Identity

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (109)

1. #01

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.32

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx's concept of creative labor (poiesis) as the essence of human species-being provides the normative ground for Marxist film theory: alienation names the estrangement from this creative essence under capitalism, and a Marxist critique of form—including film form—is itself an expression of that creative-critical faculty, not merely its negation.

   Meditations on the status of alienation—including self-division, the division of labor, and social antagonism—may be assessed in terms of whether they project an ultimate identity and integration, or whether they foresee the ongoingness of alienation even after the end of capitalism.

2. #02

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.150

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club* operationalizes a sophisticated theory of ideology—drawing on Marx, Althusser, and Žižek—whereby ideology is not false belief but practical consciousness constituted in consumption, work, and even ostensibly anti-ideological resistance; the film's formal devices (editing, lighting, indistinct setting) underscore that there is no outside of ideology, and that the subject's critical distance from ideology is itself ideological.

   identities are illusory. At the same time, they are materially determined by class position, economic activity and privilege, and social practices.

3. #03

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.168

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Ideology in Fight Club** > <span id="page-164-0"></span>**Intertextuality and the labor of cinema**

   Theoretical move: Fight Club's intertextuality is theorized not merely as aesthetic citation but as a formal technique that mediates the cinematic mode of production — making visible the collective labor behind the unified screen illusion — and thereby functions ideologically to interrogate capitalism and representation from within the film itself.

   identities, whether 'real' like 'Edward Norton' or fictional like 'Tyler Durden,' and including the unconscious, are intertwined with material forces.

4. #04

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.88

   LIFE DUR IN G WARTIME

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalism's ideological power rests on naturalizing itself as coincident with being itself, and that this error is shared not only by capitalism's champions (Rand, Smith) but even by its communist critics (Badiou), who by equating capitalism with 'economy as such' and animality concede capitalism's fundamental ideological contention — that it exists as nature — thereby fighting on capitalist terrain.

   Rand's philosophy of identity (which she claims wrongly to take from Aristotle) depends on this same misperception produced by capitalism's form of appearance. She believes that identity simply is, that a = a.

5. #05

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.260

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

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

   the child's own identity is formed not independently, yet also not entirely from the Other, but in an encounter with this judgment… identity is always also a 'mistaken identity'

6. #06

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

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego functions as a structural misrecognition-faculty — a lens that distorts rather than corrects — and that the proper distinction between the ideal ego and ego-ideal (as well as the difference between Verwerfung/foreclosure and repression) requires a topological-optical model rather than behavioral observation, demonstrating how the symbolic and imaginary registers differently shape (intra)subjective structure.

   One of the key lessons of psychoanalysis should be that identity, the 'person,' as the etymology of the word 'person' suggests [persona], is more like a mask: constructed, artificial

7. #07

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.152

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

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

   Love announces the subject as divided in itself and thereby invaded by the other. The Christian commandment of universal love becomes in Hegel's eyes the enactment of contradiction. I am both myself and other.

8. #08

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

   <span id="Chapter23.htm_page214"></span>Postmodern Antiques: *Patience (After Sebald)*

   Theoretical move: Fisher uses Christopher Nolan's *Inception* as a cultural-critical lens to argue that the film's real achievement is the diagnosis of a postmodern condition in which identity, memory, and selfhood are irreducible from fiction and self-deception, while simultaneously exposing how the film itself capitulates to the logic of spectacular capitalism and the 'creative industries', replacing the uncanny unconscious with CGI spectacle.

   in Nolan's worlds, it is not only that we deceive ourselves; it is also that we are deceived about having a self. There is no separating identity from fiction.

9. #09

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.91

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

   Theoretical move: Through the Zhuangzi butterfly dream, Lacan argues that the gaze is the site where the subject apprehends a root of its identity — not as unified consciousness but as a captured, desiring being — and that the objet petit a of the gaze is what causes the subject's fall in the scopic field, linking the primal marking of desire to the structure of scopic satisfaction.

   it is when he was the butterfly that he apprehended one of the roots of his identity—that he was, and is, in his essence, that butterfly who paints himself with his own colours

10. #10

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.91

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

    Theoretical move: Through the Zhuangzi butterfly dream, Lacan argues that the gaze is not a function of conscious self-identity but of a pre-subjective showing that marks the subject's essence; it is in the dream-state (as butterfly) that the subject touches the root of identity via the gaze, not in waking consciousness, and this structure grounds the gaze as objet petit a within the scopic field.

    it is when he was the butterfly that he apprehended one of the roots of his identity—that he was, and is, in his essence, that butterfly who paints himself with his own colours

11. #11

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.185

    **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the successful termination of analysis consists in the analysand's "conquest of the name" — the separation from identificatory names (father's name, analyst's name) and the founding of a singular subjective identity — with transference liquidation as the structural hinge between alienated and autonomous subjectivity.

    Philip, finally, twice baptised, will have conquered his own identity.

12. #12

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.259

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

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

    Everything is identical to itself, which allows the object, the thing qua one, to fall under the concept.

13. #13

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.117

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

    Theoretical move: Miller introduces the "logic of the signifier" as an archaeology of logic itself—one that precedes and prescribes logical law rather than following it—and argues, through a close reading of Frege's *Grundlagen*, that the excluded psychological subject reappears as a structural function (suture) necessary to the genesis of number, thereby grounding Lacanian theory in formal logic.

    It is by this reduplication that we enter into the logical dimension as such. It is essential to see that the entry into the logical dimension as such is produced by the appearance of identity.

14. #14

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118

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

    Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that what Frege's logical genesis of number actually stages—despite its explicit exclusion of the psychological subject—is the operation of a non-psychological subject as a structural function: the function of identity that transforms things into objects and units is precisely the logic of the signifier, which precedes and prescribes formal logic rather than falling under it.

    eadam sunt quorum unum potes substitui alteri salva veritate, things are identical when one can be substituted for the other without truth being lost.

15. #15

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.119

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

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

    the field of truth that the identity to itself emerges. And the identical is to be situated in the field of the truth in so far as it is essential to what can be safeguarded in this field.

