Fetishistic Disavowal

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (246)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.71

   The Lie > The Sadeian trap

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

   we are dealing here with a case of double 'self-deception'. The first moment of self-deception is... we deceive ourselves as to our actual intention... But this self-deception is possible only on the basis of another, more fundamental moment of self-deception.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.135

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

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

   Don Juan's attitude might best be described as: 'I certainly believe (or even: I know perfectly well) that God exists - but so what?'

3. #03

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.59

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

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

   Žižek insists that ideology works by means of disavowal, renouncing or repressing a truth: we know that we live in an exploitative, contingent system, yet we act as if we do not know.

4. #04

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.63

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Critique as practice**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology critique is best understood not as external demystification but as immanent, symptomatic practice—reading for the internal gaps and shadows of representation—and that cinema's projective technology makes it a privileged site for this dialectical procedure, which aims not merely to evaluate cultural products but to produce situated knowledge capable of precipitating social transformation.

   Whether ideology is inversion, falsity, legitimation, interpellation, or disavowal, it functions to constitute a matrix for action

5. #05

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.105

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Film form**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marxist film theory must integrate formalist analysis with contextual/ideological critique by treating film form as a dialectical "system" — a dynamic interrelation of elements — whose internal contradictions and fictionality are precisely what enable the critique of ideology and the capitalist mode of production.

   supports racist preconceptions while the narrative enables disavowing any racism.

6. #06

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.117

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > <span id="page-111-0"></span>[Marxist Film Theory](#page-5-2) and [Fight Club](#page-5-2)

   Theoretical move: The passage uses *Fight Club*'s opening credit sequence as a formal emblem of the core Marxist problem: the contradiction between aesthetic form and industrial economic production cannot be bypassed but must be crossed like a "scratch," and the film's own cult status and commercial failure-turned-success encapsulate that contradiction in material history.

   to commercialize anti-commercialism and to market anti-capitalism are contradictory endeavors

7. #07

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.148

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Ideology in Fight Club**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club* enacts a formal critique of ideology by deploying cinematic projection as both the medium of ideology and the means of its exposure; ideology operates not through belief but through practice (what we do), and the film's formal apparatus—voice-over vs. diegesis, camera axis, sound editing—stages precisely the split between cynical self-exemption and ideological complicity that prevents subjects from escaping ideology.

   it is also the illusory freedom of our cynicism in doing what we do but telling ourselves we object to it.

8. #08

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.170

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Ideology in Fight Club** > **Splicing**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club*'s formal technique of splicing operates as a self-reflexive materialization of ideology critique: the film's editing practice (cigarette burns, spliced frames, diegetic/extra-diegetic switching) enacts within its own medium the very logic of concealed labor and illusory coherence it thematizes, thereby constructing a parallism between the subject's disavowal of dissociation and the spectator's ignorance of cinematic artifice.

   constructing a parallelism between Jack's inability to accept the reality of his dissociations and the cinema-goer's ignorance of the technological artifice.

9. #09

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.59

   FAN TA SIZ IN G THE E ND

   Theoretical move: Capitalism exploits the constitutive unknowability of the Other's desire by supplying fantasy as both its mystification and its apparent solution—the commodity form oscillates between presenting the Other's desire as enigmatic and as answerable, thereby binding the subject to the capitalist order while keeping belonging permanently deferred.

   The faith in the Other that informs every financial transaction is a fantasy that the Other actually exists and that everyone else will continue to believe in the existence of this figure.

10. #10

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.87

    THE IM AGE OF NEU TR ALIT Y

    Theoretical move: Capitalism sustains itself not by hiding its existence (like the Devil) but by presenting itself as natural and self-grounding, thereby concealing the political decision that constitutes it; Freud's discovery that subjects consistently act against self-interest demolishes capitalism's foundational claim to accord with human nature, revealing capitalism as a political construction rather than a natural order.

    they can derive satisfaction from their self-sabotage, while disavowing this form of satisfaction and believing themselves to be purely self-interested—and thus purely natural—beings.

11. #11

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.102

    FA S C I SM OR E M AN C IPATION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the political valence of capitalism's crises is determined by how one interprets the emergent gaze: fascism misreads it as an external distortion to be purified, while emancipatory politics identifies with it as the system's inherent imbalance — a distinction illustrated through The Usual Suspects as a cinematic analogue for the encounter with the gaze.

    The appeal of fascism is almost always stronger because it offers the assurance that a neutral background exists and enables us to avoid confronting the trauma of a political decision.

12. #12

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.110

    EV IL , BE THOU M Y G O OD

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that sacrifice—not self-interest—is the structural motor of capitalism, and that the consumer's enjoyment of commodified labour depends on fetishistic disavowal: the co-existence of knowing and not-knowing that conceals the worker's sacrificial surplus value. Surplus-jouissance is thus grounded in a structural obscuring of loss, not mere ideological manipulation.

    The consumer's enjoyment of the worker's sacrifi ce—the enjoyment of the value given to the commodity by the worker's sacrifi ce of time occurs through an act of fetishistic disavowal.

13. #13

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.115

    C ONDITION S OF THE WOR K IN G C L A SS IN THE C ON G O

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that worker sacrifice is not a contingent feature but the structural condition of possibility for capitalist value and enjoyment: exploitation cannot be separated from the commodity form because sacrifice is the very source of value, and capitalism specifically enables the subject to fetishistically disavow the sacrifice that grounds their enjoyment.

    capitalism permits us to enjoy sacrifi ce while fetishistically disavowing it. We can ensure that we are unaware that Congolese children labored in a pitch-black mine or that Chinese workers died in explosions for the sake of our iPads.

14. #14

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.116

    C ONDITION S OF THE WOR K IN G C L A SS IN THE C ON G O > IN V E N TIN G FOR MS OF WA STE

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's psychic motor is not utility but sacrificial jouissance: the modern subject's enjoyment is structured through fetishistic disavowal of sacrifice, and Keynes's discovery that wasteful spending outperforms productive spending confirms that capitalism is organised around the pleasure of useless expenditure rather than need-satisfaction, dismantling the ideological myth of utility from within.

    the result of this confluence is the turn to fetishistic disavowal, which permits an unconscious satisfaction for modern consciousness. Only through the fetish can the modern consumer enjoy the miseries that produce the objects to be consumed.

15. #15

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.125

    HIDDE N E N JOYME N T AND ITS V IC I SSIT UDE S

    Theoretical move: Against Bataille's ontology of excess energy, McGowan argues that capitalism does not abolish sacrifice but renders it invisible and multiplies it structurally; reactionary responses (terrorism, fundamentalism) misread this hiddenness as absence, thereby reinforcing capitalist ideology rather than subverting it.

    Though no one in capitalist society cuts out the beating heart of a sacrificial victim, nuclear warheads, elaborate churches, and slaughterhouses testify to the persistence of sacrifice.

16. #16

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.139

    N OT G OD BU T AN ADV E RTI SE ME N T

    Theoretical move: Advertising functions as the modern form of the big Other, saving subjects from the trauma of freedom by providing an image of a gaze that authorizes consumer choices; McGowan argues this structure is more insidious when it presents itself as liberation from conformity, and reads Fitzgerald's Dr. T. J. Eckleberg as the paradigmatic figure of the absent-yet-operative capitalist Other.

    The best advertisements enable the subject to disavow this reliance on the Other's approval at the same time that they offer it most thoroughly.

17. #17

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.175

    THE R EC O GNITION OF L AB OR

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's insistence on the final cause (teleological purposiveness) constitutes a systematic disavowal of the means of labor and of unconscious repetition, positioning capitalism as an anachronistic philosophical regime that obscures the satisfaction immanent in pure means—a satisfaction structurally homologous to unconscious desire.

    Capitalism relies on the means of labor, but it refuses to grant the means any status of its own. There is, in other words, no space for the acknowledgment of pure means.

18. #18

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

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

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

    The alternative to capitalism lies in the means that capitalism requires and yet cannot avow.

19. #19

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.235

    M ARX C ON TR A M ARX

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Marx's apparent self-contradiction between the desublimating logic of capital (Communist Manifesto) and the sublime mystification of the commodity (Capital) is not a break but a causal sequence: capitalism destroys traditional transcendence only to reinstate it as an immanent sublime internal to the commodity form, whose jouissance derives precisely from its inutility.

    One buys the SUV for its sublimity even as one insists on its usefulness for hauling things.

20. #20

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.271

    . SHIE LDIN G OUR E YE S FROM THE GAZ E

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage develops several theoretical moves: it distinguishes the Lacanian gaze as traumatic object (founding absence structuring desire) from the gaze as mastering look; argues Marx's error was not underestimating selfishness but overestimating self-interest; and uses Hitchcock's Rear Window to anchor the gaze/objet petit a distinction, while also touching on fetishistic disavowal, ideology, and emancipatory politics.

    gold seems more secure than paper currency because it permits a fetishistic disavowal of its dependence on collective belief for its value.

21. #21

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.275

    . THE PE R SI STE N C E OF SAC R IFIC E AF TE R ITS OBSOLESC EN C E

    Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus advances the theoretical argument that sacrifice under capitalism is not merely destructive but constitutively enjoyable (jouissance-laden), and that capitalism's occlusion of sacrifice—rather than its elimination—is the precondition for modernity's ideological functioning; Marxist, vitalist, and utilitarian critiques fail precisely because they cannot theorize the enjoyment of sacrifice.

    The fetishistic disavowal at work in consumption becomes especially evident during holiday sales. Consumers can say that they awaken at 3 am and stand in line for hours in order to save money, but the situation is actually the reverse.

22. #22

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.281

    . A MOR E TOLE R ABLE INFINIT Y

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section for "A More Tolerable Infinity" deploys Hegel's distinction between spurious/bad infinity and true infinity as a critical lever against capitalism's structural logic of endless expansion, while mobilizing fetishistic disavowal, the drive toward loss, and natural limits to argue that capitalism's infinite movement is self-undermining rather than genuinely infinite.

    many people acknowledge the possibility of the eventual heat death of the universe but remain capitalist subjects insofar as they engage in a fetishistic disavowal of it. They know it will come, but they act as if they don't know.

23. #23

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.141

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

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's provocative claim that Christianity is "the one true religion" as a pivot to interrogate the relationship between religion, meaning-production, and psychoanalytic concepts: it contrasts Judaism's lack-driven, interpretively open relation to the sacred text (anticipating Lacanian theory of das Ding and the signifier) with Christianity's capacity to "secrete meaning" in response to the real, setting up the theoretical question of what Christianity adds to Lacan's framework that Judaism cannot.

    fetishism, as Freud defined it, functions to disavow uncertainty by appeal to the stabilizing influence of the fetish object

24. #24

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.166

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Credo: How Christianity Invented Ideology

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Christianity's distinctive innovation is the elevation of *belief itself* (the act of believing, for-itself) over religious action or content, and that this structure of belief is fundamentally a social/ideological defense against the unknown Other — making it the very mechanism by which the church betrays Jesus's teaching of love.

    The unavowed form of belief is 'I don't really know, but for that very reason I assert emphatically and unequivocally that I believe.'

25. #25

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.170

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Credo: How Christianity Invented Ideology > The Manichaean Temptation

    Theoretical move: The Lacanian architecture of belief—which requires a supposed non-believer as its structural support—explains why mainstream Christianity persistently "substantializes" evil into a gnostic dualism despite both orthodox Augustinian theology and Jesus's own teaching; the psychic requirement of belief generates the division between good and evil as its ideological shadow.

    Christians routinely profess to accept such a view, mouthing pious admissions about how we are all sinners. But when the going gets rough, such glib pieties routinely give way to self-righteous, fingerpointing condemnations.

26. #26

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.85

    I > 2 > Finding Our Lost Enjoyment

    Theoretical move: Capitalist ideology and capitalist practice are structurally at odds: ideology directs subjects toward accumulation/having the object, while the actual mechanism of capitalist enjoyment operates through the object's absence/loss — and exposing this gap (relocating enjoyment to loss) is identified as a lever for undermining ideological seduction.

    this ideology never allows these subjects to locate the actual source of their enjoyment.

27. #27

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.128

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Anxiety as Ethics

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

    While they disbelieve in the possibility of enjoyment or authentic commitment, they do believe in belief. That is, they believe that there are others who really believe.

28. #28

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.132

    I > Sustaining Anxiety > Whose Enjoyment?

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

    Fascism is founded on the disavowal of enjoyment — the attempt to enjoy while keeping enjoyment at arm's length.

29. #29

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.164

    I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > Shared Sacrifi ce of Nothing

    Theoretical move: The shared sacrifice that founds social bonds repeats the originary loss that constitutes the subject; this repetition converts impossibility into prohibition, installs a constitutive lie at the heart of socialization, and explains the persistence of sacrifice (in religion, war, ritual) as enjoyment of loss itself rather than for any external end.

    We need a reason to sacrifi ce not because we otherwise aren't willing to sacrifi ce but because a reason allows us to disavow the traumatic nature of our own enjoyment.

30. #30

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.176

    I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > From Enjoyment to Pleasure

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the social bond is constituted through the enjoyment of traumatic loss rather than through pleasure, and that every social project (war, monument-building, political identification) uses pleasure as an alibi for this foundational enjoyment—while the structure of the signifier itself generates paranoia about the Other's enjoyment, rendering utopian equality impossible.

    The strength allows subjects who identify with the leader in her/his weakness to disavow this would-be traumatic identification and to associate themselves consciously with strength rather than weakness.

31. #31

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.188

    I > Against Knowledge > Th e End of Class Consciousness

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that emancipatory politics has misidentified knowledge as the engine of political change, when in fact political struggle has always been organized around competing modes of jouissance; today, as knowledge (rather than law) assumes the role of prohibition, the libidinal charge of challenging authority has migrated from challenging the master to challenging the expert, rendering classic consciousness-raising politically ineffective.

