Graph of Desire

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (199)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.183

   Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Some preliminary remarks

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

   when he refers, for example, in his commentary on Hamlet, to the famous graph of desire, the tragedy is not just an illustration of the graph but, rather, the graph itself - that is to say, its proper articulation.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.204

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

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

   in his famous 'graph of desire' Lacan situates at the place of the remainder of the signifying chain the voice

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.221

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

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Oedipus is not a subject of retroactive quilting but rather its inverse: he travels the signifying chain in the "wrong" direction, enacting a linear thrust-forward that produces the retroactive constitution of meaning as its Real—thereby simultaneously installing the big Other (symbolic order) and demonstrating that the Other doesn't exist, making him the paradigmatic ethical act as vanishing mediator.

   let us consider the elementary section of the graph of desire, the figure that presents the destiny of Oedipus the King.

4. #04

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

   Index

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

   graph of desire 2 08-9

5. #05

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.172

   [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > I. Toward Freud

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychotic hallucinations—both 'code phenomena' (autonomous neologisms) and 'message phenomena' (disrupted signifying chains)—are not symptomatic of an underlying illness but ARE the structure itself, revealing the subject's relationship to the signifier as mapped by the Graph of Desire; the subject is constituted as an effect of signifier-to-signifier reference, not of any neurological or imaginary substrate.

   In making this distinction Lacan refers to his schema on the generation of meaning, included in his so-called 'graph of desire,' which he discusses in 'Subversion of the Subject and Dialectics of Desire' (682, 2 and 684).

6. #06

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.209

   [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > Context

   Theoretical move: The passage contextualizes Lacan's 'The Direction of the Treatment' as a theoretical turning point that pivots from an intersubjective/symbolic model of analysis toward a structural account of desire as the metonymy of lack-of-being, in direct opposition to ego psychology and object relations approaches that centre adaptation and the analyst's ego as goals of treatment.

   'The Direction of the Treatment', situated between Seminars V (Lacan, 1957–1958/1998) and VI (Lacan, 1958–1959/2013), where the graph of desire, Lacan's central formalization of the structure of desire, was elaborated.

7. #07

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.236

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

   Theoretical move: By reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams through the butcher's wife dream, Lacan argues that desire operates through the linguistic mechanisms of metonymy (desire as sliding lack-of-being) and metaphor (surplus of meaning), and that analytic treatment must preserve the literal, signifier-structured dimension of desire rather than reducing it to ego-psychological normalization.

   The second part of the sentence might be read as a reference to his "graph of desire"… the vector from left to right is the vector of speech, whereas the other vector, from right to left, can be read as the vector of subjectivity.

8. #08

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.241

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

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

   the phallus as the signifier for the lack in the Other, which will appear in the graph of desire as Φ

9. #09

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.245

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the direction of treatment must preserve a place for desire by refusing to respond at the level of demand; the phallus as signifier of lack structures the subject's desire metonymically, and analysis must lead the subject to confront the lack in the Other rather than offering new identifications that only deepen alienation.

   In clear reference to the graph of desire (elaborated in the years before this text and crystallized in 'The Subversion of the Subject'; 1960/2006), Lacan further elaborates the importance of preserving a place for desire in transference.

10. #10

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.269

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that negation (Verneinung/Bejahung) is not a logical operation but a structural one grounded in the signifying chain: the "failed negation" of the French 'ne' exemplifies how repression and the return of the repressed are identical, and how the subject of desire emerges precisely from the space carved out between the statement and enunciation by this structural capacity for one signifier to replace another — making lack, not fusion or adaptation, the founding condition of both subject and objective reality.

    In Lacan's famous graph of desire this space is indicated by the gap between the two arrows going from left to right.

11. #11

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

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

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

    graph of desire 172–174, 209, 236–237, 241, 244–245, 248, 269

12. #12

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.134

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

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

    Remember the graph. It is there that I can say 'Thou shalt not lie' there where I lie, where I repress, where I, the liar, speak.

13. #13

    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_55"></span>**drive**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's reworking of Freudian drive theory: by distinguishing drive from instinct, articulating the drive's circuit through three grammatical voices, insisting on the irreducible partiality of drives, and identifying every drive as a death drive, Lacan reframes the drive as a symbolic-cultural construct whose circular aim — not goal — constitutes the only path beyond the pleasure principle.

    In 1957, in the context of the graph of desire, Lacan proposes the formula [...] as the MATHEME for the drive.

14. #14

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_ncx_77"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_page_0096"></span>***G***

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

    The graph of desire is a topographical representation of the structure of desire…. In the complete graph there are not one but two signifying chains. The lower chain…is the conscious signifying chain, the level of the statement. The upper chain…is the signifying chain in the unconscious, the level of the ENUNCIATION.

15. #15

    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_153"></span>***point de capiton***

    Theoretical move: The point de capiton is theorized as the minimal quilting operation that arrests the endless sliding of the signified under the signifier, producing the necessary illusion of fixed meaning; it operates on two axes—diachronically as the retroactive effect of punctuation, and synchronically as metaphor—and its absence or dissolution is the structural condition of psychosis.

    This function is illustrated in the elementary cell of the GRAPH OF DESIRE, in which the point de capiton is the leftmost point of intersection between the vector S–S' and the vector

16. #16

    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_161"></span>**punctuation**

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

    illustrated in the 'elementary cell' of the GRAPH OF DESIRE

17. #17

    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_36"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0050"></span>**code**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes 'code' (a system of fixed, bi-univocal indices used in animal communication) from 'language' (a system of signifiers characterised by irreducible ambiguity and equivocation), while acknowledging his own inconsistency in applying this distinction in the Graph of Desire seminar.

    In the seminar of 1958–9, for example, when presenting the elementary cell of the graph of desire, he designates one point as the code, which he also designates as the place of the Other and the battery of signifiers.

18. #18

    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_201"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0229"></span>**Symptom**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of the symptom across his work: from a linguistic conception (symptom as signifier, signification, metaphor, message) grounded in the unconscious-structured-like-a-language thesis, through to a post-1962 shift toward the symptom as pure jouissance culminating in the concept of the sinthome — while consistently distinguishing symptom from clinical structure as the proper focus of psychoanalytic diagnosis and treatment.

    In the GRAPH OF DESIRE, which first appears in the seminar of 1957–8, the symptom is described as a message.

19. #19

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_16"></span>**algebra**

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

    The algebraic symbols used by Lacan, which appear principally in the MATHEMES, SCHEMA L and the GRAPH OF DESIRE

20. #20

    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_68"></span>**fantasy**

    Theoretical move: Fantasy is not opposed to reality but is a discursively constituted, structurally fixed defence against castration and the lack in the Other; its mathemic formalisation ($ ◇ a) places it within a signifying structure that the analysand must ultimately traverse in the course of treatment.

    appears in the graph of desire as the subject's response to the enigmatic desire of the Other

21. #21

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_62"></span>**enunciation**

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

    In the graph of desire, the lower chain is the statement, which is speech in its conscious dimension, while the upper chain is 'the unconscious enunciation' (E, 316).

22. #22

    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_185"></span>**Signification**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of 'signification' undergoes a trajectory from a vague association with meaningfulness to a precise, imaginary-order process in which the play of signifiers produces the illusion of the signified through metonymy and metaphor, with the bar in the Saussurean algorithm marking not a bond but a rupture—a theoretical move that radically inverts Saussure's stable sign relation.

    Signification is designated by the symbol s in Lacanian algebra (as in the notation s(A) which labels one of the main nodes in the graph of desire).

23. #23

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_118"></span>**matheme**

    Theoretical move: The matheme is defined as a formal algebraic index of psychoanalytic concepts designed to resist univocal (imaginary) interpretation and enable integral transmission of theory precisely because its meaning remains opaque — it is to be used, not understood.

    These formulae, which were both created to designate points in the GRAPH OF DESIRE, are the matheme for the drive… and the matheme for fantasy

24. #24

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.357

    **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index/reference section from Seminar X, listing concepts, proper names, and bibliographic entries alphabetically; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

    graph of desire 4-5, 6, 7, 43, 273

25. #25

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.53

    BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

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

    there they will find, I think to their satisfaction, the phases of construction and the functioning of what together we have called the graph

26. #26

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.285

    **xx** > **WHAT COMES IN THROUGH THE EAR**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice, as object a, is not assimilated but incorporated (Einverleibung), functioning not as sonorous resonance in physical space but as what resonates ex nihilo in the void of the Other — thereby linking the voice-object to anxiety, the desire of the Other, and ultimately to sacrifice as the capture of the Other in the web of desire.

    I shall say right away that the famous graph that's been badgering you so much over the years shows its worth in connection with these problems of genesis and development.

27. #27

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.14

    BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY IN THE NET OF SIGNIFIERS**

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar X by positioning anxiety as the nodal concept that will retroactively knot together the key terms of his previous disquisitions (fantasy, the Graph of Desire, the desire of the Other, the subject's relation to the signifier), insisting anxiety is not locatable at the centre of seriousness/care/expectation but rather escapes that encirclement — and distinguishing the Lacanian approach from existentialist (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre) treatments of anxiety.

    might not its form ever have struck you as being akin to the shape of a poire d'angoisse, a choke pear?

28. #28

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.153

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's relation to the signifier is the primary and constitutive reference-point for analytic theory, illustrated through the constitutive ambiguity of the patient's assertion—where truth is established precisely via the lie—and grounded in the distinction between enunciation and statement as formalized in the Graph of Desire.

    I will centre things on the four-cornered schema of my graph, which purposely distinguishes the level of the enunciation (énonciation) from the level of the statement (énoncé).

29. #29

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.224

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the losange (◇) as a topological algorithm that supports the two operations of alienation and separation, showing it functions as a "rim" that articulates the subject's relation to the Other in both the fantasy matheme ($◇a) and the demand/drive node ($◇D), grounding subjectivity in the dependence on the signifier.

    the small losange that I used as algorithm in my graph precisely because it is necessary in integrating some of the finished products of this dialectic.

30. #30

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.153

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic commitment is constitutively double-sided: truth is established through—and not despite—the lie, so that the subject's relation to the signifier (rather than any substantified unconscious) becomes the foundational reference-point for analytic theory, anchored in the distinction between enunciation and statement on the Graph of Desire.

    I will centre things on the four-cornered schema of my graph, which purposely distinguishes the level of the enunciation (énonciation) from the level of the statement (énoncé).

31. #31

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.224

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the lozange (losange) as a topological algorithm unifying the two fundamental operations of subject/Other relation—alienation and separation—showing how it functions as the formal support for both the fantasy formula ($<>a) and the demand/drive node ($<>D), with the vel of the lower half marking the first operation (alienation).

    the small losange that I used as algorithm in my graph precisely because it is necessary in integrating some of the finished products of this dialectic.