16. #16

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.185

    **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic process culminates in the subject's "conquest of the proper name" — a symbolic achievement of identity through the liquidation of transference, separation from parental figures, and the re-knotting of the signifying chain, with literature positioned as a magnified analogue of this process via metaphor and metonymy.

    Philip, finally, twice baptised, will have conquered his own identity.

17. #17

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.80

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Möbius strip and its cuts to furnish a structural (non-metaphorical) account of the barred subject ($) and its relation to the non-specular objet a, arguing that the strip resulting from cutting a Möbius strip is applicable to the torus and models the subject, while the discal residue from cutting the projective plane models the o-object as non-specular.

    Something which will have this essential property to define the conjunction of identity and difference. Here is what appears to us to be most appropriate to support for us structurally the function of the subject.

18. #18

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

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 22 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Green opens by collapsing the distinction between the object *of* psychoanalysis (as a science's aim) and the object *as* psychoanalysis theorises it, arguing the two senses are structurally interdependent — a move that frames the subject/object relation not as an opposition to dissolve but as a site of identity/difference, conjunction/disjunction, and suture/cut.

    we are going to have to face up to the confrontations of identity and difference, of conjunction and disjunction, of suturing and cutting

19. #19

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.80

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the Möbius strip and its topological transformations (cutting, doubling, the toric strip, the projective plane, and the discal residue) as the structural support for the barred subject ($) and the non-specular objet petit a, arguing that the conjunction of identity and difference proper to subjectivity can only be rigorously grounded in these topological—not metaphorical—structures, and that distinctions between real and imaginary reversal depend entirely on which surface-structure is in play.

    Something which will have this essential property to define the conjunction of identity and difference.

20. #20

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 22 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: André Green's paper opens by arguing that the "object of psychoanalysis" is irreducibly double — simultaneously the target of a scientific discipline and a theoretically constituted object — and that this doubling forces us to confront the co-implication of subject and object rather than either their confusion or their clean separation, with suture and cutting as the operative conceptual pair.

    we are going to have to face up to the confrontations of identity and difference, of conjunction and disjunction, of suturing and cutting

21. #21

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.44

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 14 December 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the question "what links the Écrits?" to argue that the thread running through his work is the critique of the formula "Me, I am me" — the illusion of self-identical ego — and then pivots to introduce the Klein group as a structural (rather than identificatory) framework for approaching the subject, showing that structure, not intuitive ego-identity, is the proper ground for psychoanalytic questions.

    what seemed to me to form the link - I am thinking here not so much of my teaching but my Ecrits as they may present themselves to someone who, precisely, is going to open them - well then, it is what in the order of what is called 'identity'

22. #22

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

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

    Theoretical move: The passage uses the concept of "stupidity" (la bêtise) as the constitutive condition of analytic discourse and the *encore* drive, while Recanati's intervention develops a Peircean semiotic account of repetition—arguing that repetition is grounded in an irreducible impossibility (the hole between object and representamen), which structurally mirrors Lacan's claim that there is no sexual relationship as the unspeakable truth conditioning analytic discourse.

    the initial tautology of a is a which you will remember that Wittgenstein says is something without meaning, is properly what establishes meaning, because something happens within it.

23. #23

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.3

    **Introduction**

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

    I will take things from the angle of the identity of self to self. The question is whether this applies to the analyst. Can the analyst be considered as an element? Does he make, in other words, a set?

24. #24

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.89

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ERYXIM ACHUS*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Eryximachus's cosmological medicine as a hinge to argue that the RSI triad (imaginary, symbolic, real) is the proper categorical framework for grounding analytic discourse, while simultaneously showing that Freud's "death instinct" is itself a survival of the ancient Empedoclean cosmological conception of man—thus implicating psychoanalysis in the very pre-scientific metaphysics it must both inherit and critique.

    Questioning not his place, but his identity, man must situate himself, not on the inside of the limited enclosure which is his body, but in the total, crude reality [réel] he deals with.

25. #25

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.4

    *Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar IX by arguing that identification must be approached not through the imaginary relation to the other but through the logical problem of identity (A = A), and that the subject is constituted not by any self-present cogito but solely through the existence of the signifier and its effects — a thesis which frames the entire year's inquiry.

    I will put the accent rather on that which, in identification, poses itself immediately as identical, as founded on the notion of the same, and even of the same to the same, with all the difficulties that this gives rise to.

26. #26

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.32

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 4*: *Wednesday 6 December 1961*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that apparent tautologies ("A is A") are never purely tautological because the signifier, following Saussure, is defined only by its difference from all other signifiers — making the self-identity of A structurally impossible; identity is always a relation between registers (real/symbolic, imaginary/symbolic) rather than a logical self-equivalence.

    this belief suspended on the fact that this is the real support of identity: you must be got to sense it.

27. #27

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.299

    *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier's essential non-identity to itself (a ≠ a) is the logical ground for the constitution of the object of desire at the place of the splitting of the subject, thereby differentiating psychoanalytic logic from classical formal logic and grounding reality-constitution in the furrow of desire.

    a = a is the principle of identity, this is its principle; we will not say 0 the signifier except to say that it is not the same big 0, the signifier is essentially different to itself.

28. #28

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.25

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity

    Theoretical move: From a "negative psychoanalytic-existential" standpoint, the subject's innermost core is constitutive non-being: identity and life-narrative are compensatory illusions masking a foundational void, while existence itself is structured as repetition compulsion—a serial re-encounter with one's own non-existence, wound, and trauma.

    The coherence of our identity and our life narrative is only compensatory and optional illusions covering up our foundation's emptiness.

29. #29

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.33

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity > The Formative Power of Destruction

    Theoretical move: Drawing on Catherine Malabou's critique, the passage argues that both Freud and Lacan fail to conceptualise trauma as genuinely formative and irreparable: the death drive is domesticated back under the pleasure principle, and the Real's intrusion is assumed to be ultimately assimilable, leaving psychoanalysis unable to think the 'living dead' — a new posttraumatic subject formed by destruction itself, without continuity or possibility of restoration.

    Freud never came to recognise the formation of a completely new identity and the discontinuous leap of catastrophe that separates an old identity from a posttraumatic identity.