    It is not that we have the ability to enjoy while disavowing our knowledge but more that the knowledge works to serve our enjoyment.

32. #32

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.202

    I > Against Knowledge > Taking the Side of Knowledge

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that emancipatory politics fails when it aligns itself with knowledge/expert authority against enjoyment, because popular identification with political figures operates precisely through shared enjoyment rather than rational conviction — and documentary film, as a form structurally committed to facts over enjoyment, exemplifies this failure.

    The film pronounces itself against fast food while at the same time revealing on the level of the image the intense enjoyment that this product delivers. Unlike in Fahrenheit, we see directly the enjoyment that knowledge facilitates.

33. #33

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

    I > Against Knowledge > Taking the Side of Knowledge

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that emancipatory politics fails by investing in knowledge-transmission (the documentary form) while ceding the terrain of enjoyment to conservatism; genuine political transformation requires reorganizing enjoyment, not merely supplementing knowledge.

    if a documentary contents itself with providing knowledge, it will have the effect of contributing to the very problem that it attempts to eradicate

34. #34

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.221

    I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Marx with the Philosophers

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx's political project shares a fundamental structure with Western philosophy's politics: both treat the critique of fantasy as the precondition for authentic political action, identifying fantasy (whether as commodity fetishism, individualist ideology, or the mystification of profit) as the barrier to class consciousness and emancipation — thereby making the attack on fantasy the sine qua non of Marxist politics.

    the process of commodity fetishism 'entails a fantasy disavowal. A commodity's market success depends on the erasure of the marks of production, any trace of indexicality, the grime of the factory, the mass moulding of the machine, and most of all, the exploitation of the worker.'

35. #35

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

    I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Even the Losers

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

    One could say that we are never more inauthentic than when we fantasize but never more authentic at the same time.

36. #36

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.263

    I > 10 > A Universe of Utility

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that critiques of religious belief (e.g. Dawkins) are structurally self-defeating because they appeal to utility, whereas the libidinal force of belief is grounded in wasteful sacrifice—the very uselessness of belief constitutes its enjoyment—and this enjoyment is inversely proportional to utility, meaning that rational debunking only augments the enjoyment it attempts to eliminate.

    The promise of a future reward in the afterlife is nothing but the alibi that religion provides in order to seduce the subject on the conscious level. But this is not where the real libidinal appeal of religion lies.

37. #37

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.338

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 8. The Politics of Fantasy

    Theoretical move: This notes section advances the argument that fantasy is theoretically inescapable—neither Western philosophy nor Marxist politics can fully overcome it—and that the properly psychoanalytic (Lacanian) attitude toward fantasy is not its elimination but its dialectical traversal, which simultaneously dispels and reconfigures it.

    When we see the importance of shatt ering commodity fetishism for Marxist politics, it becomes clear why Brecht's aesthetic predominates among Marxist artists.

38. #38

    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_194"></span>**Structure**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically traces Lacan's evolving concept of 'structure' from early social/affective relations through Saussurean linguistics and structuralism to topology, while establishing Clinical Structures (neurosis, psychosis, perversion) as the definitive nosographic framework grounded in discrete subject-positions relative to the Other rather than collections of symptoms.

    perversion by the operation of disavowal

39. #39

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_148"></span>**perversion**

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

    The pervert disavows castration; he perceives that the mother lacks the phallus, and at the same time refuses to accept the reality of this traumatic perception.

40. #40

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_70"></span>**fetishism**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the Lacanian reworking of fetishism: shifting Freud's account from a realist (penis-substitution) to a symbolic-linguistic framework (phallus-substitution), extending disavowal as the constitutive mechanism of perversion in general, and ultimately destabilising Freud's claim that fetishism is an exclusively male perversion by proposing that the real penis can itself function as a fetish for heterosexual women.

    the fetishist disavows this lack and finds an object (the fetish) as a symbolic substitute for the mother's missing penis

41. #41

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_33"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0046"></span>**castration complex**

    Theoretical move: The passage reconstructs Lacan's transformation of Freud's castration complex: by redefining castration as a symbolic lack of an imaginary object (the phallus), articulated across three "times" of the Oedipus complex, Lacan universalises castration beyond anatomical difference and makes the assumption or refusal of castration the structural hinge for both clinical structures (neurosis/perversion/psychosis) and sexuation.

    A more radical defence against castration than repression is disavowal, which is at the root of the perverse structure.

42. #42

    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_193"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0219"></span>**split**

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

    two contradictory attitudes to reality come to exist side by side in the ego; those of acceptance and DISAVOWAL

43. #43

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_53"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0068"></span>**disavowal**

    Theoretical move: Lacan systematically tightens Freud's concept of disavowal by restricting it exclusively to perversion and contrasting it rigorously with repression (neurosis) and foreclosure (psychosis), while reframing its object from the perceived absence of the penis to the structural lack of the phallus in the Other — making disavowal the denial that lack causes desire.

    Freud uses the term Verleugnung to denote 'a specific mode of defence which consists in the subject's refusing to recognise the reality of a traumatic perception'

44. #44

    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_174"></span>**sadism/masochism**

    Theoretical move: The passage makes two related theoretical moves: (1) it establishes Lacan's reversal of Freud's sadism/masochism hierarchy by grounding both in the invocatory drive, making masochism primary and sadism a disavowal of it; (2) it articulates the concept of 'scene' as the frame distinguishing acting out (remaining within the symbolic) from passage to the act (exit from the symbolic into the real via identification with objet petit a).

    'sadism is merely the disavowal of masochism' (S11, 186).

45. #45

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

    <span id="part4.htm_page195"></span>03: THE STAIN OF PLACE

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Laura Oldfield Ford's *Savage Messiah* enacts a counter-hegemonic practice of anachronism and drift against neoliberal biopolitical identity, deploying the spectral residues of defeated subcultures (punk, rave, squatting) as weapons in a struggle over time and space against Restoration London's enclosure of the commons.

    The 'return' to the postpunk moment is the route to an alternative present. Yet this is a return only to a certain ensemble of styles and methods – nothing quite like *Savage Messiah* actually existed back then.

46. #46

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

    <span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses Jungle/darkside music as a cultural-theoretical site where jouissance, the death drive, and dystopian negativity paradoxically flip into a utopian gesture, while the concept of 'scenius' (collective anonymous production) is posed against individualist celebrity as the structural condition of radical cultural innovation.

    Capital can never openly admit that it is a system based on inhuman rapacity; the Terminator can never remove its human mask. Jungle not only ripped the mask off, it actively identified with the inorganic circuitry beneath.

47. #47

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

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

    Theoretical move: Fisher deploys Derrida's hauntology as a diagnostic concept for late capitalist cultural pathology, distinguishing two temporal vectors (the no-longer and the not-yet) and arguing that hauntological music's melancholia constitutes a political refusal to accept capitalist realism's closure of futurity.

    To the rhythm of a cadenced march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead... long live capitalism, long live the market

48. #48

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

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

    Theoretical move: Fisher deploys psychoanalytic concepts—particularly the split between Law and jouissance embodied in the figure of Gene Hunt, and the mechanism of fetishistic disavowal that enables reactionary enjoyment—to argue that *Life On Mars* is ideologically reactionary, before pivoting to contrast this with David Peace's hauntological fiction, which refuses nostalgic vindication and instead approaches history as unexorcised, theologically charged suffering.

    Simm, as the modern, enlightened 'good cop', was less the anti-type of antediluvian 'bad cop' Gene Hunt than the postmodern disavowal which made possible our enjoyment of Hunt's invective and violence.

49. #49

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

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

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that the "slow cancellation of the future" is not an absence of change but a collapse of cultural temporality, wherein Jameson's "nostalgia mode" — a formal attachment to past aesthetic formulas rather than psychological yearning — has been naturalised under neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism, producing a permanent anachronism that disguises the disappearance of the future as its opposite.

    What blocks Body Heat from being a period piece or a nostalgia picture in any straightforward way is its disavowal of any explicit reference to the past.

50. #50

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher · p.187

    <span id="Chapter18.htm_page172"></span>Electricity and Ghosts: Interview with John Foxx

    Theoretical move: The passage makes two theoretical moves: first, an aesthetic-phenomenological argument (via the Foxx interview) that temporal deceleration in music/art opens an alternative perceptual ecology in which events become significant through scarcity; second, a cultural-diagnostic argument that post-2008 electronic pop (Darkstar, Kanye, Drake) registers a structural shift from collectively-experienced rave affect to privatised, introspective emotion, which Fisher names as a symptom of hauntology—living in an interregnum where the future has failed and melancholy saturates consumer hedonism.

    This hedonist's sadness – a sadness as widespread as it is disavowed – was nowhere better captured than in the doleful way that Drake sings, 'we threw a party/ yeah, we threw a party'

51. #51

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

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

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

    much of what makes the melancholy Brown analyses so pernicious is its disavowed quality. Brown's left melancholic is a depressive who believes he is realistic; someone who no longer has any expectation that his desire for radical transformation could be achieved, but who doesn't recognise that he has given up.

52. #52

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

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

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

    or the foundation of an identification disavowed by the subject. In this sense, sadism is merely the disavowal of masochism.

53. #53

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

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

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

    sadism is merely the disavowal of masochism. This formula will make it possible to illuminate many things concerning the true nature of sadism.

54. #54

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.109

    Another question.

    Theoretical move: The passage stages a methodological debate about the analyst's position as predicating subject: it distinguishes narcissistic phantasy (unconscious) from narcissistic myth (conscious/preconscious), argues that the analyst's interpretive word operates from a place irreducible to the transference position attributed to him, and pivots on whether the analyst's word constitutes a Verneinung (negation/denial) or Bejahung (affirmation) — ultimately framing interpretation as a cut that denies narcissistic omnipotence and is constitutive of desire.

    I had said Verleugnung. This puts me a little bit in a false position

55. #55

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.115

    Another question.

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that predication is not a logical act but an expression of desire's particular forcing, and that the analytic relationship cannot be grounded in a specular grammar of pronoun-equivalence; the remainder that escapes specularisation is what distinguishes the big Other from the barred Other, and it is precisely this remainder that structures both transference (the subject supposed to know) and the analyst's relationship to truth.

    it is not perhaps for nothing that precisely Verneinung here was understood instead of Verleugnung. For Verleugnung precisely introduces this dimension of the lie which is nothing other than denegation.

56. #56

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.30

    D - The (o) as fetish

    Theoretical move: Lacan's theorisation is distinguished from post-Freudian authors by its privileging of a negative/reflexive approach to the object: rather than marking the positive qualities of the object (e.g. the phallus as terrifying instrument), Lacan follows Freud's logic of the Medusa to argue that the fetish object functions as a veil over castration — a witness to the lack in the field of the Other.

    the reptiles which took the place of hair for her denied, as many times as there were serpents, castration and by this reversal it was recalled in a multiplied way to the one who wanted to cancel it out.

57. #57

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

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

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

    the use of Verleugnung which it has been proposed to translate by déni (denial) is more and more specific; it finds its most precise formulation in the article on fetishism (1927)

58. #58

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    Madame le Docteur Parisot

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Dragonetti's commentary on Dante's *Divine Comedy*, Lacan (or his seminar presenter) elaborates how the myth of Narcissus structures a theory of fraudulent conscience: the mirror of Narcissus figures the capture of the subject by its own image, such that the falsification of the sign (counterfeit money) allegorizes the primal separation of consciousness from truth — a movement from the Real to a self-enclosed fiction that becomes "truth itself" for the pervert.

    once it has been put into circulation, the false word, like false money, so much resembles the authentic that the true becomes unrecognisable and invisible… the counterfeiter himself is not capable of identifying the product of his own artifice.

59. #59

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.109

    Another question.

    Theoretical move: The passage stages a theoretical dispute between Stein/Conté/Melman and Lacan over the status of narcissism, the analyst's word, and the place of predication, arguing that the analyst's interpretive position is structurally distinct from the narcissistic/transference position (Bejahung) and operates instead as a cut—a denial of narcissistic omnipotence correlative to repression and desire.

    You had translated it as Verneinung and I had said Verleugnung.

60. #60

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.30

    D - The (o) as fetish

    Theoretical move: Lacan's theoretical distinctiveness lies in his privileging of a negative or reflective approach to the object, exemplified by his reading of fetishism: the fetish is not defined by the positive qualities of the object but as the veil/witness of the lack (castration) in the field of the Other.

    the reptiles which took the place of hair for her denied, as many times as there were serpents, castration and by this reversal it was recalled in a multiplied way to the one who wanted to cancel it out.

61. #61

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.115

    Another question.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that predication is not a logical act but an act of desire's forcing, and that the analytic relation cannot be grounded in a specular grammar of pronouns (I/you equivalence); the remainder that escapes specularisation is what opens the dialectic between the barred Other and truth, and the transference's misunderstanding consists in the analysand supposing the analyst knows everything except the truth.

    it is not perhaps for nothing that precisely Verneinung here was understood instead of Verleugnung. For Verleugnung precisely introduces this dimension of the lie which is nothing other than denegation.

62. #62

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

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

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

    the use of Verleugnung which it has been proposed to translate by déni (denial) is more and more specific; it finds its most precise formulation in the article on fetishism (1927)

63. #63

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.130

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the sexual act through the harmonic "mean and extreme ratio" (golden ratio logic), mapping the relation between the subject (small o), the mother as unifying One (capital O), and castration (minus phi) as the fundamental lack structurally inscribed in any subjective realization of the sexual act — thereby grounding sublimation and acting-out as proportional variants within the same signifying quadrangle organized by repetition.

