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Invocatory Drive

ELI5

The invocatory drive is what happens when a sound or call grabs you in a way that goes beyond just hearing words — it's the pull of a voice that seems to come from somewhere else but somehow belongs to you, like hearing a command you can't ignore or feeling mysteriously "called" without knowing by whom.

Definition

The invocatory drive is the partial drive whose privileged object is the voice—not the voice as sonorous phenomenon or musical resonance, but the voice "unfastened from its support" (Seminar X, p. 287), the voice as imperative that demands obedience or conviction, circulating between mouth and ear in a loop that does not return to the subject but goes toward the Other. It is Lacan's own addition to Freud's drive catalogue—Freud, Lacan notes in Seminar XI, "says nothing" of it—and its reflexive formula, by analogy with "making oneself seen," is "making oneself heard." As one of the two higher partial drives (alongside the scopic), it operates at the level of desire and the desire of the Other rather than at the level of demand (oral/anal), and it holds the privileged position of being "the closest to the experience of the unconscious" (Seminar XI, p. 119). Among the partial drives it also bears the unique privilege of structural non-closure: unlike the oral, anal, or scopic drives, the invocatory drive "has the privilege of not being able to close" (Seminar XI, p. 215)—an incapacity that ties it especially tightly to the permanent opening/closing of the unconscious gap.

The voice as objet petit a is not a content but a structural remainder. It is incorporated (Einverleibung) rather than assimilated, resonating not in physical space but "ex nihilo in the void of the Other." In psychosis this structure becomes clinically visible: when the signifier-chain collapses and the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed, the object a erupts "in the invocative register, as a voice" that "suddenly invades consciousness" (derek-hook et al., p. 190). In verbal hallucination the subject is immanent in the voice rather than its master: "It is in so far as the object of the voice is present in it that the percipiens is present in it" (Seminar XI, p. 273). This is why Lacan links the invocatory drive to the subversion of the classical epistemic ideal: psychoanalysis replaces the purification of the perceiving subject with the encounter with the "filth" of the partial object, with the demonic voice—like Socrates's daimōn—that is at once inseparable from the subject yet irreducible to his mastery.

Evolution

In the early seminars (return-to-freud period), the invocatory dimension appears in embryonic form under the name "invocation." In Seminar III (p. 317), Lacan elevates what he had been calling the "mandate" to "invocation," emphasizing its religious connotation as an address that carries faith across to the Other—"that by which I get that faith which is mine to pass into the other." In Seminar V (p. 144), invocation is distinguished from mere address: it "solicits the subject's voice as carrier of desire," making it the condition under which demand can be authenticated by the Other. The drive itself is not yet named, but its structure—the voice as what supports speech, the appeal that makes the Other a subject—is already operative. Psychotic hallucination (Schreber, Seminar III) provides the first clinical theater in which the voice-object erupts.

The decisive theoretical elaboration occurs in the object-a period, concentrated in Seminars X and XI. In Seminar X (p. 255), Lacan uses Theodor Reik's analysis of the shofar to stage the move from "the level of the eye" to "the stage of the ear," formally completing the range of object relations by adding the voice as the fifth and final term after the oral, anal, phallic, and scopic objects. In Seminar XI (1964), the name "la pulsion invocante" appears for the first time (p. 195), prospectively—Lacan announces it as something he "will later distinguish"—while simultaneously insisting that no genetic or deductive relation obtains among the drives. The reflexive formula "making oneself heard" is introduced (p. 210) as Lacan's gap-filling supplement to Freud, and the structural asymmetry with the scopic drive is marked: making oneself seen returns to the subject, while making oneself heard goes toward the Other. The invocatory drive is also assigned its highest topological rank: "closest to the experience of the unconscious" (p. 119) and uniquely incapable of closure (p. 215), linking it directly to the permanent gaping of the unconscious gap via the erogenous rim.

In the later Seminars (XII, XIII, XV, XXII, XXIV), the concept is further concretized through clinical and cultural material. The mouth-to-ear circuit is mapped in Seminar XII (p. 208); the voice and look are jointly identified as "integral to the division of the subject" in Seminar XIII (p. 230); and in Seminar XXIV (p. 38), the myth of Ulysses and the Sirens is used to dramatize the internal torsion of the invocatory circuit—the distinction between passively hearing (being exposed to the drive) and actively making oneself heard (the reversal into the musician/speaker). A commentator in Seminar XXIV (Didier, p. 32) ventures the novel concept of a "listening drive" as the invocatory drive's reversal, explicitly flagging it as without established theoretical status.