32. #32

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.153

    **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language is not a code transmitting information between emitter and receiver, but rather a structure that constitutes — rather than merely designates — the traversal of opposites (good/bad, beautiful/ugly), and that even the most reduced linguistic unit (the interjection) is always situated in the cut between Subject and the big Other, making Demand irreducible to Need or to expressive sincerity.

    if this person had better searched and located in my graph the formula, the schema, the articulation which conjoins the S with the D, joining them with a diamond, conjunction, disjunction, inclusion, exclusion

33. #33

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.61

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological surface (specifically the Klein bottle) provides the most adequate schema for the divided subject constituted under language, and maps the three dimensions of Logical Time (instant of seeing, time to comprehend, moment to conclude) onto the subject's experience at the locus of the Other, showing how Demand circulates on this surface and requires an additional dimension—time as three-dimensional space—to escape indefinite self-enclosure.

    this aspect of demand and what depends on it, namely, essentially, here and now, the schize caused by the demand in the subject, depends the function of what I wrote in the right-hand corner of my graph in the formula S D

34. #34

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.23

    All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the impossibility of metalanguage (demonstrated through Russell's own reductio) grounds the irreducibly precarious position of the subject in language, and that this same impossibility produces the structural incommunicability of psychoanalytic experience—communicable only through non-sense rather than master-words or codified sense.

    The relationship S D which is situated somewhere on the right of the graph, which at least some of you know the existence of, has in a discourse such as the one that I am pursuing here

35. #35

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.33

    All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Russell's *Principia Mathematica* and the theory of metalanguages as a foil to assert the foundational thesis that there is no metalanguage—every logical or structural discourse presupposes the primary use of language—and situates this thesis as the precondition for psychoanalytic practice, positioning the analyst not as a subject supposed to know but as one who risks themselves at the place of the subject's lack.

    The relationship S D which is situated somewhere on the right of the graph, which at least some of you know the existence of

36. #36

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.61

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that subjective structure is best apprehended topologically—via surfaces (Klein bottle, torus) rather than volume—and maps the three moments of Logical Time (instant of seeing, time to comprehend, moment to conclude) onto a three-dimensional temporal field structured by the Other, through which demand, transference, and identification are articulated as inscriptions on that surface.

    the schize caused by the demand in the subject, depends the function of what I wrote in the right-hand corner of my graph in the formula S D

37. #37

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.153

    **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Language is not a code transmitting information between emitter and receiver; rather, the subject is always already present in every enunciation, even the most reduced form (the interjection), which is situated precisely in the cut between subject and the locus of the Other — a structural argument that grounds the density of analytic speech against communication-theory reductionism and sets up the function of the Subject Supposed to Know in the analyst's position.

    if this person had better searched and located in my graph the formula, the schema, the articulation which conjoins the S with the D, joining them with a diamond, conjunction, disjunction, inclusion, exclusion

38. #38

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.253

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement to psychoanalytic formation but its very substance — the 'stuff into which the analyst cuts' — and uses the mathematician's disclosure that mathematical discourse conceals its own referent to illuminate the structural parallel with the psychoanalyst's position, where the unconscious (Urverdrangung) prevents any direct saying of what is spoken about; jouissance, caught in the net of language/the signifier, is identified as the hidden dimension that grounds desire and that only topology can begin to approach.

    these orientated networks that are called successively Schema L or Schema R or the Graph

39. #39

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's theory of chance (the "rule of parts") and the passion of the gambler to articulate the structure of the subject's relationship to the lost object (objet petit a): chance/randomness is the site where science touches the real, while the gambler's act reveals that what is at stake is always the recovery of the object lost to the signifier—culminating in the claim that Pascal's Wager encodes the fundamental structure of desire as the subject's claim on (o) within the field of the divided Other.

    the field with respect to which there is established the claim of (o), the object of desire, is the field of the Other *qua* divided with respect to being itself, it is what is in my graph as S, signifier of Ø.

40. #40

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.264

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement to psychoanalytic training but its very operative 'stuff' — the medium in which the analyst cuts the subject — and uses the mathematician's structural concealment of his object as a foil to show that the analyst's non-saying differs because an irreducible unconscious (Urverdrängung) prevents knowledge, while jouissance, caught in the net of language as sexual jouissance, is the hidden ground that desire defends against, pointing toward the death drive as the only genuine philosophical question.

    these orientated networks that are called successively Schema L or Schema R or the Graph

41. #41

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.5

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the theoretical stakes of the "subject as cut" — the split between truth and knowledge, Wirklichkeit and Realität — and grounds his structuralism in topology (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Graph of Desire), arguing that the analyst's position is defined by, and must accommodate, this constitutive cut rather than escaping it through subjectivist laxity.

    You have the graph, the two storied graph and the function of the word in so far as there is differentiated in it the enunciating and the enunciated

42. #42

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.147

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs, for an American audience, the foundational articulation between demand and desire, the splitting of the subject, and the topology of the torus as the structural support (*upokeimenon*) of desire — arguing that desire is not desire for jouissance but the barrier that keeps the subject at a calculated distance from it, and that this duplicity of desire with respect to demand grounds everything called ambivalence in analysis.

    it is not impossible, even before an American audience, to introduce the inscription of the formula in the top right-hand corner of my graph, namely $ D (S barred in its relationship to demand)

43. #43

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's theory of chance (the "rule of parts") and the figure of the gambler to argue that the passion of gambling is structurally homologous to the subject's relation to the signifier: the gambler bets on a mode of encounter with the real in which the lost object (objet petit a) is not implicated in the usual signifying loss, while Pascal's Wager ultimately reveals the field of the Other as barred — the signifier of the barred Other (S(Ø)) — as the structural condition for any claim of desire's object.

    it is what is in my graph as S, signifier of Ø.

44. #44

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.253

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement for the psychoanalyst but the very material into which the psychoanalytic operation cuts, and that jouissance—placed on the hither side of the big Other and caught in the net of subjective topology as sexual jouissance—is the irreducible, unsayable dimension that language/desire both defends against and compels us to question, linking the emergence of the signifier to the individual's relation to jouissance via Freud's death drive.

    these orientated networks that are called successively Schema L or Schema R or the Graph

45. #45

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.147

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan recounts his American seminars as an occasion to condense his core theoretical moves—distinguishing demand from desire, grounding the splitting of the subject in the unconscious, locating sexuality as desire-to-know, and announcing that topology (torus, cross-cap, Klein bottle) will provide the structural substance for showing how one demand generates a duplicity of desire.

    to introduce the inscription of the formula in the top right-hand corner of my graph, namely \$ D (S barred in its relationship to demand)

46. #46

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.6

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject must be rigorously understood as a "cut" (not a subjectivist position), and uses this to articulate the analyst's impossible-but-necessary position; he connects the Möbius strip and cross-cap as topological figures that make the constituting cut of the subject graspable, while distinguishing Wirklichkeit (realizable analytic relation) from Realität (the impossible Real that determines failure).

    You have the graph, the two storied graph and the function of the word in so far as there is differentiated in it the enunciating and the enunciated.

47. #47

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.264

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement to psychoanalytic training but its very operative material, and uses the structural parallel between mathematical discourse (which speaks what it cannot name) and psychoanalytic discourse (which cannot name what it speaks about due to the irreducible unconscious) to re-ground the function of language, desire, and jouissance as the hidden field from which the subject withdraws its object.

    these orientated networks that are called successively Schema L or Schema R or the Graph

48. #48

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.7

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the symbolic order in the primacy of the hole (lack/void) over presence, arguing that the object of science, the vase as symbolic creation, and energetics all converge on the same structural point: what matters is not what fills the void but the void itself — a thesis that links the subject of science (Descartes/Frege) to the functioning of the signifier and forecloses any meta-language.

    a new little graph which I am giving you as an object of reflection which is properly speaking useful in order to grasp the relationships of what I called and continue to make function as the signifier

49. #49

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.50

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > KLEIN GROUP

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the Klein group as a four-term topological structure to ground Metaphor and the logic of the Unconscious, arguing that the formula of metaphor (signifying substitution) shares the same structural cell as the Klein group, and that this structure supports the claim that there is no Universe of discourse — a formal condition for the subject of the unconscious that is co-extensive with, yet irreducible to, the Cartesian cogito.

    this graph, of this graph that most of you know and to which you can now easily refer in my book, specifically as it is developed in the article: Subversion of the subject and dialectic of desire

50. #50

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.14

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiom that "no signifier can signify itself" as the founding structural principle of the Universe of discourse, and demonstrates—through a self-referential paradox of writing—that this axiom introduces a constitutive gap or exclusion within that very Universe, raising the question of whether what the axiom specifies can itself be said.

    I constructed the graph which is designed to order, precisely what, in the function of the word, is defined by this field, this field which the structure of language requires: it is properly what is called the paths of discourse or again what I called the defiles of the signifier.

51. #51

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.164

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure—the fact that the subject is an effect of language—must be the founding premise of psychoanalysis, just as Marx had to expose the latent structural difference within the equation of value before political economy could become rigorous; and he culminates this argument with the provocative thesis that "there is no sexual act," positioning the unconscious as speaking *about* sexuality through metaphor and metonymy rather than expressing a libidinal drive-force like Eros.

    I wrote the formula of the drive - on the top right of the graph - as S barred diamond of capital D (the demand): it is when the demand keeps quiet that the drive begins.

52. #52

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no sexual relation by showing that the field between the small o (objet petit a) and the big Other is structured as a hole — not a unifying One — and that identification (ego ideal/ideal ego) operates in this gap; the Oedipus myth is then mobilised to demonstrate that jouissance itself is constitutively bound to rottenness and the hole, not to any unitive fullness.

    what is imaged for a long time in my graph by the connotation, signifier of capital O barred, S(Ø)

53. #53

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.50

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > KLEIN GROUP

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Klein group's four-term structure provides the formal skeleton for both the metaphor/repression formula and the unconscious-as-language thesis, and that S(Ø)—the signifier of the barred Other—marks the constitutive 'One too many' that replaces the absent Universe of discourse, linking the logical structure of the subject to the Cartesian cogito.

    remember the point whose interest I already signalled to you, of this graph… as it is developed in the article: Subversion of the subject and dialectic of desire.

54. #54

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.14

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the paradox of self-reference (the smallest whole number not written on the board) to establish a foundational axiom for his theory of the signifier: that no signifier can signify itself. This axiom, when introduced into the Universe of discourse, generates a structural gap — a specification that simultaneously belongs to and threatens to exceed the totality of what can be said — linking the logic of writing, the Graph of Desire, and the structure of the unconscious as language.

    I constructed the graph which is designed to order, precisely what, in the function of the word, is defined by this field, this field which the structure of language requires: it is properly what is called the paths of discourse or again what I called the defiles of the signifier.