    His personal Verleugnung, the contradiction that he may oppose to the fact that this has the value of a decisive break-through, changes nothing in it.

64. #64

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.129

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

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

    the correlate of misrecognition, or more exactly the limit imposed on this recognition in the subject, or if you wish again, his Reprasentanz in the Vorstellung, to this act, is the Verleugnung.

65. #65

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.258

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that perversion is structurally intelligible as the attempt to reconnect jouissance and the body that have been disjuncted by the signifying intervention constitutive of the subject, with the objet petit a (small o) serving as the topological and structural key to this reconnection, while the sadistic act paradigmatically illustrates how the perverse subject, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of a jouissance located in the Other rather than knowing itself as the subject of that jouissance.

    That he does not know what he himself is doing as a subject, that he is essentially in Verleugnung.

66. #66

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.121

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

    Theoretical move: The Act is defined not as motor discharge but as the intrinsic repetition of the signifier upon itself—a double loop that constitutes the subject as pure division; its effects are measured topologically by the mutation of surface produced by the cut, and Verleugnung is specifically identified as the rubric for the ambiguity that results from these effects.

    what is of the order of Verleugnung is always what is concerned with the ambiguity that results from the effects of the act as such.

67. #67

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.121

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

    Theoretical move: The passage defines the Act as structurally equivalent to repetition-in-a-single-stroke (the double loop of the signifier), grounded in the topology of the Möbius strip cut; it argues that the act constitutes the subject as pure division (Repräsentanz), and that Verleugnung names the ambiguity produced by the act's effects, distinguishing the act from mere motor performance, imitation, and acting-out.

    what is of the order of Verleugnung is always what is concerned with the ambiguity that results from the effects of the act as such.

68. #68

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.258

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden-ratio schema of objet petit a to articulate how perversion attempts to reconnect the body and jouissance that the signifying intervention (the subject-function) necessarily disjoins — with the sadist as the exemplary figure who, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of jouissance rather than its master, ultimately revealing that jouissance can only be located in the 'outside-the-body' part that is the o-object.

    he does not know what he himself is doing as a subject, that he is essentially in Verleugnung.

69. #69

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.129

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

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

    the correlate of misrecognition, or more exactly the limit imposed on this recognition in the subject, or if you wish again, his Reprasentanz in the Vorstellung, to this act, is the Verleugnung.

70. #70

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.130

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the harmonic (mean and extreme) ratio — anchored in the Phallus as signifier — to formalise the sexual act's relation to repetition, castration, and subjective lack, then uses this quadrangular proportion to position passage à l'acte, acting-out, sublimation, and repetition in structural relation to one another and to the analytic act.

    His personal Verleugnung, the contradiction that he may oppose to the fact that this has the value of a decisive break-through, changes nothing in it.

71. #71

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.44

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic act is constituted by a structural feint: the analyst must pretend (while knowing otherwise from their own analysis) that the Subject Supposed to Know is tenable, in order to set the process in motion—but the act itself exceeds doing (faire) and produces a renewal of the subject's presence precisely by excluding the analyst-as-subject from its agency.

    he finds himself very curiously disavowing the whole analytic technique in itself.

72. #72

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.189

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*

    Theoretical move: Lacan reflects ceremonially on the interrupted Seminar on the psychoanalytic act, arguing that the act's constitutive paradox—that the analyst must operate from a position that gives the lie to their own position—requires the concept of Verleugnung (fetishistic disavowal) rather than Verwerfung (foreclosure), while also registering the political events of May 1968 as an index of a structural gap in the universe of knowledge.

    I have reserved throughout the years, kept under covers, put to one side the term Verleugnung that undoubtedly Freud brings up in connection with an exemplary moment of the Spaltung of the subject.

73. #73

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.189

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*

    Theoretical move: In this closing ceremonial address, Lacan reflects on the interrupted transmission of his theory of the psychoanalytic act, identifying Verleugnung (disavowal) as the concept he had reserved to articulate the analyst's position in relation to the Subject Supposed to Know, and situates the May '68 events as an unexpected enactment of the 'act' dimension his seminar had been developing.

    I have reserved throughout the years, kept under covers, put to one side the term Verleugnung that undoubtedly Freud brings up in connection with an exemplary moment of the Spaltung of the subject

74. #74

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.44

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

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the claim that the Subject Supposed to Know is constitutive of the analytic situation from its very inception, and that the psychoanalytic act is defined precisely by the analyst's feigned (and potentially forgotten) displacement of that function—a displacement that is the condition of truth, not of knowledge.

    He finds himself very curiously disavowing the whole analytic technique in itself.

75. #75

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.73

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

    Theoretical move: The passage theorises the Passe as the moment at which the split between knowledge and the locus of enunciation is overcome, producing a paradoxical "communion in non-being" at S(Ø) where subject and Other share the same lack, beyond fantasy and transference—this constitutes the structural condition for the emergence of a heretical, self-responsible analytic subjectivity.

    he does not demand an avowal of the heretic, but a disavowal… this disavowal lies in wait for us at every moment

76. #76

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.163

    **X** > **XI** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan theorises Verwerfung (Foreclosure) as the rejection of a primordial signifier into outer shadows—distinct from both Verdrängung (repression) and Verleugnung—positing it as the foundational mechanism of psychosis/paranoia, while simultaneously developing, via Freud's Letter 52 and the mystic writing-pad, a multi-register account of memory as the circulating chain of signifiers that underpins the repetition compulsion.

    those who make the most objections to me suggest… that I look in some of Freud's other texts at something that might not be Verwerfung but, for instance, Verleugnung

77. #77

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.353

    **XXV** > **INDE X**

    Theoretical move: This is an index from Seminar III, non-substantive in itself, but it maps the conceptual architecture of the seminar by clustering key Lacanian terms (Verwerfung/foreclosure, signifier, unconscious, symbolic, subject, Verneinung, etc.) with their page references, making visible the theoretical relations Lacan constructs across the seminar.

    Verleugnung [disavowal] and Verwerfung, 150

78. #78

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.21

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-7-0"></span>INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory's biologistic and adaptationist framework by showing that the object's function is not complementary satisfaction but a defensive structure against fundamental anxiety—exemplified by the phobic object and the fetish—and proposes that the essential difference between phobia and fetish (both responses to castration anxiety) must be grasped through a rigorous structural analysis of the object, not through developmental mythology.

    castration anxiety in so far as it is linked to the perception of the absence of a phallic organ in the female subject, and to the negation of this absence.

79. #79

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.151

    THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fetish must be understood not in terms of an imaginary deficiency (the real penis) but as a substitute for the symbolic phallus qua absence — the phallus that exists only insofar as it circulates in symbolic exchange as both present and absent — thereby locating fetishism within the structure of the veil/curtain, where the object stands in for a constitutive lack that is simultaneously affirmed and disavowed.

    Freud speaks of Verleugnung with regard to the fundamental stance of disavowing in the relationship to the fetish… woman's castration is at once affirmed yet denied.

80. #80

    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.

    The fetishist's perversion in the masculine subject consists in affirming that the woman has it against the background of not having it. Without that, there would be no need of an object to represent it.

81. #81

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.513

    **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing technical terms, proper names, and page references from Lacan's Seminar V, providing no original theoretical argument but mapping the conceptual terrain of the seminar.

    fetishistic displacements 68

82. #82

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.13

    <span id="page-8-0"></span>Introduction: Welcome to Hell

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychotherapeutic "positive orientation" of contemporary society constitutes a collective disavowal of a foundational inner negativity or deadness, and that psychoanalysis — despite Freud's self-distinction from religion's consolation function — largely replicates religion's salvational logic by promising deliverance from suffering rather than confronting the constitutive negativity of existence.

    This is the work of our silent agreement when everybody knows but pretends that they don't.

83. #83

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Transcendental Ideal (Prototypon Trancendentale).

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the Transcendental Ideal (ens realissimum) arises from a dialectical illusion in which the distributive unity of empirical reality is illegitimately converted into a collective whole, which is then hypostatized and personified — a move Lacan will later theorize as the production of the big Other or the Subject Supposed to Know as a guarantee of completeness.

    a natural illusion leads us to consider this principle, which is valid only of sensuous objects, as valid with regard to things in general

84. #84

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.61

    chapter 2 > A brief course in the history of metaphysics

    Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the history of metaphysics is not simply phonocentric but is structured by a compulsive attempt to subordinate voice to logos; the voice harbors an irreducible alterity and ambivalent jouissance that escapes sense and presence, and it is precisely this excess that constitutes the properly Lacanian 'object voice.'

    It presented the voice as the illusory pledge of presence, reduced its inherent ambivalence, and disavowed its part of alterity.

85. #85

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.41

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the non-linguistic voice (laughter, singing) is neither simply outside linguistic structure nor fully captured by it, and that the singing voice's apparent surplus-meaning is a structural fantasy/illusion that functions as a fetish disavowing castration—the very condition that gives the voice its fascination. The object voice (objet petit a) is precisely what aesthetic or religious idealization of the voice conceals.

    Freud's theory of fetishism is based precisely on the fetish materializing the disavowal of castration.

86. #86

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.76

    chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

    Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice—a voice whose source cannot be seen or located—is shown to structurally produce effects of divinity, authority, and uncanny presence (Unheimlichkeit) by separating the voice from its body, and this mechanism operates through a fantasy-encirclement of the enigmatic object behind the screen, linking the acousmatic to the Voice as Lacanian object.

    The voice behind the screen not only fuels our curiosity, but also implies a certain disavowal epitomized by the formula 'I know very well, but nevertheless. . . .'

87. #87

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.20

    Read My Desire

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the impossibility of metalanguage—rather than "flattening" social analysis—installs a split between appearance and being that gives society a generative principle; this move, paralleled in Freud's primal father and death drive, is what Lacan's "structures are real" claim means, and it constitutes psychoanalysis's fundamental challenge to Foucauldian historicism by grounding desire in the non-coincidence of appearance and being.

    The statement puts into play what it would abolish; even the disavowal becomes an avowal.

88. #88

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.36

    2 The Orthopsychic Subj ect: Film Theory and the Reception o£Lacan > The Screen as Miror

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucauldian and film-theory conceptions of the law as purely positive (productive rather than repressive) collapse the distinction between desire as effect and desire as realization, thereby eliminating the split subject of psychoanalysis; only by maintaining the repressive, negative dimension of the law—and desire as constitutively unrealized—does psychoanalysis preserve a genuinely divided subject rather than a self-surveilling, inculpable one.

    the model of self-surveillance implicitly recalls the psychoanalytic model of moral conscience even as the resemblance is being disavowed

89. #89

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.108

    Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle

    Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis corrects both Kantian ethics and utilitarianism by reinstating the superego as the hidden enunciator of the moral law, thereby restoring the division of the subject that Kant's erasure of the enunciating instance threatens to abolish—and exposing how the disavowal of this division underwrites the violence latent in utilitarian happiness-maximization.

    The principle of the maximization of happiness on which the ethics of utilitarianism is based is a product of this disavowal

90. #90

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.121

    Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that perversion (specifically fetishism) inverts the structure of fantasy: where the neurotic subject constitutes itself in relation to the object a as an externalized image of loss, the pervert positions himself as the object a in its real form, becoming the instrument of the Other's enjoyment rather than a desiring subject—and Clerambault's fetishistic photographs thereby expose, rather than obscure, the utilitarian fantasy's dependence on the supposition of an obscene Other jouissance.

    'I know very well, but just the same [Il . .. ' here we see laid out before us the splitting of the two I's in the statement, but what we do not see is the instance of enunciation, the pervert, who positions himself safely outside this division.

91. #91

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.167

    The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Modern Forms of Power

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's theory of disciplinary power is fundamentally incomplete because it lacks a psychoanalytic account of jouissance: the "mild and provident" ideal father (Name of the Father) does not simply neutralize power but installs interdiction of jouissance as its operative principle, which drives the escalation of surveillance and ultimately precipitates the return of totalitarianism as the primal father's revenge — a structural trajectory Foucault cannot see because he expelled psychoanalysis from his framework.

    how a society could be founded on a nonrecognition of the contradictions it contains ... The totemic is a pluralistic society. America is a good example. The scrupulous autonomy and independence of the brothers are assured in this fraternity. The field may be glutted with contradictions without disturbing the society in the least.

92. #92

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *Christianity as a/theistic*

    Theoretical move: Rollins argues that Christianity harbors an irreducible "a/theistic" structure: because all beliefs necessarily fall short of the divine (Hyper-presence), authentic faith must simultaneously affirm and negate its own content, producing a productive tension that is neither agnosticism nor synthesis but the condition of faith itself—a move supported by the apophatic tradition from Pseudo-Dionysius to Anselm.

    believing in God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes about God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain).

93. #93

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

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

    A faith that can only exist in the light of victory and certainty is one which really affirms the self while pretending to affirm Christ.

94. #94

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

    Theoretical move: The passage advances an "a/theistic" theological position arguing that authentic Christian faith requires the simultaneous affirmation and negation of every concept of God — a structural movement of naming and de-naming that mirrors the Lacanian logic of lack, where no signifier can adequately capture the Real of the divine.

    the fundamentalist within us all resolutely affirms that our belief in God is a true reflection of what God is really like – that God is on our side

95. #95

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

    Theoretical move: The passage uses a liturgical parody of prosperity theology and self-centred faith to enact a critique of orthopraxis versus orthodoxy: authentic faith is demonstrated not through correct doctrine, Bible-reading, or worship practices, but through transformative action oriented toward the neighbour — a theological move that deploys the logic of transgression to expose ideological religion as a fetishistic crutch that substitutes symbolic performance for genuine ethical engagement.

    we believe primarily as a psychological crutch to escape reality, or in order to explain reality, at the expense of transforming reality

96. #96

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’* > *Background to the service*

    Theoretical move: Rollins argues that the theological weight of the crucifixion is only accessible when it is severed from the immediate comfort of the resurrection—the "closed tomb" as a testing-ground for faith stripped of economic return—thereby reframing the Easter singularity not as a consoling unity but as a site of irreducible decision and gift.

