Jouissance

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (1465)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.15

   Introduction

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's engagement with Kant constitutes a double move: exposing the perverse underside of Kantian ethics (via "Kant with Sade") while simultaneously crediting Kant with discovering the irreducible dimension of desire and the Real in ethics — a discovery that must itself be supplemented by a further step toward the drive, which frames the project of an "ethics of the Real."

   the dimension of desire, which circles around the real qua impossible. This dimension was excluded from the purview of traditional ethics, and could therefore appear to it only as an excess.

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.22

   The (Moral-) Pathology of Everyday Life

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kant's concept of the 'pathological' designates not the abnormal but the entire register of normal, drive-motivated action, and that the transition to the ethical requires not gradual refinement but a revolutionary break — a creation ex nihilo — structurally analogous to Lacan's conception of The Act, with the ethical dimension forming a Real-like surplus irreducible to the legal/illegal binary.

   Life is the faculty of a being by which it acts according to the laws of the faculty of desire... Pleasure is the representation of the agreement of an object or an action with the subjective conditions of life

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.35

   The Subject of Freedom > What freedom?

   Theoretical move: Against both 'humanist' and 'psychological' accounts of freedom, Zupančič argues that Kantian freedom is grounded not in the subject's inner inclinations but in a 'foreign body' that is paradoxically most truly one's own — a structure she links to alienation, jouissance, and the ethical dimension that will be connected to guilt rather than psychological causality.

   These objections clearly show that Kant has struck the nerve of the problem of ethics: the question of the (specifically ethical) jouissance, and of its domestication in 'love for one's neighbour'.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.42

   The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kantian freedom is not located beyond causal determination but emerges precisely within it, at the point where the causal chain fails to close on itself—a "crack in the Other"—and that this structure mirrors Lacan's move of introducing the subject as correlative to the lack in the Other, making guilt (not moral conscience) the paradoxical mode of the subject's participation in freedom.

   The first consists in introducing a moment of irreducible jouissance as the 'proof of the subject's existence'.

5. #05

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.68

   The Lie > The Unconditional

   Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of Kant's "parable of the gallows" exposes a hidden pathological motive (the good of the neighbour) smuggled into what should be a purely formal moral argument; the passage then aligns Kantian duty with the Lacanian ethics of desire by locating the ultimate limit of pathology in the Other, and grounds the ethical act in the dimension of the Real rather than law or transgression.

   Must I go toward my duty of truth insofar as it preserves the authentic place of my jouissance, even if it is empty? Or must I resign myself to this lie which, by making me substitute forcefully the good for the principle of my jouissance, commands me to blow alternately hot and cold?

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.72

   The Lie > The Sadeian trap

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

   the categorical imperative is not a test which would enable us to make a list... behind which we could hide the surplus-enjoyment we derive from our acts.

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.93

   Good and Evil

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's postulate of the immortality of the soul is structurally a fantasy in the Lacanian sense: it responds to the same impasse as Sadeian fantasy—the incommensurability between the body's finite capacity for pleasure/pain and the infinite demand of jouissance—thereby demonstrating that "Kant with Sade" finds its most precise illustration in the immortality postulate, whose truth is not an immortal soul but an immortal body.

   The enjoyment [jouissance] - which the victims seem to experience and which coincides, in this case, with their extreme suffering - encounters here an obstacle in the form of the 'pleasure principle'.

8. #08

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.108

   Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that within Kantian ethics, "diabolical evil" and "the highest good" are structurally indistinguishable—both name the formal structure of an accomplished ethical act—and that any genuine act necessarily involves a transgression of the existing symbolic order, such that the difference between good and evil dissolves at the level of the act's structure, a conclusion Kant produced but refused to acknowledge.

   Lacan's thesis according to which depression 'isn't a state of the soul, it is simply a moral failing... a sin, which means a moral weakness'

9. #09

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.112

   Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils > The act as 'subjectivation without subject'

   Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Kant's exclusion of 'diabolical evil' and 'highest good' as impossible for human agents stems not from intellectual courage but from a flawed conceptualization that links the Real to the will; following Lacan, she proposes that Acts do occur in reality precisely because jouissance (as the real kernel of the law) operates independently of will, introducing a 'fundamental alienation of the subject in the act' that dissolves the requirement for a holy or diabolical will and grounds ethics in the irreducible split between subject of enunciation and subject of the statement.

   Lacan raises the objection that such a 'force' - namely, jouissance (as distinct from pleasure) - does exist... jouissance implies precisely the acceptance of death.

10. #10

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.118

    Good and Evil > Like angels, like devils > Notes

    Theoretical move: This notes section is bibliographic apparatus, but note 23 makes a substantive theoretical move: it articulates Lacan's later reformulation of the subject/enunciation split in terms of the Other/jouissance difference, locating ethical responsibility in the fragment of jouissance that 'grows' from the act rather than in the Other-determined dimension of speech.

    However, there is something else which 'grows' from this act, namely, some jouissance. It is in this fragment of jouissance that we must situate the subject and his responsibility.

11. #11

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.119

    The Act and Evil in Literature

    Theoretical move: The passage constructs two paradigmatic figures of ethical failure — the 'Sadeian' (infinite approach to the object of desire, part-by-part) and the 'Don Juanian' (overhasty pursuit, one-by-one) — as the two faces of Kant's theory of the act, using Lacan's reading of Zeno's paradox to show that both fail to close the gap between will and jouissance and thus enter the territory of 'diabolical evil'.

    the one that governs the relationship between the will and jouissance as the real kernel of the act.

12. #12

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.120

    The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont

    Theoretical move: The passage uses the literary case of Valmont and Merteuil in *Les Liaisons dangereuses* to dramatize the Lacanian thesis that there is no sexual relation — that love (identification, the formula of One) and jouissance (always partial, never whole) are fundamentally incompatible — while also arguing that the path to autonomous subjectivity, in eighteenth-century ethical thought, runs through Evil as a deliberate project rather than mere knowledge.

    love has to do with identification, and thus functions according to the formula 'we are one'. On the other side is enjoyment, jouissance, which in principle is never 'whole'. The jouissance of the body of the other is always partial; it can never be One.

13. #13

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.128

    The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > In letter 70, he puts it like this:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Valmont's conduct toward Madame de Tourvel exemplifies the perverse structure as Lacan conceives it—making the Other enjoy/become a subject—while his eventual betrayal of Merteuil illustrates Lacan's formula of 'giving ground on one's desire' (céder sur son désir), wherein the rhetoric of 'it is not my fault' is itself the purest confession of guilt and the mark of the subject who has abandoned desire for the logic of the superego.

    'L 'heureuse femme, elle se voit jouir' ('Fortunate woman, she is watching herself enjoying!)

14. #14

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.141

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

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

    This is evident from the very start of the play ... what a pleasure he takes in offering it right and left wherever he happens to be ... This is precisely how Don Juan handles his agalma.

15. #15

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.147

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

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes a structural distinction between desire and the drive by reading Valmont (desire) against Don Juan (drive): Valmont perpetually defers satisfaction to maintain the gap of desire, while Don Juan attains satisfaction in each object yet is propelled by the irreducible hole constitutive of the drive itself, which Zupančič links to the not-all and objet petit a.

    enjoyment is the drive of Don Juan's actions, whereas in the case of Valmont, it is the will to enjoy ('la volonte de jouissance') that constitutes his drive.

16. #16

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.150

    The Act and Evil in Literature > Notes

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for a chapter on "The Act and Evil in Literature," gathering citations from Lacan, Kierkegaard, Zizek, and others; while non-narrative in form, several notes contain substantive theoretical quotations on partial drive, jouissance, castration/repression, and the Master/Slave dialectic as applied to Don Juan.

    one can only enjoy a part of the Other's body, for the simple reason that one has never seen a body completely wrap itself around the Other's body

17. #17

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.157

    Between the Moral Law and the Superego

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's concept of 'respect' (Achtung) is structurally homologous to Lacan's concept of anxiety: both are 'objective' affects without a cause but with an object (objet petit a), both arise from a 'lack that comes to lack' (le manque vient à manquer), and both mark the subject's encounter with what exceeds the order of representation — thereby aligning Kantian drive theory with Lacanian drive theory avant la lettre.

    it is in anxiety that the subject comes closest to the object (i.e. to the Real kernel of his jouissance), and that it is precisely this proximity of the object which lies at the origin of anxiety.

18. #18

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.168

    Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The sublime and the logic of the superego > The second passage is from the Critique of Judgement.

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Kantian sublime is structurally homologous to the Freudian superego: the subject's conversion of anxiety into elevated feeling relies on a "superego inflation" that displaces the ego's concerns while simultaneously functioning as a strategy to avoid direct encounter with das Ding and the death drive in its pure state. The sublime's narcissistic self-estimation, its link to moral feeling, and its metonymic evocation of an internal "devastating force" all reveal the superego as the hidden engine of the sublime.

    The destructive power of natural phenomena is already familiar to the subject, so the devastating force 'above me' easily evokes a devastating force 'within me'... it corresponds very well to the agency of the superego, that is, to the law equipped with the gaze and voice which can 'make even the boldest sinner tremble'.

19. #19

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.170

    Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The sublime and the logic of the superego > The second passage is from the Critique of Judgement.

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's theory of the sublime can be read as a theory of the logic of fantasy, in which the subject's safe observation of its own annihilation through the 'window of fantasy' reveals the superego structure latent in Kantian ethics — while simultaneously opening the question of whether a non-superego ethics (Lacanian ethics) is conceivable.

    the subject is entirely passive, an inert matter given over to the enjoyment of the Law.

20. #20

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.193

    Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > The theft of desire - and the mother in exchange

    Theoretical move: Against the dominant reading of Oedipus as a hero who heroically assumes symbolic guilt, Zupančič argues that Oedipus identifies not with his destiny but with his blindness as abject outcast—a move closer to traversing the fantasy and identifying with the symptom than to subjectivation through internalized guilt—thereby reorienting the ethical stakes of psychoanalysis away from the glorification of lack-of-being toward an irreducible 'being of an outcast'.

    he has actually begun to enjoy it, precisely because he uses this excuse.

21. #21

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.201

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

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

    The guilt of Oedipus is located in the fact that he has not consented to the loss of the Thing/Jouissance which is the usual condition of the hero's initiation.

22. #22

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.213

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Oedipus' answer to the Sphinx's riddle exemplifies "knowledge as truth" — a word wagered without guarantee from the Other — and that this act is not transgression but an act of creation that founds a new symbolic order, rendering ethics possible as fidelity to an inaugurating event.

    this knowledge that does not know itself (that remains unknown), but still does the work, constitutes the point through which we have access to jouissance, and also to truth

23. #23

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.225

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder

    Theoretical move: The passage introduces Claudel's *The Hostage* as the literary-dramatic material Lacan reads in his seminar *Le transfert* as a contemporary tragedy, setting up Sygne de Coufontaine's final tic — her compulsive, wordless refusal — as the key enigmatic gesture around which the theoretical discussion of enjoyment, sacrifice, and the ethics of psychoanalysis will turn.

    Sygne shields Turelure with her own body, intercepting Georges's bullet... The dying Sygne utters not a sound: she merely signals her rejection of a final reconciliation with her husband by means of a compulsive tic.

24. #24

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.226

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Ethics and terror

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'terror' as a political-ethical form operates through a forced logic of subjectivation—compelling the subject to choose in a way that simultaneously constitutes and destroys her as subject—revealing a structural homology between radical terror and the ethical Act, and showing that the closest approach to the ethical Act may require the transgression of the universal moral law itself.

    'The subject is asked to assume with enjoyment the very injustice that he finds horrifying.'

25. #25

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.232

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Ethics and terror

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Sygne de Coufontaine's 'monstrous' ethical choice—doing one's duty at the price of one's humanity and faith—exemplifies a distinctly modern ethical dimension that begins precisely where conventional duty ends, and that Kantian moral law in its purest form (wanting nothing from the subject) coincides with desire in its pure state, opening a 'hole beyond faith' that is constitutive of modern ethics rather than a deviation from it.

    the story of Sygne de Coufontaine presents just such a choice of 'heroic monstrosity' against humanity

26. #26

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.237

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Enjoyment - my neighbour

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian commandment to 'love thy neighbour' founders on the problem of jouissance, which Freud evades: the neighbour is structurally the enemy because enjoyment is always 'the Same' (real register) rather than the similar (imaginary) or identity (symbolic), and Sygne's sacrifice dramatizes the crossing from the service of goods into the abyss of desire-as-enjoyment, illustrating Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis through literary and political analysis.

    Lacan, of course, places the source of hostility, of the aggression which arises in my relation to the neighbour, in the field of enjoyment. It is enjoyment that is always strange, other, dissimilar.

27. #27

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.244

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > Enjoyment - my neighbour

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Sygne's final 'no' is not an afterthought but the necessary telos of her sacrifice: the logic of pure desire, by driving the subject to traverse the fundamental fantasy from within, opens onto the register of enjoyment (jouissance), where the remainder of flesh that refuses sublimation prevents the sublime image from closing over the void it veils.

    'To encounter enjoyment, desire must not only understand, but traverse [franchir] the very fantasy which constructs and supports it.'

28. #28

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.247

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > The Real in ethics

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that ethics is grounded in the encounter with the Real (or Badiou's 'event'), and that the central danger of Kantian ethics lies in misreading its descriptive ethical configuration as a 'user's guide' — thereby collapsing ethics into terror, masochism, or the obscure desire for catastrophe by treating the Real as a direct object of will rather than an irreducible by-product of subjective action.

    we escape to the realm of infinite symbolic metonymy in order to avoid the encounter with the Real of enjoyment.

29. #29

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.252

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and drive are not opposed but sequentially related: pure desire is the limit-moment at which the subject's fantasy-support appears within its own frame and is sacrificed, marking a torsion from the register of desire into the register of the drive—a passage that constitutes the telos of analytic experience beyond the traversal of fundamental fantasy.

    for the early Lacan, jouissance does not exist. More precisely, it exists only in its own loss (it exists only in so far as it is always-already lost), as something lacking.

30. #30

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.262

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive > Notes

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "ethics of the Real" is grounded not in finitude but in the infinite's unavoidable parasitism of the finite—identified as jouissance/death drive—and that this opens two distinct figures of the infinite (desire vs. jouissance) corresponding to two paradigms of ethics (classical/Antigone vs. modern/Sygne), a distinction that reframes the death drive as radically indifferent to death rather than oriented toward it.

    The Lacanian name for this parasitism is enjoyment [jouissance].

31. #31

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.266

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive > Notes

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "realization of desire" operates through an infinite measure (the logic of negative magnitude and endless metonymy) that can only be articulated from the point of view of a Last Judgement, and she uses the parallel between Kant's postulates and Lacan's ethics to show that the Act (as in Antigone) dissolves the divided subject by transposing it wholly to the side of the object—thereby distinguishing desire from jouissance and opening onto a "modern" ethics adequate to a symbolic order in which the Other's non-existence is itself known.

    we precipitate ourselves towards death in order to avoid this realization, in order to be finally able to 'live in peace', sheltered from jouissance, sheltered from the drive that makes us do things which go against our well-being.

32. #32

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.270

    Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive > Notes

    Theoretical move: Zupančič distinguishes two modes of "realizing desire" - Antigone's sublimation through which she becomes the phallic signifier of desire (the Φ), and Sygne de Coufontaine's drive-logic that short-circuits the infinite/finite opposition by sacrificing even the absolute condition itself, rendering the finite not-whole and making visible the Real of desire (the real residue of castration) rather than the Symbolic/Imaginary phallus.

    in the distortions, in the torsions, of a body which is not made in the measure of the infinite (of the jouissance) that inhabits it.

33. #33

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.277

    Index

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

    jouissance ... in ethics 23, 55-6, 99-1 00 relation to the infinite 249-55 in Kant and Sade 80-81 Lacan 's two conceptualizations of 240-42 as the kernel of the law 1 00

34. #34

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.58

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

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

    drive, the force behind human activity and enjoyment

35. #35

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.81

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

    Theoretical move: The passage expounds the Frankfurt School's "culture industry" thesis — that industrially produced mass culture functions as propaganda that secures ruling-class hegemony by cultivating passive, conformist subjects — and frames this as the negative-critical baseline against which emancipatory aesthetic theory must be measured.

    those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth.

36. #36

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.141

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Mode of production in Fight Club** > **Creative destruction**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club* theorizes the structural entwinement of destruction and production under capitalism, advancing the thesis that psychic self-destruction is a necessary precondition for politico-economic revolution — that any change in the mode of production must simultaneously be a change in the mode of subjectivization.

    This erotic charge behind the idea of self-destruction is a titillating clue to how the film thinks about selfhood; after self-destruction, there remains erotic energy and dynamic animation.

37. #37

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.177

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Fight Club's formal system—voice-over narration, second-person address, fourth-wall breaks, and multi-narrator rivalry—enacts the ideological contradiction between the imaginary and the symbolic, modeling both interpellation and its potential undoing through medium-consciousness and situated subjectivity.

    Tyler's monologue imagines a process of disillusionment, when this temporary embarrassment is recognized as a permanent social fact. Yet at the same time, the film's pointing to the cinema's role in perpetuating the illusion means we might also question what new illusion arises when the illusion is revealed.

38. #38

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.181

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>[Conclusion](#page-5-3)

    Theoretical move: The conclusion argues that dialectical Marxist film theory must hold the contradictions of cinema simultaneously — as both industrial ideological apparatus and site of collective critical practice — rather than resolving them, making the theory itself an ongoing, fallible social relation rather than a definitive interpretive authority.

    The time of the cinema is the time of leisure, of play, of producing things other than calculable value.

39. #39

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **THE LOBSTER AND THE LITTLE GIRL: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH DREAMS, THANKS TO FREUD** > ***Analysis***

    Theoretical move: The passage performs a Lacanian-Freudian dream analysis that maps the phallic mother and imaginary father onto dream figures, locating the dreamer's desire for autonomy at the threshold between the Imaginary and the Real, where self-nomination and self-creation begin to emerge as a wished-for but deferred psychic position.

    'Enjoy, at all costs, but only as I say.' In commanding enjoyment according to her likes, where none can freely be taken, the phallic mother takes recompense for being deprived of all desired or experienced pleasure through torturing the child

40. #40

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the dream's "navel" (its irreducible, unrepresentable core) is homologous to the Lacanian Real, and that aesthetic/creative production (sublimation) is the closest a subject can come to encountering this impossible kernel—while terror, theorized via Lyotard, names the affective-political structure of that encounter with the Real in both psychic and cultural life.

    It is the object of the drive to experience the ultimate enjoyment, the enjoyment of an ecstasy that would shatter the self even unto death

41. #41

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: This passage surveys early psychoanalytic and psychiatric theories of dream-formation, arguing that dreams originate from subjective sensory stimuli (hypnagogic hallucinations, retinal excitation) and internal organic sensations, while raising the methodological challenge of tracing dream content back to its somatic exciting source.

    in digestive disturbances the dream contains ideas from the sphere of enjoyment and disgust. Finally, the influence of sexual excitement on the dream content is perceptible enough in every one's experience

42. #42

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.16

    P SYC HOANALYSI S OF C APITALI SM

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's incompleteness—the very gaps it produces—opens the space for its psychoanalysis and critique, and that previous critical approaches (including Marx's egalitarian critique of surplus value) have been insufficient precisely because they subordinate psychoanalytic insight to a pre-given political verdict rather than letting the analysis of psychic satisfaction drive the critique.

    Psychoanalysis probes the satisfaction of subjects and tries to understand why this satisfaction takes the forms that it does. It does not transform dissatisfaction into satisfaction, but analyzes why certain structures provide satisfaction despite appearances.

43. #43

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.24

    THE R E PR E SSI V E EC ON OMIC APPAR AT US

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the twentieth-century leftist critique of capitalism — from Freudian Marxists (Gross, Reich) through the Frankfurt School to Foucault — is structurally homologous: all versions replace or supplement the Marxist critique of inequality with a critique of repression/constraint, and even Foucault's ostensible break from the repressive hypothesis reproduces its emancipatory logic under different vocabulary, thus failing to constitute a genuinely new epoch of critique.

    Life must be disentangled from power in order to discover the pleasure that capitalism blocks.

44. #44

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.25

    FINDIN G SATI SFAC TION UN SATI SF YIN G

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's power resides not in repression or inequality but in its structural production of unrecognized satisfaction through the logic of the promise, and that a genuinely revolutionary act consists in recognizing this immanent satisfaction rather than investing in the promissory fantasy of a better future—a move enabled by the later Freud's shift from repression to repetition and the death drive.

    capitalist subjects experience satisfaction itself as dissatisfying, which enables them to simultaneously enjoy themselves and believe wholeheartedly that a more complete satisfaction exists just around the corner

45. #45

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.31

    FINDIN G SATI SFAC TION UN SATI SF YIN G

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's later theory — the compulsion to repeat as itself satisfying — undermines the liberatory political promise of early Freudian Marxism (Adorno et al.), and that capitalism's hold on subjects derives not from imposed dissatisfaction but from the satisfaction subjects already derive from their own repetition of loss and dissatisfaction.

    patients resist the psychoanalytic cure precisely because they already have the satisfaction that psychoanalysis promises them.

46. #46

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.35

    MOSE S AND THE PROPHETS

    Theoretical move: Capitalism's staying power derives not from its socioeconomic flexibility but from a psychic structure that mirrors the logic of desire: it promises an ultimate satisfaction through accumulation while structurally ensuring that satisfaction can never be reached, thereby allowing the subject to perpetuate enjoyment through the very failure to realize desire.

    The psyche satisfies itself through the failure to realize its desire, and capitalism allows the subject to perpetuate this failure, all the while believing in the idea that it pursues success.

47. #47

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.37

    THE DI V I SION OF THE OBJEC T

    Theoretical move: Capitalism's psychic appeal is not grounded in human nature but in the alienation from nature produced by the signifier: because signification introduces a constitutive gap between signifier and signified, subjects are structurally oriented around lack and the impossible search for a satisfying object, and capitalism exploits this by presenting the commodity as a contingent — rather than necessary — remedy for the absence that signification installs at the heart of desire.

    the apple will embody something more as a result of the division introduced by signification, and this excess attached to the apple produces a satisfaction for the subject that an apple by itself... can never provide

48. #48

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.43

    LOSIN G W H AT WA S ALR E ADY G ONE

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the lost object is constitutively lost—generated retroactively by signification itself rather than empirically lost—and that the subject's satisfaction is inseparable from the repetition of this loss; capitalism and object relations psychoanalysis both err by granting the lost object a substantial, pre-given status, thereby obscuring the ontological primacy of lack.

    By slightly changing it to jouir les entraves (enjoy the hindrances), we capture the constitutive importance of the obstacle.

49. #49

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.49

    THE ALLUR E OF BU YIN G A BUN C H OF THIN GS

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist accumulation operates by exploiting the subject's constitutive misrecognition of its own satisfaction: because satisfaction is located in the act of desiring (rooted in loss) rather than in the object obtained, the subject endlessly pursues objects via the fantasy of the Other's desire, and capitalism recruits this structural failure as its engine.

    the crucial insight of psychoanalysis is that the subject's satisfaction is located in how it desires and not what it obtains

50. #50

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.52

    THE ALLUR E OF BU YIN G A BUN C H OF THIN GS > BARRIER S WITHOU T B OUNDARIE S

    Theoretical move: Capitalism sustains itself by exploiting the structure of desire: it converts the subject's constitutive loss into perpetual dissatisfaction, thereby capturing subjects within a fantasy of the lost object while simultaneously delivering (unacknowledged) satisfaction through repetition of failure; liberation requires recognizing this self-satisfaction and divesting from the logic of success.

    capitalism does provide authentic satisfaction—the satisfaction of loss—in the guise of dissatisfaction

51. #51

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.55

    THE E ND OF THE OTHE R

    Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis after Freud's 1920 theoretical revolution moves subjects not from dissatisfaction to satisfaction but from one form of satisfaction to another, and this intervention turns on the subject's relation to a non-existent Other whose desire is both the necessary stimulus for desire itself and the source of its constitutive alienation — a structure capitalism uniquely exploits by insisting the Other's desire actually exists and is interpretable.

    Th e path of psychoanalysis, at least after Freud's theoretical revolution in 1920, is not one leading from dissatisfaction to satisfaction but from one form of satisfaction to another.

52. #52

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.58

    FAN TA SIZ IN G THE E ND

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

    The commodity presents itself at once as the unknown desire of the Other and the fantasized solution to that desire. The fact that it maintains these two contradictory positions gives capitalism great power in the psyche.

53. #53

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.62

    FR E E D FROM THE OTHE R'S DE SIR E

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's structural function is not the liberation of desire but its enslavement to the fantasy of the Other's desire, and that genuine freedom—and the real critique of capitalism—lies not in more desire (contra Deleuze/Guattari) but in recognizing that the barrier IS what the subject desires, i.e., that the pleasure principle serves the death drive and the subject seeks loss, not accumulation.

    Capitalism remolds the subject in its own image and protects the subject from confronting its own traumatic satisfaction.

54. #54

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.67

    Th e Psychic Constitution of Private Space

    Theoretical move: Capitalism systematically inverts the actual ontological priority of the public over the private: the subject is constituted through its encounter with the desire of the Other (a public process), yet capitalism produces the ideological fantasy that the subject is primordially private—thereby structuring an obstacle to the very satisfaction it promises.

    Universal private property functions like a universal ban on satisfaction (though this ban, like all bans, doesn't work).

55. #55

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

    Th e Psychic Constitution of Private Space

    Theoretical move: Capitalism's ideological power lies not in its cynical realism about human nature but in its flattering misrepresentation of the psyche: it conceals from subjects that their satisfaction is structured around the pursuit of failure (the death drive / jouissance logic), not successful accumulation, thereby shielding them from the trauma constitutive of subjectivity itself.

    it protects them from confronting the traumatic nature of their mode of obtaining satisfaction

56. #56

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.74

    RETRE ATIN G BEHIND THE GATE

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalism's shift from production-oriented to consumption-oriented economy erodes the public sphere not simply because consumption is private, but because capitalism increasingly promises subjects the recovery of the lost object, fostering investment in unlimited private satisfaction and thus hostility toward the public world—the necessary site of loss and otherness.

    As subjects invest themselves in the ideal of unlimited satisfaction, the possibility of a public gradually disappears.

57. #57

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.77

    RETRE ATIN G BEHIND THE GATE > THE P UBLIC OBSTAC LE TO PR I VAC Y

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis, by revealing that the subject's satisfaction is constituted by the obstacle (the public world) rather than by overcoming it, offers a structural counter-logic to capitalism, which systematically misrecognizes the obstacle as merely a barrier to private enjoyment rather than as the object-cause of desire itself.

    Satisfaction in the obstacle replaces an unending and dissatisfying pursuit. The subject overcomes the constitutive dissatisfaction that capitalism requires by transforming the relation to the obstacle.

58. #58

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.83

    RETRE ATIN G BEHIND THE GATE > IN VA SION OF PR I VAC Y

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that surveillance capitalism does not threaten subjects by eliminating privacy but rather functions ideologically to deepen their investment in privacy, thereby privatizing subjectivity and severing subjects from the public world on which genuine satisfaction depends; the real counter to capitalist privatization is not defending privacy but recognizing that desire requires the obstacle of the public.

    our satisfaction depends on this public world and the obstacle to desire it erects... The most effective counter to privacy lies in showing that the retreat into privacy is actually a retreat from the subject's own satisfaction.

59. #59

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

    THE IM AGE OF NEU TR ALIT Y

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

    capitalism sustains itself through their self-sabotage... subjects can derive satisfaction from their self-sabotage, while disavowing this form of satisfaction and believing themselves to be purely self-interested

60. #60

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.94

    LIFE DUR IN G WARTIME > SE E IN G TH AT ONE SE E S

    Theoretical move: McGowan uses Lacan's concept of the gaze—redeployed against its Anglo-American film-theory misreading—as a structural homology for the subject's relationship to capitalism: just as the gaze exposes the visual field's apparent neutrality as a desire-constituted distortion, encountering the "capitalist gaze" reveals capitalism's unnaturalness and opens a space for politics.

    this look makes it impossible to take voyeuristic pleasure in the violence

61. #61

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.105

    SAC R IFIC E BEC OMIN G SEC UL AR

    Theoretical move: Capitalism does not abolish sacrifice but secularizes it — migrating it from visible ritual into the invisible everyday acts of production and consumption — and this secularization is theoretically legible only when we recognise that, for the subject of the signifier, loss is the very structure of value: the lost object is what every actual present object substitutes for, making sacrifice constitutive of desire and satisfaction rather than merely archaic.

    In capitalism, subjects can enjoy sacrifi ce while believing that they aren't. We can enjoy sacrifi ce in and through its very invisibility when it becomes secular.

62. #62

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

    EV IL , BE THOU M Y G O OD

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

    The enjoyment of the sacrifi ce embodied in the commodity depends on the obscurity of this sacrifi ce.

63. #63

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.111

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

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

    their enjoyment of the commodities they purchase demands some sacrifi ce on the part of the workers who produce them. But consumers must be able not to know about it.

64. #64

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

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

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

    The onset of modernity makes the direct enjoyment of sacrifice impossible... modernity continues to require sacrifice in order to satisfy its subjects

65. #65

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.123

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist ideology rests on a vitalist, tautological logic (Ricardo) that naturalises desire and cannot account for sacrifice; the true test of capitalism is not whether it meets needs but whether it can avow the sacrificial structure it requires to produce satisfaction — a test it fails, opening the door to Bataille's critique.

    Capitalism relies on the violent sacrifice of workers, consumers, and even capitalists themselves, and it uses this sacrifice to produce satisfied subjects.

66. #66

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.124

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

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

    Bataille was also the first thinker to identify sacrifice with enjoyment. His critique of capitalism focuses on its turn away from sacrifice and thus from the possibility for a true satisfaction.

67. #67

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.132

    N OT G OD BU T AN OTHE R

    Theoretical move: Capitalist modernity creates the structural conditions for genuine freedom by displacing God as a substantial Other, but simultaneously forecloses that freedom by substituting the market as a new tyrannical authority; Kant's moral philosophy—grounding the law in the subject's own self-division rather than any external Other—is identified as the authentic philosophical articulation of modern freedom that capitalism cannot stomach.

    capitalism provides the perfect avenue for retreat from the trauma inherent within freedom.

68. #68

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.135

    THE P OV E RT Y OF FR E E D OM

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism installs the market as a new form of the big Other — a substitute for God — that paradoxically relieves subjects of the burden of freedom by directing their desire, thereby revealing that capitalist freedom is ideologically self-undermining: its most zealous defenders (von Mises, Hayek) inadvertently celebrate capitalism's capacity to rescue subjects from the very freedom they champion.

    the free market rescues me from the horrible freedom of having no grounds for deciding what I desire to take up as an occupation.

69. #69

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.140

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

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

    We can believe ourselves to be rejecting the market while nonetheless finding recognition in this new form of God.

70. #70

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.145

    DAS ADAM SMITH PROBLEM

    Theoretical move: The "invisible hand" in Adam Smith's two major works functions as the modern, capitalist reformulation of God—an absent Other that coordinates and directs subjects' desires, thereby resolving both Das Adam Smith Problem (the apparent contradiction between Smith's moral philosophy and his economics) and the deeper problem of unbearable Kantian freedom that capitalism poses to its subjects.

    Th e invisible hand doesn't demand that we abandon enjoyable activities like bearing false witness and coveting our neighbor's wife. Far from prohibiting them, it integrates these activities into the alignment of competing desires within the capitalist universe.

71. #71

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.149

    THE OTHE R D OE S E X I ST

    Theoretical move: Capitalism produces neurosis not through repression but by sustaining the illusion that the big Other exists as a substantial authority whose demands align with its desire; the psychoanalytic critique of neurosis therefore names the ideological mechanism underpinning capitalist subjectivity, and emancipation requires dissolving this belief in the Other.

    The result is a neurotic failure on the part of the subject to find its satisfaction satisfying.

72. #72

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.152

    A More Tolerable Infi nity

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Hegel's concept of the "true infinite" (self-limiting, circular) constitutes a more radical anticapitalist critique than Marx's, because it poses an internal limit that capitalism—structurally committed to the "bad infinite" of endless expansion—cannot subsume; this true infinite shares the structure of the psychoanalytic subject.

    capitalism subsists on nothing but newness. Capitalist society would collapse in a static state. It constantly aims beyond itself and seeks new laborers, new commodities, and new markets.

73. #73

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.156

    A More Tolerable Infi nity > JOUIR S AN S E N T R AV E S

    Theoretical move: Capitalism is structurally committed to the bad infinite — an endless expansion without limit or endpoint — and this structure provides psychic relief from the true infinite by displacing desire onto a perpetually deferred future satisfaction, making the limitlessness of desire the ideological engine of limitless production and consumption.

    Th e bad infi nite focuses the subject on the future and the possibility of a form of satisfaction that will never be realized.

74. #74

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.160

    THE DIFFIC ULTIE S OF H APPINE SS

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that rational choice theory, behavioral economics, and happiness economics all remain trapped within the Hegelian "bad infinite" — an endless striving for more without internal limit — and that capitalism's attachment to this bad infinite can only be overcome by reconceiving nature not as an external limit (Scylla of finitude) nor as a site of infinite possibility (Charybdis of the bad infinite), but as the internal limit of the social order, which alone can ground a true infinite and genuine satisfaction.

    capitalism creates an ideal of success that makes it impossible to see the satisfaction that inheres in our failures.

75. #75

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.164

    FAK IN G THE LIMIT

    Theoretical move: Attempts to set external moral limits on capitalism (Sandel, environmentalism) are structurally self-defeating because capitalism requires a limit to transcend; the only viable alternative is to inhabit the true infinite (Hegel/Lacan's self-limiting structure of subjectivity), which capitalism occludes by substituting the bad infinite and converting the existential burden of eternity into the finite anxiety of death and aging.

    capitalism focuses all our despair on death and aging... The imminence of our death and our inability to continue growing becomes the fundamental limit that we must confront.

76. #76

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.167

    C APITALISM'S UN CON S C IOUS INFINITE

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism structurally enacts the bad infinite while inadvertently producing the true infinite (its own internal limit), and that Marx's error is to theorize communism as the perfect realization of the bad infinite—an elimination of all limits—rather than following Hegel's dialectical logic (Aufhebung) which requires recognizing the limit as internally constituted and necessary, not contingent and external.

    Instead of continually surpassing their limit (which is what occurs under capitalism), the forces of production would experience no limit at all. They would continue to grow unabated in concert with the growth of desire.

77. #77

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.173

    Th e Ends of Capitalism

    Theoretical move: Capitalism's privileging of ends over means structurally deflects the subject's attention from the lost object (cause of desire) to empirical objects of desire, producing constitutive dissatisfaction that fuels consumption; psychoanalysis wages an asymmetric counter-movement by restoring the lost object to its central position, thereby reconciling the subject with partial satisfaction and rendering it incapable of capitalist accumulation.

    The psychoanalytic cure involves leading the subject to the point where it can embrace the partial satisfaction that the lost object provides. It is a satisfaction of not having rather than having.

78. #78

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.179

    THE R EC O GNITION OF L AB OR

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

    The purpose of the act exists within the satisfaction of the act itself, not in what the act actualizes.

79. #79

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.180

    THE V IRT UE S OF IN TE R RUP TION

    Theoretical move: Capitalism does not merely demand pure productivity but structurally requires its interruption: impotentiality and withdrawal from the system paradoxically generate new surplus value, which is why neither Marx's prediction of capitalism's decay nor Agamben's advocacy of impotentiality as resistance straightforwardly escapes the capitalist logic that recuperates refusal as fuel for renewed accumulation.

    Even when we claim to want only to survive, we must find some satisfaction in this survival or else we wouldn't bother with it.

80. #80

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.184

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

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

    capitalism as a system found revitalization in them... The assertion of nonproductivity within capitalism's regime of productivity fuels the regime.

81. #81

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.189

    THE IMM ANE N T ALTE R NATI V E

    Theoretical move: Against both resistance-politics and utopian communist blueprints, McGowan argues that the alternative to capitalism is already immanent within it as the 'means without end' — privileging the means over the final cause constitutes a philosophical act that reveals, rather than constructs, a post-capitalist order already latent in the present system.

    We immerse ourselves in the traumatic satisfaction of work that matters more than its goal.

82. #82

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.193

    LOV E FOR SALE

    Theoretical move: Capitalism transforms love — an inherently traumatic encounter that disrupts the subject — into romance, a commodified and domesticated version of love available for purchase. The dating service serves as the paradigm and synecdoche for this ideological operation: it packages love as a commodity by eliminating its traumatic unpredictability, revealing how capitalism contains love's disruptiveness while exploiting its affective power to sustain subject investment in capitalist relations.

    Without the traumatic satisfaction that love provides, life often ceases to seem worth living. While it relies on love, capitalism must contain its fundamental disruptiveness and mitigate its trauma

83. #83

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.194

    OBTAININ G WH AT YOU D ON' T WAN T

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that love—distinguished from romance—is constitutively structured by dissymmetry and disruption rather than complementarity, and that this structure (visible already in Plato's Symposium) is precisely what capitalism must neutralize by transforming love into romance, which reduces the Other to a mere object of desire.

    When one falls in love, one falls for the other's way of enjoying itself, for the other's satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire.

84. #84

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.199

    THE TR E E S OF ROM AN C E AND THE FOR E ST OF LOV E

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the distinction between love and romance maps onto the distinction between confronting the lost object (self-divided, non-identical) and the commodity logic of desire/fantasy; romance is capitalism's mechanism for keeping love safe by converting the beloved's self-division into an identifiable, acquirable trait, thereby preventing the traumatic encounter that genuine love requires.

    love, in contrast to romance, doesn't provide anything for the subject to accumulate. Instead of contributing to the subject's wealth, it takes away from it.

85. #85

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.201

    THE TR IP BE YOND NARC I SSI SM

    Theoretical move: Love is theorized as exceeding both narcissism and desire by enacting a traumatic encounter with the other's irreducible singularity, and this disruptive structure is then contrasted with capitalist "romance," which domesticates love into an investment fantasy organized around the ideology of the soul mate as perfect commodity.

    The lover refuses to remain at a safe distance and bombards the subject with its mode of satisfaction, a mode of satisfaction around which the subject must try to orient itself. This satisfaction is what we almost always recoil from, but in the act of love we embrace it.

86. #86

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.206

    ROM AN TIC C OME DIE S AND LOV E C OME DIE S

    Theoretical move: Romantic comedies ideologically transform love into romance by eliminating love's traumatic core and rendering it a profitable commodity; authentic love, by contrast, disrupts social recognition and status, working against the capitalist logic of acquisition that romance serves.

    the beginning is not the boring part... the act of falling in love disrupts every aspect of one's life. Even the quotidian details of one's life become charged with anticipation and concern.

87. #87

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.214

    THE C APITALI ST SINE QUA N ON

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's psychic appeal lies not in solving scarcity but in deploying scarcity ideologically to shield subjects from confronting the more fundamentally traumatic excess (jouissance/abundance), inverting the usual association of trauma with lack and grounding a psychoanalytic critique of capitalist ideology.

    the trauma of abundance. Unlike psychoanalysis, capitalism provides an avenue for escaping the trauma of overabundance by assuring us that scarcity is the intractable background against which we act.

88. #88

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.215

    TO O MU C H I S R E ALLY TO O MU C H

    Theoretical move: Scarcity and abundance are not economic facts but psychic structures isomorphic with fantasy: the subject constitutively requires loss in order to achieve satisfaction, which is why capitalism (like fantasy) stages an illusory future abundance while the real enjoyment occurs in the struggle with scarcity, and why every attempt to deliver pure abundance—utopian or otherwise—is self-defeating.

    I see the cause of my lack in the other's excess. I envy the other's enjoyment and believe that this enjoyment comes at my expense.

89. #89

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.222

    THE DIFFIC ULTIE S OF SUSTAININ G SC ARC IT Y

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that economic crises are not merely structural failures of capitalism but expressions of the subject's unconscious investment in sustaining scarcity: as capitalism approaches abundance, subjects recoil because desire depends on the inaccessibility of the lost object, and this psychic necessity of loss structurally reproduces scarcity, thereby propping up capitalism itself.

    The subject's satisfaction depends on sustaining a relation to loss. This satisfaction functions on the basis of the object's absence.

90. #90

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.224

    THE NEW GR AV E DIG GE R S

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's persistence is sustained not by ideology or class consciousness but by a psychic investment in scarcity as protection from the trauma of abundance; the political revolution required is therefore not economic but psychic—recognizing that lack and excess are inseparable, so that abundance is not the solution to scarcity but its own traumatic problem, requiring subjects to abandon the fantasy of future enjoyment and confront the satisfaction they cannot escape.

    it enjoys too much, and its every act is marked by this excessive satisfaction. As a result of the damage done by the signifier to the human animal, it becomes a figure of monstrous excess.

91. #91

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.229

    A LIFE WORTH LI V IN G

    Theoretical move: Capitalism transforms but does not eliminate the sublime: it subtracts the traumatic, awe-inspiring figure of traditional sublimity and replaces it with a more tolerable, less satisfying version, thereby securing subjects' libidinal investment in a system that would otherwise offer no enjoyment. Sublimation—producing an unreachable object that animates the subject through necessary failure—is identified as the structural mechanism underlying all social reproduction.

    capitalism simply eliminated the sublimity of traditional society, it would not be able to provide any enjoyment for its subjects, and they would never invest themselves in its perpetuation.

92. #92

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.234

    M ARX C ON TR A M ARX

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

    We enjoy it not in spite of its uselessness but actually because it serves no practical purpose... the enjoyment that it offers—the enjoyment of the sublime commodity—is an enjoyment that depends on the absence of self-interest.

93. #93

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.237

    THEOLO GIC AL COMMODITIES

    Theoretical move: The commodity's sublimity is a purely formal effect produced by the structure of capitalist exchange—specifically by the barrier/packaging that functions as the object-cause of desire—rather than by any content; advertisements are therefore the true site of satisfaction, since they sustain the promise of transcendence that no empirical commodity can deliver.

    The commodity embodies the promise of an ultimate satisfaction or enjoyment that would transport the consumer beyond the secular world, a promise that no commodity will ever fulfil.

94. #94

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.240

    DR I V IN G THE C AR OFF THE LOT

    Theoretical move: Capitalism exploits the structure of desire by keeping the sublime perpetually deferred in a futural immanence: the commodity's sublimity evaporates at the moment of acquisition, compelling the subject to artificial strategies (security systems, anticipated threats) that recreate distance—and the Hegelian critique of Kantian morality's 'future sublime' doubles as an implicit critique of capitalism's own deferral structure, pointing toward a 'present sublime' as the condition of an egalitarian alternative.

    The prospect of consumption is always more gratifying than the act of consumption… Before we purchase an object, it has a transcendent quality… After the purchase, the sublimity rushes out of it.

95. #95

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.244

    HEGE L'S C ON TR IBU TION TO THE C R ITIQUE OF COMMODIT Y FETISHISM

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Hegel's critique of the Kantian 'ought' (Sollen) provides the philosophical lever for a critique of commodity fetishism: where Kant relocates the sublime immanently but retains its futural distance, Hegel collapses that distance by insisting the moral deed is already accomplished, a move that, translated into political economy, destroys the commodity's hold by locating satisfaction in the form itself rather than deferring it to future fulfilment.

    One finds satisfaction in commodities, but one ceases to expect any more satisfaction. The Hegelian relation to the commodity demands the abandonment of one's claims to dissatisfaction with the content because it locates satisfaction in the commodity form itself.

96. #96

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.248

    A SATI SFIE D OR IE N TALI SM

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that orientalism is a structural product of capitalism's commodity-sublime logic — the exoticism of the Other is an extension of commodity fetishism — and that Coppola's *Lost in Translation* performs an antiorientalist move not by revealing an 'authentic' Japan but by relocating sublimity in the act of sublimation itself, thereby invalidating the Other as commodity and opening a Hegelian path beyond capitalist accumulation.

    The satisfaction that derives from the commodity can exhaust the desire for the accumulation of commodities.

97. #97

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.249

    THOSE FOR W HOM C APITALI SM I S N OT SUBLIME EN OUGH

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that fundamentalism is the internal psychic product of capitalism's broken promise of sublimity, while the true theoretical-political task is to become 'Hegelian rather than Kantian' about the sublime—recognising that failure and immanence, not transcendence, constitute the real nature of the sublime, thereby emancipating oneself from capitalism's obfuscations.

    the fundamentalist is able to retain the promise of an ultimate enjoyment attached to a transcendent sublime

98. #98

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.258

    Enjoy, Don't Accumulate

    Theoretical move: The decisive critique of capitalism must begin not from dissatisfaction but from the recognition of the satisfaction capitalism already provides—a satisfaction rooted in loss rather than accumulation. Only by shifting from the logic of accumulation to the logic of satisfaction (acceptance of the lost object) can capitalism be undermined, a move McGowan grounds in a buried sentence from Marx's second volume of Capital and links to Freud's post-1920 thought.

    For capitalism is already essentially abolished once we assume that it is enjoyment that is the driving motive and not enrichment itself.

99. #99

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.261

    . THE SUBJEC T OF DE SIR E AND THE SUBJEC T OF C APITALISM

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs several interlocking theoretical moves: it grounds capitalism's logic in the structure of desire and the signifier (gap, mediation, lack), distinguishes psychoanalytic castration from mere frustration, aligns Hegel's ontology of nothing with the foundational role of absence in signification, and positions psychoanalysis against object-relations, deconstruction, and Heideggerian authenticity in their respective treatments of loss and the Other.

    The simplicity of the object hides its excess and enables subjects to enjoy this excess without recognizing the relationship between their enjoyment and the divided status of the object.

100. #100

     Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.268

     . THE P SYC HIC C ON STIT U TION OF PR I VATE SPAC E

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several load-bearing theoretical moves: it locates the analyst's function in identification with objet a (rather than the Other), marks the objet a's theoretical advance over the object of desire in Seminar X, and frames symptom-enjoyment as a political strategy of resistance to ideological interpellation, while grounding these claims in readings of Freud, Lacan, Arendt, Marx, and Habermas on the public/private distinction.

     When one identifies with and enjoys one's symptom, one sides with the part of oneself that resists ideological interpellation, even though this resistance implies suffering.

101. #101

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

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

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

     the change in positioning of the camera… would represent an increasing refusal of prohibition and an attempt to inhabit directly the promise of enjoyment embodied in the gaze.

102. #102

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

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

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

     Mandel's mistake here lies in his failure to recognize the enjoyment associated with waste. The 'wastage and destruction' of capitalism is not an argument against the system, but an argument for it.

103. #103

     Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.278

     . A G OD W E C AN BE LIEV E IN

     Theoretical move: This passage argues, through a series of endnotes, that the heliocentric/capitalist dislocation of God generates the structural conditions for neurosis, that Hegel's move of grasping substance as subject is the philosophical response to this dislocation, and that capitalism substitutes an unconscious, irrational belief in a new Other for genuine freedom—collapsing ontological freedom into empirical consumer choice.

     the belief that capitalism demands is far more oppressive than earlier forms of belief because it is wholly unconscious and irrational, though it exists within a rational system.

104. #104

     Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.283

     . A MOR E TOLE R ABLE INFINIT Y

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

     One might respond to Kahneman that the losing side often fights when defeat is certain because they find satisfaction in the defeat itself. But such an understanding is impossible for the behavioral economist, who, despite modifications, believes in the pursuit of the good.

105. #105

     Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.288

     . A MOR E TOLE R ABLE INFINIT Y > . THE E NDS OF C APITALI SM

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage advances the theoretical argument that capitalism's structure is isomorphic with utilitarian ethics and teleological (final cause) thinking, while psychoanalysis, Spinoza, and Agamben's impotentiality offer resources for resisting capitalism's productivity imperative—locating the subject's desire, not the body, as the true site of power.

     No social authority cares about the body. It is desire that counts.

106. #106

     Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.295

     . E XC H AN GIN G LOV E FOR ROM AN C E > . ABUNDAN C E AND SC ARC IT Y

     Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus argues that scarcity is a capitalist ideological construction rather than an ontological given, and that the subject's fundamental condition is one of excess/abundance (driven by the excessiveness of signification itself), which is what psychoanalysis addresses — not the absence of the object but its necessarily lost status within a structure of surplus.

     Or happiness comes at the expense of enjoyment.

107. #107

     Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.298

     . THE M AR K ET'S FETI SHI STIC SUBLIME

     Theoretical move: This passage (a footnote/endnote section) develops the theoretical grounding for the chapter's argument that commodity fetishism produces a sublimity rooted in immanent transcendence—a structure Hegel makes possible and Marx theorizes—while also deploying Lacanian concepts (subject supposed to know, lack) to critique orientalism and capitalism's psychic appeal.

     Depression is not the result of failing to obtain what we want but of recognizing that even what we want will not provide the satisfaction that we can imagine.

108. #108

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

     [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The imaginary in neurosis and object relations

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurotic impasses (hysterical and obsessional) are constituted entirely within the imaginary register—between little others and ego-images—and therefore cannot be resolved from within that register; the hysteric perpetuates an alienated desire mediated through the other's image while the obsessive deploys his ego as a puppet to stave off death, both strategies ultimately annulling desire and blocking genuine subjective engagement.

     Although the neurotic may not be conscious of any pleasure (or jouissance) he obtains from his feats or his compulsive acts, he may project that pleasure onto an imaginary other.

109. #109

     Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.91

     [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Approaching neurosis in the imaginary vs. the symbolic

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the IPA's ego-strengthening approach to neurosis deepens alienation by keeping the subject in the imaginary register, and that only orienting analysis through the symbolic Other—rather than the imaginary other of identification—can treat neurosis as a genuine question rather than a lure; this critique extends to all empiricist, biologistic, and behaviorist appropriations of psychoanalysis that destroy its symbolic foundation.

     For Jones, Aphanisis is the notion of the disappearance of sexual enjoyment, the fear of which is for him prior to and generative of castration anxiety and penis envy

110. #110

     Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.125

     [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Once upon a time on an enchanted couch

     Theoretical move: Lacan's satirical fable in "The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956" exposes how the IPA's bureaucratic institutional structure produces narcissistic identification, imaginary prestige, and endless subordination rather than genuine analytic transmission, arguing that the institutional training machine is structurally self-defeating and anti-intellectual.

     the feeling that most solidly ties the troop together: this feeling is knowledge in a pathetic form; people commune in it without communicating, and it is called hatred

111. #111

     Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.151

     [The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter, being, and the other

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego is a symptomatic compromise-formation that covers over the radical heteronomy of the subject, while the unconscious, understood as the Other's discourse, is the true object of psychoanalysis; the letter's insistence through metaphor and metonymy links being to desire and repetition, grounding Lacan's claim that subjects are spoken by signifiers rather than speaking them.

     Repetition itself becomes a site of enjoyment.

112. #112

     Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.153

     [The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter, being, and the other

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's account of the letter (metaphor/metonymy) constitutes an implicit but sustained response to Heidegger: where Heidegger sees language as the "house of being," Lacan insists that language captures, mutilates, and tortures the subject, making the unconscious the condition of any question of being and symptom/desire the structural correlates of metaphor/metonymy respectively.

     Fort–Da therefore reflects a compulsion to repeat and the enjoyment of one's own subjectivity—an attachment to imagined agency that provides an anchor for enjoyment

113. #113

     Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.165

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

     Theoretical move: This passage provides a contextual and structural overview of Lacan's 'On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,' arguing that the text marks a pivotal shift in Lacan's theorization of psychosis as a unitary clinical structure grounded in the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, situated within a four-period developmental arc in Lacan's broader work on psychosis.

     With the concept of jouissance he makes clear distinctions between paranoia and schizophrenia, and addresses the question of how problems with regard to jouissance might trigger acute delusional episodes.

114. #114

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

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

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

     the signifier names the real and by producing signifying chains what is overwhelming can be processed, thus permitting mastery over jouissance.

115. #115

     Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.186

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

     Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how Lacan's formula of metaphor, applied to the Oedipus complex as the paternal metaphor, structures subjective identity through the substitution of the Name-of-the-Father for the Mother's Desire, while the R-schema (reconceived as a Möbius strip) situates the objet petit a as the virtual support of reality in neurosis versus its chaotic real manifestation in psychosis.

     in perversion the subject positions themselves as the instrument of the Other's jouissance. He is what the Other lacks; even if the Other is not aware of his own lack.

116. #116

     Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.189

     [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 jouissance of the (m)Other is a strange enigma in psychosis.

117. #117

     Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.195

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

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's reading of Schreber's psychosis through the I-schema, arguing that foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father produces a parabolic, delusional reality in which Schreber reconstructs subjectivity by occupying the position of God's phallus/wife—a process structured by the interplay of foreclosure, imaginary regression to the mirror stage, and the absence of fundamental fantasy.

     he undergoes a jouissance he cannot identify with. Next, as a result of the reconciliation/sacrifice (Versöhnung) between Schreber and God, he moves towards a position in which he more actively deals with enjoyment

118. #118

     Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.198

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

     Theoretical move: The I-schema formalizes Schreber's psychotic structure as the product of foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (P₀→Φ₀), while demonstrating that his delusion constitutes an efficient stabilizing solution rather than mere deterioration; madness is re-theorized as the extreme limit-case of human freedom in the face of constitutive lack.

     The latter attitude might provoke a transference relation in which one starts to be an intrusive other that is marked by jouissance.

119. #119

     Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.240

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

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

     satisfying those needs is a lure, which only deprives the subject of his/her passions

120. #120

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

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

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

     For Lacan, and in terms of his graph of desire, this fundamentally ignores the level of desire and jouissance, the point where psychoanalysis must lead.