30. #30

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.34

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity > Destructive Plasticity

    Theoretical move: Malabou's concept of 'destructive plasticity' is introduced as a 'beyond of the beyond' of the pleasure principle, correcting both Freud's death drive and neuroscience's exclusively positive plasticity by theorising form-generating destructiveness as irreducible to any logic of cure, compensation, or symbolic mediation.

    the formation of identity through destruction is simply invoked as a morbid eventuality

31. #31

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.47

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity > ŽiŽek's Response > Destructive Plasticity as the Only Plasticity

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek and Malabou's restriction of destructive plasticity to a special sub-group of subjects (the 'living dead') implicitly preserves a norm/pathology distinction and a residual hope of non-traumatic development, and that genuine universalisation of destructive plasticity — recognising every living being as already a living dead — requires collapsing that distinction entirely.

    People whose self is the result of destructive plasticity are those whom Malabou calls the living figures of death.

32. #32

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.51

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity > In the Long Run, We Are All Dead

    Theoretical move: The passage radicalises Malabou's concept of destructive plasticity by universalising it: rather than being limited to pathological cases, destructive plasticity is argued to be the constitutive process of all subjectivity and identity, rendering every psyche a formation of irreversible trauma, with life itself understood as perpetual dying "always beyond the pleasure principle."

    the subject's self and individuality as such reveals to be nothing else but a collection of psychic scars obtained from life.

33. #33

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.57

    <span id="page-53-0"></span>Destructive Plasticity, War, and Anarchism: A Conversation Between Catherine Malabou and Julie Reshe

    Theoretical move: Malabou argues that Freud accurately sensed destructive plasticity through the concept of the death drive but failed to give it autonomous form independent of Eros; the passage uses this gap to introduce destructive plasticity as a concept that radically destabilises identity, reframes trauma as a new form-creating force, and proposes anarchism as the political translation of plasticity.

    It very strongly threatens the idea of a stable self… it destabilises the idea of identity in a very different way from what analytic philosophers describe as the illusion of the self.

34. #34

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > SS 8.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the scholastic transcendental predicates (unum, verum, bonum) are not genuine additions to the categories but are merely the three categories of quantity (unity, plurality, totality) re-deployed in a formal, logical register—criteria of cognition's self-consistency rather than properties of objects in themselves—thus dissolving a spurious metaphysical tradition by showing it rests on a category mistake.

    the completeness of the principle of the explanation of these deductions, which refer to neither more nor less than what was admitted in the hypothesis, restoring analytically and a posteriori, what was cogitated synthetically and a priori

35. #35

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > CHAPTER II Of the Deduction of the Pure Conceptions of the Understanding.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the transcendental unity of apperception is the supreme condition of all cognition: it grounds the objective validity of representations by uniting the sensuous manifold under pure categories of the understanding, whose only legitimate use is in application to objects of possible experience.

    to connect them, as my representation with the identical self, and so to unite them synthetically in one apperception, by means of the general expression, 'I think'

36. #36

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > APPENDIX.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that confusing transcendental with empirical uses of the understanding produces an "amphiboly" in the conceptions of reflection (identity/difference, agreement/opposition, internal/external, matter/form), and that only transcendental reflection — which refers representations back to their proper faculty (sensibility or understanding) — can ground correct objective comparison; this critique is directed specifically at Leibniz's error of treating phenomena as noumena.

    When an object is presented to us several times, but always with the same internal determinations (qualitas et quantitas), it, if an object of pure understanding, is always the same, not several things, but only one thing (numerica identitas)

37. #37

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > APPENDIX.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the systematic unity of nature required by reason rests on three transcendental principles—homogeneity, specification, and continuity of forms—which are not empirical hypotheses but regulative ideas of reason that make experience and understanding possible, yet find no fully adequate object in experience itself.

    The logical principle of genera, which demands identity in phenomena, is balanced by another principle—that of species, which requires variety and diversity

38. #38

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > APPENDIX. > REMARK ON THE AMPHIBOLY OF THE CONCEPTIONS OF REFLECTION.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that Leibniz's philosophical errors (monadology, pre-established harmony, intellectualization of space/time) all stem from a single source: the failure to perform transcendental reflection, i.e., to assign representations correctly to either sensibility or pure understanding before comparing them, resulting in the "amphiboly of the conceptions of reflection" — treating phenomena as if they were things in themselves cognized by the pure understanding alone.

    He compares them in regard to their identity or difference—as judged by the understanding...he should extend the application of the principle of indiscernibles, which is valid solely of conceptions of things in general, to objects of sense

39. #39

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > CHAPTER I. Of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

    Theoretical move: Kant exposes rational psychology's foundational "paralogism" as a sophistic equivocation: the inference from the logical unity of self-consciousness ("I think") to the substantial, simple, and permanent soul illegitimately treats a purely logical subject as an ontologically real substance, and neither materialism nor spiritualism can determine the mode of the soul's existence from self-consciousness alone.

    as identical Subject, in every state of my thought

40. #40

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > APPENDIX. > REMARK ON THE AMPHIBOLY OF THE CONCEPTIONS OF REFLECTION.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the "Amphiboly of Conceptions of Reflection" — the error of treating purely logical comparisons as determinations of things in themselves — exposes the nullity of Leibniz's intellectual system, and establishes that the noumenon can only be a negative/problematical concept: phenomena are the sole domain of objective cognition, because thought without sensuous intuition has no relation to any object.

    Leibnitz's principle of the identity of indiscernibles or indistinguishables is really based on the presupposition that, if in the conception of a thing a certain distinction is not to be found, it is also not to be met with in things themselves

41. #41

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > APPENDIX.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the three ideas of pure reason (soul, world, God) are strictly regulative—not constitutive—principles: they function as schemata for systematically unifying empirical inquiry rather than as cognitions of actual objects, and treating them as constitutive produces characteristic errors (ignava ratio, false spiritualism, physico-theological dogmatism).

    constructs the idea of a simple substance which is in itself unchangeable, possessing personal identity

42. #42

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.212

    LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

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

    Judith Butler's strongly argued Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

43. #43

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.101

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis fundamentally opposes utilitarianism's ethics by grounding moral law not in reciprocity and shared pleasure but in the nonreciprocal relation between the subject and its inaccessible Thing—demonstrating that repressed desire is the cause, not the consequence, of the law, and that true freedom consists in acting contrary to self-interest, even unto death.

    technology came to be symbolized as the embodiment of the very impossibility of man's complete identity.