    Such reflections can still offer the believer a safe, cathartic horror that is wrapped in the understanding that everything works out well in the end.

97. #97

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *Theology and the voice of God*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that theology should be understood not as human discourse that defines God, but as the site where God speaks into human discourse — a shift from idolatrous representationalism to a responsive, a/theological posture that acknowledges the irreducible excess of the divine over any tradition's understanding of it.

    the fundamentalist, is Pharisaic in nature, for it refuses to give up its interpretation of God, even in the presence of God.

98. #98

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *Revelation as concealment*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that revelation structurally contains concealment within itself — God is "known as unknown" — and uses this to displace fundamentalist demands for doctrinal certainty in favour of a transformative, plurally-interpreted encounter with the divine; the theoretical move is from revelation-as-disclosure to revelation-as-excess-of-meaning that resists singular mastery.

    many Christian communities view the stories and parables of the Bible as raw material to be translated into a single, understandable meaning rather than experienced as infinitely rich treasures

99. #99

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *The idolatry of ideology*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the philosophical critique of ideology and the biblical prohibition of idolatry share a common root (the Greek *eidos*, essence), thereby allowing a theological discourse to appropriate ideological critique not as its enemy but as a mirror of its own tradition's anti-idolatrous impulse.

    Idolatry does not rest in the idea of the object itself but rather in the eye of the beholder... it is the way one engages with an object or idea that makes an idol an idol

100. #100

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.63

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > From Fortune to Providence

     Theoretical move: Ruda argues, via Descartes, that true rationalism requires fatalism: the affirmation of divine providence (absolute necessity) is the only consistent way to abolish fortune and hope, because it enables proper judgment by revealing the dialectical structure of the necessity of contingency and the contingency of necessity.

     Hope results from a disregard of one's own lack of knowledge and is grounded in acting as if we did not know that we did not know.

101. #101

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

     Fatalism in Times of Universalized Assthetization

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theoretical inversion: rather than awaiting a future catastrophic event to transform social coordinates, it proposes that the transformative "comet" has already occurred (unacknowledged), and that abolishing freedom—embracing catastrophe—is the precondition for imagining a genuinely different form of freedom.

     we act as if we did not know that we know this: that is, we still act as if we hoped for the world to change from within

102. #102

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

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > <span id="unp-ruda-0017.xhtml_p141" class="page"></span>Atta Choice! Countering the Presence of an Illusion

     Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Freudian psychoanalysis installs a forced choice for psychical determinism over free will—a choice predetermined by determinism itself—revealing that the belief in psychical freedom is a culturally produced illusion (wishful reversal) that repression sustains, while true rationalist-materialist universalism requires accepting full psychical causality, including the cracks and ruptures the unconscious introduces into apparent causality.

     We do know it, but we do not want to believe what we know. The illusion generated by intellectual education and culture works as a defense mechanism against the efficacy of this very knowledge.

103. #103

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.51

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny*

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

     social fantasies that blind us to the possibility that the big Other might be plagued by exactly the same kinds of internal fractures as we ourselves belabor under

104. #104

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.254

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *Conclusion: The Other as Face*

     Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical apparatus of the chapter's argument about the neighbor/Other, drawing on Lacan, Žižek, Levinas, and Badiou to negotiate the tension between singularity, universality, and the traumatic jouissance of the Other as the ethical crux of love and politics.

     This disavowal does not primarily concern the raw reality of flesh ('I know very well that beneath the face there is just the Real of the raw flesh, bones, and blood, but I nonetheless act as if the face is a window into the mysterious interiority of the soul')

105. #105

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.206

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The "Faceless" Face*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely post-Lacanian ethics must reckon with the non-symbolizable, nonrelational surplus (jouissance) of the other rather than retreating to the "dazzling epiphany" of the face as a fetishistic totality; the Muselmann is deployed as the limit case that exposes this ethical demand at its most traumatic.

     the trouble with our usual ethical attitude is that we treat the other's face as a fetish that allows us to disavow its nonrelational aspects

106. #106

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.10

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's failure to theorize the generative principle of a social regime stems from his rejection of the linguistic model (and its ban on metalanguage), and that Lacan's claim that "structures are real" — i.e., that a regime's instituting principle is irreducible to and negates its positive relations — is precisely what allows one to think the genealogy, resistance, and institution of social space without collapsing into historicism or nominalism.

     The statement puts into play what it would abolish; even the disavowal becomes an avowal.

107. #107

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.98

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle**

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis radicalizes Kant's ethical subject by insisting that the moral law is always enunciated by a superegoic Other whose sadistic enjoyment is concealed when the marks of enunciation are erased; restoring this division of the subject is itself an ethical necessity, and its disavowal generates the violent aggressions disguised as utilitarian benevolence.

     The principle of the maximization of happiness on which the ethics of utilitarianism is based is a product of this disavowal.

108. #108

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing neurotic fantasy (barred subject in relation to objet a) from perversion (subject positioning himself *as* objet a, becoming agent of division in the Other), Copjec argues that Clérambault's fetishistic photographs do not simply reproduce the colonialist fantasy of cloth but pervert it—exposing the fantasy's structural dependence on the supposition of an obscene, useless enjoyment of the Other that the fantasy simultaneously requires and disavows.

     'I know very well, but just the same [I] …'—here we see laid out before us the splitting of the two I's in the statement, but what we do not see is the instance of enunciation, the pervert, who positions himself safely outside this division.

109. #109

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.29

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

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

     Bachelard, then, too, like Foucault and film theory, recalls and yet disavows the psychoanalytic model of moral conscience—however differently.

110. #110

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.158

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c11_r1.xhtml_page_143" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="143"></span>*11*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs an analytic move of self-accusation in which the author recognises that his systematic disavowal of his own anger operated as a defence mechanism that produced 'sham harmony,' and theorises that his son may have assumed the very aggressive current the father repudiated—an 'inverting mirror' dynamic that links parental repression to the child's symptom.

     I couldn't tolerate my own anger at her, an anger that I had ample means of denying, or—much more importantly—of expressing in other, more quietly destructive ways.

111. #111

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.216

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c15_r1.xhtml_page_207" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="207"></span>*15*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a clinical-psychoanalytic move in which dream-work becomes the site for recognizing disavowed aggression and tracing an intergenerational transmission of denied ambition; the analyst's intervention forces the analysand to own the dream's transformative energy as his own, turning the dream from passive observation into an act of unconscious desire.

     Was Oliver caught in the grip of a disavowed rage I passed on to him? Was he the victim of a denial that I never worked out for myself?

112. #112

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.204

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c14_r1.xhtml_page_198" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="198"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c14_r1.xhtml_page_199" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="199"></span>*14*

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a classic analytic move: the analysand's resistance to self-knowledge (contempt for "pat Freudian formulas") is itself interpreted as a defence against a painful discovery — that projected opacity onto the other (ex-wife, son) screens disavowed rage within the self, illustrating how projection and denial function in the transference relationship.

     Was that sense of something opaque and inaccessible in my ex-wife really a cover for my own need for opacity, the need to deny my own potential for anger and violence?

113. #113

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.30

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Abraham and absolute fidelity

     Theoretical move: By aligning Abraham and Judas as structurally parallel figures—both divinely chosen for a murderous act, both renouncing an intimate—the passage argues that the distinction between betrayer and faithful servant collapses into a difference of perceived motive rather than actual deed, thereby reframing betrayal as a possible mode of absolute fidelity.

     The difference between them comes down to the way their motives are understood... It is not then the acts of Abraham and Judas that are fundamentally distinct.

114. #114

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.141

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The intervention of God

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the most radical form of Christian doubt is not atheism or deism but rather the inversion that retains the reality of divine *intervention* while suspending certainty about God's existence—making the Event/happening primary and theological belief secondary, so that doubt becomes the natural outworking of faith rather than its enemy.

     namely, the idea that we doubt the existence of God but we retain the belief in intervention. Here the belief in God is not primary but rather the movement of God is.

115. #115

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.96

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Religion as well-being

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that reducing Christian faith to a set of theoretical beliefs (especially about afterlife and eternal meaning) constitutes a form of nihilism that evacuates the transformative truth of faith; genuine faith must embrace existential uncertainty and unknowing rather than use beliefs as protective "crutches" against the fragility of mortal life.

     if one does believe in a literal heaven, it may even be important to suspend this belief in order to approach the truly good news of Christianity.

116. #116

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.133

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The end of religion as its beginning

     Theoretical move: Christianity's internal self-critique is constitutive of authentic faith: the passage argues that true fidelity to Christianity requires betraying its institutional/systematic form, such that Christianity is structurally "ir/religious" — a religion that negates itself as religion, making the authentic believer a "non-Christian in the Christian sense."

     Christianity grounds us and yet invites us to gaze beyond its walls... the critique of Christianity as a religion derives from Christianity itself.

117. #117

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.165

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Faith with (mis)deeds

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious belief functions not as an inner truth that counteracts worldly action, but as a fantasy that enables and sustains precisely the behavior it ostensibly opposes — a 'religion without religion' that demands betrayal of belief-as-ideology in order to reach authentic faith.

     What if these types of destructive businesses run efficiently precisely because most of us who are involved, when asked, will voice concerns and even some guilt about what we do?

118. #118

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.60

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

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

     To believe that the words are the Word reduces the text to what can be named, described, and transcribed... The Word of God, in this reading, thus refers to something, some thing, some set of things.

119. #119

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.99

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The death of God

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nietzsche's 'death of God' is not a metaphysical claim about divine non-existence but a critique of the Cartesian-ideological function of God as a guarantor of cosmic meaning — a function that operates equally in believers and atheists alike, serving as an ideological crutch that forecloses genuine life-transformation.

     while they had given up on church, prayer, and even the word 'God,' they implicitly affirmed and were comforted by the idea of overall cosmic meaning

120. #120

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

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > <span id="chapter004.html_page_66"></span>Truth as object

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Western philosophy has bequeathed a dominant conception of truth as "truth as object" — truth as whatever shows itself to a distanced subject for contemplation — and that both Christian apologetics and its critics (Logical Positivism, New Atheism) share this same onto-epistemological framework, which the passage positions as philosophically, religiously, and biblically inadequate.

     The Word is taken to be some*thing* (the words of Scripture) that we can assess and interpret (stretching and distorting it until it becomes intelligible to us).

121. #121

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.44

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Modern inerrancy

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that modern biblical inerrancy and historical criticism share the same rationalist epistemological ground, making fundamentalism a distinctly modern phenomenon that paradoxically compromises more than pre-modern inerrancy; against both, the author proposes a "religious register" of reading that brackets factual questions to engage a spectral presence beneath the text's antagonisms.

     when engaging with it in the religious register, we bracket out such questions in order to perceive a spectral presence

122. #122

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

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Divine antagonism

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the internal fractures, ruptures, and antagonisms within the biblical text need not be read as evidence against divine inspiration; rather, by shifting interpretive focus, these contradictions can be understood as precisely what one would expect from a text born out of the divine itself — reframing contradiction from a defect into a theological signature.

     for so much of the Church, there is a desire to demonstrate that there is no antagonism or contradiction within the Bible, that its message is analogous to a magnificent orchestral piece in which all the parts move in perfect harmony

123. #123

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.169

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > A system against systems

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic Christianity functions as an "anti-system" — a system that systematically undermines every system of power by seeking out the excluded — and that this structural logic requires questioning the place of power itself rather than merely replacing its occupants, constituting a religion without religion whose expression is irreducible to ideological universalism.

     The disavowed obverse of 'all humans are part of my family' is then, 'if you will not be part of my family you are not human.'

124. #124

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.76

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Moses and the burning bush: the scriptural naming of God

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the Exodus narrative of Moses and the burning bush to argue that the divine name ('ehyeh 'asher 'ehyeh / "I AM WHO I AM") resists both magical manipulation and simple descriptive capture, positioning God as fundamentally beyond human control or conceptual grasp — a theological move that sets up a critique of any name-based mastery over the divine.

     judging that it would be neither prudent nor wise to question God directly, he summons up his strength and asks, 'Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh'

125. #125

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter008.html_page_45"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic love operates as a structural excess beyond the law — not as an ethical system that calculates duty but as a force that always already surpasses what the law can command — and pairs this with a parable in which aesthetic appearance (beauty) functions as a concealment that neutralises the symbolic content of a prophetic message.

     the people moved toward their destruction with dancing and celebration, with eyes that could not see and ears that could not hear.

126. #126

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.58

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic faith is not secured by ideological self-image (ego-ideal) but is revealed precisely through the stripping away of religious belief-as-ideology, so that true conviction emerges from the subject's confrontation with lack and powerlessness rather than from identification with a flattering image of the self.

     These activities help to remind me of who I really am.

127. #127

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.121

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two related theoretical moves: first, it articulates the paradox of authentic teaching as requiring a "faithful betrayal" — a loving transgression of the master's letter in fidelity to its spirit; second, the parable of Leon illustrates how ritual practice (the symbolic act) operates independently of subjective belief, enacting jouissance or the big Other's efficacy regardless of the subject's conscious disavowal.

     "Of course I don't believe it works, what kind of idiot do you take me for?" … "it is because the priest informed me that this prayer works even if you don't believe in it."