121. #121

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.14

     E M B R A C I N G THE VOID

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Lacanian shift from thematic to structural analysis—reframing the Oedipus complex in terms of language and symbolic castration rather than literal familial drama—provides the conceptual foundation for a distinctly Lacanian theory of religion, in which the sacred is grounded not in divine presence but in the subject's primordial relation to a constitutive Void (the unconscious).

     the very strange fact, that 'sexual jouissance [or excessive enjoyment] has the privilege of being specified by an impasse'

122. #122

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.25

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Worshipful Obsession, Obsessional Worship

     Theoretical move: By reading Freud's 1907 "compromise formation" theory of the obsessional symptom through a Lacanian lens, the passage argues that religious ritual is structurally identical to neurotic symptom-formation: it is simultaneously repressive and gratifying of primitive drives, and this double function—not wish-fulfillment or superego guilt—is the deepest psychoanalytic account of the stubborn attachment underlying religious practice.

     Freud also relies on the bifold character of symptomatic enjoyment to sketch a theory of the historical evolution of religions.

123. #123

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.29

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Worshipful Obsession, Obsessional Worship > Lacanian Heresy

     Theoretical move: By introducing the three Lacanian registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) through a rereading of the Rat Man case, the passage argues that the RSI triad constitutes a comprehensive rewriting of psychoanalytic theory: the Imaginary grounds ego-formation and alienation, the Symbolic structures the unconscious through signifying excess, and the Real names the traumatic, impossible kernel that ordinary reality functions to ward off.

     Its subjective impact Lacan calls jouissance, rather tepidly translated by the English term 'enjoyment.' The French word derives from the verb jouir, which is, among other things, slang for the experience of orgasm, also referred to as la petite mort, 'the little death.'

124. #124

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.42

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing > Alone Together

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding—located in the Other rather than in consciousness itself (contra Sartre)—is the primal source of both anxiety and desire in intersubjective life, and that contemporary digital behaviour (social-media addiction, 'alone together' gadget use) is best understood as a defensive yet ambivalent negotiation with this void in the Other, simultaneously evading and chasing it.

     Nothing more reliably characterizes Facebook posts than depictions of enviable jouissance.

125. #125

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.44

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Ambivalence and the Falsely False

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian "falsely false" (a structure unique to the signifying subject) reveals ambivalence toward das Ding as the primal form of social intercourse: polite conventions simultaneously defend against the anxiety of the Other while preserving a limited opening toward the hidden excess of the Other-Thing, thereby retracing the structure of the symptom.

     they indulge a compulsive enjoyment of the Thing-like character of the internet as an opening to something unexpected.

126. #126

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.48

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > ". . . It's Not My Mother"

     Theoretical move: By reading stranger anxiety as a displacement that inverts and conceals the maternal origin of primal anxiety, Boothby deploys Lacan's concept of extimacy to argue that *das Ding* is the paradoxical locus where the most intimate and the most alien coincide, linking the death drive, desire, and jouissance to the irreducible unknown at the core of the Other.

     Clothing spares us the obscenity of too intimate a proximity to the Other's secret jouissance.

127. #127

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.50

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Finding Oneself in the Void

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's coming-to-be is constituted through its excentric relation to the Other via *das Ding*, and that the *objet petit a*—materialized through the cession of part objects (culminating in the infant's cry as first ceded object)—is the structural trace of the Thing that inaugurates both separation from the Other and the subject's positioning in the space of desire.

     What anxiety targets in the real... includes the x of a primordial subject moving towards his advent as subject... [This subject] is the subject of jouissance.

128. #128

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.58

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* does not disappear from Lacan's thought after Seminar VII but is progressively replaced by *objet petit a*, which functions as the trace of the Thing; this substitution is theoretically motivated by the need to avoid reifying the Thing, which is ultimately a locus of pure lack—not a substance but something purely supposed by the subject.

     The shopkeeper's leering smile was a clue to an obscene enjoyment that remained completely mysterious for the young girl, in fact very likely an enjoyment that the shopkeeper could not fully acknowledge even to himself.

129. #129

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.63

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > Behind the Wall of the Law

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates a double function with respect to das Ding: it defensively separates the subject from the Thing (through the big Other, law, grammar, the paternal metaphor) while simultaneously, through its constitutive excess over the signified and its horizon of semantic indeterminacy, reopening pathways toward the Thing — making the signifier both the wall against and the route back to the abyssal Real.

     the enigma of the Other's jouissance becomes the undetectable 'dark matter,' by definition invisible, that underlies the edifice of the social-symbolic world.

130. #130

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.85

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Agon of Forces

     Theoretical move: By reconstructing the archaic Greek ontology as one of "no things, only forces," Boothby argues that the Greek gods represent more-than-human natural forces arranged in a hierarchical agon, and uses this to ground a Lacanian conception of the big Other as the order of cosmic precincts of power, with fate (moira) as its ultimate, unknowable face.

     Even hunger and thirst are presented by Homer as fundamental forces with which human beings have to contend... Those desires will be back, of course, like the tides of the sea. We do not control such forces. The best we can do is to temporarily fend them off.

131. #131

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.108

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

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

     men, who seek above all the nobility of self-determination and self-control, cannot resist being caught up in lust for the folds of female flesh. Woman thus becomes the ultimate index of masculine failure.

132. #132

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.111

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

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

     Having heard the dreadful prophecy about his growing up to murder his father and marry his mother, Jocasta had given her infant son... How likely was it that she might fail to notice that the new king, her husband-to-be, was dragging a deformed foot?

133. #133

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.122

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > . . . and Offer Him There as a Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that monotheism's (specifically Judaism's) structural break with paganism lies not merely in the rejection of quid-pro-quo sacrifice but in the concentration of the unknown onto a *single* Other — thereby making religious experience the first explicit encounter with the enigmatic desire of the big Other, with das Ding as its constitutive ground.

     The worship of Yahweh becomes an end in itself.

134. #134

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.136

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

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

     It calls up not merely the objects the Other possesses... but rather the way(s) he enjoys them. At this point we again encounter the essential ambiguity that inhabits the Lacanian concept of jouissance.

135. #135

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.137

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Living with the Law— the God Symptom

     Theoretical move: Judaic monotheism's unprecedented proximity to *das Ding* is argued to generate anxiety that is structurally managed through a symptomatic displacement into obsessive legal observance (halacha), which simultaneously creates distance from and intimacy with the terrifying Other; this symptom formation is socially stabilized not by verified conformity but by a collective suppositional regime—what Pfaller calls "interpassivity"—in which the big Other's authority rests on the fiction that everyone else obeys.

     the neighbor as a locus of unknowable enjoyment

136. #136

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.145

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, from a Lacanian vantage, that Jesus's commandment to love the neighbor constitutes a radical injunction to abandon defensive barriers toward the threatening, jouissance-laden dimension of the Other—and, by extension, of oneself—thereby locating the divine wholly in the immanent encounter with the neighbor-as-Thing, a move that goes further than Freud's imaginary-bound critique of neighbourly love by opening onto the unconscious.

     what is demanded by Jesus is a gesture that exposes me to something beyond my own reflection in the mirror, something that speaks to the threatening prospect, beyond mere pleasure, of jouissance.

137. #137

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.147

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

     Theoretical move: By deploying Lacan's concept of the jouissance of the Other alongside das Ding, the passage argues that loving one's neighbor and loving one's enemy are structurally identical challenges: the neighbor's undomesticated jouissance makes the neighbor an enemy, so that Christian love of the enemy constitutes an acceptance of the Other's radical alterity and, reflexively, of one's own.

     If we allow that the jouissance of the Other is what is truly at stake, then the love of the neighbor overlaps with the challenge of loving the enemy.

138. #138

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.153

     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.

     No one needs, for all that, to dialogue or dialectize about love to be involved in this gap or discord— it suffices to be in the thick of it, to be in love.

139. #139

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.155

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christianity constitutes the "one true religion" precisely because its teaching of love — as direct embrace of the neighbor-Thing — collapses the defensive triangulation effected by paganism and Judaism, thereby generating atheism from within its own theology: God's kenotic self-emptying in the crucifixion is the Hegelian-Lacanian move by which the transcendent big Other is abolished and divinity is identified with human love itself.

     The atheist would be he who has succeeded in doing away with the fantasy of the Almighty.

140. #140

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.158

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Abyss of Freedom

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the radical Christian ethic of love—grounded in freedom, unknowing, and relation to das Ding beyond the law—is systematically betrayed by orthodox Christian dogma, which functions as a defensive, compensatory reinvestment in the symbolic big Other against the anxiety produced by that original abyssal encounter; the psychoanalytic transference is offered as a structural parallel to this dynamic of supposed knowledge arising from a void of unknowing.

     Lacan says that it's obvious that 'she's coming. There's no doubt about it. What is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it.'

141. #141

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.188

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Cash Is the Thing!

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that money in capitalist culture functions as a phantasmatic incarnation of *das Ding*, structuring social relations by both intensifying and defending against the anxiety produced by the unknown Thing in the Other — capitalism thereby operates as a religion, with the market economy displacing the "human economy" of gift-exchange that kept subjects entangled with the Other's desire.

     having wealth, far from satisfying the hunger for lucre, seems only to intensify it. As Solon had already observed in antiquity: 'Of wealth, there is no limit that appears to men.'

142. #142

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.199

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Money God

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that money functions as the true interpellating agency of modern capitalist society—replacing Althusser's divine Big Other with an anonymous, faceless force—by occupying the structural position of das Ding: it colonizes the void of desire so completely that subjects are always-already constituted as 'free' agents before any explicit ideological address, atomizing the social body and foreclosing collective solidarity.

     money is an object not of fear but of unlimited, covetous desire... in the case of money, as with no other god, the void of the unknown is completely colonized by lust.

143. #143

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.209

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Conclusions > The Heart of the Matter

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a Lacanian account of religion grounds the sacred not in wish-fulfilling illusion but in the subject's primordial, ambivalent orientation toward das Ding as the void at the heart of the Other—and further proposes that both religion and science are ultimately forms of devotion to (and defense against) this unknown Thing, thereby dissolving Freud's simple religion/science opposition while aligning Lacan with an "art of unknowing."

     The unthinkable jouissance of the Other, is what most ineluctably lures us. The religious posture is thus inseparable from longing for a destabilizing jouissance.

144. #144

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.226

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Notes > Part 2

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section (endnotes for Part 2) providing citations and brief clarifications supporting the main argument; it is largely non-substantive apparatus, though it contains scattered theoretical anchors linking Lacan, Žižek, Hegel, and Freud to the book's argument about religion, the sacred, and the neighbor.

     the child's encounter with the enigma of the Other's jouissance

145. #145

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.233

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Notes > Part 2

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section providing scholarly citations and brief parenthetical remarks; it contains minimal sustained theoretical argument, though several notes gesture toward substantive theoretical connections (Rumi as Lacanian, religion as symptomatic, das Ding and divinity, sexuation formulas, jouissance and the Other as locus of truth).

     Lacan focuses on the linkage between jouissance and signifiance.

146. #146

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.247

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is a book index (pages 244–247) listing conceptual terms, proper names, and their page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical passage but reveals the conceptual architecture of Boothby's text by mapping Lacanian concepts (das Ding, objet a, jouissance, sujet supposé savoir, sexuation, etc.) onto comparative religion.

     jouissance: and coveting, 126–27; and nakedness, 38–39; the Other's, 54; and religious fervor, 199; and sexuation, 195–97; as term, 19, 126

147. #147

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.249

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage (pages 248–249) listing key terms, persons, and concepts with page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but surfaces the book's central conceptual architecture through its entry clusters.

     Other, the: … *jouissance* of, 195; money and, 178

148. #148

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.15

     Acknowledgments > Introduction > Th e Politics of a Nonpolitical Th eory

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the death drive—understood as the source of self-sabotaging enjoyment rather than merely an obstacle to social betterment—grounds a genuinely emancipatory psychoanalytic politics that supersedes Marxism precisely because it can theorize sacrifice as an end in itself, while psychoanalysis's universal claims about the irreducible antagonism between subject and social order simultaneously undermine any political program aimed at the good society.

     Th e politics of psychoanalysis after Marxism is an emancipatory project based on the self-sacrificing enjoyment located in the death drive.

149. #149

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.19

     Acknowledgments > Introduction > You're No Good

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis poses a fundamental challenge to all emancipatory politics by revealing that the Good is constituted by its own prohibition (das Ding), making antagonism not a resolvable conflict but an internal, constitutive feature of the social order — a position that differentiates Freud from both liberal reconciliation theories and Marx's ultimate vision of overcoming antagonism.

     As we get closer to the ideal of a good society, we simultaneously approach the emptiness concealed within the ideal.

150. #150

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.27

     Acknowledgments > Introduction > Death at the Bott om of Everything

     Theoretical move: McGowan redefines the death drive not as aggression or a return to inorganic stasis but as a structural impetus to repeat an originary constitutive loss, arguing that masochism—not sadism—is the paradigmatic form of subjectivity, and that this primacy of the death drive makes any notion of progress inherently self-undermining.

     the death drive, which produces enjoyment through the repetition of the initial loss

151. #151

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.31

     Acknowledgments > Introduction > Progressing Backward

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis fundamentally inverts the Enlightenment equation of knowledge with progress: whereas Enlightenment subjects desire to know, the psychoanalytic subject is constituted by a "horror of knowing," organizing existence around the avoidance of unconscious knowledge so that desire and the death drive remain operative. Analytic recognition therefore does not produce progress but rather a confrontation with what one already was — the death drive as truth of subjectivity, not an obstacle to be overcome.

     the subject doesn't want to know what it desires or how it enjoys… the gap within knowledge is the trigger for the subject's desire and the point at which it enjoys.

152. #152

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.33

     Acknowledgments > Introduction > Interminable Repetition

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that a genuinely emancipatory psychoanalytic politics must abandon the pursuit of the good society and instead identify with the barrier/limit that blocks it, reversing the valence of the death drive from obstacle to constitutive principle of freedom — such that repetition, loss, and the drive become the foundation of political thought rather than problems to be overcome.

     The barrier to the good society — the social symptom — is at once the obstacle over which we continually stumble and the source of our enjoyment.

153. #153

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.44

     I > 1 > Eating Nothing

     Theoretical move: Anorexia is reframed not as victimization or feminist resistance but as the exemplary form of desiring subjectivity, one that directly "eats nothing" — the lost object itself — thereby laying bare the structural logic of desire: all objects are desirable only insofar as they fail to represent the impossible lost object, and freedom/dissatisfaction are the constitutive correlates of this originary sacrifice.

     Subjects invest the lost object with the idea of their own completion: the loss of the object retroactively causes a prior state of completion to arise — a state of completion that never actually existed — and the object itself bears the promise of inaugurating a return to this imaginary prior state.

154. #154

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.46

     I > 1 > Suff ering as Ideology

     Theoretical move: Ideology is defined by its promise to render loss productive (redeemable through future gain), whereas psychoanalysis — and Hegel's Phenomenology read against the grain — insists on the absolute, unproductive character of founding loss; the death drive is therefore the engine of genuine ideological critique, since it is precisely what no ideology can acknowledge.

     the psychoanalytic idea that our enjoyment is linked to an initial experience of loss and that we derive enjoyment when we repeat this experience

155. #155

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.51

     I > 1 > Th e Joy of Not Surviving

     Theoretical move: McGowan reinterprets the death drive not as a drive toward biological death but as a compulsion to repeat the foundational experience of losing the privileged object — the very loss that constitutes the desiring subject — arguing that enjoyment (jouissance) is structurally tied to this loss rather than to pleasure, and that the fort/da game, tragedy, and the pleasure principle itself are all best understood in this framework.

     the subject enjoys the disappearance of its privileged object; it enjoys not having it rather than having it because this experience returns the subject to the initial moment of loss... Freud calls the death drive.

156. #156

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.53

     I > 1 > Th ings Were Never Bett er

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that nostalgia is structurally grounded in the subject's misrecognition of constitutive loss as a loss of something substantial, and that this misrecognition has a fundamentally conservative political function: it obscures the gap within the social order, closes the space of freedom/subjectivity, and depends on never actually fulfilling its promise of return.

     This enjoyment never existed, and the recovery of the object, though it may bring some degree of pleasure, always brings disappointment as well

157. #157

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.58

     I > 1 > Enemies Within and Without

     Theoretical move: Paranoia is theorized as a political-libidinal structure that closes the gap in social authority by positing a hidden "Other of the Other," thereby rendering constitutive loss merely contingent and depriving subjects of the agency that emerges precisely from social inconsistency; this makes paranoia—left or right—a fundamentally self-undermining political strategy.

     paranoia locates it in the other. Paranoia thus offers the subject not just the image of the ultimate enjoyment (like nostalgia) but also an explanation for its absence.

158. #158

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.64

     I > 1 > Targeted Violence

     Theoretical move: The abandonment of the seduction theory is reframed as Freud's foundational theoretical move toward the death drive: by relocating violence from an external aggressor to the subject's own self-inflicted sacrificial loss, Freud (and Lacan after him) grounds subjectivity in a constitutive self-violence that repetition compels the subject to re-enact — making aggressive violence toward the other a detour, not a solution, and redirecting the ethical question toward assaulting one's own symbolic identity.

     Aggressive violence toward the other tries to separate the enjoyment of repetition (which it reserves for the subject) with the suff ering of it (which it consigns to the other).

159. #159

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.66

     I > 2 > I Can Get Satisfaction

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that psychoanalysis is fundamentally an economic theory of the psyche in which the drive always-already produces satisfaction, meaning the analytic intervention is not a cure from dissatisfaction to satisfaction but a quantitative shortening of the circuitous path the subject takes to its inevitable enjoyment — a political critique of capitalism's logic of accumulation follows directly from this.

     enjoyment is located in what disturbs us rather than in what we might obtain, and when we grasp this, we change the nature of our political subjectivity. The obstacle to our enjoyment is at once the source of our enjoyment.

160. #160

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.69

     I > 2 > Th e Secret of the Symptom

     Theoretical move: The symptom is not a barrier to enjoyment but its very source and foundation: psychoanalytic intervention works not by eliminating the symptom but by transforming the subject's relationship to the satisfaction it already obtains through symptomatic disruption, and desire itself is a fundamental misrecognition of the death drive.

     What neurotics don't see, however, is the satisfaction that the disruptiveness of the symptom offers.

161. #161

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.74

     I > 2 > Capitalism contra the Death Drive

     Theoretical move: Capitalism structurally depends on the misrecognition of drive as desire—sustaining subjects in perpetual dissatisfaction and aligning accumulation with enjoyment—while the death drive, by finding satisfaction in the act of not-getting-the-object, constitutes the inherently anticapitalist beyond of the capitalist subject.

     The new holds the promise of a future enjoyment that will surpass whatever the subject has experienced before. This promise is the engine behind capitalism's creation of ever more needs.

162. #162

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.80

     I > 2 > Finding Our Lost Enjoyment

     Theoretical move: Capitalist ideology distorts the death drive by forging a false link between enjoyment and accumulation, concealing that our actual enjoyment derives not from obtaining the object but from the experience of its loss; emancipatory politics consists in revealing this 'map of enjoyment' — that we enjoy the absent object, not the present one.

     We really do enjoy ourselves within the capitalist universe — the death drive continues to function — but we don't enjoy in the way that capitalist ideology tries to convince us that we do.

163. #163

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

     I > 2 > Finding Our Lost Enjoyment

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

     capitalism delivers enjoyment to the subject through a process of securing this absence.

164. #164

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.86

     I > 2 > Th e Ego as Detour

     Theoretical move: The ego functions as a structural detour for the death drive — its side-cathexes diffuse excitation and dull trauma but simultaneously alienate the subject from its own satisfaction, making the strong ego the ideal psychic modality for capitalist subjectivity rather than a remedy for dissatisfaction.

     The strong ego of the subject causes the subject to experience its own enjoyment as alien — as the enjoyment of the other.

165. #165

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.88

     I > 2 > Miserliness and Excess

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's structural deferral of enjoyment imposes detours on the death drive, producing miserliness in jouissance rather than excess, and that the Freudian economy of the joke reveals an alternative logic—economizing to release excess enjoyment—that capitalism must suppress to function.

     even when capitalism produces excessive enjoyment, it never allows subjects to find satisfaction in it. Capitalist subjects remain necessarily alienated from their own enjoyment

166. #166

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.95

     I > 3 > Freedom and Injustice

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis offers a distinct critique of capitalism grounded not in justice (as in Marxism) but in freedom: class society deprives subjects of freedom and enjoyment at the level of the unconscious, and psychoanalysis emerges precisely to address the persistence of unfreedom after the Enlightenment's failure to achieve its own ideal.

     The point is rather to emphasize the unfreedom and lack of enjoyment that haunt the beneficiaries of capitalism and all class society. Even those who win in the capitalist game lose

167. #167

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.97

     I > 3 > Analyzing the Rich

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that class privilege functions as a systematic barrier to enjoyment by demanding repression and producing only a circuitous, unrecognized enjoyment (outrage, disgust), so that psychoanalysis's critique of capitalism is not that it produces too much enjoyment but that it structurally prevents subjects from avowing their own enjoyment—making the psychoanalytic rallying cry "more enjoyment" rather than "less."

     Class status involves forgoing more enjoyment and living more strictly according to the dictates of the social law that commands its sacrifi ce.

168. #168

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.103

     I > 3 > Th e Cost of Recognition

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the pursuit of social recognition structurally forecloses enjoyment because recognition operates at the level of the signifier's demand while concealing the Other's unarticulated desire; genuine jouissance is incompatible with validation by the Other, and the subject's sacrificed enjoyment feeds the social order, making the pursuit of recognition a form of subjection rather than liberation—a critique that exposes the limit of recognition-based political projects.

     Jouissance flourishes only there where it is not validated by the Other.

169. #169

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.107

     I > 3 > Mastery versus Capitalism

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism, by universalizing the demand for recognition through the structural appropriation of surplus value, eliminates the 'outside' position that allowed the slave to enjoy, yet simultaneously reveals that enjoyment is always already based on a prior loss — making capitalism the condition of possibility for a 'fully realized infinite' enjoyment rather than the slave's merely 'potential infinite.'

     The slave, as Lacan notes in Seminar XVII, is 'the sole possessor of the means of jouissance.'

170. #170

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.116

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Beyond the Demand

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary capitalism has replaced the traditional dialectic of demand and desire (prohibition-based paternal authority) with an imperative to enjoy, producing a subject overwhelmed by the obscene proximity of the enjoying other rather than structured by lack — and that the ethical psychoanalytic response is the embrace of the resulting anxiety.

     Rather than hiding its desire, authority publicly flaunts its enjoyment and encourages the subject to do the same.

171. #171

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.119

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Taking a Short Cut

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety in contemporary subjects—and the violence it generates—derives from the encounter with the "enjoying other," and that this logic applies equally to fundamentalist terrorism and the War on Terror: both are misguided attempts to eradicate an enjoyment that is actually a projection of the subject's own fantasmatic construction, not a property of the other itself.

     The bond that unites the characters on the level of their subjective experience is the proximity of the real or enjoying other.

172. #172

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.125

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Taking a Short Cut

     Theoretical move: Violence directed at the enjoying other is structurally self-defeating and self-sustaining: it does not aim to eliminate the other's enjoyment but to perpetuate it, revealing that anxiety about jouissance can be managed through flight, violence, or—as a third ethical option—embracing anxiety itself.

     Laura's contradictory identity leads all the other characters in the show to see her as a cipher for their own ideas about enjoyment. She acts as the embodiment of the enjoying other.

173. #173

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.130

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Anxiety as Ethics

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

     It is this excessive and intrusive jouissance that we should learn to tolerate.

174. #174

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.131

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Whose Enjoyment?

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

     when it comes to the enjoyment of the other and my own enjoyment, 'nothing indicates they are distinct.'

175. #175

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.138

     I > Changing the World > Th e Modern Critique of Normality

     Theoretical move: Against the modern critical tradition that treats normality as the hegemonic suppressor of difference and subversion as the path to resistance, the passage argues that psychoanalysis inverts this logic: the norm dominates *through* transgression, not despite it, and genuine ethical subjectivity requires recognising that abnormality—not normality—perpetuates capitalist ideology.

     He advocates resisting the discourse of sexuality altogether and insisting instead on 'bodies and pleasures.'

176. #176

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.143

     I > Changing the World > Th e Questionable Task of Analysis

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that neurosis, psychosis, and perversion are forms of private rebellion that leave the social order intact, and that psychoanalytic "normalization" should be understood not as adaptation to the status quo but as the production of a subject capable of genuinely transformative public action.

     perverts insist on their private enjoyment, but they continually publicize it, thereby forcing the symbolic law to reveal itself through the oppressive stifling of this enjoyment.

177. #177

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.144

     I > Changing the World > Th e Obscenity of Revelation

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the traumatic realization of fantasy — its exposure within external reality — is not a failure but the very mechanism by which fantasy transforms social reality, because the form of fantasy (its hiddenness and transgressive structure) rather than its content constitutes the subject's obscene enjoyment, and only by shattering this private reservation does the subject become an agent of social transformation rather than a neurotic refuge-seeker.

     rather than assisting subjects in accommodating themselves to a dissatisfying or unjust reality, psychoanalysis helps them to realize their own fantasmatic enjoyment

178. #178

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.149

     I > Changing the World > Psychoanalytic Success

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic success consists in the subject publicly avowing its fantasy and acting from the "nonsense" of its own enjoyment rather than sacrificing that enjoyment to social authority — thereby exposing the groundlessness of all symbolic authority and opening a path for collective transformation. Hamlet's trajectory from perverse fool to authentic fool is used as the paradigmatic illustration of this move.

     'While it [perversion] may sometimes present itself as a no-holds-barred, jouissance-seeking activity, its less apparent aim is to bring the law into being: to make the Other as law (or law-giving Other) exist.'

179. #179

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.159

     I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > A Shared Absence

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis uniquely resolves the liberal/Marxist impasse on individual vs. society by showing that neither exists independently but each emerges from the other's incompleteness (constitutive lack/failure), and that the subject's foundational loss and frustrated jouissance are precisely what motivate entry into the social bond.

     Once deceived by the lure of an imaginary complete enjoyment and disappointed with all the enjoyment it experiences, the subject is ready to agree to the entrance requirements of a society.

180. #180

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.162

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

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

     Societies perform sacrifi cial rituals in order to allow subjects to experience and enjoy the social bond through an encounter with the nothing that they hold in common.

181. #181

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.166

     I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > An Absence of Final Causes

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that teleological thinking (the "final cause") structurally occludes enjoyment/jouissance, which operates as an "immanent cause" inhering in action itself rather than as a pursued end; psychoanalysis—through free association—is theorized as the method that brackets the final cause to expose this immanent causality, identifying the death drive as Freud's formal theorization of enjoyment-as-immanent-cause.

     Enjoyment is irreducible to a good that one pursues because, rather than benefiting the society, it deprives the society of something. Enjoyment is expenditure without the possibility of recompense.

182. #182

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

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

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

     The female logic of not-having or universalized exceptionality is not a separate logic of the social order... It is, rather, the hidden bond lying beneath the phallic order founded on exception.

183. #183

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.173

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

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

     most Americans, in the strict psychoanalytic sense of the term, enjoyed the attacks insofar as the attacks allowed them to experience once again their social bond with great intensity.

184. #184

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.179

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

     Theoretical move: By accepting the logic of female sexuation — that enjoyment is constitutively tied to loss rather than impeded by it — subjects can dissolve the envy that drives social antagonism, because a 'nothing' that can only be lost admits no hierarchy of possession and thus enables an authentic social bond.

     the other's enjoyment is the enjoyment of loss because there is no other kind

185. #185

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.184

     I > Against Knowledge > Rule by Experts

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the historical shift from master authority to expert authority under capitalism transforms knowledge from a liberating force into a mechanism of subjection, and that this shift demands a political program oriented around enjoyment rather than knowledge, since the knowledge that once subverted mastery is now the very weapon the expert wields against subjects.

     A different political program — one that focuses on enjoyment rather than knowledge — becomes necessary because the master and the expert take up radically different positions relative to enjoyment.

186. #186

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.187

     I > Against Knowledge > Th e End of Class Consciousness

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

     Conservatism permits people a way of organizing their enjoyment in a way that today's emancipatory politics does not. Emancipatory politics may offer a truer vision of the world, but the Right offers a superior way of enjoying.

187. #187

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.190

     I > Against Knowledge > An Oxymoronic Populism

     Theoretical move: The rise of expert authority (university discourse) structurally tips the balance of political enjoyment toward conservative populism, because the contemporary master-figure monopolises both modes of enjoyment — transgression and obedience — leaving emancipatory politics with only knowledge, which yields enjoyment only for experts and their identifiers.

     The appeal of populist leaders consists in the relation that they take up to enjoyment. While the traditional master prohibits enjoyment, the populist leader liberates subjects from the restrictions on their enjoyment posed by experts.

188. #188

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.193

     I > Against Knowledge > Th e Emergence of University Discourse

     Theoretical move: The transition from the Discourse of the Master to the Discourse of the University does not end mastery but relocates the Master Signifier from the position of agent to the position of truth, making mastery more concealed and thus more effective — expert authority ultimately serves the hidden master, functioning as a retooling of domination under capitalist conditions.

     The surplus enjoyment that the master's discourse produces has the capacity to animate revolt as much as compliance. It is a structure that relies on the enjoyment that stems from obedience but that is constantly endangered by an enjoyment associated with revolt.

189. #189

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.196

     I > Against Knowledge > Th e Form of the Superego

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian retheorization of the superego — from Freud's internalized prohibiting authority to an imperative to enjoy — tracks a historical shift from the regime of the master (whose idiotic, unjustified authority externalizes the law's irrationality) to the regime of expert knowledge (which evacuates external idiocy and thereby intensifies the superego's tyrannical internal demand to enjoy).

     The order of the superego . . . originates precisely . . . in this call for pure enjoyment, that is also to say for non-castration.

190. #190

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.198

     I > Against Knowledge > Taking the Side of Knowledge

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

     If emancipatory politics places itself on the side of knowledge, it abdicates its former position as a challenge to authority and becomes associated with the restriction of enjoyment rather than the unleashing of it.

191. #191

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

     I > Against Knowledge > Taking the Side of Knowledge

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

     It must alter their way of organizing their enjoyment, which is what occurs in Moore's early documentaries and in Sicko (2007)

192. #192

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.204

     I > Against Knowledge > Too Much Democracy

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that democracy must be reconceived not as a social good but as a lost object—a groundless, excessive enjoyment beyond the capitalist order—so that it can mobilize subjects through sacrifice of interest rather than through rational self-interest, reversing the domestication of democracy by capitalism and aligning it with psychoanalytic emancipation via enjoyment.

     democracy is the social arrangement organized around enjoyment and its excess. This becomes disguised when democracy aligns itself with capitalism and with a parliamentary system that ensures the domestication of democracy's inherent excess.

193. #193

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.210

     I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Philosophy versus Fantasy

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Western philosophy's long-standing critique of fantasy as a political and epistemological obstacle is precisely what psychoanalysis overturns: rather than treating fantasy as ipso facto negative, psychoanalysis opens the possibility of relating to fantasy differently, transforming it from an object of critique into a potential basis for political engagement.

     Shifting the emphasis of politics from the question of knowledge to the question of enjoyment requires a rethinking of the role that fantasy plays in political struggle.

194. #194

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.223

     I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Th e Psychoanalytic Embrace of Fantasy

     Theoretical move: Against the dominant view — shared by philosophy, Marxism, and a strand of psychoanalytic practice (Stavrakakis) — that psychoanalysis should dissolve fantasy by "traversing" it, McGowan argues that fantasy has an irreducible positive political valence: while it conceals subjection to the symbolic structure, it simultaneously enables experiences of transcendence that make alternatives to that structure thinkable, facilitate encounters with traumatic disruption, and link loss to enjoyment.

     fantasy makes evident the link between loss and enjoyment, allowing us to conceive of a politics that embraces loss rather than attempting to escape it.

195. #195

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.230

     I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > An Express Path to Trauma

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as simultaneously ideological (concealing the traumatic kernel that grounds social reality) and subversive: by luring the subject toward the very gap it conceals, fantasy stages an encounter with the Real that exposes the contingency of the symbolic structure and thereby opens political possibility.

     Every fantasy returns the subject to an imaginary time prior to the loss of enjoyment that occurred with symbolic castration.

196. #196

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.231

     I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Even the Losers

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

     We fall for the deception that fantasy offers because of the enjoyment it produces... both philosophy and Marxism fail to consider the enjoyment that subjects derive from their investment in fantasy.

197. #197

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.238

     I > 9 > Life versus Death

     Theoretical move: The death drive, understood as a third option beyond the life/death binary, reveals the falsity of the opposition between global capitalism (pure life, bad infinite) and fundamentalism (love of death), and shows that modernity's repression of finitude/death necessarily produces the fundamentalist eruptions it cannot accommodate — what it forecloses in the Symbolic returns in the Real.

     The struggle to assert the importance of death — the act of being in love with death, as bin Laden claims that the Muslim youths are — is a mode of avowing one's allegiance to the infinite enjoyment that death doesn't extinguish but instead spawns.

198. #198

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.244

     I > 9 > Progress or Value

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the traditional left-right opposition of life vs. death is internally unstable: the left's identification with life (from Marx through Deleuze/Guattari to Hardt/Negri) reproduces a capitalist fantasy of unrestrained productivity, while conservatism and fascism deploy death in the service of making life valuable — both positions failing to reckon with the subject's constitutive alienation from pure enjoyment.

     even with Nazism the devotion to death doesn't go far enough in abandoning the ideology of life. This position fails to reconcile itself with our inescapable alienation from life — with our inability to enjoy pure life.

199. #199

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.245

     I > 9 > Fighting for Death in the Guise of Life

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that American social conservatism's "culture of life" rhetoric is structurally a culture of death: it privileges limit, negation, and the interruption of life's flow as the only source of value, thereby aligning itself—beneath its own stated position—with the death-affirming logic it projects onto its enemies.

     It is a 127-minute immersion in the beauty of sadistic torture and death. If one enjoys the film, one enjoys the long, grueling death itself.

200. #200

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.250

     I > 9 > Death in Life

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis offers a "third way" beyond the life/death binary by locating the death drive as internal to life: the subject is constituted through an originary loss (correlative to the acquisition of the signifier/name), and enjoyment derives not from life or death but from this death-in-life, which also grounds a political position that transcends the Left/Right opposition.

     The only enjoyment that the subject experiences derives not from life nor from death but from the death-in-life that is the death drive.

201. #201

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.256

     I > 9 > Death in Life

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that subjectivity emerges through a constitutive break introduced by the death drive — a gap that was already present in the evolutionary process — and that recognizing death's excess within life would transform the social order by re-situating loss as the very site of enjoyment rather than something to be overcome.

     We would see the trauma of loss as our only destiny, but we would also see loss as the site of our enjoyment.

202. #202

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.260

     I > 10 > Fighting against Faith

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that religious belief is not a contingent delusion but a structurally necessary effect of the gap within signification, and that the psychoanalytic counter-move is not Enlightenment atheism but insistence on the absolute necessity of faith — revealing belief's structural foundation in order to strip it of its political-delusional power and restore the subject to genuine political responsibility.

     these arguments that adduce reasons for not believing end up providing more libidinal rewards for the believer.

203. #203

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.261

     I > 10 > A Universe of Utility

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

     What Dawkins's argument against belief leaves intact — and what every argument against belief leaves intact — is the enjoyment that derives from believing. In fact, arguments that make clear the inutility of belief augment this enjoyment rather than detracting from it.

204. #204

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.261

     I > 10 > A Universe of Utility

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

     Enjoyment has an inverse relationship to utility: we enjoy in proportion to the uselessness of our actions.

205. #205

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.264

     I > 10 > No Club to Join

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that religious belief is not a contingent psychological or ideological phenomenon but a structural necessity arising from the absence of a binary signifier in the signifying chain; the psychoanalytic-atheist move is not to deny God but to assert that 'God is unconscious' — i.e., that the gap in the signifying order holds no knowledge — thereby founding emancipatory politics on the recognition that nothing grounds human existence.

     Religious belief has the power that it does over subjects because they are convinced that their belief is the result of an extraordinary act, a leap that places them among the elect and the truly enlightened.

206. #206

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.272

     I > 10 > Worshiping Contingency

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that genuine freedom requires not the absence of God (atheism) nor a transcendent lawgiver (theism), but rather the structural primacy of contingency occupying the place of the absent signifier — an "unconscious God" — which alone grounds the subject's self-positing act of self-limitation and secures a truly radical, non-utilitarian freedom.

     Freedom is nothing but the ability of a being to act against its own good or to reject what is in its self-interest.

207. #207

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

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

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

     the right to legal abortion, according to the fundamentalist position, allows women to have sex — to enjoy — without severe consequences. It permits the disruptiveness of feminine enjoyment to appear publicly, and this enjoyment is precisely what the master signifier cannot account for.

208. #208

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

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

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

     we can identify with it as that which defi nes us, as that which produces our enjoyment rather than destroying it.

209. #209

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.297

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Conclusion

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a positive politics of the death drive is possible not by eliminating it or escaping toward a utopian good, but by recognizing internal limits as the very source of infinite enjoyment—transforming the relationship to the lost object and the figures of the enemy so that external threats are seen as internal self-limitations rather than obstacles to be overcome.

     Rather than being done for the sake of an ultimate enjoyment to be achieved in the future, it would be done for its own sake.

210. #210

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.303

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > Introduction

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage grounds the book's theoretical argument about enjoyment, repetition, and political emancipation by positioning Lacan's death drive (as repetitive encircling rather than aggression) against Frankfurt School and Reichian attempts to subsume it under Eros/surplus repression, while also contesting Derridean justice-to-come and the ideology of progress as ontological illusions that capitalism exploits.

     The carving up of others' bodies marks . . . the attempt to deal with the uncanny intimate kernel of one's being, the Thing that is too unbearable to face

211. #211

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.309

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 1. The Formation of Subjectivity

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances the theoretical argument that loss is constitutive of value, subjectivity, and drive, reinterpreting Freud's death drive as the theoretical elaboration of repetition compulsion and positioning Hegel—rather than Nietzsche or Schopenhauer—as Freud's closest philosophical predecessor through the shared recognition of a structural limit (nonknowledge/unconscious desire) within the project of knowledge.

     As Juan-David Nasio puts it, 'To be reduced to a state of ruin constitutes enjoying.'

212. #212

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.311

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 2. The Economics of the Drive

     Theoretical move: This endnotes section advances several load-bearing theoretical moves: it aligns the drive's structure with a satisfaction that bypasses aim (via Copjec/Lacan), contrasts psychoanalytic identification-with-the-symptom against Marxist elimination-of-the-symptom, links the drive's constancy to capitalism's logic of endless accumulation, and grounds the ego's rivalry-structure in the Imaginary to argue against ego-psychology.

     the subsequent reappearance of murdered women reveals that the symptom is indestructible due to its role in the way that subjects organize their enjoyment.

213. #213

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.317

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 3. Class Status and Enjoyment

     Theoretical move: These endnotes develop the theoretical argument that enjoyment, class status, subjectivity, and emancipation are structurally interlinked: the master's power is constituted through the renunciation of jouissance, anarchism fails by positing a subject outside social restriction, and the capitalist infinite of enjoyment corresponds to Hegel's true infinity (circular) rather than the bad infinite (linear).

     The renunciation of enjoyment . . . constitutes the master, which means that the principle of the master's power is formed out of it

214. #214

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.320

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 4. Sustaining Anxiety

     Theoretical move: This endnotes section traces Lacan's theoretical trajectory from an early Hegelian recognition-based psychoanalysis toward a later framework that integrates destructiveness and jouissance into subjectivity, while also mapping how anxiety, enjoyment, and the enjoying Other function in contemporary consumer society, political violence, and fascism.

     the subject is constantly encouraged to pursue his or her own jouissance

215. #215

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.325

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 5. Changing the World

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section (notes 1–36 for chapter "Changing the World") providing bibliographic references and parenthetical theoretical glosses on ideology, normality, fantasy, jouissance, obsession, hysteria, and the political stakes of psychoanalysis; it is substantive insofar as it deploys several load-bearing concepts in the glosses, but its primary function is citational scaffolding.

     it 'imag(e)-ines' the loss of a jouissance that continues to fascinate the subject

216. #216

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.329

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 6. The Appeal of Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: This notes section is bibliographic and citational apparatus for a chapter on sacrifice, assembling theoretical scaffolding from Hegel, Bataille, Freud, Lacan, and others; it is non-substantive as a theoretical passage in itself, though several notes do brief theoretical work clarifying the chapter's arguments about singularity vs. universality, the pleasure principle, sexuation, and the enjoyment-loss link.

     the question of sexuation is not solely posed in terms of identification, but also in terms of a position of jouissance, a way of enjoyment, namely, a way of life

217. #217

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.329

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 6. The Appeal of Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: This notes section is bibliographic and citational apparatus for a chapter on sacrifice, assembling theoretical scaffolding from Hegel, Bataille, Freud, Lacan, and others; it is non-substantive as a theoretical passage in itself, though several notes do brief theoretical work clarifying the chapter's arguments about singularity vs. universality, the pleasure principle, sexuation, and the enjoyment-loss link.

     One only enjoys what one pays for, because it is the act of paying — the act of losing — that functions as the source of enjoyment.

218. #218

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.332

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 7. Against Knowledge

     Theoretical move: This endnotes section performs several theoretical micro-moves: it distinguishes the master signifier's exceptional status from the general equivalent in capitalism, argues that knowledge-intrusion converts pleasure into jouissance, and clarifies how hysterical discourse structurally returns to the discourse of the master, while also linking sexuation to the asymmetry of the superego between male and female subjects.

     In Seminar XXIII, Jacques Lacan points out that our enjoyment is 'enjoyment of the real' and that 'masochism is the main enjoyment that the real gives'

219. #219

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

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

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

     he moves away from Laclau and Mouff e and roots his political project more fi rmly within psychoanalytic thought, and this enables him to see the political possibilities inhering in fantasy and in the enjoyment that fantasy provides.

220. #220

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.340

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 9. Beyond Bare Life

     Theoretical move: This endnotes section theoretically anchors the main argument by linking the capitalist valorization of "bare life," the death drive's role in value-creation, the fetishistic function of afterlife imagery, and the structural necessity of the unconscious (as science's elided gap) to Lacan, Heidegger, Marx, and Agamben — positioning psychoanalysis as the discipline that occupies the subject-shaped gap that science must repress.

     The link between the finitude of death and the infinitude of enjoyment is made apparent in Michel Foucault's stated desire to die at the moment of the most intense enjoyment.

221. #221

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.346

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 10. The Necessity of Belief

     Theoretical move: This notes section develops several interlocking theoretical claims: that psychoanalysis addresses the trauma of existence that neither God's existence nor nonexistence can resolve; that religion functions to mask social antagonism; that Pascal's wager affirms a point of non-knowledge irreducible to calculation; and that authentic events retroactively restructure the field of probability and meaning.

     The most pragmatic nation will be the most believing in order to compensate for the elimination of pure wastefulness in everyday life.

222. #222

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.114

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Th e Paradox of Recognition

     Theoretical move: Recognition's ethical value is undermined by its constitutive failure: it reduces the subject to a symbolic identity and never reaches the real other (the neighbor); genuine ethics and encounter with the other are grounded not in the sacrifice of enjoyment but in enjoyment itself, since it is the other's singular, untranslatable enjoyment that first constitutes the real other as such.

     The neighbor 'materializes an uncanniness within the social relationship, an enjoyment that resists sympathetic identification and 'understanding.'

223. #223

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_106"></span>**language**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces four developmental phases of Lacan's theory of language, arguing that language (langage) functions as the single paradigm of all structure, that the unconscious is structured like a language of signifiers, and that language has both symbolic and imaginary dimensions—against any reduction of it to the symbolic order alone or to a mere code.

     playing on ambiguity and homophony, give rise to a kind of jouissance (S20, 126). The term 'language' now becomes opposed to lalangue.

224. #224

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_170"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0191"></span>**repetition**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's successive redefinitions of Freudian repetition compulsion: from automatism tied to the complex, through the 1950s reformulation as the insistence of the signifier, to the 1960s recast as the return of jouissance — each move progressively de-biologising and re-semioticising (then re-libidinising) the concept while carefully distinguishing repetition from transference as its special clinical subset.

     In the 1960s, repetition is redefined as the return of jouissance, an excess of enjoyment which returns again and again to transgress the limits of the PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

225. #225

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

     The pervert does not pursue his activity for his own pleasure, but for the enjoyment of the big Other. He finds enjoyment precisely in this instrumentalisation, in working for the enjoyment of the Other

226. #226

     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_181"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0205"></span>**sexual difference**

     Theoretical move: Sexual difference cannot be grounded in anatomy or biology but is constituted by a fundamental dissymmetry in the signifier: the phallus is the only sexual signifier with no feminine equivalent, so sexual positions (masculine/feminine) are symbolic constructions determined by one's relation to the phallus and formalised through the formulae of sexuation, with the result that no fully 'finished' sexual identity is achievable and the sexual relationship is structurally impossible.

     'each side is defined by both an affirmation and a negation of the phallic function, an inclusion and exclusion of absolute (non-phallic) jouissance' (Copjec, 1994: 27)

227. #227

     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_46"></span>**defence**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconfigures Freudian defence by distinguishing it structurally from resistance—defences are permanent symbolic structures (effectively equivalent to fantasy) while resistances are transitory imaginary responses—and further identifies desire itself as dialectically constituted by a defensive prohibition against exceeding the limit of jouissance.

     'desire is a defence (défense), a prohibition (défense) against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance'

228. #228

     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.

     they do not represent the reproductive function of sexuality but only the dimension of enjoyment (S11, 204).

229. #229

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_203"></span>**Thing**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's concept of *das Ding* (the Thing) functions as both the real object beyond symbolisation and the forbidden object of incestuous desire/jouissance, and that this concept serves as the conceptual precursor to *objet petit a*, which inherits and develops its key structural features from 1963 onwards.

     The Thing is thus presented to the subject as his Sovereign Good, but if the subject transgresses the pleasure principle and attains this Good, it is experienced as suffering/evil

230. #230

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

     The upper chain (from jouissance to castration) is the signifying chain in the unconscious, the level of the ENUNCIATION.

231. #231

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_136"></span>***objet (petit) a***

     Theoretical move: This passage traces the full conceptual evolution of objet petit a across Lacan's work, showing how it migrates from a purely imaginary little other (schema L, 1955) through the object of desire/fantasy (1957) to the real cause of desire, surplus-jouissance, and finally semblance of being at the centre of the Borromean knot—demonstrating that the concept accumulates rather than replaces its earlier determinations.

     a is the excess of jouissance which has no 'use value', but persists for the mere sake of enjoyment.

232. #232

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part20.xhtml_ncx_99"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part20.xhtml_page_0117"></span>***J***

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the conceptual development of jouissance in Lacan's work from a simple Hegelian notion of enjoyment to a complex articulation of the paradoxical "painful pleasure" beyond the pleasure principle, culminating in the distinction between phallic jouissance and the Other (feminine) jouissance, while anchoring the concept in the prohibition inherent to the symbolic order, castration, and the death drive.

     Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this 'painful pleasure' is what Lacan calls jouissance; 'jouissance is suffering' (S7, 184).

233. #233

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

     'Castration means that jouissance must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (l'échelle renversée) of the Law of desire'

234. #234

     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_189"></span>***sinthome***

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical evolution from Lacan's linguistic conception of the symptom (as signifier/ciphered message) to the topological concept of the *sinthome* as an unanalysable kernel of jouissance that serves as a fourth Borromean ring binding RSI, with Joyce's writing as the exemplary case of *sinthome*-as-suppléance in the absence of the paternal function.

     a kernel of enjoyment immune to the efficacy of the symbolic...the invasion of the symbolic order by the subject's private jouissance

235. #235

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_201"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0229"></span>**Symptom**

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

     From 1962 on, there is a gradual tendency in Lacan's work away from the linguistic conception of the symptom, and towards a view of the symptom as pure jouissance which cannot be interpreted.

236. #236

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

     J = *jouissance* Jö = phallic *jouissance* JA = the *jouissance* of the other

237. #237

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_68"></span>**fantasy**

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

     These unique features express the subject's particular mode of jouissance, though in a distorted way.

238. #238

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_63"></span>**ethics**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's analytic ethic is defined against both traditional (Aristotelian/Kantian) ethics and the normative ethics of ego-psychology, positioning it as an ethic of desire — and later of 'speaking well' — that refuses the Sovereign Good, the pleasure principle, and the 'service of goods' in favour of the subject's fidelity to their desire.

     there is a limit to pleasure and, when this is transgressed, pleasure becomes pain (see JOUISSANCE).

239. #239

     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_45"></span>**death drive**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's successive relocations of the death drive—from the imaginary (early remarks linking it to narcissism and preoedipal fusion), to the symbolic (as the engine of repetition in the 1950s), to an aspect immanent in every drive (1964)—marking in each shift a decisive divergence from Freud's biologism.

     every drive is an attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle, to the realm of excess JOUISSANCE where enjoyment is experienced as suffering

240. #240

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part06.xhtml_ncx_5"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part06.xhtml_page_0010"></span>***Preface***

     Theoretical move: This preface to an introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis establishes its methodological framework: Lacan's discourse constitutes a unique, topologically structured language whose terms are mutually defining, and the dictionary form—itself a synchronic, self-referential, metonymic system—is the appropriate vehicle for exploring it, while the preface also theorises the dangers of ignoring the diachronic evolution of Lacan's concepts.

     I have also followed Sheridan's practice of leaving certain terms untranslated (e.g. jouissance)

241. #241

     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_149"></span>**phallus**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the phallus across Lacan's three registers (real, imaginary, symbolic), arguing that Lacan's terminological innovation—distinguishing phallus from penis—clarifies a logic implicit in Freud while elevating the phallus to the status of a privileged signifier that organises both the Oedipus complex and sexual difference, a move that invites both feminist defence and Derridean critique of phallogocentrism.

     the phallus is described as 'the signifier of the desire of the Other' (E, 290), and the signifier of jouissance (E, 320).

242. #242

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

     jouissance is only evoked or elaborated on the basis of a semblance (S20, 85).

243. #243

     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_152"></span>**pleasure principle**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's progressive theorization of the pleasure principle from a homeostatic device opposing the death drive to a symbolic law that regulates distance from das Ding and prohibits jouissance—ultimately identifying the pleasure principle with the dominance of the signifier, while exposing the paradox that the symbolic also hosts the repetition compulsion that goes beyond it.

     Jouissance is now defined as an excessive quantity of excitation which the pleasure principle attempts to prevent.

244. #244

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_185"></span>**Signification**

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

     Although signification and meaning are opposed, they are both related to the production of jouissance. Lacan indicates this by coining two neologisms: signifiance (from the words signification and jouissance) and jouis-sens (from jouissance and sens).

245. #245

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_19"></span>**anxiety**

     Theoretical move: Lacan radically reorients Freud's two theories of anxiety by tying it to the Real, the objet petit a, and the logic of lack—arguing that anxiety is not caused by separation from the mother but by the failure to separate, and that it is the only non-deceptive affect, arising specifically when lack itself is lacking (i.e., when objet petit a fills its place).

     anxiety is that which exists in the interior of the body when the body is overcome with phallic jouissance

246. #246

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_109"></span>**libido**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's repositioning of the Freudian libido concept: first aligned with the Imaginary (and narcissism) in the 1950s, then relocated toward the Real from 1964 onward, and ultimately superseded in Lacan's own vocabulary by the concept of jouissance—all while maintaining Freud's sexual dualism against Jung's neutral life-energy monism.

     Lacan does not use the term 'libido' anywhere near as frequently as Freud, preferring to reconceptualise sexual energy in terms of JOUISSANCE.

247. #247

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_138"></span>**Oedipus complex**

     Theoretical move: The passage expounds Lacan's distinctive reworking of the Oedipus complex as a three-timed logical passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic order, mediated by the paternal function and the phallus, arguing that the prohibition of jouissance operative in the Oedipal myth masks the more fundamental Lacanian insight (drawn from Totem and Taboo) that maternal jouissance is not merely forbidden but structurally impossible.

     In the Oedipus complex a prohibition of jouissance thus serves to hide the impossibility of this jouissance; the subject can thus persist in the neurotic illusion that, were it not for the Law which forbids it, jouissance would be possible.

248. #248

     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 specific imperative involved is the command 'Enjoy!'; the superego is the Other insofar as the Other commands the subject to enjoy.

249. #249

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_ncx_101"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_page_0119"></span>***K***

     Theoretical move: This passage makes two theoretical moves: first, it positions Kleinian psychoanalysis as a key foil for Lacan's reading of Freud, cataloguing his criticisms (fantasy in the imaginary, neglect of the symbolic, linguistic unconscious) while acknowledging partial affinities; second, it articulates Lacan's fundamental distinction between two modes of knowledge—imaginary connaissance (ego-based misrecognition) and symbolic savoir (unconscious desire, jouissance of the Other)—establishing their opposed roles in psychoanalytic treatment.

     Knowledge in this sense is a form of jouissance: 'knowledge is the jouissance of the Other' (S17, 13).

250. #250

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     2

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the programme of the pleasure principle governs mental life but is structurally incompatible with reality, and surveys the various strategies (intoxication, sublimation, drive-control, isolation, etc.) by which human beings attempt to manage this constitutive tension between the pursuit of happiness and the inevitability of suffering — positioning religion as one palliative among others rather than as a unique answer to the purpose of life.

     the effect of intoxicants in the struggle for happiness and in keeping misery at a distance is seen as so great a boon that not only individuals, but whole nations, have accorded them a firm place in the economy of the libido.