44. #44

    How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

    HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *Away-from-here*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic Christian faith is constituted by perpetual becoming rather than arrival at a fixed destination, dissolving the binary between journey and destination by positing the movement of departure itself ("away-from-here") as the destination — a structural claim about subjectivity, desire, and theological identity.

    the participants are unified neither by a shared theological tradition, nor by an aspiration to one day develop one.

45. #45

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.210

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Towards Universalist Ethics*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuine universalist ethics must bypass particular identity categories by grounding itself in singularity rather than collective substance: only the singular subject who refuses identitarian particularity can participate in the universal, while fidelity to particularist "simulacra" (e.g., National Socialism) produces totalizing violence rather than liberating truth.

    The goal of such a politics is to challenge the status quo rather than to expand it to include individuals belonging to previously excluded identity categories—categories that, always fantasmatically, unite those of a certain gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation.

46. #46

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.132

    5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Enjoyment-in-Meaning*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's late concept of the sinthome, via *jouis-sens*, reframes the signifier not as a passive instrument of ideological interpellation but as a vehicle of jouissance-laden, polyvalent meaning-production — thereby challenging readings that treat the real only as a site of subjective destitution and showing that language and jouissance are not mutually exclusive.

    Your ultimate identity, the ultimate support of your being, is the particular way in which you enjoy meaning: your sinthome.

47. #47

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

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

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

    Lacan has allowed us to perceive the fraudulence at the heart of every claim to positive sexual identity.

48. #48

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.52

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

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's concept of *automaton* (Aristotle's category of chance/failure of final cause) reframes the classical philosophical problem of cause: rather than a Prime Mover securing bodily unity and freedom, it is language's cut that divides the subject from part of itself, and this primary detachment — not Bergsonian illusion — is the true source of Eleatic paradoxes and the endless, asymptotic structure of desire.

    the failure of identity… the five-man examining committee which fails infinitely in the exchange of looks that would establish its identity

49. #49

    The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.167

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

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

    we can begin to see how the affirmation of Christianity as a religious system can allow us to think of our identity as somehow not directly implicated in our activity.

50. #50

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

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic Christian faith requires a perpetual self-overcoming—a "faithful betrayal"—whereby any religious system birthed from the originary Event must be continuously subverted and overturned, not as an external correction but as a constitutive feature of faith itself, enacted through "transformance art" gatherings that suspend identity, refuse pastoral hierarchy, and point toward an unspeakable Happening beyond objectification.

    a space in which individuals can lay aside their various political, religious, and social identities for a time

51. #51

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.186

    Ancient Figures of Speech > **"Opening One's Eyes"** > **Hidden Kings and Medicine Men**

    Theoretical move: The passage maps Heidegger's 1924 Aristotle lectures onto a tripartite typology (aletheutikos / eiron / alazon) to argue that Heidegger's critique of "medicine men" in academic philosophy—particularly Husserl—is the practical enactment of his philosophical distinction between unconcealed truth-telling and self-aggrandizing boastfulness, with Heidegger himself embodying the mock-modest "hidden king" and Husserl cast as the braggart-in-chief.

    The aletheutikos is someone whose identity consists in 'having being-there with respect to discoveredness [Entdecktheit] at one's disposal, presenting oneself so that one's self-presentation and being with others is not a self-concealing.'

52. #52

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.54

    Barbers and Philosophers > **Poorly Provisioned Parrots**

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Kierkegaard's concept of *Eftersnakken* (parroting) to argue that Hegelian discipleship in Denmark constitutes a form of self-deluding intellectual mimicry, in which derivative repetition is compounded by delusional claims of having surpassed the original — a duplicity of tedious parroting cloaked in pretentious chatter (*snak*).

    At issue here, Kier ke gaard suggests, is a latent identity crisis, the symptoms of which are at once hilarious and disturbing.

53. #53

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.308

    A Play of Props > **A Sociology of Associations**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that actor-network theory dissolves the modern self/society dichotomy by reconceiving individuality as assembled from 'extra-psychic' associations rather than atomic interiority, and then positions the conceptual history of chatter/idle talk/empty speech (from Kierkegaard through Heidegger to Lacan) as a pre-history of the communicative 'modes of circulation' that actor-network theory needs but has not yet theorized.

    theories of the self have centered on the verb 'to be' and, with it, the problem of identity. New techniques and technologies of mobile communication suggest that the verb of our times is not 'to be' but 'to have,' and that the dilemma we now face is not one of identity but one of association.

54. #54

    The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.115

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

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

    he shifts the emphasis from doubles and twins to masking and cross-dressing as the primary source of identity confusion

55. #55

    The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.167

    Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

    Theoretical move: Zupančič maps Deleuze's three-fold temporal structure of repetition (mechanical/comic, metamorphic/tragic, and unconditional/eternal-return) against Lacan's framework, arguing that Deleuze's attempt to ground selectivity and difference in a purely asubjective force (the eternal return) ultimately reinstates an absolute law that undermines the very subjective edge his political-philosophical predicates require.

    Identity, similarity, sameness, one—these are all secondary categories which, according to Deleuze, do not enable us to think difference, but are themselves products of (the labor of) difference.

56. #56

    The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.101

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

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic trust (and transference) operates not through knowledge but through a credit extended precisely at the point of the Other's lack, and that the comic suspension of the big Other (as in comedies of mistaken identity) produces a surplus object — "error incorporated" — as a little other that takes the Other's place, revealing that comedy proper pivots not on the Other's failure itself but on the surplus effects that failure generates.

    what is subjected to the comic treatment is the Other as the guarantee of a fixed or steady correlation between 'someone' and his or her symbolic identity.

