the barred Other through the procession of objet petit a objects—making the sexual relation structurally impossible.

     the woman is for man the signifier of the Other in so far as she is not-all in the function φ

109. #109

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.124

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

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

     it is perhaps along a different path that I will manage to bring but something that is not altogether what has come out up to the present about feminine sexuality.

110. #110

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.100

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan theorizes that for the obsessional, death is a 'parapraxis' (failed act), linking the structure of obsession to the impossibility of grasping death as a genuine act; simultaneously, he pivots to the problem of feminine ek-sistence, arguing that women exist not under a universal 'The' but as numerable ones — a move that articulates the Not-all against any totalizing universal.

     whether by saying that the woman does not ek-sist, as someone has objected to me, I did not make her ek-sist! Don't believe a word of it…women ek-sist, and not in the state of *The*.

111. #111

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.71

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses an anecdotal tour through Nice, Strasbourg, London, and his reading of Strachey's *Queen Victoria* to advance the theoretical claim that the sexual non-relationship is confirmed by historical-biographical evidence, while elaborating the resistance of different *lalangues* to the unconscious and reiterating that "The woman does not exist" but that women (as not-all) have a privileged, unmeasured relation to liberty and to the unconscious.

     I believe that this book seems to me to make something tangible for you, in short tangible with a particular relief, the fact that love has nothing to do with the sexual relationship

112. #112

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.35

     **Introduction** > *Anxiety*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety, symptom, and inhibition are as heterogeneous to each other as Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary are to each other; using Little Hans as a case study, he demonstrates that anxiety is the bodily ek-sistence of jouissance, and that the phallus is an irreducible burden upon the male speaking being (parlêtre), not a natural genital drive but a symbolic imposition.

     The woman, who does not ek-sist, can dream about having one, but the man is afflicted with it.

113. #113

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.117

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallic Real constitutes man's fundamental affliction — "aphligé" by a phallus that bars him from genuine access to the body of the Other — such that all discourse, especially the Discourse of the Master, is grounded on a semblance that phallus-as-signifier-index-1 installs; the Name-of-the-Father is reread as a merely tribal supplement to the Borromean knot, and unconscious signifier-copulation (savoir) is what gives rise to the subject as pathème divided by the One.

     the woman about whom I said in short that she was the very type of wandering (*l'errance*)

114. #114

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 4: Tuesday 21 January 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that "a woman is a symptom" for a man, grounding this in the structure of phallic jouissance, the non-existence of The woman (not-all), and the logic of belief — distinguishing believing-in (the symptom/neurosis) from believing-her (love/psychosis) — while also reformulating the paternal function as père-version and redefining the symptom as an untamed form of writing from the unconscious.

     it's a matter of knowing what corresponds to it for her. You must not imagine that it is the little yoke that Freud talks about! It has nothing to do with that.

115. #115

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.114

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that the Real is defined by its ek-sistence *outside* meaning—as the impossible, the expelled, the anti-meaning—and that the Borromean knot of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary is the structural form of the Name-of-the-Father, with feminine ek-sistence (as symptom) arising where the Symbolic circles an inviolable hole and the not-all resists phallic universality.

     to give what one does not have, is love. It is the love of women, in so far, namely, that it is true that one by one, they ek-sist. They are real and even terribly so

116. #116

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.154

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's *Finnegans Wake* and the sinthome to distinguish the unanalysable from what analysis can address, then pivots to the Phallus as a "phunction of phonation" substitutive for man, contrasting it with S(Ⓞ) — the signifier of the non-existence of the Other of the Other — which Lacan identifies with "The woman" as the only candidate for an Other of the Other, thereby articulating the impossibility of the sexual relation through the bar that no Other can cross.

     it was feminine eroticism... seems to be carried to its extremes. At this extreme there is the phantasy... of killing the man.

117. #117

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.107

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 10 February 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's relationship to madness, faith, and writing as a clinical-theoretical probe to distinguish the true from the Real, locating jouissance (including masochism) in the Real rather than the true; he simultaneously advances a topological argument about the Borromean knot and the torus as the best available "physics" for measuring belief and subjective structure.

     the inside-out glove is Nora. This is his way of considering that she fits him like a glove... Not alone must she fit him like a glove but she must, she must squeeze him like a glove.

118. #118

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.127

     Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sinthome is precisely what installs sexual non-equivalence and thereby makes the sexual relationship possible: it is not despite the absence of the sexual relationship but through the sinthome (which repairs the failed Borromean knot asymmetrically) that something like a relation is structured, such that woman is the sinthome for man and man is a "devastation" for woman.

     If a woman is a sinthome for every man, it is quite clear that there is a need to find another name for what is involved in the case of a man for a woman; since precisely the sinthome is characterised by non-equivalence.

119. #119

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     **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.

     the only means of escape... is to accept his transformation into a woman... His body is thus progressively invaded by images of feminine identification to which he opens the door

120. #120

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.190

     **XII** > **XIII** > **The hysteric's question (II):** *What is a woman?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dissymmetry of the Oedipus complex between the sexes is not anatomical but fundamentally symbolic: the absence of a signifier for the female sex forces the girl to take a detour through identification with the male (phallic) image, making the phallus as signifier — not as organ — the pivot of sexuation for both sexes; this symbolic lack is what structures neurosis and, specifically, the hysteric's question "What is a woman?"

     When Dora finds herself wondering, What is a woman?, she is attempting to symbolize the female organ as such. Her identification with the man, bearer of the penis, is for her on this occasion a means of approaching this definition that escapes her.