Secondary literature (Copjec, Žižek, McGowan, Boothby) extends the invocatory drive into cultural analysis. Copjec (october-books, pp. 198, 190; radical-thinkers, p. 190) reads film noir voice-over through the drive's "making oneself heard"—jouissance in the act of speaking that separates the subject from the community of sense. Žižek (less-than-nothing) elaborates the voice as spectral partial object: its resonance is "the lament for the lost object," music is a screen against the horror of the voice qua object, and the telephone scene in Proust illustrates what happens when the voice is subtracted from its body and triggers anxiety through over-proximity rather than loss. McGowan (the-real-gaze) situates the invocatory drive structurally alongside the scopic as Lacan's addition to the Freudian catalogue. Boothby (diaeresis, p. 126) reads the shofar and the burning bush as religious instantiations of the invocatory drive's structure: the impossible address, the ambiguity between being-called and calling.

Key formulations

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.195)

or even what I will later distinguish as the invocatory drive (la pulsion invocante), and to establish between them the slightest relation of deduction or genesis.

The first formal naming of 'la pulsion invocante' in the corpus, introduced precisely to demonstrate the impossibility of any genetic or deductive ordering among the partial drives.

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.210)

After making oneself seen, I will introduce another, making oneself heard, of which Freud says nothing.

Establishes the reflexive formula of the invocatory drive and marks it as Lacan's own supplement to Freud, while structurally distinguishing it from the scopic drive by its directional arc toward the Other.

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.215)

what one ought almost to call the invocatory drive, which has, as I told you in passing—nothing of what I say is mere joking—the privilege of not being able to close.

Assigns the invocatory drive its unique topological exception among the partial drives: structural non-closure, tying it most directly to the permanent opening of the unconscious gap.

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.119)

It is the same at the level of the invocatory drive, which is the closest to the experience of the unconscious.

Positions the invocatory drive at the apex of the drive hierarchy — beyond demand, at the level of desire and the desire of the Other — and marks its privileged proximity to the unconscious.

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismSlavoj Žižek · 2012 (page unknown)

the vocal object involves a desire from the Other (announcing what it wants from me) ... the voice is an invocation (Lacan: 'invocatory drive'), an attempt to provoke the Other (God, the king, the beloved) to respond

Žižek's synthetic formulation that condenses the structural logic of the invocatory drive — desire from/to the Other, the voice as appeal — while differentiating it from the scopic drive along the demand/desire axis.

Cited examples

Schreber's hallucinatory voices (from Schreber's 1903 autobiography, as read by Lacan in 'On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis') (case_study)

Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.190). Schreber's psychotic hallucinations instantiate the invocatory drive in its pathological form: when the signifier-chain collapses through foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, the object a erupts 'in the invocative register, as a voice' that suddenly invades consciousness. This makes visible what is ordinarily invisible — the voice as partial object operating at the structural limit of the subject.

The shofar, as analysed by Theodor Reik in his work on Jewish religious ritual (history)

Cited by Seminar X · AnxietyJacques Lacan · 1962 (p.255). Lacan uses Reik's analysis of the shofar — a ritual horn sounded at the level of the voice-object — to stage the move from the scopic to the auditory drive-register. The shofar's sound embodies das Ding as lost object and illustrates the fifth object relation (the voice), completing the range of partial drives anchored in anxiety.

Socrates' daimōn (the demonic voice that intervenes at every moment of his philosophical practice) (history)

Cited by Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1964 (p.273). Lacan invokes Socrates' daimonic voice as a trace of the invocatory drive object: a voice inseparable from the subject yet irreducible to his mastery, illustrating how the psychoanalytic inversion of epistemology grounds subjective assurance in an encounter with the filth of the partial object rather than the purification of the percipiens.

Philip's ritual of blowing into cupped hands to produce a siren-like call (clinical case of Leclaire's analysand, discussed in Seminar XII) (case_study)

Cited by Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1964 (p.207). Philip's obsessional game — mimicking the appeal of the Other's voice through a hollow, echo-producing gesture — is read as an invocatory drive manoeuvre: an attempt to master the voice-object by producing an 'empty reproduction of the appeal of the voice,' enacting the drive's circuit of desire without ever closing upon its object.

The myth of Ulysses and the Sirens (from Homer's Odyssey, discussed in Seminar XXIV) (literature)

Cited by Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourreJacques Lacan · 1976 (p.38). Lacan's commentator uses Ulysses — who exposes himself to hearing the Sirens' song while his crew's ears are stopped — to dramatise the internal torsion of the invocatory drive: the distinction between passively submitting to hearing (the drive's receptive moment) and actively making oneself heard (its reversal into the productive/musician position).

Proust's telephone scene (Marcel hearing his grandmother's voice over the telephone, separated from her body) (literature)

Cited by Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismSlavoj Žižek · 2012 (page unknown). Žižek reads Proust's scene as a phenomenological instantiation of the voice as partial object: when the voice is subtracted from the body and becomes autonomous, it does not signal loss but over-proximity — the objet a falling directly into reality — triggering anxiety and revealing the fantasmatic libidinal investment that ordinary embodied presence conceals.