57. #57

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.78

    *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter02.xhtml_pg_78" class="pagebreak" title="78"></span>**Now a Stomach, Now an Anus . . .**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that political economy's reductive abstraction produces the worker not as a natural animal but as a "surplus abstraction" — an entity fragmented into vanishing particular bodily functions, structurally identified with sense-certainty's contradictions (now a mouth, now an anus), and thereby rendered ontologically inexistent: less than an animal, the shadow of an agent.

    the worker and his bodily functions form an identity ... the essentializing identity of being and having leads to the fact that the worker is structurally already vanished

58. #58

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.34

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Diagram Traversed by Antagonism**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the identity of an object resides not in an inner core but in its "diagram" — the virtual structure of non-actualized potentials — and crucially refines this by distinguishing accidental non-actualizations from essentially impossible ones (the impossible-real), applying this logic to politics to show that capitalism's particular malfunctions are structurally necessary rather than accidental symptoms to be reformed away.

    The identity of an object, its In-itself, resides in its diagram, in virtualities of which only some are actualized

59. #59

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.24

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Dialectical Materialism is Immaterialism**

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that genuine dialectical materialism is paradoxically "immaterialist": it holds that every actual interaction must be sustained by a virtual background (vacuum fluctuations, the big Other, normative structures), and that purely relational virtual entities—though they have no substance of their own—are nonetheless real agents that resist reduction to "really existing" material practices, thereby redefining materialism against both naïve substance-ontology and pure flux/relationism.

    Basically, it is the Deleuzean concept of becoming versus a return to stable identities of being – a stance that is today more or less universally accepted.

60. #60

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.290

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Implications of Quantum Gravity](#contents.xhtml_ahd19)

    Theoretical move: Žižek uses quantum physics (wave-function collapse, decoherence, virtual particles) to argue that ignorance is not merely epistemic but has a positive ontological status inscribed in reality itself, which in turn redefines the big Other/God as necessarily non-omniscient and "retarded" (always registering too late), and connects this to a Hegelian dialectic in which the indivisible One of a thing is identical with a void of Nothing at its core.

    it divides itself from itself so that the division that establishes itself is the division into one and nothing.

61. #61

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.120

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the shift from Kant to Hegel is not a return to pre-critical ontology but a move that inscribes epistemological antinomies into the Real itself, making "subjective distortion" the very mode of contact with the Absolute—and that sexuality, as the impossible-real Absolute, is accessible only through the detours and gaps of the symbolic order, with Lacan's formulas of sexuation homologous to Kant's antinomies of pure reason.

    The assertion of self-identity is thus the assertion of the difference itself: not just the difference of the thing from all other things… but the difference of a thing with regard to itself

62. #62

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.258

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle](#contents.xhtml_ahd17)

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

    every identity (up to the most elementary ones, 'masculine' and 'feminine') already is an 'identity in non-identity'

63. #63

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.277

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Implications of Quantum Gravity](#contents.xhtml_ahd19)

    Theoretical move: Žižek uses Rovelli's quantum gravity framework—where spacetime is not a fundamental container but emerges from quantum fields, and time is an effect of statistical ignorance—to argue that a truly 'complete description' of reality must incorporate higher-level orders (meaning, language, form) as positive conditions rather than mere illusions, invoking Hegel's notion of totality against a reductionist ontology.

    when we perceive an object as chair or table, or already a letter as a letter, we perceive an idealized form which persists as the same and which is in its identity more than an average.

64. #64

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.354

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [How to Do Words with Things](#contents.xhtml_ahd23)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that assemblage theory's "flat ontology" must be supplemented by a Lacanian/Hegelian dimension of abstract negativity: elements do not combine to form a larger Whole but are already traversed by a universal antagonism/inconsistency, and this negativity requires a subjective support in objet a as "less than nothing"—thereby rejecting both the subjectless object of Bryant/Badiou and the self-congratulatory liberal gesture of declaring oneself "nothing" without fully renouncing surplus-enjoyment.

    elements don't strive for assemblage in order to become part of a larger Whole, they strive for assemblage in order to become themselves, to actualize their identity

65. #65

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology functions through a surplus-enjoyment generated by renunciation itself (structurally homologous to Marxian surplus-value), and that this enjoyment must remain concealed to operate—since ideological form is its own end; further, it theorizes how ideological fields achieve unity through the 'quilting' function of the point de capiton (nodal point), which arrests the sliding of floating signifiers and retroactively fixes their identity.

    What creates and sustains the identity of a given ideological field beyond all possible variations of its positive content?

66. #66

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.131

    ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 4. Fantasizing the Father in *Blue Velvet* > *6. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with* Me and Identificatio n with the Object

    Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing citations and theoretical elaborations for a chapter on *Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me*, with substantive theoretical content concentrated in notes 4, 6, 13, 17, and 25 on identity, fantasy, the phallus as signifier, and castration.

    The point is not that Laura's identity is multiple but that none of these roles capture her. Her identity cannot find adequate expression because there is nothing to express.

67. #67

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.32

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

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that *Eraserhead* distinguishes itself from traditional Hollywood cinema by fully committing to fantasy's consequences: the embrace of fantasy unleashes jouissance but simultaneously destroys the social reality whose consistency depends on the shared sacrifice of enjoyment, thereby exposing the subject's complicity in capitalist production and the political cost of any genuine act of refusal.

    Our investment in the capitalist world derives from the stable grounding that it provides for our identity.

68. #68

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.74

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

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

    Her subjectivity is an emptiness that remains irreducible to any identity.

69. #69

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.126

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

    Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes to a chapter on *The Elephant Man*) advances two key theoretical moves: (1) it revises the Lacanian account of jouissance by arguing that enjoyment is internal to the law rather than requiring transgression, marking a development from Seminar VII to Seminar XX; and (2) it distinguishes objet petit a (constitutive absence) from das Ding (sublime Thing) to argue that Merrick functions as an impossible object rather than a sublime presence, while deploying the Hegelian Beautiful Soul to critique the speculative identity of noble and base attitudes toward Merrick.

    the fundamental (Hegelian) contention of the film is that there is, in the last instance, no difference between identity and difference. Thus, insisting on difference is a disguised way of insisting on identity.