251. #251

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     2

     Theoretical move: Freud surveys the available techniques for achieving happiness and avoiding suffering—art, love, beauty, narcissistic withdrawal, religious delusion, neurosis—and concludes that none can fully satisfy the programme imposed by the pleasure principle; the best strategy is a flexible economy of the individual libido rather than any single exclusive technique.

     The enjoyment of beauty has a special quality of feeling that is mildly intoxicating… one manifestation of love, sexual love, has afforded us the most potent experience of overwhelming pleasure and thereby set a pattern for our quest for happiness.

252. #252

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     3

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization is itself the primary source of neurotic suffering—its demands for instinctual renunciation generate unhappiness—while simultaneously being the very apparatus through which humanity seeks protection from nature, thus making any simple "return to primitive conditions" self-undermining. The passage pivots on the paradox that technological mastery (the "god with artificial limbs") has not increased happiness, relocating the unconquerable element of nature inward, in the psyche.

     most of these satisfactions follow the pattern of the 'cheap pleasure' recommended in a certain joke, a pleasure that one can enjoy by sticking a bare leg out from under the covers on a cold winter's night, then pulling it back in

253. #253

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     3

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a structural homology between civilizational development and individual libidinal development, arguing that civilization is built on drive-renunciation (via repression, suppression, and sublimation), that order is a compulsion to repeat modelled on natural regularities, and that the tension between individual freedom and communal restriction is the fundamental, potentially irreconcilable problem of civilization.

     the members of the community restrict themselves in their scope for satisfaction; whereas the individual knew no such restriction

254. #254

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     4

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization is founded on two forces—Eros (love/libido) and Ananke (necessity/work)—but that the same civilizing process structurally conflicts with sexuality by diverting libidinal energy into aim-inhibited, sublimated forms, thereby restricting and damaging sexual life as an inherent and not merely contingent consequence.

     something inherent in the function itself denies us total satisfaction and forces us on to other paths

255. #255

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     5

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization is constitutively threatened by an innate human drive to aggression that is irreducible to socio-economic conditions, and that the commandment to love one's neighbor functions as civilization's ideological demand precisely because it runs counter to this fundamental hostility—thus establishing the antagonism between Eros and aggression as the central engine of cultural development.

     he has no hesitation in harming me, nor does he ask himself whether the magnitude of his advantage is commensurate with the harm he does me. Indeed, it need not bring him any advantage at all: if he can merely satisfy some desire by acting in this way

256. #256

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     5

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization's restriction of the aggressive drive generates discontent by redirecting aggression outward toward outsiders, and that the trade-off between instinctual freedom and social security is structurally unavoidable, culminating in the diagnosis of a "psychological misery of the mass" produced by identification-based social bonding without strong individual leadership.

     Primitive man was actually better off, because his drives were not restricted. Yet this was counterbalanced by the fact that he had little certainty of enjoying this good fortune for long.

257. #257

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     6

     Theoretical move: Freud reconstructs the history of his drive theory, arguing that the introduction of the death drive beside Eros is not a rupture but a clarification of a long-developing dualism, and concludes that civilization itself is the arena of the struggle between Eros and the death drive—the life drive's project of binding humanity into ever-larger units against the autonomous, original drive for aggression and destruction.

     even where it appears without any sexual purpose, in the blindest destructive fury, there is no mistaking the fact that its satisfaction is linked with an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment

258. #258

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     7

     Theoretical move: Freud advances the paradoxical thesis that the superego/conscience is not merely the product of drive-renunciation imposed by external authority, but that drive-renunciation itself dynamically generates conscience, which in turn demands further renunciation — a reversing of the causal relation that explains why virtue intensifies rather than appeases the severity of conscience.

     adults regularly allow themselves to commit wrongful acts that hold out the promise of enjoyment, so long as they are sure that the authority will not learn of it

259. #259

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     7

     Theoretical move: Freud resolves the apparent contradiction between two accounts of conscience's origin by arguing that the sense of guilt is fundamentally the expression of the ambivalence-conflict between Eros and the Death Drive: whether aggression is acted out (parricide) or suppressed, guilt is inevitable, and civilization's expansion necessarily intensifies this guilt by transferring the Oedipal conflict onto the social mass.

     What usually happens in these everyday cases is that a need generated by a drive acquires sufficient strength to prevail over a relatively weak conscience and achieve satisfaction; once satisfied, the need is naturally reduced, and the previous balance of forces is restored.

260. #260

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

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

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

     it is an art of collective enjoyment, in which a world beyond work can – however briefly – be glimpsed and grasped

261. #261

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

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

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

     Jungle liberated the suppressed libido in the dystopian impulse, releasing and amplifying the jouissance that comes from anticipating the annihilation of all current certainties.

262. #262

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

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

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

     This dominating discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work.

263. #263

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

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

     Theoretical move: Fisher deploys psychoanalytic categories (obsessional neurosis, masochism, the impossible object, fantasy screens, jouissance) to argue that Smiley's character is misread by Alfredson's film, which imposes a neoliberal logic of consumerism and youth onto a figure whose allure depends on the baroque mechanisms of self-deception proper to obsessional neurosis and the organisation of enjoyment around an unattainable object.

     the secret satisfaction that he experiences in Ann playing her assigned role as impossible object. But where the masochist would organise his enjoyment around this impossible object, for Smiley, the function of Ann's unattainability is to keep her at a safe distance.

264. #264

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

     *<span id="Chapter25.htm_page233"></span>Handsworth Songs* and the English Riots

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses *Handsworth Songs* and Patrick Keiller's Robinson films as cultural-political evidence that neoliberalism's "privatisation of the mind" has decomposed collective political subjectivity since the 1980s, and that struggles are never definitively won but can be (re)constituted — implicitly theorising cultural avant-garde practice as a site of resistance to ideological closure.

     Mathison's sound – which is simultaneously seductive and estranging – liberates lyricism from personalised emotion, and frees up the potentials of the audio from the strictures of 'music'.

265. #265

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

     <span id="Chapter13.htm_page140"></span>Hauntological Blues: Little Axe

     Theoretical move: Fisher develops a theory of sonic hauntology through Little Axe's music, arguing that the combination of blues and dub constitutes a political-aesthetic practice that confronts American slavery as unassimilable trauma by detaching sound from presence (acousmatic production), producing a "dyschronic contemporaneity" that refuses to let the dead be silenced.

     the combination of skin-tingling voices (some original, some sampled) with dub space and drift is deeply addictive

266. #266

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

     <span id="Chapter9.htm_page113"></span>Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots from an interview with Leyland Kirby (The Caretaker) about hauntological music-making to a theoretical argument that hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension—phonography over phonocentrism—and that The Shining's "ghosts of the Real" must be read psychoanalytically as a fantasmatic, retrospectively posited past structured around repression, superego demands, and libidinal economy.

     Jack comes to believe that he would be failing in his duty as a man and a father if he didn't succumb to his desire to kill his wife and child.

267. #267

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

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

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

     The deep libidinal appeal of Hunt derives from his impossible duality as upholder of the Law and he who enjoys unlimited jouissance.

268. #268

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

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

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

     retro offers the quick and easy promise of a minimal variation on an already familiar satisfaction

269. #269

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

     <span id="Chapter14.htm_page145"></span>Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and Belbury Poly

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that postmodern culture suppresses not darkness but luminosity/the numinous, and that certain minimalist electronic music (Foxx, Budd) succeeds in rendering a haecceitic, depersonalised encounter with the numinous that operates as a release from identity — a melancholic grace that ego psychology actively forecloses.

     enjoyable melancholy is rendered by the minimally disturbed stillness and barely perturbed poise of the sounds themselves

270. #270

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

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

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses Tricky's artistic practice as a case study for theorising the split subject and the voice as an object: Tricky's gender-sliding, spectral vocal production, and class consciousness collectively demonstrate how the voice, far from guaranteeing presence and identity, indexes a fundamental splitting of the subject that is also its creative precondition.

     'coke in your nose…everyone wants to be naked and famous' – 'Tricky Kid' anticipated the way in which, in the first decade of the 21st century, working class ambitions would be bought off by the fool's gold of celebrity culture

271. #271

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

     <span id="Chapter3.htm_page62"></span>No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Joy Division's depression is not a mood but an ontological-philosophical position that operates beyond the pleasure principle—a Schopenhauerian diagnosis of the Will's obscene undead insatiability—and that what makes it theoretically distinct from ordinary sadness or rock nihilism is the total absence of an object-cause, making it structurally homologous to Lacanian melancholia while functioning as a dangerously seductive half-truth about the human condition.

     No heat in Joy Division's loins... libidinally as well as sonically, anti-rock

272. #272

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

     <span id="Chapter9.htm_page113"></span>Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Kubrick's *The Shining* stages a Freudian/Lacanian hauntology of patriarchy: the dead Father's injunction to enjoy persists spectrally, trauma is transmitted intergenerationally as a kind of recording that replays across generations, and the Unheimliche (the uncanny return of the repressed) is coextensive with the domestic space itself.

     the obscene Alpha Ape Pere-Jouissance of Totem and Taboo… the children discover, too late, that total enjoyment is not possible.

273. #273

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

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

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

     A secret sadness lurks behind the 21st century's forced smile. This sadness concerns hedonism itself… Drake and Kanye West are both morbidly fixated on exploring the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism.

274. #274

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

     <span id="Chapter9.htm_page113"></span>Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses The Caretaker's music as a diagnostic object to argue that postmodern culture suffers from a structural anterograde amnesia: not nostalgia as longing for the past, but an incapacity to form new memories of the present, which he links to late-capitalist temporal disorder and the death of rave futurity.

     the trip down memory lane was deliciously intoxicating but there was a bitter undertaste. A faint horror, something like the dim but insistent awareness of plague and mortality

275. #275

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

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

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

     seems to exemplify the transition from desire (which in Lacanian terms is the desire to desire) to drive (an enjoyment through failure)

276. #276

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

     <span id="Chapter3.htm_page62"></span>No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses Joy Division as a cultural symptom—their music indexes the threshold moment (1979–80) when social-democratic, Fordist modernity collapsed into neoliberal control society, arguing that the band's depressive, catatonic expressionism is not merely aesthetic but diagnostic of a historically specific breakdown of subjectivity, community, and futurity.

     little deaths (petil mals as petit morts) which offer terrifying but exhilarating releases from identity, more powerful than any orgasm

277. #277

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

     <span id="Chapter9.htm_page113"></span>Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses Burial's music and persona as the exemplary case for hauntology as a cultural-theoretical concept, arguing that Burial's sound articulates a mourning for lost collective futures (Rave, the underground) haunted by events never directly experienced, while his treatment of voice and anonymity constitutes a resistance to the spectacularizing logic of digital/media culture.

     Old Rave tunes used to be the masters of that, for a reason, to do with the Rave, half human endorphins and half something hypnotised by drugs. It was stolen from us and it never really came back.

278. #278

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

     <span id="Chapter21.htm_page205"></span>Nomadalgia: The Junior Boys’ *So This is Goodbye*

     Theoretical move: Fisher coins "nomadalgia" (sickness *of* travel, as complement to nostalgia) as a critical concept to theorise the affective condition of permanent displacement in global-digital modernity, reading the Junior Boys' album as its objective correlative and linking this to hauntology and Žižek's figure of the windowless digital monad.

     2 Step's 'feminine pressure' has long since been crushed by the testosterone-saturated bluntness of Grime and Dubstep.

279. #279

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

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

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses a comparison between Peace's novel and Hooper/Morgan's film adaptation to argue that "pulp modernism" confronts a Real that bourgeois/middlebrow realism forecloses, while the adaptation's reduction to received images and jaunty tone neutralises the novel's masochistic jouissance and existential dread.

     the jouissance of sport is essentially masochistic. 'The Damned Utd shows what Clough's tragedy was,' Chris Petit put in his review of the novel, 'deep down, he knew that winning was only loss deferred.'

280. #280

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

     <span id="Chapter7.htm_page100"></span>Now Then, Now Then: Jimmy Savile and ‘the 70s On Trial’

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses the Jimmy Savile scandal to theorise how power structures warp the experience of reality itself—what was "out in the open" could not be acknowledged because institutional authority produces a cognitive dissonance that forecloses the naming of abuse in the present, confining it structurally to the past; fiction (Peace's noir) functions as the only available register for a Real that consensual reality cannot accommodate.

     No doubt Savile took a sociopathic delight in being able to get away with it in plain sight.

281. #281

     Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher · p.81

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

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses the figure of Smiley to theorize a subject driven not by repressed sexuality but by a constitutive lack of interiority — a "chameleon" subjectivity that dissolves into role-playing, making desire, drive, and perversion irreducible to sadomasochism or therapeutic models of repression. The passage pivots on distinguishing Smiley's ascetic renunciation-as-perversity from both repression and sadomasochistic enjoyment.

     For sadomasochism entails enjoyment, not repression. Far from being repressed, it's clear that Smiley is *driven*

282. #282

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

     *<span id="Chapter25.htm_page233"></span>Handsworth Songs* and the English Riots

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that the radical Green perspective in Keiller's *Robinson in Ruins* produces a properly dialectical confrontation between capital and ecology as two competing totalities, and that ecological catastrophe furnishes an image of life-after-capitalism that a neoliberalism-colonised political unconscious cannot — connecting this to speculative realist philosophy's contemplation of extinction and Jameson's concept of radical incommensurability between human time and historical duration.

     Robinson may have headed off into some kind of dark Deleuzean communion with Nature.

283. #283

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.207

     **XVI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Balint's object-relations theory as a foil to argue that "two-body psychology" remains a relation of object to object, failing to introduce the properly intersubjective (symbolic) register, and that the erasure of the symbolic and imaginary in favour of a "call on the real" constitutes a technical and theoretical deviation from the fundamental analytic experience.

     The dimension of enjoyment [joie], which is extremely extensive, goes well beyond the category of jouissance in a way that one should spell out.

284. #284

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the optical schema to articulate the structural difference between the Ideal Ego (Idealich) and the Ego-Ideal (Ichideal): the imaginary is regulated by the symbolic (governed by the voice/speech of the Other), and love/transference are theorised as perturbations of that symbolic regulation—love confusing the two registers, transference exploiting the same imaginary mechanism but within the analytic symbolic frame.

     The essence of the image is to be invested by the libido. What we call libidinal investment is what makes an object become desirable.

285. #285

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     **XVII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critically exposes the theoretical dead end of Balint's object-relation theory, which defines the object purely as satisfier of need and models all libidinal life on a closed, harmonious mother-infant complementarity—arguing this framework cannot account for the subject's encounter with the Other as a genuine subject, and thus deviates from the fundamental analytic conception of the libido.

     He concerns himself, not only with the enjoyment [jouissance] of his partner, but with many other requirements which are associated with it.

286. #286

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.226

     xvra > **The symbolic order**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that perverse desire, structured around the imaginary dyadic relation, necessarily dissolves into an impasse (annihilation of either subject or object), and that escaping this impasse requires the symbolic order — demonstrated by showing that the Master/Slave dialectic, though mythically imaginary in origin, is always already bounded by symbolic/numerical structuration, which underpins the intersubjective field and language itself.

     A law is imposed upon the slave, that he should satisfy the desire and the pleasure (jouissance) of the other. It is not sufficient for him to plea for mercy, he has to go to work.

287. #287

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.306

     xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index page from Seminar I, providing page references for key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts; it is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but maps the distribution of core concepts (imaginary, ideal ego, ignorance, image, interpretation, intersubjectivity, introjection) across the seminar.

     and erotism 174 and libido 122,149

288. #288

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: The passage works through Freud's "On Narcissism" to distinguish two distinct functions—Ideal Ego (*Idealich*) and Ego Ideal (*Ichideal*)—arguing that their coexistence in Freud's text is not a confusion but marks two different structural functions; simultaneously, the passage establishes that both narcissistic and anaclitic object choices are imaginary and grounded in identification, and separates sublimation (object-libido process) from idealization (ego-libido process) as theoretically distinct operations.

     Illness is no doubt the final cause of the whole urge to create. By creating, I could recover. By creating, I became healthy.

289. #289

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.307

     xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index page (partial, letters I–L) from Seminar I, listing page references for key concepts and proper names; it is non-substantive in itself but registers the conceptual vocabulary in use across the seminar.

     jouissance 205, 223

290. #290

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.348

     **xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar X by distinguishing mourning, melancholia, and mania through the functional difference between objet a and i(a), and then pivots to announce the Names-of-the-Father as the next seminar's project, arguing that the father is not a causa sui but a subject who has integrated his desire back into the irreducible a — the only passage through which desire can be authentically realised in the field of the Other.

     the father is not a causa sui, but a subject who has gone far enough into the realization of his desire to be able to integrate it back into its cause, whatever that may be, back into what is irreducible in the function of the a

291. #291

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.250

     **x** > **THE MOUTH AND THE EYE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops a topological inversion between the anxiety-point and the point of desire across the oral and phallic/scopic levels: at the oral level anxiety is located at the Other (the mother's body) while desire is secured in the fantasy-relation to the partial object; at the phallic level this is strictly reversed, with orgasm itself functioning as the anxiety-point's homologue. The eye is then introduced as the new partial object (objet a) whose structure of mirage and exclusion from transcendental aesthetics anchors this topology.

     the vampire is not dreamt of in human imagination in any other way than as a mode of fusing or initial subtraction at the very life source where the assailing subject can find the wellhead of his jouissance.

292. #292

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.190

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

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

     Only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire.

293. #293

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.66

     BookX Anxiety > **v** > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dimension of the Other is structurally irreducible across all approaches to anxiety—experimental (Pavlov, Goldstein), philosophical, and analytic—and that the illusion of self-transparent consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein / Subject Supposed to Know) is precisely what blocks recognition of this, while the uncanny marks the point where specular identification fails and anxiety's structural void becomes legible.

     the Other's demand, the Other's jouissance, and in a modalized form... the desire of the Other

294. #294

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.150

     **x** > **ON A LACK THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO THE SIGNIFIER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the analytic paradox of "defence against anxiety" by arguing that defence is not against anxiety itself but against the lack of which anxiety is a signal, and he further differentiates the structural positions of the objet petit a in neurosis versus perversion/psychosis to clarify the handling of the transferential relation — culminating in a redefinition of mourning as identifying with the function of being the Other's lack.

     What we give in love is essentially what we haven't got and when this not having comes back at us there is most certainly regression and at the same time a revelation of the way in which we left him wanting

295. #295

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.193

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

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

     The fact of having nothing wanting on the road to jouissance does not resolve the question of desire for her in the slightest

296. #296

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.89

     BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not without object but has a distinct object structure: it is the cut that precedes and grounds signification, and as "that which deceives not," it is the cause of doubt rather than doubt itself—the only phenomenon that escapes the signifier's constitutive capacity for deception. This leads to the claim that action borrows its certainty from anxiety by transferring it, and that jouissance-on-command (as in Ecclesiastes/circumcision) marks the originary site of anxiety.

     To jouir on order is all the same something about which each of us can sense that, if there's a wellspring, an origin, of anxiety, then it must be found somewhere there.

297. #297

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.359

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

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

     jouissance 46, 49, 71, 125, 167-9, 1745, 177, 178-81, 182-4, 187, 1901, 260, 261-2,263-4,268,269,292,295, 304, 309,320

298. #298

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage reframes Objet petit a not as the intentional object *of* desire (in the phenomenological/Husserlian sense) but as the *cause* of desire that lies *behind* it, prior to any internalization; this reconfiguration is then used to distinguish the structural positions of sadism and masochism as different modes of identification with the object.

     the relation that Freud indicates, when anxiety is involved, using the word Libidohaushalt... the sustaining of libido... a synthesis between anxiety's signal function and its relation with something that we may call an interruption in the sustaining of libido.

299. #299

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.357

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

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

     God'sjouissance 165

300. #300

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is grounded in the "deciduous" (falling-away) character of the partial object, which he reframes as a neurotic fantasy rather than a structural given, and uses the clinical phenomenon of anxiety-triggered orgasm to illustrate the real relation between anxiety, jouissance, and desire — positioning anxiety as a signal at the intersection of the Real and the subject's loss.

     We'll try to make some headway next time on the study of the respective faces of anxiety, on the side of jouissance and on the side of desire.

301. #301

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps the perverse positions of sadism and masochism through the differential concealment of anxiety and the object (objet a), arguing that anxiety is the subject's real leftover and that castration is best understood not as threat but through the structural "falling-away" of the phallus as object—a detumescent object whose loss is more constitutive of desire than its presence.

     targeting the Other's jouissance is a fantasmatic target. What is sought out is the response in the Other to the subject's essential downfall into his final misery, and this response is anxiety.

302. #302

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.303

     **xx** > **XXI PIAGET'S TAP** > what the reproducer has understood what the explainer had understood

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Piaget's tap experiment to critique psychology's blindness to the causal dimension of the object as structured by desire and the phallic relation, then articulates five levels of the constitution of objet petit a in the S/A relation—oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and the desire of the Other—deploying this schema to reframe obsessional neurosis as structured around demand's cover over the desire of the Other, with anxiety as the irreducible kernel.

     The third level is the phallus. Here we'll call it jouissance in the Other. The relationship of this jouissance in the Other to the missing instrument that (-φ) designates is an inverted relationship.

303. #303

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.332

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the anal object (objet a) functions as the *cause* of desire rather than its goal, and that inhibition is the structural locus where desire operates; this grounds a theory of the obsessional's recursive desire as a defence against genital/castration anxiety, whereby the excremental *a* acts as a "stopper" substituting for the impossible phallic object.

     this desire, in accordance with its specific structuring around the intermediary of an object, is posited as harbouring anxiety at its core, which separates desire from jouissance.

304. #304

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.306

     **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues for a "circular constitution" of objet petit a across all libidinal stages—against Abraham's linear-developmental model—grounding the cause-function of desire structurally in the gap between cause and effect, with excrement as the paradigm case that reveals how biological objects only acquire their subjective destiny through the dominance of the signifier.

     the missing phallus that constitutes the disjunction that joins desire to jouissance

305. #305

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.202

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

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

     with respect to woman's jouissance, which fully warrants all kinds of care from the partner being focused upon her… experience teaches us that the partner's impotence can be very well accepted.

306. #306

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.272

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that castration anxiety is constituted by the *fading* of the phallic function precisely where it is expected to operate (the phallic stage), denoted (−φ), and uses the Wolf Man's primal scene—where the phallus is everywhere yet invisible, freezing the subject into a phallic-erect state—to show that objet petit a, jouissance, gaze, and anxiety converge at this structural moment; orgasm is then posed as the functional equivalent of anxiety because both confirm that anxiety is not without object.

     This jouissance - akin to what Freud elsewhere called the Rat Man's horror at a jouissance of which he was ignorant, a jouissance that exceeds any possible marking-out by the subject - is here presentified in this erect form.

307. #307

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.321

     **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's impossibilized desire is structurally linked to the fantasy of an Almighty God (ubiquity/omnivoyance), which functions as the Ego Ideal covering over anxiety — such that true atheism, conceived as the dissolution of this fantasy of almightiness, is the analytic task specific to the obsessional structure.

     the fundamental impossibility, the impossibility that divides desire and jouissance at the sexual level

308. #308

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan

     BookX Anxiety > *PASSAGE* **A** *L'ACTE* **AND ACTING-OUT**

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes that objet petit a is doubly relational: it is isolated by the big Other and constituted as a remainder in the subject's relation to the Other, grounding the mathemic table of division that structures subject, Other, and a together.

     The jouissance of the symptom

309. #309

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.342

     **xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and jouissance are structurally disjoint—separated by a central gap—and that the object *a* as the irreducible remainder is the cause of desire, not a brute forced fact; it then uses the inhibition-symptom-anxiety grid at the scopic level to reframe mourning as the labour of restoring the link to the masked object *a*, distinguishing Lacan's account from Freud's while following the same trajectory.

     a failing that strikes the jouissance situated at the level of the Other… jouissance is not inherently destined to desire.

310. #310

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.171

     **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not without object (*nicht objektlos*) but signals the Real's irreducibility, distinguishing anxiety from fear by locating it at the logical moment prior to desire where the remainder of subjective division — *objet petit a* — first appears as cause; the structure is formalised through an arithmetic analogy of division in which the barred subject emerges as the quotient of *a* over the signifier.

     The one who possessed the object of desire and of law, the one who found jouissance with his mother, Oedipus.

311. #311

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

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

     The locus, the house of jouissance, is ordinarily found, since it's naturally found, placed in an organ that is, as experience and anatomo-physiological investigation teach you in the most certain fashion, non-sensitive.

312. #312

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.280

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a "deceptive might" — never present where expected — such that anxiety is the truth of sexuality, and the subject-Other relation (S→A) is primordial over communication, with the subject first receiving his own message in broken, inverted form via the Other, a structure confirmed by the infant's pre-mirror-stage monologue.

     she can only enjoy (cp) because it's not in its place, in the place of her jouissance, in the place where her jouissance might be realized.

313. #313

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.134

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural distinction between acting-out and passage à l'acte by anchoring both to the object a and its cut-relation to the Other: acting-out is essentially a monstration (wild transference) that shows the a as cause of desire to the Other, while the symptom is self-sufficient jouissance that only requires interpretation through established transference. The originary cut is relocated from birth-separation to the embryonic envelopes, grounding a topological account of a as off-cut.

     the symptom, in its nature, is jouissance, don't forget this, a jouissance under wraps no doubt, unterbliebene Befriedigung, it has no need of you, unlike acting-out, it is sufficient unto itself.

314. #314

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.185

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety functions not as a mediator but as a *median* term between jouissance and desire: the subject of jouissance is mythical and can only appear through the remainder *a*, which resists signifierization and therefore cannot serve as a metaphor for that subject; it is precisely this irreducible waste-remainder that founds the desiring (barred) subject, with anxiety marking the gap between jouissance and desire that must be traversed in the constitution of fantasy.

     I left this subject, in its first position, indeterminate with regard to its denomination, but the end of my talk allowed you to recognize how it could be denoted at this mythical level, prior to the operation being played out in its entirety. It is the subject of jouissance, in so far as this term has a meaning, but precisely, for reasons we shall be going back over later, it can in no way be isolated as a subject, unless mythically.

315. #315

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.55

     BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

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

     What might ensure a relationship between the subject and this universe of significations, if not the fact that somewhere there is jouissance?

316. #316

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.315

     **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the anal object (excrement as objet petit a) achieves its subjective function not through the mother's demand alone, but through its structural articulation with castration (- φ): excrement symbolizes phallic loss, grounds obsessional ambivalence, and prefigures the function of the object a as territorial/representative trace — yet this still falls short of explaining how the concealment of the object founds desire as such.

     the moment of the advance of the Other's jouissance... entails the constitution of castration as the surety of their meeting.

317. #317

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots the classical Freudian account of castration anxiety from anxiety-as-signal-of-lack to anxiety-as-presence-of-the-object, demonstrating through the neurotic/pervert contrast and the exhaustion of demand that it is not the absence but the imminence of the object that generates anxiety, and that castration only appears at the far limit of demand's regressive cycle.

     the perverse subject, whilst remaining oblivious to the way this functions, offers himself loyally to the Other's jouissance.

318. #318

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.277

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

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

     man's jouissance and woman's jouissance will never conjoin organically. To the extent that man's desire miscarries, woman is led, if I may say, normally, to the idea of having the man's organ, inasmuch as it would be a genuine amboceptor, and this is what is called the phallus.

319. #319

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.20

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan constructs a coordinate matrix of inhibition/impediment/embarrassment (difficulty axis) and emotion/turmoil/anxiety (movement axis) to situate anxiety as a specific affect distinct from emotion, symptom, and turmoil—arguing that anxiety is not repressed but drifts, moored only by the signifiers that are repressed, and that psychoanalysis is an 'erotology' (discourse of desire) rather than a psychology of affects.

     with the same movement by which the subject advances towards jouissance, that is to say, towards what is furthest from him, he encounters this intimate fracture, right up close

320. #320

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     BookX Anxiety > **v** > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety is constituted by the emergence of lack under the pressure of a question (from the Other), and traces the origin of the signifier itself to a primordial act of deception — laying a falsely false trace — which simultaneously constitutes the subject, the Other, and the structure of cause, showing that the signifier reveals the subject only by effacing his trace.

     the nightmare's anxiety is felt, properly speaking, as that of the Other's jouissance... the creature that bears down on your chest with all its opaque weight of foreign jouissance, which crushes you beneath its jouissance.

321. #321

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan triangulates anxiety by situating it within three intersecting themes—the Other's jouissance, the Other's demand, and the analyst's desire as it operates in interpretation—thereby framing the analyst's desire as the privileged and enigmatic terminus of an inquiry into the economy of desire that will orient the subsequent sessions.

     One is the Other's jouissance.

322. #322

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

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

     we have to conceive of jouissance as being profoundly independent of the articulation of desire.

323. #323

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.159

     **x** > **PUNCTUATIONS ON DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage makes the theoretical move of grounding the problem of the analyst's desire in a precise articulation of desire as law and as will-to-jouissance, then pivots to redefine anxiety—against Freud's ego-signal model—as the specific manifestation of the desire of the Other, thereby linking countertransference, the ethics of psychoanalysis, and anxiety under a single structural logic.

     Desire presents itself as a will to jouissance, whichever angle it appears from, whether from the Sadean angle... or from the side of what is known as masochism.

324. #324

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: The passage theorizes artistic creation as sublimation that serves a social function through the dual operation of 'dompte-regard' (taming the gaze) and 'trompe-l'œil' (the lure), arguing that the work satisfies desire by encouraging renunciation and that the painter's success depends not on verisimilitude but on the structural play of the gaze.

     one can say that the work calms people, comforts them, by showing them that at least some of them can live from the exploitation of their desire.

325. #325

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.128

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: Lacan extends his analysis of the gaze beyond the scopic drive to argue that the icon's social and religious function is structured around a third gaze — neither the viewer's nor the painter's, but the divine or communal gaze behind the image — revealing that the objet petit a (as gaze) always operates within a triangulated social/sacrificial economy rather than a simple dyadic relation of viewer and image.

     if Javeh forbids the Jews to make idols, it is because they give pleasure to the other gods.

326. #326

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.191

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the partial drives constitute the irreducible middle term between repression/symptom (structured as signifiers) and interpretation/desire, and that sexuality participates in psychical life precisely through the gap-like structure of the unconscious—a structure that cannot be reduced to neutral psychical energy.

     sexuality as essentially polymorphous, aberrant. The spell of a supposed infantile innocence was broken.

327. #327

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.179

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the Freudian drive (Trieb) from any biological need or organismic totality, grounding it instead in a topological surface field (the Real-Ich/nervous system) defined by constant force (konstante Kraft) rather than momentary impulse — a move that separates drive from need and opens the terrain of libidinal energy as potential energy.

     This investment places us on the terrain of an energy—and not any energy—a potential energy

328. #328

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

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

     Theoretical move: The partial drive is theorised as the mechanism by which the pleasure principle is forced open, revealing a jouissance beyond homeostasis and introducing an "other reality" that retroactively structures the Real-Ich itself.

     he will realize that there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle

329. #329

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

     Theoretical move: The partial drive achieves satisfaction not by attaining a biologically defined reproductive aim but through the self-enclosed circuit of its own return to the erogenous zone; the distinction between 'aim' (way taken) and 'goal' (terminal end) is used to redefine drive satisfaction as the loop itself rather than any external terminus.

     the form that the drive may assume, in attaining its satisfaction without attaining its aim—in so far as it would be defined by a biological function, by the realization of reproductive coupling

330. #330

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces a fundamental antinomy between drive and satisfaction, arguing that the neurotic subject paradoxically achieves a form of satisfaction through displeasure, and that analytic intervention is justified precisely at the level of the drive where this paradoxical satisfaction must be rectified.

     everything they experience, even their symptoms, involves satisfaction. They something that no doubt runs counter to that with which they might be satisfied, or rather, perhaps, they give satisfaction to something.

331. #331

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.200

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive is structured around a lacunary apparatus in which the lost object (objet a) is installed, while fantasy functions as the support of desire by placing a split subject in relation to an object that never shows its true face; perversion is then theorized as an inversion of this fantasy structure wherein the subject determines itself as object.

     the sadist himself occupies the place of the object, but without knowing it, to the benefit of another, for whose jouissance he exercises his action as sadistic pervert.

332. #332

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.182

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real must be defined as the impossible—not merely as the obstacle to the pleasure principle (Freud's limited formulation) but as constitutive of both fields (pleasure principle and drive alike), and that no object of need can ever satisfy the drive, whose satisfaction is always partial and displaced.

     it is not the food that satisfies it, it is, as one says, the pleasure of the mouth.

333. #333

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.198

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

     Theoretical move: The circuit of the partial drive—illustrated through exhibitionism and sado-masochism—is only completed in its reversed, active form when the other is brought into play; this circuit constitutes the sole permitted transgression of the pleasure principle, revealing that desire is a detour aimed at catching the jouissance of the other.

     the subject will realize that his desire is merely a vain detour with the aim of catching the jouissance of the other

334. #334

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.295

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: This concluding passage makes two theoretical moves: (1) it positions the analyst's desire as a desire for absolute difference — the condition under which limitless love outside the law becomes possible — and (2) it provides a translator's glossary that operationally defines key Lacanian concepts (desire/need/demand, jouissance, the three orders, objet petit a, Name-of-the-Father, knowledge) as relational and context-dependent rather than static definitions.

     'Jouissance' transgresses this law and, in that respect, it is beyond the pleasure principle.

335. #335

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four vicissitudes of the drive—particularly the enigma of sublimation as aim-inhibited yet satisfying—to argue that drive satisfaction is fundamentally decoupled from biological rhythm, kinetic discharge, and aim-attainment, establishing the drive as a constant force whose satisfaction does not require reaching its object.

     for the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction

336. #336

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the libido not as a fluid or divisible energy but as an organ — both in the sense of a bodily part and an instrument — thereby displacing hydraulic/economic models and preparing a structural-topological account of the drive and its relation to the subject and the Other.

     the libido is not something fleeting or fluid, it cannot be divided up, or accumulated, like magnetism

337. #337

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Subject Supposed to Know cannot be fully dismantled even when the analyst is put in question, because the analysand still credits the analyst with a residual infallibility; and that recognition of the good (Socratic/Platonic tradition) is never sufficient to produce action toward it, since jouissance itself imposes a recoil that splits knowing from wanting.

     knowing the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such

338. #338

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between psychopathological art and genuine artistic creation, arguing that sublimation structures the painter's work by offering a social function (the 'dompte-regard') that both comforts and encourages renunciation of desire, and that this function is inseparable from—not opposed to—the trompe-l'œil effect, as illustrated by the Zeuxis/Parrhasios opposition.

     one can say that the work calms people, comforts them, by showing them that at least some of them can live from the exploitation of their desire

339. #339

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the gaze is structured by desire — specifically the desire of the Other — and that painting's hypnotic power derives not from elevated aesthetics but from the eye's voracity, exemplified by the evil eye (invidia), which operates as a separating, destructive force rather than a benevolent one.

     the eye filled with voracity, the evil eye

340. #340

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive, as a Grundbegriff, functions not as a model but as a fundamental fiction (in Bentham's sense), and begins deconstructing Freud's four terms of the drive by examining their disjointed character, starting with thrust as a tendency to discharge tied to the concept of excitation (Reiz).

     thrust will be identified with a mere tendency to discharge. This tendency is what is produced by the fact of a stimulus, namely, the transmission of the accepted portion, at the level of the stimulus, of the additional energy, the celebrated Qn quantity of the Entwurf.

341. #341

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four vicissitudes of the drive—particularly the paradox of sublimation as aim-inhibited yet satisfying—to argue that drive satisfaction is structurally decoupled from biological rhythm and from the attainment of any specific aim, establishing the drive's constancy as irreducible to kinetic or biological models.

     for the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction

342. #342

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan identifies a constitutive antinomy between drive and satisfaction: symptoms and neurotic suffering involve a paradoxical satisfaction that fulfils the pleasure principle in a roundabout way, and analytic intervention is justified precisely at the level of the drive, where this satisfaction must be rectified—introducing the category of the impossible as a new dimension of drive-satisfaction.

     everything they are, everything they experience, even their symptoms, involves satisfaction. They something that no doubt runs counter to that with which they might be satisfied, or rather, perhaps, they give satisfaction to something.

343. #343

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.191

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

     Theoretical move: Sexuality enters psychical life exclusively through partial drives whose gap-like structure mirrors that of the unconscious; it occupies the interval between the primal repressed (a signifier, homogeneous with the symptom) and interpretation (which is directed toward desire and is, in a certain sense, identical with it), and this interval cannot be reduced to a neutral energetics.

     sexuality, in the form of the partial drives, had not manifested itself as dominating the whole economy of this interval, our experience would be reduced to a mantic, to which the neutral term psychical energy would then have been appropriate

344. #344

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the partial drive's satisfaction consists not in reaching a biological end-goal (reproduction) but in the circular itinerary of the drive itself — the loop that departs from and returns to the erogenous rim — distinguishing 'aim' as path/circuit from 'goal' as terminal end-point, and grounding this in Freud's auto-erotic metaphor of the self-kissing mouth.

     a mouth sewn up, in which, in analysis, we see indicating as clearly as possible, in certain silences, the pure agency of the oral drive, closing upon its own satisfaction.

345. #345

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.198

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

     Theoretical move: The circuit of the partial drive — illustrated through exhibitionism and sadomasochism — is only completed in its reversed form (return to the subject via the Other), and the drive's course is posited as the sole form of transgression available to the subject with respect to the pleasure principle, with jouissance of the Other as the drive's ultimate, always-missed aim.

     the subject will realize that his desire is merely a vain detour with the aim of catching the jouissance of the other

346. #346

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

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

     Theoretical move: The partial drive's forcing of the pleasure principle is theorized as the mechanism by which a jouissance beyond homeostasis becomes operative, revealing that a second reality (beyond the Real-Ich) retroactively structures the subject's very organization.

     he will realize that there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle

347. #347

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.200

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

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the drive's circuit through the lacunary apparatus of the subject, distinguishing the lost object's role in the drive from fantasy's role as the support of desire, and pivoting to argue that perversion is fantasy's inverted effect—where the subject determines itself as object—which in turn constitutes the sado-masochistic drive structure.

     the sadist himself occupies the place of the object, but without knowing it, to the benefit of another, for whose jouissance he exercises his action as sadistic pervert.

348. #348

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that even when the analyst is put in question or suspected of being a lure, something stops at the limit—an irreducible credit of infallibility is granted to the analyst—and this paradox of trust is used to contest the Socratic/Platonist thesis that recognition of the good is irresistible for man, precisely because jouissance as such provokes a constitutive recoil.

     the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such

349. #349

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hegelian-Marxist historical frameworks cannot account for Nazism's sacrificial logic, which reveals that human desire is fundamentally oriented toward finding evidence of the dark Other's desire in the sacrificial object; only Spinoza's reduction of God to the universality of the signifier offers an escape, but Kant's practical reason is ultimately 'more true' because it shows moral law as pure desire culminating in sacrifice.

     the offering to obscure gods of an object of sacrifice is something to which few subjects can resist succumbing, as if under some monstrous spell

350. #350

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.295

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: This concluding passage of Seminar XI makes two theoretical moves: first, it articulates the analyst's desire as a desire for "absolute difference" that enables a love beyond the law; second, the appended glossary (translator's note) provides operational definitions of Lacan's key concepts—desire/need/demand, the three orders (Imaginary/Symbolic/Real), jouissance, objet petit a, and Name-of-the-Father—framing them as evolving and best understood contextually rather than statically.

     'Jouissance' transgresses this law and, in that respect, it is beyond the pleasure principle.

351. #351

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analysable symptom is constitutively structured as a reference to Knowledge—always indicating that something is known (or unknown) somewhere—and uses this to distinguish neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, while simultaneously positioning the psychoanalyst as the Subject Supposed to Know who enters the signifying operation rather than standing outside it as a classifier; this framework is then set against Hegel's Absolute Knowing and modern epistemology to articulate that knowledge is itself a signifying articulation contingent on its moment of constitution.

     the pervert for whom desire situates itself properly speaking in the dimension of a secret that is possessed, experienced as such and which as such develops the dimension of his jouissance.

352. #352

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the clinical structures of neurosis (hysteria and obsession) through the differential relation each takes to the demand of the Other, showing how the o-object (objet petit a) anchors subjective positions differently in each structure, and concludes that the end of analysis is the signifier of the barred Other — the Other's acknowledgment that it is nothing.

     the major repartition of the demand, of the jouissance of the Other and of the anxiety of the Other as corresponding to the three perspectives determining the respective aspects of neurosis, perversion and psychosis

353. #353

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan rereads Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysteric's desire-to-desire) as demanding a tripartite structural framework—privation, frustration, castration—in which the status of the subject (oscillating between zero and one) must be posited prior to any account of demand, transference, or castration, thereby exposing the conceptual limitations of post-Freudian analytic practice.

     the libido that is immortal in itself… this sort of different, questing, transmutation, this transmutation of a libido that is immortal in itself

354. #354

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: The child's "omnipotence" over the adult has no magical source but derives from the fact that the child *is* the objet petit a for the desiring parent; the analyst's failure to locate this function means she herself is transformed into an object by the patient, and the question of her own jouissance in enduring ten years of intolerable tension reveals that counter-transference is structurally equivalent to a transference neurosis—a neurosis of the analyst grounded in a failure of the desire of the analyst.

     the question is why she put up with ten years of a tension which was so intolerable to herself, without asking herself what jouissance she herself might have been finding in it.

355. #355

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.172

     **Presentation by Monsieur Oury**

     Theoretical move: Oury argues that the phonematic gestalt "Poord'jeli" is not a fantasy but rather a pre-subjective phonological structure marking the emergence of the speaking subject, located at the articulation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, while Leclaire's response opens the question of whether fantasy must be organized around the scopic drive or whether it may equally be constituted by the voice as objet petit a.

     the crystallised cry of a primitive jouissance which is inscribed to indicate the almost inaccessible path

356. #356

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the frustration-centered analytic theory of demand obscures the Freudian foundation of desire and sexuality, and that only the rigorous reference to language as signifying structure (demonstrated via mathematics' own "everything must be said" imperative and the impossibility of metalanguage) can ground the subject between zero and one — a subject who does not use language but arises from it, first appearing as privation before entering demand.

     We cannot do it by taking our bearings from the opacity of the sexual thing, from the *jouissance* which motivates in only the most obscure, the most mystagogical, fashion the thing that is involved

357. #357

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.331

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that American psychoanalysis has undergone a pathological inversion by becoming an 'o-object' (objet petit a) of conspicuous display and ideological suture — masking the class struggle under the 'pursuit of happiness' and the promise of adaptation — while true psychoanalysis is defined by assuming the irreparable, i.e. the lack of being, and the properly oriented desire of the analyst.

     Analysis in the United States is analysis for display

358. #358

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structure of neurosis by showing how desire is constituted with respect to the demand of the Other, distinguishing hysteria (desire maintained as unsatisfied, castration instrumentalised) from obsessional neurosis (desire rendered impossible, phallus safeguarded via oblativity), while warning that interpreting the o-object under its faecal species as the truth of the obsessional is a clinical trap that merely satisfies the neurotic's demand — and concluding that the end of analysis is the signifier of a barred Other whose knowledge is nothing.

     I will not return to the major repartition of the demand, of the jouissance of the Other and of the anxiety of the Other as corresponding to the three perspectives determining the respective aspects of neurosis, perversion and psychosis.

359. #359

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.250

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates a triadic "rotating dominance" between Subject, Knowledge (unconscious), and Sex, arguing that the unconscious is a knowledge whose subject remains undetermined precisely because Sex marks the impossible-to-know point around which this economy turns; the game (as formal structure) is then introduced as the reduction of this triadic dialectic to the dyadic tension of subject-waiting-for-knowledge, with the impossible (sex/the real) converted into the stake.

     Sex, in its essence as radical difference, remains untouched and sets its face against knowledge.

360. #360

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.108

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: The child's "all-powerfulness" is not magical omnipotence but derives from the child's structural position as the objet petit a for the desiring adult; the analyst's failure to recognise this makes her into an object herself, turning counter-transference into a transference neurosis that renders analysis interminable.

     she for her part was transformed by him into an object. And the question is why she put up with ten years of a tension which was so intolerable to herself, without asking herself what jouissance she herself might have been finding in it.

361. #361

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic technique, grounded in language and the signifier, must take mathematics as its guiding reference precisely because mathematics demonstrates that there is no metalanguage—every formal construction must be accompanied by common discourse—and that the subject is best located in the interval between zero and one, as a "shadow of the number," a figure of privation that precedes its constitution in demand.

     We cannot do it by taking our bearings from the opacity of the sexual thing, from the *jouissance* which motivates in only the most obscure, the most mystagogical, fashion the thing that is involved

362. #362

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.172

     **Presentation by Monsieur Oury**

     Theoretical move: Oury argues that the "phonematic gestalt" (Poord'jeli) is not a fantasy but rather the pre-symbolic point of emergence of the speaking subject — the locus from which fantasy and its privileged image arise — while Leclaire's response pivots on distinguishing fantasy-forms by the nature of the Lacanian object (scopic vs. vocal) implied within them.

     the crystallised cry of a primitive jouissance which is inscribed to indicate the almost inaccessible path

363. #363

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     **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 acid fringe of sweetness... the pure taste of one on this occasion the taste which here underpins, connects and produces this pure difference and the acid, acid-like fringe.

364. #364

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symptom is constitutively structured around a reference to knowledge — not merely as a sign of some organic state but as a signifier that indicates "somewhere it is known" — and uses this to differentiate psychosis, neurosis, and perversion by their distinct relations to knowledge/non-knowledge, while positioning the psychoanalyst as "subject supposed to know" who enters the signifying operation rather than merely classifying from outside.

     the pervert for whom desire situates itself properly speaking in the dimension of a secret that is possessed, experienced as such and which as such develops the dimension of his jouissance.

365. #365

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysterical desire-to-desire) as a scaffold to argue that analytic experience cannot be exhausted by demand and transference alone, and that a tripartite structure of privation, frustration, and castration—grounded in a radical materialism of the body as libido—is required to make castration thinkable and to properly situate the subject in relation to the Other.

     this transmutation of a libido that is immortal in itself

366. #366

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.257

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic dialectic cannot be confined to demand and the maternal Other (as in object-relations approaches), but must pass through desire and ultimately jouissance; castration is reinterpreted not merely as the Oedipal prohibition but as the barrier of desire that bars the subject from jouissance — and the Hegelian master/slave dialectic is criticised for falsely attributing jouissance to the master, revealing it as a mirage.

     castration presents itself when it is taken from this angle, as something which suggests to us that we should ask ourselves about the object through which the subject is involved in this dialectic of the Other, in so far as this time it does not respond either to demand or to desire, but to jouissance.

367. #367

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.46

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critically engages with Conrad Stein's theory of narcissistic regression in the analytic situation, using it as a foil to sharpen the distinction between imaginary dual relations and the properly Lacanian categories of the big Other, the small other, and objet petit a — arguing that the analytic situation cannot be reduced to fusional narcissism but involves an articulated structure of desire and the object.

     to preserve a mastery over it and through that a substitutive jouissance of narcissistic regression

368. #368

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

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

     The jouissance of the ancient world is the slave. And this reserved park of jouissance, as I might say, was the factor of inertia which ensured that neither science nor at the same time the being of the subject were able to emerge.

369. #369

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's Wager as a vehicle to articulate the structure of the subject's division between knowledge and truth, arguing that the Wager's logic—wagering a finite life for an infinite series—mirrors the fantasy structure in which the subject is constituted as split by the objet petit a, while also repositioning feminine masochism and narcissism as the deceptive face of truth itself.

     feminine masochism is, in the last resort, the profile of the jouissance reserved for the one who enters into the world of the Other, in so far as this Other is the feminine Other, namely: the Truth.

370. #370

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions the analytic experience as requiring the analyst to occupy a Pyrrhonian/sceptical stance toward truth, introduces the Subject Supposed to Know as the patient's trap for the analyst's epistemological drive, and pivots toward Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject's relationship to infinity, the real, and the impossibility of enjoying truth.

     the epistemological drive is the truth which offers itself as jouissance and which knows that it is prohibited by that very fact, for who can enjoy the truth (jouir de la vérité)?

371. #371

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.182

     **Seminar 16: Wednesday 4 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology—specifically projective geometry—provides the non-metaphorical, combinatorial foundation for the subject's relation to extension and signification, displacing the classical unifying subject (grounded in Cartesian homogeneous space) in favour of a structural account where the screen, the signifier, and the combinatorial replace imaginary unity and representational resemblance.

     the elliptical response that I would have been able to give, would have confronted us with jouissance, would have been a reply that was not sufficiently commentated on.

372. #372

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     Mademoiselle Grazien

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the relationship between Jones's concept of aphanisis and Lacan's theory of the subject's fading, using this parallel to introduce jouissance as a bodily dimension that cannot be reduced to the pleasure principle and that stands in a constitutive tension with the subject's "I am" — arguing that the subject is always already implicated in the duplicity between being and non-being that jouissance makes visible.

     Jouissance, for us, cannot but be identical to every presence of Kant. Jouissance can only be apprehended, can only be conceived of with regard to what is body.

373. #373

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.254

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

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

     as regards what remains hidden about it, much more than hidden, limitless, unknown, scarcely approached at some access points, I said, something that we also only say very rarely; even to the point that it is better not to say it, I am speaking about *jouissance.*

374. #374

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     Mademoiselle Grazien

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

     jouissance, I would say, surfaces. This takes on a privileged sense for us from the fact that where it surfaces, at the surface par excellence, the one that we have defined, that we are trying to grasp, as structural, as that of the subject.

375. #375

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.268

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object (objet petit a) must be understood not merely at the level of demand (breast, faeces) but through desire and jouissance, where castration is the barrier that projects jouissance onto the murdered father as an Oedipal mirage — a move that corrects what Lacan identifies as the Hegelian error of attributing jouissance to the master rather than understanding its structural unavailability to any subject.

     castration presents itself when it is taken from this angle, as something which suggests to us that we should ask ourselves about the object through which the subject is involved in this dialectic of the Other, in so far as this time it does not respond either to demand or to desire, but to jouissance

376. #376

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

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

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

     it is precisely on the side of the slave that jouissance remains... the cement of the society of masters... the starting point for society is the homosexual bond, precisely in its relationship to the prohibition of jouissance

377. #377

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

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

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

     it is quite simply homosexual. It is the desire, that is true, not to undergo castration, which means that the homosexuals, or, more exactly, the masters are homosexual and this is what Freud says.

378. #378

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.13

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both the scientific object and the psychoanalytic object (objet petit a) are structurally constituted as lack/hole, and that the subject of science is defined by a cut homologous to Dedekind's cut; the antinomy between "saving truth" (science) and "enjoying truth" (epistemological drive/jouissance) is structured by the same alienation schema as "your money or your life," such that the objet petit a is always the excluded intersection-term of this forced choice.

     There is another position which is to enjoy (*jouir de*) the truth. Well then, that is the epistemological drive. Knowledge as *jouissance* with the opacity that it brings with it in the scientific approach to the object

379. #379

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Möbius strip's double-circuit topology to argue that the Oedipus Complex has two equivalent articulations — the generative drama of the law and the drama of the desire to know — and proposes that only through the objet petit a can the castration complex be rigorously formalized, a task he defers to the following year's seminar.

     everything that concerns his relationship to jouissance, has to come to him through the mediation of what is linked to the Other

380. #380

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

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

     as regards what remains hidden about it, much more than hidden, limitless, unknown, scarcely approached at some access points, I said, something that we also only say very rarely; even to the point that it is better not to say it, I am speaking about *jouissance.*

381. #381

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.286

     Monsieur Safouan

     Theoretical move: Safouan's case presentation of an obsessional's 'duplication of the feminine object' is used to argue that the split between a narcissistic/desired beloved and an anaclitic/demanding 'perverse' partner is structurally grounded in the imaginary phallus (-phi): the beloved is not identified to the phallus but to minus-phi, the guarantee of the Other's castration, while the subject himself is subtilised into (-phi), such that symbolic castration (as the regularisation of the phallic position) must be distinguished from imaginary castration via yet-unformulated distinctions around negation.

     it is in the very measure that a subject finds it impossible, as I might say, to "s'avoir" (to have oneself, to know) as object of jouissance, that he thinks he is it

382. #382

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's poetic structure—particularly the Narcissus/mirror motif and the figure of Beatrice in courtly love—to argue that the objet petit a (o-object) is non-specular: it appears as an image of nothing, and this structure of sublimation (where jouissance is withdrawn) establishes a privileged equilibrium between truth and knowledge that poetic construction can illuminate more directly than psychoanalytic theory alone.

     It is in so far as jouissance - I am not saying pleasure - is withdrawn from the field of courtly love that a certain configuration is established there which allows a certain equilibrium between truth and knowledge.

383. #383

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

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

     far from desire being desire for jouissance, it is precisely the barrier that keeps you at the distance that is more or less correctly calculated from this burning hearth, from what is precisely to be avoided by the thinking subject and which is called jouissance.

384. #384

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.279

     there are normal perverts,

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

     The place of jouissance, I indicated many things to you, specifically, and settled this question in passing of what I called Hegel's error, that jouissance is in the master.