128. #128

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.61

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that institutionalized religious practice functions as a "safety valve" that reproduces the very social order it purports to resist — a logic illustrated through The Matrix and Bonhoeffer's theology — and that authentic faith requires total worldly immersion rather than the consolation of a designated religious sphere; the accompanying parable then dramatizes the tension between ethics-without-guarantee and faith instrumentalized for personal salvation.

     we think that it is our commitment to prayer groups, church meetings, and Bible studies that reflects the essence of our inner lives... Yet for Bonhoeffer this was not the end of the story.

129. #129

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > DIS-COURSES\

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine religious truth cannot be communicated through detached logical discourse but only through the performative 'dis-course' of the parable, which transforms the subject at the level of action rather than mere cognition—a structure homologous to Lacanian fetishistic disavowal, where the gap between knowing and doing reveals a split between intellectual assent and embodied transformation.

     The parable does not create more self-aware purveyors of irony—whereby one mocks the very behavior that one engages in, thus enjoying the activity in the very moment of disavowing it.

130. #130

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.157

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage makes a theological-ethical argument that genuine reconciliation transcends the transactional logic of exchange (apology accepted/rejected), enacting a form of love that dissolves the demand for symmetrical accounting—paralleling the claim that true faith-wealth is love rather than accumulation, thereby critiquing both prosperity theology and moralistic debt-repayment models of forgiveness.

     if I were to accept your apology, then this would mean that I considered you to have intentionally hurt me—something I know is not the case. So I reject your apology as unnecessary

131. #131

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.11

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses parabolic fiction to collapse the inner/outer distinction in faith, arguing that authentic belief is legible only through embodied, subversive action, and that the fictional 'alternative universe' functions as a mirror that reveals the reader's actual ideological universe.

     what was truly amazing, what was miraculous about this meal, was that when they had finished the massive banquet there were not even enough crumbs left to fill a starving person's hand.

132. #132

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.71

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic affirmation of the Resurrection (and of Christ's lordship) is not an intellectual/propositional act but an incarnated, lived praxis—and that orthodox doctrinal belief can itself become a barrier to this affirmation; it then reinforces this via a parabolic inversion of the Prodigal Son, where waiting, desire, and unresolved lack become the site of genuine fidelity.

     for many today, belief in the Resurrection simply acts as a guarantee of eternal life and cosmic meaning. In this way, the belief itself is divorced from action and acts as nothing more than a type of divine insurance policy.

133. #133

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter029.html_page_163"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a parabolic/theological mode to argue that divine wisdom, when progressively distilled, reduces to a single operative word—"love"—and that this unconditional love is demonstrated precisely toward figures of failure (Judas), subverting the reader's tendency toward self-righteous identification with the virtuous.

     we find it all too easy to condemn the first and praise the second without asking whether our own actions are closer to the one we have rejected

134. #134

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.169

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love is the irreducible ground of all theological, ethical, and political structures, and that these structures become oppressive when severed from that ground; the parable then enacts an epistemological pivot—subjective transformation trumps institutional or empirical verification of miraculous reality.

     But the Pharisees began to laugh. 'Old man, meeting Jesus has caused you to lose your mind. You had to be carried into this room by friends, you still stumble and fall like a fool. You are as blind today as the day you were born.'

135. #135

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter019.html_page_107"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely universal atheism — one that rejects all possible concepts of God in advance — is not opposed to but is rather the most rigorous expression of the Judeo-Christian apophatic tradition, because God, as that which utterly transcends all conceptual capture, demands the rejection of every idolatrous objectification; the second parable then dramatizes this logic by showing that alignment with "God" cannot be instrumentalized by any power, since God's involvement structurally sides with the oppressed.

     The thoughtful believer is not questioning or denying the value or importance of positive descriptions (theism), but simply refusing to let those provisional, fractured descriptions take on the guise of absolute authority.

136. #136

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.122

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the Marxist concept of fetishism to argue that belief is primarily enacted through practice and context rather than conscious conviction, and that genuine change requires transforming the symbolic/material environment in which subjects are embedded, not merely altering intellectual assent.

     While we may disavow these values intellectually, they continue to seep into our lives. While the message can be disbelieved and even ridiculed at a conscious level, it simultaneously commands our obedience at the level of our action.

137. #137

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.26

     part i

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

     'Je sais bien, mais quand même . . . (I know very well, but nevertheless . . .)' is a quasiuniversal paradigm of the post-Enlightenment belief

138. #138

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.114

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the comic object functions as the material subsistence of the symbolic Other's suspension, identifying it with objet petit a as a paradoxical "effect-cause" rather than a mere effect, and distinguishes genuine comedy (which produces the Thing as objectified surplus) from derision (which veils the Thing's comedy by prematurely exhibiting its obscene underside). She then extends this to Marivaux, where the comic mechanism operates through pure structural difference rather than surplus-object.

     'showing it' might be a way of protecting and veiling something else: the sacred mystery of a given symbolic structure, put in jeopardy by this or that 'comic charade.'

139. #139

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.217

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the phallus functions as the signifier of castration not because anatomy is destiny, but because an anatomical peculiarity comes to incarnate a pre-existing symbolic impasse — the constitutive gap between body and enjoyment — and psychoanalysis, by disclosing this contingent linkage, dethrones the phallus from necessity to contingency and reveals human sexuality as itself the problematic junction of nature and culture.

     Their insistence is definitely symptomatic. It is symptomatic because it involves a radical disavowal of what was really ground-breaking in the psychoanalytic discovery of sexuality.

140. #140

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.85

     *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter02.xhtml_pg_82" class="pagebreak" title="82"></span>**The Immanence of Reduction, or: Lacking (Animal) Lack**

     Theoretical move: By reading Marx through Hegel's dialectic of the human-animal distinction, the passage argues that capitalist alienation reduces the worker to a figure who lacks even the animal's lack—knowing his limitations but not knowing that he knows them—thus producing an "unconscious lack" that forecloses resistance from within ideology itself.

     he knows his limitations, he knows he is not what political economy assumes he is, but he does not know that he knows it, or knows very well but acts nonetheless as if he does not know.

141. #141

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.42

     *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter01.xhtml_pg_36" class="pagebreak" title="36"></span>**Antagonism and Universality**

     Theoretical move: Universality is not a neutral container for particular cultural identities but is inscribed within them as their inner antagonism; postcolonial "fluid ontology" frameworks that privilege the multiplicity of particular communities systematically disavow this universality, and this disavowal is itself the flip side of their failure to recognize the internal antagonisms that traverse every community.

     the link between Srinivasan's disavowal of universality (the ontological primacy of particular cultures/communities) and his ignoring of the inner antagonisms constitutive of particular communities: they are two sides of the same misrecognition

142. #142

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.425

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that an "empty ritual" — one whose traditional content is lost and whose artificiality is fully acknowledged — can be more authentically operative than an immersive, "authentic" one, and uses this case to construct a four-term Greimasian matrix of ethical gestures organized around the axes of negative/positive and ritual/non-ritualized act, while also distinguishing hegemonic false universality from the authentic universality embodied by those excluded from the hegemonic order.

     the fact that we know it is all rubbish in no way diminishes its efficiency

143. #143

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.457

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_43_beckett_as_the_writer_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-162"></span>Beckett as the Writer of Abstraction

     Theoretical move: Žižek reads Beckett's procedure of abstraction—the gap between the "material of experience" and the "material of expression"—as the formal operation by which the Real/Impossible interrupts any seamless passage to social totality, and argues that this same logic of the almost-closed circle (humanitarian charity reproduces what it opposes) can only be broken by a real-impossible act.

     you are part of the same hypocritical game, enjoying the spectacle of suffering which makes you feel good in your solidarity with the victim

144. #144

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.255

     **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.

     it is easy to conceive such a multiplication of modernities as a form of fetishist disavowal

145. #145

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.310

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_31_the_ethical_mobius_strip.xhtml_IDX-326"></span>The Ethical <span id="scholium_31_the_ethical_mobius_strip.xhtml_IDX-606"></span>Möbius Strip

     Theoretical move: The Möbius strip structure of the ethical-political—where opposites coincide such that following either liberal humanism or emancipatory engagement to its conclusion reverses into the other—reveals that contemporary ideology presents oppressive unfreedom as freedom and destruction as remedy, making the Heydrich example the paradigm case where "universal" ethical action requires overcoming immediate compassion toward the neighbor.

     Soros personifies financial speculation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy

146. #146

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **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 > [<span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_p259" class="pagebreak" title="259"></span>A Snout in Plato’s Cave](#contents.xhtml_ahd18)

     Theoretical move: By reinterpreting Plato's cave through topology (Möbius strip, Klein bottle) and the Lacanian Real, Žižek argues that the Self is a fragile surface between two outsides, that authentic emancipation requires a dialectics of master and volunteer structurally homologous to the analytic relation, and that capitalist "freedom" and emancipatory "servitude" are two inversions of the same Möbius-strip reversal of freedom/servitude.

     In today's cynical functioning of capitalism, I can know very well what I am doing and continue to do it

147. #147

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.104

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The “Death of Truth”

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the liberal diagnosis of a "death of truth" misidentifies the problem: what has died is not truth per se but a hegemonic "big Lie" that provided ideological stability; the only genuine path to universal truth runs through a partial, engaged standpoint committed to emancipation, not through pseudo-objective liberal neutrality.

     the most efficient lies are lies with truth, lies which reproduce only factual data.

148. #148

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.408

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic ethical action—whether Karen's autonomous withdrawal, Morck's self-sacrificial compassion, or the post-tribulationist "impure" believer—requires abandoning the safety of a big Other and confronting the Real in its senseless indifference; only a "Christian atheist" who acts without divine guarantee can be truly and unconditionally ethical, with Christianity's core being the only consequent atheism and atheists the only true believers.

     Joe tells her that he believes it's not true but, on Karen's insistence, he nonetheless asks her if it's true or not … Joe's asking the question is the second act of betrayal masked, again, as an ethical gesture.

149. #149

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.89

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Buddha, Kant, <span id="scholium_11_buddha_kant_husserl.xhtml_IDX-235"></span>Husserl

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Husserl's phenomenological epoché enacts a "splitting of the Ego" structurally homologous to Buddhist anatman and, paradoxically, to a perverse de-subjectivization — the subject becoming the transparent instrument of the Other's will — thereby exposing the politically dangerous underside of any stance that dissolves subjectivity's constitutive hysteria.

     we are here back at the idea of fetishist disavowal, of je sais bien, mais quand même…

150. #150

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time

     Theoretical move: Sexuality is reframed as a formal rather than content-based phenomenon: an activity becomes "sexualized" when it is captured in a distorted circular temporality identical to Freud's death drive, while Sade's attempt to eliminate that circularity paradoxically de-eroticizes sexuality into a post-human mechanism.

     the closet-Kantian Marquis de Sade, and the paradox is that, in his work, the practice of search for sexual pleasures gets desexualized

151. #151

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.341

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues for a "Platonic materialism" in which the Idea is not pre-given but comes-to-be through distortion of reality; it then applies this logic—via the Lacanian claim that the Real appears as a fiction within a fiction—to politics (Europe, Trump/Kim) and to the structure of fantasy, showing that the impossible "impossible Real" is the virtual point of reference that both grounds and undermines actual fantasies and realities.

     The stake of this (politically and aesthetically) disgusting idea is, of course, to obfuscate the basic social antagonism

152. #152

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.205

     **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: By reading Brecht's Marxist parody of Kant on sexual contracts alongside Marx's structural analysis of labor exploitation, Žižek argues that the MeToo movement's privileging of structural weakness over objective weakness reproduces a ruthless power logic that reduces sex entirely to power, foreclosing love and reinscribing the very domination it claims to contest — while the only genuine path to emancipation paradoxically runs through radical commodification (the Möbius-strip reversal).

     It goes without saying that very few actual MeToo members are ready to spell out this radical implication … the large majority are not ready to claim that a sexual act is as such an act of masculine violence … However, the implication … clearly functions as the unspoken presupposition

153. #153

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.445

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_42_prokofievs_travels.xhtml_IDX-1802"></span>Prokofiev’s Travels

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Philippe Petit's high-wire act and Prokofiev's return to the USSR as parallel figures of "the Act" — a gesture combining meticulous planning with abyssal purposelessness — to argue that simple beauty produced under conditions of terror is not mere escapism but ideology at its most efficient, precisely because it is "homogenizable" (not identical) with the dominant order while retaining its own coherent artistic greatness.

     although it would be stupid to claim that Buddhist spirituality is homogenous with global capitalism, it is definitely homogenizable with it.

154. #154

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.51

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism](#contents.xhtml_ahd3)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Sadean dream of a "second death" as radical external annihilation misrecognises what Lacan (and Hegel) identify as already primordial: the subject IS the second death, the immanent negativity/inconsistency internal to Substance itself; and this same error—presupposing an ontologically consistent Whole—recurs in Western Marxism (Ilyenkov, Bloch), while Adorno's "negative dialectics" and "primacy of the objective" approximate but do not fully reach the Lacanian distinction between symbolically-mediated reality and the impossible Real.

     for all its wantonness and havoc the Sadeian will-to-extinction is premised on a fetishistic denial of the death drive

155. #155

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.57

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [<span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_p57" class="pagebreak" title="57"></span>The Margin of Radical Uncertainty](#contents.xhtml_ahd4)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that radical materialism requires rejecting both "objective reality" and consistent subjectivity, identifying the Real not with nature-in-itself but with the crack/gap in every ontological edifice—a deficiency shared by transcendental reason and reality itself—which Freud/Lacan name 'sexuality,' and whose trans-ontological elaboration requires a concept of 'less than nothing' formalized through the Klein bottle as the minimal definition of the Absolute.

     Although we vaguely know about this, we mostly ignore (or, rather, neutralize) this knowledge.