55. #55

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "sexual relation" does not exist as a consistent dyadic unity — it is structurally a hole or gap between the small o and the big Other — and uses the cauldron metaphor (from Freud's Witz) to indict analytic theory for triply refusing to acknowledge this void; the Oedipus myth is recruited to demonstrate that accessing full jouissance covers over a foundational rottenness that truth cannot tolerate.

    what is imaged for a long time in my graph by the connotation, signifier of capital O barred, S(Ø)

56. #56

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.164

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is a structural effect of language — not a psychological substance — and that the unconscious, far from "speaking sexuality" in the manner of a life-instinct, speaks *about* sexuality by producing partial objects in relations of metaphor and metonymy to it; the climactic theoretical move is the assertion that "there is no sexual act," grounding the entire argument in the constitutive impossibility of the sexual relation.

    When I wrote the formula of the drive - on the top right of the graph - as S barred diamond of capital D (the demand)

57. #57

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.103

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968**

    Theoretical move: By deploying Aristotelian syllogistic logic—specifically the middle term—Lacan argues that the Objet petit a functions as the true middle term connecting the psychoanalysand-as-subject to the psychoanalyst-as-predicate, such that the psychoanalyst is defined not as a pre-given identity but as a production of the psychoanalysing task, sustained by the analyst's identification with the o-object in itself.

    in the new graph that you see me using here for the last two years, not what the psychoanalyst becomes, what is implied at the start by the whole operation

58. #58

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.79

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the claim that the inconsistency of the Other is what converts all stating into demand, situating the subject's division on the Graph of Desire; he then mobilises Gödel's incompleteness theorems as the logical analogue of castration, and closes by arguing that meaning is a lure veiling language's essential meaninglessness, with surplus-jouissance as the remainder that articulates the subject's relation to castration and enjoyment.

    what in the big completed graph, the one that I drew here (Fig 6), is inscribed in the form of $◇D

59. #59

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.26

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 November 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that surplus-jouissance (surplus enjoying) is structurally homologous to Marx's surplus value: both arise from the renunciation of enjoyment within a discourse, and both only become visible once knowledge is unified and marketised under capitalist logic — establishing that the conflictual 'truth' of the capitalist system is a problem of knowledge, jouissance, and discourse, not merely of political economy.

    it is that of my graph that I constructed more than ten years ago before an audience of donkeys. They still have not found where the 'I' is on this graph!

60. #60

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.268

    Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 23 April 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan stages a confrontation between Hegel's Selbstbewusstsein and the Freudian unconscious to argue that thinking is constitutively a censorship of an originary "I do not know," and that desire (to know) is born from this nodal failure of knowledge — a topology illustrated via the Klein bottle and Möbius strip, and clinically anchored in free association and the objet petit a.

    I have for a long time marked on the upper line of my graph 'he did not know' in connection with the celebrated dream of 'he did not know that he had died'.

61. #61

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.256

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

    Theoretical move: The neurotic's problem is located in the impossibility of integrating the objet petit a onto the imaginary plane alongside the narcissistic image; Lacan reframes primary narcissism as a retroactive illusion produced by secondary (imaginary) narcissistic capture, and positions the fantasy formula ($ ◇ a) at the level of sublimation—while diagnosing neurosis as a structural failure of sublimation.

    The third line of the graph, the one that crosses the two others, is properly speaking what from a symbolic concatenation is carried on to the imaginary where it finds its ballast. It is on this line that in the complete graph you will encounter the ego, desire, the phantasy and finally the specular image

62. #62

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.37

    Am I making myself understood?

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a is not a theoretical artifice but an effect of analytic discourse itself—homologous to Marx's discovery of surplus value—and uses this claim to introduce the Graph of Desire's earliest construction (1957-58) as the formal ground for understanding how a signifier represents the subject for another signifier, with meaning constituted retroactively.

    ten years! Ten years already since this operation culminated in its coming to birth in the seminar of 1957-58 on The formations of the unconscious. And to clearly mark things… it is through a commentary on the Witz, on the witticism as Freud puts it, that this construction began

63. #63

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.393

    Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969

    Theoretical move: In this final session of Seminar XVI at the École Normale Supérieure, Lacan argues that a genuine student revolt would require attacking the relationship between the subject and knowledge at its root—distinguishing s(O) (neurotic) from the intact signifier of O (pervert)—while contextualizing this within a critique of the University discourse and announcing his expulsion from the ENS.

    to rewrite it s(O), which is on the left and on the lower line of my graph. It should be stated, in other words, where one knows what one is saying. It is there that psychoanalysis stops, while what should be done, is to reconnect what is on the top left, the S, signifier of O.

64. #64

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.262

    Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 23 April 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the imaginary (body image, ideal norms, Utopia) provides the historical ground for pre-scientific "knowledge," but genuine science — including the Freudian rationalist doctrine — breaks with the imaginary by grounding itself in the symbolic/mathematical function (x = f(y)), where meaning is retroactively determined by the point of arrival in a signifying chain.

    On my graph where the two horizontal lines that I retraced the last time in order to have them intersected by this hook-shaped line that cuts both of them and determines the four essential crossroads where there is inscribed a certain mapping out.

65. #65

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.94

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Gödel's incompleteness theorems as a structural analogy for the psychoanalytic subject: just as formalization reveals a constitutive limit (incompleteness) at the heart of the most consistent discourse, the subject is nothing but the function of the cut that separates formal from natural language—and this structural lack grounds both the desire of the mathematician and, via the Graph of Desire, the alienation of meaning and the exclusion of jouissance.

    it is here that I must remind you that in this graph (fig 6), constructed to respond very precisely to the constitutive questioning of analysis, what lies between the two lines called stating and stated

66. #66

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.116

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 22 January 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's wager as a formal model for the structure of the subject's relation to loss, arguing that Pascal's mathematical discovery (that the stake is lost at the outset) grounds the logic of repetition, the unary trait, and the gap between body and jouissance introduced by the signifier — not a narcissistic-imaginary wound but a symbolic-real effect.

    this relation orientated by the vector starting from $^>D on the graph towards this desire, the desire of the Other to question it in an 'I ask myself what you want' which is also balanced by an 'I ask you what I want'.

67. #67

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.39

    Am I making myself understood?

    Theoretical move: Lacan revisits the two-tier structure of the Graph of Desire—signifying chain vs. circle of discourse—to show how the Witz (joke/wit) demonstrates the subject's triple register and its entanglement in the big Other, culminating in the claim that the subject is defined as what a signifier represents for another signifier, and that primal repression (Urverdrängung) is the originary fading of the subject into opaque knowledge.

    the interest of recalling the structure, in recalling that from this point on I distinguished here in a rigorous way the circle of discourse, is indeed to show that in this way there was prepared the true function of what completes this first approximation of what is involved in discourse.

68. #68

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.246

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

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

    It is starting from the witticism that I constructed this graph which moreover, even though it has not yet demonstrated to everyone how obvious it is, nonetheless remains fundamental on this occasion. As everyone knows and can see, it is made up of the network of three chains

69. #69

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.51

    Am I making myself understood?

    Theoretical move: By mapping Russell's paradox onto the relation of the subject (S) to the big Other (O), Lacan demonstrates that the Other cannot be totalized as a closed code or complete set of discourse, and that this structural impossibility — topologically figured by the cross-cap and Klein bottle — is precisely what produces the split subject and positions the objet petit a as the hole in the Other.

    the continuation of the consequence that I will pursue as regards the graph and which may take on its full import as regards the place of analytic questioning between the chain of demand and the enunciating chain.

70. #70

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.293

    Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the stain/gaze as the structuring lack in the field of vision that inserts vision into desire via the o-object, then leverages this to distinguish perversion (where objet a fills/masks the phallic lack, restoring o to the Other) from neurosis (where the signified of the barred Other reveals the conflictual articulation at the level of logic itself), with the neologism 'hommelle/famil' marking the transition between these clinical structures.

    founded on the old graphs, I will be able to show you the place taken in the operation of neurosis

71. #71

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.120

    *[A porter appears]* > Seminar 7: Wednesday 18 February 1970

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Dora case to argue that Freud's substitution of the Oedipus complex for the truths offered by hysterical experience was a defensive idealization that masked the fundamental truth — audible in the hysteric's discourse — that the father/master is castrated from the start; this leads to a critique of the Oedipus myth as an unworkable, quasi-religious fiction that displaces the proper analytic relation between knowledge and truth.

    it is the answer my graph designates to stating. This calls seriously into question whether one can play doubles or quits between surplus enjoying and eternal life.

72. #72

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.165

    Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

    Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the usual claim about the Freud-Saussure relationship by arguing that the unconscious is the condition of linguistics (not the reverse), and that language is the condition of the unconscious — positioning the Lacanian reading of Freud as what makes modern structural linguistics possible rather than derivative of it.

    I remember the discomfort with which I was questioned by a man who had attended the presentation of my Dialectic of desire and subversion of the subject

73. #73

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.76

    *[A porter appears]*

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

    This is an operation that, even though I constructed my graph precisely on its foundation, I nevertheless have no hesitation in describing as arbitrary.

74. #74

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.61

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

    Theoretical move: Writing is theorized as the necessary condition for logic and for questioning the symbolic order, while the Phallus is recast not as a missing signifier but as an obstacle to the sexual relationship—what establishes jouissance as the condition of truth in analytic discourse.

    they are wrong, the graphs are only understandable in function, I would say, of the slightest effect of style of the aforesaid Ecrits, which are in a way the steps to reach it

75. #75

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.80

    *Lacan writes on the board: "L 'achose"*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that 'l'achose' (the thing-as-absent) can only be approached through writing (l'écrit), not speech, because the thing's place is always marked by the absence of the o-object (castration), and topology—exemplified by the Graph of Desire—is irreducibly a written form that the spoken word cannot substitute for.

    I constructed for them bit by bit, and fragment by fragment, things that are called graphs...one can already note that there are things which are not like the rest of the printed text.

76. #76

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.157

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the claim that feminine (Other) jouissance is an enjoyment that is experienced but known nothing about, linking mystical experience to the structural position of the not-all and to the impossibility of the sexual relationship; he then introduces the sexuation formulas and explains how the barred subject's only access to the Other is via the fantasy ($ ◇ a), which also constitutes the reality principle.

    as is moreover indicated in my graph by the conjunction highlighted between this S barred – $ – and this little o, which is nothing other than the phantasy

77. #77

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.64

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces topological figures (flattening of the Borromean knot) to generate the Real/Imaginary distinction, then cedes the floor to Alain Didier Weill, who constructs a multi-stage circuit using the Graph of Desire and the Purloined Letter schema to theorise the *Passe* as a process by which successive inversions of knowledge between subject (Bozef) and Other (the King) propel the subject through positions of innocence, duplicity, and finally radical exposure before the Other.