Film noir voice-over narration, particularly Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (film)

Cited by Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 2015 (p.190). Copjec reads the noir narrator's clinging to the act of speaking — beyond its communicative purpose — as an instance of the invocatory drive: 'Neff clings not to the community with which speech puts him in touch but to the enjoyment that separates him from that community.' The voice-over materialises the subject's irreducible absence from diegetic reality, staging jouissance in the very act of vocal self-exposure.

David Lynch's Dune — voice-over narration by Princess Irulan (film)

Cited by The Impossible David LynchTodd McGowan · 2007 (p.47). McGowan argues that Lynch's deployment of Irulan's voice-over emphasises the voice's capacity to 'thwart the mastery we usually associate with speech,' becoming 'deep and completely hollow.' This hollowing-out of the speaker's distinctive character instantiates the invocatory drive's object: a voice that functions as cause of desire rather than vehicle of meaning, destabilising rather than securing the subject's position.

Kleist's short story 'St Cecilia or the Power of the Voice' — the sublime nun's song that mesmerises Protestant thugs, who spend years thereafter repeating it in an asylum (literature)

Cited by Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismSlavoj Žižek · 2012 (page unknown). Žižek uses Kleist's story to demonstrate the 'ugly jouissance' of the singing voice as sinthome: the original sublime song embodies the drive-object in its redemptive dimension, while its repetition by the madmen enacts the horror of the voice qua object returning uncannily, stripping the drive of sublimatory cover.

Tensions

Within the corpus

Whether the invocatory drive's arc goes toward the Other (and therefore cannot close) or whether it constitutes a fully circular loop.

  • Lacan (Seminar XI, p. 210): 'making oneself heard goes towards the other. The reason for this is a structural one.' The invocatory drive is asymmetrical to the scopic precisely because its movement does not return to the subject but opens outward toward the Other. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1 p.210

  • Lacan (Seminar XII, p. 208): 'the voice necessarily brings into play another organ, namely the ear, which pictures in a more singular way, the circuit of sense, from mouth to ear.' Here the drive is characterised as a circuit running from mouth to ear and back — a loop, not an open vector — suggesting circularity rather than unidirectional movement toward the Other. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-12-1 p.208

    The tension matters for understanding whether the invocatory drive's non-closure is a feature of its directionality (toward the Other, never returning) or of the circuit's topological structure (looping but never fully closing).

Whether the invocatory drive's distinctiveness from the scopic lies in its non-closure (topological privilege) or in its privileged proximity to the unconscious (hierarchical privilege).

  • Lacan (Seminar XI, p. 215): the invocatory drive has 'the privilege of not being able to close,' distinguishing it structurally from all other drives including the scopic — its exceptional status is topological and structural. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1 p.215

  • Lacan (Seminar XI, p. 119): 'At the scopic level, we are no longer at the level of demand, but of desire, of the desire of the Other. It is the same at the level of the invocatory drive, which is the closest to the experience of the unconscious.' Here scopic and invocatory are placed on the same level (both at the level of desire of the Other), with the invocatory marked only by its greater proximity to the unconscious — a quantitative/hierarchical rather than structural differentiation. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1 p.119

    This tension affects how the invocatory drive's special status is theorised: as a unique topological exception (non-closure) or as the highest rung of an ordered hierarchy shared with the scopic.

Across frameworks

vs Ego Psychology

Lacanian: The invocatory drive is not a developmental achievement or an ego function but a structural circuit organized around a constitutive lack — the voice as lost object (objet a). Its activation involves no synthesis of perception and reality-testing; on the contrary, in verbal hallucination the percipiens is 'deviated' rather than mistaken, and the subject is immanent in the voice rather than evaluating it from outside. There is no graduated maturation from lower (oral) to higher (invocatory) drives.

Ego Psychology: Ego psychology (Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein) would understand vocal-auditory experience primarily in terms of the ego's synthetic and reality-testing functions: the capacity to distinguish inner from outer, hallucination from perception, would be a marker of ego strength. Disturbed voice-experience (as in psychosis) would signal regression, defective neutralization of drive energy, or failures of autonomous ego development. Therapeutic work would aim to strengthen reality-testing and expand the conflict-free sphere.

Fault line: Lacanian theory treats the voice-object as constitutively resistant to ego-integration — its non-closure is not a deficit to be corrected but the structural condition of subjectivity itself — whereas ego psychology treats vocally disturbed experience as a reparable failure of synthesis and reality orientation.

vs Object Oriented Ontology

Lacanian: The voice as objet petit a is not an autonomous object with its own withdrawn reality but a structural gap or remainder produced by the subject's entry into language. It exists only insofar as it is lost; it has no substance independent of the signifying chain that produces its absence. The invocatory drive circles this void without ever possessing it.