70. #70

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.167

    Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

    Theoretical move: Zupančič contrasts Deleuze's ontology of difference-as-repetition (three temporal modes, eternal return as selective force) with an implied Lacanian counter-position, arguing that Deleuze's asubjective account of repetition ultimately installs an absolute law that undermines the very predicates (excess, difference, nomadism) it claims to champion — thereby setting up the conceptual stakes for a Lacanian re-articulation of repetition central to comedy.

    Identity, similarity, sameness, one—these are all secondary categories which, according to Deleuze, do not enable us to think difference, but are themselves products of (the labor of) difference.

71. #71

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.118

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

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, through Marivaux's comic dramaturgy, that access to the Real is achieved not by stripping away symbolic fiction but by *redoubling* it: a second mask/fiction produces an internal difference that constitutes the Symbolic as immanent to the situation, distinguishing this comic logic from both romantic immediacy and carnivalesque transgression.

    the comic suspense turns around the question of how this or that identity will sustain this difference... Mixed and confused identities in Marivaux are mostly not—despite the preeminent role of the masquerade—in the service of a carnivalesque enabling of transgressions.

72. #72

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.115

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

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the comic object (as surplus-object) is not merely a humorous treatment of the symbolic Other but the material condition for any retroactive effect of the phenomenal order on its own transcendental coordinates; she further distinguishes genuine comedy from derision by showing that derision protects the sacred mystery of the symbolic structure whereas comedy produces das Ding as an objectified surplus, and introduces Marivaux as the figure who replaces surplus-objects with pure difference as the mechanism of comic suspension.

    he shifts the emphasis from doubles and twins to masking and cross-dressing as the primary source of identity confusion... consisting in correlating the suspension of the Other not with a surplus-object but with a pure difference, difference as inherent to identity.

73. #73

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.88

    Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

    Theoretical move: The passage uses the comedic motif of the double (via Plautus/Molière's *Amphitryon*) as a philosophical demonstration that the ego is structurally an object among objects, whose identity is defined by reversibility of master/servant positions and intimate connection to the pleasure principle — a dramatization Lacan himself glosses as a "pretty definition of the ego."

    I swear to you, I was there before I had arrived.

74. #74

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan

    29 > **Index** > *Todd McGowan Todd McGowan*

    Theoretical move: This is a back-cover/bibliographic passage introducing the book and its author; it is non-substantive filler with no original theoretical argumentation beyond a brief statement of the book's central intervention (relocating the gaze from spectator to filmic image).

    disrupt the spectator's sense of identity and challenge the foundations of ideology

75. #75

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.68

    **The Real** > **Reason**

    Theoretical move: The passage performs dual conceptual work: first, it situates Kant's faculty of Reason as the highest synthesizing power over Understanding and Sensibility; second, it defines Hegelian Reflection as the logical operation of returning to self-identity through otherness, and distinguishes Hegel's therapeutic use of reflection from ordinary-language philosophy by insisting that philosophical reflection — not common sense — is the proper remedy for pseudo-problems generated by the Understanding.

    it refers to the relations of same and other, identity and difference, especially when these two relations go together to convey the logical act of returning to identity out of difference or otherness.

76. #76

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.37

    **Fantasy** > **Identity**

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

    Our identity is, to put it in Kant's terms, always pathological and bespeaks heteronomy rather than autonomy. What he means by this is that external forces, not ourselves on our own, produce identity for us.

77. #77

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.99

    Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)^{<a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a>} > III

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's Lacanian reading of Hegel correctly recovers neglected Hegelian themes (retroactivity, Spirit as self-producing, rejection of the narcissistic sublation model) but ultimately distorts Hegel by over-assimilating him to Lacan, failing to articulate the genuinely Hegelian alternative regarding Reason and sociality.

    the picture so beloved by Adorno in his dismissal of Hegel as the epitome of 'identity thinking'

78. #78

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

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

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sublimation, repression, and jouissance are structurally inseparable—desublimation is always already repressive, primordial repression constitutes rather than suppresses its content, and castration and the death drive are two faces of the same parallax structure rather than opposing forces—thereby refuting any emancipatory vision premised on overcoming repression or positing a new Master Signifier as sufficient.

    For Hegel, identity is the most radical form of difference, difference brought to its self-reference, not just in the obvious sense that a thing's identity is defined by the difference from all other things but above all in the sense that 'identity' names the difference of a thing with itself.

79. #79

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

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

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

    Every particular identity shares its relation to antagonism. No matter what form the identity takes, it must confront the inevitability of antagonism.

80. #80

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

    Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)^{<a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a>} > II

    Theoretical move: The passage (by Robert Pippin, critiquing Žižek's Hegel) argues that Žižek's Schellingian-Lacanian reading of Hegel—grounding subjectivity in an ontological "gap" or "rupture" in being—misreads the German Idealist tradition, which is better understood through Kant's apperception thesis: subjectivity is not a negative-ontological void but a self-conscious, norm-governed activity where action just *is* consciousness of action, requiring no appeal to a pre-transcendental gap or drive.

    In any respect relevant to my practical identity [and not any empirical feature], I am what I take myself to be... Or at least I am provisionally; I must also enact what I take myself to be, or it is a mere confabulation

81. #81

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.165

    Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Caught in Their Butterfly Net

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Zhuang Zi's butterfly dream—as read through Lacan's Seminar XI—to argue that the subject (as doubt, deposition, and questioning) is structurally opposed to the ego/identity, and that ideology functions as the 'butterfly net' of identity-captivity, while critique of ideology works like dream-interpretation: accessing unconscious commitments from within, with no view from nowhere.

    personal identity itself is a way of being caught in a dream. Whether you are aware of it or not, there is a fantasmatic structure in any identity

82. #82

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

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

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

    every self-identity is thus grounded in a failure of predicates… The masculine position fails in its position to be masculine, as does the female position.

83. #83

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

    Žižek Responds! > [<span class="grey">INDEX</span>](#contents.xhtml_end1)

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section from the edited volume "Žižek Responds!" listing proper names and concepts (H–K) with hyperlinked page references; it performs no theoretical argument.

    identity [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here]...