    Before putting up Lacan's graph here is how things are going to happen... starting from the new position of the Other is going to carry Bozef who was at B1, here an elementary subject effect what Lacan would call the signified of the Other

78. #78

    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 can only discover that in writing this outline, that this outline in a certain way has already been sketched out, perhaps even before he learned how to read, on the graphs of a certain Dr Lacan

79. #79

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.98

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977**

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the relation between the Real, the universal, and sense: Lacan argues that the Real is defined by the exclusion of all sense and by impossibility (what does not cease not to be written), yet psychoanalysis as a practice depends on words having import — a tension he navigates by revisiting the Four Discourses, specifically the Discourse of the Analyst, to show how the barred subject holds the place of Truth through Knowledge, while the gap between S1 and S2 marks an irreducible incompletion.

    this is what I try to draw somewhere on my graph, this graph that I risked a long time ago, on which like that so that no one would speculate about it, I wrote this something which is the signifier, the signifier of the fact that the Other does not exist

80. #80

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.80

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Passe cannot be transmitted by a speaking subject alone (the *passant*) because the locus of enunciating from which S(Ø) is emitted cannot itself be said; only a topological writing—a graphical arrangement that articulates the subject of the enunciated and the subject of enunciating in a transmissible way—can function as the true Passer, which is why Lacan's seminars and graphs perpetually recreate the conditions of division.

    What can account for his position, I ask you, from where he speaks, if not this concatenation of graphs that I have drawn for you

81. #81

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.66

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

    Theoretical move: Through a game-theoretic allegory (Bozef/king chess positions), the passage argues that the subject's total dispossession before an omniscient Other (Absolute Knowing at R3) forces the emergence of the repressed signifier S2 into the Real—constituting aphanisis/fading—and that the only exit from this petrified position is a single word ("it is you," S(Ø)) which, rather than merely keeping one's word, *sustains* speech as an act anchored in the subject's desire, making the pass (passe) the topological test of whether enunciation corresponds to enunciating.

    the position of the eclipsing of the subject, of fading before the signifier of demand, which is written on the graph – this also designates the drive, I am not going to talk about that now - $◊D.

82. #82

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.432

    FAREWELL > AUSTRIA-HUNGARY > Translator's Notes

    Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's and editorial notes for Seminar IV, providing bibliographic clarifications, attestation checks against typescripts, and cross-references to Écrits and Freud; it contains no substantive theoretical moves.

    links the two levels of signifier and signified to the two levels of the graph to be developed throughout the following year's seminar, where a retroactive vector rises, loops back, and falls, thus to cross each horizontal line twice

83. #83

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.141

    **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bateson's double bind as a foil to argue that the genesis of psychosis cannot be reduced to double-meaning communication but requires identifying the missing signifier — the Name-of-the-Father — as the grounding element of the law in the Other; its Verwerfung (foreclosure) is what distinguishes psychotic from neurotic structure, while the accompanying schema of the witticism illustrates how desire is essentially transformed (betrayed) by its passage through the signifying chain.

    It was around witticisms, with the satisfaction that results from them… that I tried to organize this schema for you last trimester.

84. #84

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.465

    **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the resolution of obsessional and hysterical neurosis hinges on the subject's correct relationship to the phallus as a signifier—not identifying with it but assuming one's place relative to it—and that failures of analytic technique (reducing this to imaginary phallic identification) produce symptomatic persistence rather than cure, with the Freudian formula 'Wo Es war soll Ich werden' pointing toward the properly symbolic realization of desire.

    realizing something at the level of the unconscious, which is equivalent to what, at the lower level [of the graph], is full speech... At the upper level, attaining unconscious articulation assumes that the circuit...

85. #85

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.454

    **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurosis is a fully structured linguistic phenomenon—"speech pronounced by the barred subject"—and that the opacity of the unconscious derives specifically from the Other's desire, which sits between the Other as locus of speech and the Other as embodied being; regression is thereby recast not as a temporal return but as the reappearance in discourse of earlier signifying forms linked to demand.

    Let's once more ask ourselves what the line at the top of our schema is. It's a signifying line, in that it's structured like a language... this beyond that is articulated in the upper line of our schema is the Other of the Other.

86. #86

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.25

    THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of the 'famillionaire' witticism to argue that wit operates through a formal technique of the signifier (condensation of two signifying chains), that it requires the Other as a third party to codify the incongruous message, and that the essence of wit lies not in truth but in truth's alibi — a dimension always glimpsed only by looking obliquely, as with the unconscious itself.

    Discourse can obviously be schematized by saying that it starts from the J and goes to the Other... it's reflected by the J at p... returns to the Other at a second moment... and that it then heads off towards the message, y.

87. #87

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    *UNE FEMME DE NON-RECEVOIR,* **OR: A FLAT REFUSAL**

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that love is the fundamental human solution to the structural unsatisfiability of demand—having "an Other of one's own"—and uses this thesis to trace comedy's history from Aristophanic id-irruption through New Comedy's metonymic love-object, culminating in Molière's *The School for Wives* as the paradigm case in which full speech, metonymy, and the comedic treatment of desire are displayed with Euclidean clarity.

    The link uniting the Other, the I, the metonymic object and the message defines the zone in which full speech has to reside [see graphs pp. 85 and 112].

88. #88

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.350

    **THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE** > Then Freud makes this parenthesis: > A further parenthetical remark by Freud:

    Theoretical move: By working through the Dora case, Lacan demonstrates how hysteria is structurally defined by the subject's inability to advance beyond demand to desire: the hysteric's identification with the little other (Herr K.) functions as a substitute for the beyond-of-demand constituted by the paternal metaphor, and the collapse of this identification reveals the fundamental interchangeability—and fragility—of the two lines connecting desire and demand in the Graph of Desire.

    You can see it set out on this diagram. This beyond-the-relationship-to-the-Other's-speech is introduced through the signifier phallus.

89. #89

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.494

    **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **EDITOR'S NOTE**

    Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive editorial note by Jacques-Alain Miller situating Seminar V's key schemas and lessons in relation to contemporaneous Écrits texts, and acknowledging manuscript sources and collaborators.

    The schema constructed over the course of this Seminar ('the graph of desire') acquired its definitive form in 'Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire', written in 1962.

90. #90

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.319

    **SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that demand, constituted through the symbolic parenthesis of presence, generates two distinct formations along separate signifying lines: the ego-ideal (produced via the transformation of rejected demand through the mask) and the superego (produced along the line of signifying prohibition from the Other); the mask itself is constructed through dissatisfaction, and a privileged signifier—the phallus—will be required to unify the subject across the plurality of masks.

    it's sufficient to draw this essential distinction between need and the words in which need is expressed to understand how these two products can be both co-dimensional and different... the superego is formulated along the [lower] line of the articulation of signifiers... whereas the ego-ideal is produced along the [upper] line

91. #91

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.378

    **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the privileged signifier that designates the overall effects of the signifier on the signified, and that desire—structured as the desire of the Other—is the key axis around which both hysterical and obsessional clinical structures are organized, with the Splitting of the Subject (Spaltung) as the structural condition making the unconscious possible.

    In the first loop, the subject, via the manifestation of need, its tension, crosses the first signifying line of demand, and we can place here, so as to topologize things, the ego's [m] relation to the image of the other, the imaginary little a [i(a)].

92. #92

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.118

    *UNE FEMME DE NON-RECEVOIR,* **OR: A FLAT REFUSAL**

    Theoretical move: By duplicating the Graph of Desire to incorporate the Other as a parallel subject-system, Lacan formalizes the conditions under which a Witz succeeds: the Other must share the same signifying chain (be "of like mind"), and the comic/naive works by evoking a primal lack of inhibition that mirrors the metonymic captivation structuring the joke's mechanism.

    This, then, is the schema we have been using. The Other, the message, the r and the metonymic object are here [see the graphs on pages 10 and 80].

93. #93

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.487

    APPENDICES

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive appendix entry providing a bibliographic reference and reproduction of the Graph of Desire diagram, with no theoretical argumentation.

    The definitive version of the major schema elaborated over the course of the Seminar, subsequently called 'The Graph of Desire', can be found on page 692 of Écrits.

94. #94

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.376

    **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bouvet's object-relations account of obsessional neurosis—centred on imaginary phallic incorporation—by insisting the phallus must be understood as a signifier (part object properly so called), and he uses this critique as a springboard to re-articulate the Graph of Desire, showing that desire is constitutively located in a field *beyond* demand, irreducible to the passage of need through the defiles of demand.

    We've already placed here the big A, the big Other, which is where the code is located and receives demands. It's in the passage from A to the point where the message is that the signified of the Other [seA)] is produced.

95. #95

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.395

    **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional desire is structurally maintained through prohibition rather than satisfaction: the obsessional turns the evanescence of desire into a forbidden desire supported by the Other's refusal, while clinically demonstrating that drive-stage 'fixations' are not imaginary regressions but signifying articulations of demand at the level of the unconscious—thereby critiquing developmental object-relations theory in favour of a structural account of desire beyond demand.

    We can identify, and we can read, what is going on in the obsessional at the level of this schema... this occurs at the level of [S 0 D].

96. #96

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.416

    **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional neurosis requires interpretation at the level of castration-as-symbolic-law rather than suggestive identification with a part-object; mistaking the plane of demand for the plane of fantasy-identification constitutes a fundamental technical error whose visible symptom is the analyst's projecting passive homosexuality onto material (the bidet dream) that actually poses the question of the castration of the Other.

    The identification in question is placed here, at [g 0 a], which, as I pointed out to you last time, is where fantasy is.

97. #97

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.179

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the "nodal point" of the Oedipus complex as the moment when the subject must decide whether to accept the father's castration/privation of the mother, distinguishing two structural alternatives—"being or not being the phallus" (imaginary) versus "having or not having the phallus" (symbolic)—and shows how the father must intervene not merely as the bearer of the law de jure but as a real, graduated symbolic agent whose effective presence or deficit determines clinical structure.

    This is where the little schema I was commenting on for you in the first trimester... turns out, however, not to have been completely useless.

98. #98

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.490

    **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > 2 This year's schema

    Theoretical move: The passage explicates the Graph of Desire schema by showing how the retroactive action of the signifying chain on the signified produces meaning, and how desire serves as the middle term that inserts discourse into the speaking subject, distinguishing the human level (with desire and the Other) from the animal level (specular imaginary confrontation).

    This year's schema is only a response to the quilting points that link the signifier to the signified.

99. #99

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.420

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of his schema—distinguishing the line of articulated demand from the upper horizon of the demand for love—to argue that desire is structurally located in the intermediary zone between need and that horizon, always structured by the Other; he then critiques a clinical case where reduction to a dyadic, two-person (homosexual transference) framework systematically misses the symbolic/phallic elements visible in the dream material.

    I remind you that the lozenge in question is the same thing as the square in a much older fundamental schema that I reproduced in a simplified form for you here in January... on which I inscribed the subject's relationship to the Other as the locus of speech and message.

100. #100

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.470

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar V by arguing that the phallus signifier is pluripresent across all neurotic structures, that obsessional neurosis is characterised by a 'demand for death' that structurally destroys the very possibility of demand, and that guilt in neurosis is independent of any reference to the law — reversing the Pauline formula so that 'if God is dead, nothing is permitted.'

     over the course of this year I have tried to familiarize you with this little graph that for some while it has seemed to me, I'm speaking for myself, timely to make use of to support my experiences.