Object Oriented Ontology: Object-oriented ontology (Harman, Morton) would grant the voice a genuine ontological status as an object that withdraws from all relations — including the subject's desire — and that exceeds any relational account. Rather than being constituted as a lack-in-the-Other, the voice-object would be treated as having its own autonomous, alluring depth that the subject (and the signifier) can never fully translate.

Fault line: For Lacan the voice-object is ontologically hollow — it exists as void, not as withdrawn plenitude — whereas OOO would resist the reduction of object-being to a function of subjective lack or signifying structure, insisting on the object's own excessive reality prior to and beyond any relation.

vs Humanistic Self Actualization

Lacanian: The invocatory drive cannot be integrated into a developmental telos of self-actualization. The voice that 'calls' the subject is not a call toward authentic selfhood or growth but the demand of the Other, a force of jouissance that the subject cannot master or own. The very privilege of non-closure means the drive never resolves into satisfaction or wholeness.

Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Rogers, Maslow) would treat the experience of being 'called' — vocation, inner voice, the voice of conscience or authentic self — as a resource for growth toward congruence and self-actualization. Therapeutic attention to the voice would aim at helping the subject hear and trust their own 'organismic valuing process,' distinguishing the authentic inner voice from introjected external conditions of worth.

Fault line: Lacanian theory insists there is no authentic inner voice that belongs unambiguously to the self — the voice is always already the voice of the Other, and the drive's non-closure forecloses any telos of self-completion — whereas humanistic psychology presupposes a recoverable self whose voice, properly heard, guides authentic fulfillment.

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (54)

  1. #01

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.190

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > IV. Schreber’s way

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Schreber's psychosis is structurally determined by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which produces a cascade of effects—absence of phallic signification, invasion of the Real by hallucinatory voices and gazes (object a), and compensatory metonymic 'forced thought'—all of which Lacan formalizes through the R-schema and the I-schema as an alternative symbolic architecture to neurotic repression.

    the object a is expressed in the invocative register, as a voice. In terms of speech production and reception, the voice suddenly invades consciousness.

  2. #02

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.126

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > The Voice from the Burning Bush

    Theoretical move: Lacan's reading of "Eyeh asher eyeh" and the shofar together argue that the Jewish sacred is constituted by the divided subject and the pure voice as objet a: the burning bush declares the non-coincidence of the subject of enunciation with the subject of the enounced, while the shofar embodies das Ding as lost object, making Judaism the religion of the law of language.

    We inevitably feel called by this raw, uninterpretable voice. It is inevitably a voice sounded for us, that calls to us.

  3. #03

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    In SADISM/MASOCHISM, the subject locates himself as the object of the invocatory drive (S11, 182–5).

  4. #04

    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.

    Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive, the anal drive, the scopic drive, and the invocatory drive.

  5. #05

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_174"></span>**sadism/masochism**

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

    both being related to the invocatory drive (which he also calls the 'sado-masochistic drive'; S11, 183). Both the masochist and the sadist locate themselves as the object of the invocatory drive, the voice.

  6. #06

    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_199"></span>**superego**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's progressive retheorization of the Freudian superego: from a symbolic agency tied to the Law and the Oedipus complex, to a paradoxical structure that is simultaneously the Law and its destruction, culminating in its identification with the Kantian categorical imperative and the jouissance-commanding voice of the Other.

    The superego is related to the voice, and thus to the invoking drive and to SADISM/MASOCHISM.

  7. #07

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.255

    **x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Reik's analysis of the shofar—a ritual horn sounding at the voice-level of the object—to illustrate both the promise and the structural limit of analogical symbol-use in early psychoanalysis, positioning the voice (as objet petit a) as the final, fifth object relation that ties desire to anxiety in its ultimate form, while distinguishing rigorous theoretical grounding from mere intuitive analogy.

    For our last two meetings, I was at the level of the eye. I'm going to take my bearings there again today, so as to lead you to the stage that needs to be broached now, that of the ear.

  8. #08

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.335

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's desire is structurally circular and irreducible — sustained as impossible by circling through oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and vociferous registers without ever closing on itself — and that this topology (figured as a circle on a torus that cannot be contracted to a point) explains the obsessional's relation to symptom, acting-out, passage à l'acte, idealized love, and narcissistic image-maintenance.

    from the phallic to the scopic, and from the scopic to the vociferated, it never loops back upon itself

  9. #09

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.287

    **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.

    a voice unfastened from its support... The voice at issue here is the voice as an imperative, a voice that demands obedience or conviction. It is not situated in relation to music, but in relation to speech.