156. #156

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.407

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that true ethical universality requires a militant, partisan stance rather than neutral tolerance, and that the excess of subjectivity (Hegel's "night of the world") is the condition of redemption rather than the source of evil — evil properly resides in the "ontologization" of excess into a global cosmic order. This is illustrated through a reading of *The Children's Hour*, where the structure of false appearance reveals that truth has the structure of a fiction, and that an authentic ethical act consists in breaking out of the closed social space rather than seeking reconciliation within it.

     Mrs. Tilford's apology, sincere as it is, is thus the first act of betrayal masked as an ethical act.

157. #157

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian perspective on ideology inverts the Marxist critique: where Marxism attacks false universalization, Lacanian analysis targets over-rapid historicization that blinds us to the Real kernel that returns as the same. The homology between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment (objet petit a) shows that enjoyment is constitutively an excess—a structural lack that drives the capitalist machine—and that Marx's own failure to think this paradox explains both his vulgar evolutionist formulations and the historical irony of 'real socialism'.

     All this, of course, Marx 'knows very well … and yet': and yet, in the crucial formulation in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, he proceeds as if he does not know it.

158. #158

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek, via Sohn-Rethel's concept of 'real abstraction', argues that the commodity-form harbours an unconscious of the transcendental subject: the formal categories of pure reason (Kantian a priori) are already at work in the act of commodity exchange before thought arrives at them, making the symbolic order the external 'Other Scene' where thought's form is staged in advance—and this structural misrecognition is the fundamental dimension of ideology.

     How tempting to recall here the formula of fetishistic disavowal: 'I know very well, but still . . .'.

159. #159

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology is not false consciousness about reality but reality itself insofar as it is sustained by non-knowledge; this is mapped onto Marx's "invention of the symptom" — the logic by which a particular element (e.g. labour-power, the proletariat) simultaneously belongs to and subverts a universal (freedom, equivalent exchange), with commodity fetishism explained as the structural displacement of fetishism from interpersonal domination to relations between things at the passage from feudalism to capitalism.

     the appearance is exactly opposite: A seems to relate to B as if, for B, to be an equivalent of A would not be a 'reflexive determination' (Marx) of A — that is as if B would already in itself be the equivalent of A

160. #160

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology cannot be fully grasped through discourse analysis (interpellation/symbolic identification) alone; its ultimate support is a pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment structured in fantasy, and therefore ideology critique must be supplemented by a logic of enjoyment that 'traverses' social fantasy and identifies with the symptom — demonstrated through the case of anti-Semitism, where 'the Jew' functions as a fetish embodying the structural impossibility of 'Society'.

     it is as if in the figure of the Jew this impossibility had acquired a positive, palpable existence - and that is why it marks the eruption of enjoyment in the social field

161. #161

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that 'going through the fantasy' reveals the subject as the void/lack in the Other—not a hidden substantial Essence—and that appearance deceives precisely by pretending to deceive (dissimulating dissimulation). This is then mapped onto the Hegelian substance/subject distinction, exemplified through Stalinist and Yugoslav ideological deception, before pivoting to the Kantian Beauty/Sublimity dialectic as a matrix for reading Greek, Jewish, and Christian religion.

     everybody knows that nobody believes in it; but still, the appearance is to be maintained at any price

162. #162

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order is constituted around an impossible Real kernel, requiring a contingent element to embody its structural necessity; this logic generates a quartet of "subject presumed to…" figures (know, believe, enjoy, desire) that articulate the unconscious as the gap between form and content—illustrated through Hitchcock and Mozart.

     Each participant reasons as follows: 'I'm not naive and stupid, I know very well that there is more than enough toilet paper in the shops; but there are probably some naive and stupid people who believe these rumours... so even if I know very well that there is enough, it would be a good idea to go and buy a lot!'

163. #163

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology operates not at the level of false consciousness (knowledge) but as an unconscious fantasy structuring social reality itself — a "fetishistic inversion" that persists even under cynical distance — and supports this with a Lacanian account of belief as radically exterior and materialized in social practice rather than interior and psychological.

     they know very well that their idea of Freedom is masking a particular form of exploitation, but they still continue to follow this idea of Freedom.

164. #164

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the classical ideology-critique model (false consciousness, "they do not know it but they are doing it") is insufficient against cynical reason; the deeper, untouched level of ideology is that of ideological fantasy, which operates not in knowing but in doing—subjects are "fetishists in practice, not in theory"—so that the illusion is inscribed in social reality itself, not merely in consciousness.

     on an everyday level, the individuals know very well that there are relations between people behind the relations between things. The problem is that in their social activity itself, in what they are doing, they are acting as if money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth as such.

165. #165

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.242

     Russell Sbriglia

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian sublime—understood as the Idea's immanence to the phenomenal as pure negativity—converges with Lacanian sublimation (elevating an object to the dignity of the Thing via anamorphosis/objet petit a), and uses this convergence to reread Ahab's transcendentalism in Moby Dick as a fetishistic disavowal of the nothingness of the Ideal rather than a genuine pursuit of the transcendent.

     Ahab does know very well that there's naught beyond the phenomenal but nonetheless uses transcendentalism as a means of disowning or disavowing this knowledge.

166. #166

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.180

     Who Cares?

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis must be positioned against new materialism not to defend anthropocentrism but to supply what new materialism lacks: a theorization of the Real as the consequence of castration (not a pre-discursive thing-in-itself), and of sexuality as an "ontological lapse" that marks the specificity of human being without grounding a hierarchy—thereby enabling an ethics of the nonhuman other that new materialism's own "democracy of objects" forecloses.

     New materialism's refusal to think this specificity therefore amounts to a refusal to avow the particularly human phenomenon of castration, a fetishistic disavowal that, as such, cannot but remain attached to and reproduce the very symptom it means to undermine.

167. #167

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.253

     Russell Sbriglia > Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes section providing bibliographic citations and brief theoretical glosses for an extended Lacanian reading of Moby Dick, touching on fetishistic disavowal, das Ding, objet petit a, extimacy, castration, and critiques of object-oriented/flat ontology from a subject-centred perspective.

     What Cavell calls 'disowning knowledge' is in many regards proximate to fetishistic disavowal.

168. #168

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.251

     Russell Sbriglia > Notes

     Theoretical move: This is a scholarly endnotes section providing bibliographic and argumentative scaffolding for a chapter on Melville, the sublime, and the Hegel-Lacan nexus; it is non-substantive in itself but indexes several load-bearing theoretical concepts (the sublime, fetishistic disavowal, das Ding, Appearance/Suprasensible) as they operate across Kant, Hegel, Žižek, and Lacan.

     I am here invoking the language of fetishistic disavowal, the classic formulation of which, as identified by Octave Mannoni, is 'I know very well, but all the same . . .'

169. #169

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

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

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

     new materialism rehearses a convoluted version of the refrain that Octave Mannoni made famous in his account of the fetishist's disavowal of the knowledge of castration: 'I know well, but all the same . . .'

170. #170

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.65

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **A Utopia Without Disavowal** > The Excesses of W¡/d ot Heorl

     Theoretical move: McGowan reads *Wild at Heart* as a filmic staging of unrestrained jouissance: by denying any space of narrative normalcy against which excess could be measured, Lynch shows that a world without lack produces not liberation but suffocation, figured through the perverse authority of a maternal superego and an anal father of enjoyment who command the subject to enjoy.

     A Utopia Without Disavowal

171. #171

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.91

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

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that fantasy is not an escape from reality but a solution to the torment of desire—it stages a determinate answer to the enigma of the Other's desire, thereby producing the very "sense of reality" that we mistake for the real world, while the Real is revealed precisely at the traumatic transition-point between desire and fantasy.

     This fantasy cannot allow Fred to see himself as so innocent as to be a dupe, but neither can it allow him to see himself as in any way culpable.

172. #172

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.10

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

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that mainstream cinema structurally produces a voyeuristic illusion of safe distance for the spectator, but this distance is always already undermined by the fact that the film's structure is organized around the spectator's desire—a condition Lynch's films uniquely make visible rather than disavow. The spectator's imaginary proximity is thus a mediated fiction that conceals their full enmeshment in the cinematic event.

     this is precisely what most films—and, just as importantly, most spectators—attempt to disavow.

173. #173

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.23

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

     Theoretical move: Fantasy in *Eraserhead* is theorized not merely as ideological veil (obscuring production) but as the very mechanism that exposes the subject's foundational sacrifice of enjoyment — a sacrifice of nothing — which constitutes subjectivity itself and fuels capitalist productivity; this dual function (obscuring/revealing) revalues both fantasy and avant-garde critique.

     Fantasy distorts the subject's initial act of sacrifice by making it seem as if we have sacrificed something substantial rather than nothing. But this distortion is at the same time a revelation.

174. #174

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.49

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

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

     The depiction of the Harkonnen world forces us to see the aspect of our fantasy that we would like to disavow, and yet it is integral to the way that fantasy delivers on its promises.

175. #175

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.64

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **A Utopia Without Disavowal** > Lost in Fantasy

     Theoretical move: By reading *Wild at Heart* as *The Wizard of Oz* without Kansas—a world entirely subsumed by fantasy—McGowan argues that when the public realm collapses into unrelenting excess, the structural gap that makes fantasy operative disappears, revealing that fantasy depends on the world of desire (and its constitutive lack/absence) rather than on the proliferation of enjoyment-images; the truly fantasmatic requires a commitment to fantasy's non-specular, impossible-object dimension beyond its visual form.

     A Utopia Without Disavowal

176. #176

     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.

     Betty and Rita find themselves caught up in it anyway, able to disavow this knowledge. They experience the enjoyment of the impossible object in the voice.

177. #177

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.13

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

     Theoretical move: The Brechtian/Godardian aesthetic of spectator distancing, while targeting the Imaginary in favour of the Symbolic, fails on two counts: it cannot eliminate desire entirely (the spectator must remain implicated), and it misses the Real gap within ideology that every fantasy both covers and, potentially, radicalises—a gap that Lynch's cinema, unlike Godard's, actually exploits.

     Subjects adopt a position of cynical distance in which the transparency of the game becomes part of the game itself.

178. #178

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.63

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **A Utopia Without Disavowal**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fantasy's value lies not in its success but in its failure: it is only at the point where fantasy fails—where desire re-emerges as an irreducible stain—that we gain access to an otherwise inaccessible object. An absolute, non-half-hearted commitment to fantasy paradoxically restores the very desire that fantasy initially seemed to betray.

     We most often think of the turn to fantasy as a betrayal of desire, as a way of compromising on the purity of desire.

179. #179

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.122

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for the introduction of a book on David Lynch, providing scholarly citations and brief elaborations on concepts including the gaze, fantasy, desire, normality, and the uncanny in relation to film theory and psychoanalysis. It is primarily apparatus rather than original theoretical argument.

     people don't believe it, or don't care, and yet act accordingly

180. #180

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.51

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

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

     The result is the massive disavowal of the film's achievement—a disavowal that extends even to Lynch himself.

181. #181

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.26

     part i

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

     'Je sais bien, mais quand même . . . (I know very well, but nevertheless . . .)' is a quasi-universal paradigm of the post-Enlightenment belief

182. #182

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.217

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's insistence on the phallus as the *signifier* of castration—rather than its anatomical embodiment—transforms phallic necessity into contingency: by spelling out the link between an anatomical peculiarity and the symbolic deadlock (the constitutive gap between body and enjoyment), psychoanalysis moves the phallus from the impossible-necessary register into the contingent, thereby dethroning it and exposing sexual difference as defined not by presence/absence of castration but by the mode of relation to its universal signifier.

     it involves a radical disavowal of what was really ground-breaking in the psychoanalytic discovery of sexuality

183. #183

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.360

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that "culture war is class war in a displaced mode": the ideological coding of economic class antagonism as moral/cultural struggle (US populist conservatism) is not mere false consciousness or contingent hegemonic articulation, but is structurally overdetermined by class struggle as the "concrete universal" that determines how all other antagonisms (race, gender, religion) are articulated—while liberal multiculturalism, by seeking to translate antagonisms into differences, itself functions as an upper-class ideological tool.

     'I don't really believe in it, it's just part of my culture' seems in effect to be the predominant mode of the disavowed/displaced belief characteristic of our times.

184. #184

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.313

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Jouissance as a Political Category

     Theoretical move: The Matrix trilogy is read as a political allegory in which jouissance functions as the ultimate stake of both oppression and liberation: the Matrix's true need is not energy but human jouissance, making any genuine revolution a transformation in the regime of jouissance-appropriation rather than a mere exit from illusion into reality.

     I know it's just a virtual illusion, but I don't care, since it tastes real.

185. #185

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.307

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that power is constitutively obscene—its "truth" is that it always already functions as an illegal excess—and uses this diagnosis to press the question of whether a structurally new Master Signifier (Lacan's *vers un signifiant nouveau*) is possible, or whether every revolution merely returns to the same obscene supplement, a structural problem shared by Badiou's and Miller's frameworks.

     in Western democratic societies in which the disappearance of the figure of the Master, far from abolishing domination, is sustained by unprecedented forms of disavowed control and domination

186. #186

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.111

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

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

     this 'reification' of a social relation in a person cannot be dismissed as a simple 'fetishist misperception'

187. #187

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.365

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

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

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

188. #188

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.36

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegelian concrete universality is not a peaceful synthesis of particularities but is itself the site of an irreducible antagonism or "inherent gap of the One," such that particular forms are failed attempts to resolve the universal's self-contradiction — a logic that surpasses both Kantian moral abstraction and Laclau's externally opposed logics of difference and antagonism.

     the disavowal of castration is represented as the multiplication of the phallus-representatives (a multitude of phalluses signals castration, the lack of the one), it is easy to conceive such a multiplication of modernities as a form of fetishist disavowal

189. #189

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.297

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Biopolitical Parallax

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that late capitalism's shift from desire to demand (and from Oedipal to post-Oedipal subjectivity) converges with biopolitical control as two faces of the University Discourse; the correct psychoanalytic response is not conservative re-Oedipalization but a full assumption of the Other's nonexistence, enabling a demand no longer addressed to the Other — a mode that coincides with the drive.