121. #121

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.191

     **XII** > **XIII** > **The hysteric's question (II):** *What is a woman?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that hysteria (in both men and women) revolves around the question of procreation—a question generated by the fact that the Symbolic cannot account for individual existence, birth, or death—and grounds this in a reading of Freud's early letters showing that repression originates in the failure of signifying inscriptions to carry over across developmental stages.

     There are many more women hysterics than men hysterics... because the path to the woman's symbolic realization is more complicated.

122. #122

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.139

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the structures of neurosis and perversion by mapping Dora's hysteria as a perpetual metaphorical self-positioning under shifting signifiers (Frau K. as her metaphor), while the young homosexual woman's perversion operates metonymically—pointing along the signifying chain to what lies beyond, namely the refused paternal phallus—and uses Lévi-Strauss's exchange theory to ground why woman is structurally reduced to object within the Law of symbolic exchange.

     Dora asks herself, What is a woman? And it's in so far as Frau K. embodies this feminine function as such that for Dora she is the representation of the very thing into which Dora projects herself, as the question of femininity.

123. #123

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-22-0"></span>THE THREE FORMS OF THE LACK OF OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces a tripartite typology of the lack of object — frustration (imaginary detriment, real object), privation (real hole, symbolic object), and castration (symbolic indebtedness, imaginary object) — arguing that each form must be distinguished by its modal register rather than collapsed into a single principle, and that this matrix is essential to understanding the different developments of sexuality in men and women.

     those sleights of hand whereby, in the ensuing part of the dialectic... desperate bids are made to bring these two terms back to a single principle... why their respective development will be so different.

124. #124

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.92

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > THE PRIMACY OF THE PHALLUS AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian primacy of the phallus cannot be grounded in real anatomical experience but must be understood symbolically: the phallus functions as a signifier whose retroactive operation structures castration and privation, and analytic interpretations that treat frustration as an imaginary object-substitute (child-for-phallus) risk short-circuiting the symbolic structuration proper to the Oedipus complex.

     The problem now is to find out what the female object thinks about this, because what the female object thinks about it is even less natural than the way in which the male subject approaches her.

125. #125

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Freudian equation Penis=Child as the pivot for a structural account of how the phallus slides from the imaginary to the real differently for boys and girls, arguing that the girl's entry into the Oedipus complex is paradoxically simpler because her path via lack leads directly to the father as real bearer of the phallus/child, while the boy faces the deeper difficulty of acceding to the symbolic father function.

     for the woman, the phallus... slides into the real... This is what Freud explains when he tells us that in the yearning for the originary phallus... the child will be the substitute for the phallus.

126. #126

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.236

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the child's position in relation to the mother is structurally determined by the mother's lack (the phallus), such that the child functions not as the metaphor of her love but as the metonymy of her desire—a distinction that explains the genesis of anxiety and its transformation into phobia in the case of Little Hans.

     as the experience of the analysis of female sexuality assures us, this being the referential axis that has to be staunchly maintained given what Freud upheld to the very end concerning female sexuality

127. #127

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.120

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs Freud's case of the young homosexual woman through the L Schema's symbolic (S-A) and imaginary (a-a') axes, arguing that the phallus functions as the imaginary element through which the subject enters the symbolic dialectic of the gift, and distinguishing between frustration of love (intersubjective, symbolic) and frustration of jouissance (real, non-generative of object-constitution) against Klein and Winnicott's formulations.

     For the female child, she will be introduced to the symbolic aspect of the gift precisely in so far as she does not possess the phallus... Freud tells us that the girl's first introduction into the dialectic of the Oedipus complex hinges on the fact that the penis she desires will be received from the father in the form of a substitute, namely a child.

128. #128

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

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

     The history of phallic phobia is only a detour along the path to a primordially determined position. A woman is born, born a woman, in a position that is already that of a mouth, of an absorbent mouth.

129. #129

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.434

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the resolution of the castration complex does not hinge on having or not having the phallus as an organ, but on the subject's recognition that she/he *is not* the phallus; the Phallus functions as the signifier of desire itself, and the case of the obsessional woman illustrates how misrecognizing this—treating the phallus as an object to be possessed rather than a signifier of desire—leads to analytic impasse.

     by wanting to present herself as having what she knows perfectly well she doesn't have, at issue is something that for her has a completely different value, which I have called the value of masquerade. She makes a mask of her femininity.

130. #130

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.263

     **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.

     he goes further and shows us how this same phallus appears at the centre of the feminine dialectic. Here, something gaping seems to open up.

131. #131

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.335

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: The phallus is constitutively barred from the signifying order — it is the signifier of the Other's desire — and this structural bar is what introduces castration for both sexes, producing asymmetrical dilemmas: the woman must *be* the phallus (identifying with it as desired object) while the man must *have* it, yet both are divided from their being by this impossible relation to the phallic signifier.

     The woman — the man also, moreover — finds herself caught in an insoluble dilemma, around which it's necessary to place all the typical manifestations of her femininity, whether neurotic or not.

132. #132

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.238

     **FANTASY, BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Freud's 'beyond the pleasure principle' by grounding it in the subject's fundamental relation to the signifying chain: the death drive, negative therapeutic reaction, and masochism are not biological inertia but expressions of the subject's refusal to constitute itself in signifiers, a refusal that paradoxically binds it ever more tightly to the chain.

     It's not because masochists display certain signs or fantasies of a typically feminine position in their relations with their partner that, inversely, a woman's relation to the man is a masochistic relation.