385. #385

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

     Mademoiselle Grazien

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

     jouissance of femininity as such from this homosexual beginning, which only simply illustrates the mediating function that this phallus takes on which then allows us to designate its place.

386. #386

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

     there are normal perverts,

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

     The place of jouissance, I indicated many things to you, specifically, and settled this question in passing of what I called Hegel's error, that jouissance is in the master.

387. #387

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the normality of perversion (illustrated by the Abbé de Choisy) to a recapitulation of the year's key theoretical advances: the gaze as the privileged objet petit a whose function as (-phi) articulates the castration complex, and the Oedipus Complex re-read via the Möbius strip as requiring two full circuits to complete its meaning.

     everything that concerns his relationship to jouissance, has to come to him through the mediation of what is linked to the Other

388. #388

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.254

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

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

     even to the point that it is better not to say it, I am speaking about *jouissance.* We would have no idea of any kind about this dimension, about this depth, as regards which one cannot say that it offers itself to us since it is prohibited, but at the very least we can name *jouissance.*

389. #389

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

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

     far from desire being desire for jouissance, it is precisely the barrier that keeps you at the distance that is more or less correctly calculated from this burning hearth… which is called jouissance.

390. #390

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

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**

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

     feminine masochism is, in the last resort, the profile of the jouissance reserved for the one who enters into the world of the Other, in so far as this Other is the feminine Other, namely: the Truth.

391. #391

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     Mademoiselle Grazien

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

     we can consider jouissance, the one that is in orgasm, as something which will be inscribed, for example, in a particular shape that our torus will take on

392. #392

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     **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.

     jouissance, here, then, opens out for the first time as a question, in so far as the subject is barred from it… The subject is embarrassed before this jouissance. And this barrier which embarrasses him is very precisely desire itself.

393. #393

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.270

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the Hegelian master/slave dialectic by locating jouissance on the side of the slave, then reframes castration not as a prohibitive structure but as the operation of negativing the phallus so that desire and jouissance can be articulated across sexual difference — a move he introduces as preliminary to the 'logic of phantasy' and organises around three registers (imaginary, symbolic, real/torsion).

     it is precisely on the side of the slave that jouissance remains... the starting point for society is the homosexual bond, precisely in its relationship to the prohibition of jouissance, the jouissance of the Other

394. #394

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

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

     The jouissance of the ancient world is the slave. And this reserved park of jouissance... was the factor of inertia which ensured that neither science nor at the same time the being of the subject were able to emerge.

395. #395

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.46

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critically engages Stein's account of narcissistic regression in the analytic situation, using it as a foil to distinguish the imaginary dual relation from the big Other and to locate the o-object (objet petit a) within the structure of desire rather than as a supplement to fusional narcissism—thereby insisting that the analytic situation has an articulated symbolic structure, not merely a fusional lack of distinction.

     to preserve a mastery over it and through that a substitutive jouissance of narcissistic regression

396. #396

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is non-specular — it appears as an image of nothing — and that courtly love (as in Dante's poetic construction) uniquely structures the relationship between the subject, the ego ideal, the o-object, and jouissance, thereby grounding psychoanalytic theory of sublimation in a topological framework.

     It is in so far as jouissance - I am not saying pleasure - is withdrawn from the field of courtly love that a certain configuration is established there which allows a certain equilibrium between truth and knowledge.

397. #397

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

     Mademoiselle Grazien

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

     jouissance of femininity as such from this homosexual beginning, which only simply illustrates the mediating function that this phallus takes on which then allows us to designate its place.

398. #398

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.13

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a structural homology between the scientific object (defined as lack/hole, measurable only through the cut) and the objet petit a in psychoanalysis, showing that both the subject of science and the o-object are constituted through alienation—a forced choice in which something is always lost, either truth-as-jouissance or science-as-knowledge.

     There is another position which is to enjoy (jouir de) the truth. Well then, that is the epistemological drive. Knowledge as jouissance with the opacity that it brings with it in the scientific approach to the object.

399. #399

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **Seminar 9: 2 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the analytic situation — where every demand is necessarily disappointed — to critique masochism as a hasty diagnostic label, introduces the analyst as Subject Supposed to Know whose epistemological drive toward truth is itself caught in the law of disappointed demand, and pivots to Pascal's Wager as a structural model for the subject who must wager on truth while initially renouncing access to it in a Pyrrhonian suspension.

     the epistemological drive is the truth which offers itself as jouissance and which knows that it is prohibited by that very fact, for who can enjoy the truth (jouir de la vérité)?

400. #400

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

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

     as regards what remains hidden about it, much more than hidden, limitless, unknown, scarcely approached at some access points, I said, something that we also only say very rarely; even to the point that it is better not to say it, I am speaking about jouissance.

401. #401

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     Mademoiselle Grazien

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Jones's concept of aphanisis to pivot from a discussion of the o-object's four aspects (breast, faeces, gaze, voice) toward the foundational problem of the subject's being, arguing that aphanisis—the fading of the subject behind the signifier—opens the question of how jouissance (irreducibly corporeal) relates to the subject constituted by the "I think/I am" split, a relation Jones gestures toward without being able to theorize.

     Jouissance, for us, cannot but be identical to every presence of Kant. Jouissance can only be apprehended, can only be conceived of with regard to what is body... it is only a body that can orgasm or not orgasm, this at least is the definition that we are going to give to jouissance

402. #402

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the classical philosophical reduction of the body and the real to three-dimensional homogeneous (spherical) extension is a fundamental deception about the subject and knowledge; by drawing on topology (the sphere, the cut, the hole, the cylinder, the torus), he proposes that a two-dimensional, edge-based topological structure—rather than metric space—is the proper framework for articulating the divided subject and its inscription in the real.

     the affect of extension. No doubt, there is here something which has always been very seductive.

403. #403

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

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

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

     It is precisely on the side of the slave that jouissance remains, and, precisely, because he renounces it. It is because the master erects his desire that he comes to grief on the margins of jouissance.

404. #404

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.267

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the object of demand (the o-object as bodily appurtenance recovered from the field of the Other) must be distinguished from the object of jouissance, and that castration is properly understood not through the Oedipus myth of incest prohibition alone, but as the barrier that bars the subject from jouissance—a barrier that is desire itself—thereby exposing the Hegelian error of attributing jouissance to the master in the Master/Slave dialectic.

     that copulation is sustained by a certain jouissance... castration presents itself... as something which suggests to us that we should ask ourselves about the object through which the subject is involved in this dialectic of the Other, in so far as this time it does not respond either to demand or to desire, but to jouissance

405. #405

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.182

     **Seminar 16: Wednesday 4 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology — specifically projective geometry — provides a non-metaphorical, combinatorial foundation for situating the subject, replacing the classical unified-point subject (grounded in Cartesian extension/thought dualism) with a structural account in which the screen, signification, and the subject's relation to extension are all rigorously formalised without appeal to intuitive or metrical geometry.

     the elliptical response that I would have been able to give, would have confronted us with jouissance

406. #406

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.286

     Monsieur Safouan

     Theoretical move: Safouan uses the case of the obsessional's duplicated love-object to argue that the splitting between the narcissistic (desired) and anaclitic (demanded) object is structured by the function of (-phi): the more the virtual body-image i(o") tends to coincide with the imaginary phallus, the more the subject is "subtilised" into (-phi), so that the beloved's identification with the phallus is not an act the subject performs but an operation in which he is already caught — resolving into the question of how symbolic castration (via Oedipal negation) regularises the phallic position.

     it is in the very measure that a subject finds it impossible, as I might say, to 's'avoir' (to have oneself, to know) as object of jouissance, that he thinks he is it

407. #407

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation from both Marxist and idealist versions, and uses this to argue that the objet petit a — exemplified by the breast as an unrepresentable object — is what supplies for the lack in Selbstbewusstsein, with the analyst necessarily occupying the position of this object, which grounds a legitimate anxiety in the analyst.

     which much more rather has no other status than what we can call with all the opaqueness of these terms: a point of jouissance.

408. #408

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-grounds the locus of the Other in the body (as the site where the signifier is originally inscribed), then pivots to argue that jouissance—distinguished from pleasure as its beyond—cannot be derived from Hegelian self-consciousness or dialectics but must be theorised through the structural impossibility of the sexual act, with the signifier's reference found not in thought but in its real effects.

     It is in effect required that this term jouissance should be put forward, and properly so, as distinct from pleasure, as constituting its beyond.

409. #409

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.243

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

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

     Jouissance, as I pointed out, is an ambiguous term. It slides. From something which makes us say that there is no jouissance except that of the body and which opens the field of the substance in which there come to be inscribed the severe limits in which the subject contains itself from the incidences of pleasure.

410. #410

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205

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

     Theoretical move: By critically engaging Bergler's theory of "oral neurosis" and its invocation of masochism, Lacan argues that masochism cannot be reduced to the enjoyment of pain; rather, it is structurally defined by the subject assuming the position of the object (objet petit a as remainder/waste) within a contractual scenario that implicates the big Other as the locus of a regulating word—thereby illuminating the Other's role in jouissance and the logic of fantasy.

     incontestably, is at the source of a gain of jouissance, whatever note we may or not add to it, concerning the maintenance, the respect and the integrity of the pleasure principle.

411. #411

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.219

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is not a biographical anecdote but a structural-logical condition that "norms" the subject with respect to the sexual act, and that the passage from masturbatory jouissance to the sexual act requires the mediation of a value-function tied to castration — a move that repudiates ego-psychology's proliferation of subjective entities and the concept of primary narcissism.

     The jouissance, sought for in itself, of a part of the body … the passage of the subject to the function of signifier, in this precise locus … which is called this problematic point that is the sexual act.

412. #412

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.127

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

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

     the satisfaction that Freud conjugates for us as essential for repetition in its most radical form

413. #413

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

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

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

     Erection is a phenomenon that must be situated along the path of jouissance. I mean that, of itself, this erection is jouissance, and that precisely, what is demanded, for the sexual act to operate, is that one should not stop there.

414. #414

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

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

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

     this object only disappears leaving her to the satisfaction of her essential jouissance - through the intermediary of masculine castration.

415. #415

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.183

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden ratio (φ) as a mathematical support to argue that sublimation cannot close the gap between even and odd power series—between the sexes—thereby demonstrating that there is no sexual relation at the level of the signifier, and condemning the psychoanalytic myth of primary narcissism/fusion as the foundation of libidinal economy.

     the fusion from which the enjoyer of his enjoyment (*jouissade*) is supposed to benefit: the little *baby* in its mother's womb

416. #416

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

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

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

     it is clear that the important thing is to see the reversal which results from it. Namely, that it is in so far as the phallus designates - from something raised to a value, by this less which the castration complex constitutes- this something which constitutes precisely the distance between the small o and the unit of sex.

417. #417

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

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

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

     sixty seven years of psychoanalytic surgery have not resulted in us knowing more about what is involved in feminine jouissance, even though we ceaselessly speak about the woman and about the mother, people do not really know how to express it.

418. #418

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.176

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance-value—not truth—is the primary currency of the unconscious economy and of any discourse, including analytic discourse; this reframes the relation between truth, the unconscious, and the analyst's desire, while grounding the objet petit a topologically as the "setting" of the subject produced by the cut of repetition in the projective plane.

     the introduction of jouissance-value poses a question, at the very root of a discourse, of any discourse, which can be entitled a truth-discourse.

419. #419

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.222

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

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

     detumescence is only there for its subjective utilisation, in other words, to recall the limit described as the pleasure principle… to introduce the fact that there is jouissance beyond.

420. #420

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.142

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

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

     this is, at the same time, what gives its limit to what one can call jouissance, in so far as jouissance is supposed to be at the centre of what is involved in sexual satisfaction

421. #421

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 22 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage re-articulates alienation as the structural elimination of a closed, unified field of the Other (no universe of discourse), and situates truth, jouissance, symptom, and repetition as the key concepts that must be reintegrated once the Other is understood as disjoint — building toward a quadrangular schema whose four poles are alienation, the unconscious/Es, castration, and the act/repetition.

     There is no other jouissance given to me, or giveable, than that of my body... this protective grill of a law described as universal and which is called 'Human rights'... jouissance has dried up for everyone!

422. #422

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.256

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

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

     Jouissance, Eurydice, as one might say, twice lost, this jouissance that the pervert rediscovers, where is he going to rediscover it?

423. #423

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.235

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance as a third function is topologically located at the locus of objet petit a, and that perversion—unlike neurosis or the master/slave dialectic—constitutes an experimental, subject-driven inquiry into jouissance by seeking the partial objects that escape signifying alienation; sadism and masochism are reframed as researches along the path of the sexual act rather than natural gender attributes.

     This interrogation about what is involved in jouissance as a third function, is precisely what is given to us in a different approach

424. #424

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.116

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight/Möbius strip) provides the structural model for both repetition and alienation, showing how the "additional One" (Un-en-plus) generated by the retroactive return of repetition fractures the Other and the subject alike, and that the act emerges precisely at the point where the passage à l'acte of alienation and repetition intersect on these non-orientable surfaces.

     a point of jouissance is essentially locatable as jouissance of the Other; a point without which it is impossible to understand what is at stake in perversion.

425. #425

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.136

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the "mean and extreme ratio" (golden ratio) as the mathematical model for the structure of the sexual relation, arguing that subjective satisfaction in the sexual act cannot be grounded in homeostatic/pleasure-principle models nor in complementarity (key-and-lock), but requires a third term (phallus/castration, child-phallus equivalence) whose structural logic is captured by this uniquely determined, incommensurable proportion—linking repetition, the division of the Other, and the problem of the object.

     how infinitely more problematic it is to highlight that the true order of subjective satisfaction is to be sought in the sexual act, which is precisely the point in which it proves to be the most torn apart.

426. #426

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.276

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the neurotic's relation to fantasy from the perverse by situating their respective jouissance-arrangements in topological-spatial figures (toilet, bedroom, boudoir, parlour), and closes by announcing that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is foreclosed — a structural definition of the analytic act that will anchor the following year's seminar.

     the disjunction, in the field of the Other, of the body and of jouissance, and of this preserved part of the body in which jouissance can take refugee.

427. #427

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.275

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire structurally emerges from the gap between demand and need within language, that unconscious desire is constituted as "desire-not" (désirpas) through a broken link in the discourse of the Other, and that fantasy functions not as content within the unconscious discourse but as an axiom — a "truth-meaning" — that anchors the transformation-rules of neurotic desire.

     its arrangement is borrowed from the field of the determination of perverse jouissance

428. #428

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.213

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act constitutes the founding impossibility (the "holed One") from which all truth, symptom, and signification emerge, while identifying the big Other not with spirit but with the body as the primary site of inscription — thereby grounding the Symbolic in a Real that cannot be formally proved.

     The symptom, then, any symptom, is knotted together at this locus of the holed One. And this is why it always involves, however astonishing this may appear to us, its aspect of satisfaction.

429. #429

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.156

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden number (mean and extreme ratio) as a matheme to distinguish the sexual act—where lack is structurally elided—from sublimation, which starts from lack, reproduces it iteratively, and arrives at a final cut strictly equal to the initiating lack; Fantasy ($ ◇ a) is then re-situated as the relation between objet a and the barred subject in the field of sexual satisfaction.

     lack of being, lack in the jouissance of the Other, this lack, this non-coincidence of the subject as product, in so far as he advances into the field of the sexual act

430. #430

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.251

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy has a grammatically closed structure ("a child is being beaten") that is the correlative of the alienation-choice "I am not thinking," and that jouissance in perversion must be distinguished from the neurotic fantasy's role as a measure of comprehension/desire — with perversion defined through the impasse of the sexual act rather than through the fantasy structure itself.

     I introduced the term of jouissance… it is a new term, at least in the function that I give it, and that it is not a term that Freud had put in the forefront of theoretical articulation.

431. #431

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

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

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

     The goddess is jouissance, it is very important to recall it. Her status as goddess is to be jouissance. And to fail to recognise it is properly to condemn oneself to understanding nothing of all that is involved in jouissance.

432. #432

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.215

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject is constituted precisely as the cut between the field of the One and the field of the Other (the unconscious), with topology—surface defined by its edge, volume defined by its cutting—providing the structural model; the Other is ultimately revealed to be the Other of objet petit a, whose incommensurability generates every question of measure.

     this curious One which, for its part, is tied together in the beast with two backs, in other words in the embrace of two bodies.

433. #433

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.146

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from methodological self-reflection on the subject's implication in psychoanalytic field-theory to the conceptual forging of "the psychoanalytic act," arguing that analytic theory systematically effaces the cut-structure of the sexual act, and that neither libertarian ideology nor the genital-stage ideal resolves the structural deficit (castration, guilt) inscribed in sexuality; this sets up the question of whether hatred, not tenderness, can co-constitute the sexual act.

     successful jouissance in bed essentially results, as you have been able to see - I will dot the i's - from forgetting what may be found on the slide-rule.

434. #434

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.259

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism exemplifies the fundamental economy of perversion: the masochist's identification with the rejected o-object and his demonstrative capture of jouissance reveals that sadism is not the reversal of masochism but its naive counterpart—the sadist, believing himself master, unknowingly occupies the masochistic position of the o-object, enslaved to jouissance from the outside.

     This search, this almost frantic construction, of an impossible identification to what is reduced to the extremes of waste products, and that this is linked for him to the capture of jouissance, here is where there appears naked, exemplary, the economy that is at stake.

435. #435

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.197

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

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

     what Freud designates is this something rotten in jouissance ... to accede to the sexual act is to accede to a jouissance that is guilty, even and especially if it is innocent

436. #436

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.232

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiomatic principle "there is no jouissance except that of the body" and argues that the subject's constitution through the signifier effects an alienation that structurally separates body from jouissance — making castration the condition of possibility for any genuine sexual act, while systematically dismantling the Hegelian master/slave dialectic as a sufficient account of jouissance's distribution.

     There is no jouissance except that of the body (il n'y a de jouissance que du corps).

437. #437

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.199

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is constitutively excluded from the locus of truth (the Other), such that the sexual act can only be established through a structural lie or dissimulation; the Oedipus myth is re-read not as a story of ignorance but as the mythic formula for a 'canned' (killed-off/aseptic) jouissance whose sacrificial negation is the precondition for all subsequent economies of jouissance in psychoanalytic experience.

     jouissance in so far as it is at the source of truth... jouissance - which it is a matter of knowing there where it is – posits itself as questioning in the name of truth.

438. #438

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.172

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

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

     there is something that takes the place of exchange-value, in so far as, from its false identification to use-value, there results the foundation of the object of merchandise… jouissance-value plays here the role of exchange-value.

439. #439

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.276

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the function of fantasy in neurosis from its function in perversion by mapping clinical structures onto spatial metaphors (bedroom, toilet, boudoir, wardrobe, parlour, bog, analyst's office), culminating in the claim that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is presented as foreclosure (Verwerfung), thereby anticipating the seminar on the psychoanalytic act.

     with respect to the disjunction, in the field of the Other, of the body and of jouissance, and of this preserved part of the body in which jouissance can take refugee.

440. #440

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

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

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

     Erection is a phenomenon that must be situated along the path of jouissance … this erection is jouissance … It is auto-erotic jouissance.

441. #441

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.146

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic theory systematically effaces the structural character of the sexual act as a *cut* (an act in the strong sense), substituting a discourse of relational adequacy ('genital stage', 'tenderness') that evades the irreducible discordance and failure built into that act; he introduces the 'psychoanalytic act' as a distinct concept requiring its own structural formalization, in contrast to—and as a corrective upon—the sexual act it takes as its reference point.

     successful jouissance in bed essentially results, as you have been able to see - I will dot the i's - from forgetting what may be found on the slide-rule.

442. #442

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.275

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is structurally constituted by its displacement from demand through language, making it inherently the desire of the Other and necessarily unsatisfied; fantasy is reframed not as a content to be interpreted but as a truth-meaning axiom within the neurotic's unconscious discourse, supplying for the lack of desire.

     its arrangement is borrowed from the field of the determination of perverse jouissance

443. #443

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.222

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

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

     there is no jouissance, in any case one that can be located, except of one's own body. And what is beyond the limits that the pleasure principle imposes on it … is not chance but necessity which associates it as such with the evocation of the sexual correlate

444. #444

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.251

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy is structured like a language (as a grammatically closed sentence), introduces jouissance as a new theoretical term to account for the economy of fantasy, and distinguishes neurotic fantasy (as a closed, inadmissible meaning correlative to alienation's forced choice) from perverse jouissance—articulated through the impasse of the (non-existent/only-existing) sexual act—insisting these are structurally distinct rather than analogically continuous.

     that indeed is why at the end of this discourse I introduced the term of jouissance. I introduced it while underlining, while accentuating that this is a new term, at least in the function that I give it, and that it is not a term that Freud had put in the forefront of theoretical articulation.

445. #445

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.199

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance is constitutively separated from the sexual act by truth—the locus of the Other is the site where jouissance questions itself in the name of truth, but truth cannot be heard in the field of the sexual act without causing it to collapse. Lacan re-reads the Oedipus myth (and Freud's primal-father myth) to establish that originary, absolute jouissance only functions as already "canned" (killed-off, asepticised), and that this transformation of jouissance is the prerequisite for all psychoanalytic economy of exchange and reversal.

     jouissance in so far as it is at the source of truth. That means what is articulated at the locus of the Other, so that jouissance - which it is a matter of knowing there where it is – posits itself as questioning in the name of truth.

446. #446

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.172

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

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

     jouissance-value plays here the role of exchange-value.

447. #447

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.136

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act cannot be modeled on organic satisfaction or simple complementarity (key/lock), but requires a structural, mathematical account of the "measure and proportion" implicit in repetition — introducing the Golden Ratio (mean and extreme ratio) as the formal analogue for the third element (phallus/castration) that structures the sexual relation, linking this to the incommensurable and to objet petit a.

     the true order of subjective satisfaction is to be sought in the sexual act, which is precisely the point in which it proves to be the most torn apart.

448. #448

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.219

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is not a narrative fantasy but a structural condition—being "normed" with respect to the sexual act—and that the passage from masturbatory jouissance to the sexual act requires the introduction of jouissance to a value-function through negation/castration, while simultaneously repudiating ego-psychological entity-multiplication and the notion of primary narcissism as an analytic foundation.

     The passage of the subject to the function of signifier, in this precise locus … which is called this problematic point that is the sexual act. That the passage from jouissance, where it can be grasped, should be … by a certain negativing … that this passage, in any case, has the most manifest relation with the introduction of this jouissance to a value function.

449. #449

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

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

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

     The goddess is jouissance, it is very important to recall it. Her status as goddess is to be jouissance. And to fail to recognise it is properly to condemn oneself to understanding nothing of all that is involved in jouissance.

450. #450

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.205

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bergler's concept of "oral neurosis" and its triad of masochistic mechanism as a critical foil to develop his own theory of the oral drive, distinguishing raw aggression, narcissistic aggression, and pseudo-aggression, and then redefines masochism not as assumption of pain but as the subject taking the position of the object (objet petit a as waste/remainder) in a contractual scenario involving the big Other and jouissance.

     incontestably, is at the source of a gain of jouissance, whatever note we may or not add to it, concerning the maintenance, the respect and the integrity of the pleasure principle.

451. #451

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation sharply from both Marxist and idealist-philosophical senses, then develops the Objet petit a as the structural support of the subject's "I am not" — the analyst occupies the position of objet a in the analytic operation, while the breast-as-object exemplifies the fundamentally non-representable, jouissance-laden character of the partial object that supplies for the lack of Selbstbewusstsein.

     what is involved in this object, which much more rather has no other status than what we can call with all the opaqueness of these terms: a point of jouissance. But what does that mean?

452. #452

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 22 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that alienation, understood as the elimination of the Other as a closed unified field (i.e., the impossibility of a universe of discourse), is the logical starting point from which he derives the interrelated poles of a structural quadrangle articulated around repetition, the act, the unconscious (Id), and castration - with truth emerging as the emanation from a disconnected field of the Other, made manifest in the symptom.

     There is no other jouissance given to me, or giveable, than that of my body... around this jouissance, which is indeed henceforth my only good, this protective grill of a law described as universal and which is called 'Human rights'... is that jouissance has dried up for everyone!

453. #453

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.142

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

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

     this is, at the same time, what gives its limit to what one can call jouissance, in so far as jouissance is supposed to be at the centre of what is involved in sexual satisfaction

454. #454

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.243

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

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

     Jouissance, as I pointed out, is an ambiguous term. It slides. From something which makes us say that there is no jouissance except that of the body and which opens the field of the substance in which there come to be inscribed the severe limits in which the subject contains itself from the incidences of pleasure.

455. #455

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

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

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

     she does not disappear into this object. I mean that this object only disappears leaving her to the satisfaction of her essential jouissance - through the intermediary of masculine castration.

456. #456

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.183

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

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

     the fusion from which the enjoyer of his enjoyment (*jouissade*) is supposed to benefit: the little *baby* in its mother's womb

457. #457

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.197

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

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

     what Freud designates is this something rotten in jouissance ... Full jouissance, that of the king of Thebes, the saviour of the people ... this jouissance which covers over what? Rottenness, what finally explodes in the plague.

458. #458

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.209

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that "masochism" as a clinical label obscures the logical structure of neurotic desire (specifically the "wish to be refused"), and that grasping the full range of satisfactions implied by the sexual act requires logical articulation—not moralistic or adaptive frameworks—culminating in the claim that the sexual act necessarily implies a third element (the prohibited mother, the phallus) and that feminine jouissance remains fundamentally unarticulated by sixty-seven years of psychoanalytic practice.

     sixty seven years of psychoanalytic surgery have not resulted in us knowing more about what is involved in feminine jouissance, even though we ceaselessly speak about the woman and about the mother

459. #459

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

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

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

     it is clear that the important thing is to see the reversal which results from it. Namely, that it is in so far as the phallus designates - from something raised to a value, by this less which the castration complex constitutes- this something which constitutes precisely the distance between the small o and the unit of sex.

460. #460

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.259

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism—not sadism—reveals the naked economy of perversion: the masochist's frantic identification with the rejected object (objet petit a) as the locus of jouissance is itself a demonstration that constitutes his jouissance, while the sadist, thinking himself master, unknowingly occupies the masochistic position as slave of the drive. Both perversions share the same logic as fantasy, linking perversion to neurosis.

     This search, this almost frantic construction, of an impossible identification to what is reduced to the extremes of waste products, and that this is linked for him to the capture of jouissance, here is where there appears naked, exemplary, the economy that is at stake.

461. #461

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.176

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance-value is the foundational economy of the unconscious, and that the unconscious speaks of sex without necessarily saying the truth about it — establishing a structural gap between speaking and saying that conditions the analyst's position and explains the psychoanalyst's constitutive resistance to his own discourse.

     Jouissance-value, I said, is at the source of the economy of the unconscious.

462. #462

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.256

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

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

     Jouissance, Eurydice, as one might say, twice lost, this jouissance that the pervert rediscovers, where is he going to rediscover it?

463. #463

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions jouissance as the central concept linking the failure of the sexual act to subjective constitution, arguing that the signifier's introduction into the real—not thought—gives jouissance its radical analytical value; this requires both a departure from the Hegelian dialectic (where jouissance belongs to the master) and an opening toward the irreducible non-relation at the heart of sexuality.

     Jouissance, namely, this something that has a certain relation to the subject, as this confrontation with the hole left in a certain questionable register of act, that of the sexual act.

464. #464

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.127

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

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

     the fundamental satisfaction, which is the one that Freud articulates as a subjective opaqueness, as the satisfaction of repetition.

465. #465

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.232

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiomatic principle that "there is no jouissance except that of the body" and argues that the introduction of the subject as an effect of signification necessarily alienates the subject from jouissance — separating body from jouissance — with castration named as the structural mechanism by which jouissance is cancelled in the sexual relation, making any genuine sexual act contingent on this loss.

     There is no jouissance except that of the body (il n'y a de jouissance que du corps).

466. #466

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.235

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance as a third function is topologically located at the locus of objet petit a — the partial objects that escape signifying domination — and uses the master/slave dialectic to demonstrate that jouissance subsists on the side of the slave, not the master; perversion is then recast as a systematic, subject-driven inquiry into this residual jouissance of the Other, while sadism and masochism are reframed as researches along the path of the sexual relation rather than natural gendered dispositions.

     This interrogation about what is involved in jouissance as a third function, is precisely what is given to us in a different approach

467. #467

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.156

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden ratio (mean and extreme ratio) as a structural matheme to differentiate the sexual act from sublimation: whereas in the sexual act the lack is obscured (the remainder o² is not noticed), sublimation begins from lack and iteratively reproduces it, with the repetitive reduction of successive powers of o converging on the original lack—thereby grounding sublimation's structure in repetition and linking objet petit a to fantasy as the subject's relation to sexual satisfaction.

     lack in the jouissance of the Other, this lack, this non-coincidence of the subject as product, in so far as he advances into the field of the sexual act

468. #468

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.116

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

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes that the topological figure of the double loop (inverted eight) is the structural ground of both repetition and alienation, and uses this topology to argue that the Other is inherently "fractured" (barred), that the subject's division is ineradicable from truth, and that the Act emerges as the logical consequence of alienation's passage through the topology of repetition.

     a point of jouissance is essentially locatable as jouissance of the Other; a point without which it is impossible to understand what is at stake in perversion.

469. #469

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.213

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act is constitutively impossible (there is no sexual act), yet it remains the sole ground of truth; the symptom is the knot at the hole of the 'One', the Other is identified with the body as the primordial locus of inscription, and all truth—including ideology and perception—is structured by this foundational gap.

     The symptom, then, any symptom, is knotted together at this locus of the holed One. And this is why it always involves, however astonishing this may appear to us, its aspect of satisfaction.

470. #470

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's annex summary argues that the psychoanalytic act is the pivotal moment of passage from analysand to analyst, structurally constituted by the objet petit a, and that this act—which dismisses the very subject it establishes—grounds an ethics of jouissance, exposes the fault in the subject supposed to know, and requires that there is no Other of the Other (no metalanguage) as the condition for a consistent theory of the unconscious.

     there remains declared to him that enjoyment (jouissance), privileged in that it commands the sexual relationship, is offered by a forbidden act, but that this is to mask the fact that this relationship is only established by not being verifiable because it requires the middle term that is distinguished as lacking in it: this is what is called making a subject of castration.

471. #471

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the events of May 1968 and the institutional crisis of his École as the occasion to argue that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively determined by jouissance while simultaneously requiring protection from it, and to formulate the key lemma that "there is no transference of transference" — a claim whose misreading by contemporaries demonstrates both the necessity of his strategic unreadability and the gap between the act and its subsequent theoretical appropriation.

     to establish what determines it from enjoyment and the ways at the same time it must protect itself from it

472. #472

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is structurally grounded in the analyst's prior traversal of analysis, whereby the analyst's *désêtre*—his shedding of the Subject Supposed to Know—positions him as pure support for the objet petit a, and that this logic illuminates the status of every act, distinguishing the Freudian dialectic of enjoyment from both Cartesian and Hegelian suspensions of knowledge.

     it is from it that there comes this Aufhebung of enjoyment. This explains it. And it is as renouncing enjoyment in a decisive act, in order to make himself the subject of death that the master is established.

473. #473

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

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

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

     it is in effect the recourse of the woman, in what is involved in the embarrassment that the exercise of her enjoyment leaves her in her relation to what is involved in the act

474. #474

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "stupidity" (la connerie) as a structural function — neither an insult nor a psychological category but a knot of "dé-connaissance" (mis-knowing) — in order to argue that the psychoanalytic act must reckon with the irreducible overlap between truth and stupidity, grounded ultimately in the inappropriateness of the sexual organ for enjoyment and the constitutive failure of truth when it encounters the sexual field.

     the organ which gives, as I might say, its category to the attribute in question, is precisely marked by what I would call a particular inappropriateness for enjoyment. It is from this that what is at stake takes on its relief.

475. #475

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes *savoir* (knowledge as operative, structural) from *connaissance* (knowing as representation), and uses Pavlov's conditioned reflex experiment to argue that what is truly demonstrated there is the structural formula of the signifier — that "the signifier is what represents a subject for another signifier" — thereby grounding the psychoanalytic act in a logic of the signifier rather than in any organo-dynamic or spiritualist model.

     fruition meaning enjoyment (jouissance). I did not mean to say enjoyment, for since I already put a certain stress on the word enjoyment, I do not want to introduce it here with its whole context

476. #476

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.93

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the act from the doing in order to locate the analyst's position as a specific structural function: psychoanalytic practice, as a doing of pure speech, approaches the act through the 'signifier in act', and the analyst must occupy this corner of the barred subject supposed to know precisely by absenting himself from the doing—a structural self-effacement that risks collapsing into a 'hypochondriacal jouissance' if theorised away as mere equidistance from all schools.

     this doing, despite its futile character, I am speaking about psychoanalysis, has perhaps a greater chance than any other of allowing us access to enjoyment

477. #477

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex functions as a mythical frame that psychoanalysis uses to contain and regulate the irreducible gap between male and female jouissance, while the 'o-object' (objet petit a) — not castration itself — is the structural operator through which subjectification of sex is accomplished, with castration being merely the elegant sign of a remaining outside jouissance that psychoanalysis cannot access.

     this distance forever established between the two enjoyments

478. #478

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.50

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a triangular mapping of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real as cardinal poles to locate the Barred Subject, the unary stroke (first Identification), and the objet petit a, arguing that Truth belongs to the Other/Symbolic, Jouissance to the Real, and Knowledge to the Imaginary—positioning the analyst in the void between them. He then reads Winnicott's transitional object as an inadvertent, incomplete articulation of the objet petit a, showing how object-relations theory approaches but fails to theorize the subject commanded by that object.

     not 'in the beginning is dissatisfaction', which means nothing. It is not that the living individual chases after satisfaction that is important, it is that there is a status of enjoyment (jouissance) which is dissatisfaction.

479. #479

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.74

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is theorized as the analyst's acceptance of the transference structured around the Subject Supposed to Know, which is constitutively doomed to 'désêtre' — a fall into the Objet petit a — while the end of analysis realizes the subject precisely as lack, culminating in castration as the subjective experience of the absence of unifying jouissance.

     the subject realises that he does not have, that he does not have the organ of what I would call unique, unary, unifying enjoyment (jouissance). It is a matter, properly, of what makes enjoyment one in the conjunction of subjects of opposite sex.

480. #480

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.77

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act constitutes a structural "tipping over" of the completed analysis: the analysand who has realized himself in castration rotates into the position of the analyst, who must embody the désêtre of the Subject Supposed to Know and offer himself as the little o-object — thus the logic of alienation that initiates analysis is preserved and repeated at a new level, renewing the question of the status of every act.

     it is as renouncing enjoyment in a decisive act, in order to make himself the subject of death that the master is established

481. #481

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.119

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex functions as a mythical framework that contains and limits psychoanalytic operations rather than explaining masculine enjoyment, and that the structural logic of the analytic act culminates in the relation $◇a — where castration is the sign of an irreducible gap between male and feminine enjoyment that psychoanalysis cannot close.

     enjoyment, for its part, remains outside. We do not know a single word more about what is involved in feminine enjoyment.

482. #482

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.50

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian primary process introduces jouissance as a constitutive dissatisfaction—not reducible to general psychology's satisfaction-seeking—and then maps the three registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) onto a topological diagram, locating Truth at the Other/Symbolic pole, Jouissance at the Real pole, and Knowledge as an imaginary idealisation, with the barred Subject, the unary stroke (I), and objet petit a as the three projected points, using Winnicott's transitional object as a clinical illustration that points toward—but stops short of—the full concept of the objet petit a as the subject's first object of enjoyment.

     not 'in the beginning is dissatisfaction', which means nothing. It is not that the living individual chases after satisfaction that is important, it is that there is a status of enjoyment *(jouissance)* which is dissatisfaction.

483. #483

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Pavlovian conditioned reflex as a structural illustration to argue that the signifier's operation always implies the presence of a subject, while simultaneously distinguishing knowledge-as-savoir from mere representation (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz), thereby grounding the psychoanalytic act in a logic of the signifier rather than in organo-dynamic or idealist models.

     really detached from any object of eventual fruition, fruition meaning enjoyment (jouissance). I did not mean to say enjoyment

484. #484

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

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

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

     the recourse of the woman, in what is involved in the embarrassment that the exercise of her enjoyment leaves her in her relation to what is involved in the act.

485. #485

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "stupidity" (la connerie) as a structural, quasi-intransitive function irreducible to a mere insult, arguing that the psychoanalytic act must grapple with the overlap between truth and stupidity—specifically, that the sexual act (marked by an inherent inappropriateness for enjoyment) renders truth irreducibly compromised, which is the very dimension the psychoanalytic act operates within.

     the organ which gives, as I might say, its category to the attribute in question, is precisely marked by what I would call a particular inappropriateness for enjoyment.

486. #486

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar summary argues that the psychoanalytic act—the transition from analysand to analyst—is constituted by and through the objet petit a, such that it enacts a 'subjective dismissal' (destitution of the subject supposed to know) and grounds a new ethics of psychoanalysis organized around the structural negativity of the sexual relation and jouissance rather than norms or sublimation.

     enjoyment (jouissance), privileged in that it commands the sexual relationship, is offered by a forbidden act, but that this is to mask the fact that this relationship is only established by not being verifiable

487. #487

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.75

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is defined as the analyst's acceptance of supporting the transference — specifically, sustaining the function of the Subject Supposed to Know while knowing it is destined to fall — such that the analytic process culminates not in knowledge but in castration as subjective experience: the subject's realisation of itself exclusively as lack, figured by (-φ) and the incommensurability of Objet petit a to 1.

     the subject realises that he does not have, that he does not have the organ of what I would call unique, unary, unifying enjoyment (jouissance). It is a matter, properly, of what makes enjoyment one in the conjunction of subjects of opposite sex.

488. #488

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends the strategic obscurity of his texts as a protection against ideological capture, while articulating that the psychoanalytic act is determined by its relation to jouissance (from which it must simultaneously protect itself), and advancing the lemma that "there is no transference of transference" as a key formula distinguishing the psychoanalytic act from ordinary clinical transference.

     to establish what determines it from enjoyment and the ways at the same time it must protect itself from it

489. #489

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.184

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

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

     one of the heads of this insurrection… 'Tell us. my friend, from the point that you are at. what might you expect from psychoanalysts?'… psychoanalysts ought to expect something from the insurrection

490. #490

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.181

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan intervenes in the May 1968 context to argue that what is at stake in the student insurrection is not mere disorder but a structural phenomenon in which the relations between desire and knowledge are put in question — a terrain that psychoanalysts are uniquely positioned to address but consistently fail to occupy.

     the effect of the shoulder-to-shoulder - of those who are batonned while singing the Internationale - as surface: those who are in this field allow themselves to be carried along by it with the feeling of absolute community.

491. #491

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.93

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the gap between 'the act' and 'the doing' is the central problem of psychoanalytic practice, distinguishing the analyst's peculiar position—a doing of pure speech in which the subject absents itself so the signifier may operate—from mere activity, and linking this to the question of the Subject Supposed to Know, the logic of quantifiers, and the impossibility of meta-language.

     this doing, despite its futile character, I am speaking about psychoanalysis, has perhaps a greater chance than any other of allowing us access to enjoyment.

492. #492

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968**

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

     The sense of what is involved in castration is balanced with that of enjoyment.

493. #493

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.237

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a semi-autobiographical digression on surrealism, Sartre, and student militancy to frame a critique of ideology-critique as self-defeating repetition, then pivots to position sublimation—especially courtly love—as the more productive terrain before gesturing toward the drive-level account of sublimation (the bell/grelot figure) and the broader subversion of the function of knowledge that psychoanalysis enables.

     there have always been, naturally, dominating or enjoying classes, or the two, and that they had their philosophers.

494. #494

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.220

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual relationship cannot be grasped through biological, logical, or identificatory schemas (active/passive, male/female, +/−), and that Freudian logic ultimately reduces sex to the formal mark of castration as constitutive lack; this requires distinguishing the Other (as terrain cleared of enjoyment, site of the unconscious structured like a language) from Das Ding (the intolerable imminence of jouissance/the neighbour), and poses the central question: is the Woman the locus of desire (the Other) or the locus of enjoyment (the Thing)?

     The neighbour, is the intolerable imminence of enjoyment. The Other is only its cleared out terreplein.

495. #495

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

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

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

     enjoyment is quite real. The fact is that in the system of the subject, it is nowhere symbolised, nor can it be symbolised.

496. #496

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.341

     Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that neurosis (hysteria and obsession) stages the fundamental aporia between knowledge and enjoyment, and that the neurotic's testimony—not therapeutic benefit—is what gives psychoanalysis its historical and theoretical stakes, particularly within capitalism's structuring of enjoyment.

     the dimension of community, the relationships of knowledge to enjoyment, are not the same as they were, for example, in ancient times

497. #497

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan displaces the classical inside/outside opposition—via commodity, money, Berkeley's idealism, and Aristotle's optics—to argue that the scopic field is structured not by a synthesising subject in a darkroom but by the objet petit a as lack/stain, a third term missing from both ancient and modern accounts of vision.

     it is only when they are inside that they are reduced to their exchange value… The use value on the inside, where one might expect it, is precisely prohibited

498. #498

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.273

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of desire—grounded in the impossibility of the sexual relation and the barrier jouissance poses to Other jouissance—is homologous to formal logical flaws (the undecidable, Gödelian incompleteness), and that psychoanalytic stagnation consists in analysts becoming hypnotized by the patient's demand rather than dissolving the neurotic knot at its structural root.

     The pleasure principle, is this barrier to enjoyment and nothing else.

499. #499

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the May 1968 events as a collective manifestation of the "strike of truth" — the symptomatic eruption of surplus-jouissance (Mehrlust) from within a social order that commodifies knowledge — and uses this to argue that no discourse can fully articulate truth, making the discourse of psychoanalysis structurally distinct from the emerging market of knowledge in the University.

     The way in which each one suffers in his relationship to enjoyment in so far as he does not insert himself into it only through the function of surplus enjoying

500. #500

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.334

     Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment (jouissance) is structurally excluded from the symbolic system of knowledge, yet is thereby realised as the Real; this exclusion—figured through the phallic signifier—organises all clinical structures (neurosis/psychosis), and the triad of enjoyment, the Other as locus of knowledge, and the objet petit a provides the proper framework for understanding both infantile biography and the analytic encounter.

     enjoyment is excluded, the circle is closed. This exclusion is only stated from the system itself in so far as it is the symbolic. Now, it is through this that it is affirmed as real

501. #501

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.143

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > Seminar **9:** Wednesday **29** January **1969**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipus complex establishes the Law by constituting enjoyment-of-the-mother as primordially forbidden, and that the Name of the Father - whose authority rests on the irreducible unknowability of biological paternity - is the purely symbolic pivot around which subjectivity and the transmission of castration turn.

     To enjoy the mother is forbidden, we are told, and this does not go far enough. What has consequences is the fact that to enjoy the mother is forbidden. Nothing is organised except from this first statement.

502. #502

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.106

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 January 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Jouissance is irreducible to the pleasure principle and is topologically structured as the subject's own topology; he then deploys this against Hegel's Master/Slave Dialectic (where the master renounces enjoyment from the start) and Pascal's Wager (where Surplus-jouissance, not enjoyment itself, is what is actually at stake in the bet).

     with our experience, psychoanalytic experience, enjoyment, if you will allow me this to abbreviate, is coloured. There is a whole background, of course, to this reference.

503. #503

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.360

     Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around failure: the objet petit a emerges as a substitute for the gap left by castration (the impasse of the sexual relationship), the analyst incarnates the 'subject supposed to know' only to evacuate the o-object at analysis's end, and transference is properly defined not through repetition alone but through its structural relation to the subject supposed to know as the illusory One of the Other—while the analyst occupies the paradoxical position of a scapegoat who bears the o-object so the subject can be reprieved from it.

     what is articulated behind it, in terms of a knot of enjoyment at the origin of all knowledge.

504. #504

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 November 1968**

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

     Knowledge, at the extreme point, is what we call the price. The price of what? It is clear, the price of the renunciation of enjoyment.

505. #505

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.206

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that jouissance functions as an absolute Real, and that it is hysteria—not androcentric theory—that logically unveils the structure of desire as lack-of-the-One; the drive already implies knowledge, but this knowledge is marked by a constitutive lie (proton pseudos), forcing the displacement from sign to signifier as the properly psychoanalytic move beyond metaphysics.

     Enjoyment is here an absolute, it is the real, and in the way that I have defined it as what always returns to the same place.

506. #506

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

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

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

     what is characteristic of the traumatic scene, that the body is glimpsed there as separated from enjoyment. The function of the other is incarnated here. It is this body perceived as separated from enjoyment.

507. #507

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.32

     Am I making myself understood?

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

     implying the transformation of the relationship of knowledge to this enigmatic foundation of enjoyment

508. #508

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.199

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic knowledge is constitutively related to—yet irreducible to—sexual knowledge: the drives are "montages" oriented toward satisfaction within a horizon that is the sexual, but the sexual act itself does not exist in any structural sense, and analytic knowledge is not a technique but a mode of "knowing how to be with it" (savoir y être) that reveals how one is always already in the sexual field without knowing it—a dupery that benefits no one and implicates all fields of knowledge.

     How can we define this satisfaction? We have to believe that there must here be something, all the same, that is not working because what we spend our time on, with regard to these montages, is dismantling them.

509. #509

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the structural homology between Marx's surplus value and his own concept of surplus-jouissance (plus de jouir), arguing that the o-object (objet petit a) is produced as a remainder/loss at the very point where the subject is constituted by the inter-signifier relation — a loss strictly correlative to the renunciation of enjoyment under the effect of discourse.

     No newer than labour was in the production of merchandise, is the renunciation of enjoyment (jouissance), whose relation to labour I do not have to define any further.

510. #510

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.248

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the perverse drives (scoptophilic, sadomasochistic) are fundamentally asymmetrical and structured around the topology of the Objet petit a: each drive operates not as a return of its counterpart but as a supplement to the Other, aimed at producing or evacuating the jouissance of the Other rather than of the subject—a logic that makes the pervert a "defender of the faith" of the Other's jouissance.

     It is the enjoyment of the Other that the exhibitionist watches over... the exhibitionist for his part is interested in that. It is in that way that he is a defender of the faith.

511. #511

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.125

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the mathematical proportion I/o = 1+o (the golden ratio / Fibonacci series) and Pascal's wager to argue that the Objet petit a (o) is the structural measure of loss in relation to the Other, and that surplus-jouissance (masochistic enjoyment) is the analogical position by which the subject takes on the role of the waste-product (o) in order to constitute the Other as a complete field — thus linking the formalization of desire's cause to the topology of the Other.

     as regards the genesis of this Other, if it is true that we can distinguish it from the 1 before the 1, namely enjoyment, you see that by having affirmed the 1 + o... it is about o in its relation to 1, namely, about this lack that we have received from the Other.

512. #512

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 January 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's wager and its renunciation of pleasures as a pivot to historicize the displacement from hedonistic ethics (grounded in a natural sovereign good) to modern capitalist morality, arguing that Freud's pleasure principle operates not as the ancient hedone but as a subterranean regulatory mechanism — a tempering force in the underground — which reframes how psychoanalysis must situate pleasure and the objet petit a.

     It is the very principle on which there is installed a certain morality that one can qualify as modern morality.

513. #513

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969**

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

     the exclusion of enjoyment...it is a slave, and in the same way people said that up to now that one could reproach psychoanalysis for overlooking the conditions in which man is subjected to the social

514. #514

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.308

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the anaclitic relation is structurally grounded in the operation of objet petit a as a masking of the Other, that perversion consists in returning o to the big Other, and that phobia reveals the true function of anxiety-objects: the substitution of a frightening signifier for the object of anxiety, marking the passage from the imaginary (narcissism) to the Symbolic field.

     moves about without ever leaving an arena that is well defined by the fact that it prohibits a properly central region which is that of enjoyment

515. #515

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.127

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden ratio (φ, written 'o') and the Fibonacci series to demonstrate the structural reciprocity between the divided subject and objet petit a, arguing that the 'I' of enjoyment is necessarily excluded from any totalised field of knowledge, and that the question of subjective existence must be posed impersonally — 'does it exist?' rather than 'I exist'.

     precisely in this measure and in the very measure of its perfection the 'I' of enjoyment remains completely excluded

516. #516

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.114

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

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

     enjoyment is aimed at in an effort of rediscoveries and that it can only be so by being recognised by the effect of the mark, that this mark itself introduces into it a blemish from which this loss results.

517. #517

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the truth "speaks I" (rather than being spoken by a subject), and formalises this through the ordered pair of signifiers to show that the subject is constituted as infinite repetition within—and thus excluded from—absolute knowledge; this logical structure grounds both the analytic rule of free association and the link between the subject supposed to know, transference, and objet petit a.

     the subject, with respect to what refers it to some fall of enjoyment, can only be manifested as repetition

518. #518

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.40

     Am I making myself understood?

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

     it is in so far precisely as each of the interlocutors feels himself, without knowing it, at the passage of this gentle fun of 'famillionaireness', involved as an employee… that this causes laughter.

519. #519

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > Seminar **9:** Wednesday **29** January **1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-reads Pascal's wager through the lens of the objet petit a as the real stake, arguing that the asymmetry of the wager only becomes legible once the 'falling effect' of the signifying conjunction — which produces the divided subject and surplus-jouissance — is distinguished from the fiction of a neutral zero; the wager thus becomes a figure for the subject's irreducible implication in the desire of the Other.

     its tailing effect at the level of enjoyment you fail to recognise the true nature of the o-object

520. #520

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.363

     Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is distinguished from masochistic practice by a double sense of 'faire le maître': the analysand produces/makes the analyst through the act, while the analyst merely plays/pretends at mastery—yet the analyst's genuine function is to bring the full weight of the objet petit a into play, not to master the operation. This distinction grounds a further claim that for the neurotic, knowledge is the enjoyment of the subject supposed to know, which is precisely why the neurotic cannot sublimate.

     But even though the masochist fails he enjoys it all the same... For the neurotic, knowledge is the enjoyment of the subject supposed to know.

521. #521

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.380

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

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

     the woman - I did not say the hysteric, I said the woman because the hysteric, as the obsessional earlier does, is only explained by reason of these references - risks, wagers this enjoyment which everyone knows is for the woman inaugural and existing.

522. #522

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.224

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

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

     as edge enjoyment, how was it able to be called to the equivalence of sexual enjoyment?... If there were not the configuration of the vacuole, of the hole proper to enjoyment

523. #523

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan reworks Pascal's wager through the mathematical logic of repetition and the genesis of objet petit a (o), arguing that the wagering subject's very existence is constituted by the act of inscription/writing rather than by philosophical conceptualization, and that the zero in Pascal's matrix marks not a neutral outcome but the constitutive loss of the bet and the possibility of refusing to play — a structure homologous to the entry of life into the symbolic game of repetition.

     it is only posited in order to attempt the repetition of, to rediscover enjoyment in so far as it has already fled.

524. #524

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.242

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

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

     this price is something it receives from a privileged relationship of value to what in my discourse I isolate and distinguish as enjoyment. Enjoyment being this term established only by its evacuation from the field of the Other

525. #525

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) to ground the constitution of fantasy as the point where subject and object (objet a) achieve a non-reducible consistency, arguing that truth has no guarantee in the Other but only its correlate in the fabricated o-object, while perversion names the site where surplus-jouissance is unveiled in naked form.

     Give her what you do not have, because what can unite you to her, is only enjoyment

526. #526

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 November 1968** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 27 November 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds surplus-jouissance as a structural (not merely analogical) homologue to Marxist surplus value, with jouissance itself designated as the substance of psychoanalytic discourse — the move establishes jouissance as a formal, topological concept rather than a formless background.

     It is only too obvious that enjoyment is of course the substance of everything we speak about in psychoanalysis.

527. #527

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.385

     Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the subject's constitution through the fantasy ($◇a) and the Four Discourses schema, arguing that knowledge born from the slave serves the master, that the objet petit a as surplus-jouissance is the structural stake in the Master/Slave dialectic, and that the Discourse of the University is the hommelle (alma mater) whose subjection effects on students mirror the hysteric's truth-telling function—making the political question of revolution inseparable from the psychoanalytic question of knowledge and the subject.

     it is this enigmatic enjoyment attested to by the fact that we know nothing about it except the following... nothing is known about it except the fact that it wants another enjoyment.

528. #528

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.323

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the phallus functions as the "missing signifier" of the sexual relation precisely because sexual jouissance is outside the system of the subject — there is no subject of sexual enjoyment — and this impossibility is demonstrated by the untraceable, non-coupled nature of the male/female distinction at the level of the signifier.

     the one that brings into play what, no doubt, is placed at its origin, namely, enjoyment

529. #529

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.134

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > Seminar **9:** Wednesday **29** January **1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fibonacci series and the golden ratio (φ/o) to demonstrate that the subject's division is irremediable: the relation between the subject of enjoyment and the subject constituted by the unary trait (1) can never collapse into self-identity (Hegelian Selbstbewusstsein), because the o (objet petit a as surplus-jouissance) is always already an effect of the inaugural mark and persists as an irreducible remainder across infinite repetition.

     What is involved in the absolute subject of enjoyment and the subject that is generated from this 1 that marks it, namely, the point of origin of identification.

530. #530

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.211

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation, as Freud formulates it, is a mode of drive satisfaction that operates *with* the drive (mit dem Trieb) rather than through repression, and that its satisfaction is achieved precisely by being goal-inhibited (zielgehemmt) — eliding the sexual goal while still satisfying the drive. This pivot is used to distinguish sublimation structurally from repression and to set up the question of what exactly is satisfied when the drive bypasses its sexual goal. The passage also stages a critical dialogue with Deleuze's appropriation of Lacanian concepts, particularly around the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.