101. #101

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.69

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metonymy is irreducible to metaphor by using Heine's "Golden Calf" witticism to show that the wit resides not in metaphorical substitution but in a metonymic displacement that subverts the metaphor; this is grounded in a structural distinction between desire and need, where need is always refracted through the laws of the signifier before it can appear as demand.

     there is a symmetry between the two elements of the circuit - a closed loop, which is the circle of discourse, and an open loop. Something is uttered by the subject and, coming to the point at which there is a bifurcation at A, it loops back upon itself as an articulated sentence, a ring of discourse [see graph, p. 10].

102. #102

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.524

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index chunk from Seminar V, listing page references for key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts without advancing a theoretical argument.

     Graph of Desire 489-90

103. #103

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.405

     **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps Freud's three types of identification onto his schema of need/demand/desire, distinguishing the line of suggestion (identification with the Other's insignia along the demand axis) from the line of transference (a second, properly analytic articulation beyond demand), thereby reframing the transference/suggestion opposition as a topological split within the structure of demand itself.

     imagine that you take my little network, crumple it up, make it into a little ball and put it in your pocket. Well then, in principle, the relations still remain the same, inasmuch as they are relations of order.

104. #104

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.518

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing key terms, page references, and cross-references for Seminar V concepts; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

     Graph of Desirelschemas 133-5, 321-2,432-3,465Q,472,485

105. #105

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.493

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > 3 **Concerning the Oedipus complex**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipus complex is a structural prerequisite for theorizing pre-Oedipal configurations (perversion, neurosis, homosexuality), and uses the superimposition of two schemas—one imaginary, one intersubjective—to give 'identification' a precise topological meaning: the mutual substitution of subjects in speech.

     Inasmuch as I have been able to combine this schema and the schema where the code turns back upon the message - which introduces intersubjectivity and the relationship to the Other

106. #106

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.349

     **THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE** > Then Freud makes this parenthesis: > A further parenthetical remark by Freud:

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Freud's dream of the butcher's wife, Lacan argues that hysterical identification enacts the structural split between demand and desire: the hysteric's unsatisfied desire is not a deficiency but a necessary condition for constituting a real Other, and it is only through the Other's barred desire that the subject can recognize and encounter its own barred, castrated desire.

     These notations are now going to enable us to begin to point to what the little diagram that I drew for you last time means ... what manifests itself as a need must be expressed in demand, that is, must be addressed to the Other [A].

107. #107

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.326

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the bar as the essential property of the signifier — its capacity to be cancelled/effaced — and uses this to ground the relationship between the signifying chain, the subject, desire, and the phallus; the Aufhebung of a non-signifying element (real or imaginary) is precisely what raises it to the dignity of a signifier, making the bar the hinge between signification, subjectivity, and the castration complex.

     The first line links the small d of desire to the image of a [i(a)], on the one hand, and, on the other, to m, which is the ego - by the intermediary of the subject's relation to small a [S(;a)].

108. #108

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.476

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates guilt as structurally located between desire and demand on the Graph of Desire, not merely as a response to prohibition: the prohibited demand kills desire, and this mechanism—visible only from outside the subject's lived position—defines neurotic (especially obsessional) guilt. The demand for death is shown to be an articulated symbolic demand whose reflexive structure makes it equivalent to the death of demand itself, while the polypresence of the phallus-as-signifier (rather than imaginary organ) explains the unity of obsessional phenomenology across sexes.

     Guilt is inscribed in the relationship between desire and demand. Everything that goes in the direction of a particular formulation of demand is accompanied by the disappearance of desire, and does so through a mechanism whose threads we can see on this little graph.

109. #109

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.303

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **THE FORMULAS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The phallus is theorized as the privileged signifier that introduces the relationship to the little other (a) into the big Other (A) as the locus of speech, thereby barring the Other and implicating it in the dialectic of desire — a structural move that critiques Jones's reductive biologism (aphanisis as disappearance of desire) in favour of a properly symbolic account of the castration complex.

     this new little lozenge symbol that we keep coming across in these formulas... In order for demand to exist, to have a chance, or to be something, there needs to be a certain relationship between s(A) and desire as it's structured, A 0 d. This refers us back to the first line.

110. #110

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.81

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that metonymy, through the perpetual sliding of meaning along the signifying chain, constitutes the primordial dimension of human language not as meaning but as value — a claim grounded in readings of Maupassant, Feneon's micro-fictions, and Marx's theory of general equivalence, all of which demonstrate that discourse can only grasp reality by introducing a decentring, disorganizing movement irreducible to reference.

     We have, then, passed through the I and returned with 'Golden Calf at A... it is ultimately a commonplace that Soulie sends to the locus of the message via the classic alphagamma pathway.

111. #111

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.18

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Graph of Desire's two-line schema to distinguish the signifying chain (permeable to metaphor/metonymy) from the line of rational discourse, showing how their two intersections (code and message) generate meaning; he then opens the inquiry into Witz as the privileged Freudian site where the interplay between code and message—and thereby the structural relation between wit and the unconscious—becomes legible.

     The little stopper stands for the beginning of the trajectory. and the tip of the arrow is its end. You will recognize my first line here, which the other hooks onto once it has crossed it twice.

112. #112

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.460

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus achieves its privileged status as master signifier of the unconscious not through anatomical primacy but through its metaphorical passage into the signifying chain via the paternal metaphor; in psychosis, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father prevents this metaphorical effect, leaving the Other's desire unsymbolized and causing the 'it speaks' of the unconscious to erupt in the Real as hallucination, while in obsessional neurosis the Other's desire is actively disavowed (Verneinung) rather than left unsymbolized.

     these phrases... are a series of messages that only aim at what in the code refers to the message... This can be precisely recorded on the graph.

113. #113

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.291

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **THE FORMULAS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the "psychologizing" regression in post-Freudian theory (culminating in Klein's "early Oedipus complex") that reduces castration to a partial, aggressive drive, and counter-proposes that castration must be understood in its irreducibly signifying character: as the structural relation between desire and the mark, prior to any psychological or genetic narrative.

     $$d \longrightarrow 8 \circ a \stackrel{\longrightarrow}{\longleftarrow} i (a) \longleftarrow m$$ $$D \longrightarrow A \circ d \stackrel{\longrightarrow}{\longleftarrow} s (A) \longleftarrow I$$ $$\Delta \longrightarrow 8 \circ D \stackrel{\longrightarrow}{\longleftarrow} S (A) \longleftarrow \Phi$$

114. #114

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.359

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS**

     Theoretical move: Against Dolto's imaginarist account of the phallus as a 'beautiful and good form,' Lacan argues that the phallus is neither image, fantasy, nor object but a signifier—specifically the signifier of desire—and that only this symbolic status allows it to articulate the heterosexual relation's irreducible complexity, which is then illustrated through close reading of Freud's hysteric's market dream.

     it is absolutely clear and structured exactly along the lines of the little schema I started drawing for you in relation to the hysteric's desire.

115. #115

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE**

     Theoretical move: By tracing demand through a three-moment schema, Lacan argues that the introduction of signifiers necessarily transforms raw need into desire, and that this minimal metaphorical transformation—instating the Other and the message simultaneously—is the mythical-structural foundation for all subsequent operations of the unconscious, including wit, surprise, and the metonymic circuit of the subject's desire in the Other.

     It describes the function of need. Something gets expressed, coming from the subject, and I'll make it the line of his need. It ends here, in A, where it also crosses the curved line of what we've identified as discourse.

116. #116

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.147

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that Foreclosure (Verwerfung) of the Name-of-the-Father destroys the message/code circuit at point A (the locus of the Other), thereby collapsing the signifying conditions for desire's satisfaction and precipitating psychosis—illustrated through Schreber's voice hallucinations as substitutes for the absent paternal signifier.

     Pay close attention to this schema behind me and simply suppose that everything in the Other that might correspond … to the level that I am calling the Name-of-the-Father … were verworfen.

117. #117

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.321

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes desire from demand by insisting on desire's eccentricity to satisfaction and its irreducibility to any graspable meaning produced by signification, while simultaneously grounding the signifier's distinctive status in its capacity for self-substitution within the topological space of the big Other — a structure animals lack, since they possess no law organizing signifiers into a concatenated discourse.

     Outline of the graph of desire

118. #118

     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.

     Graph of Desire see Graph of Desirelschemas

119. #119

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.492

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object of desire (objet a) is constituted as the signifier of desire-for-desire—not as a complement to instinct—and that the phallus functions not as a biological referent but as the privileged signifier of the Other's desire; desire is located in the gap between two signifying chains (repressed and manifest), while the Real is defined by inexorable return to the same place, and analytic interventions that reduce transference to current reality miss the essential dimension of desire.

     The object of desire - in other words, object a on the graph, if you will

120. #120

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.146

     THE LITTLE COUGH AS A MESSAGE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Graph of Desire to articulate the structural distinction between statement (énoncé) and enunciation (énonciation) in dream-reporting, arguing that the subject's asides, doubts, and stresses are not incidental but are inscribed at the level of enunciation and connect directly to the latent dream-thoughts — thereby giving the formula E(e) as the general structure of the enigma.

     The graph of desire will serve us here, in the following form... This graph is of interest to us because it is structural. It is a structure that allows us to map the relationship between the subject and the signifier.

121. #121

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.24

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the Graph of Desire by differentiating desire from need and will through psychoanalytic categories (drive, fantasy), then grounds subjectivity in the signifying chain, demonstrating that the graph's two levels articulate the subject's progressive capture in language and the emergence of the Other as such.

     I would like to show you, not the genesis, but rather the construction of the three schemas I just put up on the blackboard [Figures 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3].

122. #122

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     FURTHER EXPLANATION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire in dreams (and in analytic experience) cannot be reduced to sexual desire or simple wish-fulfilment; rather, desire is essentially structured by fantasy — "to desire someone" means "to include them in one's fundamental fantasy" — and this fantasy structure is located on the Graph of Desire at the locus of the unconscious, where only signifying elements (signifiers) circulate and can be repressed.

     This point is located here on the graph. You might say that it is part of the dotted circle that traces out a type of little tail at the second level.

123. #123

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.306

     THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Hamlet's structural position—his delay, his encounter with death, and the father's revelation of truth—to articulate the Lacanian subject as constituted by the signifier and the Graph of Desire, distinguishing the obsessional's relation to desire (Erwartung) from the Oedipal structure, and positioning the father who "knew the truth" as the key differential coordinate between Hamlet and Oedipus.

     I am trying to give you a key to this structure that allows you to orient yourselves with complete confidence - namely, the topological shape that I call the graph and that we might call a gramma

124. #124

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.255

     IMPOSSIBLE ACTION

     Theoretical move: By reading Hamlet against Oedipus through a quasi-algebraic comparison of homologous signifying threads, Lacan establishes that what is structurally decisive in Hamlet is the father's knowing of his own murder — the inversion of the Oedipal unknowing — and that Hamlet's inability to act is indexed by the derangement of his desire, whose barometer is his fantasy relation to Ophelia.