133. #133

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.244

     THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PHALLUS > **DESIRE AND JOUISSANCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes desire from jouissance by showing that desire is fundamentally structured by signifiers (not reducible to imaginary relations or need), and uses Joan Riviere's case of 'womanliness as masquerade' to demonstrate that the subject's relation to the phallus — whether as theft, mask, or sign of being — reveals the constitutive splitting of the subject between existence and signifying representation, grounding the unconscious.

     what is at stake in an analysis and in the understanding of a subjective structure is always something that shows us the subject engaged in the process of recognition as such

134. #134

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.187

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan schemas the Oedipus complex as three dialectical moments governed by the paternal metaphor: (1) the child identifies with the phallic object of the mother's desire, (2) the father intervenes imaginarily as depriver/castrator of the mother, and (3) the father reveals himself as *having* (not *being*) the phallus, enabling the boy's identification as ego-ideal and the decline of the complex—the entire movement being structurally a metaphor in which one signifier (the Name-of-the-Father) is pinned to another to produce a new signification.

     the outcome of the Oedipus complex is, as everyone knows, different for the woman. For her, in effect, this third stage... is much simpler. She does not have to carry out this identification nor retain this title to virility. She knows where it is, and she knows where she has to go to get it.

135. #135

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.268

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reviews the Freud-Jones debate on female sexuality to argue that the phallus functions not as a natural drive object but as a signifier — and, pivotally, that in the little girl's Oedipal relations the phallus operates as a fetish rather than a phobic object, a distinction that advances his own structural account beyond both Freud's biologism and Jones's naturalist counter-argument.

     Is a woman a being who is born a woman, as such? Or is she a being who is made a woman? That is where he locates his question, and it's what makes him rebel against Freud's position.

136. #136

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan reappropriates Jones's term "aphanisis" — redirecting it from a fear of desire's disappearance rooted in developmental psychology toward a structurally prior effect of castration, arguing that it is precisely because the signifier is operative in castration that the subject can become alarmed at the potential disappearance of his desire; this allows Lacan to reframe the clinical material of Ella Sharpe's patient in terms of intersubjective topology rather than imaginary equivalences.

     the British psychoanalytic scene was dominated by discussions I have spoken to you about regarding the phallic phase and the phallic function in female sexuality, especially the discussions that took place between Ernest Jones and Joan Riviere

137. #137

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION > But Freud adds the following:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus, operating in the signifying function, generates an asymmetrical splitting in the love/desire relation for men and women: men split love from desire (idealizing the woman as phallus while reducing her in the erotic act), while women, finding the real phallus in men, achieve a jouissance that satisfies desire yet orient their love toward castrated, speaking beings beyond that encounter.

     When we turn, on the other hand, to women's relationships to men, which people like to believe are more monogamous, we see that they present the same ambiguity - except that women find the real phallus in men.

138. #138

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a signifier—not a privileged object (contra Klein)—and that the subject's relation to it is structured by the dialectic of being versus having: men "are not without having it" (castration enables possession of objects), while women "are without having it," making the sexual positions asymmetrical and irreducible to each other.

     For women, relations to the phallus and to the phallic phase, which has an essential function in the development of female sexuality, must be formulated in the exact opposite manner... A female subject's relation to the phallus can be formulated as follows: 'She is without having it.'

139. #139

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

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

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

     You should nevertheless be aware of what I shall be talking about next time. It will have to do with the ambiguous and enigmatic problem of the feminine object.

140. #140

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

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

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

     sexuality, feminine, see feminine sexuality

141. #141

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.307

     **XIV** > **XXII**

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

     The omission of this barrier, which prevents the direct experience of that which is to be found at the center of sexual union, seems to me to be at the origin of all kinds of questions that cannot be answered, including notably the matter of feminine sexuality

142. #142

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.17

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

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

     the topic I have placed on the agenda of our forthcoming conference, namely, feminine sexuality, is one of the clearest of signs in the development of analysis of the lack I am referring to with regard to such an investigation.

143. #143

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.372

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **IDENTIFICATION VIA** *"E IN E IN Z IG E R Z U G* **"**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs two linked theoretical moves: (1) it distinguishes the *einziger Zug* (single trait) as a sign rather than a signifier, using it to differentiate Ego Ideal (symbolic introjection) from Ideal Ego (imaginary projection); and (2) it articulates love as structured by the unconditional dimension of demand, where love is "giving what you don't have," connecting poverty/lack structurally to desire, and wealth/jouissance structurally to the saint's position — thereby positioning the analyst's own ideal against the horizon of sainthood and jouissance.

     It is clear that only women can incarnate the ferociousness of wealth in a dignified manner... This would, however, require a return to the topic of feminine sexuality

144. #144

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.62

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

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Symposium through the Alcestis/Achilles contrast, Lacan argues that the "signification of love" culminates in the reversal whereby the beloved (eromenon) acts as lover (erastes) — a structural inversion that anticipates his analytic distinction between activity and strength, and between lack and desire, particularly as these play out in the heterosexual couple.

     in a couple, a heterosexual couple in this case, we find in the woman both lack, as we say, but also, and at the same time, activity?

145. #145

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.216

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 19*: *Wednesday 9 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the pivot of desire's constitution by operating as a signifier that cannot signify itself — the transmutation from need to desire passes through the phallic function — and that this structure can only be adequately rendered through topology (torus, cross-cap), which provides the 'transcendental aesthetic model' for the subject's exclusion from the signifying field and the analyst's place as incarnated desire.

     it is because the phallus has to be demanded where it was not, namely in the mother, from the mother, through the mother, for the mother that it is along there that there passes the normal path through which it can come to be desired by the woman.