  10. #10

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.195

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that there is no natural developmental or dialectical metamorphosis between partial drives; the passage from one drive to another is produced not by organic maturation but by the intervention of the demand of the Other, with the lost object (objet petit a) serving as the structural cause of drive-circuit incompleteness rather than an originary satisfaction.

    or even what I will later distinguish as the invocatory drive (la pulsion invocante), and to establish between them the slightest relation of deduction or genesis.

  11. #11

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.210

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan reformulates Freud's drive theory by substituting 'machen' for 'werden' to reveal that the drive's loop is structured around 'making oneself' (se faire) — seeing, heard, sucked — thereby showing that each drive's reflexive turn constitutes the subject while also introducing the voice drive (making oneself heard) as a structural complement to the scopic drive.

    After making oneself seen, I will introduce another, making oneself heard, of which Freud says nothing.

  12. #12

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.119

    THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: The passage maps the partial drives (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory) onto a hierarchy of structural positions—demand, metaphor/gift, desire, unconscious—culminating in the argument that the gaze functions as objet petit a precisely because it operates through a constitutive lure, placing the subject at the level of lack.

    It is the same at the level of the invocatory drive, which is the closest to the experience of the unconscious.

  13. #13

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.215

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the activity/passivity distinction in drive theory is purely grammatical (an artifice of Freud's articulation), and that each drive stage must be reformulated as an active "making oneself seen/heard," while distinguishing the drive field (pure activity) from the narcissistic field of love (reciprocity); he simultaneously grounds the erogenous zones in the lamella's rim-insertion into bodily orifices as the structural link between libido, the drives, and the unconscious.

    what one ought almost to call the invocatory drive, which has, as I told you in passing—nothing of what I say is mere joking—the privilege of not being able to close.

  14. #14

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

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

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

    It is in so far as the object of the voice is present in it that the percipiens is present in it.

  15. #15

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.41

    THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the unconscious not as a closed, enveloping unity but as constitutively structured by discontinuity, rupture, and split—arguing that the 'un' of the Unbewusste signals lack rather than mere negation, and that the unconscious is best situated at the level of the subject of enunciation in the dimension of synchrony, where the signifier's effacement (oblivium) enables the barring function.

    in an interjection, in an Imperative, in an invocation, even in a hesitation it is always the unconscious that presents you with its m a, and speaks

  16. #16

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.133

    WHAT IS A PICTURE? > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the gaze as a mortifying, anti-life force (the fascinum/evil eye) whose encounter arrests movement and suspends the subject; the moment of seeing functions as a suture between the imaginary and symbolic, while the scopic field is distinguished from the invocatory field precisely because the subject is determined—not indeterminate—through the separating cut of objet a.

    the total distinction between the scopic register and the invocatory, vocatory, vocational field

  17. #17

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.119

    THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: The passage maps the partial drives (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory) onto distinct registers of lack and desire, arguing that at the scopic level the gaze functions as objet petit a through a constitutive lure whereby the subject is presented as other than he is and what is shown is not what he wishes to see.

    It is the same at the level of the invocatory drive, which is the closest to the experience of the unconscious.

  18. #18

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.133

    WHAT IS A PICTURE? > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the evil eye (fascinum) as the point at which the gaze exercises its anti-life, mortifying power, distinguishing the scopic register—where the subject is determined by the separation introduced by the gaze (objet a)—from the invocatory field, and locating the moment of seeing as a suture between the imaginary and the symbolic.

    What I wish to emphasize is the total distinction between the scopic register and the invocatory, vocatory, vocational field.

  19. #19

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.195

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that there is no natural developmental or dialectical progression between partial drives; rather, transitions between drives are produced by the intervention of the demand of the Other, not by organic maturation or logical deduction. The objet petit a is not the origin of the oral drive but the structural marker of its constitutive lack.

    or even what I will later distinguish as the invocatory drive (la pulsion invocante), and to establish between them the slightest relation of deduction or genesis.

  20. #20

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.202

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the libido not as a fluid or diffuse energy but as an organ—both a bodily part and an instrument—thereby shifting the conceptual ground from energetics to topology, and uses an analogy (the bladder rather than Plato's cave) to reframe the unconscious away from depth-metaphors.

    making oneself... seen, heard, sucked, shitted

  21. #21

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.210

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: By replacing Freud's 'werden' with 'machen' in the formulation of the drive, Lacan redefines the drive's loop as a reflexive circuit of "making oneself seen/heard," concentrating its activity in the se faire (making oneself), and uses this to illuminate the partial drives—scopic, invocatory, oral—as each tracing a different structural relation between subject and other.

    After making oneself seen, I will introduce another, making oneself heard, of which Freud says nothing.