     In the dream about the dead father, we placed 'he did not know' on the upper line [of the graph]. In Hamlet, we place 'he knew he was dead' there

125. #125

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.361

     PHALLOPHANIES

     Theoretical move: The Oedipus complex's dissolution (Untergang) is structured as a mourning of the phallus, which Lacan re-articulates through the triad of castration/frustration/deprivation: symbolic castration marks the barred subject as speaking subject, and the imaginary subtraction of the phallus (−φ) is what generates Objet petit a as the object that sustains the subject precisely in his position as "not being the phallus."

     This part is what is transmitted by the dotted signifying chain found at the top of the graph of desire [see Figure 15.4].

126. #126

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     FURTHER EXPLANATION

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

     At the second level of the graph, the subject is something other than a subject who passes through the defiles of signifying articulation. It is the subject who begins to speak - that is, the subject qua I.

127. #127

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     FURTHER EXPLANATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs the Graph of Desire step by step to show how its two levels articulate the speaking subject's relation to the signifier, demonstrating that continuity and fragmentation on each trajectory encode the retroactive effect of the signifier's synchronic structure on need, demand, and intentionality, thereby distinguishing the repressed, desire, and the unconscious as three non-identical registers.

     to understand what I mean to show you by taking up the example of the interpretation of a dream, as well as the use of what we have, for some time now, been conventionally calling the graph [of desire].

128. #128

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

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

     This year we are going to talk about desire and its interpretation.

129. #129

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.74

     LITTLE ANNA'S DREAM

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Little Anna's dream as a pedagogical entry point to articulate the strict distinction between the pleasure principle (primary process, hallucination) and desire, arguing that hallucination—produced by topographical regression when motor discharge is blocked—constitutes the foundational backdrop against which human reality is constructed, while the secondary process substitutes for instinct by testing hallucinatory reality against experience.

     To clearly see what is at stake, we will articulate it using the graph of desire.

130. #130

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that metaphor produces a new signified by substituting an unexpected signifier, and that this metaphorical operation always veils/unveils death — the constitutive absence at the heart of language — through the structural function of the phallus as the missing signifier subtracted from the chain of speech, making desire the metonymy of being and castration the inevitable consequence of the subject's capture in speech.

     We could arrive at the same result without it, but the schema guides us and shows us what is really happening.

131. #131

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.468

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between neurotic and perverse desire by deploying the fantasy matheme ($◇a) to show that fantasy constitutes the subject at the point where unconscious discourse escapes him; masochistic jouissance is reread as the subject's relation to the Other's discourse rather than the death drive, schizophrenic foreclosure is located at the identification with the cut, and neurotic desire is defined as structurally dependent on the paternal metaphor that masks a metonymy of castration.

     situated on the graph we use here to map the position of desire in a speaking subject

132. #132

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.167

     THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Ella Sharpe's clinical case to argue that interpreting a patient's symptoms (cough, dream, enuresis) at the level of imaginary rivalry and omnipotence misses the properly symbolic dimension: what is at stake is the omnipotence of discourse via the Other, not the subject's own omnipotence — and the cough must be read as a signifier (message) addressed to the Other, not a spontaneous affective release.

     what I have been proposing for a long time, and whose map I have tried to give you in the form of the topological schema, the graph, that we use.

133. #133

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.270

     THE DESIRE TRAP

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hamlet is not merely another version of the father-hero myth but a uniquely articulated dramatic structure that maps the very framework of desire—showing how, under specific conditions, desire must be sought at mortal cost—and that the ghost's command pivots not on vengeance against Claudius but on the mother's desire, which is the essential, immediate object of the conflict.

     Hamlet brings out the different levels, indeed the very framework that I am trying to present to you here, the framework in which desire is situated.

134. #134

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the movement from the animal's excremental territoriality through language's complication of the subject/object relation (use→exchange value), to the dialectic of desire: identification with the father fails to resolve desire's impasse, so the most general "solution" offered to the barred subject is narcissism, which structures fantasy by transferring the subject's anxiety onto object a, yielding the formula of the ego-ideal as i(a)/$ ◇ a/I.

     A transformation of the algorithm is necessary here, that I can already put on the blackboard as a sort of preannouncement... Formula of the ego-ideal: i(a)/$ ◇ a/I

135. #135

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.414

     CUT AND FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "cut" (coupure) is the fundamental structural characteristic of the symbolic order and the locus of the subject's relation to being, and that works of art—exemplified by Hamlet—do not sublimate or imitate reality but structurally instantiate this cut, thereby making accessible, via fantasy, the subject's real as an unconscious speaking subject.

     If I may use, in this regard, the topology of my graph to convey this, this dimension is not parallel to the field of reality created in reality by human symbolization, but cuts across it

136. #136

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.506

     MARGINALIA ON THE SEMINAR ON DESIRE

     Theoretical move: This passage is a set of editorial marginalia by Jacques-Alain Miller providing bibliographic references, personal anecdotes, and contextual notes on Seminar VI; it is non-substantive from a theoretical standpoint, though it contains brief allusions to several canonical concepts (Graph of Desire, Master/Slave Dialectic, Phallus, Hilflosigkeit) in passing bibliographic form.

     In Lacan's earlier work, see Seminar V where Lacan introduces the first stage of the graph; in his later work, see the article in which he finalizes his conception four years later: 'The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,' Ecrits, pp. 671-702.

137. #137

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG > Crossing and exchange

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates how the fantasy formula ($◇a) operates clinically by tracking a patient's chain of associations through the Graph of Desire, showing that the subject's fantasy structure requires the absence of the big Other as witness, and that the oscillation between the imaginary other (little a) and the symbolic Other is the pivotal hinge around which the subject's desire and shame are organized.

     According to the formulation that I have given of it, a metaphor, from the vantage point of the graph, consists essentially of the following: something at the level of the upper line is displaced or elided with respect to something that in the lower line, that of the signified, is also displaced.

138. #138

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.323

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the Graph of Desire to distinguish fantasy's imaginary object (a) from the signifiers of demand, arguing that Object Relations theory errs by collapsing this distinction—Ophelia serves as the dramatic instantiation of objet petit a, and Hamlet's vacillating desire is theorized as the subject's fading (aphanisis) at the intersection of demand and fantasy.

     How this reverberates in the very heart of Hamlet's will, which, on my graph, is the hook or question mark constituted by the 'Che vuoi?' of the subjectivity that is constituted in the Other and articulated in the Other [see Figure 1.3].

139. #139

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.100

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

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

     We have seen, as we should have expected, that desire has to find its place somewhere on the graph between, on the one hand, the point from which we began when we said that the subject is alienated there [A]

140. #140

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.499

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation — defined as the form into which desire flows, reducible to the pure play of the signifier — and perversion together constitute a dialectical circuit that resists social normalization, and that the analyst's function is to occupy the position of desire's midwife by maintaining the "cut" as the privileged mode of psychoanalytic intervention.

     To situate at its proper and organizing level what is at stake in desire, we could, at least provisionally, point to the closed circuit constituted by the four terms on the graph: d, (\$0a), S(A), and (\$OD).

141. #141

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.317

     THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is essentially the distance encoded in the barred subject's relation to objet petit a — the formula ($◇a) — and uses Ophelia as the paradigmatic figure of the phallus (girl = phallus) to dramatize how psychoanalysis has gone wrong by defining libido as object-seeking rather than grasping the object through the lens of aphanisis (fading of the subject).

     which I place on the graph on the line that returns from the x of unconscious will, and which is, as it were, the cursor of the level at which desire in the subject, strictly speaking, is situated

142. #142

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.341

     MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Hamlet's final duel to demonstrate that desire is structured by the formula ($◇a) — fantasy — where the object in desire functions as a substitute for the phallus the subject sacrifices to the signifier; Hamlet's inability to act from desire proper (he engages only at the level of imaginary, specular rivalry) reveals the structural gap between the object of need and the object in desire, and exposes the mirror stage as the imaginary short-circuit that occludes the real stakes of his action.

     On the graph, this chain is represented by the upper circuit... What we are dealing with here is the imaginary short circuit that lies halfway between the upper and the lower circuits, where desire connects up with what lies across from it: fantasy.

143. #143

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.184

     THE IMAGE OF THE INSIDE-OUT GLOVE

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the Graph of Desire to theorize the structural asymmetry between fantasy and dream: in fantasy the subject (barred, announcing itself as other) is foregrounded while the object remains enigmatic, whereas in the dream the object is foregrounded and the subject remains unknown — thereby elaborating the formula ($◇a) as a mobile, two-sided structure where desire arises in the gap between need and demand.

     I will begin by turning to the graph again for a moment… I think you are beginning to glimpse what the two different levels of the graph mean.

144. #144

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.315

     THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage delivers the core formulation S(Ⱥ) — the signifier of the barred Other — as the "big secret of psychoanalysis": there is no Other of the Other, no metalanguage or guarantor that can give the subject back what it has sacrificed to the signifying order, and the phallus names precisely that missing, symbolically-sacrificed signifier; Hamlet is read as the dramatic figure who receives this radical revelation and whose desire is consequently structured around this absence.

     It concerns what we are approaching, after having established the function of the two lines of the graph - namely, what lies in the gap between them.

145. #145

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.131

     DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the privileged signifier mediating between demand and desire, such that neurosis consists precisely in the inscription of desire within the register of demand; the Graph of Desire is used to map this structural tension, and the beating fantasy ('A child is being beaten') is introduced as the exemplary case through which fantasy props up desire at the imaginary level.

     everything that must be articulated at the interrogative level resides in the Other, here at A [on the lower level of the graph], as a predetermined code that completely pre-exists the subject's experience

146. #146

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Sharpe's analytic intervention by distinguishing the activation of the penis as a real (biological) organ from its function as a signifier, arguing that the patient's violent acting-out demonstrates a failure to engage the Other as the locus of speech and law — marking a missed encounter with the symbolic rather than a genuine therapeutic advance.

     With the help of the graph and related notions, I will try to provide you with several formulas indicating how we should conceptualize the function of what we should very precisely attribute to the phallic signifier in all its generality.

147. #147

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.280

     THE DESIRE TRAP

     Theoretical move: The passage identifies a pivotal structural moment in Hamlet's trajectory: his sudden identification with his desire in its totality occurs precisely when the barred subject ($) enters into a specific relation with objet petit a — triggered by the scene at Ophelia's grave — resolving the long-flagging, "unfinishable" desire that had paralyzed him throughout.

     a revolution takes place in him owing to something that is highly significant, I can say, with respect to our schema.