     In a disavowal similar to that of the few remaining 'orthodox' Marxists, it continues to act as if nothing has really changed

190. #190

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.241

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > From Physics to Design?

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses Dennett's dual-ontology (physics/design) and intentional-stance framework as a foil to argue that consciousness is constitutively negative—its power lies in abstraction, delay, and the ability to veto—thereby mobilising Hegel's infinite negative power of Understanding against eliminativist and adaptationist accounts of mind, while exposing the covert teleology (quasi-Kantian regulative idea, fetishistic disavowal) lurking in Darwinian naturalism.

     No wonder Damasio resorts directly to the formula of fetishist disavowal—we know, but nonetheless . . .

191. #191

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.383

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby's Smile

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" operates as a formal gesture of refusal—a Versagung analogous to Sygne's No—directed not against hegemonic power but against the very 'rumspringa' of ideological resistance (charity, activism, inner distance) that reproduces the system; and he exposes Western Buddhism as the perfect ideological supplement to virtual capitalism precisely because it licenses participation-with-distance.

     today's ideal subject says to himself: 'I am well aware that the whole business of social competition and material success is just an empty game, that my true Self is elsewhere!'

192. #192

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.61

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy > ". . . ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore"

     Theoretical move: By reading Marx's account of capital's self-movement through Hegel's substance-to-subject passage and Lacan's desire/drive distinction, Žižek argues that capitalism operates at three levels—subjective experience, objective exploitation, and an "objective deception" (the unconscious fantasy of self-generating capital)—and that the shift from desire to drive requires distinguishing objet petit a as lost object (desire) from objet petit a as loss itself (drive), while redefining the death drive as an excess of life rather than a thrust toward annihilation.

     the underlying belief, disavowed and just practiced, is thus directly asserted. It is crucial how, in this elevation of money to the status of the only true commodity... Marx resorts to the precise Pauline definition of Christians as 'inwardly circumcised Jews'

193. #193

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.369

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

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

     in public, everyone pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence

194. #194

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.346

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the opposition between liberal cynicism and fundamentalism is a false one masking a deeper shared pathology—both substitute direct knowledge for authentic belief—while the structural logic of the symbolic order (fetishistic disavowal, the big Other, les non-dupes errent) requires a "third term" to reveal the true antagonism beneath ideological surface oppositions, and that "the truth has the structure of a fiction" applies to political, aesthetic, and theological domains alike.

     This functioning involves the structure of fetishist disavowal: 'I know very well that things are the way I see them [that this person is a corrupt weakling], but nonetheless I treat him with respect, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him.'

195. #195

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.352

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

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

     Niels Bohr...also provided the perfect example of how a fetishist disavowal of belief works in ideology: seeing a horseshoe on his door...Bohr snapped back: 'I don't believe in it either; I have it there because I was told that it works even if one doesn't believe in it!'

196. #196

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.331

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'free choice' is always already a meta-choice whose conditions are ideologically pre-structured, and uses the Amish rumspringa as a model for how academic 'radical' distance from the state functions as a reproductive mechanism of hegemony rather than genuine resistance; against Critchley's ethics-first localism, Žižek proposes a parallax shift that reveals 'resistance' as feeding the power-machine, and authentic revolution as a 'Must' rather than an 'ought.'

     this belief is 'tolerated' as their idiosyncratic personal choice/opinion; the moment they present it publicly as what it is for them (a matter of substantial belonging), they are accused of 'fundamentalism.'

197. #197

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.358

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek proposes a fourth, materialist reading of the crucifixion (God repaying his own debt to humanity) to expose the theological truth concealed by the three standard versions, and argues that only a comprehensive materialism—not liberal tolerance or religious fundamentalism—can sustain a genuinely ascetic, militant ethics capable of judging fundamentalism on its own terms.

     Instead of trying to redeem the pure ethical core of a religion against its political instrumentalizations, we should ruthlessly criticize this very core

198. #198

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.405

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James > 3The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances several interlocking theoretical moves: it articulates drive as an ethical/metaphysical category distinguishable from instinct; critically probes Badiou's four truth-procedures (science, art, politics, love) by exposing their hidden asymmetry (three plus one); and raises the question of whether every order of Being is the disavowal of a founding Event, linking Badiou's event-theory to Lacanian notions of the Real and inscription.

     is every order of Being the disavowal-obliteration of a founding Event, a 'perverse' je sais bien, mais quand même..., a reduction-reinscription of the Event into the causal order of Being?

199. #199

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.220

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

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the "gap" between consciousness and raw nature should not be bridged but properly formulated, and deploys Metzinger's phenomenal self-model (PSM) theory to show that the Self exists only as a transparent representational illusion—a structure homologous to Hegelian-Marxian fetishist misrecognition—such that the ego is constitutively méconnaissance, and the Self, like the Freudian symptom, exists only insofar as its generative mechanism remains opaque to it.

     here we are back at the idea of fetishist disavowal, of je sais bien, mais quand même...: You cannot believe in it . . . the SMT is a theory of which you cannot be convinced, in principle

200. #200

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.223

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

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

     this transparency, however, is not the same as the 'fetishist' transparency of the generative process eclipsed by its product

201. #201

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.200

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

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

     what disavowals do such integrations involve; can I really accept that the industrially fabricated pill I hold in my hand puts me in contact with God?

202. #202

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.60

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Marxian "parallax" consists in the irreducible, non-synthesisable gap between the logic of economy (commodity-form as socio-transcendental a priori) and the logic of politics (antagonism), such that the bracketing which produces each domain is not merely epistemological but inscribed in "real abstraction" — and that post-Marxist "pure politics" (Badiou, Rancière, etc.) mistakes by reducing economy to an ontic sphere while Karatani's Kantianism fails to go beyond a transcendental X that leaves the fetishism of Power intact.

     'I know very well that this is an ordinary person just like me, but nonetheless . . . (while he is in power, he becomes an instrument of a transcendent force; Power speaks and acts through him)!'

203. #203

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.111

     **The Banality of Orson Welles**

     Theoretical move: By reading Welles's *Touch of Evil* and *The Magnificent Ambersons*, McGowan argues that the objet petit a is not a mysterious, elusive object but a banal, simply absent one, and that cinema of desire—by refusing fantasmatic supplements—can transform lack from a barrier into a source of enjoyment, teaching the subject to desire for its own sake.

     The films of Orson Welles disabuse us of this fantasmatic deception, demanding that we recognize the emptiness of the object where we anticipate its richness.

204. #204

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.59

     5

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

     the link between wealth and obscenity, which is a link that capitalist ideology continually works to disavow

205. #205

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.122

     15

     Theoretical move: Italian neorealism politicizes desire by refusing fantasmatic resolution—whether fascist or capitalist—thereby constituting the spectator as a desiring subject whose political engagement is grounded in the impossibility of a stable object, and Lacanian concepts of fantasy, desire, and the lost/impossible object are deployed to explain both the films' form and their ideological critique.

     Fascism is itself a fantasy formation that envisions overcoming the antagonism that motivates desire.

206. #206

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.56

     **Early Explorations of Fantasy**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that early cinema's fantasmatic dimension — exemplified by Eisenstein's montage and Chaplin's mise-en-scène — politically exposes the obscene jouissance embedded in social authority and capitalist production, demonstrating that filmic fantasy can interrupt ideology by unmasking the excess it must constitutively disavow.

     Ideology depends on an excessive enjoyment that it must constitutively disavow and hide, but the cinema of fantasy enacts a process of unmasking it.

207. #207

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.255

     29 > **25. The Politics of the Cinema of Intersection**

     Theoretical move: This passage (an endnotes section) makes several subsidiary theoretical moves: it critiques Butler's "resignifying" as ideologically captured agency that never challenges the underlying structure, aligns capitalist democracy with fundamentalism as sharing the same logic, and reads Tarkovsky's use of color/fantasy against Hegelian thinking-without-hope and conservative nostalgia.

     The attractiveness of traditional values derives from the fallen position from which we see them, not from the values themselves.

208. #208

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.65

     6

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Spike Lee deploys cinematic excess not as aesthetic failure but as a formal strategy for making visible the fantasmatic enjoyment that structures social reality, thereby forcing spectators to confront the gaze rather than disavow it—and that this exposure of fantasy's role in racism constitutes a more fundamental political intervention than any articulated political program.

     which allows the subject to disavow its own enjoyment of this excess

209. #209

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.182

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love, conceived as drive rather than desire, operates through a "time warp" logic in which the impossible Real happens rather than remaining structurally inaccessible; this enables love to "humanize jouissance" through a sublimation-as-desublimation that dislocates the sublime object from its source of enjoyment, thereby making jouissance itself an object of desire.

     it disavows what has already happened by trying to submit it to the existing transcendental scheme of the subject's fantasy.

210. #210

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.4

     **Anxiety**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary compilation that defines and elaborates several Lacanian and Hegelian concepts — Anxiety, Analysand, Appearance, Sublation (Aufhebung), the Barred subject, Beautiful Soul, Beyond (Jenseits), and Castration — drawing on Žižek, Fink, McGowan, and Kalkavage to show how each concept performs a specific theoretical function within the broader structure of desire, subjectivity, and dialectical mediation.

     I know very well it's a fake, but nonetheless, I let myself be emotionally affected.

211. #211

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.31

     **Fantasy** > **Fetish**

     Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the fetish as a structural mechanism that enables subjects to simultaneously know and not-know about lack and castration, arguing that commodity fetishism and Freudian fetishistic disavowal are mutually reinforcing, and that the fetish's efficacy depends on its performative effect remaining opaque to the subject.

     Fetishistic disavowal enables the subject to know and not to know about symbolic castration at the same time.

212. #212

     Theory Keywords · Various

     **Fantasy** > **Fetishistic Disavowal**

     Theoretical move: Žižek's concept of fetishistic disavowal is deployed to argue that capitalist ideology is uniquely powerful because it displaces belief onto commodities themselves, so that the cynical postmodern subject who disavows belief is nevertheless structurally caught in ideological capture - a move that links Marxist commodity fetishism to Lacanian logic of the Other as the site of belief.

     the cynical postmodern subject of global capitalism is actually a believer, unwittingly caught in an ideological mechanism...capitalist ideology is stronger than any other preceding ideology because it disavows belief, transferring it onto the fetish-commodity

213. #213

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.38

     **Fantasy** > **Identity**

     Theoretical move: The passage develops a cluster of arguments around Identity, Ideology, and Identification: Identity is always externally determined and thus structurally unfree (Kant/McGowan); Ideology is not false consciousness but the social reality that conceals its own antagonistic kernel (Žižek/Lacan); and excess within narrative is internal to signification rather than external to it, making ideological subversion possible only from within the structure it exceeds.

     ideology is particularly effective over those who count on a degree of imaginary dis-identification from the ideological predicament–this being especially true of the cynical postmodern subject who believes precisely through disbelief.

214. #214

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.14

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > Real Communism

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's communism is grounded not in a positive vision of emancipated production but in privileging the encounter with the Real and the commons over capitalist fantasy, and that this political project is underwritten by a Hegelian-Christian logic of divine self-division and a theory of belief-through-the-Other that exposes the disavowed religious investment in liberal ideology.

     the fascination with the fundamentalist terrorist is a disavowal of our own belief and a disavowal of our hidden investment in the Other who really believes in and through us.

215. #215

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.19

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table-of-contents-style summary of contributed chapters in an edited volume responding to Žižek; it maps the theoretical terrain each contributor covers but makes no single theoretical argument of its own, functioning as an editorial overview rather than a substantive intervention.

     we may see the contradiction within ideology but then disavow what we have seen

216. #216

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.230

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek defends the Lacanian notion of sexual difference against Butler's historicist critique by arguing that "primordial repression" (Ur-Verdrängung) is not a trans-historical a priori but a retroactively posited presupposition of any social space, and that the gap between form and content must be reflected back into content itself — a move that grounds his concept of "inherent transgression" as the structural supplement that constitutes rather than merely polices the public sphere.

     the libidinal economy of the army community itself relies on a thwarted/disavowed homosexuality as the key component of the soldiers' male-bonding.

217. #217

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > Universally Antagonistic

     Theoretical move: Žižek's political project is grounded in a reconceptualization of universality as constitutive antagonism rather than totalizing wholeness: particulars, identities, and social structures emerge from and are sustained by a universal antagonism that can never be resolved, making emancipation consist not in overcoming antagonism but in insisting on it—a position figured topologically through the Möbius strip and the objet a as the excremental singular point that embodies the universal.

     The conservative preserves the image of the whole through the fetishistic disavowal of the antagonism.

218. #218

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.313

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against reducing the Russia/Ukraine conflict and Western cancel culture to psychotic foreclosure or clashing paranoiac singularities, instead mapping both phenomena onto Lacan's University Discourse and formulas of sexuation, while insisting that symbolic communication (the inverted message) and fetishistic disavowal—not psychosis—are the operative mechanisms.

     the mechanism at work here is not a direct psychotic foreclosure but a form of fetishism, a fetishist disavowal in which knowledge itself can work as a fetish

219. #219

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > The Violent Issue

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's concept of violence is properly self-directed (striking at one's own ideological investment) rather than outwardly aggressive, distinguishes subjective from objective/structural violence to expose liberalism's ideological complicity with capitalism, and contends that Žižek himself does not go far enough in theorizing how the self-destructive violence of the radical act can be integrated into a conception of emancipatory governance.

     our outrage about the most visible forms of violence can serve to support hidden and objective forms of violence by providing them ideological cover.