146. #146

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.13

     Read My Desire

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's reduction of society to immanent relations of power and knowledge constitutes a historicism that undermines his own best insights about a 'surplus existence' that escapes predication—an insight whose Lacanian inflection (the non-existence of 'The' woman, the 'il y a') Copjec identifies and defends against Foucault's own anti-linguistic turn.

     "'The' woman does not exist [La femme n'existe pas)"

147. #147

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.247

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamical sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share the same logic of the limit/exception (foreclosure of existential judgment), and uses this alignment to call for a new, alternative ethics proper to women—an "ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited"—beyond the superego's logic of exception.

     the notorious argument that presents woman as constitutionally indisposed to developing a superego and thus susceptible to an ethical laxity... an ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited, that is, an ethics proper to the woman.

148. #148

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.225

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Phallic Function

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the Lacanian formulas of sexuation theorize sexual difference not as a positive attribute of the subject but as two distinct modes of failure of the phallic function—mapped onto Kant's mathematical and dynamical antinomies—thereby grounding a necessarily sexed universal subject and distinguishing psychoanalysis from deconstruction's collapse of difference into indistinctness.

     This function, and particularly the fact that it does appear on both sides of the table, has been at the center of controversy since Freud first began elaborating his theory of feminine sexuality.

149. #149

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.189

     The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Locked-Room Paradox and the Group

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "gap" internal to the symbolic—the absence of a final signifier—is what makes interpretation (which Lacan identifies with desire) both necessary and quasi-transcendental: the detective's desire is not a subjective bias but the structural principle that bridges irreducible evidence to its reading, and this same missing signifier (the signifier for woman) structurally forbids the sexual relation within detective fiction.

     This signifier, if it existed, would be the signifier for woman... the detective is structurally forbidden any involvement with a woman.

150. #150

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.213

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, first, that film noir's visual techniques and the femme fatale figure both function as failed symbolic defenses against the drive/jouissance; and second, pivoting to Butler's Gender Trouble, that the sex-as-substance vs. sex-as-signification binary is inadequate because it smuggles in an imaginary (complementary) conception of sexual difference, which Lacanian sexuation can displace.

     Is there a different way to think the division of subjects into two sexes, one that does not support a normative heterosexuality?

151. #151

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.235

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Female Side: Mathematical Failure

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's "not-all" formula for woman functions as an indefinite judgment in the Kantian sense — affirming a negative predicate rather than negating a copula — which means woman's ex-sistence is neither denied nor confirmed, her non-collectibility into a whole stems from an internal limit (the failure of castration's "no"), and she is ultimately the product of lalangue, a symbolic without the guarantee of the Other.

     he leaves open the possibility of there being something-a feminine jouissance- that is unlocatable in experience, that cannot, then, be said to exist in the symbolic order.

152. #152

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.232

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Female Side: Mathematical Failure

     Theoretical move: By mapping Kant's first mathematical antinomy (the "not-all" structure of phenomena) onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation for the female side, the passage argues that "the woman does not exist" is a rigorously Kantian thesis about the internal limit of reason—not a historicist claim about particular, discursively constructed women—thereby distinguishing Lacanian universality from both Aristotelian particularity and Butler-style anti-universalism.

     the formulas we have produced from Kant's two statements regarding the solution of the first mathematical antinomy formally reduplicate those that Lacan gives for the woman, who, like the world, does not exist.

153. #153

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.245

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Female Side: Mathematical Failure > The Male Side: Dynamical Failure

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation desubstantialize sex entirely: masculinity is an imposture and femininity a masquerade, because being escapes the symbolic for men just as universality is impossible for women—the sexual relation fails doubly (prohibition for men, impossibility for women), meaning no complementary universe of the sexes can be constructed.

     just as every display of femininity is sheer masquerade.

154. #154

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that narcissism and object-love constitute two fundamentally different libidinal economies whose interaction explains the gendered asymmetry of erotic fascination, the structure of parental love, and the various paths to object-choice — showing narcissism to be not merely a developmental phase but a persistent force that shapes object-relations throughout life.

     Things develop in a quite different way in the commonest, probably purest and most authentic type of female. Here, the onset of puberty … appears to be accompanied by an intensification of her original narcissism unfavourable to the forming of any proper object-love.

155. #155

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

     <span id="unp-ruda-0011.xhtml_p2" class="page"></span><span id="unp-ruda-0011.xhtml_p3" class="page"></span><a href="#unp-ruda-0009.xhtml_toc" class="xref">Provocations</a>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that in a historical conjuncture where freedom has become a signifier of oppression, "comic fatalism" is the only stance that can think freedom non-indifferently — operationalized through a series of imperative paradoxes that negate the subject's existence, freedom, and survival as a precondition for genuine action.

     Act as if you were an inexistent woman!

156. #156

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

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Anatomy Is Destiny II: Male Illusions and Female Choices

     Theoretical move: By reconstructing Freud's "Anatomy is destiny" through the asymmetry between male and female developmental logics, Ruda argues that the female logic—as a forced choice of one's own unconscious that precedes and exceeds the Oedipus complex—reveals a non-arbitrary, non-conscious freedom irreducible to the male totalizing illusion, making "woman" the name for an emancipatory act rather than a fixed entity.

     Freud enumerates three developmental destinies for the female child... Anatomy thus generates only one destiny for the male, but three destinies for the female.

157. #157

     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.

     This table also appears on page 149 of the translation of this session of the seminar that is included in Mitchell and Rose, Feminine Sexuality.