  22. #22

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.215

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the activity/passivity distinction in drive theory is purely grammatical (an artifice Freud uses to articulate the drive's outward-return movement), while the drive's structure is fundamentally active at every stage - each of the three Freudian stages must be replaced by reflexive formulas like 'making oneself seen/heard', linking the lamella, erogenous zones, and partial drives to the unconscious through the opening/closing of its gap.

    what one ought almost to call the invocatory drive, which has, as I told you in passing—nothing of what I say is mere joking —the privilege of not being able to close.

  23. #23

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.273

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Through the function of objet petit a, the subject achieves separation from the vacillation of being that characterizes alienation; and the paradigm case of verbal hallucination — where the voice is the operative object — reveals that psychoanalysis inverts the classical epistemic ideal of a purified percipiens by grounding subjective assurance in an encounter with the 'filth' of the partial object.

    Take Socrates. The inflexible purity of Socrates and his atopia are correlative. Intervening, at every moment, there is the demonic voice.

  24. #24

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.208

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand), Lacan articulates the drive's circuit as a loop around a gap in the body, where "pure difference" (exquisite/acid fringe of sweetness) functions as the irreducible kernel of desire; the ejaculatory formula Poord'jeli is analysed as a vocal signifier that mimes and masters this circuit, connecting the drive's reversal to the sacred incantatory dimension of the Voice.

    the voice necessarily brings into play another organ, namely the ear, which pictures in a more singular way, the circuit of sense, from mouth to ear as people say.

  25. #25

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.107

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object (objet petit a) is the hiding place of the Other's desire, not merely a register of demand or transference identification, and that failing to distinguish desire from demand leads to a clinical impasse — illustrated through a case where the analyst remains captive to a decade-long identificatory grip because she reduces the symptom to oral demand rather than grasping the dimension of desire.

    precisely because the oral demand is made through the same orifice as the invoking demand, that the demand to eat is the same because it is the mouth which speaks, he has two mouths

  26. #26

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.107

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a clinical vignette of a borderline patient treated for ten years to argue that the analyst's error was reducing the patient's symptomatology to demand (and its oral regression) rather than locating the properly structural dimension of desire—specifically, that desire is constituted by its torsion toward the Other's desire, and that the objet petit a is the site where the desire of the Other dwells, not a relation between two egos.

    precisely because the oral demand is made through the same orifice as the invoking demand, that the demand to eat is the same because it is the mouth which speaks, he has two mouths

  27. #27

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.207

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand) to theorise how the circuit of sense—anchored by pure difference, the gap of the body, and the dehiscence of the other body—produces desire, the drive, and the object voice, culminating in the Shemah prayer as a limit-case where the signifier, jouissance, and the sacred converge around an invocatory formula.

    the siren call produced by blowing into the hands that are joined like a shell and offered to the echo of the forest is presented as an imitation, a reduplication, an empty reproduction of the appeal of the voice.

  28. #28

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.230

    **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Velázquez's *Las Meninas* to distinguish the picture from the mirror and to argue that the scopic field reveals the subject's constitutive division: the picture is not representation but the *Vorstellungsrepresentanz* (representative of the representation), and the Objet petit a occupies the interval between the plane of fantasy and the picture-plane, which is the only genuine *Dasein* of the divided subject.

    These other objects, specifically the look and the voice, if we leave for what is to come the object at stake in castration, are an integral part of this division of the subject.

  29. #29

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.40

    B - The problem of the differential distribution of the mode of representation

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Objet petit a cannot be reduced to perception but must be understood as a structural "representative of representation" — a trajectory of the subject through registers — that grounds desire through aphanisis, negative hallucination, and the mourning of the primordial object, while also proposing a systematic mapping of the object across synchronic and diachronic axes of Freudian theory.

    the scopic object and the auditory object that Lacan brings into this register

  30. #30

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.230

    **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the picture from the mirror by theorising the picture as the "representative of the representation" (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz): the scopic field of the picture inscribes both the Objet petit a and the division of the subject through projective topology, where the subject's "there" (Dasein) is not a presence but the gap/interval between two parallel planes — the picture-plane and the fantasy-window — in which the object a falls.

    These other objects, specifically the look and the voice, if we leave for what is to come the object at stake in castration, are an integral part of this division of the subject and presentify in the very field of the perceived the elided part of it as libidinal.

  31. #31

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.257

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object of demand (breast, faeces) must be distinguished from the objects of desire (gaze, voice) and jouissance (linked to castration), and that castration is not reducible to the Oedipus myth's prohibition but marks the bar between the subject and jouissance — a bar that IS desire itself; further, the Hegelian master/slave dialectic fundamentally misreads jouissance by assuming that renunciation entails its loss.

    this other object, which is strange… namely, the voice… what falls (choit) in this retroaction of one signifier on the other, which is what we have defined as the fundamental condition for the apparition of the subject

  32. #32

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.161

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "not-all" logic of quantification—applied to the proposition "not all knowledge is conscious"—does not entail the existence of a positive unconscious knowledge; instead, the analyst's proper position is determined by their identification with the objet petit a (as cause of desire and object of demand), and each register of this object (gaze, voice, breast, anal) carries an immunity to negation that grounds the psychoanalytic act.