220. #220

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.161

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Neroni](#contents.xhtml_ch6a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses self-critique to advance three corrective moves on his standard positions: (1) the disintegration of the big Other is a real social danger, not merely a theoretical non-existence; (2) jouissance is the irreducible motor of ideology that neither class-interest analysis nor discourse-hegemony models can capture; (3) the state must be theorized not only as an instrument of class oppression but as the material embodiment of a 'real illusion' of common protection, as revealed by the pandemic.

     state authority appears and functions as a neutral space above particular groups; this neutrality is illusory, of course, but it is a 'real illusion' embodied in a series of material social and ideological apparatuses

221. #221

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Friedlander](#contents.xhtml_ch12a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek refines his politics of hopelessness by insisting that hopelessness is not merely a clearing-away of false hope but an irreducible, inescapable risk that cannot be transcended, and extends this into a defence of apathy as a basic right against capitalism's demand for hyper-activity, ultimately arguing that only a communist (rather than socialist) collectivism can address the structural crises produced by global capital.

     We know things are broken. We know what needs fixing. We even sometimes have ideas about how to fix them. But, nevertheless, we keep doing nothing

222. #222

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.168

     Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Overidentification

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Laibach's strategy of "overidentification"—staging the obscene superego underside of ideology without ironic distance—is theoretically significant precisely because it exposes how ideology functions not through belief but through unconscious enjoyment, while also raising the limit-question of whether critical awareness of one's own disavowed authoritarian traits merely produces a more refined ironic stance rather than genuine ideological rupture.

     the more unpleasant parts of the glue that keeps our non-wakefullness together are put on display so that we can no longer secretly adhere to them, while still pretending that they are not there.

223. #223

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.188

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek *contra* Levinas

     Theoretical move: Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics argues that the "face" of the other is always already symbolically mediated and therefore politically domesticated; against Levinas's ethical alterity, Žižek proposes the neighbor as the embodiment of the Lacanian Real—a traumatic, inhuman Thing that short-circuits the particular to produce genuine universality and grounds a more radical anti-racist politics.

     ethics invests itself in a fetishistic ideal of humanity … disavowing any knowledge of suffering or man-made evil in the world.

224. #224

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's position on the refugee crisis is best understood not as Eurocentric conditional hospitality but as a resistance to the "double blackmail" of pure heterophilia vs. pure heterophobia, and that Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics of alterity actually converges with Derrida's own deconstruction of pure alterity as ideological fantasy—though Žižek misses this convergence by lumping Derrida with Levinas.

     Racism arises in no small part from the disavowal of such strangeness

225. #225

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6)

     Theoretical move: Žižek's theory of ideology is presented as his most significant contribution to contemporary thought, distinguished by its insistence that ideology operates unconsciously and through a libidinal "obscene underside," and by its capacity to track ideological shifts—such as authority itself becoming obscene—that trap even critical subjects; this theory uniquely integrates the psychic and the social into a single analytical framework for leftist politics.

     especially his theorizing the importance of disavowal and the structuring necessity of the obscene underside of ideology, an underside that gives ideology its libidinal hold on subjects

226. #226

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.171

     Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Irony

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that effective ideological critique (exemplified by Laibach's overidentification) requires an ironic, estranged subjectivity—not as a safe external standpoint but as an immanent undermining of a form of life—and that distinguishing productive estrangement from mere cynical distancing cannot be resolved theoretically in abstracto but only through concrete situational analysis; Žižek's reading of Zhuang Zi is used to show that critique opens a sense of the 'not-all' of one's condition rather than providing certified knowledge.

     how do you distinguish between a productive estrangement that challenges unacknowledged, unconscious attachments—and a conscious or ironic distancing from oneself that 'knows very well,' but nonetheless persists in the same, more or less reactionary patterns?

227. #227

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

     Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian subject occupies a paradoxical double role in ideology critique—simultaneously enabling genuine rupture and enabling ideological reproduction through ironic non-identification—and that this ambivalence demands a dimension of critical praxis (exemplified by Laibach and Žižek) that exceeds mere theoretical questioning.

     precisely the subject's non-identity can function as a sense of non-complicity with prevailing ideological formations and thereby as a reason (or an excuse) not to challenge them

228. #228

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bjerre](#contents.xhtml_ch7a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that every identity rests on an immanent exclusion, that over-identification (as practiced by Laibach) is more ideologically subversive than ironic distance, and that Laibach's genuine radicality lay not in riding the democratic wave but in prescient critique of democracy's own authoritarian underside—a dark message with no redemptive hope.

     'I know very well' can itself function as a fetish; i.e., we can only enjoy totalitarian rituals if we 'know very well' they are not to be taken seriously, so if we drop 'I know very well' … enjoyment itself loses its ideological function.

229. #229

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.142

     Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > The Ideology of Marx

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the history of ideology theory from Marx through Althusser to argue that neither Marx's "false consciousness" model nor Althusser's interpellation model can account for the unconscious dimensions of ideological investment—a gap that Žižek fills by recentering ideology theory on the desiring subject rather than the economic infrastructure.

     He sees fetishism as the vehicle through which capitalist ideology functions (even though he no longer mentions the term ideology when he conceives of commodity fetishism in Capital).

230. #230

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.153

     Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > Žižek’s Psyche

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology operates by harnessing the psyche's capacity for repression and self-destruction, functioning most effectively when subjects mistake ideological experience for authentic feeling (via disavowal); and that Žižek's ideology critique—exemplified through the *They Live* allegory—constitutes a form of existentialist choice demanding a psychic, rather than merely economic, revolution.

     This is an important disavowal that allows ideology to function, which is why Žižek so often brings up the importance of disavowal in the theory of ideology.

231. #231

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

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Finkelde](#contents.xhtml_ch2a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues against any dogmatic a priori (Kantian or Habermasian) as a necessary foundation for rational discourse, insisting instead that Hegelian dialectics submits every discursive norm to immanent self-questioning; ethical and historical progress is real but never guaranteed, and is structured by retroactivity—present acts restructure the past, and the past remains open to future reinterpretation.

     what if such stories are propagated by the regime not as literal truths but as something like folkloric tales told with respect although we know they are a fiction. There is, however, a price to be paid for such respect of appearances.

232. #232

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.105

     [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **NAZISM’S POSTHUMOUS TRIUMPH**

     Theoretical move: Nazism's postwar ideological victory lies precisely in its depoliticization: by being rendered as 'pure evil' (a lust for power or a natural danger) rather than as an anti-universalist identity politics, Hollywood and popular ideology unwittingly ratify Nazism's own particularist logic, confirming that the real danger of Nazism is its refusal to think universally, not an excess of universalism.

     The victory consists in convincing those who survived its murderous regime that its fundamental thrust was not political.

233. #233

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.190

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **ZOOTOPIA VS. UTOPIA**

     Theoretical move: Using *Zootopia* as a philosophical allegory, McGowan argues that identity is a false solution to the problem of subjectivity: the film stages a dialectical move in which the apparent multicultural utopia of mutual tolerance is revealed as a site of hidden political antagonism, and true universality is achieved only when subjects abandon their investment in identity altogether.

     each animal performs the functions associated with this identity while not intruding on the identity of other animals

234. #234

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.182

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **COLORBLIND OR JUST BLIND**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that universality is not the additive sum of all particulars but rather what all particulars lack, and that Black Lives Matter exemplifies genuine universalism by fighting at the site of inequality rather than advocating colorblind inclusion — whereas "All Lives Matter" represents a retreat into particularism disguised as universality.

     it enables those invested in it to believe in their utter nonracism and at the same time to adopt clearly racist prejudices that they do not experience as prejudices.

235. #235

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.130

     [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > **ON NOT SEEING INVISIBLE HANDS**

     Theoretical move: Capitalism structurally requires subjects to disavow knowledge of the capitalist whole, misidentifying the advantage of capital with their own advantage; this constitutes a necessary deception that converts individual dissatisfaction into an engine of endless accumulation, so that the capitalist subject sacrifices real satisfaction for the commodity form's demand.

     In order to be an effective capitalist subject, one must disavow knowledge of the capitalist project as a whole and not allow it to factor into one's decisions.

236. #236

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.25

     <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc2_2" id="introduction.xhtml_toc2-2"><span id="introduction.xhtml_pg_1" aria-label="1" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>INTRODUCTION</a> > **PARTICULAR ENTITIES**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the twentieth-century turn from universality to particular identity is both a political catastrophe and a philosophical opportunity: by redefining the universal not as a shared possession but as a shared absence, he reclaims universality as the only genuine basis for emancipation and exposes identity politics as an ideological product of capitalism's evacuation of particular content.

     Often, these struggles paint themselves as anti-capitalist or articulate critiques of aspects of capitalism, but actually their role in creating a sense of identity for capitalist subjects helps them to endure the capitalist system.

237. #237

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.169

     [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > <span id="chapter5.xhtml_pg_165" aria-label="165" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>**THE UNIVERSAL ANATHEMA**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the defining feature of Nazi anti-Semitism—its ideological revolution over prior anti-Semitism—is its inversion of the Jew from a subject too particular to one identified with universality itself; this reveals that identity politics structurally requires the universal as its constitutive enemy, and that the rejection of universality entails the rejection of truth as such.

     The defenses of Jewish identity that Jews perform become, for the Nazis, ruses through which Jews can hide their true universalist intentions.

238. #238

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.11

     What Is Sex? > <span id="page-9-0"></span>Introduction

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sublimation demonstrates that satisfaction in non-sexual activity is identical to—not a substitute for—sexual satisfaction, which forces a properly philosophical and ontological re-examination of what sex *is*; sex is reframed not as a content but as a structural contradiction immanent to reality itself, making it the privileged "position" from which psychoanalysis theorizes the real.

     what is problematic (in some ways of doing philosophy) is the disavowal or effacement of the inherent contradiction (or antagonism) they all imply

239. #239

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.40

     <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > "The Invisible 'Handjob' of the Market"

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that modern forms of social power—paradigmatically capitalism—operate not by abolishing the constitutive non-relation of the symbolic order but by *appropriating* it (a "privatization of the negative"), building it into a narrative of a higher Relation (e.g., the invisible hand of the market), while Marx's concept of the proletariat names the precise structural point of this disavowed negativity within the capitalist mode of production.

     disavowing it while at the same time appropriating it as the generic (and productive) point of social power.

240. #240

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     ‘There’s no central exchange’

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that the centerlessness of global capitalism produces a structural logic of deflection and fetishistic disavowal — blame circulates between impotent governments and immoral individuals, obscuring the impersonal, acephalous nature of Capital itself, which cannot be held responsible because it is not a subject.

     A case of fetishist disavowal, perhaps – 'we know perfectly well that the government is not pulling the strings, but nevertheless...'

241. #241

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

     Theoretical move: Fisher introduces 'capitalist realism' as a historically specific ideological condition—deeper than postmodernism—in which capitalism's totality forecloses the imaginability of any alternative, rendering cultural and political exhaustion not a mood but a structural feature of late-capitalist subjectivity.

     The attitude of ironic distance proper to postmodern capitalism is supposed to immunize us against the seductions of fanaticism.

242. #242

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that "Really Existing Capitalism," like Really Existing Socialism, depends on the big Other as a structural guarantor of symbolic fiction—not its dissolution—and that post-Fordist bureaucratic audit culture intensifies rather than dissolves this dependency, producing a permanent, Kafkaesque anxiety in which subjects become their own surveyors while the big Other's authority is simultaneously disavowed and re-entrenched.

     bureaucratic libido, with the enjoyment that certain officials derive from this position of disavowed responsibility ('it's not me, I'm afraid, it's the regulations')

243. #243

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     ‘...if you can watch the overlap of one reality with another’: capitalist realism as dreamwork and memory disorder

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that capitalist realism operates through a "dreamwork" logic—producing confabulated consistency that covers over structural contradictions—and that the attendant "memory disorder" (inability to form new memories, retrospective confabulation) is both the psychological correlative of postmodern temporality and an adaptive strategy demanded by capitalism's perpetual ontological instability.

     the preservation of his 60s liberal self-image depended upon his 'not really believing' in the auditing processes he so assiduously enforced... the distinction between inner subjective attitude and outward behavior

244. #244

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     Marxist Supernanny

     Theoretical move: Fisher deploys the failure of the Paternal Function in late capitalism as the diagnostic lens for a broader critique of neoliberal hedonism, arguing that a 'paternalism without the father'—drawing on Spinoza rather than deontological Law—is needed to reconstruct public culture, resist capitalist realism's affective management, and reconnect structural cause (Capital) to symptomatic social effects.

     The parental disavowal of this role is doubled at the level of cultural production by the refusal of 'gatekeepers' to do anything but give audiences what they already (appear to) want.

245. #245

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     What if you held a protest and everyone came?

     Theoretical move: Capitalist realism is not undermined by anti-capitalism but structurally sustained by it: through fetishistic disavowal and interpassivity, ideological fantasy operates at the level of unconscious behavior rather than explicit belief, so that gestural anti-capitalism (Hollywood films, Live 8, Product Red) performs critique on our behalf while leaving capitalist relations intact.

     According to Žižek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value.

246. #246

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that neoliberal 'market Stalinism' is not a deviation from capitalism but its essential logic: the proliferation of bureaucratic audit culture and PR-production instantiates a structural compulsion to substitute representations of performance for actual achievement, and this system is held together by the Lacanian big Other as the collective fiction that must be maintained in its constitutive ignorance for social reality to function.

     who was it, for instance, who didn't know that Really Existing Socialism (RES) was shabby and corrupt? Not any of the people... nor any of the government administrators... No, it was the big Other who was the one deemed not to know.