     Sublimation to reach Enjoyment with the drive / The representative of representation (On the board)

531. #531

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.47

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Hysteric underlies both philosophical discourse (Hegel as "the most sublime of hysterics") and analytic experience, and that the structure of psychoanalytic interpretation operates through a logic of the "half-said" — figured as either a riddle (stating without statement) or a quotation (statement invoking authorial authority) — with the analyst functioning as Objet petit a and cause of desire rather than Subject Supposed to Know.

     Absolute knowledge would be purely and simply the abolition of this term Anyone who closely studies the text of the Phenomenology can have no doubt about it... its dialectic with enjoyment

532. #532

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.12

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK XVII** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 26 November 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the four discourses as a structural apparatus, anchoring the Discourse of the Master in the S1→S2 relation and grounding this structure in the Freudian articulation of the signifier, jouissance, and surplus-jouissance, while aligning the slave's knowledge (S2) with the philosophical operation of extracting know-how from the slave as the inaugural move of philosophy itself.

     There is a primitive relationship between knowledge and enjoyment, and it is here that there is inserted what emerges when the apparatus of the signifier appears.

533. #533

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the transition from the ancient Master's discourse to modern capitalism/bureaucracy involves a displacement of knowledge (S2) into the dominant position, producing a new tyranny that occludes truth; and that psychoanalytic experience operates by introducing the Hysteric's discourse as a structural condition ("hystericisation") that exposes the non-self-knowing character of unconscious knowledge and the impossibility of sexual rapport.

     The imaginary idea of the whole as given by the body, based on the good form of satisfaction, on what at the limit is a sphere, has always been used in politics, and is part of political preaching.

534. #534

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.212

     Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970 > Seminar 12: Wednesday 13 May 1970

     Theoretical move: In this informal Q&A transcription, Lacan defends the centrality of affect in his work by distinguishing his translation of Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz from the 'ideational representative' reading, argues that repression displaces rather than suppresses affect, and retrospectively links the Discourse of the Master to his 1962 Seminar on Anxiety while positioning Kierkegaard as a historical moment in the conceptualization of anxiety within an economy of jouissance.

     if I put all this emphasis on anxiety in the economy, because what is at stake is an economy of enjoyment

535. #535

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     **ANALYTICON** > **X:** You mean a relative deafness.

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that revolutionary aspiration inevitably collapses back into the Discourse of the Master, and that what dominates any society is "the practice of language" — a claim grounded in psychoanalytic evidence — while simultaneously accusing the student militants of unconsciously serving the very regime they oppose by performing enjoyment for it.

     The regime is showing you off. It says: 'Look at them enjoying themselves!'

536. #536

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.232

     X: *[On revolutionaries and the proletariat]* > Seminar 13: Wednesday 20 May 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fibonacci series and its limiting proportion (the golden number) as a mathematical formalization of the structure of affect, cause, and the repetition of the unary trait, arguing that science—grounded in symbolic/combinatorial proof rather than perception—produces an "unsubstance" that dissolves the male/female forming principles, and that each subject is ultimately determined as objet petit a, the cause of desire.

     it is in what is involved in unformed enjoyment, precisely without any form, that we can find the place in the operçoit in which science comes to be constructed.

537. #537

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the 'no smoke without fire' sign-logic to argue that the signifier (smoke/sign) does not point to a supreme subject-guarantor behind appearances, but rather to the materialist productivity of surplus-jouissance; he then defends his independent deployment of metaphor and metonymy against claims of mere Jakobsonian borrowing, insisting he was saying something categorically different.

     it required the phallic joy, the primitive urination with which man, says psychoanalysis, replies to fire

538. #538

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a dialogue with biblical scholar Caquot about Sellin's Moses to argue that Freud's Oedipus complex is a 'dream' requiring interpretation—a displacement-effect that short-circuits the real father's function (castration) by substituting the imaginary father's prohibition of enjoyment, while positioning the analyst's neutrality against the passionate 'fierce ignorance' of Yahweh as the paradoxical figure of the discourse of the Master.

     the imaginary father, namely, the prohibition of enjoyment

539. #539

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that phallic enjoyment is structurally excluded from the social-libidinal economy, and that this exclusion—not biological sexuality—is what Freudian discourse is fundamentally about; the repetition compulsion discovered in *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* is reread as the commemoration of an irruption of jouissance, while surplus-jouissance is positioned as the substitute system that operates in place of prohibited phallic enjoyment.

     this is what Freud discovered precisely around 1920...what we are dealing with in the exploration of the unconscious, is repetition...a trait in so far as it commemorates an irruption of enjoyment.

540. #540

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.254

     **ANALYTICON** > Seminar 14: Wednesday 10 June 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan draws a structural homology between Freud's three 'impossible professions' (governing, educating, analysing) and his own Four Discourses, arguing that the shift from the Discourse of the Master to its capitalist-University variant constitutes the key theoretical lens for understanding contemporary student unrest, while warning that "speaking out" can function as "dead meat" — mere signifier without discourse — unless grounded in proper discursive analysis.

     Dead meat is irresistible to them, they adore it.

541. #541

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     Seminar 8: Wednesday 11 March 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian schema of "murder of the father – enjoyment of the mother" is insufficient because it elides the tragic dimension of the Oedipus myth; beyond the axes of desire and jouissance, truth must be introduced as a third, irreducible dimension. He reinforces this by contrasting the paternal metaphor (his own formalization) with Freud's literal-historical reading in Totem and Taboo, and by reading Hosea as evidence that the prophetic tradition concerns a relation to Truth rather than to enjoyment.

     murder of the father and enjoyment of the mother - to be understood in the objective and subjective sense, you enjoy the mother and the mother enjoys, there is a link.

542. #542

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logic of material implication and the 'A child is being beaten' phantasy to argue that truth cannot be isolated as an attribute of propositional knowledge, that the subject is constitutively divided by jouissance, and that University discourse inevitably reinstates the transcendental I as master-signifier, whereas analytic discourse must attend to the truth that only emerges from the effects of language including the unconscious.

     he does receive his own message in an inverted form - that means here, his own enjoyment in the form of the enjoyment of the Other

543. #543

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     Seminar 8: Wednesday 11 March 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) is the structural analogue of Marxian surplus value within the Discourse of the Master, and that the Discourse of the Analyst uniquely situates knowledge in the place of truth — a position occupied by myth and governed by the law of half-saying — thereby reframing the Oedipus complex as myth rather than clinical universal.

     The barrier that it is immediately possible for us to name, in the discourse of the Master is enjoyment, quite simply in so far as it is prohibited, fundamentally prohibited.

544. #544

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.98

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Master structurally generates surplus-jouissance as the extracted 'tithe' from the slave's knowledge, and that Marx's critique of surplus value is the memorial of this prior extraction of enjoyment — a process whose secret lies in knowledge itself, not in labour, thereby subverting Hegel's claim that labour culminates in Absolute Knowledge.

     there is no discourse, and not just analytic, except about enjoyment, at least when one expects from it the work of the truth.

545. #545

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that repetition—rooted in the pursuit of enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle—necessarily produces a loss (entropy), and it is precisely at the site of this lost enjoyment that the lost object (objet petit a) and knowledge as a formal apparatus of enjoyment originate; the unary trait is redeployed from Freud as the minimal mark that simultaneously founds the signifier and introduces surplus-jouissance.

     It is here that the function of the lost object takes its origin in the Freudian discourse... in repetition itself, there is a waste of enjoyment.

546. #546

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     *[A porter appears]*

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

     it is only from enjoyment, and not along any other paths that there is established the division by which narcissism is distinguished from a relation to the object.

547. #547

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970 > (12) OK, let's go and after that we'll leave it.

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of the unconscious is analogous to mathematical logic (Gödel-type incompleteness), where the "false" (falsus) is causally operative in the production of being through interpretation — and that Freud's unique insight into this topology was sustained by a Jewish hermeneutic tradition (the Midrash) of reading the letter literally, rather than by any natural truth.

     the true of nature can be summed up in the enjoyment that allows the true of texture.

548. #548

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.111

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Dora case to demonstrate the structural logic of the Discourse of the Hysteric: the hysteric maintains an alienated relation to the master-signifier (the idealised father) precisely by refusing to surrender knowledge and by orienting desire around the Other's enjoyment rather than her own, thereby unmasking the master's function while remaining in solidarity with it.

     whereas the insertion into enjoyment is the doing of knowledge... Under the Other, it is the one where loss is produced, the loss of enjoyment from which we extract the function of surplus enjoying.

549. #549

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     X: *[On revolutionaries and the proletariat]* > X: *Where then do you place the proletarian?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions the proletarian structurally in the place of the big Other—the place where knowledge no longer carries weight—arguing that proletarian exploitation is not merely economic but constitutes a stripping of the function of knowledge, and raises the question of whether manual know-how can still function as a subversive force in a world dominated by objectified science.

     can know-how at the level of manual work carry enough weight to be a subversive factor?

550. #550

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 18 March 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets the Freudian myth of the dead father (Totem and Taboo, Oedipus) to argue that the murder/death of the father does not liberate but rather founds the prohibition on jouissance; the structural operator is the equivalence between the dead father and jouissance, and it is castration—transmitted from father to son—rather than death per se that is the true key to the master's position and to succession.

     the equivalence is therefore established in Freudian terms, between the dead father and enjoyment. It is he who keeps it in reserve, as I might say.

551. #551

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     **ANALYTICON** > Seminar 14: Wednesday 10 June 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic as a foil to show that the Master Signifier is constitutively tied to the impossibility of mastery, and that the Real—defined as the impossible—cannot be reached through truth alone; this structural impossibility is what the discourse of the master conceals and what analytic discourse uniquely allows us to articulate.

     the slave, by the term of enjoyment, which firstly he had not wished to renounce and, secondly, he really wanted, because he substituted one for the other worth

552. #552

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.84

     *[A porter appears]*

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

     It is we who are used by it. Language uses us, and that is how it enjoys itself.

553. #553

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 17 June 1970

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth operates not as an open revelation but as a hidden debt that conditions discourse, and that the master signifier emerges not from a heroic struggle for prestige but from something as contingent and shameful as shame itself—a move that reframes the Four Discourses as radical structural functions rather than a deterministic model of historical progression.

     the production of shame. That can be translated - it is impudence (impudence).

554. #554

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK XVII** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 26 November 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XVII by introducing the Four Discourses as a formal apparatus derived from a quarter-turn operation on the algebraic chain (S1, S2, $, a), and articulates the foundational claim that 'knowledge is the enjoyment of the Other', linking repetition, the lost object, and the death drive to the structural limits of the subject within discourse.

     Repetition has a certain relationship with the limit of this subject and this knowledge, which is called enjoyment (jouissance). This is why it is a logical articulation that is at stake in the formula that 'knowledge is the enjoyment of the Other'.

555. #555

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     **ANALYTICON** > Seminar 14: Wednesday 10 June 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the impossibility structuring each of the Four Discourses is grounded in the problem of surplus-jouissance: ancient thought (Aristotle, Stoics) could not account for it, Hegel re-staged it, Marx made it calculable as surplus-value thereby stabilising the Master Signifier, while the University discourse symptomatically produces the student as objet petit a — miscarriage of the cause of desire. The key to any revolutionary step lies not in the subject but in questioning what enjoyment is, a question made possible only by the entry of the signifier and its mark of death.

     The one I have not named is the unnameable one because it is upon its prohibition that the entire structure is founded - namely enjoyment.

556. #556

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.150

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 18 March 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the Real Father as a structural-logical operator defined by impossibility: as the agent (not the performer) of castration, the Real Father is constitutively an effect of language, not a psychological or empirical figure, and the impossibility he embodies is precisely what generates the master signifier through the repetitive failure of demand, producing surplus-jouissance as loss.

     the dead father is enjoyment presents itself to us like the sign of the impossible itself.

557. #557

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     X: *[On revolutionaries and the proletariat]* > Seminar 13: Wednesday 20 May 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic discourse reveals a single foundational affect—the subject's capture as object in discourse—and that this, rather than dialectical ontology, is the proper frame for rereading the Cartesian cogito, the Master Signifier, castration, and the impossibility of the sexual relation, all grounded in the unary trait as language's inaugural effect.

     what the woman has to deal with, assuming that we are able to speak about it, is her own enjoyment which is represented somewhere by an omnipotence of man, which is precisely that through which man, articulating himself, articulating himself as master, finds himself lacking.

558. #558

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 18 March 1970

     Theoretical move: Castration is redefined as the real operation produced by the impact of the signifier on the sexual relationship — not a fantasy — and this reframing allows Lacan to articulate how jouissance separates the master-signifier from knowledge-as-truth, completing the structural account of the Discourse of the Analyst and grounding the hysteric's desire as the historical source of Freud's master-signifiers.

     The real mainspring is the following - enjoyment separates the master-signifier, in so far as one would like to attribute to the father, knowledge qua truth.

559. #559

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.168

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure is the effect of language already operative in reality—not a representational function of any subject—and uses this to demarcate psychoanalysis from linguistics and ethnology: neither can master the unconscious because psychoanalysis operates within a particular tongue where there is no metalanguage, the signifier represents a subject (not another signifier), and sexual non-relation is the irreducible structural remainder that myth and linguistics cannot formulate.

     the upper waters from their enjoyment, charged with a lightening that redistributes body and flesh... the instruments of enjoyment, necklaces, goblets, arms: sub-members more to enumerate enjoyment than to make it enter into the body

560. #560

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.107

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

     Theoretical move: The Discourse of the Master is identified as the structural inverse of the Analytic Discourse (symmetry with respect to a point, not a line or plane), and the Master Signifier is shown to determine castration by transmitting itself toward the means of enjoyment (knowledge); this move simultaneously distinguishes the unconscious as a disjointed, mythical knowledge irreducible to scientific discourse.

     the one who wanted to keep it and its access to enjoyment, in other words, the slave… the master signifier, not only induces, but determines castration… the means, of enjoyment which are those described as knowledge

561. #561

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.17

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK XVII** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 26 November 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that philosophy's historical function is the betrayal and expropriation of the slave's knowledge (*episteme*) in order to transmute it into the Master's knowledge, and that it is only by breaking from this wrongly-acquired knowledge — through Descartes's extraction of the subject — that modern science is born; moreover, the desire to know is radically distinct from knowledge itself, and it is the hysteric's discourse, not the Master's will, that actually leads to knowledge.

     What is usually said is that enjoyment is the privilege of the Master. What is interesting on the contrary, as everyone knows, is what belies this.

562. #562

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     *[A porter appears]*

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

     A curious thing non-sense can make up the weight. That gets at your gut.

563. #563

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.172

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > - We can't hear you!

     Theoretical move: Lacan drives a wedge between the Oedipus myth (dictated by the hysteric's dissatisfaction, privileging law over enjoyment) and *Totem and Taboo* (an obsessional-neurotic construction that places enjoyment at the origin, then law), arguing that the psychoanalytic discourse must move beyond mythic interpretation toward a more rigorous combinatorial of desire's causation.

     Enjoyment is promoted by Freud to the rank of an absolute which brings back to the care of the man... of the Father of the primitive horde... the totality of what 'femininely' can be subject to enjoyment.

564. #564

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

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

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

     The woman is in a position, with respect to sexual enjoyment, to punctuate the equivalence of enjoyment and the semblance.

565. #565

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

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

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

     at this level of functions determined by a certain discourse, I can establish the equivalence that writing is enjoyment (l'écrit, c'est la jouissance).

566. #566

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.67

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

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

     There is an enjoyment which constitutes in this relationship, different from the sexual relationship, what, what we will call its condition of truth.

567. #567

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971** > *Lituraterre*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the neologism *lituraterre/litturaterrir* to theorise writing as furrowing (not metaphor), arguing that the Japanese writing system — where a character can be read in two distinct pronunciations — exemplifies how the letter, distinct from the sign, supports the signifier and divides the subject between writing-register and speech-register; this division exposes that there is no sexual relationship, only an "impossible 'it is written.'"

     nothing is more distinct from the void hollowed out by writing than the semblance. First of all by the fact that it is the first of my bowls that are always ready to give enjoyment a welcome, or at least to invoke it by its artifice.

568. #568

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.17

     **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Freud's pleasure-principle economy as a "hyper-hedonism" in which jouissance is structurally produced by discourse rather than being a natural fact, and introduces surplus-jouissance as the impossible-real effect that the emerging discourse of the unconscious names but cannot simply realise.

     what is conceived as enjoyment not involving in itself, in principle, any other limit than this lower tangential point

569. #569

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > - We can't hear you!

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the hysteric's desire—structurally unsatisfied because it emphasises the invariance of the unknown—functions as a formal schema for the logic of the Not-all (pas-toute), such that 'a woman' can only emerge by sliding beyond the hysteric's phallic semblance; simultaneously, Lacan grounds the unconscious-structured-like-a-language thesis in the irreducible division between jouissance and semblance, and links truth to half-saying rather than full articulation.

     the irremediable division between enjoyment and the semblance. The truth is to enjoy being a semblance

570. #570

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.31

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that there is no sexual relationship because sexuality at the level of discourse is constituted as semblance, with surplus-jouissance (not biology) as its operative term; the phallus functions as the signifier of sexual enjoyment precisely insofar as it is identical with the Name of the Father, and the Oedipus myth is the discourse's necessary fiction for designating the real of an impossible enjoyment.

     surplus enjoying is only normalised from a relationship that one establishes to sexual enjoyment, except for the fact that this enjoyment, this sexual enjoyment is only formulated, is only articulated from the phallus

571. #571

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.106

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the analysis of Poe's "The Purloined Letter" to argue that the circulation of the letter (as a structural object) produces castration effects on all subjects who handle it, and that writing—as a material, literal support—exceeds both intuition and the tetrahedric structure of the four discourses, ultimately framing the unreadable as the condition of meaning in psychoanalysis, particularly through the written myth of the Oedipus complex.

     what one can say is that Dupin enjoys (jouit). So then, here is the question... whether the narrator and the one who writes are the same thing?

572. #572

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.155

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > - We can't hear you!

     Theoretical move: Language has only one Bedeutung — the phallus — because it is constituted from the impossibility of symbolising the sexual relationship; writing provides the "bone" that jouissance lacks, and the semblance that structures discourse is irreducibly phallic, meaning sexual enjoyment forever remains barred from the field of truth.

     it can only say the semblance about enjoyment, and it wins over sexual enjoyment on every occasion.

573. #573

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.110

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexual jouissance cannot be written (inscribed in the symbolic), and that this unwriteability is the structural condition from which both the Oedipus complex and the formulas of sexuation derive — specifically: "the woman" does not exist because the universal affirmative ("all women") is impossible, while the prohibition on jouissance (pleasure principle as "not too much enjoyment") and the maternal body supply the only available symbolic scaffolding for the sexual relationship.

     sexual enjoyment is found not to be able to be written, and it is from this that there results the structural multiplicity

574. #574

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.182

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that every discourse is structured as a semblance, and that the four discourses—particularly analytic discourse—circle around the fundamental impossibility of the sexual relationship, a void that is managed (but never resolved) through the composition of jouissance and castration; surplus-jouissance, as the Freudian analogue of Marxian surplus value, names the point where the semblance of discourse is anchored to this constitutive gap.

     the phallus, in so far as it is to this third that there is ordered everything which, in short, creates an impasse in enjoyment, which makes of the man and of the woman... in difficulty with it

575. #575

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971** > *Lituraterre*

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces "lituraterre" as a neologism to theorise the letter not as a frontier between knowledge and jouissance but as a *littoral* — the edge of the hole in knowledge — thereby distinguishing the letter from the signifier and from psychobiographical reduction, while implicitly critiquing the Discourse of the University for conflating letter and signifier.

     when all its interpretations can be summed up in enjoyment. Between enjoyment and knowledge, the letter might be the littoral.

576. #576

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.127

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971** > *Lituraterre*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses his experience of the Siberian landscape (streaming/furrowing) and Japanese calligraphy to establish that the letter/writing belongs to the Real as the 'furrowing of the signified,' while the signifier belongs to the Symbolic — thereby distinguishing the letter from the signifier and articulating the concept of 'lituraterre' (litoral/literal/literature) as the erasure that constitutes the subject.

     Between centre and absence, between knowledge and enjoyment, there is littoral which only veers towards the literal from the fact that this bend is one you can take in the same way at every instant.

577. #577

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     **Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that discourse is constitutively a semblance—not a semblance *of* something else, but semblance as its proper object—and that the Freudian hypothesis (repetition against the pleasure principle, introducing surplus-jouissance) is what points toward a discourse that might not be a semblance, linking the emergence of the signifier, the master signifier, and the subject to this economy of semblance.

     repetition is exercised in such a way that a dangerous enjoyment, an enjoyment that goes beyond this minimal excitation, is brought back

578. #578

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex and the Name-of-the-Father function as logical zero-points (analogous to Peano's axiom of zero) that ground the series of natural numbers, and that the "murder of the Father" is the hysterical substitute for rejected castration; he then pivots to show that the superego — originating from the mythical primordial father of *Totem and Taboo* — issues the paradoxical impossible command "Enjoy!", which is the hidden motor of moral conscience.

     it originates from this more than mythical original father, from this summons as such to pure enjoyment, namely, also to non-castration... what the superego says is: 'Enjoy!'

579. #579

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that the logic of quantification (universal/particular, affirmative/negative) is not merely a formal apparatus but carries the mark of the sexual impasse: the impossibility of writing the sexual relationship without a third term (the phallus), and the asymmetry between the masculine "all" (grounded in a mythical exception) and the feminine "not-all" (sustained only as a discordant statement, as 'a-woman' rather than 'every woman'), with Hysteria named as the neurosis that articulates this truth of failure.

     nothing can be grounded about the status of man, I mean seen from analytic experience, except by constructing artificially, mythically, this every man with this presumed one, the mythical father of Totem and Taboo, namely, the one who is capable of satisfying the enjoyment of all the women.

580. #580

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     accommodate yourselves.

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the quantifying logic of "not-all" to correct the Oedipal myth of the primal father, then pivots to argue that the sexual non-relationship is what generates desire as a language-effect, before closing with a meditation on the analyst's intolerable position as objet petit a (semblance) in the analytic discourse—a position only made liveable through logic.

     what it is a matter of suspending, that is what sleep is designed for... the ambiguousness that there is in the relationship to the body with herself, the enjoying of itself.

581. #581

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972

     Theoretical move: In this closing session of Seminar XIX, Lacan condenses the year's argument: the *Yadl'un* (the One makes Being) is not ontology but the structural ground of analytic discourse, and Freud's essential contribution—overdetermination—is precisely the irreducible relation of the signifying chain to the body as the site of jouissance, a jouissance that is always "hand to hand" and never attributable to a single body.

     from the moment that one starts from enjoyment, this means very exactly that the body is not alone, that there is another one of them... what is proper to enjoyment, is that when there are two bodies, much more indeed when there are more, naturally, we do not know, we cannot say, which of them enjoys.

582. #582

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.127

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses mathematical logic (Boole, Frege, Cantor) to argue that Truth can only "half-say" itself — that 0 is not the negation of 1 but the mark of a constitutive lack, such that the impossibility of reaching 2 from 0 and 1 formally mirrors the impossibility of the sexual relationship and the inaccessibility of the Real; the analyst's position as semblance of Objet petit a grounds a non-initiatory knowledge of truth that is structural, not esoteric.

     a knowledge that is taught by other voices than the direct ones of enjoyment, which are always conditioned by the fundamental failure of sexual enjoyment.

583. #583

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that discourse is always discourse of semblance, and that the Four Discourses—grounded in the tetrad of semblance, truth, enjoyment, and surplus-jouissance—are held together not by their content but by the formal necessity of the number four and its vectors; the analytic discourse is distinguished by placing the objet petit a in the position of semblance, thereby intervening in the gap between body and discourse.

     if there is something somewhere which authorises me some enjoyment, precisely, it is to pretend (faire semblant).

584. #584

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.78

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment is always "from the Other" but never sexual (there is no sexual relation), and that the Other must be barred — emptied out — to become the locus where the sexuation formulae and knowledge are inscribed; this move connects the barred Other S(Ø) to lalangue, fantasy, repetition (Nachträglichkeit), and the necessity of writing for psychoanalysis to be possible at all.

     you only enjoy from the Other (on ne jouit que de l'Autre). [...] you do not enjoy it sexually - there is no sexual relationship - nor are you enjoyed. [...] You enjoy, it has to be said, the Other, you enjoy it mentally.

585. #585

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

     Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

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

     the common error which does not see that the signifier is enjoyment, and that the phallus is only its signified

586. #586

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.51

     Seminar 4: Wednesday 19 January 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that logical necessity is not prior to but produced by discourse itself, and that this production retroactively posits its own ground as 'inexistent' — a structure illustrated by the symptom (truth as inexistent) and the automaton/repetition (jouissance as inexistent), both grounded in Frege's zero, and culminating in the claim that the Phallus as Bedeutung (denotation/reference) is what anchors signification to discourse's necessity.

     it is the inexistence of the enjoyment that the automatism described as repetition brings to light... enjoyment as it operates as necessitated by discourse and it only operates, as you see, as inexistence.

587. #587

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.86

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

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

     by encouraging the woman to exist as an equal Equal to what? No one knows, because one can also very well say that man is equal to zero because he needs the existence of something that denies him in order for him to exist as all

588. #588

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the formulas of sexuation through a quasi-mathematical notation, arguing that sexual enjoyment constitutes the obstacle to the sexual relationship, that every sexed signifier falls under the castration function (ΦΧ), and that the logic of quantifiers—specifically the 'not-all'—is the proper instrument for writing what cannot be said in classical predicate logic.

     there exists this enjoyment called sexual enjoyment and which is properly what creates an obstacle to the relationship. That sexual enjoyment opens the door to enjoyment for the speaking being

589. #589

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.6

     Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the title "...Ou pire" as a vehicle for the claim that "there is no sexual relationship" — a truth that can only be half-said, such that any attempt to escape it produces something worse — and grounds this in a logical analysis of the empty place in language, the impossibility of metalanguage, and the introduction of the "not-all" as what exceeds Aristotelian quantification, thereby linking the structure of language to castration and sexuation.

     the supposition of the enjoyment described as sexual as instrumental for the animal... every animal that has claws does not masturbate. This is the difference between man and the lobster.

590. #590

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 10 May 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the unary trait (support of imaginary identification via the mirror stage) from the *Yad'lun* (there-is-One), while arguing that the Not-all grounds both the crowd and the question of Woman; he then re-situates the Subject Supposed to Know as a pleonasm pointing to the analyst's legitimate occupation of the position of semblance with respect to jouissance.

     wisdom as it appears in the very book of patience, of sapience, which *Ecclesiastes* is, is what? It is, as it is clearly said there, it is knowledge about enjoyment.

591. #591

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.41

     Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logic of quantifiers (∃x and its negations) to ground sexuation and castration in a structural-logical necessity rather than anecdote, positioning the Real as that which affirms itself through the irreducible impasses of logic (Gödel), and insisting that castration cannot be reduced to myth or trauma but constitutes the impossible foundation of any articulation of sexual bipolarity in language.

     the life-death dialogue happens at the level of what is reproduced, and to our best knowledge that only takes on a dramatic character starting from the moment when in the equilibrium between life and death enjoyment intervenes.

592. #592

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     Seminar 2: Wednesday 15 December 1971

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the formulas of sexuation by deploying predicate logic's quantifiers (the universal, the particular, the existential, and their negations) to give castration a non-anecdotal, strictly logical articulation: the masculine side is defined by the universal phallic function grounded by the exception ('at least one' who is not subject to it), while the feminine side is defined by the 'not-all' — a contingent rather than particular negation — showing that the sexual relation is irreducibly non-complementary.

     the speaking being to put it plainly, is this unbalanced relationship to one's own body which is called enjoyment... this has as a starting point a privileged relationship to sexual enjoyment.

593. #593

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the occasion of speaking "to the wall" at Sainte-Anne to develop a structural argument about repetition (which requires a third, not merely a second), tying it to Nachträglichkeit, the Christian Trinity as a model of belief/self-grounding, Plato's cave as a proto-structuralist theory of the object and the origin of language in resonance, and jouissance as what the wall itself occasions.

     It is obvious that the walls make me enjoy! And that is why you all enjoy, each and every one of you, by participation. Seeing me talk to the wall is something that cannot leave you indifferent.

594. #594

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.10

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's appeal to Copernican and Darwinian "revolutions" to explain resistance to psychoanalysis actually masks the true subversion psychoanalysis introduces: not a revolution in cosmological or biological knowledge, but a transformation in the very structure and function of knowledge itself — specifically, the discovery that the unconscious is a knowledge unknown to itself, structured like a language, and inextricably bound to jouissance and the body's descent toward death.

     there is no interpretation that ever means something else, but an analytic interpretation is always that. Whether the gain is secondary or primary, the gain is of enjoyment.

595. #595

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.46

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses topology (the non-orientable surface) to argue that castration is structurally ubiquitous—present at every point of the relational surface between man and woman—and then anchors this topological claim to the Four Discourses, showing that the mathemes ($, S1, S2, a) constitute the logical "walls" behind which enjoyment, surplus-enjoyment, truth, and semblance must be situated.

     the enjoyment that one could call sexual... is marked by the index - nothing more, up to now - of what is only stated, of what is only announced as the index of castration.

596. #596

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > **4 1 \* May 1972**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the claim that the analytic discourse operates by reproducing neurosis through a model that isolates the master signifier, and that psychoanalysis differs from ideology only insofar as it maps out, rather than veils, the jouissance organised by the signifier's positional effects in a discourse.

     What psychoanalysis teaches us, is that every naive knowledge...is associated with a veiling of enjoyment which is realised in it and poses the question of what is betrayed in it about the limits of power.

597. #597

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a is not a localized object but the very tetrahedral structure of the four discourses, and that each discourse constitutively prevents its own agent from comprehending it — the analyst included — because it is castration (as a gap) that guarantees the Real from which all discourse stems.

     the entire dimension of enjoyment, namely, the relationship of this speaking being to his body - because there is no other possible definition of enjoyment

598. #598

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus is the singular meaning (Bedeutung) through which language signifies, that this phallic function structurally prevents any harmonious sexual relation, and that the objet petit a — as metonymical cause of desire — is what determines the speaking being as a divided subject within discourse, with the semblance-pole (analyst's position) and enjoyment-pole standing as the two irreducible terms of the quadripode.

     enjoyment, which is right at the end of the right hand branch, is certainly a phallic enjoyment. But that one cannot say sexual enjoyment

599. #599

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.143

     The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst > **1 Jane 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the sexuation formulas by mapping the masculine side (universal castration grounded by the exceptional father who says-no) against the feminine side (not-all, grounded not by an exception but by the absence/void of any denial of the phallic function), and identifies the four logical relations between the quadrant terms as existence, contradiction, undecidable, and lack/desire/objet a, while equating the mathematical notion of the set with the barred subject and the non-numerable with feminine not-all.

     it is even by being this jouiscentre, this jouiscentre that there is conjugated to what I will not call an absence, but a dé-sencë - that the woman posits herself for this signifying fact

600. #600

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.24

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that mathematical incomprehension is not a flight from truth but an over-sensitivity to it, and uses this to pivot toward the claim that there is no sexual relationship for speaking beings — because sexual enjoyment (jouissance) can only be approached through lalangue and castration, never directly articulated, requiring the mathème as its proper formalization.

     the importance, the preeminence in everything that is going to ensure at its level the semblance of sex... everything depends on this pivotal point that is called sexual enjoyment

601. #601

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what specifies the human animal is its anomalous, 'limping and amputated' relationship to enjoyment—a structural disjunction between copulation and jouissance—and that this very disjunction, rather than any biological reduction, is what grounds the possibility of mathemes and science, with lalangue as the medium through which this deficit-conditioned appearance leads to knowledge.

     it is very probably this in effect that specifies this animal species: his is a quite anomalous and bizarre relationship with its enjoyment.

602. #602

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

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

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

     it does not need to have remained an attempt for it to be in any case failed, completely failed from the point of view of enjoyment.

603. #603

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.120

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > Pascal's Triangle

     Theoretical move: By working through Pascal's triangle and set theory (the empty set as element, pure difference as sameness), Lacan argues that the One operative in analytic theory is not the One of similitude/Platonic universality but the One of pure difference that grounds repetition — the S1 produced at the level of surplus-jouissance in the analytic discourse.

     what is produced from placing the subject at the level of the enjoyment of speaking? What is produced and what I designate at the level described as that of surplus enjoying

604. #604

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > **4 1 \* May 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of the sexual relationship is grounded not in biological or metaphysical mythology (Eros-as-fusion) but in the formal structure of the sexuation formulae and set theory: the One emerges from a foundational lack (the empty set), which means sex as the dual-real can never produce a relationship, only two irreducible ones.

     the one that is not 'in analysis', if you will allow me to express myself in this way, plays the function for him of the real. What he has on the other hand in analysis, namely, the subject, he takes for what he is, namely, as an effect of discourse.

605. #605

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.123

     The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst > **1 Jane 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan situates the psychoanalyst's complex, horror-laden relationship to knowledge as the central theoretical problem, arguing that the discourse of the analyst places its practitioner in a structurally difficult position where knowledge about truth—mapped onto the four-discourse schema—is simultaneously perceived and repudiated, with foreclosure (Verwerfung) operating not only in psychosis but as a rationally legitimated social force.

     this that of enjoyment, and this that of surplus enjoying

606. #606

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.54

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the tetrahedron to ground the Four Discourses as a structural necessity derived from the properties of four points in space, then pivots to the question of the function of speech as the unique form of action that posits itself as truth—establishing the epistemological basis for the knowledge of the psychoanalyst.

     these four poles that I am stating with the terms of truth, of semblance, of enjoyment and of surplus enjoying.

607. #607

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's knowledge is constituted by a "scrap of knowledge" drawn from the subject's own jouissance—unconscious knowledge that is not "supposed" but emerges from slips, dreams, and the analysand's work—and locates this within the Four Discourses structure where S2 occupies the place of truth and $ occupies the place of enjoyment, distinguishing scientific (mathematical/topological) writing from the zone of discourse where meaning is always partial and borrowed from another discourse.

     this knowledge, this knowledge that, for its part, is not supposed. It is knowledge, an out of date knowledge, a scrap of knowledge, a tiny scrap of knowledge: that is what the unconscious is. This knowledge is what I assume... only from the enjoyment of the subject.

608. #608

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > XVII

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's reality is constituted not by the brute real but by the emergence of the symbolic order, which structures even somatic reactions, obsessional alienation, and intersubjective experience — the real only becomes effective for the subject at the junction where symbolic "tables of presence" organise it.

     he finds himself eternally deprived of any kind of enjoyment [jouissance] in the thing.

609. #609

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.82

     VI > M. H YPPOLI TE: A lot is.

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's discovery of the death drive marks the decisive rupture with humanism and ego-psychology: where Hegel's phenomenology ends in an "elaborated mastery" grounded in reciprocal alienation, Freud escapes anthropology altogether by establishing that "man isn't entirely in man" — the death instinct is not an abdication of reason but a concept that surpasses the reality principle.

     those who don't have it have nothing left but to turn to jazz, to dance, to entertain themselves, the good fellows, the nice guys, the libidinal types.

610. #610

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

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

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

     the re-purchasing of what one could call the bad mana attached to the letter... The sacred value of remuneration of the fee kind is clearly indicated by the context of the medical story.

611. #611

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     XVIII

     Theoretical move: By reading Poe's M. Valdemar alongside Oedipus at Colonus and Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan argues that life is fundamentally a detour toward death, that desire emerges only at the joint of speech/symbolism, and that the phenomena of wit, dream, and psychopathology all inhabit the vacillating level of speech where the subject's being is at stake.

     Life doesn't want to be healed. The negative therapeutic reaction is fundamental to it.

612. #612

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.278

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the myth of Amphitryon (Sosie/double) and a critique of Fairbairn's clinical case to argue that analysis progresses not through ego-splitting observation but through speech addressed to the absolute Other, and that misrecognition of the imaginary register—treating imaginary drives as real—produces iatrogenic paranoia rather than cure.

     He effaces his pleasure [jouissance] so as not to arouse the anger of his master.

613. #613

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.274

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

     Theoretical move: Using the Amphitryon/Sosie myth as a clinical allegory, Lacan argues that the ego is constitutively alienated—always encountering its own reflected image rather than attaining desire or the Other—and that this imaginary capture is at its most binding in obsessional neurosis, where ego-reinforcement (as prescribed by ego psychology) only deepens the subject's dispossession.

     he imagines that the object of her desire, the peace of her pleasure [jouissance], hangs on his merits. This is the man of the super-ego, who is always wanting to elevate himself to the dignity of the ideals of the father.

614. #614

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

     **¹⁰⁷x** > The rat in the maze

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that llanguage is primary and precedes language (which is merely scientific knowledge's "harebrained lucubration" about llanguage), that the unconscious is a knowing-how-to-do-things with llanguage that exceeds what any speaking being can articulate, and that the Lacanian hypothesis — that a signifier represents a subject to another signifier — is structurally necessary to the functioning of llanguage itself.

     the use (exercice) of knowledge could but imply (représenter) a jouissance... If communication approaches what is effectively at work in the jouissance of llanguage, it is because communication implies a reply

615. #615

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.45

     **II** > **The function of the written¹**

     Theoretical move: The letter is constituted as a radical effect of discourse — it precedes the signifier historically and functionally — and analytic discourse is distinguished by its capacity to produce a different reading of signifiers than what they signify, a capacity instantiated most purely in Joyce's work where the signifier stuffs the signified.

     Bouchon, which I have translated here as 'cork,' can also mean 'stopper' or 'plug'; it seems to put a stop here to this form of jouissance.

616. #616

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.74

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the non-existence of the sexual relationship is the ground from which its supplements (love, phallic jouissance, courtly love) must be theorised, and uses the distinction between reading and understanding—illustrated by commentary on *Le titre de la lettre*—to reframe the Subject Supposed to Know as the very structure of love/transference.

     another satisfaction, the satisfaction of speech... the satisfaction that answers to phallic jouissance.

617. #617

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.101

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that truth can only be "half-told" (mi-dire) because jouissance constitutes a structural limit on avowal, and that the phallic function is not necessary but merely contingent—it has "stopped not being written" through analytic experience without entering the register of the necessary or the impossible—thereby re-situating knowledge, truth, and the real within the schema of analytic discourse and the three registers.

     what is sought - especially in legal testimony - is that on the basis of which one can judge his jouissance... The goal is that jouissance be avowed, precisely insofar as it may be unavowable.

618. #618

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

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

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

     the more a man can believe a woman confuses him with God, in other words, what she enjoys

619. #619

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.65

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is constitutively deficient — it is the "other satisfaction" that language-structured beings cannot fully live up to — and proposes that reality is approached through "apparatuses of jouissance" (language), thereby correcting Freud's pleasure principle and rejecting developmentalist (Lust-Ich/Real-Ich) accounts as mere "hypotheses of mastery."

     jouissance shows that in itself it is deficient (en défaut) for, in order for it to be that way, something about it mustn't be working.

620. #620

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     **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.

     it is precisely because the said jouissance speaks that the sexual relationship is not.

621. #621

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     **II** > Love and the signifier

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is characterized by contingency rather than eternity, and that this contingency (figured through creationism, the *ex nihilo*, and the Copernican/Newtonian revolution) grounds his central claim that love compensates for the absence of the sexual relationship — a relation only accessible through the function of the phallus as that which is articulated on the basis of absence. The "revolution" Lacan values is not a change of center but the shift from "it turns" to "it falls," marking the real subversion of the signified's routine.

     Jouissance of the Other - the Other I said to be symbolized by the body - is not a sign of love.

622. #622

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.106

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

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

     the foundation of knowledge is that the jouissance of its exercise is the same as that of its acquisition.

623. #623

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.21

     On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > COMPLEMENT

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes his seminar's opening address on love as actually being about 'stupidity' (la bêtise), and argues that analytic discourse, uniquely among discourses, does not flee stupidity but rather approaches and produces it—grounding this in the non-existence of the sexual relationship as the indisputable truth that conditions the discourse.

     it's that you enjoy it. My sole presence - at least I dare believe it my sole presence in my discourse, my sole presence is my stupidity.

624. #624

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.60

     **II** > Love and the signifier

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier introduces the One into the world and that the subject is nothing but the effect that slides between signifiers; love aims at this subject as such, while desire is aroused by the sign of the subject — thereby distinguishing sign from signifier and articulating their differential relation to jouissance.

     A subject, as such, doesn't have much to do with jouissance. But, on the other hand, his sign is capable of arousing desire. Therein lies the mainspring of love.

625. #625

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.121

     **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is the substance of thought and that its irreducible gap from language—marked by the cry "that's not it"—demonstrates that structure and jouissance are co-constitutive, grounding the non-existence of the sexual relationship; Christianity and Aristotle serve as foils to show how philosophical and theological traditions have covered over this gap with the fantasy of knowledge and soul.

     That's not it" is the very cry by which the jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance expected. It is here that what can be said in language is specified. Negation certainly seems to derive therefrom.

626. #626

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

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

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

     the space of sexual jouissance, which thereby proves to be compact

627. #627

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

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

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

     That which is written - what would that be in the end? The conditions of jouissance. And that which is counted - what would that be? The residues of jouissance.

628. #628

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.16

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexual jouissance is structurally defined by an impasse—the impossibility of the sexual relationship—and uses topological concepts (compactness, open sets, finity) to articulate how phallic jouissance constitutes an obstacle to jouissance of the Other, while the Not-all marks the female pole's irreducible remainder. Love is revealed as narcissistic, and its object-like substance is in fact the objet petit a as remainder in desire.

     being is the jouissance of the body as such, that is, as asexual (asexué), because what is known as sexual jouissance is marked and dominated by the impossibility of establishing as such, anywhere in the enunciable, the sole One that interests us

629. #629

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

     **VII** > 92 Complement

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

     I raise the question of a jouissance that, with respect to everything that can be used in the function Ox, is in the realm of the infinite

630. #630

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.26

     **II** > To Jakobson

     Theoretical move: Lacan carves out "linguistricks" (linguisterie) as a domain distinct from Jakobson's linguistics proper, arguing that the consequences of "the unconscious is structured like a language" exceed linguistics and belong to a separate field grounded in the psychoanalytic discourse; he then deploys the Four Discourses to show that love—as opposed to jouissance of the Other—is the sign of a shift between discourses, with the emergence of analytic discourse marking every such transition.

     jouissance of the Other is not the sign of love … What is not a sign of love is jouissance of the Other, jouissance of the Other sex.

631. #631

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the unconscious as the site where being, by speaking, enjoys and wants to know nothing about it — thereby challenging Aristotelian/traditional science's equation of thought with its object — and uses this to position analytic discourse against both behaviorism and Christianity, while aligning his own practice with the 'baroque' as the aesthetic/ethical mode that sides with the sleeve rather than the winning hand of classical thought.

     this knowledge is utterly and completely limited to that insufficient jouissance constituted by the fact that he speaks.

632. #632

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

     **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that every wisdom tradition—Taoism, Buddhism, mythology, Christianity—fails to satisfy the "thought of being" except at the price of castration, positioning psychoanalytic discourse as a contingent, non-mathematical pathway toward an economy of jouissance that science and religion alike cannot reach.

     None of that implies that there weren't things from time to time thanks to which jouissance - without it, there could be no wisdom - could believe that it had reached the goal of satisfying the thought of being. But that goal has never been satisfied, except at the price of a castration.

633. #633

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of metalanguage to pivot toward topology: because the symbolic ex-sists rather than being, and because language can only be transmitted through further language, the matheme/formalization points beyond itself to the Borromean knot as the structural figure that can 'operate' on the first knot—linking writing, jouissance, and the non-rapport of sexuation under a single topological framework.

     the end of jouissance does not coincide with what it leads to, namely, the fact that we reproduce.

634. #634

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

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

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

     this groundbreaking Seminar - including some of Lacan's most sophisticated work on love, desire, and jouissance - could well have appeared in English around the same time as the early Écrits

635. #635

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.85

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan theorizes a feminine jouissance that is "beyond the phallus" — experienced but unknowable even to women themselves — and uses mystical testimony (St. Teresa, Hadewijch) as its privileged witness, then links this Other jouissance to the God-face of the big Other and the paternal/castration function, arguing these do not resolve into either one God or two.

     Christianity naturally ended up inventing a God such that he is the one who gets off (jouit).

636. #636

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     **II** > To Jakobson > **What is the signifier?**

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines the signifier as both the cause of jouissance (its material and efficient cause, enabling access to a part of the Other's body) and simultaneously what brings jouissance to a halt (its final cause), thereby grounding the signifier not in Aristotelian physics or Cartesian extended substance but in a new ontological category: 'enjoying substance' (la substance jouissante).

     the signifier is situated at the level of enjoying substance (substance jouissante)… The signifier is the cause of jouissance. Without the signifier, how could we even approach that part of the body?

637. #637

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.136

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of Borromean knots and rings of string to ground a theory of desire, the subject, and the Other: object a is the void presupposed by demand, the subject's division is structurally equivalent to the 'bending' of a ring, and the Other is not additive to the One but is the 'One-missing' — a difference internal to the One rather than supplementary to it.

     the request for object a, for the object that could satisfy jouissance. The latter would then be the Lustbefriedigung presupposed in what is improperly called the 'genital drive'

638. #638

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

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

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

     there is something, jouissance, regarding which it is not possible to say whether a woman can say anything about it, whether she can say what she knows about it.

639. #639

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.12

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds Seminar XX's inquiry by defining jouissance as "what serves no purpose," distinguishing it from love (which is always mutual and demands more), positioning the superego as the imperative of jouissance ("Enjoy!"), and asserting that jouissance of the Other's body is not the sign of love — thereby opening the problem of what, beyond necessity or sufficiency, can answer with jouissance.

     What is jouissance? Here it amounts to no more than a negative instance. Jouissance is what serves no purpose.

640. #640

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.93

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

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

     what analytic discourse contributes - and perhaps that is, after all, the reason for its emergence at a certain point in scientific discourse - is that to speak of love is in itself a jouissance.

641. #641

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.80

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

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

     Thought is jouissance. What analytic discourse contributes is the following, and it is already hinted at in the philosophy of being: there is jouissance of being.

642. #642

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     **¹⁰⁷x** > The rat in the maze

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject is constituted as fleeting and vanishing through its dependence on the signifier, that love is grounded in the encounter between unconscious knowledges rather than in any sexual harmony, and that love's drama consists in the modal shift from contingency ("stops not being written") to necessity ("doesn't stop being written") — a shift that is always illusory because the sexual relationship is structurally impossible.

     There's no such thing as a sexual relationship because one's jouissance of the Other taken as a body is always inadequate - perverse, on the one hand, insofar as the Other is reduced to object a, and crazy and enigmatic, on the other.

643. #643

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.92

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

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

     it is in the opaque place of jouissance of the Other, of this Other insofar as woman, if she existed, could be it, that the Supreme Being is situated

644. #644

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.56

     **II** > Love and the signifier

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic discourse breaks with the cosmological presupposition of a unified world-substance by privileging the letter and writing over lived meaning-effects; love is posited as what "makes up for" the non-existent sexual relationship, and the unconscious is clarified as structured *like* (not *by*) a language—specifically like the assemblages of set theory, which are constituted (not merely designated) by letters.

     But isn't it possible that language may have other effects than to lead people by the nose to reproduce yet again (encore), in the body to body (en corps à corps), and in incarnated bodies (en corps incarné)?

645. #645

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.68

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

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

     they are used so that there may be the jouissance that should be (qu'il faut). With the caveat that, given the equivocation between faillir and falloir, the jouissance that should be must be translated as the jouissance that shouldn't be/never fails

646. #646

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the true from the real by arguing that truth can only be "half-said" (because jouissance constitutes its limit), while the real is accessible only through the impasse of formalisation; the mathemes (objet a, S(Ø), $) are introduced as written supports that, unlike speech, can designate the limits where the symbolic encounters the real—culminating in the claim that the phallic function is a contingency (ceases not to be written) rather than a necessity or impossibility.

     enjoyment is a limit. This is something that stems from the very structure that was evoked...enjoyment can only be summoned, can only be evoked, can only be elaborated starting from a semblance.

647. #647

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.95

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "Copernican revolution" as a foil to argue that genuine subversion lies not in changing a centre but in substituting a new formal principle ('things fall', expressed as Newton's law of gravity written down) — an argument that privileges the function of the written over imaginary, sphere-centred thinking, while reframing the phallus, the Other, love, and the sign as the year's key compass-points.

     enjoyment, the enjoyment of the Other, which I said was symbolised by the body, is not a sign of love.

648. #648

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.12

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys topological concepts of compactness and open sets to demonstrate that the impossibility of the sexual relationship is what structures all discourse, and that feminine sexuality is characterized by the 'not-all'—women taken 'une par une'—rather than by phallic jouissance or universal fusion, grounding sexuation in a logical rather than anatomical requirement.

     Enjoyment is marked on the one side by this hole which only assures it of a path other than that of phallic enjoyment.

649. #649

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     What is the signifier? > What is a signifier?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier cannot be collectivised through semantic or lexical predication alone, and that its proper "substance" is Jouissance — the body enjoys itself only by corporalising itself in a signifying way, making enjoyment-substance the third term beyond thinking substance and extended substance, and reframing the subject of the unconscious as the one who speaks stupidities rather than thinks.

     enjoying a body... Substance of the body, on condition that it is defined only as what enjoys itself.

650. #650

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

     (3) Naturally since I made a small mistake

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

     What is written, in short, what might that be? The conditions of enjoyment. And what counts, what might that be? The residues of enjoyment.

651. #651

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.126

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bentham's utilitarianism and Stoic logic (material implication) to articulate the modal structure of jouissance—that enjoyment 'does not cease not to be written' (the impossible)—and to show that repression is secondary to a primal non-suitability of jouissance for the sexual relationship, with metaphor as repression's first effect; he then aligns this with Aristotle's energeia-pleasure (sight, smell, hearing) to locate the objet petit a as the male-side substitute for the missing partner, constituting fantasy.

     We know what they are used for: that there should be the enjoyment that is required (qu'il faut) - if you have been following me up to now.

652. #652

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 15 Ma y 1973

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no metalanguage by distinguishing the Symbolic from being, grounding formalisation in the act of saying rather than in ontological subsistence, and then demonstrates how topology—specifically the Borromean knot and the torus—provides the only adequate 'writing' of what cannot be said about the sexual non-relation and the structure of the subject.

     there would be better enjoyment, harmony between enjoyment and its end. Now the end of enjoyment is... that we reproduce ourselves.

653. #653

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.17

     **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.

     It is that you enjoy it. Simply my presence - at least I dare believe it - my sole presence in my discourse, my sole presence is my stupidity.

654. #654

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

     Seminar 13: Wednesday 26 Jun e 1973

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

     the enjoyment of the Other taken as body, that this enjoyment is always inadequate: perverse on one side in so far as the other is reduced to the small o-object

655. #655

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.251

     (3) Naturally since I made a small mistake

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot as a topological demonstration that the One (ring of string enclosing nothing but a hole) grounds both the structure of desire—where the objet petit a is not a being but a void supposed by demand, sustained only by metonymy—and the logic of mathematical language, where removing a single element disperses all the rest simultaneously.

     in the desire of every demand, there is only the request of this something which with regard to enjoyment would be satisfying, which would be the Lustbefriedigung supposed in what is equally wrongly called in analytic discourse the genital drive

656. #656

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     J.Lacan-... of this?

     Theoretical move: Recanati's intervention uses Berkeley's semiotics and Kierkegaard's relation to Régine to interrogate whether 'supplementary feminine jouissance' can be anything other than the signifier of masculine quest/fatum, deploying the not-all and the barred Other to show that the Woman's relationship to the big Other resists masculine perspectival capture, while the Kierkegaard example maps the masculine dilemma (exclusion vs. mediated relation to God) onto the Splitting of the Subject, from which the woman is structurally exempt.

     while at the same of course being present enough for this, namely, the represented eternity, should be valid as a pseudo-transgression as is sufficiently proved by the fact that from this mystical instant, from this superior instant of grace, one enjoys it.

657. #657

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     **Seminar 3:** Wednesday **19 December 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the neologism *linguisterie* to mark the irreducible difference between linguistics (Jakobson's domain) and what psychoanalysis does with language—specifically the claim that "the unconscious is structured like a language"—while simultaneously arguing that psychoanalytic discourse is the foundational condition of possibility for all four discourses and that love is the sign of a change of discourse, not of the Other's jouissance.

     the enjoyment of the Other - I am skipping the rest, you can take it up again - is not the sign of love.

658. #658

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.231

     J.Lacan-... of this? > **Seminar 11 : Wednesday 8 May 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance (enjoyment) constitutes the substance of thinking and is irreducibly linked to the inertia of language, such that the sexual relationship remains inexistent and unthinkable — a gap named the Other — and all cultural, religious, and philosophical formations (including Christianity's baroque obscenity and Aristotle's active intellect) are so many failed attempts to make enjoyment adequate to the sexual relationship, with castration as the only price of any apparent satisfaction.

     an enjoyment which reveals itself to be the substance of thinking

659. #659

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.262

     Seminar 13: Wednesday 26 Jun e 1973

     Theoretical move: Knowledge is not primarily communication but an enigma constituted by lalangue, which operates in the unconscious as a knowing-how-to-act that exceeds any stated knowledge; scientific discourse misrecognises this by reducing knowledge to learning (as in behaviourist rat experiments), thereby failing to grasp that the experimenter's own relation to lalangue is the hidden condition of the montage.

     its exercise could only represent an enjoyment. This is the key, the turning point.