    'I am not saying', is in general understood as, 'I am not saying no'.

  33. #33

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.72

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that jouissance is structurally 'inappropriate' to the sexual relationship, making repression a secondary effect that generates metaphor; he then aligns Aristotle's energeia-pleasure (exemplified by seeing/smell/hearing) with the analytic function of objet petit a as that which, from the male pole, substitutes for the missing partner and thereby constitutes fantasy, while announcing that the female pole requires a different supplement to the non-existent sexual relationship.

    Thirdly, he adds hearing.

  34. #34

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.57

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot's topological properties to argue that the three consistencies—Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real—are irreducibly linked and that this triadic structure grounds both representation and the subject's condition, while the objet petit a (small o), as cause of desire rather than its object, marks an irrational, non-conjunctive gap between the One of the signifier and the One of meaning.

    the ear, you should note hears sphere just as much, even though it is presented in a different form that everyone knows is that of a snail

  35. #35

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.32

    What is the way of distinguishing these two cases?

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots on two interlocking theoretical moves: Lacan argues for the primacy of topological structure over phenomenal shape (using the torus and Klein bottle), and Alain Didier extends this by mapping the circuit of the invocatory drive onto the logic of separation, proposing that musical jouissance operates as a sublimation that "evaporates" the lost object and thus transmutes lack into nostalgia.

    the invocatory drive and its reversal into a listening drive. I mean that the word listening drive, does not, I believe, exist does not exist anywhere as such

  36. #36

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.38

    So then what is this lack?

    Theoretical move: The passage maps a four-moment dialectical circuit of the drive (using music as its privileged illustration) in which the subject's repeated failure to encounter the objet petit a gradually confirms its radical impossibility, ultimately enabling a leap "through the fantasy" toward an ecstatic, desexualised Other jouissance that Lacan identifies with sublimation – and which constitutes the terminal point of the analytic process beyond ordinary surplus-jouissance.

    Ulysses exposes himself to hearing, to hearing the invocatory drive, in fact to hearing the song of the Sirens

  37. #37

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.317

    **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **1**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychosis is structurally precipitated when a primordial signifier—the Name-of-the-Father—is foreclosed (verworfen) and thus cannot be received from the field of the Other, reducing the subject to a purely imaginary, dual relation of mutual destruction; this is contrasted with the authentic symbolic invocation that addresses "all the signifiers" constituting the subject, including symptoms.

    this way of stating the sentence I have until now been calling the mandate I shall now call the invocation, with this term's religious connotations. An invocation isn't an inert formula. It's that by which I get that faith which is mine to pass into the other.

  38. #38

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.37

    **II** > **The meaning of delusion** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the defining feature of psychotic delusion is not its content or degree of understandability but its closure to dialectical movement — its "dialectical inertia" — and that the question "Who speaks?" must govern the analysis of paranoia, as demonstrated by the centrality of verbal hallucination and the Schreber case.

    one hears the sound of one's own words. It's possible not to pay attention to it, but it's certain that one hears it.

  39. #39

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.144

    **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.

    The word means I make an appeal to the voice - that is, to what supports speech. Not to speech, but to the subject insofar as he carries it.

  40. #40

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.86

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

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

    The drive always functions as this absurd alliance between animality and machinality: they don't fit, but it works nevertheless.

  41. #41

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.181

    Silence > Ulysses

    Theoretical move: Dolar reads Kafka's "Silence of the Sirens" to articulate how the law operates not through command but through silence—its zero-point of voice—which is irresistible precisely because there is nothing to resist, and shows that Ulysses' "escape" relies on a self-cancelling pretense whose structure mirrors the logic of the Jewish joke, leaving the law's mechanism intact.

    the song of the Sirens could pierce any wax, and true passion could break any chains. But the Sirens have a weapon far more effective than their voice: their silence, that is, the voice at its purest.

  42. #42

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.95

    The voice and the drive > The voice of the daemon

    Theoretical move: By tracing the "voice of conscience" from Socrates' daemon through Rousseau's Savoy vicar, Dolar argues that the supposedly pure inner voice — positioned as the ground of morality beyond logos — is structurally tied to the big Other: the apotreptic, negative function of the divine inner voice always requires an external authority (Teacher, daemon, God) to authenticate it, so the ideal of autonomous self-authorization secretly reproduces heteronomy.

    Socrates is a creature of the voice. It is not only that he committed nothing to writing, so that his revolution in thought was supported merely by the voice, the voice which vanished without trace, as voices do, but keeps reverberating through the history of philosophy.