158. #158

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.224

     **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.

     he also claims, and this has not been as readily observed, that her existence cannot be contradicted by reason—nor, obviously, can it be confirmed. In other words, he leaves open the possibility of there being something—a feminine jouissance—that is unbeatable in experience

159. #159

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Butler's critique of sex-as-substance illegitimately slides into a voluntarist constructivism by treating the instability of signification as evidence for the incompleteness of sexual being itself; against this, Copjec advances the Lacanian/Freudian thesis that sex is produced not by the success but by the *internal limit* of signification—its constitutive failure—and that the antinomy this generates cannot be resolved by either the dogmatic-structuralist or the skeptical-constructivist solution.

     Must sexual difference be conceived only as an imaginary relation? Or, is there a different way to think the division of subjects into two sexes, one that does not support a normative heterosexuality?

160. #160

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.55

     **Cutting Up** > **Cause: Lacan and Aristotle**

     Theoretical move: Against both Bergson's vitalist temporality and historicist constructions of the subject as language's determinate effect, Copjec argues—via Lacan—that the opacity of the signifier generates an irreducible surplus (objet petit a) that causes the subject ex nihilo: the subject is not the fulfillment of a social demand but the product of language's constitutive duplicity, which produces desire as a striving for an indeterminate, extradiscursive nothing.

     my particular interest is in the problem this position presents for feminism. For when this assumption is combined with the uncovering of a masculinist bias … woman can only be comprehended as a realization of male desires

161. #161

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.207

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that sex must be understood as the structural impossibility of completing meaning—the Real failure of language with itself—rather than as an incomplete or unstable signification (Butler), and that only this Kantian/psychoanalytic definition of sex as radically unknowable preserves the subject's sovereignty and protects against the voluntarism and calculability that underwrite racism and homogenization.

     Sex serves no other function than to limit reason, to remove the subject from the realm of possible experience or pure understanding.

162. #162

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.198

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Lethal Jouissance and the Femme Fatale**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir's visual techniques (deep-focus, chiaroscuro) and the figure of the femme fatale both function as symbolic defenses against the drive—ersatz substitutes for a genuinely operative symbolic order—and that the femme fatale specifically embodies a contract by which the noir hero surrenders jouissance to an external double, a delegation that proves lethal rather than stabilising because she hoards rather than screens enjoyment.

     The femme fatale remains a two-dimensional figure with no hidden sides; the deception is only up front.

163. #163

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.218

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

     Theoretical move: By mapping Kant's first mathematical antinomy onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation for the female side, Copjec argues that "the woman does not exist" follows the same logic by which the world cannot be constructed as a totality: both the universal and the not-all formulas arise not from empirical limitation but from the constitutive impossibility of an unconditioned whole, a logic irreducible to Aristotelian particularity or historicist critique.

     We are not going to begin our reading, as is customary, on the left, but rather on the right, or female, side of the formulas.

164. #164

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.215

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c08_r1.htm_page212"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c08_r1.htm_pg212" class="pagebreak" title="212"></span></span>**The Phallic Function**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that sexual difference is not a positive characteristic but a modality of reason's failure, and that Lacan's formulas of sexuation map onto Kant's mathematical/dynamical antinomies—making the "universal" subject necessarily sexed rather than neuter, and distinguishing psychoanalysis from deconstruction by insisting that bisexuality (undecidability of sexual signifiers) does not collapse sexual difference into indistinction.

     This function, and particularly the fact that it does appear on both sides of the table, has been at the center of controversy since Freud first began elaborating his theory of feminine sexuality.

165. #165

     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.

     just as every display of femininity is sheer masquerade… while the universe of women is, as we have argued at length, simply impossible

166. #166

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec's introduction argues that Foucault's post-1968 historicism—his reduction of society to immanent relations of power—undermines his own most productive insight (the desubstantialized 'plebness' as an existence without predicate), and that Lacanian theory preserves what Foucault's genealogical turn abandons: a surplus existence that exceeds the positivity of the social.

     Can you not hear the murmur of the famous Lacanian formulations ''The' woman does not exist [La femme n'existe pas]' and 'There is some of One [Il y a d'l'Un]' behind Foucault's phrases?

167. #167

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud uses the distinction between narcissistic and imitative (anaclitic) object-choice to theorize gender difference in love-life, arguing that female libidinal development tends toward intensified narcissism rather than object-love, and that parental love reveals itself as a structural repetition/resurgence of the parents' own abandoned primary narcissism.

     the onset of puberty manifest in the development of the previously latent female sexual organs appears to be accompanied by an intensification of her original narcissism unfavourable to the forming of any proper object-love

168. #168

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.253

     **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 > [From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle](#contents.xhtml_ahd17)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sexual difference (and analogous structures like class antagonism) cannot be resolved by nominalist multiplication of categories, because the "+" remainder in any classificatory series is not an epistemological gap but a positive ontological entity—the very embodiment of antagonism—homologous to objet a as the reflexive stand-in for surplus desire itself; fetishistic multiplication of identities/modernities is thus a disavowal of castration.

     the minimal formula of sexual difference is simply M+: masculine (phallic) identity plus something to be added. Femininity is not another identity, a counter-position to complement the masculine position, but its impossible supplement.

169. #169

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.135

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

     Theoretical move: Sexual difference as Real is not the difference between two positive entities but an immanent antagonism that precedes and constitutes both terms; the 'third element' (transgender, chimney sweep, objet a) does not supplement the binary but materialises the pure difference/antagonism itself, and the Other sex is merely the reflexive determination of the impossibility of the One.

     it is not just that there is no sexual relationship; in the figure of the Other (sex), this non-relationship comes to exist. It is not just that a man cannot form a relationship with a woman, 'woman' is as such the name for this non-relationship.