148. #148

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     LITTLE ANNA'S DREAM

     Theoretical move: The passage develops the distinction between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement as the structural foundation of the Graph of Desire's two lines, arguing that repression is essentially the effacement of the subject at the level of the enunciation process, and that all speech is primordially the Other's discourse — with Foreclosure (Verwerfung) marking the pathological limit of this structure.

     The relationship between these two lines that represent the enunciation process and the statement process is quite simple: it is the whole of grammar.

149. #149

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.348

     MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hamlet's identification with the "foil" (the mortal phallus) as the structural key to his desire, and then pivots to argue that mourning—illustrated by the cemetery scene—produces a hole in the Real that is the strict converse of Foreclosure: what is lost in reality irrupts as an absolute (impossible) object, and this opens onto a rearticulation of mourning via the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real rather than mere object-relations.

     this element is located at the lower level of our graph, at i(a). Hamlet, for whom men and women are no longer anything but insubstantial and putrid shadows

150. #150

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE

     Theoretical move: By testing the algorithm (S◇a) against the phenomenology of desire—through dream interpretation, clinical vignette, and Jones's concept of aphanisis—Lacan argues that desire is structurally alienated in a sign and thereby constitutively linked to lack, such that castration functions as the "final temperament" of the metonymic vanishing of desire's object.

     I showed you in what respect this could be represented on the little graph that we use here, by situating the elements of the dream 'he did not know he was dead' on it.

151. #151

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     LITTLE ANNA'S DREAM

     Theoretical move: By reading Freud's Niederschrift (inscription) through the topology of two superimposed signifying chains—illustrated via Anna Freud's dream—Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured as a topology of signifiers, where desire appears not as naked immediacy but only through its signifying articulation, and the subject is constituted differentially by the upper (desire/message) versus lower (demand/sentence) chain of the Graph of Desire.

     What I am trying to show you with this graph is the very structure of the signifying system... it suffices to conceptualize it as constituted by two superimposed chains.

152. #152

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the second and third stages of the Graph of Desire by showing how the encounter with the Other's desire (Che vuoi?) introduces the principles of substitution (metaphor) and similarity (metonymy), situating desire in the gap between demand and being, and how fantasy ($ ◇ a) emerges as the subject's imaginary defense against Hilflosigkeit — the structural response to the opacity of the Other's desire.

     If I did not immediately provide you with what I call the graph [of desire], I would have to provide you with it little by little as I did last year

153. #153

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.385

     THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan presents a synchronic schema of the dialectic of desire that articulates how the subject is constituted through the structural failure of the Other as guarantor, establishing objet petit a as the remainder produced by the division of the Other by Demand—a mortified lost object that desire aims at only as hidden, always beyond the nothing to which the subject must consent through castration.

     The relations between the letters that I am now going to write on the blackboard [see Table 20.l] are designed to allow you to situate little a in its proper place.

154. #154

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     THE LITTLE COUGH AS A MESSAGE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject of enunciation is structurally split from the subject of the statement, and that desire is neither identical to demand nor to repressed signifiers, but is what the subject *is* as a function of demand — a being-dimension introduced and simultaneously stolen by language. He then demonstrates this through a clinical dream reported by Ella Sharpe, showing how the fantasy culminating in the dream's key signifier ("masturbate her" used transitively) will reveal the true meaning of desire.

     The restoring of the meaning of the fantasy... is inscribed on the graph [see Figure 2.2] between the two lines: between the statement of the subject's intention, on the one hand, and the enunciation in which the subject reads his intention in a profoundly decomposed, fragmented, and refracted form through spoken language.

155. #155

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION

     Theoretical move: Desire cannot be reduced to demand or frustration but must be grasped through the tight knot of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic; the dream of the dead father exemplifies how the imaginary interposition of the father's image props up desire as a shield against the anxiety of subjective elision, with the fantasy formula (S◇a) expressing the structural absence of the subject that is constitutive of desire itself.

     This is why the relationship between desire and fantasy is inscribed on the graph in the field that lies midway between the two structural lines of any and every signifying enunciation

156. #156

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.535

     449. "Your daughter is mute" > 462. The article I devoted to the case of Andre Gide > 483. "Neurosis and Psychosis" > 486. A mark of fancy

     Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it consists of a brief editorial note identifying the source of a spoonerism cited by Lacan (Desire Viardot's *Ripopée*, 1956), followed by index pages (pp. 533–536) listing concepts and proper names from Seminar VI with page references.

     graph of desire 89, 1 33-4, 136-8, 158-9, 1 68, 1 72-3, 181

157. #157

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

     Theoretical move: The dream about the dead father is analyzed as a metaphor produced by the elision (subtraction) of signifiers, where repression operates at the level of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz rather than content; this analysis hinges on the distinction between signifying elision and repression, and opens toward the graph of desire, fantasy, and the differential clinical significance of similar structures across neurosis and psychosis.

     the 'chain of the subject' and the 'signifying chain,' respectively, such as they are posited, repeated, and insistently presented to you in the form of our graph of desire.

158. #158

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.406

     CUT AND FANTASY

     Theoretical move: This passage systematically works through the upper level of the Graph of Desire to show how fantasy functions as an imaginary prop that substitutes for the unattainable articulation of the subject as subject of the unconscious—bridging the gap between the barred subject's encounter with demand and the insufficiency of the Other's guarantee of truth.

     You know where fantasy as a function is situated on what I call the graph. It is, in short, very simple. The intersecting of the two signifying chains, the upper and lower chains, by a loop which is that of subjective intention, defines four points.

159. #159

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.170

     THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Ella Sharpe's case to demonstrate that the patient's question about the purpose of his cough operates at the level of the signifier of the Other (the unconscious question "what does the Other want?"), and that the barking-dog fantasy exemplifies how the subject constitutes itself through a signifier as other-than-what-it-is — establishing the structural function of the signifier in fantasy as distinct from the order of affect and comprehension.

     Up to a certain point, we can already begin to get our bearings thanks to our graph. When the patient wonders what his cough is about, it is a question raised to the second power [au second degre] regarding the event. He raises this question using the Other as his starting point

160. #160

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     THE IMAGE OF THE INSIDE-OUT GLOVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy must not be dissolved into pre-formed imaginary significations (mouth/vagina, womb/envelopment) but must be respected as a precise object with signifying value; using the Graph of Desire, he locates fantasy midway between the signifier of the barred Other S(Ⱥ) and the signified of the Other s(A), insisting that the object in fantasy is simultaneously a visual representation and a signifier.

     Fantasy finds its place on the graph of desire halfway between the signifier of the barred Other, S(A.), and the signified of the Other, s(A) [see Figure 2.2].

161. #161

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

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

     what is the relationship between the phallus and the Other with a capital O that we speak about as the locus of speech? ...we are trying to orient our experience of desire and its interpretation.

162. #162

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.105

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

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

     it is easy to show on the graph that a first interpretation can immediately be made at the lower level, at the level of the continuous line on which are inscribed the dreamer's words 'he did not know.'

163. #163

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.297

     THE MOTHER'S DESIRE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the closet scene of Hamlet to demonstrate that desire is constitutively the Other's desire, mapping Hamlet's oscillating plea/collapse onto the Graph of Desire to show how Fantasy regulates desire's fixation and how, when the subject drops back without meeting his own desire, he is left with nothing but the Other's message — the mother's impenetrable jouissance.

     Today, in concluding, I will try to show you the relationship between what I am in the process of articulating and the graph of desire.

164. #164

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.325

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

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

     In these fantasms one finds projected nothing but the structural relationship that I attempted to indicate on the graph with the line of the signifier.

165. #165

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.201

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

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

     It is there the sign appears that I presented to you in my graph in the form of S (O). Situated as you know in the upper left section

166. #166

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     **V**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes das Ding from Vorstellungen/Sachvorstellungen by positioning it as the primordial, absent, and unsymbolizable Thing that governs the gravitational field of unconscious representations, while using Freud's Verneinung/Verdrängung/Verwerfung triad to map different levels of negation onto the structure of discourse, ultimately grounding the Reality Principle and superego in the relation to das Ding and the Other of the Other.

     This 'ne' has a floating place between the two levels of the graph that I showed you how to use, so as to distinguish between the level of enunciation and the level of the enunciated.

167. #167

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.242

     **XIV** > **XVIII**

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

     Let us recall the terms around which, in the first year of my seminar devoted to Freud's Technical Writings, I organized the ideal ego and the ego ideal, terms that I represented in my graph.

168. #168

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.90

     **VI**

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

     'Thou shalt not lie' as a negative precept has as its function to withdraw the subject of enunciation from that which is enunciated. Remember the graph.

169. #169

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.302

     **XIV** > **XXII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's ethical task is inseparable from the question of desire's realization—which can only be posed from the standpoint of a "Last Judgment"—and that sublimation, properly understood via the metonymic structure of the drive and the signifier, is not a new object but the change of object as such, grounding the subject's access to its own relationship with death.

     In the graph of desire that I gave you, the instinct is situated at the level of the unconscious articulation of a signifying series and is for this reason constituted as fundamental alienation.

170. #170

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.112

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

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

     It is, in short, the 'he did not know' that I wrote for you at the top of the Graph of Desire, on the enunciation line that is fundamental to the topology of the unconscious.

171. #171

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus (Φ) functions as a privileged signifier that uniquely arrests the infinite deferral of the signifying chain, and that the subject's unnameable relation to this signifier of desire is what organizes both fantasy and the symptomatic effects of the castration complex — exemplified through a reading of Dora's hysteria as a game of substituting imaginary φ where the veiled Φ is sought.

     The lower level of the Graph of Desire, with the two intersections of each of its two arrows, is designed to draw attention to the fact that simultaneity is not synchrony.

172. #172

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.418

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > *Erastés Erômenos*

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, providing philological, bibliographic, and editorial clarifications; it contains no substantive theoretical argument.

     The Graph of Desire can be found in Écrits, p. 817.

173. #173

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.76

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan identifies Aristophanes' hiccoughs as Plato's own comic commentary on Pausanias' speech, then pivots to locate in Aristophanes' myth of splitting (Spaltung) a pre-figuration of the subject's division, and culminates by showing that Socrates' reduction of love to desire establishes desire as structurally identical to lack—the foundational Lacanian equation.

     a Spaltung or splitting, which, while not identical to what I have developed for you with the Graph of Desire, is certainly not totally unrelated.

174. #174

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Symposium's final scene between Alcibiades and Socrates reveals the fundamental structure of desire: the subject, through the metonymic sliding of the signifier, finds an object (objet petit a / agalma) that arrests that sliding and paradoxically restores subjective dignity, while the subject simultaneously undergoes a "deposing" before the Other—establishing that transference is not reducible to repetition but must be approached via this dialectic of love and desire.

     the topological summary we conventionally refer to here as the Graph. Its general form is supplied by the splitting or fundamental doubling of two signifying chains by which the subject is constituted.