  43. #43

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

    A Voice and Nothing More > The voice and the signifier

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

    The voice is like a fingerprint, instantly recognizable and identifiable. This fingerprint quality of the voice is something that does not contribute to meaning, nor can it be linguistically described

  44. #44

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.71

    chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

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

    they had to concentrate merely on the voice and the meaning emanating from it

  45. #45

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.90

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

    Theoretical move: The voice, as object of the drive, operates through a constitutive asymmetry of incorporation and expulsion that makes it extimate—belonging to neither interior nor exterior—and this same structural topology grounds the intimate connection between voice and conscience that has animated the ethical tradition.

    One is too exposed to the voice and the voice exposes too much, one incorporates and one expels too much.

  46. #46

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.195

    Silence > The dog

    Theoretical move: By reading Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog," Dolar traces how the acousmatic voice-from-nowhere (objet petit a as pure resonance) converges with the enigma of food to identify objet petit a as the common-source intersection of voice and nourishment—both passing through the mouth in mutual exclusion—while also theorising psychoanalysis as the abandonment of childhood rather than its retrieval.

    Food and voice—both pass through the mouth. There is an alternative: either you eat or you speak, use your voice, you cannot do both at the same time. They share the same location, but in mutual exclusion: either incorporation or emission.

  47. #47

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

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

    Theoretical move: Against the standard reading that the film noir voice-over signals the hero's limited knowledge, Copjec argues that the voice-over's excess over commentary indexes a surplus jouissance — a private enjoyment adhering in the act of speech itself — and that the "grain of the voice" (following Barthes rather than Bonitzer) functions as a transferential X that eroticizes the voice, preserving particularity and desire rather than marking mere epistemic failure.

    Neff clings not to the community with which speech puts him in touch but to the enjoyment that separates him from that community.

  48. #48

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

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

    What's involved in the drive, Lacan tells us, is a making oneself heard or making oneself seen

  49. #49

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.190

    **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Voice and the Voice-Over**

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the "grain of the voice" operates as a structural limit that collapses universal sense and installs the listener in a relation of transference/desire toward an unknown X; when desire gives way to drive, this private beyond is no longer hidden but exposed as a void—jouissance surfacing within the phenomenal field without becoming phenomenal—a move that explains the film noir voice-over's materialization of the narrator's irreducible absence from diegetic reality.

    What's involved in the drive, Lacan tells us, is a making oneself heard or making oneself seen … the very reciprocity that is implied by desire is denied in drive

  50. #50

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.187

    **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Voice and the Voice-Over**

    Theoretical move: Copjec contests standard film noir criticism's equation of the voice-over's "grain" with epistemological failure or masculine malaise, arguing instead that the voice-over marks a radical heterogeneity between speech and image driven by the primacy of jouissance (drive) over desire—a structural excess that refuses reduction to either commentary or social particularity, and which Barthes's "grain of the voice" captures more precisely than Bonitzer's "body of the voice."

    Neff clings not to the community with which speech puts him in touch but to the enjoyment that separates him from that community.

  51. #51

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.47

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

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's *Dune* deploys the voice as an "impossible object" — an object-cause of desire that destabilizes rather than secures symbolic authority — in order to construct a fully fantasmatic world where the originary loss of the privileged object has not occurred, enabling direct access to jouissance and collapsing the boundary between internal and external reality.

    Lynch's presentation of the voice emphasizes its ability to thwart the mastery we usually associate with speech. The sound of the speaker's voice loses the distinctive character of the speaker, becoming deep and completely hollow.

  52. #52

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.19

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

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that early Lacanian film theory mislocated the gaze in the subjective look of the spectator, whereas Lacan's own conception treats the gaze as objet petit a—an objective, real-order disturbance within the visual field that implicates rather than empowers the spectator, thereby fundamentally reorienting psychoanalytic film theory away from imaginary/symbolic models toward the real.

    the voice in what Lacan calls the 'invocatory' drive

  53. #53

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.227

    29 > **Preface** > **Introduction**

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage consolidates the theoretical apparatus of the book by anchoring its key moves—the Lacanian gaze as object rather than look, the critique of empiricism in spectator theory, the real as the neglected register in film theory, and masochism as the primary form of cinematic enjoyment—through a dense network of citations and polemical asides.

    Lacan adds the scopic and invocatory drives to those that Freud discovers in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

  54. #54

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.52

    **Neurosis** > **Oedipus Complex** > *objet a*

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically theorizes the *objet petit a* as the object-cause of desire — constitutively absent, irreducible to signification, and functioning as the remainder/gap that both inaugurates subjectivity through loss and sustains desire by perpetually eluding satisfaction, thereby distinguishing it sharply from any empirical object of desire.

    the voice in what Lacan calls the 'invocatory' drive