170. #170

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.125

     **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.

     when one speaks, to take up Freud's terms, of the enigma of femininity (what is woman?), I propose with Freud to move to the function of the enigma in femininity (what does a woman want?)

171. #171

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.256

     **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 > [From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle](#contents.xhtml_ahd17)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues, via a dialectical reading of the Universal/Particular relation, that sexual difference is not a difference between two species-identities but a constitutive antagonism that cuts within each sex, making every particular sexual identity a failed attempt to resolve an irreducible deadlock—and that ideologies of gender fluidity or "unlearning gender" evade rather than confront this constitutive impossibility captured in Lacan's "there is no sexual relationship."

     man stands for the particularity of a species of the human genus and woman is the out-of-place element which stands for its universality

172. #172

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.299

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing](#contents.xhtml_ahd20)

     Theoretical move: Žižek deploys Lacan's formal logic of 1+a and 2+a to argue that neither the One nor the Two are primordial: the originary level is a "less than zero" (the quantum distinction between two vacuums), whose internal tension generates the entire series One→supplement→Two→excess, identifying the operator of this transformation with the barred subject ($) as the inverted counterpart of objet a.

     sexual difference is the difference between species (masculine) and the universality of genus embodied in an unlocatable excess (feminine).

173. #173

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.201

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Marx, <span id="scholium_22_marx_brecht_and_sexual_contracts.xhtml_IDX-211"></span>Brecht, and Sexual Contracts

     Theoretical move: The Möbius strip topology of political logic reveals that the incel/hierarchy position flips into a demand for egalitarian redistribution at its extreme, just as the logic of egalitarian human rights flips into its opposite at the point of sexuality; simultaneously, Marx's analysis of the 'free' labor contract is extended to the sexual contract to show that formal consent/freedom conceals structural coercion, and that surplus-jouissance is the sexual homologue of surplus-value, making contractual sex inherently asymmetric and ideologically limited.

     The fact that should be accepted in all its brutality is the ultimate incompatibility of sexuality and human rights.

174. #174

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.342

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Towards a <span id="scholium_35_towards_a_quantum_platonism.xhtml_IDX-1843"></span>Quantum Platonism > Notes

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/endnotes section containing bibliographic references and brief clarificatory remarks; it is non-substantive except for a passing theoretical aside on sexual difference and the gendered position of violent abstraction.

     One should notice how sexual difference intervenes in this example: it is a masculine painter who brutally dissects (the image of) the woman's body to extract its Idea out of it. Does this mean that my presentation is immanently sexed from the aggressive male position?

175. #175

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.184

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Cracks in Circular Time](#contents.xhtml_ahd12)

     Theoretical move: By reading the film *Arrival* through the opposition of circular (heptapod) and linear (human) temporality, Žižek argues that the circle of time is always-already an ellipse structured around a disavowed cut, and that the act of "willing the inevitable" is not empty but ontologically necessary—the finite, sexualized subject's capacity to intervene with a decision is what the holistic Other lacks and needs, making temporal finitude superior to atemporal plenitude.

     heptapods have the form of squid, kraken even, the ultimate form of animal horror … heptapods are not feminine but asexual monsters

176. #176

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.347

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

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

     sexuality is the very terrain where humans detach themselves from nature: the idea of sexual perversion or of a deadly sexual passion is totally foreign to the animal universe

177. #177

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.415

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Wagner's *Parsifal* — framed against historicist contextualization — Žižek argues that the opera's central ethical and libidinal drama turns on the obscene superego-jouissance of the father (Titurel as père-version), hysterical feminine subjectivity (Kundry), and the paradox of a wound that is simultaneously the mark of corruption and the source of immortal life-energy; Parsifal's salvation-gesture is grounded not in simple purity but in hysterical identification with the very suffering he refuses.

     Kundry as Amfortas's counterpart is one of the ultimate portraits of a hysterical woman … the theme of the hysterical madwoman is 'camouflaged with the exotic trappings of antiquity'

178. #178

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.2

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-2453"></span>Unorientable Space of <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-498"></span><span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-1339"></span>Dialectical Materialism

     Theoretical move: Žižek proposes "dialectical materialism of a failed ontology" (DM2) against Stalinist DM1, arguing that the theoretical space of dialectical materialism is topologically "unorientable" — structured like a Möbius strip or cross-cap — because antagonism is not the struggle of external opposites but the constitutive self-contradiction of an entity with itself, a minimal reflexivity (gap, mediation, failure) that cuts through every immediate unity, including sexuality.

     the female orgasm, this most ecstatic moment of sexual pleasure … is the high point of human evolution. Sloterdijk even claims that its experience plays the role of providing the ontological proof of god: in it, we humans come into contact with the Absolute.

179. #179

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.137

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that subjectivity is constitutively sexed by mapping the Kantian mathematical/dynamic antinomy onto Hegel's logic of Being/Essence, and then showing that each domain, when carried to its limit (via differential calculus as the paradigm case), self-sublates into a void that constitutes a distinct sexed subject: "feminine" subjectivity emerges from the self-sublation of the mathematical/Being domain, while "masculine" subjectivity emerges from the dynamic/Essence domain.

     we can understand Lacan's claim la femme n'existe pas: existence is being 'sublated' into the appearance of an essence, and woman is not yet caught in the tension between essence and appearance.