660. #660

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.163

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

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

     to speak about love is in itself an enjoyment... to say anything at all, which is the very watchword of the discourse of the analysand, is what leads to the Lustprinzip

661. #661

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.238

     J.Lacan-... of this? > **Seminar 11 : Wednesday 8 May 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic discourse diverges from scientific discourse precisely because the 'economy of enjoyment' cannot be rendered as a mathematical device, yet mythology, the Counter-Reformation, and Baroque art all attest to historically contingent attempts to regulate jouissance — attempts that are 'founded in the gap proper to the sexuality of the speaking being' and that analytic discourse may partially continue.

     The economy of enjoyment is something that is not yet at our fingertips. It is important all the same, it would be of some little interest to get there.

662. #662

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.113

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan revisits Logical Time to show that intersubjective inference is structured around the objet petit a (the third term that reduces the dyad to One + o), then pivots to distinguish sign from signifier, grounding the subject as an effect of the signifier chain; the second seminar session opens by establishing that the speaking being's needs are contaminated by an "other satisfaction" rooted in the unconscious structured like a language, which Lacan links retrospectively to the Ethics of Psychoanalysis and ultimately to the universals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

     What then is aimed at, is aimed at in love is the subject. A subject, as such, does not have very much to do with enjoyment.

663. #663

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972** > What does that mean?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic discourse resists grounding in any substance or being, and that the impossibility of predication (the absolute 'being' that cannot be completed) is revealed precisely through the fracture of sexed being as it is constituted by jouissance—thus breaking with philosophy and grounding analysis in topology rather than ontology.

     a being that would posit itself as absolute is never anything but the fracture, the break, the interruption of the formula sexed being in so far as the sexed being is involved in enjoyment

664. #664

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan links the objet petit a as a semblance of being to a primordial scene of jealous enjoyment (jalouissance) drawn from Augustine, positioning it as the first substitutive enjoyment that founds desire through metonymy and demand addressed to the Other, and closes on the question of whether having the object a is the same as being it — a question he refers to "The Meaning of the Phallus."

     jealous hatred, the one that springs from jalouissance, from what 'imageaillisse from the look according to St. Augustine

665. #665

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.169

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual non-relationship is irreducible: love operates in a 'hommosexual' (soul-to-soul) register that bypasses sex, courtly love was a historically singular meteor rather than a dialectical synthesis, and the question of woman's enjoyment opens onto whether the barred Other itself knows — with the conclusion that attributing omniscience to the Other (or to God/woman) actually diminishes rather than enriches love.

     in what constitutes feminine enjoyment, in so far as it is not-all occupied by man, and even, I would say, that as such, it is not so at all, the question is to know precisely what is involved in its knowledge.

666. #666

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

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

     That the difficulty in exercising it is what enhances that of its acquisition. It is because with every exercise of this acquisition it is repeated that there is no question of which of these repetitions, of which is to be posited as first in its learnt.

667. #667

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.144

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

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

     we are the playthings of enjoyment. That thinking is enjoyment, that what analytic discourse contributes...is that there is enjoyment of being.

668. #668

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.150

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

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

     It is very important. Since of course, all of that, as in courtly love, is, alas, in Freud's discourse, covered over by… minute considerations on clitoral enjoyment, on the enjoyment that we call as best we can, the other precisely

669. #669

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.5

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XX by grounding the impossibility of the sexual relation in the structural gap between jouissance (phallic enjoyissance) and love: love aims at making One but can only produce narcissistic identification, while enjoyment of the Other's body is neither necessary nor sufficient as a response to love, with the Not-all (pas-toute) marking woman's asymmetrical position relative to phallic jouissance.

     at the basis of all rights there is what I am going to talk about, namely, enjoyment. The law speaks about that.

670. #670

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.222

     J.Lacan-... of this? > **Seminar 11 : Wednesday 8 May 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the unconscious against the Aristotelian premise that "being thinks," positing instead that being-in-speaking *enjoys* and wants to know nothing about it — thereby making jouissance, not knowledge-drive, the motor of the unconscious — and then traces how this claim restructures the relation between truth, science, Christianity, and the barred subject.

     this knowledge is completely limited to this insufficient enjoyment constituted by the fact that he speaks.

671. #671

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.134

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that what supplements the absent sexual relationship is not a dyadic fusion but a singular "there is something of the One" — irreducibly solitary — and that love (including transference as love) is the operative name for this supplement; the big Other, far from being abolished, must be reckoned with precisely as the site that mediates between the sexes in the absence of a sexual relationship, a point that also grounds his endorsement of courtly love as a "feint" for the missing relation.

     the one that corresponds to the enjoyment that had to be just right (juste). Just right for it to happen between what I will abbreviate by calling them the man and the woman, and which is phallic enjoyment.

672. #672

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.74

     What is the signifier? > What is a signifier?

     Theoretical move: The signifier is repositioned as a fourfold Aristotelian cause of jouissance: it is simultaneously the material cause (it centres and signifies the body-part that is the material cause of enjoyment), the final cause (it brings enjoyment to a halt, as its limit), and the efficient cause (it limits enjoyment's trajectory); this reframes the signifier not as a bearer of meaning but as the very operator that produces, bounds, and divides the enjoying subject — culminating in the claim that love, not sex, is at stake when one loves.

     The signifier is the *cause* of enjoyment. Without the signifier, how can we even tackle this part of the body, how, without the signifier, centre this something which is the material cause of enjoyment?

673. #673

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.120

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

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

     Reality is approached by systems (appareils) of enjoyment. Here again is a formula that I am proposing to you, as long as we centre ourselves clearly on the fact that there is no other system than that of language.

674. #674

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logic of Port-Royal's distinction between comprehension (collection of predicates) and extension (set of objects falling under a predicate) to argue that substance is simultaneously what constitutes a set and what is lacking to it — a move that grounds his concept of the subject as that which is lacking in the signifying set, and ties the logical structure of predication to his broader theory of the Real as what escapes discourse yet constitutes it.

     being must certainly be situated moreover at the beginning of the discourse, in the non-radical, that has its end in encore.

675. #675

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.104

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Names-of-the-Father as identical to the RSI triad (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary), argues that the phallus furnishes the consistency of the Real while enjoyment ek-sists with respect to it, and situates naming/the Borromean knot as the structural answer to the philosophical impasse between realism and nominalism about language and the Real.

     There is a Real that eksists with respect to this phallus, which is called enjoyment, but it is rather its consistency.

676. #676

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 9: Tuesday 8 April 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot's topology — particularly the distinction between ek-sistence (the track/cycle) and the hole — as the operative figure for primordial repression (Urverdrängt), arguing that the difficulty of mentally grasping the knot is itself the trace of an irreducible, foundational repression, and that the inexistence of the sexual relationship is not a failure but the very structure knotted into being.

     starting from meaning there is enjoyed, s'oui-je, j'ouisse myself, souis-je m'assoter with words.

677. #677

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.95

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes ek-sistence as the Real dimension of the Borromean Knot, uses this to articulate the triadic RSI structure as an "infernal trinity," and pivots to redefine the symptom—against both Hegelian repetition (via Kierkegaard) and Marxian social analysis—as the particular way each speaking being (parlêtre) enjoys their unconscious.

     the highlighting of this repetition as being a fundamental function whose stamp is found in enjoyment

678. #678

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.155

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 10: Tuesday 15 April 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot is not a model or representation but the Real itself — its topological structure (where breaking one element unknots all others) grounds the concepts of the unconscious as Real, the non-existence of the sexual relationship, and hainamoration, while the signifier is redefined as that which makes a hole, linking the Symbolic to the Real through knotting.

     love persists (s'obstine) because there is something of the Real in the affair, love persists, quite contrary to the wellbeing of the other. This indeed is why I called it hainamoration

679. #679

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 2: Tuesday 17 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot is not a model (which would be grounded in the Imaginary) but rather a writing that directly supports the Real; the three registers (R.S.I.) achieve consistency only by holding together, and jouissance ek-sists to the Real as a hole, with phallic jouissance functioning as the nodal term that analytic experience discovers as primary.

     enjoyment, with regard to this Imaginary consistency, can do nothing but ek-sist, or parody it, it is with regard to the Real, it is something other than meaning that is at stake in enjoyment.

680. #680

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 1: Tuesday 10 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan assigns the Borromean knot to the Imaginary register (grounded in three-dimensional space), then uses it as a topological framework to redistribute Freud's triad of Inhibition/Symptom/Anxiety across the three registers: Inhibition as arrest in the Symbolic, Anxiety as arising from the Real, and the Symptom as the effect of the Symbolic in the Real—with Jouissance locatable at the intersections of the knot.

     It is a matter of knowing that there are two enjoyments… Enjoyment, in so far as it participates in the Imaginary of meaning, the enjoying of life… And on the other hand what about this other mode of enjoyment

681. #681

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.45

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 3: Tuesday 14 January 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Borromean knot topology as the minimal structure of existence (ek-sistence), arguing that Freud's Oedipus complex functions as a fourth term (psychical reality) needed to knot the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real because Freud lacked the three-ring Borromean solution; analysis itself operates by making the Real surmount the Symbolic at two crossing points, rendering the fourth term (Oedipus complex / Name-of-the-Father) superfluous.

     Here, and there, you can see how difficult it is…we have something that is called phallic enjoyment.

682. #682

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

     **Introduction** > *Anxiety*

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

     the phallic drive is not the genital drive… the genital drive, in the man, make no mistake, is not at all natural.

683. #683

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.62

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

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

     if there is no enjoyment of the Other as such, namely, if there is no guarantee that can be met in the enjoyment of the body of the Other which ensures that to enjoy the Other as such exists, here is the most manifest example of the hole

684. #684

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 2: Tuesday 17 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot structures the three registers (R.S.I.) such that phallic enjoyment, ek-sistence, and the hole are each topologically grounded: phallic enjoyment is produced through the knotting of the Symbolic ring; the Real is made by jouissance that ek-sists; and the sexual non-relationship is inscribed in language rather than filled by it, with anxiety marking the limit of enjoyment of the other body.

     what we find is anxiety…if we seek what this enjoyment of the other body can be bordered by, in so far as it surely makes a hole

685. #685

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.155

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976

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

     S(0); S of 0 barred is something quite different. It is not what man makes love with

686. #686

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 > There you are!

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the Borromean knot as the first genuine philosophical writing—a "logic of sacks and cords"—and uses Joyce's anomalous relationship to his own body (body-as-foreign, affect that "drains away" like a fruit skin) to theorise a specific ego-function that writing fulfils when the normal bodily imaginary fails, distinguishing this from the Freudian Unconscious as ignorance of the body.

     He did not enjoy (joui) on that occasion. He had a reaction of disgust. And this disgust concerns his own body in short.

687. #687

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.3

     Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

     Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates Seminar XXIII by introducing the *sinthome* as a new spelling/concept that bridges symptom, sin, and the Joycean art of lalangue-injection, arguing that Joyce's literary practice offers a privileged case for understanding how the sinthome functions as a logical-phallic supplement that can reach the Real — and that this case illuminates the structural necessity of castration, the not-all, and the inexistence of the Woman.

     This elation that we are told is at the source of some symptom or other that in psychiatry we call mania.

688. #688

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention

     Theoretical move: Through close reading of Joyce's Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist, Jacques Aubert demonstrates that the Name-of-the-Father functions as a poisoned/self-poisoning signifier, where the father's name change (deed poll), suicide, and spectral return in the Circe episode enact a structural logic of sliding from the paternal (Symbolic) toward the maternal (Imaginary), with the signifier 'Mud' serving as the pivot that triggers the mother's hallucinatory emergence.

     this jubilation of Bloom who prudently, has said the things he had to say, they are things which then give everyone pleasure.

689. #689

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.93

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention > *Where now?*

     Theoretical move: Jacques Aubert's intervention traces Joyce's deployment of legitimacy, certitude, and the voice-effects of the signifier across his work, while Lacan closes by grounding these in the Borromean knot and its irreducible topological ambiguity (the indistinguishability of its rings without colouring), arguing that right/left orientation cannot be expressed in the Symbolic.

     prudence, aptitude in choosing the means to obtain the greatest wellbeing for oneself

690. #690

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention > *Where now?*

     Theoretical move: Jacques Aubert's intervention in Lacan's seminar on Joyce traces how the Name-of-the-Father operates as a plural, shifting function in Ulysses—not as a fixed paternal authority but as a series of displacements (Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Virag, Dedalus, J.J. O'Molloy) that fill and re-fill structural holes in the text, while the epiphany is reread as a redoubling that liquidates the poetic dimension, and the mother's imaginary relationship to religion frames Joyce's entire symbolic economy.

     Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed... what was she laughing at?

691. #691

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.34

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1975** > QUESTIONS

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a seminar Q&A to clarify the topological function of the Borromean knot as the fourth term (symptom) that holds RSI together, argues that the Real operates as a third pole mediating between body and language rather than being reducible to either, and distinguishes the knot from a 'model' on the grounds that it resists imagination while topology itself remains insufficient to prove its four-fold Borromean realisation.

     Without language, would not the hole exist because of a direct physical engagement with the real? I am talking about love and of enjoyment.

692. #692

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.67

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976** > W w e W.

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's riddle (the fox burying his grandmother) as an exemplar of the analytic response — necessarily "stupid" relative to the poem-like symptom — and argues that meaning is produced by suturing/splicing the Imaginary to the Symbolic, while simultaneously splicing the sinthome to the parasitic Real of enjoyment; the Borromean knot is the structural model for this therapeutic operation.

     to render this enjoyment possible, is the same thing as what I will write: l'ouissens. It is the same thing as to hear a meaning.

693. #693

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot is the proper topological support for "first truths" about the Real, which is founded precisely by excluding meaning; and that the speaking being's (parlêtre's) only consistency is bodily/imaginary, while the knot — not the cord — is what properly ex-sists, grounding both truth and the analyst's responsibility in know-how (savoir-faire) rather than in any Other of the Other.

     there is something that we cannot enjoy. Let us call that the enjoyment of God, with the sense of sexual enjoyment included within it.

694. #694

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.100

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

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

     I am trying to note, to point out that enjoyment belongs to the Real. This leads me into enormous difficulties. First of all, because it is clear that the enjoyment of the Real comprises what Freud had glimpsed, comprises masochism.

695. #695

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.51

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday! 6 December 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the Borromean knot of three (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) constitutes the minimal support of the subject — and is itself the structure of paranoid psychosis — while the Sinthome emerges as a necessary fourth term that knots the three rings when they would otherwise come apart, with phallic jouissance located at the conjunction of the Symbolic and the Real, and meaning at the conjunction of the Symbolic and the Imaginary.

     with regard to this field, that I already, here noted as [O] what is at stake is enjoyment (jouissance) the enjoyment not of the Other, because of the fact that I stated that there is no Other of the Other

696. #696

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976

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

     it is not after what I have opened up about the sexual relationship, it is not difficult to suggest that, when there is equivalence, it is indeed in that there is no relationship.

697. #697

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.47

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 11 January 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Knowledge (as unconscious signifier-effects) and Truth have no relation to one another, that the unconscious is structured as signifier-effects rather than philosophy, and that psychoanalysis is a 'scientific delusion' awaiting a science it may never produce — pivoting through the Four Discourses, the Borromean Knot, and the parlêtre to situate the irreducibility of the Real to matter.

     One never says anything but one and the same thing which in short is upsetting, hence its defence and everything that is elucubrated about so-called resistances.

698. #698

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.35

     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.

     what I propose to you, is to comprehend effectively the enjoyment, one of the articulations of musical enjoyment, as having the power to evaporate the object.

699. #699

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.39

     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.

     the nature of the enjoyment to which one can accede at the end of the journey is not at all on the side of a 'surplus enjoying', but precisely on the side of this experience of this enjoyment, that perhaps one might call 'ecstatic', enjoyment of existence itself

700. #700

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     **II** > **Ill** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reworks Freud's grammatical analysis of paranoia by mapping each mode of negation of "I love him" onto a distinct structure of alienation (inverted, diverted, converted), while grounding the whole in the distinction between the big Other (symbolic, unknown) and the little other (imaginary, rival ego), arguing that psychosis must be understood through the structure of the subject's relation to an Other that speaks to him.

     The master has taken the slave's enjoyment from him, he has stolen the object of desire as object of the slave's desire, but at the same time he has lost his own humanity.

701. #701

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.94

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces Verwerfung (foreclosure) as a logical-prior failure of primitive symbolization—distinct from repression—whereby what is not symbolized reappears in the Real, establishing the foundational distinction between psychosis and neurosis and grounding a critique of the "defense" concept and premature interpretation in analytic technique.

     He renews his symptom, and at a point that has no more foundation or existence than the one at which he showed it at the outset. Is there something that he shows? I would go further—I would say that there is nothing at all that he shows, but that something shows itself.

702. #702

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

     **XVI** > *Reading from the* Memoirs, *308-10*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is structurally indivisible—its meaning-effect overruns any mechanical interruption—and uses this property to reframe the question of libidinal investment in psychosis: what is at stake is not energy per se but the subject's fundamental relationship to the signifier as such.

     why it's effectively in the relationship to the signifier that the subject invests all his capacities for interest

703. #703

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     **X** > **On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's psychosis to develop a theory of the signifier in the real: the verbal hallucination is not a false perception but the limit-phenomenon where discourse opens onto a signifier that precedes and exceeds the subject's intentional grasp, reframing the ego and the Other in terms of this foreign discourse at the heart of subjectivity.

     Where does the ineffable voluptuousness - a fundamental feature of the subject's life - which is attached to this discourse, stem from?

704. #704

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.154

     **X** > **On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle**

     Theoretical move: By tracking the gradations between the bellowing-miracle (pure signifier without meaning) and the call for help (meaning without genuine subjecthood), Lacan argues that in psychosis the unconscious signifier is situated as externally real rather than internally repressed — pointing toward the structural difference between Verwerfung (Foreclosure) and Verdrängung (Repression) as two distinct modes of subjective localization of the signifier.

     traces of the passage of the subject absorbed in an undeniably erotized link. The connotations are there - this is a male-female relationship.

705. #705

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.230

     **XVII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in psychosis (particularly Schreber's hallucinations), the signifier's dimension of contiguity dominates over the dimension of similarity/metaphor, and that misrecognising the primordial mediating role of the signifier — reducing analysis to the signified — renders psychosis unintelligible; the hallucinatory phenomenon is precisely the grammatical-syntactic part of language imposed as an external reality, marking a failure of the metaphoric function.

     He literally loves it like himself. This phenomenon can hardly be described as an internal dialogue since it's precisely around the existence of the other that the meaning of the preeminence of the signifying game revolves, increasingly emptied of meaning.

706. #706

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the psychotic's relation to reality from that of the normal subject by showing that what is at stake in psychosis is not belief in the reality of hallucinations but an unshakeable *certainty* that phenomena concern the subject — a certainty that is structurally prior to and independent of reality-testing, and which must be understood through the symbolic frame (L Schema) rather than reduced to normal mechanisms like projection.

     he is the female correspondent of God. Henceforth, everything becomes understandable, everything works out... the Versöhnung, the reconciliation, that positions him as the woman of God

707. #707

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.66

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that frustration must be re-theorized through a structural distinction between the real object and the symbolic agent (the mother), showing how the presence-absence opposition introduced by the fort-da game grounds the virtual origin of the symbolic order, and how the mother's failure to respond converts her from symbolic agent into a real power, causing a reversal whereby the object becomes symbolic (a gift-token) rather than merely real.

     the child will depend on her in the most manifest way for access to those objects that hitherto were purely and simply objects of satisfaction

708. #708

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.123

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the case of the young homosexual woman to demonstrate how perversion arises from a structural permutation within the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real triad: when the symbolic father intrudes into the imaginary plane as a real event (giving a child to the mother), the subject identifies with the paternal function and reorganises her desire around what the love-object lacks (the symbolic phallus), revealing that love is essentially a gift of what one does not have.

     What follows on from the child's frustration of jouissance is an original dimension that persists in the subject in the state of an imaginary relationship.

709. #709

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.286

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is seized by the autonomous play of the signifier — not by drives or affects — and uses the case of Little Hans to show that phobia/myth functions as a structural solution to an impossible symbolic impasse; he then anchors this in Freud's Witz to demonstrate that condensation at the level of the signifier is the constitutive mechanism of both wit and symptomatic production.

     There is something especially satisfying about this for little Hans.

710. #710

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.108

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

     Theoretical move: By closely reading Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten" through a structural lens, Lacan argues that perversion cannot be reduced to either a fixated partial drive or the eroticisation of defences, but must be understood via the multi-level subjective structure revealed in the three-stage transformation of fantasy — a structure that is fundamentally intersubjective and retroactively organised through symbolisation.

     Frustration, love and jouissance

711. #711

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     WHAT MYTH IS FOR

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hans's phobia arises at the precise moment when the child is required to make the transition from treating the phallus as an imaginary element in the mother's desire to recognising its symbolic value within the signifying system — a passage that is structurally insurmountable without the paternal intervention that introduces a minimum ternary (or quaternary) organisation of the symbolic order.

     the ravaging character, most especially for paranoiacs, of the first climactic, orgasmic sensation... testimony of a character of harrowing invasion, of destabilising upsurge

712. #712

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Id (Es) is not a brute physical or energic reality but is organized and articulated like a signifier, thereby reframing the analytic notion of libido as a purely abstract measure (akin to energy) that operates at the level of the imaginary, and situating the body image and clinical objects (phobia, fetish) within the signifier/signified relation rather than within developmental-stage object theory.

     Nothing is less anchored in a material underpinning than the notion of libido in analysis.

713. #713

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

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL

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

     with the introduction of masturbation, this real jouissance with his own real penis

714. #714

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.122

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

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

     The frustration of love and the frustration of jouissance are two distinct things... the frustration of jouissance is on no account pervaded by just anything, contrary to what people say.

715. #715

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.287

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formation of the Ego Ideal has a fundamentally metaphorical structure: the father-object, desired and refused, is substituted for the subject and becomes a metaphor of the subject, thereby transforming desire and reorganising the subject's entire signifying history — a process categorically distinct from the prohibition of jouissance and the foreclosure-like rejection (*Verwerfung*) that produces melancholic states.

     Reducing these identifications would risk placing the subject in a position of loss in comparison with what the treatment reveals to have been the basis of the jouissance she had established before her analysis.

716. #716

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.130

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

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

     The whole detour is only taken so as to come back to jouissance, and the most elementary at that. That is how comedy makes its entrance

717. #717

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.431

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

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

     'I feel a kind of intense pleasure and anxiety'

718. #718

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

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

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

     a Witz restores an essentially unsatisfied demand its jouissance, under the double and moreover identical aspects of surprise and pleasure - the pleasure of surprise and the surprise in pleasure.

719. #719

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.374

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

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

     the following declaration - 'I had an extraordinary experience, that of being able to enjoy my husband's happiness, I was extremely moved to observe his joy, and his pleasure was my pleasure'

720. #720

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.252

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

     Theoretical move: By reading Genet's *The Balcony* as a clinical illustration, Lacan argues that the Ego Ideal is not the product of sublimation but of an eroticization of the symbolic function, and that perversion consists in enjoying the image of a signifying function; the drama's resolution—where the Chief of Police finally achieves symbolic recognition only through castration—demonstrates that accession to the order of the phallic symbol is inseparable from castration.

     we begin to imagine what it is like to enjoy these functions... what is it really like to enjoy the status of a bishop, a judge or a general?

721. #721

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.504

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > Chapter X The Three Moments of the Oedipus Complex (I)

     Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly apparatus (editorial footnotes and bibliographic references) for Seminar V, providing source citations, translations, and cross-references for chapters X–XVI. It is non-substantive theoretical content.

     Chapter XIV Desire and Jouissance

722. #722

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that hallucinatory satisfaction is not a primitive imaginary phenomenon but is constituted at the level of signifiers and presupposes the locus of the Other; consequently, both the pleasure principle and the reality principle must be rethought as effects of the signifying chain rather than of need-satisfaction or experiential adaptation.

     What the little Anna Freud dreams of is precisely what the child has been forbidden, 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, pudding'... She doesn't dream simply of what corresponds to a need, but of what is present in the mode of a feast, going beyond the limits of the natural object

723. #723

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the joke's mechanism reveals the Other as a dual structure: both a real, living subject (whose needs give meaning direction) and a purely symbolic locus — an anonymous, abstract "treasure trove" of signifiers — and that it is precisely this function of the Other, as the empty Grail or form, that the joke invokes and must awaken, thereby showing that the unconscious is the plane on which the joke's surprise arrives.

     there is also something quasi anonymous, which is present in what I refer to as I reach out to him and arouse his pleasure at the same time as my own.

724. #724

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.307

     **SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the original Freudian discovery of unconscious desire must be recovered against the distorting backdrop of contemporary psychoanalytic normativization: early Freudian interpretations derived their efficacy precisely from the absence of a pre-formed cultural framework, whereas today the analyst's intervention is weighted by an implicit normative horizon that obscures desire's essential link to its mask (symptom), making desire structurally unarticulable even when articulated.

     how much the latter has promoted this characteristic inherent in desire qua perverse desire, which is a second-order desire, an enjoyment of desire qua desire.

725. #725

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.116

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jokes operate through a shared symbolic field (the "parish"/paroisse) constituted by metonymic stock common to speaker and Other, and that the joke's mechanism works by using the Other-as-censor as a "reflecting concavity" to make the unconscious resonate — the obstacle to meaning becomes the very vehicle for transmitting what cannot ordinarily be heard.

     in order for a joke to make the Other laugh… you have to have a lot in common, you have to belong to the same church

726. #726

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.251

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject's constitution depends on whether he is inscribed as a "desired child" within the symbolic triad (mother's desire, paternal signifier, subject), and uses the case of André Gide to demonstrate how the failure of this inscription produces perversion—where the ego-ideal is formed through an unconscious pathway rather than a conscious one—before pivoting to a theory of comedy as the representation of the subject's relationship to his own signifieds, culminating in the appearance of the phallus on the comic scene.

     It's a matter of that in which he has to express himself as a person whose destiny it is to absorb the substance and matter of this communion, profit from it, enjoy it and consume it.

727. #727

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.78

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

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

     This constant diversion which means you don't know whether it's the flesh of a young girl or a trout that's on the table makes it possible for the so-called realist description to dispense with any unfathomable reference to any meaning or trans-meaning whatsoever.

728. #728

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.241

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

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

     This notion I am speaking about will be the other pole of my discourse today. It's called jouissance.

729. #729

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.462

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

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

     This element is only a point of sensuality on the body, and this is how the subject discovers it in the first place. Masturbatory autoerotism, which effectively plays such a big role in the subject's history, is not at all in itself liable to trigger such catastrophes.

730. #730

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

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

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

     the very progress of the treatment might deprive the said subjects of the point that they had come to in their sexual relations and threaten the level of jouissance they had acquired and achieved.

731. #731

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.300

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces three formulas of desire (articulating desire's relations to narcissistic identification, demand/the Other, and the phallus as signifier) while arguing that Freud's *Totem and Taboo* discloses the constitutive link between desire and the signifier — specifically that the murder of the father marks the emergence of signifiers from death, and that human desire is irreducible to adaptation because the subject enjoys desiring itself.

     The subject does not simply satisfy a desire, he derives enjoyment from desiring, and this is an essential dimension of his enjoyment.

732. #732

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.258

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

     Theoretical move: Reintegration into the human order requires castration as the precondition for the phallus to be re-elevated to the status of signifier — something that can be given or withheld by the paternal figure — establishing castration as the structural hinge between desire and jouissance.

     These terms, which I will come back to, will serve as reference points for the essential question of desire and jouissance, a taste of which I wanted to give you today.

733. #733

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.90

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

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

     What prolongs the effect of signifiers is when they are resolved into their own authentic pleasure, the pleasure we get from using signifiers.

734. #734

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.286

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes a minimal three-term schema for secondary identification: a libidinal object is transformed into a signifier that anchors the ego-ideal, while desire undergoes substitution via a third term (the rival/father), with the phallus functioning as the universal "lowest common denominator" — the metonymic pivot through which desire must pass in any signifying economy, regardless of sex.

     she will find her satisfaction in a position that will, then, no longer be purely passive, but in a position of jouissance that is assured in this very privation of clitoral jouissance that has been imposed on her.

735. #735

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

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

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

     jouissance and 235-52 clitoral jouissance 281, 283

736. #736

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.332

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps three successive stages of Hamlet's relation to the object (Ophelia) — estrangement, rejection/externalization, and mourning/reconquest — arguing that Ophelia functions structurally as the phallus that the subject externalizes and rejects, and that the fantasy formula ($◇a) tilts toward ($◇φ) in a movement that illuminates das Unheimliche and the modern hero's constitutive displacement onto the other's time.

     they involve 'rapiers' and 'their assigns' [V, ii, 145], things that have value only as luxury objects. Hamlet is in fact provoked to engage in a sort of jousting

737. #737

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the chess metaphor — specifically the patient's refusal to sacrifice his queen — to argue that the phallus is a hidden signifier displaced onto the female partner (wife/analyst), and that the subject's desire is structured around preserving this phallic substitute at the cost of remaining bound in a fantasy of omnipotence; the analytic task is to bring this secret relation between subject and partner into the open.

     Everyone senses the connection between power and these problematic instruments of our civilization, automobiles - their horsepower, speed, and 'peak of speed' - and everyone obviously considers them to be phallic equivalents, the backup potency of those who are impotent

738. #738

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.20

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

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

     Desire is the very essence of man...inasmuch as it is understood to be based on one of his inclinations, understood as determined and dominated by one of his inclinations to do something.

739. #739

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Jones's concept of aphanisis as a failed equalization of male and female desire, then rehabilitates it as a structural question about the subject's existence beyond desire, showing that when the subject encounters objet petit a, the subject vanishes ($), and that displacement/metonymy functions as the mechanism by which desire is preserved precisely through the thwarting of satisfaction.

     in this case, a certain retention of the object - as we say, bringing in an anal metaphor - is the necessary condition for desire to subsist. But this is only to the degree to which the retained object, which props up desire, not itself be the object of any jouissance.

740. #740

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.470

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

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

     masochistic jouissance essentially requires one not to go beyond a certain point when it comes to physical abuse

741. #741

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

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

     the sacrosanct 'genital object' that we find in recent psychoanalytic terminology presents itself in her as no other than the object of a jouissance that is truly the direct satisfaction of a need.

742. #742

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     THE DESIRE TRAP

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hamlet's play-within-the-play scene not merely as a strategic ruse to expose Claudius but as Hamlet's attempt to construct a "fictional structure of truth" that orients him with respect to his own desire—and identifies the analyst's position with Hamlet's intermediary role of stepping "between" subject and desire.

     what he wants to do is surprise the other in the excess of his pleasures, in other words, in relations with the queen.

743. #743

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.426

     THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that being is co-extensive with the cut/gap in the signifying chain, and that the subject, constituted as "not one" (barred, split), appears precisely at those gaps in desire — a structural account that displaces both ego-psychological notions of genital maturity and religious/moral frameworks for desire's satisfaction, while insisting on desire as the irreducible proof of the subject's presence.

     it is not superfluous to recall to mind here certain questions with a moral or even ... social horizon. It seems clear in contemporary experience that there cannot be satisfaction of one person without the satisfaction of all

744. #744

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.441

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of fantasy — defined by the aphanisis of the subject at the height of desire — is the hub from which neurotic (and perverse) clinical structures differentiate: the subject must find something to sustain desire in the face of the Other's desire, generating the distinct solutions of phobia, hysteria (unsatisfied desire), and obsession (impossible desire).

     She derives jouissance from blocking desire. This is one of the fundamental functions of hysterical subjects in the situations they fabricate: stopping desire from being satisfied so that they themselves can remain what is at stake in desire.

745. #745

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.466

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural logic of the phallus as signifier through the "either/or" formulation — one either *is* the phallus or *has* it — and deploys this to distinguish feminine desire from neurotic desire, where the neurotic regresses to a metonymic substitution in which "not having" disguises an unconscious identification with being the phallus, while the ego usurps the place of the barred subject in the dialectic of desire.

     Consider what actually happens at the end of the obsessive's complicated maneuvers - he is not the one who enjoys.

746. #746

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.444

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a differential dialectic of desire in neurosis: hysteria and obsession are contrasted as two distinct structural positions relative to desire and the phallus, with the phallus theorized as the signifier that ties desire to the law of exchange and fertility, such that the neurotic subject's fundamental impasse is the "to be or not to have" disjunction—being the phallus for the Other exposes one to the threat of castration, while the neurotic ego-defense is what organizes the subject's distance from the Other's desire.

     At the level at which it is an organ, it is the instrument of a jouissance, and it is not integrated into the mechanism of desire, for the latter is situated at another level.

747. #747

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.520

     33 1. The way the wager was structured

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Kojève's reading of Hegel's Absolute Knowing—and Queneau's novelistic satirization of it—as a foil to articulate Lacan's fundamental theoretical commitment to the divided subject: wisdom's 'perfect satisfaction' and absence of division is precisely what Lacanian theory refuses, and Hamlet (bustling, uncertain, linguistic) is posed against the Kojevian Sage as the proper figure of the subject.

     'the satiated rest of a sort of colossal seventh day on this Sunday of life on which the human animal can finally shove its muzzle in the grass'

748. #748

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.448

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: By re-reading Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten" through the lens of metaphor and alienation, Lacan argues that the obsessive fantasy stages the neurotic's structural relation to desire: the subject sustains desire precisely by perpetuating its precariousness, finding jouissance not in satisfaction but in the symptomatic metonymy of 'être pour' (being-for) that defers 'pour être' (being as such).

     masturbatory jouissance is not the solution to desire here; it represents, instead, the crushing of desire - just as a child at the breast crushes his demand for love from his mother with the satisfaction of nursing.

749. #749

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.433

     THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the structural argument that in perverse fantasy (exhibitionism/voyeurism), the subject is not identified with the visible object but with the 'slit' itself — the cut or gap that mediates between the glimpsed and the not-glimpsed — and that the barred subject ($) in fantasy is therefore structurally constituted by this cut, while the objet petit a in fantasy turns out to be the Other's desire rather than a simple part-object.

     The voyeur's jouissance reaches its true height when something in the gestures of the woman he is spying on allows him to suspect that, in some way, she is capable of offering herself up to his jouissance.

750. #750

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

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

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

     they present the same ambiguity - except that women find the real phallus in men. They are thus in a position to in fact obtain from such relationships a jouissance that satisfies their desire.

751. #751

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     THE IMAGE OF THE INSIDE-OUT GLOVE > I am going to skip here a little,

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a clinical case analysis to argue that the patient's fundamental fantasy is structured around an "inside-out glove" image — a masturbatory, non-separating envelopment of male and female elements — and that the analyst's (Sharpe's) interpretive errors stem from reducing a complex signifying fantasy to a dyadic, imaginary transference and crude screen-memory reconstruction, thereby missing the structural topology of the subject's desire.

     The sort of supplement or false jouissance he gets from urination is something that we frequently note in patients who have been in close proximity to parental coitus.

752. #752

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.477

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural difference between neurotic and perverse desire turns on how each subject bears the "cut" or split: the neurotic indefinitely defers his desire in metonymic evasion, while the pervert directly identifies with the split/cut as constitutive of fantasy—a distinction Lacan develops by critiquing Gillespie's anatomical reduction of ego-splitting and by reading Gide's fantasies as evidence that perverse identification with the phallus operates differently from neurotic castration anxiety.

     two of the themes that gave me physical enjoyment [jouissance]: one was furnished me very innocently by George Sand in her charming story of Gribouille.

753. #753

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.301

     THE MOTHER'S DESIRE

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

     'I am what I am. In my case there's nothing to be done, I'm a true genital personality'… 'I know nothing of mourning.'

754. #754

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

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

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

     As if we hadn't been plagued enough by desire on earth, part of eternity is to be given over to keeping accounts.

755. #755

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     **VII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's doctrine of the libido (against Jung's cosmological misreading) to establish Das Ding as the structural obstacle around which the subject must navigate on the path of pleasure, arguing that sublimation cannot be reduced to direct drive-satisfaction or collective approval because it always involves an antinomy—a reaction formation—that reveals the fundamental incompatibility between the drive and any Sovereign Good.

     beyond a certain limit, we are in a thoroughly enigmatic position relative to that which lies within das Ding, because there is no ethical rule which acts as a mediator between our pleasure and its real rule.

756. #756

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     **XIV** > The function of the good

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic conception of the good cannot be reduced to the hedonist tradition because Freud's pleasure principle—read through the Entwurf up to Beyond the Pleasure Principle—introduces a dimension of memory/facilitation/repetition that rivals and exceeds satisfaction, thereby grounding ethics in the subject's relation to desire rather than in utility or the natural good.

     UTILITY AND jouissance

757. #757

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     **XI** > **XIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo to argue that the primordial murder of the father does not open the path to jouissance but paradoxically strengthens its prohibition — a structural asymmetry in which the transfer of jouissance to prohibition always increases the superego's cruelty, while the reverse passage (toward uninhibited jouissance) generates its own obstacles, revealing the fundamental fault at the origin of moral law.

     not only does the murder of the father not open the path to jouissance that the presence of the father was supposed to prohibit, but it, in fact, strengthens the prohibition.

758. #758

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.237

     **XIV** > The function of the good

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the domain of the good is not reducible to utilitarian use-value but is fundamentally structured by power—the capacity to deprive others—which erects the first barrier against desire; jouissance introduces a surplus that splits the good from mere utility, and the depriving agent is revealed to be an imaginary function (the little other), not a real one.

     There is its jouissance use. As a result, the good is articulated in a wholly different way. The good is not at the level of the use of the cloth.

759. #759

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's engagement with the commandment to love one's neighbor (from *Civilization and Its Discontents*) as the pivot for a meditation on the death of God, the Name-of-the-Father, and the political/ethical consequences of Freud's demystification of the paternal function, arguing that the "truth about truth" must be approached step by step rather than through metaphysical pretension.

     WHY JOUISSANCE IS EVIL

760. #760

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.176

     **XI** > **XIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two interlocking theoretical moves: (1) it critiques Sperber's sexual-origin theory of language by insisting that the metaphorical spread of sexual signifiers proves not a reduction of meaning to sexual roots but rather that an "emptiness" or gap — the form of the female organ — is the privileged pole around which metaphorical play of the signifier is organised; (2) it pivots to Freud's treatment of the paternal function in religious experience, arguing that religious knowledge (Moses, the Name of the Father) belongs within the analytic field of inquiry precisely because all knowledge emerges against a background of ignorance.

     JOUISSANCE AND DEBT

761. #761

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

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

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

     The paradox of jouissance introduces its problematic into that dialectic of happiness which we analysts have perhaps rashly set out to explore.

762. #762

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.271

     **XIV** > **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's close reading of Sophocles' *Antigone* argues that the play's central organizing term *Atè* — the limit that human life can only briefly cross — structures Antigone's desire as an orientation toward the beyond of the human, making her not monstrous but the embodiment of desire aimed past the boundary of civilization, with the surrounding drama functioning not as action but as a temporal "subsidence" that reveals the irreducible relation of the tragic hero to the dimension of truth.

     Need I go further and add that in connection with that image Christianity has been crucifying man in holiness for centuries? In holiness.

763. #763

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

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

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

     the Lady, leads one commentator to say that they all seemed to have been praising the same person.

764. #764

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.324

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis is grounded not in the service of goods or traditional moral regulation, but in the question "Have you acted in conformity with your desire?" — a standard derived from the topology of desire that both tragedy and comedy reveal, and which Kant's categorical imperative partially anticipates but fails to complete, leaving a void that psychoanalysis identifies as the place of desire.

     one can easily substitute for Kant's 'Thou shalt' the Sadean fantasm of jouissance elevated to the level of an imperative

765. #765

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

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

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

     jouissance and, 322

766. #766

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.186

     **XI** > **XIII**

     Theoretical move: The Law and transgression are constitutively bound together as the condition of access to jouissance; without the Law's prohibition, desire loses its driving force. This dialectic is grounded in Freud's myth of the murder of the father, which reveals that God was never anything but the father of the son's mythology — a structure whose inner atheism Hegel already diagnosed as Christianity's own consequence.

     without a transgression there is no access to jouissance, and, to return to Saint Paul, that that is precisely the function of the Law.

767. #767

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.277

     **XIV** > **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan completes his close reading of Sophocles' *Antigone*, tracing how the play's dramatic escalation — through the chorus's hymn to mankind, the punishment decree, the appearance of Tiresias, the hymn to Dionysus, and the catastrophic finale — consistently orbits the limit-concept of *Ate*, and how the Greek term *ïmeros enargês* (desire made visible) names the specific quality of desire that erupts at the moment of Antigone's condemnation, linking the ethical stakes of the tragedy to the broader Lacanian analysis of desire and the beautiful.

     At the moment when it is moving more and more toward a kind of explosive climax of divine delirium, the blind Tiresias appears.

768. #768

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.345

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

     Theoretical move: This is an index page from Seminar VII, non-substantive in theoretical content but reflecting the conceptual terrain of the seminar through its entries.

     jouissance, 229, 298, 316 as accessible to other, 237 as evil, 179, 184-90 murder of father and, 176 as satisfaction of drive, 209 sublimation and, 322 taming of, 4-5 of transgression, 177, 191-204

769. #769

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.245

     **XIV** > **XVIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the field "beyond the good principle" is delimited on one side by the beautiful (which suspends desire rather than fulfilling it) and on the other by pain/masochism, and that neither side exhausts that field; it pivots toward Antigone as the exemplary case of an absolute, non-good-motivated choice, while grounding the whole inquiry in the relationship between the human being, the signifier, and the death drive.

     this register of a jouissance as that which is only accessible to the other is the only dimension in which we can locate the strange malaise... with the word Lebensneid.

770. #770

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

     **XIV** > **XXII**

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

     the only moment of jouissance that man knows occurs at the site where fantasms are produced, fantasms that represent for us the same barrier as far as access to jouissance is concerned

771. #771

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.270

     **XIV** > **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads *Antigone* through the lens of Aristotle's hamartia and Kantian practical reason to argue that Creon's error is the unlimited pursuit of the good, and uses the conjunction of beauty and the Sadean fantasy of indestructible suffering to define the "limit of the second death" as the structural boundary that both tragedy and psychoanalysis must locate — a limit that Christianity displaces onto the image of the crucifixion.

     The play of pain. For the space in question is the same as that in which aesthetic phenomena disport themselves, a space of freedom. And the conjunction between the play of pain and the phenomena of beauty is to be found there.

772. #772

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.210

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade's work to argue that the literary experiment of transgression reveals the structure of jouissance as approach to an unbearable centre, and introduces two theoretical terms: the part object (as the logic of Sade's social law) and the indestructibility of the Other in fantasy — ultimately connecting the Sadistic relation to the structure of obsessional neurosis.

     When one approaches that central emptiness, which up to now has been the form in which access to jouissance has presented itself to us, my neighbor's body breaks into pieces.

773. #773

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that courtly love operates as a structural technology of sublimation that installs an artificial vacuole—an emptied, depersonalized object (das Ding)—at the center of signification, thereby organizing desire through inaccessibility and privation rather than mystical or historical derivation; this structural analysis then pivots to the ethics of eroticism, connecting the courtly logic of foreplay (Vorlust) and detour to the psychic economy as something irreducible to the pleasure principle.

     what man demands, what he cannot help but demand, is to be deprived of something real.

774. #774

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.341

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

     Theoretical move: This is an index section (pages 340-344) of Seminar VII, listing key terms, proper names, and page references with no independent theoretical argument; it is non-substantive filler but maps the conceptual terrain of the seminar.

     jouissance as satisfaction of, 209

775. #775

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.212

     **XIV** > **XV** > *The Death Drive According to Bernfeld*

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames Freud's death drive as itself a sublimation projected beyond the barrier where the object-as-jouissance is inaccessible, and uses Bernfeld's failed energetic theory of the drive as a productive aporia that reveals the ethical-subjective dimension within which Freud's thought actually moves.

     the inaccessibility of the object as object of jouissance is organized. It is in brief the place where the battlefield of our experience is situated.

776. #776

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     **V**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding—identified with the mother as the primordial forbidden object—is both the structural ground of the prohibition of incest and the constitutive condition of speech and the pleasure principle itself; the Ten Commandments are reread as the preconscious articulation of this distance from the Thing, and Freud's doctrine is presented as the overturning of any Sovereign Good.

     we spend our time breaking the ten commandments, and that is why society is possible

777. #777

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.117

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kant's moral fable to expose the limits of the reality/pleasure principle as a criterion for ethics, arguing that sublimation and perversion both open onto a different register of morality oriented by das Ding (the place of desire), and re-grounds sublimation theoretically by distinguishing it from symptomatic repression through the drive's capacity to find its aim elsewhere without signifying substitution.

     it is not impossible for a man to sleep with a woman knowing full well that he is to be bumped off on his way out... it is not impossible that this man coolly accepts such an eventuality on his leaving

778. #778

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.205

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade as a limit-figure who, in his theory (if not his fantasy), points toward the genuine space of the neighbor as irreducibly other — beyond imaginary capture by the fellow-man — and thereby illuminates the structure of jouissance, transgression, and the ethical problem of loving one's neighbor as oneself.

     the jouissance of destruction, the peculiar virtue of crime, evil sought for evil's sake, and, in the last instance, the Supreme-Being-in-Evil

779. #779

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     **II**

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the object-level opposition of fiction/knowable vs. appetite/unknowable to the subject-level opposition, arguing that the pleasure principle presents the good as the substance of subjective activity, while the reality principle — following Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* — refuses any identification of adequacy to reality with a specific good, leaving the substratum of subjective reality as an unresolved question mark.

     Freud doesn't for a moment consider identifying adequacy to reality with a specific good. In Civilization and Its Discontents he tells us that civilization or culture certainly asks too much of the subject.

780. #780

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     **VII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces sublimation as the positive, "other side" of the psychoanalytic critique of ethics, arguing that the plasticity and displacement-structure of the drives (*Triebe*) — irreducible to instinct and governed by the play of signifiers — is the necessary starting point for any theory of sublimation, while simultaneously exposing the paradoxical cruelty of the moral conscience as a parasite fed by the very satisfactions it demands.

     There is something that cannot be sublimated; libidinal demand exists, the demand for a certain dose, of a certain level of direct satisfaction, without which harm results, serious disturbances occur.

781. #781

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes *das Ding* as the excluded interior of the psychic organization — an operational but irreducibly opaque field that lies beyond the signifying chain and the pleasure principle, and whose ethical significance distinguishes Freudian metapsychology from both Hegelian philosophy of the state and affect-based psychology.

     it is quite unthinkable nowadays to speak abstractly of society... At the end of a certain phenomenology, the opposition between the individual and the city, between the individual and the state, is obvious.

782. #782

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     **II**

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes the foundational thesis of Seminar VII: the moral law, structured by the Symbolic, is the agency through which the Real is actualized; and psychoanalytic ethics must be distinguished from all prior ethics (exemplified by Aristotle) by seeking a particular, hidden truth in the subject rather than conformity to a universal order or Sovereign Good.

     the pleasure in a second degree we may paradoxically find there, namely, moral masochism

783. #783

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     **XIV** > **XVI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian discovery of desire—irreducible to need or reason—exposes the structural insufficiency of both Hegelian and Marxist accounts of human self-realization, and that jouissance, as the satisfaction of a drive (not a need), constitutes the inaccessible yet central problem of the ethics of psychoanalysis.

     jouissance presents itself as buried at the center of a field and has the characteristics of inaccessibility, obscurity and opacity... jouissance appears not purely and simply as the satisfaction of a need but as the satisfaction of a drive

784. #784

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.69

     **V**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs Freud's *Entwurf* around *das Ding* as the original lost object that structures the entire movement of *Vorstellungen* under the pleasure principle, while establishing that the unconscious is organized according to the laws of condensation/displacement (metaphor/metonymy), and that access to thought processes requires their mediation through word-representations (*Wort-Vorstellungen*) in preconsciousness — thereby grounding the ethics of psychoanalysis in the constitutive distance from *das Ding*.

     an enfeebled jouissance, which through the age-old interrogations of the philosophers makes it the essential feature. And by isolating it in this function, Freud removes it from its tradition.

785. #785

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Kantian ethics and Sadian ethics are structural mirrors of each other—both arrive at *das Ding* by eliminating all pathological (affective) reference from the moral law—and that this convergence reveals the fundamental relationship between the moral law, desire, and the Real, with pain as the sole sentient correlative of pure practical reason.

     the outer extremity of pleasure is unbearable to us... To the degree that it involves forcing an access to the Thing

786. #786

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.303

     **XIV** > **XXII**

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

     the question of the realization of desire is necessarily formulated from the point of view of a Last Judgment.

787. #787

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.62

     **IV**

     Theoretical move: By reading das Ding as the 'beyond-of-the-signified' — the absolute, prehistoric Other that can only be missed, never reached — Lacan grounds the clinical structures of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia in differential relations to this primordial lost object, and then opens the path toward a Kantian ethics where das Ding is replaced by the pure signifying system of the moral law.

     the pleasure principle is presented to us as possessing a mode of operation which is precisely to avoid excess, too much pleasure.

788. #788

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.155

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bernfeld's ego-psychological account of sublimation (which grounds it in pre-given *Ichziele*) in order to pose the real problem: how a social consensus can originate a structural function like the poetic, and then demonstrates that courtly love is the paradigm case — a historically emergent, signifier-driven construction of the Lady as sublimated object that reshapes the entire economy of desire and social exchange.

     the scholastics of unhappy love. Certain terms define the register according to which the Lady's values are attained — a register indicated by the norms which regulate the exchanges between the partners of the strange rite, namely, reward, clemency, grace or Gnade, felicity

789. #789

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.330

     **XXIII** > **XXIV**

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar VII by consolidating the ethics of psychoanalysis around the injunction not to give ground relative to one's desire, articulating the relationship between jouissance, sublimation, and the 'service of goods' through the figures of the hero, the saint, and tragic catharsis, and ends by locating modern science as the unconscious refuge of human desire.

     Sublimate as much as you like; you have to pay for it with something. And this something is called jouissance. I have to pay for that mystical operation with a pound of flesh.

790. #790

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.121

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the defining formula of sublimation — "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing" — as the key to understanding how the drive finds satisfaction beyond its aim, and he illustrates this via courtly love and a concrete fable of collecting, arguing that sublimation reveals the relationship of the drive to das Ding as distinct from any imaginary object.

     it is quite impossible to explain it correctly without reference to what I had to say last year on the subject of desire and its behavior.

791. #791

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.168

     **XI** > **XII** > **A critique of Bernfeld**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bernfeld's account of sublimation as dependent on a synchrony with repression and the Ich/Libidoziele distinction, arguing instead that sublimation must be articulated around das Ding — a primordial, non-object — which precedes the ego's aims and anchors the properly Freudian ethics/aesthetics Lacan is developing throughout Seminar VII.

     moral complacency which is in a way that which ethics makes use of in order to render the Thing inaccessible to us, when it already was inaccessible from the beginning.

792. #792

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.13

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VII by framing the ethics of psychoanalysis as irreducible to moralism or the naturalist liberation of desire: the 'attraction of transgression' — running from Freud's murder-of-the-father myth through the death drive — constitutes the properly psychoanalytic entry-point into ethics, one that cannot be dissolved by taming perverse jouissance or reducing guilt.

     This approach involves the taming of perverse jouissance, which is assumed to emerge from the demonstration of its universality, on the one hand, and its function, on the other.

793. #793

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

     Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* and *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*, argues that jouissance remains forbidden even after the death of God, and that the commandment to love one's neighbor is ethically explosive precisely because the neighbor harbors the same "fundamental evil"—the same proximity to das Ding—that I harbour in myself; altruism and utilitarianism are exposed as frauds that allow us to avoid confronting the malignant jouissance at the heart of the ethical problem, which only Sade (and Kant) begin to articulate honestly.

     jouissance still remains forbidden as it was before, before we knew that God was dead.

794. #794

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.198

     **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that Kant's moral calculus collapses once jouissance—understood as implicitly bound to evil and death—is substituted for pleasure in the ethical equation: the moral law then serves as a support for jouissance rather than its constraint, revealing that the law of the good can only operate through evil, and that the ethical subject is torn between a duty of truth that preserves the place of jouissance and a resignation to the good that extinguishes it.

     one only has to make a conceptual shift and move the night spent with the lady from the category of pleasure to that of jouissance, given that jouissance implies precisely the acceptance of death

795. #795

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.318

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > And a bit further on she continues:

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's blind Pensée as an incarnation of the partial object of desire — specifically as a figure that, through her blindness, escapes the scopic economy (seeing-oneself-seen) and instead operates through the structure of the voice and speech, which cannot be heard hearing itself except in hallucination; this leads to the claim that castration alone separates absolute desire from natural desire, and that the sublime object of desire functions as a substitute for das Ding.

     He marries Sichel, a woman who wants him as the object of her jouissance.

796. #796

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S* > <span id="page-136-0"></span>**EXIT FROM THE ULTRA-W ORLD**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Diotima's speech in the Symposium as staging a fundamental slippage between two functions of beauty—beauty as a veil over the desire for death (between-two-deaths) and beauty as the metonymic object of desire—arguing that this movement illustrates the metonymic structure of desire itself, while also pointing toward what is missed when Plato is read as reducing Eros to narcissistic self-perfection (identification with the ideal ego).

     He loves them, she continues, in order to enjoy them.