175. #175

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-192-0"></span>**A CRITIQUE OF CO UNTERTRANSFERENCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the Kleinian theory of countertransference by showing that what analysts call "countertransference" — the analyst's feelings determined by the analysand — is not an incidental imperfection but a structural feature that must be theorized through the Graph of Desire (especially the relation between demand, the Other, and the superego), not simply attributed to projection of the "bad object."

     a gap, which only truly takes on its full importance if you refer to the Graph of Desire. It is beyond the locus of the Other that the bottom line represents the superego

176. #176

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.439

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XXV - The Relationship between Anxiety and Desire**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII Chapter XXV, clarifying terminological choices, variant readings, and cross-references to Freud, Écrits, and other seminars; it performs no independent theoretical argument.

     This is a likely reference to the complete Graph of Desire, Écrits, p. 817.

177. #177

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.334

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > **STRUCTURAL DECOM POSITION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that myth (via structuralist decomposition) and the concept of *Versagung* (primordial refusal grounded in the signifier) provide the only rigorous framework for psychoanalytic practice, displacing both normalization narratives and crude economic-topographic models; the Graph of Desire is presented as the minimal structural map of the necessary encounter between subject and signifier, while trauma is recast as an event's occupation of a pre-given structural place.

     the very ones I tried to depict in the Graph of Desire... A minimal structure including eight points of intersection seems to be necessitated by the very encounter between the subject and the signifier.

178. #178

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XVII - The Symbol Φ**

     Theoretical move: This is a translator's endnotes section providing textual variants, clarifications of French idioms, and cross-references to the Graph of Desire in the Écrits and other seminars; it contains no independent theoretical argumentation.

     The first intersection is likely at A and the second at j(A) in Graph 2 in Écrits, p. 808.

179. #179

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.425

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter ΧΠ - Transference in the Present**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a set of translator's endnotes providing bibliographic and conceptual glosses on Seminar VIII's discussion of transference, desire, and the Graph of Desire; it is largely non-substantive but contains two theoretically pointed glosses: one clarifying the aim of *Aidos* as the fall of the Other (A) into *objet a*, and one identifying the analysand's desire as the question "What does the analyst want?"

     On the Graph of Desire, see 'Subversion of the Subject,' Écrits, p. 817.

180. #180

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.301

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

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

     the support-formula of the third type of identification which I noted for you a long time ago, since the time of the graph, under the form of $

181. #181

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.212

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is not beyond language but structured through it, and that the subject's constitution as desire requires grasping both the topological dimension of the objet petit a and its role in fantasy—where the Graph of Desire's two-level structure reveals that fantasy anticipates the ideal ego in a temporal logic of the future perfect, pointing toward a 'temporal dynamics' that exceeds mere spatial topology.

     the formalisation of phantasy as being established in its relationship by the ensemble: S desire of o, S o and the situation of this formula in the graph which shows homologically, by its position at the upper level which makes it the homologue, of the i of o of the lower level

182. #182

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.244

     *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 22*: *Wednesday 30 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: By mapping the torus topologically, Lacan formalises the structural inversion between the subject's demand/object and the Other's demand/object, deriving from this the differential structure of obsessional and hysterical neurosis, and showing that the neurotic's impasse consists in pursuing objet a through the specular image i(o) rather than acceding to it directly.

     in the graph you have the following symbols s(0); at the upper level S(ø), \$ cut of D; at the two intermediary stages: i(o), e, and on the other side, \$ cut of o, the phantasy

183. #183

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.311

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

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

     Desire, you must not forget, is situated where in the graph? It aims at the phantasy \$ barred cut of little o, in a mode analogous to that of e where the ego refers itself to the specular image.

184. #184

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.141

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus and the Graph of Desire's four nodal points to articulate the structural difference between message and question, grounding desire as precisely that part of demand hidden from the Other—and showing how the neurotic (especially the obsessional) constitutes himself as a real/impossible in face of the Other's impotence to respond.

     the graph which I kept you to for a certain time of my discourse is properly speaking forged: this difference is called the difference between the message and the question

185. #185

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.154

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage traces how the subject constitutes itself through the unary trait and the non-response of the Other, rewriting Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as a formula of the One's advent, and then uses Sade to demonstrate that the object of desire is structurally dependent on the Other's silence—culminating in the Sadian drive toward annihilating signifying power as the logical extreme of this dialectic.

     it is for that reason, to introduce it, that I had to put before you again the network of the whole graph, namely the constitutive network of the relationship to the Other with all its reverberations.

186. #186

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.44

     chapter 2

     Theoretical move: The structural reduction of the voice by phonology does not eliminate the voice but produces it as a remainder — the Lacanian object petit a — thereby reversing the phonological assumption that voice is raw material prior to structure and instead positioning it as the outcome of the signifying operation.

     In the famous graph of desire we find, somewhat surprisingly, a line that runs from the signifier on the left to the voice on the right

187. #187

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.207

     Notes > Chapter 3 The "Physics" of the Voice

     Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus advances several interlocking theoretical arguments: the drive's aim/goal distinction (via Lacan) explains why the oral drive circles an eternally lacking object rather than reaching satisfaction; the acousmatic voice is shown to be structurally tied to phantomology when seen/heard fail to coincide; and the trompe-l'œil/lure distinction illuminates how deception operates at the level of the sign rather than verisimilitude.

     Lacan's formula for the drive in the graph of desire, S/ ◊ D (1989, pp. 314–315), the subject confronted with the demand, with that excess of demand which sticks to the voice.

188. #188

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.145

     A month later:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fantasy is structurally generated by the temporal gap between hearing a voice and understanding it (après-coup), functioning as a provisional quilting point in place of understanding; crucially, true understanding never dissolves fantasy but only prolongs it, so analytic progress requires traversal of fantasy rather than understanding—with the matheme and formulas of sexuation standing as the non-fantasmatic, purely literal counterpart to the traumatic voice.

     As in Lacan's graph of desire, where sense emerges on the retroactive vector (Lacan 1989, pp. 303, 306, 315), only here the retroactive loop takes its time, years pass before 'the quilting point' makes its appearance.

189. #189

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.204

     Notes > Chapter 2 The Metaphysics of the Voice

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/endnotes section providing bibliographic citations, clarificatory remarks, and brief theoretical asides for Chapter 2 on the metaphysics of the voice; substantive theoretical content is minimal and mostly cross-referential, touching on the mirror stage/objet a distinction, the voice-castration structural tie, and the voice's role in jouissance and sexuation.

     Lacan's graph of desire, where voice and castration are to be found at parallel and analogous points: Lacan 1989, p. 315

190. #190

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.46

     chapter 2 > Voice and presence

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

     in the context of the graph, we could say that it presents the counterweight, not just to differentiality but also, and in the first place, to the subject

191. #191

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.42

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory's appropriation of the Lacanian gaze fundamentally misreads it: where film theory locates the gaze as a positive, signified presence that centers and confirms the subject (aligning it with Foucauldian panopticism), Lacan's gaze is the Objet petit a in the visual field—a blind, jouissance-absorbed point of impossibility that annihilates rather than confirms the subject, constituting desire as constitutionally contentless pursuit of an impossibility.

     a fragment of the Lacanian phrase 'graph of desire' as it splits the subject that it describes

192. #192

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.32

     **The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan** > **The Mirror as Screen**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory fundamentally misreads Lacan's concept of the gaze by collapsing it into a Foucauldian optics of total visibility and perspectival construction; the Lacanian gaze, properly understood from Seminar XI, is not a point of surveillance but the Objet petit a in the visual field—an unoccupiable, impossible-real absence that founds the subject as desiring precisely through what it cannot see.

     the hyphen that splits the term photo-graph—into photo, 'light,' and graph, among other things, a fragment of the Lacanian phrase 'graph of desire'—as it splits the subject that it describes.

193. #193

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is not the scene of desire's satisfaction but its constitutive frame and simultaneously a defence against the raw desire of the Other; the completed Graph of Desire maps the structural impossibility between the Symbolic order and jouissance, where the lack in the Other enables Separation (de-alienation) and drives are tied to remnant erogenous zones that survive the signifier's evacuation of enjoyment.

     It is clear, then, why Lacan developed his graph of desire apropos of Shakespeare's Hamlet... The complete graph is thus divided into two levels, which can be designated as the level of meaning and the level of enjoyment.

194. #194

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Symbolic identification (ego-ideal, I(O)) dominates imaginary identification (ideal ego, i(o)) as the mechanism of socio-symbolic interpellation, but this quilting always leaves a remainder — the gap of 'Che vuoi?' — which marks the irreducible split between demand and desire and prevents full closure of the subject's integration into the symbolic order.

     Beyond Identification (Upper Level of the Graph of Desire) [...] the famous 'che vuoi?' - 'You're telling me that, but what do you want with it, what are you aiming at?'

195. #195

     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'.

     we could read the whole upper (second) level of the graph as designating the dimension 'beyond interpellation'

196. #196

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as a double operation: it answers the unbearable gap of the Other's desire ('Che vuoi?') by filling the void with an imaginary scenario, while simultaneously constructing the very coordinates that make desire possible; this structure illuminates hysteria as failed interpellation, anti-Semitism as racist fantasy, Christianity vs. Judaism as contrasting strategies for 'gentrifying' the desire of the Other, and sainthood/Antigone as ethical positions of not giving way on one's desire.

     Lacan put, at the end of the curve designating the question 'Che vuoi?' the formula of fantasy ($ ◊ a): fantasy is an answer to this 'che vuoi?'

197. #197

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Point de capiton functions as a 'rigid designator' — a pure, meaningless signifier that retroactively constitutes the identity of ideological objects — and that 'ideological anamorphosis' names the error by which this structural lack is misperceived as supreme plenitude of Meaning; the Objet petit a emerges as the real-impossible surplus correlative of this operation.

     The answer is obtained by the Lacanian graph of desire... Lacan articulated this graph in four successive forms; in explaining it we should not limit ourselves to the last, complete form, because the succession of the four forms cannot be reduced to a linear gradual completion; it implies the retroactive changing of preceding forms.

198. #198

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of the Graph of Desire's operation by showing that the point de capiton retroactively fixes meaning through the Master Signifier, and that this quilting operation grounds both ideology (as transferential illusion) and subjectivity (as the difference between imaginary identification with the ideal ego and symbolic identification with the ego-ideal/gaze of the Other).

     we have arrived at the second form of the graph of desire - at the specification of the two points at which the intention (Δ) cuts the signifying chain: 0 and s(O), the big Other and the signified as its function

199. #199

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.184

     <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **Network Mappings** > <span id="page-182-0"></span>TABLE Al.S

     Theoretical move: This passage is a technical appendix table presenting the combinatory network mappings used to construct Lacan's graph of desire, showing how numeric triplets recoded as binary (odds/evens) yield eight points that, when linked, produce the Network Lacan deploys — a structure Miller identifies as closely related to the graph of desire in the Écrits.

     As J.-A. Miller points out, this Network is closely related to Lacan's "graph of desire" (Ecrits, p. 315).