180. #180

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.145

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the 'feminine' formula of sexuation (non-All, multiplicity filling in the void of the missing binary signifier) has logical priority over the 'masculine' formula (All-with-exception), and that this asymmetry reveals feminine subjectivity as a more radical negativity — not determinate negation but pure 'without,' i.e., the barred subject ($) as such — making the feminine the constitutive operator of reality's inconsistency rather than its exception.

     woman is 'not' tout court, with no predicate to be negated… 'woman is not not-man' means that woman is 'not' tout court

181. #181

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.110

     Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity from Kant to Hegel

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian answer to Schelling's mytho-feminine ontology is not the immediate unity of intellectual intuition (orgasmic One) but minimal reflexivity - the subject's self-distancing gaze that cuts into every immediate enjoyment - thereby framing the chapter's project of tracing reflexivity from Kant through Hegel as the core concept of subjectivity in German Idealism.

     the 'woman question' (to use this old, totally inappropriate designation) is resolvable neither through a new symbolization of femininity nor through the elevation of woman into an entity which resists symbolization

182. #182

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.177

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ > Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes section providing scholarly apparatus (citations, bibliographic references, and brief clarifying remarks) for a chapter on sex, materialism, Laplanche, Deleuze, and Lacan; it is primarily bibliographic rather than substantively argumentative, though several notes contain compressed theoretical interventions worth tracking.

     Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973

183. #183

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.136

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 9, Navigating Mulholland Orive , David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood

     Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus develops the theoretical architecture of the chapter on *Mulholland Drive*, deploying Lacanian concepts—desire as caused rather than aimed, fantasy as constitutive of temporality and reality, the failure of the sexual relation, and sexuation—to argue that Lynch's film stages the fantasmatic structure of subjectivity against Kantian and Hegelian epistemologies.

     in Mulholland Drive, it is clear that the feminine is not 'receptivity' but a desire every bit as horrific and destructive as its male counterpart.

184. #184

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.115

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lynch's *Mulholland Drive* stages the full traversal of fantasy by driving it to its dissolution point, where fantasy's intersection with desire reveals the traumatic real; moreover, the film instantiates a specifically feminine fantasy structure—one that goes "too far" rather than stopping short—contrasting with the masculine fantasy of *Lost Highway*, and demonstrates that authentic mourning of the lost object is only possible through fantasy itself.

     A female fantasy, on the other hand, goes too far. It is a fantasy of giving oneself entirely to the love object... the female fantasy depicts the achievement of the successful sexual relation.

185. #185

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.59

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that pure desire is structurally directed at "nothing" (the impossible object), and that fantasy functions to domesticate this void by substituting a nameable object; Frank's extreme behavior toward Dorothy is thus read as an effort to translate her traumatic, undirected desire into a fantasy frame that renders it manageable for him as a male subject.

     The truth in a woman, in Lacan's sense, is measured by her subjective distance from the position of motherhood. To be a mother, the mother of one's children, is to choose to exist as Woman.

186. #186

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.17

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

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's cinema achieves a theoretically impossible feat: by formally separating the realms of desire and fantasy—rather than blending them as most films and everyday experience do—Lynch's films expose the structural relationship between the two, revealing how fantasy retroactively constitutes desire rather than merely answering it, and thereby producing a "normality" more unsettling than any avant-garde subversion.

     In the figure of the femme fatale, desire and fantasy operate simultaneously: on the one hand, she is a traumatic figure for the spectator and the noir hero—we confront her traumatic desire and are thereby reduced to the position of the desiring subject.

187. #187

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.117

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fantasy and desire are structurally opposed but mutually sustaining: the subject's retreat from desire into fantasy ultimately opens onto the traumatic Real, and Lynch's *Mulholland Drive* is exemplary precisely because it follows fantasy's logic all the way to this silence, thereby exposing the constitutive loss that generates subjectivity.

     The difference between the Mystery Man and the Cowboy attests to the association of Lost Highway with the structure of male subjectivity and Mulholland Drive with the structure of female subjectivity. For the female subject, the superego lacks the ferocity that it attains in the case of the male subject.

188. #188

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.60

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that paternal figures (both ideal and nightmarish) function as fantasy constructions that domesticate the traumatic, unsignifiable desire of the feminine object, and that the homosocial bond between Jeffrey and Frank is structured as a retreat from this trauma—Frank's symbolic authority providing psychic relief precisely because Dorothy's desire for nothing threatens to dissolve fantasy structure altogether.

     The abyss of this desire threatens to swallow men up, but homosocial violence implicitly promises to control it.

189. #189

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.106

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

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that *Mulholland Drive* advances beyond *Lost Highway* by showing not merely that fantasy sustains reality but that fantasy stages an authentic encounter with trauma and loss—deploying Lacanian fantasy theory to distinguish the ontological worlds of fantasy and desire through formal cinematic analysis.

     Lost Highway explores the structure of fantasy and desire for male subjectivity, and Mulholland Drive does so for female subjectivity

190. #190

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.75

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Contradidory Status of l auro Polmer**

     Theoretical move: By "subjectivizing the impossible object-cause of desire" in *Fire Walk with Me*, Lynch forces spectators to inhabit the perspective of the fantasy object itself, revealing that at the core of that object is not plenitude but a fundamental emptiness—a void that destabilizes the cultural fantasy of femininity by collapsing its constitutive contradictions into a single figure.

     She embodies in one person all the contradictory male fantasies about women: she is innocent, and she is a whore; she is the homecoming queen, and she is addicted to cocaine; she is a loving maternal figure, and she is a cold-blooded manipulator.

191. #191

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.55

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

     Theoretical move: Blue Velvet's fundamental opposition is not between public reality and its underside but between two equally fantasmatic worlds (stabilizing and destabilizing fantasy) and a separate space of desire; by separating the two modes of fantasy, Lynch renders visible their underlying structural similarity and opposes masculine fantasy to feminine desire.