797. #797

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.255

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

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

     the object of fantasy insofar as it presents itself as alone able to determine a special point in what must be called, alongside the pleasure principle, an economy regulated by the level of jouissance.

798. #798

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Aristophanes' myth of the spherical beings in the Symposium to argue that what is being satirized is not mere comedy but the philosophical figure of the *sphairos* — the self-sufficient, self-identical sphere central to ancient cosmology (Empedocles, Plato's Timaeus) — thereby revealing that Plato stages a comic deflation of his own cosmological imaginary through Aristophanes' discourse on love. This move prepares a critique of unification as the model of love (contra Freud's Eros/Thanatos opposition) and links the Imaginary register to the fascination with spherical wholeness.

     reigns in its royal solitude, full of its own contentment, and of its self-sufficiency

799. #799

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.206

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what Object Relations analysts call "countertransference" is actually an irreducible structural effect of transference itself: by virtue of the analytic situation, the analyst is necessarily positioned as the container of *agalma* (objet petit a), and this positioning—not the analyst's personal psychology—explains phenomena like projective identification, transference love, and the analyst's affective responses; the categories of desire, fantasy, and topology are required to articulate this adequately.

     the analyst himself realizes - 'I thought that what you were saying was all about you and not in the least about me.'

800. #800

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.364

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses his optical schema to argue that the emergence of the ego-ideal and ideal ego requires the intervention of the big Other (capital O) as a third term that exceeds the dyadic, radically imaginary and destructive conflict of the mirror stage, thereby grounding narcissistic development in a symbolic register that neither Hegel's dialectic nor the Jekels-Bergler introjection/projection model can adequately account for.

     It is insofar as the ego-ideal can be projected anew onto an object that this object - if it happens to be favorably inclined toward you or to regard you kindly - will be endowed by you with the highest degree of amorous cathexis.

801. #801

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.372

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

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

     saints cannot love God except as a name of their own jouissance. And, in the final analysis, their jouissance is always quite monstrous.

802. #802

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium to locate the origin of a specifically modern, narcissistic conception of love—the fantasy of fusion with a lost half—distinguishing it from both Christian mystical love and Socratic/Platonic eros, while also theorizing transference as the structural effect of Plato's own fantasy asserting itself across historical contexts.

     No one would think it is ή των άφροδισίων συνουσία... 'the sharing of sexual enjoyment' [partage de la jouissance sexuelle] — 'mere sex is the reason each lover takes so great and deep a joy in being with the other'

803. #803

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.215

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the oral and anal stages must be understood through the structural distinction between need, demand, and desire—where desire emerges as a gap or negation irreducible to need's satisfaction—and uses the anal stage to demolish the myth of "oblativity," revealing that anal desire is constituted by the subject's identification with the excremental object (objet a) and its symbolic evacuation, which grounds the obsessional's fundamental fantasy.

     Sexual libido is indeed a surplus, but a surplus that renders vain any satisfaction of need wherever libido is situated.

804. #804

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.299

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **TU R E L U R E 'S ABJECTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's play as a dramatization of the Oedipus complex that goes beyond its classical form: the 'imaginary dimension' of the father is shown to be sufficient for efficacy (the father dies of fright, not from a real bullet), while two women engineer the parricide by exploiting the father's desire, revealing the father as a passive, 'duped' element in a four-player game that mirrors the structure of the analytic situation.

     his avarice is equaled only by his dissipation, which is itself outstripped only by his utter and complete unscrupulousness

805. #805

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.428

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XV - Oral, Anal, and Genital**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, clarifying terminological, textual, and referential details; it is non-substantive in theoretical terms but does briefly gloss key Lacanian concepts such as aphanisis, the barred Other, and sublimation as they appear in the surrounding lecture text.

     Elle (this jouissance) could alternatively refer to the praying mantis

806. #806

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Greek term *âgalma* — traced through its etymological ambiguities (sparkle, admiration, envy) and its literary uses in Homer and Euripides — to recover the original psychoanalytic discovery of the partial object as the pivotal point of desire, against Ego Psychology's domestication of that discovery into a "totalising" genital-oblative love that falsely resolves the subject/object opposition.

     whether we seek, regarding this other … to bring him jouissance, as seems to be self-evident in the fact that it has to do with genital union, or rather to perfect him

807. #807

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.295

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **TU R E L U R E 'S ABJECTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan traces a historical progression of the father's function across tragedy—killed unknowingly (Oedipus), damned but knowing (Hamlet), humiliated (Claudel's Turelure)—to argue that only with Freud does the question "What is a father?" become properly articulable, revealing the Oedipus complex as the obscure, murderous condensation of a much older theological and mythological problematic.

     the strange iniquity of his mother's jouissance? Nothing is said about this father except that he embodied what we might call the ideal of the knight in courtly love.

808. #808

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.266

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Φ (the phallus as symbolic/unconscious function operative for all speaking subjects) from φ (the imaginary phallic unit of measurement that organises the obsessive's erotic object-equivalences), arguing that in obsessive neurosis the phallic function is not repressed but emerges consciously and avowedly at the level of symptom, which is precisely what must be explained against both Bouvet's theory of imaginary introjection and a naïve psychologism.

     Freud broaches for the first time a type of inner view of the structure of his desire in the 'horror' seen on his face of 'a jouissance of which he himself was unaware'

809. #809

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S*

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Symposium's shift from Agathon to Diotima not as Socrates' tact toward a humiliated interlocutor, but as a structural necessity: once the function of lack is installed as constitutive of desire/love, Socrates cannot continue in his own name because the substitution of *epithumei* (desire) for *era* (love) is a move that exceeds what Socratic dialectical knowledge can formally authorize.

     Socrates says something like, 'After all we have just heard, and if now Agathon is going to add his speech to the others, how am I going to be able to speak?'

810. #810

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.434

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it consists entirely of translator's endnotes providing bibliographic references, textual variants, translation clarifications, and contextual glosses for Seminar VIII, Chapter XX.

     saying that they aspire to put an end to it and that they pursue the sharing by all of the only thing that is real, which is jouissance/'

811. #811

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.291

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Claudel's Sygne de Coûfontaine to push beyond the ethical limit marked by Antigone's beauty — the "between two deaths" — arguing that Sygne's sacrifice, which ends in an absolute refusal of meaning (the "no"), goes beyond ancient tragedy's evil-God function and beyond beauty itself, indexing a new form of human tragedy organized around a desire adjacent only to the reference of Sade.

     she has drunk the bitter cup without having found anything in it but what it is: absolute dereliction, being abandoned and sorely tried by the divine powers

812. #812

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.306

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **TU R E L U R E 'S ABJECTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Claudel's trilogy to argue that castration is constitutive of the desiring subject—not as frustration of need but as the structural elevation of the phallus to a signifying function—and locates the composition of desire across three generational stages: the mark of the signifier, the undesired object, and finally the constitution of desire proper, while critiquing ego-psychology's reduction of desire to need and the concurrent eclipse of the father function.

     What Jews pursue is the sharing by all of the only thing that is real, which is jouissance.

813. #813

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.71

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pausanias's speech in the *Symposium* as a "psychology of the rich" — an ethics of love structured entirely around the valuation, investment, and capitalization of the beloved as a good — and uses this reading to argue that any ethics which reduces love to outward signs of value inevitably produces illusion, thereby distancing Plato himself from Pausanias's position.

     Pausanias' ideal in matters of love is sheltered capitalization, the stocking up of what rightfully belongs to him because he has been able to discern it and put it to good use.

814. #814

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.407

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of desire's object by showing that the phallus functions as a summit organizing the scale of objects, that the subject of desire is nothing but an apostrophe inscribed in the Other's desire, and that the ego-ideal (as Einziger Zug) is what rivets the subject to the ideal ego — a structure that also explains the distinction between mourning and melancholia as processes of exhausting narcissistic trait-identifications one by one.

     To force a being - because this is the essence of little a - beyond life is not within the grasp of all and sundry... Even to force a being to have pleasure is not a problem that we can solve so easily

815. #815

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.85

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Eryximachus' speech in Plato's Symposium as staging the foundational antinomy between concord-from-similarity and concord-from-dissimilarity/conflict, using it to illuminate topology's "full and empty," the pre-Socratic logic of contraries (Heraclitus), and—obliquely—the definition of psychoanalysis as "the science of the erotics of bodies." The comic register of the Symposium is foregrounded as philosophically significant, not merely ornamental.

     pros plesmonén kai kénosin, 'in regard to repletion and depletion'… What I wish to underscore here are the two terms 'full' and 'empty'

816. #816

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     **Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic relationship is not reducible to a neutral "situation" but is constituted by a high-degree sublimation of libidinal investment, making love — not well-being — the proper telos of analysis; he thus announces a return to the philosophical tradition on love (via Plato's Symposium) to supply what psychoanalytic literature has entirely neglected.

     The analytic cell, even if it is comfy and cozy, is nothing but a bed for lovemaking.

817. #817

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

     Theoretical move: By reading the scandalous comportment of the gods of Antiquity through the concept of âgalma, Lacan argues that divine love (eros/agape) structures the deceptive, mutually-luring relation between Socrates and Alcibiades, and that this same structure—from the unconscious toward the subject ascending to the core object—governs the psychoanalytic dialectic of love.

     Nothing is further from the trembling one feels in one's being when in love than a god's desire, or a goddess' desire for that matter

818. #818

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     **Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VIII by situating transference not within an intersubjective framework but within a constitutive disparity, tracing its origin back to love (the Breuer/Anna O. encounter), and connecting it to the prior year's ethical reflection — especially the rejection of the Sovereign Good (Plato's Schwärmerei), the function of beauty as a barrier to the death drive, and the 'between-two-deaths' — in order to establish Socrates' secret knowledge of love as the hidden key to understanding transference.

     an aggressiveness lurks within them that succeeds in stealing from he who carries out such deeds his own jouissance, while his misdeeds have endless repercussions on his social partners

819. #819

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-221-0"></span>**ORAL, ANAL, A N D GENITAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of the praying mantis to sharply distinguish animal (instinctual/synchronic) jouissance from human desire, arguing that human desire is not grounded in natural instinct but is structurally constituted in the margins of demand—a beyond and a shy-of—and is always already articulated around a partial object whose erotic value is retroactively (Nachträglich) installed by demand and its beyond of love.

     To subjectivize the praying mantis in this case is to make an assumption which is not excessive - that it has sexual jouissance... Is this jouissance - here is the following step - jouissance of something insofar as this jouissance destroys it?

820. #820

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.312

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's trilogy to show how desire is articulated through the figure of the Other incarnated in a woman, and how the void opened by betrayal and parricide generates a jouissance-inflected death-drive structure in which desire, death, and eternity collapse into a single instant — demonstrating that desire is constituted by lack and the impossibility of any lasting object.

     So short that all eternity can be contained therein! So short that this world, this life which we scorn and do not want, could be hidden away in it.

821. #821

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Socrates' refusal to enter the erotic exchange with Alcibiades is structurally determined by his knowledge of love: because Socrates knows (the truth of love), he cannot love—he refuses to become the eromenos/beloved, thereby refusing the metaphor of love that would complete the transference dynamic.

     he produces the exact same effect... the listener, whether man, woman, or adolescent, is troubled, as if struck by a blow, and strictly speaking katechômetha we become possessed by them

822. #822

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.122

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Agathon's speech in the Symposium is a deliberately ironic, "macaronic" discourse in which the tragic poet reveals love as what is radically unclassifiable and always inopportune — always lagging behind — and that this comic-tragic ambivalence is structurally necessary: in the Christian context, love fills the void left by the inexorable fatal oracle and the commandment of the second death, which can no longer be sustained.

     love lags behind what he compares it to, strangely enough, in one passage: Ate... love always figures as a marginal incident and drags behind, so to speak.

823. #823

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.362

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the Jekels-Bergler theory of narcissism and the ego-ideal by showing that their reliance on a "neutral energy" oscillating between Eros and Thanatos, and their attribution of object-creation to the death drive, result from a failure to distinguish the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real registers — a failure that his optical schema (mirror A, real image *i(a)*, and flowers *a*) is designed to correct and generalize.

     the primordial object is originally included in the subject in the narcissistic sphere - which is a primitive monad of jouissance, with which the infant is identified

824. #824

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.316

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > And a bit further on she continues:

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's trilogy as a dramatization of how, after the death of the God of fate, the subject becomes a hostage of the Word itself, such that Sygne's Versagung (radical refusal/perdition under the signifier) and Pensée's absolute desire for justice together trace the dialectic through which desire can be reborn from a radical stance of negation.

     the heroine of modern tragedy is asked to assume responsibility for the very injustice she abhors as if it were a jouissance.

825. #825

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.423

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

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII Chapter X, providing scholarly apparatus — source citations, terminological clarifications, and textual variants — for Lacan's use of agalma, Che vuoi, logical time, the maternal phallus, and oblativity. It is primarily philological and bibliographic rather than advancing a theoretical argument of its own.

     Gala comes from the Old French gale, meaning pleasure or rejoicing (réjouissance).

826. #826

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.293

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan positions the logic of desire—articulated through the fantasy matheme ($◇a) and the topology of the subject's relation to the object—as the necessary supplement to Lévi-Straussian structuralism, while simultaneously arguing that the three clinical structures (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are each 'normal' expressions of the three constitutive terms of desire, and that misreading drive as biological agency is the foundational error of ego-psychology/American psychoanalysis.

     if Sorge is care, occupation is what characterises this presence of man in the world, that means that when care relaxes a little people start fucking

827. #827

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from a critique of psychoanalytic congress discourse to articulate the structural relationship between anxiety, desire, jouissance, and the Other: the prohibition of jouissance (its Aufhebung) is the supporting plane on which desire is constituted, the Other is the metaphor of this prohibition, and anxiety must be understood through the desire of the Other rather than as the jouissance of a mythical self—a move that corrects both Jones's aphanisis and a Jungian-inflected misreading of the drive.

     a fundamental access to jouissance qua jouissance of the thing is prohibited... it is in this suspension, in the fact that this jouissance is aufgehoben, suspended properly speaking that there lies the supporting plane on which desire is going to be constituted

828. #828

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Piera Aulagnier, invited by Lacan, argues that anxiety is not typed by content (oral, castration, death) but is structurally defined as the collapse of all identificatory reference points—the ego's dissolution before the un-symbolisable—and that its resolution or temporary suspension is bound to the coincidence of demand and desire in jouissance, with castration functioning as the transitional passage that converts the penis into the phallic signifier.

     Jouissance carries within itself the source of the most profound dissatisfaction; because if desire is above all desire for continuity Jouissance is by definition something instantaneous

829. #829

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.156

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Jones's concept of 'aphanisis' misidentifies the source of anxiety in the castration complex by conflating the disappearance of desire with repression; true anxiety is always about the object that desire dissimulates (the void at the heart of demand), not about desire's disappearance—and this misrecognition occludes the decisive function of the phallus as the instrument mediating desire's relation to the big Other.

     the profound perturbation of jouissance, in so far as jouissance is defined with respect to the thing, by the dimension of the Other as such in so far as this dimension of the Other is defined by the introduction of the signifier.

830. #830

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.127

     *Seminar 13*: *Wednesday 14 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The neurotic's defining feature is the desire to know — specifically to reverse the effacing of the thing by the signifier and recover the real that preceded signification — and this structure, rather than social maladjustment, gives neurosis its theoretical authority; meanwhile, sublimation is reframed as a paradoxical detour through signification by which jouissance is obtained without repression.

     practically the Christian finds himself reduced to something which is not all that normal or fundamental, of really no longer having any other access to jouissance as such except by making love.

831. #831

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962* > Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critical commentary on Mme Aulagnier's presentation to advance his own theoretical positions: that the subject must be defined purely through its exclusion from the signifier (not as a person), that affect cannot be understood outside its relation to the signifier, that perversion must be rethought as the subject making himself object for the jouissance of a phallic god, and that anxiety is properly situated as a sensation of the desire of the Other at the level of the ideal ego rather than as a word/affect antinomy.

     the pervert is someone who makes himself object for the jouissance of a phallus whose ownership (appartenance) he does not suspect: he is the instrument of the jouissance of a god.

832. #832

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.200

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety arises at the precise moment when the desire of the Other becomes unnameable, dissolving both ego and Other as supports of identification; this structural logic is then differentiated across neurosis, perversion, and psychosis, where for the psychotic the foreclosure of symbolisation means that the emergence of desire itself—rather than its loss—is the privileged source of anxiety, since it forces a confrontation with the constitutive lack (castration) that was never symbolised.

     Jouissance and anxiety are the two extreme positions in which the ego can situate itself: in the first the ego and the Other for an instant exchange insignia, recognise each other as two signifiers whose shared Jouissance assures a momentary identity of desire

833. #833

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.196

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural typology of clinical positions (normality, neurosis, perversion, psychosis) organized around the axis of identificatory conflict with the partial object, castration, and the differential articulation of demand, desire, and jouissance — arguing that what distinguishes each structure is not the content of the drive but the subject's identificatory relation to the phallic object and the Other's desire.

     if frustration reveals the gap between need and desire, Jouissance on the contrary by responding to that which has not been formulated reveals that which is beyond the demand, in other words desire.

834. #834

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962* > *Seminar 11*: *Wednesday 28 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions desire as an unsurpassable "truth function" at the heart of analytic practice, articulates the Death Drive and Life Drive (Eros/libido) as structured around the signifier and the phallus, and uses the Kantian critique of pure reason—especially its categories, pure intuition, and the synthetic function—as an analogy to illuminate the relationship between subjectivity, the body, and desire, while invoking the Kant/Sade parallel to show that desire exceeds all pathological (comfort/need) determinations.

     the striking analogy between the total exigency of the liberty of jouissance in Sade, with the universal Kantian rule of behaviour

835. #835

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's ethics cannot be reduced to utilitarianism or humanism because its core is the structuring function of the Name-of-the-Father as prohibition of jouissance, a mechanism legible in St. Paul's account of the law and sin, and whose truth Freud traces through the Oedipus complex, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism to a Judeo-Christian ontological tradition that grounds the subject in discourse rather than in biology.

     morality... consists primarily... in the frustration of a jouissance that is posited by an apparently greedy law.

836. #836

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.82

     V. The Word BringsJouissance

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Gospel of John's "In the beginning was the Word" by insisting that the Word precedes the beginning and is the fundamental condition of human suffering ('ravaged by the Word'), while simultaneously grounding the clinical practice of analysis in the Word as a source of jouissance — the reason analysands return.

     if there were no Word - which, it must be said, brings jouissance to all these people who come to see me - why would they come back if it weren't to treat themselves to a slice of the Word each time?

837. #837

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the ego-psychological reduction of desire to libidinal object-relations (oral/anal/genital stages), arguing instead that desire has no proper object but only the Thing as its impossible horizon, and that the commandment to love one's neighbour exposes the irreducible ambivalence (love/hatred) that makes any ethics of psychoanalysis inseparable from sublimation, the death drive, and the laws of speech that encircle das Ding.

     do not believe… that I think women are more favored when it comes to jouissance. Their difficulties are hardly in short supply and are probably more profound.

838. #838

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.17

     I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freudian desire—properly understood as the "true intention" of an unconscious discourse structured like a signifying chain—poses genuinely new problems for moral philosophy, positioning psychoanalysis as a more adequate ethics than either Ego Psychology's adaptive finalism or traditional philosophy of good intentions.

     Man is ever more impotent to meet up anew with his own desire, and this impotence can go so far that he loses its carnal triggering.

839. #839

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.12

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

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

     you touched the black matter that constitutes the heart of existence? What if, in your numbness, blindness, and paralysis, you resonated the most with everything (non)existing?

840. #840

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.45

     <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity > ŽiŽek's Response > Troubles de Jouissance

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance, far from rescuing psychoanalysis from the pleasure principle as Žižek claims, actually re-anchors it more firmly within that framework—because its dialectical structure always presupposes pleasure as the governing term, leaving pure suffering (and by extension, the "living dead" subject as Homo Dolorum) theoretically unaccountable.

     jouissance invokes the dialectical codependency of pain and pleasure. In Lacan's theory, since jouissance presupposes both pleasure and pain it is 'beyond the pleasure principle'

841. #841

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.56

     <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.

     Even jouissance, the pleasure in pain, is still attached to pleasure.

842. #842

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.66

     <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Death Drive is constitutive not only of the subject but of the social bond itself, grounding sociality in shared lack, trauma, and reciprocal sacrifice of nothingness — and critically intervenes against McGowan's framework by insisting that the death drive must be thought beyond and without recourse to enjoyment (jouissance), whose admixture betrays the genuine negativity of suffering.

     Every time McGowan attempts to establish the death drive's centrality, he falls back into arguing that the death drive is a source of enjoyment, therefore justifying it from a positive perspective. He directly defines loss as 'our only source of enjoyment'.

843. #843

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.81

     <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts > The Negative Dialectics of the Individual and Society > The Negative and the Political

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology and politics are constitutively unable to acknowledge the death drive and structural lack, whereas a negatively-oriented psychoanalysis (drawing on the later Freud) resists all positive programmes of salvation — a divergence that both disqualifies psychoanalysis from conventional politics and radicalises it as a form of 'negative dialectics' of subject and society.

     Nostalgia and paranoia lead almost inevitably to violence directed towards the other who appears as a barrier to the subject's enjoyment

844. #844

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.87

     <span id="page-62-0"></span>Dead Together: Love Hurts > The Negative Project of Psychoanalysis

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely negative psychoanalysis, centred on the death drive as constitutive lack rather than as a path to enjoyment, must abandon all positive agendas (healing, emancipation, improved enjoyment) and function as a non-redemptive, comic-tragic witness to the irrevocable loss at the core of subjectivity and social bonds.

     He substitutes the ideology's promise of the ultimate pleasure with the promise of securing realistic enjoyment that does not escape the loss.

845. #845

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.98

     <span id="page-92-0"></span>The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe

     Theoretical move: McGowan and Reshe argue that the death drive, properly understood, is not anti-political but rather the only ground for a genuine social bond and political project: because the death drive is constitutive of both subject and social order (each emerging from the failure of the other), it exposes ideology's fundamental operation of displacing internal contradiction onto an external enemy, and points toward a politics of shared suffering rather than promised harmony.

     the idea of the death drive is that it's through our suffering that we find our satisfaction and enjoyment. Which is not to say that all you do is suffer, but the suffering is actually integral to the enjoyment or the satisfaction.

846. #846

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.99

     <span id="page-92-0"></span>The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive—understood as a drive toward loss, self-destruction, and repetition of originary absence—is the foundational structure of both subjectivity and sociality, with sacrifice, love, and political bonds all grounded in shared nothingness rather than positive satisfaction; the emancipated subject is thus one who avows hopelessness rather than seeking untainted enjoyment.

     It's through sacrifce that we actually create an absence and give ourselves something to enjoy. And that's the source of certain social bonds around forms of sacrifce.

847. #847

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.130

     <span id="page-126-0"></span>Human Animal, Positive Psychology, and Trauma: A Conversation Between Alenka Zupancič and Julie Reshe ̌

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the human animal's constitutive lack is not a deviation from a complete Nature but the very proof that Nature (with a capital N, as harmonious totality) does not exist; the subject emerges as the point where nature's own inconsistency becomes 'for itself', and lack and surplus-jouissance are topologically inseparable rather than opposites.

     symptoms made of surplus enjoyment

848. #848

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.134

     <span id="page-126-0"></span>Human Animal, Positive Psychology, and Trauma: A Conversation Between Alenka Zupancič and Julie Reshe ̌

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the social imperative of happiness, undergirded by a superego logic, produces misery rather than well-being; and that the death drive—understood not as a dualistic counterpart to Eros but as an ontological negativity that the social order perpetually reinvents rather than resolves—is more fundamental than the pleasure principle, while anxiety is reframed as a signal of the Real rather than a mere negative affect to be eliminated.

     the superego tells you that this is perhaps not enough. You should feel happier… The harder you try, the more you are bound to fail.

849. #849

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.144

     <span id="page-138-0"></span>Epilogue: No Salvation

     Theoretical move: The epilogue proposes "negative psychoanalysis" as a practice that refuses salvation, expertise, and positive consolation, remaining faithful to the negative insight that nothing can save us—a self-cancelling praxis that mirrors the constitutive rupture of the subject and the social bond itself.

     A space where you are not demanded or expected to enjoy, a space where you can share grief and confess your inner deadness and turmoil

850. #850

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Ideal of the Summum Bonum as a Determining Ground of the Ultimate End of Pure Reason. > 1. WHAT CAN I KNOW? 2. WHAT OUGHT I TO DO? 3. WHAT MAY I HOPE?

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the unity of ends in a moral world (regnum gratiae) grounds teleological unity in nature, making practical reason — not speculative reason — the foundation for the idea of a supreme good and a Primal Being; moral theology must remain immanent, warning against the transcendent misuse that would derive moral laws from the divine will rather than reason's own legislation.

     warns us against the fanaticism, nay, the crime of depriving reason of its legislative authority in the moral conduct of life, for the purpose of directly connecting this authority with the idea of the Supreme Being

851. #851

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION IX. Of the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason with regard to the Cosmological Ideas.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the same subject can be understood under two distinct modes of causality — an empirical character (as phenomenon, governed by natural necessity) and an intelligible character (as thing-in-itself, outside time and free from causal determination) — thereby resolving the cosmological antinomy between nature and freedom without contradiction, and grounding the practical concept of the moral 'ought' in reason's spontaneous causality.

     Whatever number of motives nature may present to my will, whatever sensuous impulses—the moral ought it is beyond their power to produce. They may produce a volition... a volition to which the ought enunciated by reason, sets an aim and a standard

852. #852

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > GENERAL REMARK

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the "I think" proposition, while empirical, cannot yield genuine self-knowledge as noumenon because internal intuition is sensuous and merely phenomenal; consequently, rational psychology cannot bootstrap itself into knowledge of the soul as a thing in itself, even if a priori moral consciousness reveals a spontaneity—since the predicates needed to determine existence remain tied to sensuous intuition and the categories (substance, cause) that apply only to phenomena.

     this wonderful faculty, which the consciousness of the moral law in me reveals, would present me with a principle of the determination of my own existence which is purely intellectual—but by what predicates? By none other than those which are given in sensuous intuition.

853. #853

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Ideal of the Summum Bonum as a Determining Ground of the Ultimate End of Pure Reason. > 1. WHAT CAN I KNOW? 2. WHAT OUGHT I TO DO? 3. WHAT MAY I HOPE?

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the three questions of pure reason—what can I know, what ought I to do, what may I hope—converge on a moral theology in which the necessary connection between moral worthiness and happiness can only be grounded in the postulate of a supreme rational cause (God) and a future life, making the 'ideal of the summum bonum' a practically necessary idea of reason rather than a speculative one.

     Happiness is the satisfaction of all our desires; extensive, in regard to their multiplicity; intensive, in regard to their degree; and protensive, in regard to their duration.

854. #854

     Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

     THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION I. Of the Ultimate End of the Pure Use of Reason.

     Theoretical move: Kant argues that the three transcendental ideas of pure reason (freedom, immortality, God) have no constitutive speculative use but converge on a single practical-moral interest, thereby subordinating the entire speculative enterprise to the question of what we ought to do — reason's ultimate vocation is moral, not theoretical.

     In the moral philosophy of prudence, for example, the sole business of reason is to bring about a union of all the ends, which are aimed at by our inclinations, into one ultimate end—that of happiness

855. #855

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.179

     Silence

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice occupies a structurally privileged position at the point of exception within the law: it epitomizes "validity beyond meaning" (Geltung ohne Bedeutung), functioning as the non-universal partial object that captures desire and holds the subject in thrall, thereby linking Lacan's topological account of subject/Other desire (via the torus) to Kafka's literary figures of bare life and sovereignty, and to Agamben's inclusive exclusion.

     the voice is enough to stupefy him; he is suddenly paralyzed: 'In front of the telephone he was powerless.' He is spellbound, mesmerized.

856. #856

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.65

     chapter 2 > Shofar

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object voice — paradigmatically embodied in the shofar — is not simply opposed to logos but is its hidden support: the paternal voice that founds the Law is structurally identical to the "other" voice it ostensibly persecutes, and both are organized around an ineradicable lack (S(A/)) that links voice, jouissance, femininity, and the impossible foundation of the Other. The voice is further theorized as the missing link between bodies and languages, connecting Lacanian object-theory to Badiou's ontology.

     it bears witness to that remainder of a presupposed and terrible Father's jouissance which could not be absorbed by the Law, that reverse side of the Father that Lacan calls le-père-la-jouissance

857. #857

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.180

     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.

     There is a sharp division between those who are doomed to be deaf and to work, and those who listen and enjoy, take pleasure in art, but are helplessly tied to the mast.

858. #858

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.104

     The voice and the drive > The voice of reason

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice operates as the operator enabling a transition from the ethics of desire to the ethics of the drive, and that Heidegger's phenomenology of the call of conscience—a pure, aphonic voice that convokes Dasein to Being—illuminates the structural function of voice as extimate alterity, while simultaneously exposing the metaphysical illusion of positing voice as a pure, prelinguistic origin.

     desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance

859. #859

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.206

     Notes > Chapter 3 The "Physics" of the Voice

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

     the problem with singing—and, by extension, music is that it tries to turn the aim into the goal, it takes the object of the drive as the object of immediate enjoyment, and precisely for that reason misses it.

860. #860

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.209

     Notes > Chapter 4 The Ethics of the Voice

     Theoretical move: These notes to "The Ethics of the Voice" develop the structural homology between the superego's categorical imperative and the Kantian moral law, trace the voice's ethical function across Rousseau, Kant, Freud, and Lacan, and culminate in the claim that the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father returns in the Real precisely as the voice in psychosis.

     Voice without law leads to lethal [mortifère] enjoyment, law without voice remains a dead letter

861. #861

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.212

     Notes > Chapter 5 The Politics of the Voice

     Theoretical move: These endnotes to Chapter 5 develop a set of theoretical positions on the voice as a political instrument: Hegel's monarch neutralizes the exception through signature (the senseless letter) rather than voice, Agamben's biopolitical logic of inclusion-by-exclusion frames the sacred/sacrificial, and Lacan's reading of Nazism as sacrifice to obscure gods is critiqued as inadequate to the problem of the Holocaust.

     the offering to obscure gods of an object of sacrifice is something to which few subjects can resist succumbing, as if under some monstrous spell

862. #862

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.60

     chapter 2 > A brief course in the history of metaphysics

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

     it also introduces, for that very reason, an indomitable and senseless enjoyment beyond the more tractable sensual pleasures

863. #863

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.111

     The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice occupies an irreducible ambiguous position between the ethical and the perverse: the ethical voice is pure enunciation without statement (demanding the subject supply the statement/act), while the superego is a "fat voice" that fills this void with positive content, guilt, and transgressive enjoyment — yet neither exhausts the voice, which always marks a void in both the subject and the Other. The chapter then opens onto the political dimension by following Aristotle's division between mere voice (phone) and speech (logos) as the foundation of the political.

     its lure lies in offering a portion of enjoyment, of transgressive enjoyment, as if in compensation, as it were, for the hardship the law demands, but this apparent indulgence will only strengthen the law

864. #864

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.143

     The voice and the drive > The click

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice functions as a traumatic kernel at the origin of fantasy, specifically the primal scene fantasy: a contingent, inexplicable sound (the 'click') short-circuits inner and outer, revealing an excess of jouissance in the Other that simultaneously constitutes the subject's own enigma, so that subjectivation is grounded not in language structure but in a pre-linguistic sonorous object.

     the sound which betrays the excess of an unfathomable enjoyment, and the position of the trapped subject shows how the enjoyment of the Other immediately raises the question of one's own enjoyment.

865. #865

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.124

     The voice and the drive > The antipolitics of the voice

     Theoretical move: The passage theorizes two opposed political uses of the voice against the letter: (1) a ritual/complementary division-of-labor in which the voice enacts and seals the letter's authority, and (2) an authoritarian-totalitarian use in which the voice supplants the letter — with fascism and Stalinism representing structurally inverse forms of this second mode, the former centred on the charismatic, law-suspending voice and the latter on the self-effacing subordination of voice to the letter-as-Big-Other.

     there is an implied promise of spoils, loot, plunder, an orgy, a promise to suspend the law—something that could not be publicly put into words

866. #866

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.154

     A month later: > Lalangue

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that lalangue names the internal divergence between the signifier's differential logic and the voice's logic of sonic resemblance/contamination, displacing the early Lacanian formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" with one in which enjoyment (jouissance) is not proscribed beyond speech but operates as the inner torsion of speech itself—the Möbius-strip surface on which signifier and voice are the same yet irreducibly split.

     Lalangue means that there is enjoyment in speech, not the proscribed object beyond it, that every sense is always jouis-sens, le sens joui, in another pun: the element of enjoyment in the very process of making sense.

867. #867

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.56

     chapter 2 > A brief course in the history of metaphysics

     Theoretical move: Against Derrida's phonocentric thesis, Dolar demonstrates that metaphysics harbors a counter-tradition in which the voice—specifically the voice unmoored from logos/text—is figured as dangerous, seductive, and ruinous, establishing a persistent dichotomy of voice and logos that runs from ancient Chinese precepts through Plato and Augustine, and which Lacan inherits rather than invents.

     up to a point, music is sublime and elevates the spirit; beyond a certain limit, however, it brings about decay, the decline of all spiritual faculties, their disintegration in enjoyment.

868. #868

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.81

     The voice and the drive

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice, as objet petit a, occupies the paradoxical topological intersection of language and the body that belongs to neither, and that this position is what makes the voice the object of the drive rather than of desire — the drive's "aim" (the voice as by-product) is satisfied on the way to the "goal" (meaning), precisely because the voice is a non-dialectical, aphonic remainder that resists signification.

     on the other hand a mechanism which has nothing to do with meaning but, rather, with enjoyment. Meaning versus enjoyment.

869. #869

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.168

     Silence

     Theoretical move: The analyst's silence does not simply oppose lalangue but is its structural flip side: by creating a void in which the analysand's speech resonates through the loop of the Other, silence dispossesses the voice, returning the message of desire as the voice of the drive, and this trajectory—from subject-supposed-to-know through fantasy to the object voice—is the path of analysis itself, culminating in la passe.

     speech appears as a process where signifier and enjoyment amalgamate in the infinity of sound reverberations and puns which form the texture of the unconscious… the constant slippage of enjoyment and sense.

870. #870

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.192

     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.

     The voice is a resonance from nowhere, it does not serve any purpose (Lacan's definition of enjoyment)

871. #871

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

     Notes > Chapter 2 The Metaphysics of the Voice

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

     The whole section of Encore from which this passage is taken actually bears the title 'God and the jouissance of The Woman.'

872. #872

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.47

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen

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

     The gaze is not clear or penetrating, not filled with knowledge or recognition; it is clouded over and turned back on itself, absorbed in its own enjoyment.

873. #873

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.95

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that utilitarianism's equation of use with pleasure—and its corollary that pleasure is usable—is the hidden engine of functionalism's imperialism and social despotism; against this, Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis intervenes by positing a subject constituted by a 'beyond the pleasure principle' (the death drive), making pleasure structurally unavailable as an index of the good and thereby exposing the utilitarian subject as a fiction of zero-resistance manipulability.

     Society can be held together only if men can be made to sacrifice their immediate, local gratifications for longer-term and greater ones. Now, it is precisely this maneuver that occasions the attack by Lacan, who sees it as the source of utilitarianism's unethical 'penchant for expansion'

874. #874

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.220

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues for a "total incompatibility" between Butler's constructivist account of sex and the psychoanalytic position: sex, defined by the law of the drives, cannot be deconstructed or culturally re-signified because the drives are the irreducible Other of culture, and the impossibility they introduce into language is precisely what necessitates repetition and forecloses voluntarism.

     Lethal Jouissance and the Female Fatale

875. #875

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

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego

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

     The superego ... [the commandment 'Enjoy'] is the correlative of castration, which is the sign that adorns our admission that the jouissance of the Other, the body of the Other, is only promised in infinity.

876. #876

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.107

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

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

     someone-the Other always benefits from the sacrifice of enjoyment and always at the subject's expense

877. #877

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.122

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

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

     Entering into a kind of complicity with this Other, photographing the cloth to meet the satisfaction of its gaze, he turned himself into an instrument of the Other's enjoyment.

878. #878

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.219

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that sex is not an incomplete or unstable meaning (as Butler's historicist/deconstructionist position holds) but the structural impossibility of completing meaning—the internal failure of signification itself—and that this makes sexual difference a Real rather than Symbolic difference, unlike race or class, while grounding a conception of the subject as radically unknowable and thus the only guarantee against racism.

     it is easy to see that one is quickly mastered by one's sensuous inclinations, even as one seeks to impose them.

879. #879

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.165

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

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

     Since the primal father is the principle of jouissance, of excess enjoyment, the signifier of his absence will be the son who promises to protect society from the trauma of jouissance's return.

880. #880

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.209

     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.

     Rather than screening jouissance, she hoards it.

881. #881

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.102

     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.

     because we recoil before the violence and obscenity of the superego's incitement to jouissance, to a boundless and aggressive enjoyment.

882. #882

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.194

     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.

     Speech, as we know-language-is the death of the thing, it contributes to the drying up of jouissance.

883. #883

     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.

     to begin with jouissance, rather than the other way around, with community, is automatically to problematize community as such, to make the link between enjoyment and society nearly unfathomable.

884. #884

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.201

     Locked RoomILonely Room

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir's characteristic "lonely room" architecture — depopulated, emptied of desire and interpretability — is the spatial correlative of the drive's displacement of the big Other: where classical detection produces an infinite interpretable space (the locked room), noir produces a space of pure being, where the intrusion of objet petit a (the grain of the voice, private jouissance) into the phenomenal public field depletes rather than enriches social reality, and the hero's choice of jouissance over the signifying network yields a satisfying "nothing."

     Neff is thus a man who enjoys too much-too much to surrender his words to another, when they hold for him such exquisite pleasure.

885. #885

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.172

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern democratic subject is constituted not by power's self-guaranteeing omniscience (Foucault) but by a structural lack of knowledge in the Other: because power cannot certify the subject, a surplus of meaning escapes social recognition, and it is precisely this conflict—including the irruption of jouissance—that both constitutes democratic subjectivity and prevents its totalisation.

     since there where the 'markers of certainty' are erased, enjoyment breaks out, democracy seems designed, if not to brew up more dissatisfaction, at least to acknowledge the impossibility of its alleviation.

886. #886

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.193

     Detour through the Drive

     Theoretical move: The shift from classical detective fiction to film noir is reinterpreted not as a narrative identification of hero with criminal but as a topological transition between two orders—desire (sense, the signifier, the fort/da game as lack) and drive (being, jouissance, repetition-as-satisfaction)—which Copjec maps onto a broader historical transition from an Oedipal order of desire to a contemporary order of drive in which jouissance is socially commanded rather than privately protected.

     our society's fetishization of being, that is, of jouissance. Which is to say we have ceased being a society that attempts to preserve the individual right to jouissance to become a society that commands jouissance as a 'civic' duty.

887. #887

     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.

     surfacing within the phenomenal field, private being, jouissance, nevertheless does not take on a phenomenal form.

888. #888

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.51

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacanian narcissism, far from anchoring the subject in pleasurable self-recognition, is structured by a constitutive fault or lack in representation that grounds the subject in desire and the death drive—directly opposing the film-theoretical account of the gaze and constructivist accounts of ideology, which mistakenly posit a smooth 'narcissistic pleasure' as the cement between psychical and social reality.

     Her complicity and even her pleasure are secured as she looks at and constructs herself through the categories provided by these discourses.

889. #889

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.139

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > The Drying Up of the Breast

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that vampirism figures the collapse of fantasy's support of desire—the "drying up of the breast" as objet petit a—when the extimate object loses its proper distance and returns as an uncanny double endowed with surplus jouissance, threatening the subject's constitutive lack; this structure is traced across breast-feeding advocacy, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and La Jetée.

     it is a matter of an oral relation, of a jouissance attained through sucking... the vampire is not only a creature that menaces the breast as object cause of desire, but that it is also a double of the victim, whose distorted bodily form indicates its possession of a certain excess object

890. #890

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.133

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety

     Theoretical move: Anxiety, understood as a signal of the overproximity of object a rather than of lack, is structurally equivalent to the Gothic vampire figure; the symbolic order defends against the Real through negation, doubt, and repetition rather than interpretation, and psychoanalysis founds itself precisely on the rigorous registration of its own inability to know the Real - a 'belief without belief' that is not skepticism.

     it is precisely there where we do not know, that enjoyment, jouissance (a pleasure in the real) arises. Jouissance is a kind of 'secondary gain' obtained where knowledge fails.

891. #891

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.117

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

     Theoretical move: Against Ferguson's reading of the sublime as escape from utilitarian claustrophobia, Copjec (following Freud/Lacan) argues that utilitarianism itself is constituted by the flight from the superego's obscene law and from repressed desire, such that the colonial fantasy of the veiled Other functions as utilitarianism's own symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the surplus jouissance it structurally denies.

     What was capital in this fantasy was the surplus pleasure, the useless jouissance that the voluminous cloth was supposed to veil and the colonial subject, thus supposed to enjoy

892. #892

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Introduction

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the Falstaff-Hal and Rosalind-Orlando dynamics in Shakespeare as allegorical demonstrations of how imaginative play can disrupt the repetition compulsion of paternal authority (superego) and the regressive pull of maternal wish-fulfilment (id), positioning Shakespeare's therapeutic imagination as an alternative to Freud's resigned acceptance of fate's harsh reductions.

     The realm that they open up is the realm of imagination. It is a place of plenty and pleasure, where we are anything but perfect, but where we enact perpetual enriching change

893. #893

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the repetition compulsion inherent in drives is not necessarily in conflict with the pleasure principle but operates alongside it, and that the pleasure principle itself is ultimately subordinate to the death drive's tendency to restore the inorganic quiescence - with the annexation of drive-impulses (secondary process) functioning as a preparatory service to both pleasure and final dissolution.

     We have all experienced how the greatest pleasure we can ever achieve, namely that of the sexual act, is accompanied by the momentary vanishment of a supremely intense excitation.

894. #894

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud develops the theory of narcissism by tracing libido distribution across organic illness, hypochondria, sleep, and love-object choice, arguing that ego-libido and object-libido are structurally parallel and that primary narcissism is universal, grounding the compulsion to love others in the pathogenic effects of excessive libidinal build-up in the ego.

     A strong ego affords some protection against falling ill; but in the end we must necessarily start loving if we are not to fall ill, and we must necessarily fall ill if refusal makes us incapable of loving

895. #895

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes the pleasure principle as the governing tendency of psychic processes—defined economically as tension-reduction—while simultaneously delimiting its dominion by introducing the reality principle and repression as the two primary sources of unpleasure that override or subvert it, thereby opening the question of whether still further constraints on the pleasure principle must be sought.

     all neurotic unpleasure is of this kind, that is to say, pleasure that cannot be experienced as such

896. #896

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud consolidates his dualistic drive theory by aligning life/death drives with biological anabolism/catabolism, traces the evolution of libido theory from ego/sexual drive opposition through narcissism to the identification of Eros as the universal binding force, and accounts for sadism as a death drive expelled from the ego that becomes an auxiliary of the sexual function — all while insisting that this dualism cannot be collapsed into Jung's monism.

     the sexual drive is the embodiment of the will to life

897. #897

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud identifies two surrogate repressive techniques specific to obsessional neurosis—obliteration and isolation—and argues that both operate through motor symbolism to achieve the same goal as repression, while also raising the problem of whether castration anxiety is the sole motor of defence across all neuroses, particularly in women.

     Eros seeks physical contact because it strives for union, for the removal of any barriers of distance between ego and love-object; but destruction of an enemy... in principle also presupposes physical contact

898. #898

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud constructs the concept of primary narcissism by tracing it through three convergent sources—clinical perversion, schizophrenic withdrawal, and child/primitive omnipotence of thought—and uses it to justify the theoretical separation of ego-libido from object-libido and sexual drives from ego drives, while defending psychoanalysis as an empirical rather than speculative science.

     he appears as a mere appendage of his germ-plasm, to whose purposes he devotes all his energies in return for the reward of a mere sensation of pleasure

899. #899

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Sins of the Father*

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys a liturgical service as a site for theorizing the structure of faith as irreducible to comfort or submission, using Žižek's Tamagotchi figure to argue that the God one thinks one understands is a projected idol of one's own creation — thereby situating genuine faith as persisting *despite* (and against) the God one has constructed.

     Then there seemed to be a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones.

900. #900

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Desire for transformation and transformative\

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that religious desire is never satisfied by its object (God as hypernonymous/hyperabsent) but is instead *constituted* by that object — making the seeking itself the finding, and transformative desire the very medium of transformation rather than a preliminary stage before it.

     Our saturation by God does not merely fill us but also testifies to an ocean we cannot contain. Thus desire for God is born in God.

901. #901

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *The end of apologetics*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that apologetics constitutes a "power discourse" that compels belief through coercive logic or wonder, whereas a genuinely Christlike "powerless discourse" operates as hint rather than command—addressing desire and opening thought rather than foreclosing it—and this distinction maps onto a theological ethics of how language relates to the subject.

     Instead of religious discourse being a type of drink designed to satisfy our thirst for answers, Jesus made his teaching salty, evoking thirst.

902. #902

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *The saying of nothing*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic theological discourse operates as a "powerless" or apophatic speech-act that does not colonize the divine with logos but instead creates a sacred clearing in which the divine can address the subject — inverting the evangelistic model from answer-provision to question-opening, and theorizing language as the medium through which its own limits are enacted.

     we have been left utterly breathless by a beauty that surpasses all words … it is here that we are nourished by our hunger.

903. #903

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

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

     Only a genuine faith can embrace doubt, for such a faith does not act because of a self-interested reason (such as fear of hell or desire for heaven) but acts simply because it must.

904. #904

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

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

     he takes his cake and stuffs it greedily into his mouth, then swallows it with the aid of his champagne. He then claims that this champagne and chocolate cake is the true body and blood of Christ.

905. #905

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Truth as soteriological event*

     Theoretical move: Rollins distinguishes metaphysical Truth (the Real, God as ungraspable) from empirical truth (descriptions of reality) and then displaces both with a third, specifically Judeo-Christian register: truth as soteriological event — a transformative encounter with the Real that short-circuits the subjective/objective debate and redefines knowledge as relational liberation rather than propositional accuracy.

     Truth is the ungraspable Real (objective) that transforms the individual (subjective).

906. #906

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

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

     whether our love of Christ is really a love of ourselves, for it is at the foot of the cross that one may truly consider embracing Christianity without the comfort of thinking that such a giving of one's life is also the means of gaining it back

907. #907

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys a liturgical/performative critique of self-legitimating religion, arguing that genuine faith requires radical self-critique — a "self-lacerating" identification with the betrayer (Judas) rather than the righteous — and that this prophetic, self-subverting structure is internal to authentic Christian discourse itself.

     genuine faith does not merely offer us such heat and light… it also burns us

908. #908

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

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

     what is important about revelation is not that we seek to interpret it in the same way but rather that we all love it and are transformed by it

909. #909

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that divine revelation operates through a third mode beyond anonymity and adequacy — "hypernymity" — in which God's superabundant presence overwhelms understanding and is experienced as absence, such that desire/longing for God is itself the sign of God's (hyper)presence rather than God's absence.

     our religious desire is never satisfied in God but rather deepened there. We cannot grasp God, not because God is absent, but rather because God is always given in excess of our ability to grasp.

910. #910

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’* > *Service description*

     Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-liturgical argument that genuine faith requires dwelling in radical uncertainty (Holy Saturday) rather than instrumentalizing God for existential security — faith forged in the void of divine absence transcends reward/punishment logic, enacting a form of desire that is unconditional and non-transactional.

     They followed his ways faithfully, even though it cost us deeply, and we remained resolute despite the fear that death defeated him and would one day defeat us also.

911. #911

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

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

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a liturgical enactment of the shift from orthodoxy as propositional belief to orthodoxy as transformative practice, using the Advent/Incarnation narrative to theorize how the subject must empty itself (undergo a kind of ego-death) to become a dwelling-place for truth, structuring this through the homology between Mary's womb and the subject's receptive void.

     that individual will give, receive and lose with equal joy

912. #912

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Religion and the absence of God*

     Theoretical move: Rollins deploys a Derridean law/justice analogy to argue that Christianity is structurally self-deconstructing: just as the law testifies to but can never embody justice, religious tradition testifies to but can never make present a God who is Wholly Other, thereby affirming religion's necessity while simultaneously announcing its redundancy.

     Christianity testifies to the impossibility of grasping God because of the Hyper-presence of God.

913. #913

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Acts of love*

     Theoretical move: Drawing on Derrida's analysis of the gift, the passage argues that authentic (divine) love is structurally impossible to consciously perform: a truly unconditional gift requires that neither giver nor receiver knows a gift has been given, mapping onto a Christlike love that operates below the threshold of self-reflection — and thereby gesturing at the limit of the subject's intentional agency.

     there is still the joy of knowing that the recipient is grateful to someone (a thought that can give us great pleasure) and that we have made that person happy

914. #914

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

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > Becoming a Movement

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Descartes's move from externally-caused passion to internally-generated emotion as a transition from natural causality to the causality of freedom, wherein subject and object of movement become indistinguishable and the will constitutes a 'practice of truth' — a firm, non-revisable mode of action grounded in the soul's self-relation, setting up the question of how this practice reconciles with fatalism.

     The perception of one's own voluntary movement combined with a judgment of that movement as desirable generates pleasure or joy.

915. #915

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

     Fatalism in Times of Universalized Assthetization

     Theoretical move: Ruda argues that "transcendental fatalism"—the assumption that the worst has always already happened—is the necessary precondition for a proper concept of freedom, and that this insight is retrievable from a Hegelian counterhistory of rationalism structured as a "speculative proposition" whose very movement enacts the argument.

     the dark excess of a ruthless divine sadism

916. #916

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

     Predestination as Emancipation > Religion as Capitalism versus Subtractive Theology

     Theoretical move: By contrasting Erasmus's "religion as capitalism" (free will as cultivable capacity, cooperative salvation) with Luther's subtractive theology (predestination, inexistence, excremental subjectivity), the passage argues that genuine emancipation requires abandoning freedom as a capacity and learning to "inexist" — a Kantian-flavored rationalist move that limits reason to make room for the impossible event of grace.

     Famously Luther gave one of the most inhuman, charming definitions of the human being as a piece of shit that fell out of God's anus. Mankind has an excremental status.

917. #917

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.169

     <span id="unp-ruda-0018.xhtml_p169" class="page"></span><a href="#unp-ruda-0009.xhtml_toc" class="xref">Last Words</a>

     Theoretical move: Ruda argues that the rationalist fatalism derived from Western philosophy (Luther through Freud/Hegel) is necessarily *comic* in structure—"comic fatalism"—because it posits that everything is always already lost, achieving "less than nothing," and that this comic dimension distinguishes it from tragic, existentialist, and nihilist versions of fatalism while constituting the subjective precondition of genuine freedom.

     Act as if you were dead! Act as if you were an inexistent woman! These are the astounding slogans of a contemporary provisional morality

918. #918

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

     Predestination as Emancipation > Letting God be . . . (Good)

     Theoretical move: The passage expounds Erasmus's position in the free will debate against Luther: by introducing a gradated theory of grace, human-divine cooperationism, and a distinction between antecedent and consequent necessity, Erasmus attempts to preserve both God's omnipotence and human freedom, framing the debate as ultimately revolving around the proper causality of grace and freedom — and positioning Luther's absolute necessity as a politically dangerous, anti-humanist excess.

     Without freedom the whole religious realm would collapse: with no grace, responsibility, sin, and commandments, God would simply be playing dirty games with us.

919. #919

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.28

     Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p27" class="page"></span>Exaggerating Exaggeration, or Letting (God) Be . . . (God)

     Theoretical move: By reading Luther's radical defense of predestination and absolute necessity through an Adornian/Hegelian lens, the passage argues that genuine freedom is not a human capacity but an impossible event of grace that can only be received through total despair and passive surrender—a structure isomorphic to the Lacanian subject's relationship to the Real and to anxiety as the condition of truth.

     we prefer to be battered with temporal tumult, rejoicing in the grace of God, for the sake of the Word of God

920. #920

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

     Fatalism in Times of Universalized Assthetization

     Theoretical move: Ruda argues that the dominant liberal conception of freedom as a capacity or possibility conflates possibility with actuality (a fundamental Aristotelianism), producing indifference and the mortification of freedom; against this, he proposes a "pure fatalism" — choosing to be unable to choose — as the only genuine exit from the impasse, illustrated through Sade's Florville as a post-Oedipal, repetition-with-difference structure.

     Florville's God must be 'a Supreme Being of Wickedness,' the center of a 'destructive theology,' a sadist who makes this extended and intensified version of Oedipus possible.

921. #921

     Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.38

     Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p34" class="page"></span>Affirm and Declare: Predestination!

     Theoretical move: By reading Luther's anti-Erasmus argument through a Lacanian-Hegelian lens, Ruda shows that the doctrine of predestination functions as a 'forced choice' that abolishes free will precisely to open the space for genuine faith: the very structure of 'no Other of the Other' (no cause behind God's cause) and the gap between revealed God and hidden God enact a logic homologous to Lacanian alienation and the Real, reframing predestination as an emancipatory, anti-perverse position.

     the only thing to do with regard to the will of God is to not give a fuck about it.

922. #922

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

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

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

     this choice determines the way one will fantasize, dream, desire, and enjoy.