84. #84

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.162

    [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > <span id="chapter5.xhtml_pg_161" aria-label="161" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>**EVERY DAY A STRUGGLE**

    Theoretical move: Identity is not a pre-given substance but is constituted by the enemy it posits as a threat: the external menace is logically prior to and structurally necessary for the identity it appears to endanger, making identity politics inherently tied to reactionary logic and the friend/enemy distinction.

    Identity does not simply exist but comes into existence through the establishing of the barriers that delimit it. Barriers enable us to see what belongs to the identity and what does not.

85. #85

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.95

    [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **NAZI IDEOLOGY**

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Nazism's political logic is fundamentally anti-universalist rather than merely anti-particularist: it targeted Jews and communists not for their particular identities but because both represented universality, and popular/historiographical accounts that depoliticize the Holocaust by framing it as ethnic persecution obscure this structural logic and thereby prevent recognition of Nazism's continuity with contemporary identitarian politics.

    Jews have no distinct racial identity of their own but are parasitical on other races... Jewishness is not a race but a nonrace, which gives it its universalist hue.

86. #86

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan

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

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia are genuinely universalist—not identity-political—and that their universality is revealed through what is constitutively absent; capitalism is identified as the structural barrier that obscures this universality by forcing subjects into bare particularity, making the critique of capitalism indispensable to any genuine universalist project.

    Although their identities and experiences may be radically different, they participate in the universal through their fights that reveal what is constitutively absent.

87. #87

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.150

    [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > **PLEASE RECOGNIZE ME**

    Theoretical move: Identity politics is theoretically indicted as a site of ideological interpellation: identity is neither essence nor free choice but the result of a "forced choice" between subjectivity and symbolic identity, whose appeal is sustained not by ideological deception alone but by the jouissance derived from exclusion—making any truly universal inclusion structurally impossible.

    Because identity operates in this nebulous realm between an imposed necessity and a conscious choice, we mistakenly believe that it is our essence.

88. #88

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan

    [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > **ACTING LIKE WE KNOW**

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the fundamental political split between Left and Right maps onto an epistemological split between universality-first and particularity-first approaches to knowledge, reading Plato as a proto-leftist because he identifies universality with constitutive absence and Aristotle as a proto-conservative because he instantiates the universal in the particular, thereby eliminating its political radicality.

    If the universal can be present, it becomes a positive identity that one can impose on others.

89. #89

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.122

    [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > **THE PERILS OF ISOLATION**

    Theoretical move: Capitalism's structuring principle—the commodity form—produces an empty particularity in subjects that identity politics (religious, ethnic, nationalist) compensates for without challenging; this double function of identity sustains capitalism by both misdirecting opposition and obscuring the commodity form as the true target of critique.

    Even though identity is always ideological insofar as it obfuscates the self-division of the subject with an image of wholeness, it is nonetheless unavoidable.

90. #90

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.106

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

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

    Echoes of Nazism remain threats because the appeal of identity resonates even louder today as the capitalist evacuation of identity has proceeded apace.

91. #91

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.50

    [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > **ADDING UP TO ALL**

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that universality cannot be reached by aggregating particulars, because any totality of inclusion structurally requires a constitutive exclusion; genuine universality must therefore be posited as an absent starting point (following Plato over Aristotle), not constructed by additive belonging.

    Adding up particular identities to create a representative whole is a failed political strategy. Each new addition only testifies to the fact that more are needed.

92. #92

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.191

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

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

    There is a distance between identity and who one is, between what one is and who one is, between identity and subjectivity. Zootopia undermines identity politics by highlighting this distance.

93. #93

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.92

    [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **HOW TO MISRECOGNIZE A CATASTROPHE**

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the predominant theoretical interpretation of Nazism and Stalinism as crimes of universality is a fundamental misrecognition: Nazism was in fact grounded in an ontology of particular difference, and Stalinism in a particularized distortion of the universal, meaning that the post-war theoretical "ethical turn" toward respecting particular identity—exemplified by Adorno—has paradoxically undermined emancipatory universalist politics and ceded political ground to the Right.

    emancipatory politics becomes the assertion of particular identity rather than the striving for universality—which means that emancipatory politics ceases to be emancipatory politics

94. #94

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.208

    <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc3_1" id="conclusion.xhtml_toc3-1"><span id="conclusion.xhtml_pg_207" aria-label="207" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>CONCLUSION</a>

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the retreat from universality into identity politics and particularism is not a safe alternative to the dangers of universalist projects, but is itself more murderous and structurally complicit with capitalist domination; genuine emancipatory politics requires reclaiming universality as a constitutive absence (structural lack) rather than a realizable presence.

    If we abandon the universal, we pave the way for the most banal dystopia in which no one expresses any concern for anyone else and identity is the only value.

95. #95

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.117

    [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **THE POWER OF MICHEL FOUCAULT**

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Foucault's particularism — his privileging of concrete local practices over universal categories — is both symptom and cause of the left's retreat from universality, and that this retreat, by misidentifying universality as domination rather than as always-absent and lacking, fatally disarms emancipatory politics and opens the ground for identity politics.

    The suspicion about universality that the twentieth century produces creates a fertile ground for identity politics.

96. #96

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.53

    [OUR PARTICULAR AGE](#contents.xhtml_toc1_1) > **FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that emancipation is structurally universalist: racism depends on the rejection of universality, and political revolt becomes possible only when one shifts from a particularist identity-standpoint to a universal one — illustrated through the trigger of Nat Turner's rebellion in Parker's film as the master's denial of Christian universality.

    Emancipation is always universalist. It arises when one sees one's identity—in this case, one's identity as a slave—not as a basis for how one knows but as a barrier to what one knows and how one acts.

97. #97

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.199

    [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **UNREPRESENTATIVE REPRESENTATION**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the politics of recognition and diversity is irreducibly particularist and must be abandoned rather than reinterpreted as latent universalism, because it substitutes representation for structural equality and occludes the fundamental divide between subject and identity that makes genuine emancipation possible.

    Rather than affirming my group identity, the universal reveals that I am not my identity, that there is a divide between who I am and what I am.