     In this relationship, feminine desire is a desire that no object can satisfy, a void that threatens to overwhelm both the desiring subject herself and the men who become caught within her desire.

192. #192

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.139

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > *Masculine!F eminine-Signifier!Signifierness*

     Theoretical move: Fink argues that sexual difference is grounded in a structural asymmetry between masculine and feminine modes of alienation in language: men are defined by the signifier of desire (Φ) and take the object (a) as partner, while women are defined by "signifierness" (the being of the signifier beyond signification) and take the phallus and S(Ⱥ) as partners—a dissymmetry so radical it forecloses any writable sexual relationship.

     In what sense can a woman be considered to be an Other to herself, as Lacan suggests?... Man serves here [in relation to castration] as a relay so that woman becomes an Other for herself, just as she is for him.

193. #193

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.141

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > *The Truth of Psychoanalysis*

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes between mathematical truth (le vrai), which is axiomatic and meaning-free, and the singular truth of psychoanalysis — that there is no sexual relationship — the analytic task being to bring the subject into encounter with this latter truth.

     The only truth of psychoanalysis, according to Lacan, is that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship

194. #194

     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.

     Feminine Sexuality (Lacan), 98-123

195. #195

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward a New Science of Appearances

     Theoretical move: By reading Rashomon's four witness accounts as a Lévi-Straussian mythic matrix, Žižek argues that the film's real stakes are not epistemological (no ultimate reality behind narratives) but socio-ethical: the disintegration of the big Other's symbolic pact is traced to feminine desire as the traumatic kernel around which the other versions function as defense-formations.

     it locates the threat to the big Other, the ultimate Cause that destabilizes the male pact and blurs the clarity of the male vision, in a woman, in feminine desire.

196. #196

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.145

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

     Theoretical move: By reading Henry James's *The Golden Bowl* and *The Wings of the Dove* through a Lacanian lens, Žižek argues that the network of protective lies ultimately serves to maintain the big Other's ignorance—keeping up social appearances—and that this "ethics of the unspoken" constitutes a false ethics, while "female masochism" is unmasked as a male fantasy rather than an attribute of feminine nature.

     'female masochism,' far from pertaining to 'feminine nature' or to 'femininity,' is a male fantasy.

197. #197

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.202

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the emergence of genuine novelty (New Order from Chaos) requires a structural-dialectical account that cannot be reduced to adaptation logic, and that Varela's "feminine ontology" of aleatory possibility maps precisely onto the Lacanian logic of the Not-all — necessity is not-all, yet nothing escapes it.

     what Varela called 'feminine ontology'... fits perfectly the coordinates of the Lacanian logic of non-All

198. #198

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.150

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth is structurally "not-whole" not because of lack but because of an irreducible surplus—an auto-referential doubling where the level of enunciation always sticks to what is enunciated—and that this same structure (the Real as the gap between knowledge and jouissance, between the Symbolic and Imaginary) underlies the Nietzschean "double affirmation," the Lacanian not-all, and the ontological status of Woman/Truth as irreducible to objet petit a.

     The only thing that, according to Lacan, constitutes the affinity between truth and woman is contained in his notion of not-whole (or not-all), as well as in the immanent 'count for two' that this notion implies.

199. #199

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.196

     <span id="page-186-0"></span>Notes > Part I: Nietzsche the Metapsychologist > Part II: Noon

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section (endnotes for Parts I and II of the book), providing citations to Nietzsche, Lacan, Badiou, Deleuze, and others. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument in itself, though several quoted passages gesture at key conceptual nodes (truth, jouissance, the not-all, analytical discourse).

     Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, p. 81.

200. #200

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič

     Contradictions that Matter > <span id="page-43-0"></span>Sex or Gender?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that desexualizing ontology (abandoning masculine/feminine principles) is the very condition under which sexuality emerges as the Real's disruptive point within being — so to subtract sex from sex is not to dissolve the problem of sexual difference but to blind oneself to its operation.

     ontology no longer being conceived as a combinatory of two, 'masculine' and 'feminine' principles

201. #201

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.54

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via a close reading of Freud and Lacan, that sexual difference does not arise from the existence of two sexes but from the non-existence of the "second sex"—a constitutive ontological deficit—and traces Lacan's shift from locating "pure loss" on the side of the body (early work) to locating it within the signifying order itself (late work), showing that surplus-enjoyment emerges at the place of a missing signifier ("with-without"), which is also the origin of sexual division.

     libido is invariably and necessary of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.

202. #202

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.65

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sexual division maps onto an ontological asymmetry between masculinity as belief (reliance on the phallus as signifying support to repress castration) and femininity as pretense (masquerade as constitutive deception), and further that this same ontological minus—the bar between signifier and signified transposed into the signifier itself—grounds Lacan's theory of the subject of the unconscious as a "with-without" inherent to the signifying order, moving beyond Saussurean structuralism.

     femininity (or womanliness) as such is nothing but this susceptibility to wear femininity as a mask (that is to say, to wear castration as a mask). There is no 'true femininity' as opposed to femininity as masquerade

203. #203

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.72

     Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology > Je te m'athème … moi non plus

     Theoretical move: The Badiou-Cassin polemic over sophistry is mobilized as a philosophical performance of the Lacanian claim that there is no sexual relation: their respective stances (truth-oriented philosophy vs. language-immersed sophistry) are themselves staged as an enactment of the masculine/feminine divide in Lacan's formulas of sexuation.

     the femininity of sophistry