98. #98

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.144

    [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > **THE MISSING REVOLUTION**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that identity politics—nationalist, religious, ethnic—functions as capitalism's structural supplement: by filling the empty particularity of working-class subjectivity with a content that capitalism itself strips away, identity politics deflects revolutionary potential and secures worker investment in the capitalist system, making it indispensable to capitalism's reproduction rather than a challenge to it.

    Throughout the twentieth century, projects of identity politics arise in order to provide what capitalist subjectivity lacks.

99. #99

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.26

    <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc2_2" id="introduction.xhtml_toc2-2"><span id="introduction.xhtml_pg_1" aria-label="1" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>INTRODUCTION</a> > **PARTICULAR ENTITIES**

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the twentieth-century turn from universality to particular identity is both a political catastrophe and a philosophical opportunity: by redefining the universal not as a shared possession but as a shared absence, he reclaims universality as the only genuine basis for emancipation and exposes identity politics as an ideological product of capitalism's evacuation of particular content.

    Identity politics hides the alienating quality of all identity and thus has an ideological function.

100. #100

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.204

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **UNIVERSALISM OR DEATH**

     Theoretical move: The climate crisis is theorized as the structuring absence within every social order, making it the privileged site for recognizing universality; particularist epistemology and capitalism's investment in particularity are exposed as constitutively inadequate to confront it, demanding instead a universalist politics and epistemology grounded in shared lack rather than shared properties.

     Particular identity is always a trap, but when the question so clearly involves the whole planet, particularism becomes even more dangerous.

101. #101

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.137

     [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > <span id="chapter4.xhtml_pg_137" aria-label="137" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>**THE EMPTY SUBJECT**

     Theoretical move: Capitalism's privileging of the general equivalent structurally empties out subject identity, reducing every particular to an interchangeable commodity form; this systemic annihilation of identity is not a contingent feature but the core logic of capitalism, which simultaneously liberates subjects from traditional mythic identity while rendering any chosen identity alien, contingent, and worthless.

     Capitalism provides commodities for individuals to enjoy, but it doesn't offer any type of identity, which differentiates it from all other socioeconomic systems.

102. #102

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.68

     [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABSENT](#contents.xhtml_toc1_2) > **INCLUDING WHAT DOESN’T BELONG**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that social status and wealth are masks for a universal equality grounded in nonbelonging: because no subject fully belongs, there exists a structural solidarity that becomes visible in crisis moments and grounds a universality that cannot exclude anyone.

     solidarity reveals itself as a universal value, not as a bond restricted to only those who share our identity.

103. #103

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.11

     <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc2_2" id="introduction.xhtml_toc2-2"><span id="introduction.xhtml_pg_1" aria-label="1" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>INTRODUCTION</a> > **KANT’S STRANGE BEDFELLOW**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kantian universality—specifically the universality of the moral law—is the condition of possibility for genuine freedom and singularity, because it alienates subjects from their particular (heteronomous) identities and thereby enables them to relate to those identities from a distance rather than being trapped within them.

     For Kant, nature and society violently impose our identity on us. Identity is not even ours but the project of external (natural and social) determinations.

104. #104

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.168

     [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > <span id="chapter5.xhtml_pg_165" aria-label="165" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>**THE UNIVERSAL ANATHEMA**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the defining feature of Nazi anti-Semitism—its ideological revolution over prior anti-Semitism—is its inversion of the Jew from a subject too particular to one identified with universality itself; this reveals that identity politics structurally requires the universal as its constitutive enemy, and that the rejection of universality entails the rejection of truth as such.

     The basic problem with Jewishness, from Hitler's perspective, is that Jewishness is not a proper identity.

105. #105

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.8

     <a href="#contents.xhtml_toc2_2" id="introduction.xhtml_toc2-2"><span id="introduction.xhtml_pg_1" aria-label="1" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>INTRODUCTION</a> > **EMANCIPATION THROUGH INTERRUPTION**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that authentic universality is constitutively absent from the social field—it appears as a gap or lack in socially authorized perception—and that this very absence is what makes it emancipatory, distinguishing it from particular identities which are products of ideology rather than resources against it.

     Identity—conceived as singular or as an intersection of multiple aspects—is not a basis from which I can fight against ideology but the result of ideology's operations.

106. #106

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.65

     [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABSENT](#contents.xhtml_toc1_2) > **INCLUDING WHAT DOESN’T BELONG**

     Theoretical move: McGowan inverts the standard critique of universality by locating universality not in a dominant norm that subordinates particulars, but in the structural failure of belonging—the internal limit that no social order can assimilate—and argues that this constitutive non-belonging is the ground of both freedom and equality, with the unconscious as its subjective manifestation.

     We would be locked into our particular identity and locked into our given world.

107. #107

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.78

     [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABSENT](#contents.xhtml_toc1_2) > **SPEAKING ABSENCES**

     Theoretical move: The universal is not a positive totality but the constitutive failure of inclusion: it appears only as an absence, through those who do not belong, and any attempt to positivize it (whether as present achievement or deferred promise) betrays it by collapsing it into a particular. McGowan deploys Fanon and Marx to show that genuine universal struggle is indexed to this structural absence rather than to the goal of complete belonging.

     It is in the nature of the universal as a failure of identity that we will never fully realize it.

108. #108

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan

     [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABSENT](#contents.xhtml_toc1_2) > **WHAT IS NOT KNOWN**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that universality is grounded not in shared positive traits but in a shared constitutive lack—the unknown blank spot within every subject—and that this internal absence is both the basis of love and the source of genuine emancipatory connection, which is more terrifying than particularist identity because it demands avowing self-alienation.

     Identity provides a security of self that universality destroys. When we commit to the universal, we betray our identity.

109. #109

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.46

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

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the psychoanalytic insistence on sex as an ontological inquiry (rather than a moral or identity question) is what gives sexual difference its political explosiveness, and that the replacement of "sexual difference" by "gender" performs a neutralization by removing sex's irreducible Real dimension — leaving psychoanalysis in a paradoxical position of being coextensive with the desexualization of reality while remaining absolutely uncompromising about the sexual as irreducible Real, not substance.

     women who see themselves as human beings with specific qualities and an identity, and try to democratically affirm it… The mythology of female identity is precisely what has made this exclusion possible, and what sustains it.