923. #923

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

     Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > Desiring Fortune

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Descartes's fatalism (as belief in divine providence and immutable necessity) serves not as a simple external determination but as the precondition for a proper practice of freedom, by countering the will's unfreedom caused by desiring things dependent on fortune—which corrupts temporality, contingency, and self-determination—and thereby opposing Aristotelian eudaimonistic ethics.

     The present is lost, which means that we can experience neither joy nor sadness proper, since only the 'consideration of a present good arouses joy in us and consideration of a present evil arouses sadness.'

924. #924

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

     Predestination as Emancipation > Is There a Choice?

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the Luther-Erasmus debate on free will to argue that genuine freedom is not a possessed capacity but an event that befalls the subject from outside, restructuring the concept of freedom from voluntary self-determination to a forced encounter with radical contingency — a theological precedent for Ruda's broader argument about abolishing freedom as self-possession.

     if I presume that my works can influence God's judgment and that there is a common measure between man and God, I end up committing blasphemy.

925. #925

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.45

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen* > *The Call of Character*

     Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes two faces of surplus drive-energy (undeadness): one that locks the subject into hegemonic symbolic investitures (the "vampire") and one that ruptures sociality and summons the subject to its singular jouissance (the "daimon/miracle"), arguing that psychoanalytic practice is precisely the site where the latter can be cultivated by attending to the eccentric, unsaid, and idiosyncratic pulse of the signifier.

     what it, in other words, might mean to remain faithful to the insistent pulse of jouissance... the repetition compulsion is where trauma and singularity meet, then Rosenzweig's daimon rescues singularity from trauma's grip by offering jouissance an alternative site of cathexis.

926. #926

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.182

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Love Object as Refound*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimatory love—paradigmatically courtly love—elevates the love object to the dignity of the Thing precisely by installing it as an interchangeable narcissistic image rather than a singular being; the objet a functions as the "remainder of the real" that condenses the Thing into a refound lost object, explaining why desire solidifies around a particular object with irresistible but unnameable intensity.

     an imaginary object that fulfills his fantasy (of recovered jouissance) from a distance.

927. #927

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.38

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Intimations of Immortality*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Real's eruption within the Symbolic constitutes a secular, worldly form of transcendence — not an escape from the world but a deeper immersion in it — that temporarily dissolves sociosymbolic identity and opens access to the subject's singularity precisely through the threat of disintegration, thereby yielding fleeting jouissance and "intimations of immortality."

     we know that it is possible occasionally (if always fleetingly) to reach jouissance. Religion, and particularly mysticism, has historically offered a powerful way to talk about what it means to hit (or at least brush against) jouissance

928. #928

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.152

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *The Allure of False Objects*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the imaginary components of the objet a function as decoys that eclipse das Ding, and that sublimation—the uniquely human capacity to create meaning from lack—can be perverted into a destructive accumulation of false objects, generating an ethical obligation to distinguish between objects that carry the Thing's echo and mere lures.

     the almost fanatical command that we seek sexual, spiritual, personal, and professional satisfaction as voraciously as we can

929. #929

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.85

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *Getting Satisfaction*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical act (not ceding on one's desire) is the logical point where desire converges with the drive, specifically the death drive, because pursuing desire to its limit necessarily catches up with the drive's proximity to the Thing; this convergence explains why subjective destitution is the radical but not the only expression of Lacanian ethics, and why desire—as the metonymy of being—must be honored to avoid self-betrayal and the contempt that follows from backing away toward the pleasure principle's endless deferral.

     desire serves as a defense against unmanageable jouissance: The incessant circling of desire around the lost Thing shields the subject from the Thing's more devouring aspects

930. #930

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

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny*

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

     the symbolic order, is structured around some traumatic impossibility, around something which cannot be symbolized—i.e. the real of jouissance: through fantasy, jouissance is domesticated, 'gentrified'

931. #931

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.36

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *The Stain of Infi nity*

     Theoretical move: Jouissance is theorized not as an ideal to be pursued but as an inescapable "stain" that infinitizes the finite from within, making any ethics grounded solely on finitude disingenuous; this parasitism of jouissance connects the lamella-like undeadness of the subject to the infinity associated with Das Ding, the death drive, and the sublime.

     The Lacanian name for this parasitism is enjoyment [jouissance]. (2000, 249)

932. #932

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.104

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Temptation to Give Up*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to a truth-event is structurally threatened by the Symbolic order's ideological valorization of utilitarian balance, which pathologizes the very excess and imbalance that genuine subjective commitment requires — making betrayal of the event the socially 'healthy' option.

     The discharge of congealed energies in the subject's fidelity to the event facilitates fresh forms of life

933. #933

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.135

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Singularity as a Social Phenomenon*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity is not an asocial eruption of the real but a social phenomenon produced by creatively linking the sinthome (the inexorable real in the subject) with the signifier, such that the rebellious energies of the real become the very engine of symbolic innovation—and this reconciles the apparent opposition between Lacanian, Foucauldian, and Derridean accounts of symbolic subversion.

     This gives us yet another rendering of how what is 'impossible' (jouissance) becomes the foundation of the possible (innovation).

934. #934

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.240

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *4. The Possibility of the Impossible*

     Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes) works through the parallels and tensions between Lacanian singularity and Badiou's truth-event, arguing that both posit a subject of truth as a fissure in the symbolic order defined by its radical break with social situatedness, while also examining the paradoxical relationship between the subject's agency and the contingency of the event via Žižek, Zupančič, and Santner.

     return to the 'service of goods' [service des biens]

935. #935

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.118

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the standard alignment of Lacan with revolutionary politics (Žižek's "inassimilable real") is an oversimplification, and that the later Lacan—better captured by Badiou—reconceptualizes the real as nameable and reweavable into the symbolic, thereby opening space for incremental as well as revolutionary political and ethical action grounded in subjective singularity.

     the early Lacan tended to view the jouissance of the real as something that was intrinsically inassimilable to the symbolic.

936. #936

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.73

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Sinthome as a Site of Singularity*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's late shift from symptom to sinthome marks a theoretical transition from the subject of lack (structured by desire and the symbolic order) to a subject of singularity grounded in jouissance—where identification with the sinthome, as an irreducible kernel of real that resists symbolization, becomes the terminal aim of analysis.

     the sinthome connects the subject to the real of its being outside of any recognizable sequence of discourse... it functions as a locus of idiosyncrasy that captures the individual's singularity 'as definitively, and as meaninglessly, as a fingerprint'

937. #937

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.207

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Critique of Multiculturalism*

     Theoretical move: Post-Lacanian ethics, drawing on the Real dimension of the other, mounts a structural critique of multiculturalism: far from respecting genuine difference, multiculturalism tolerates only a domesticated version of the other, thereby serving the logic of global capitalism and repeating a colonial imperative to assimilate.

     defending against the other's jouissance by placing the other within the relatively superficial network of 'compassionate' relationality

938. #938

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.237

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *3. The Ethics of the Act*

     Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical architecture of the chapter by elaborating the sinthome as the singular limit of analysis beyond interpretation, articulating the act as an annihilating break with fantasy and the future, and positioning the ethics of psychoanalysis around the injunction to act in conformity with desire rather than serve the 'service of goods'.

     the subject must accept its sinthome, its particular pathway to jouissance, as its 'Real identity, connecting it to the Real of its being'

939. #939

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.91

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Fraying of Social Ideals*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that social trauma and oppression fray the symbolic anchoring points (points de capiton) that suture the subject to collective ideals, and that the Lacanian act—by temporarily demolishing these quilting points—can break the repetition compulsion imposed by oppressive signifiers, opening a space for singular desire and counterhegem­onic possibility beyond the normative symbolic order.

     the symbolic supports, that protect the subject against excessive jouissance

940. #940

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.227

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *In Defense of Empathy* > *The* Ressentiment *of the Powerful*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the anti-victim universalism of Badiou and Žižek conceals a ressentiment of the powerful—a reversal of Nietzschean ressentiment by which dominant subjects begrudge the jouissance of suffering attributed to marginalized others—and that their universalism is incomplete because it arbitrarily excludes racial, sexual, and postcolonial subjects while admitting the proletariat.

     what is being envied is the jouissance of suffering. Lacan himself makes the connection between envy and jouissance when he explains that the (fantasized) jouissance of the other tends to generate a high degree of Lebensneid

941. #941

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.190

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Narcissism as an Ethical Failure*

     Theoretical move: Narcissistic desire constitutes an ethical failure precisely because it forecloses the unknowability of the other, which Lacanian ethics requires one to confront as the Real dimension of the other — including its traumatic jouissance — rather than reducing the other to a reassuring imaginary or symbolic likeness.

     the other as someone whose jouissance is potentially too close, too alien, too strong, and therefore too traumatic

942. #942

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.161

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and the act constitute two distinct but complementary ethical orientations within Lacanian ethics—both are modes of fidelity to the Thing—thus correcting the tendency to privilege the act as the sole or supreme form of Lacanian ethical praxis, and reframing "not ceding on one's desire" as a matter of keeping desire alive rather than pursuing destructive jouissance to its limit.

     the jouissance of the act neutralizes the symbolic, sublimation aspires to reconfigure it by bringing bits of jouissance into the realm of signification

943. #943

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.209

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > Santner, in turn, glosses Badiou's analysis in this way:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that multiculturalism, far from being emancipatory, functions as an arm of capital by converting identity difference into market segmentation, and proposes—via Badiou—that a universalist ethics grounded in the "Same" rather than the recognition of alterity is the genuine post-Lacanian political alternative.

     capital has an apparently infinite capacity to cater to our various desires as well as to generate new ones.

944. #944

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.126

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *The Inconsistency of the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's binary opposition between a "dead" symbolic order and a vital real misses the implication of his own insight—that the real's disruption of the symbolic is precisely what makes the signifier creative and polyvalent, so that counterhegemonic resignification can occur from within the symbolic rather than requiring an exit from it.

     the split between Other and Jouissance, between the 'dead' symbolic order which mortifies the body and the nonsymbolic Life-Substance of jouissance

945. #945

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.48

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen* > *Carving a Space for Utopian Aspirations*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity—rooted in the Real—must be held in productive tension with the Symbolic rather than used to justify a wholesale break from it; genuine transcendence weaves strands of the Real into social existence without fetishizing an "otherworldly beyond," thereby keeping the Symbolic from stagnating while resisting psychic capture.

     transform the 'immortal' energies of the real into a livable (and perhaps at times even a 'sublime') actuality

946. #946

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.84

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *Antigone's Act of Defi ance*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical status of a Lacanian act depends not merely on its self-destructiveness or transgressive form but on the subject position of its agent (the disempowered) and its orientation toward the Thing/lack; it uses Antigone to demonstrate that genuine singularity, the refusal to cede on one's desire, is what distinguishes the ethical act from its simulacrum.

     This 'break' (the hole in the symbolic through which jouissance gushes into the realm of sociality) is, of course, where the Thing appears as lost.

947. #947

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.113

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Lures of Power*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's two "lures of power"—reifying the void and absolutizing truth—are countered by the structural incompleteness of naming, and that this incompleteness aligns Badiou with Lacan's insistence on an unbridgeable gap between the Real and its symbolization, while also positioning sublimation ethics as a superior framework for both personal and social transformation.

     desire should remain partially unfulfilled, that some share of desire should always persist as desire rather than become completely overtaken by the jouissance of the act.

948. #948

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.253

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

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

     only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail—a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial expression, a tic—that signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter of the real is always traumatic

949. #949

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.150

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *"Deviant" Satisfactions*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation and symptom formation share a common structural root—both are responses to excess jouissance circling the Thing—but are distinguished by their relationship to the signifier; sublimation mobilizes the signifier to produce singular creativity, while the symptom marks the signifier's failure to contain the drives. Sublimation is thus theorized as the privileged site of singularity's social inscription, capable of revising the repertoire of satisfactions even against normative interpellation.

     the symptom, like sublimation, is at bottom a means of binding excess jouissance. It consumes and to some extent disciplines the drives that circle the Thing

950. #950

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.28

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny*

     Theoretical move: The repetition compulsion is theorized as a structural binding mechanism that converts the unmanageable pressure of jouissance into the more stable organization of desire and symptomatic fixation, making it simultaneously a trap and a protective shield that grounds subjective continuity and singularity.

     the repetition compulsion gives structure to the subject's jouissance so that the latter becomes more manageable. It translates the amorphous (or polymorphously perverse) pressure of jouissance into the relatively stable 'organization' of desire.

951. #951

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.252

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *8. The Sublimity of Love*

     Theoretical move: This notes section develops a series of theoretical positions linking Das Ding, lost object, courtly love, and the enigma of the Other's desire to show how love operates as a vehicle for the subject's approach to the Thing—always fleetingly—and how love's interpellation can momentarily suspend ordinary socio-symbolic identification.

     Psychoanalysis makes the whole achievement of happiness turn on the genital act. It is, therefore, necessary to draw the proper consequences from this. It is doubtless possible to achieve for a single moment in this act something which enables one human being to be for another in the place that is both living and dead of the Thing

952. #952

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.81

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Will to Begin Again*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's account of the act holds an irreducible tension: while the act is a suicidal, non-teleological encounter with the death drive that annihilates the subject as social agent, it simultaneously harbours a transformative potential — a "will to begin again" — that can reconstitute subjectivity and even catalyse social change, a dimension often eclipsed in post-Lacanian readings.

     the very point of undergoing the act as a locus of sociocultural 'impossibility' is to shed any lingering hope of such redemption or reward

953. #953

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.54

     2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *Validity in Excess of Meaning*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other's desire functions through a "validity in excess of meaning" — a surplus that exceeds rational comprehension — which binds subjects to institutions not through explicit juridical demands but through visceral, unconscious citation of authority, generating anxiety that curves the subject's everyday space and drives the desperate Che vuoi? toward an Other that is itself incapable of accounting for its own desire.

     organizing our drives into destiny-determining configurations of enjoyment (or lack thereof)

954. #954

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.148

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity*

     Theoretical move: Repetition is reframed not as a violation of the pleasure principle but as its virulent expression and, more provocatively, as the very vehicle of sublimation and creativity: the drive's constitutive failure to reach its object (the Thing) generates the "radical diversity" that makes creative variation possible, so that repetition and sublimation are structurally co-implicated rather than opposed.

     the stubbornness with which the repetition compulsion lands the subject in the same spot over and again is an essential facet of its attempt to contain the otherwise overwhelming pressure of jouissance.

955. #955

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.270

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a back-matter index listing key concepts, names, and page references from a book on Lacanian psychoanalysis and ethics; it is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argument but maps the conceptual terrain of the work.

     jouissance and, 25 repetition compulsion and, 16 stain of jouissance, 23–24 singularity, excess, 21

956. #956

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.76

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Act of Subjective Destitution*

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a critical engagement with Edelman's queer-theoretical appropriation of the Lacanian act of subjective destitution and sinthome, arguing that his alignment of queer subjectivity with pure negativity and the death drive forecloses transformative political action; against Edelman, the author proposes that the future is not a suturing of lack but the condition for its ongoing, open-ended translation into new signification.

     They should embrace the anti-identitarian and meaningless force of jouissance so as to forsake 'all causes, all social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow'

957. #957

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.122

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *From "Divine" Violence . . .*

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's valorization of "divine violence" by arguing that it collapses the necessary tension between transgressing and affirming normative limits, and risks "forcing the encounter with the Real" — a move that forecloses the context-specific political work of symbolization in favor of an absolute ethical act.

     divine violence is divine precisely because it does not serve a purpose

958. #958

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.159

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Professor D's Shoes*

     Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of sublimation establishes that the Real/Thing is only accessible *through* mundane objects and representations—not despite them—such that jouissance is attained via the semblances of the world rather than by aiming directly at the Thing; this vindicates the continuation of desire over any transcendent or death-driven "beyond," and refutes the nihilism that results from rigidly separating the Thing from worldly things.

     when we shun mundane objects, we gain neither these objects nor the real. This is to say that aiming directly at the real Thing without going through objects of desire does not, in most circumstances, get us anywhere

959. #959

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

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

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

     it is my ethical obligation to bear the proximity of the other's jouissance regardless of how 'demonic' this jouissance proves to be

960. #960

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.133

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Joyce as a Singular Individual*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance is not merely the repressed underside of the signifier but foundational to its innovative capacity, such that the signifier and the real mutually transform each other — a reciprocal dynamic that grounds the subject's active invention of meaning and enables singular individuality (exemplified by Joyce) through the sinthome's integration into the symbolic.

     jouissance is no longer merely the seditious underside of the signifier but, rather, foundational to its innovative thrust.

961. #961

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.248

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *6. The Dignity of the Thing*

     Theoretical move: This passage, comprising endnotes to a chapter on sublimity and love, develops the theoretical relationship between Das Ding, sublimation, the drive, jouissance, and the Real, arguing that aesthetic and sublimatory processes mediate our proximity to the Thing while the drive's satisfaction lies in its perpetual circling rather than attainment.

     insofar as certain objects evoke the Thing better than others, thereby offering a greater degree of jouissance, they cannot be a matter of indifference

962. #962

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.146

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart* > *Cézanne's Apples*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation works not by imitating objects but by allowing the dignity of Das Ding to resonate within tangible, even banal objects; the very bar from the Thing that constitutes symbolic existence is what makes manageable, partial jouissance possible through substitute objects.

     we are able to tolerate jouissance only in small doses... the very fact that we are barred from the Thing makes it possible for us to gain little bits of jouissance within the confines of symbolic existence.

963. #963

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.267

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is an index from a book chapter, listing topics, concepts, and proper names with page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical passage—no argument is advanced—but it maps the conceptual terrain of the book, including Lacanian concepts such as jouissance, sinthome, objet a, the real, sublimation, and singularity.

     animation of being, 22 / bodily, 119 / creativity of signifi er, 119 / death drive and, 22

964. #964

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.89

     3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Service of Goods*

     Theoretical move: The Lacanian act constitutes a genuine ethics precisely by rupturing the "service of goods" — the Other's disciplinary demand to subordinate desire to utility and social adaptation — and, when jouissance defeats the signifier, opens the possibility of revolutionary politics beyond mere repetition or incremental reform.

     At such moments, jouissance defeats the signifier, thereby making it impossible for the 'service of goods' to proceed with business as usual.

965. #965

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.130

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Epiphanies That Transmit the Real*

     Theoretical move: Joyce's writing is theorized as a privileged site where the Real irrupts into the Symbolic not to destroy but to radicalize language: by remaining at the level of metonymic residue rather than metaphor, Joyce's epiphanies transmit scraps of the Real and enact an eroticization of language that brushes against the sinthome without collapsing into psychosis.

     it invites the reader to experience jouissance through an intimate engagement with the text. It in fact enacts a certain eroticization of language

966. #966

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.141

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that human subjectivity is constituted by the structural inaccessibility of Das Ding, whose fundamental veiling compels sublimation as an ongoing substitutive encirclement; drawing on Kristeva, it further theorises that symbolic subjectivity is a defence against melancholia, and that depression marks the failure of sublimation—a collapse back into proximity with the Thing and a consequent loss of signifying capacity.

     the primordial (non)object that, fantasmatically, promises us unadulterated jouissance

967. #967

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.72

     3. *The Ethics of the Act*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "fundamental fantasy" operates at the level of the drive rather than desire, and thus resists the signifier-based talking cure; approaching it triggers aphanisis and the collapse of symbolic identity, generating a nexus between satisfaction and destruction that some critics (Žižek, Edelman) valorize as the liberatory "act of subjective destitution."

     This fantasy functions as the most deep-seated depository of the subject's jouissance. As such, it resides beyond the talking cure.

968. #968

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.186

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Paralysis of Desire*

     Theoretical move: Narcissistic love arrests sublimation's ethical-innovative force by converting the object into a static emblem of self-completion, and it does so through a domesticated relation to the objet a — deploying it as a predictable screen that protects the subject from the jouissance (and terror) of the Thing itself, revealing the repetition compulsion as a rigid crystallization of desire's language.

     the objet a as the (imaginary) 'cause' of our desire safeguards us against the very jouissance it promises

969. #969

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.14

     *Introduction*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian subjectivity involves a tripartite negotiation of symbolic, imaginary, and real registers, and proposes "singularity" as a concept specifically aligned with the real — a non-symbolizable surplus of being that exceeds all social categories and persists beyond the subject's symbolic and imaginary supports, distinguished from both subjectivity (symbolic) and personality (imaginary).

     the real intrudes into our lives as an unruly vortex of bodily jouissance and unintelligibility

970. #970

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.176

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Upside of Anxiety*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety and singularity are structurally linked through the surplus energies of the Real, and that sublimation functions as Lacan's more rigorous answer to Heidegger's existential authenticity: it binds anxiety by welcoming jouissance without being engulfed by it, making anxiety a precondition of creativity rather than a pathology to be eliminated.

     Lacan's notion of sublimation as a mode of welcoming jouissance without letting it engulf us.

971. #971

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.32

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *The Crisis of Consciousness*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire functions as a defense that maintains a productive distance from jouissance (which the subject is constitutionally incapable of managing), while the drive's surplus enjoyment perpetually destabilizes the subject from within — making the drive a fundamental ontological notion that deepens the crisis of consciousness beyond what Freud's unconscious or Lacan's early linguistic theory alone could account for.

     desire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance

972. #972

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.34

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *The "Undeadness" of the Drives*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity is constitutively aligned with the excess jouissance of the drives and the death drive, such that what makes a subject irreplaceable is not a positive personality attribute but a non-relational "undeadness" — a dense core that resists symbolic and imaginary assimilation and links the subject to the deadly yet indestructible pulsation of the drives.

     our singularity is inextricably aligned with this excess—that our constitutive instability is merely the flipside of the fact that we are never completely absorbed by symbolic and imaginary processes of subjectivization

973. #973

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.244

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > 8. Here is one example:

     Theoretical move: The passage, drawn from endnotes, argues that the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real are each structurally necessary components of bearable human coexistence: the Symbolic Third mediates between subjects and the monstrous Real Thing, the Imaginary enables identification with the other, and the Real supplies the dynamism of singular passion—while also elaborating the sinthome as a meaning-producing enigma that is opaque, poetic, and irreducible to ultimate signification.

     like Daniel Paul Schreber's God who directly controls me, penetrating me with the rays of jouissance

974. #974

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.137

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *The Language of Resistance*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that singular language is irreducibly tied to trauma and the real, but that experimental writing (like Joyce's) can harness the destructiveness of the death drive productively—transmuting trauma through a complex intertwining of acting out and working through—thereby granting the subject a measure of agency over inherited cultural signifiers rather than full subjection to the dominant symbolic.

     the disfiguration of language is the prerequisite of our ability to reach 'ultimate thresholds of inscribable dislocation and jouissance'

975. #975

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.121

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Transformative vs. Revolutionary Politics*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's valorization of the suicidal act and the jouissance of the Real as the only escape from a wholly corrupt Symbolic is theoretically incoherent and politically self-defeating, and that a viable politics requires interrogating the interplay of the Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary rather than evacuating the Symbolic altogether.

     the only way to undermine the symbolic is to self-destructively (or destructively) embrace the jouissance of the real

976. #976

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.102

     4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Subject of Truth*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's truth-event — arising from the void (the Lacanian real) of a situation — transforms an ordinary "some-one" into a singular, universal subject of truth (an "immortal"), and maps this structure onto Lacanian concepts of the act, the real, jouissance, and singularity to theorize how the impossible encounter with the real generates unprecedented subjective and ethical possibilities.

     we once again encounter that 'dense core of existential loneliness' (Santner) that connects the subject to the nonrelational pulse of jouissance

977. #977

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.144

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart* > *The* Erscheinung *of the Matchbox*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized not merely as artistic practice but as a universal human operation: by elevating an ordinary object (the matchbox) to the dignity of the Thing, sublimation allows a trace of Das Ding—and of forbidden jouissance—to materialize within everyday life, even though the elevated object remains a substitute that can never deliver the Thing-in-itself.

     it grants us a tiny portion of jouissance that connects us to the luster of the Thing. As I pointed out in chapter 1, it is because we feel that we have lost something infinite (and infinitely precious) that we hunt for its 'pleasurable associations'

978. #978

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.131

     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.

     Lacan no longer regards language and jouissance as mutually exclusive, but suggests that the signifi er remains creative to the extent that it transmits jouissance.

979. #979

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.230

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *1. The Singularity of Being*

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster consolidates the theoretical architecture of the chapter by specifying the structural relations among das Ding, desire, repetition compulsion, jouissance, the death drive, sublimation, the sublime, and the symbolic order—while positioning Badiou, Žižek, Zupančič, and Santner as allied but differentiated interlocutors within a Lacanian frame.

     it is not the Law itself that bars the subject's access to jouissance—it simply makes a barred subject out of an almost natural barrier. For it is pleasure that sets limits to jouissance.

980. #980

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.243

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *5. The Jouissance of the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: This passage (a notes section) deploys Žižek's and Zupančič's arguments to develop the theoretical claim that the Real's internal contamination of the Symbolic ensures the big Other's constitutive incompleteness, while also staging the political-ethical deadlock that follows from Lacanian theory when it confronts questions of action, revolutionary violence, and the Kant-Sade nexus.

     the incompatibility of ethics and pleasure leads to a methodical masochism . . . if we understand this as an injunction to act against our own well-being or against the well-being of others . . . we find ourselves caught by the throat in the snares of the 'simulacrum' of ethics, terror

981. #981

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.262

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

     Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (pages 262–263) listing concepts, proper names, and page references; it is non-substantive as continuous theoretical argument but indexes key Lacanian concepts deployed throughout the work.

     bodily jouissance, 119

982. #982

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.173

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Balancing the Symbolic and the Real*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a productive ethics of sublimation requires maintaining a precarious equilibrium between the Symbolic and the Real: too little Real yields existential blandness and betrays desire's singularity, while too much Real overwhelms the subject with jouissance; sublimation is the privileged mode of negotiating this tension, and its residue persists to reshape collective symbolic reality.

     we feel terrorized by the overproximity of jouissance; we fail to gain a steady foothold in cultural narratives and other collective landmarks that would be able to anchor us in the symbolic world.

983. #983

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.223

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *In Defense of Empathy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues against the post-Lacanian and Badiouian reduction of all interpersonal empathy to colonialist bad faith or structural impossibility, contending instead that the irreducible opacity of the Other as Thing does not preclude partial, meaningful human connection—and that the wholesale vilification of empathy may itself conceal intellectual lethargy rather than ethical rigor.

     the fact that we are asked to meet the disorienting jouissance of the other does not mean that we cannot also experience the other as a socially intelligible 'fellow human being'

984. #984

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.128

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Lacan's Reading of Joyce*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sinthome is not a site of pure destruction but of creative renewal: by identifying with his sinthome, Joyce links the symbolic and the real so as to generate innovative signification, making artistic creativity—rather than subjective destitution—a viable response to the death drive's impossibility.

     Read the pages of Finnegans Wake, without trying to understand. It reads. If it reads . . . it is because one feels present the jouissance of the one who wrote it

985. #985

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.29

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *Repetition as Destiny* > *Desire, Drive, Jouissance*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and the drive are structurally co-implicated rather than opposed: both aim at das Ding as their shared (non)object, but the drive is closer to the bodily real while desire is twice-removed via the signifier. Crucially, even the drive is already quasi-social, shaped by the signifiers of the Other, so the desire/drive distinction is one of relative proximity to the Thing—not nature versus culture.

     underneath desire courses the unstoppable force of the drive, of the very bodily jouissance, that it is designed to contain

986. #986

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.147

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *The Grief of Being Apart* > *Sublimation and the Pleasure Principle*

     Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized as the instrument by which the death drive's push toward the Thing is deflected into desire regulated by the pleasure principle: by inserting the signifier between subject and Thing and redirecting drive toward objet a, sublimation makes satisfaction possible while preserving the subject from the annihilating proximity of jouissance, thereby constituting the structural "destiny" of the subject's psychic life.

     Because the subject cannot endure the direct impact of jouissance, but can only handle its 'reflection,' sublimation transforms the drive for the Thing into a desire directed at various objets a.

987. #987

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.202

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Love's Innovative Energy*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that love's "innovative energy" derives from its structural orientation toward the Thing—the sublime kernel that desire perpetually circles without attaining—and pivots to a concluding framing of Lacanian ethics as a post-Levinasian problematic: where Levinas grounds ethics in the face's appeal, Lacan splits the other's face into culturally intelligible attributes and the anxiety-producing strangeness of das Ding, reorienting ethical concern from pluralistic tolerance to the encounter with the "inhuman" other and a resurgence of universalist ethics.

     It expresses the 'too muchness' of jouissance, the involuntary spasm, cringe, or wince that betrays the other's discomfort and disorientation.

988. #988

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.177

     7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Lacan with Dr. Phil*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity, though risking conflation with self-help authenticity, is distinguished by existential bewilderment rather than self-possession; and that the opacity of the subject (its being riven by the unconscious/drive/repetition) does not license ethical abdication but instead demands a heightened, self-reflexive accountability toward others that goes beyond Butler's ethics of forgiveness.

     it is arguable that the alignment of singularity with jouissance is not nearly as different from traditional notions of self-actualization as the evocation of Lacan's name typically implies

989. #989

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.42

     1. *The Singularity of Being* > *When Miracles Happen*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that transcendent experiences function as a counter-interpellation that breaks the hypnotic hold of sociosymbolic investments, thereby releasing congealed drive energies and opening access to subjective singularity — situating this claim at the intersection of Lacanian Real, Santner's theology-inflected post-Lacanian theory, and Althusserian interpellation.

     Žižek's exploration of the act of subjective destitution as a leap into the deadly jouissance of the real regardless of consequences

990. #990

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.192

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Call and Response of Love*

     Theoretical move: Love is theorized as a privileged form of sublimation in which the love object functions as the sublime object *par excellence*—the site where Das Ding is most forcefully evoked—and the call-and-response structure of love is shown to release singularity beyond ideological interpellation, making love simultaneously a truth-event, a locus of freedom, and the container of jouissance.

     They personify the (always receding) possibility of jouissance... I return to such an object again and again because it has become the container of my jouissance.

991. #991

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.204

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Other as "Evil"*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a properly Lacanian ethics requires risking one's symbolic and imaginary supports to endure the other's singular, potentially "evil" jouissance — a demand that goes beyond inter-subjective empathy or moral prudence, and that finds partial (but insufficient) precedent in Levinas's notion of the face as absolute singularity.

     'One would have to know how to confront the fact that my neighbor's jouissance, his harmful, malignant jouissance, is that which poses a problem for my love'

992. #992

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.181

     8. *The Sublimity of Love*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that romantic love is the paradigmatic site where the lost Thing exerts its greatest force: the beloved object functions as a sublime morsel of the real that promises unmediated jouissance, and the idiosyncratic "language of desire" born from primordial loss can either imprison the subject in narcissistic repetition or open onto genuine love and interpersonal generosity depending on whether the subject holds desire alive or forecloses it.

     it comes closer than any other object to giving us the impression that we can actually touch the Thing in tangible ways that make unmediated jouissance available to us.

993. #993

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.123

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a occupies a paradoxical double position—it is both the real itself and the symbolic's positivized failure to reach the real—and uses this logic to distinguish psychoanalysis (which registers its own limits as the condition of truth) from historicism/skepticism (which forecloses the real by filling every gap with causal-cultural chains), while reading Frankenstein's monster as the paradigmatic modern subject: structurally constituted by the failure/lack of knowledge rather than by any positive invention.

     it is precisely there where we do not know, that enjoyment, jouissance (a pleasure in the real) arises. Jouissance is a kind of 'secondary gain' obtained where knowledge fails.

994. #994

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec inverts Ferguson's reading by arguing that utilitarianism does not flee *toward* the sublime but rather *from* the superego's obscene law; the utilitarian erasure of interior lack and repressed desire produces claustrophobia, decays the symbolic/auratic relation, and necessarily generates a fantasmatic colonial Other (the veiled subject) as its symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the jouissance it structurally denies.

     What was capital in this fantasy was the surplus pleasure, the useless jouissance that the voluminous cloth was supposed to veil and the colonial subject, thus hidden, was supposed to enjoy.

995. #995

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the Lacanian gaze is not a confirming, panoptic presence but a blind, non-validating point of impossibility that constitutes the subject as a desiring, guilty, and anchored being—one structurally cut off from the Other rather than identified with it, and whose narcissism and fantasy merely circumnavigate a constitutive absence.

     it is clouded over and turned back on itself, absorbed in its own enjoyment.

996. #996

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.161

     **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Modern Forms of Power**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that democracy is constituted not by power belonging to an anonymous "anyone" (Foucault's self-guaranteeing law) but by a structural lack in the Other—no guarantees, no ultimate markers of certainty—and that this very lack produces the subject's singularity and surplus of meaning, while the enjoyment that emerges from erased certainty is precisely what sustains democratic conflict against totalitarian closure.

     since there where the 'markers of certainty' are erased, enjoyment breaks out, democracy seems designed, if not to brew up more dissatisfaction, at least to acknowledge the impossibility of its alleviation

997. #997

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

     Theoretical move: By tracing French psychiatry's concept of mental automatism through the mind/machine boundary problem, Copjec argues that the structural gap in utilitarian self-definition reveals why the psychoanalytic ethics of the Superego and the Lost Object—premised on non-reciprocal, unconditional prohibition—must replace the utilitarian model of reciprocity, pleasure-reward, and intersubjective exchange as the foundation of moral law.

     moral order is established … because we recoil before the violence and obscenity of the superego's incitement to jouissance, to a boundless and aggressive enjoyment.

998. #998

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.211

     **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason**

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

     Sex is that which cannot be spoken by speech; it is not any of the multitude of meanings that try to make up for this impossibility.

999. #999

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.128

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_page127"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_pg127" class="pagebreak" title="127"></span></span>**The Drying Up of the Breast**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that vampirism and the uncanny are structurally indexed to the collapse of the fantasy relation to the partial object (objet petit a): when the extimate object loses its status as object-cause of desire and is encountered at zero distance, anxiety replaces desire, the fantasy structure collapses, and jouissance floods in—a logic illustrated through breast-feeding discourse, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and Marker's La Jetée.

     The first thing to note is that it is a matter of an oral relation, of a jouissance attained through sucking… the presence of the uncanny registers an abandonment of prohibitions, an unabandoned embrace of jouissance.

1000. #1000

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

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

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

      Rather than screening jouissance, she hoards it.

1001. #1001

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.183

      **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Detour through the Drive**

      Theoretical move: The shift from classical detective fiction to film noir is theoretically recast not as a narrative inversion of identification but as a structural choice between desire (sense, language, lack) and drive (being, jouissance), homologized through Freud's fort/da game and mapped onto a broader historical transition from an Oedipal order of desire to a contemporary order of commanded jouissance with political consequences.

      we have ceased being a society that attempts to preserve the individual right to jouissance to become a society that commands jouissance as a 'civic' duty.

1002. #1002

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.96

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

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

      someone—the Other—always benefits from the sacrifice of enjoyment—and always at the subject's expense.

1003. #1003

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.155

      **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Modern Forms of Power**

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power is structurally blind to totalitarianism because it fails to recognize that the "mild and provident" tutelary power is, in Freudian-Lacanian terms, the ideal father who constitutes himself precisely by interdicting jouissance (expelling objet petit a), and that this interdiction — not discursive multiplicity — is what generates the fantasy of transgression and the eventual return of the despotic primal father in the form of totalitarianism.

      Since the primal father is the principle of jouissance, of excess enjoyment, the signifier of his absence will be the son who promises to protect society from the trauma of jouissance's return.

1004. #1004

      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.

      surfacing within the phenomenal field, private being, jouissance, nevertheless does not take on a phenomenal form. Phenomenal/nonphenomenal … names the division troubled by drive.

1005. #1005

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.191

      **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Locked Room/Lonely Room**

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir enacts a structural shift from the "locked room" of classical detection (governed by a benevolent-impotent Other that conceals and yields meaning) to the "lonely room" (governed by the drive), where the intrusion of the non-phenomenal private realm—the object a, the grain of the voice—into public space registers not as plenitude but as a depletion of phenomenal reality, so that noir's characteristic emptiness is the positive mark of jouissance overrunning the signifying network.

      Neff is thus a man who enjoys too much—too much to surrender his words to another, when they hold for him such exquisite pleasure.

1006. #1006

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

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

      Entering into a kind of complicity with this Other, photographing the cloth to meet the satisfaction of its gaze, he turned himself into an instrument of the Other's enjoyment.

1007. #1007

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.84

      **The Sartorial Superego** > **Guilty versus Useful Pleasures**

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that utilitarianism's conversion of a descriptive claim (use is pleasurable) into a prescriptive one (pleasure must be maximized as duty) is the hidden motor of both architectural functionalism's "extensibility" and colonialism's "civilizing mission," and that Lacan's seminar on ethics exposes this maneuver as a despotism rooted in the belief that pleasure is fully usable—rendering man infinitely manageable.

      Society can be held together only if men can be made to sacrifice their immediate, local gratifications for longer-term and greater ones. Now, it is precisely this maneuver that occasions the attack by Lacan, who sees it as the source of utilitarianism's unethical 'penchant for expansion'

1008. #1008

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.184

      **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."

      Speech, as we know—language—is the death of the thing, it contributes to the drying up of jouissance... An excess of pleasure, a private enjoyment, seems to adhere in the act of speaking as such.

1009. #1009

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.216

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

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

      beings, according to Lacan's translation of the Freudian concept of castration, who surrender their access to jouissance upon entering language.

1010. #1010

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

      **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **Sexual Difference and the Superego**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamically sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share a common logic of the limit/exception—wherein a terrifying force is posited as possible but not existent, converting the father into an impossible Real—and concludes by calling for a new ethics grounded in the "not-all" logic proper to feminine sexuation, rather than the superegoic logic of exception.

      The superego … [the commandment 'Enjoy!'] is the correlative of castration, which is the sign that adorns our admission that the jouissance of the Other, the body of the Other, is only promised in infinity.

1011. #1011

      Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.119

      <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c09_r1.xhtml_page_117" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="117"></span>*9*

      Theoretical move: Through the analytic session, the passage traces how a lifelong pattern of self-imposed exile and isolation—from family, from intimacy, from presence—constitutes a compulsive repetition that the analysand only recognizes as such mid-session, connecting childhood withdrawal to adult philosophical "theoria" and forcing a revision of his idealized self-narrative.

      Savoring those enjoyments in the wake of Oliver's death feels almost criminal.

1012. #1012

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

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

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

      I'm competitive to the point of wanting blood.

1013. #1013

      Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.96

      **WEDNESDAY, MARCH 15**

      Theoretical move: Through first-person grief narrative, the passage inverts the conventional logic of death and presence: the bereaved survivor becomes the absent ghost while the dead son assumes overwhelming, hyper-real presence, theorizing mourning as a structural reversal of reality in which the living are drained of being and project their own void onto the deceased.

      His face comes to me with astonishing vividness... He is more real than real, present with an uncanny and impossible intensity.

1014. #1014

      Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.193

      <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c13_r1.xhtml_page_182" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="182"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c13_r1.xhtml_page_183" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="183"></span>*13*

      Theoretical move: The passage uses a first-person account of a psilocybin research session to enact, at the level of lived experience, a dissolution of the boundaries between self and other, reality and unreality, life and death—culminating in an identification with the dead son that functions as a form of grief-work running parallel to, and impatient with, the formal analytic process.

      Yet once again in the midst of this anxiety I feel so overcome with pleasure that I can't mobilize myself to feel bad about it. I think to myself, 'now I see what he was after—surely this is worth dying for.'

1015. #1015

      Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.265

      **WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12**

      Theoretical move: The passage performs an autobiographical-clinical reflection on grief as a defense structure: guilt functions as a protective screen against the deeper wound of pure loss, and only when that defense is progressively dismantled through analysis does the subject encounter the more fundamental Real of absence—a move that maps directly onto psychoanalytic concepts of defense, the lost object, and the ethics of mourning.

      My guilt has been a sort of gift to him, a last act of willing sacrifice, a means of holding on.

1016. #1016

      Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.228

      <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c17_r1.xhtml_page_224" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="224"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c17_r1.xhtml_page_225" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="225"></span>*17*

      Theoretical move: The passage deploys a phenomenological account of psilocybin-induced mystical revelation to articulate a process theology in which God is not a static Substance but a "work in progress" co-constituted through subjective experience, and in which negation/death is paradoxically the condition of love's self-realization — a move that implicitly mobilises Hegelian dialectics (Aufhebung, Spirit coming to itself) and Lacanian motifs (loss as the condition of the re-encounter with the lost object) within an autobiographical register.

      Each new vision came with a double rush of stunned wonder and intense pleasure. I couldn't bear to disturb their flow.

1017. #1017

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

      <span id="Index.xhtml_p323" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 323. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Index

      Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage (letters H–K) from Boothby's *Freud as Philosopher*, listing names and concepts with page references. No theoretical argument is advanced.

      Jouissance, 159–60, 174, 293

1018. #1018

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.133

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Toward a Lacanian Theory of Sacrifice

      Theoretical move: Boothby argues that sacrifice's general function is to establish the operation of the signifier: it pivots between the imaginary and the symbolic by enacting a violation of bodily wholeness (castration logic) that simultaneously founds a system of signifiers, the law of exchange, and the big Other — thereby integrating prior anthropological theories of sacrifice into a single Lacanian account.

      Sacrifice releases the unthinkable force of pure animation from its capture in the sacrificial body and allows it to circulate in an economy of symbolic elements.

1019. #1019

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.250

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > "You don't love me . . . you just don't give a shit."

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a—exemplified by the anal object—is not a natural object but is constituted through the demand of the Other, which "colonizes" the body's orifices and transforms biological functions into denaturalized libidinal strivings; drive development across stages is thus not natural maturation but a migration of the objet a driven by the Other's demand.

      the human being enters civilized life by way of an unnatural investment of libidinal interest in functioning of its bowels. The edifice of civilization is founded upon the unconscious libidinalization of excrement.

1020. #1020

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.174

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Language Acquisition and the Oedipus Complex

      Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Oedipal transformation is best understood structurally as a labor of the death drive that deconstructs imaginary identification and installs the child in the symbolic order, linking castration anxiety, superego formation, and jouissance into a coherent Lacanian re-reading of Freudian metapsychology.

      Nothing forces anyone to enjoy, except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance—jouis!

1021. #1021

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.159

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > The Agency of Death in the Signifier

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian death drive has two complementary faces—the pressure of the Real against the Imaginary and the agency of the Symbolic—and that both operate by dissolving the alienating coherence of the imaginary ego, thereby opening the subject to jouissance either through violence or through symbolically mediated exchange.

      jouissance remains 'beyond the pleasure principle.' Jouissance thus requires the deconstruction of the imaginary, but can occur in either of two ways, either by the violence that tears the imaginary form asunder or by the submission of the subject to the law of the signifier.

1022. #1022

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.175

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > <span id="ch3.xhtml_p175" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 175. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Psychoanalysis and the Theory of Sacrifice

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that a Lacanian perspective can bridge the anthropological divide between violent (immolatory) and non-violent (votive) forms of sacrifice, and that psychoanalysis—particularly via the death drive—offers a unifying framework for understanding ritual killing as a constitutive moment of human subjectivity; a survey of anthropological theories (Smith, Tylor, Hubert/Mauss, Bataille) prepares the ground for this Lacanian intervention.

      an elemental fulguration of desire is released amid spectacular violence

1023. #1023

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.293

      <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 5. Freudian “Materialism” and the Transcendence of Desire

      Theoretical move: The Lacanian doctrine of the phallus as master signifier, together with the contradictory nature of objet a (split between the imaginary and symbolic registers), explains how the unconscious simultaneously orients desire beyond all imaging and remains tied to the imaginary body — thus Freud's "materialism" is not biological determinism but an account of how natural need is dislocated into drive and desire through the orbit of objet a, making desire structurally "useless" and open to an indefinite range of objects.

      This margin of surplus is the dimension of jouissance—the way in which what is sucked is always more than any breast, what is excreted is always more than mere waste, what becomes erect always stands for something more than the need to copulate.

1024. #1024

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > The Agency of Death in the Signifier

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive is double-sided: operating as imaginary unbinding (violence, hallucination, fragmentation) and as symbolic unbinding (signification), where the symbolic constitutes a "second-order binding" whose very bound structure enables ongoing dissolution of imaginary unities — thereby translating Freud's instinct-fusion into a dialectic of binding/unbinding immanent to the speech chain itself.

      the living being is something at all thinkable, it will be above all as subject of the jouissance; but this psychological law that we call the pleasure principle... is very soon to create a barrier to all jouissance

1025. #1025

      The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.35

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that biblical narrative is constitutively structured around unresolvable moral ambiguity and contradiction — most visible in the Eden story — and proposes a third position beyond apologetic harmonization or secular rejection: fidelity to the text means embracing its conflicts as the very mark of its divine character rather than as defects to be explained away.

      this fruit would bestow deep insight into the nature of good and evil and enable them to become like the divine.

1026. #1026

      The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.166

      <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.

      The last thing we really want is to get what we are asking for, because this would cost us so much in terms of how we live… we engage in forms of protest that enable us to blame another… while enjoying the benefits that such a corrupt system offers us.

1027. #1027

      The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.123

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic religious fidelity requires a perpetual "faithful betrayal" — God as Real exceeds every conceptual, symbolic, or propositional capture, so that true worship is always a response to an irreducible excess that ruptures any naming or systematisation, including Christianity itself.

      the revelation of Christ forms a fissure within Judaism itself... Jesus is actually introducing (or re-inscribing) a wound into the already existing religion

1028. #1028

      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 > What would Jesus do?

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that an act which appears outwardly as betrayal can, when viewed from the perspective of foreknowledge and divine complicity, constitute the highest act of fidelity — destabilising the binary of betrayal/faithfulness and reframing Judas's act as a structurally necessary, willed sacrifice rather than a simple transgression.

      Judas went on to witness his own sorrow and remorse at his acts and to witness firsthand his own suicide. This was immediately followed by a deep pain as he was confronted with wave after wave of condemnations and judgment aimed at him through the ages.

1029. #1029

      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.

      the only treasure they have is one that can never be stolen but only shared

1030. #1030

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

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

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

      the lover gives in excess of the law and will act in the absence of the law, thus fulfilling the law by dwelling beyond it.

1031. #1031

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.35

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

      Theoretical move: The passage advances a paradoxical logic of faith in which direct pursuit of reward evacuates the authenticity of sacrifice, while genuine renunciation—giving up desire for the reward itself—is the only path through which wealth (or consolation) is indirectly discovered; this is illustrated through two parables: the pearl of great price and the figure of the blacksmith who offers presence rather than theodicy.

      in becoming the poorest of all, we simultaneously become the richest of all. The poverty is not then a first step toward the treasure; rather, the poverty is the very place where we find it.

1032. #1032

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

      <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter032.html_page_176"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical act is self-justifying (its own reward), and that unconditional gift-giving retroactively creates the conditions for its own justification — a logic illustrated parabolically and then extended to a second tale where the heretic's final act exposes the universal guilt of his accusers by demanding an innocent executioner.

      the first brother acted the way he did out of love (which needs no external reward) while the second brother, when confronted by unconditional love, is brought to his knees.

1033. #1033

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

      <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter028.html_page_158"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

      Theoretical move: The passage deploys a paradoxical logic of the refused gift — a reconciliation that is achieved not through the acceptance but the rejection of apology — and then dramatizes this through a second-person retelling of the Last Supper that stages a traumatic encounter with Christ's gaze, implicating the reader as Judas and foregrounding the unbearable weight of foreknowledge and betrayal.

      You long for death to wrap around you. But Jesus grips you with his gaze... He understands that the weight you now carry is so great that it would have been better had you never been born.

1034. #1034

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.131

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

      Theoretical move: The passage makes a double theoretical move: first, it articulates a mystical epistemology of "knowing unknowing" (docta ignorantia) where proximity to the source of faith produces greater opacity rather than clarity; second, through a parable it argues that unconditional acceptance—not demand or criticism—is the condition of possibility for genuine subjective transformation.

      he was so driven by the desire to succeed... he worked long hours, rarely saw his children, and often became irritable at the slightest problem

1035. #1035

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.26

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

      Theoretical move: The passage makes a theological-ethical argument that Christ's teachings of non-retaliation and love of enemies are addressed to the oppressed, not the powerful, thereby implicating the affluent Western reader as oppressor rather than recipient; the accompanying parable then dramatises how unconditional hospitality—giving without reserve—paradoxically preserves the very interiority the adversary seeks to destroy.

      by giving everything the priest had retained the very thing that the demon sought to take. For the demon was unable to rob him of his kindness and his hospitality, his love and his compassion.

1036. #1036

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.64

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

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

      the devil, far from hating our multitude of church activities, positively loves them, for it is in these very activities that we are able to become such productive agents in carrying out his insidious desires

1037. #1037

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.147

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine forgiveness is unconditional and precedes repentance rather than following it, deploying a theological-deconstructive reading of the Prodigal Son parable to distinguish an "impossible" gift-logic from the economic/conditional logic that normally masquerades as forgiveness.

      that kind of forgiveness can really annoy people, and might help to explain why Jesus got a reputation for hanging out with drunkards and prostitutes

1038. #1038

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.101

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

      Theoretical move: The passage develops a theological argument that the ethical demand of God is immanent to worldly acts of love and solidarity with the suffering—not transcendent authority—and then enacts this via the parable of Judas, whose betrayal is reframed as a destined, self-sacrificial mission necessary for redemption, inverting the usual moral condemnation of the act.

      The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life

1039. #1039

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.154

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

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

      We give up the treasure we have for the poverty of affluence.

1040. #1040

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.134

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the law constitutively generates the transgression it prohibits, and that only unconditional love/forgiveness—offered prior to repentance rather than contingent upon it—dissolves this dialectical trap; the accompanying parable extends this into a theology of divine power-as-weakness that radically inverts imperial authority.

      the power of sin is the law… the law implicitly generates what it explicitly rejects.

1041. #1041

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.75

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

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

      he withdrew his share of the father's inheritance and ran away, losing himself in worldly distractions of all kinds. But he found that no matter where he traveled, he could not escape the sorrow in his heart

1042. #1042

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

      <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter031.html_page_170"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

      Theoretical move: The passage makes a theological pivot distinguishing a "miracle of faith" as an inner, subjective transformation — irreducible to empirical verification or physical spectacle — from miracle as an observable event in the physical world, thereby grounding the miraculous in a change in the subject's mode of existence rather than in the external Real.

      the whole life of the individual is liberated, healed, and saved, regardless of what takes place in the physical realm.

1043. #1043

      The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.313

      A Play of Props > **Calculating Machines**

      Theoretical move: The passage concludes by mapping the conceptual history of everyday talk (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Lacan) onto the digital age's "control society," arguing that the algorithmic transcoding of communicative practices into behavioral data reduces subjects to "dividuals," and that emergent forms of resistance (personal data unions) must recover the individuating, self-cultivating potentials encoded in chatter, idle talk, and empty speech.

      capable of threatening the joys of marketing

1044. #1044

      The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.37

      Barbers and Philosophers > To which his friend replies:

      Theoretical move: By analyzing Holberg's Master Gert Westphaler through Kierkegaard's correspondence, the passage establishes "chatter" as a mechanically repetitive, jouissance-driven speech act whose automated quality anticipates Lacan's "empty speech" and Heidegger's "idle talk" — and whose pathological excess stems from narcissistic delusion rather than mere foolishness.

      I can't deny that when somebody asks me about things that I know well, I get the greatest pleasure in the world to explain them.

1045. #1045

      The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.44

      Barbers and Philosophers > To which his friend replies: > **Traveler's Logorrhea** > **Communicable Disease**

      Theoretical move: The passage traces a conceptual genealogy of "chatter" (snak/Geschwätz/adoleschia) from Plutarch through Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Lacan, arguing that the medical metaphor of talkativeness as a communicable disease—flowing through barbers, journalists, and audiences alike—is the structuring logic behind Kierkegaard's critique of everyday talk as a collective, self-perpetuating civic pathology.

      the garrulous barber is unable to control, much less to curb, his glory-seeking impulse to report what he has heard— even after being tortured for it.

1046. #1046

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.234

      Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

      Theoretical move: The passage elaborates two registers of symbolic castration—enjoyment and meaning—by drawing on Plato's account of sexuality as organism-within-organism (the genealogy of hysteria and the phallic 'conjunction of high and low'), and on Žižek's formulation of the phallus as insignia/mask that introduces a constitutive gap between the subject's immediate being and its symbolic mandate.

      The concept of castration involves two registers of separation and of the exteriority of the interior. The first concerns enjoyment, the second concerns meaning (as symbolic meaning, related to the signifier).

1047. #1047

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.148

      Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical

      Theoretical move: Župančič argues that comedy and love share a structural affinity organized around a central object that incarnates impossibility rather than enabling desire through inaccessibility; she then distinguishes joke-structure (instantaneous, final satisfaction) from comic-structure (satisfaction that opens and sustains discontinuous continuity), theorizing a specific temporality of the comic as distinct from the punctual logic of the joke.

      Satisfaction does not conclude the game (as it does in the case of jokes), it launches it.

1048. #1048

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.137

      part iii

      Theoretical move: Against Bergson's binary of mechanical vs. vital, Zupančič argues that the drive (as "indestructible life") is constitutively produced *through* repetition rather than being a prior vitality that repetition merely expresses—thereby positioning comedy as an introduction to the psychoanalytic insight that life is the gap opened by repetition itself, and that all drive is ultimately death drive.

      It is only by this 'mechanical' repetition that life can rise in front of us in all its vivacity, as well as produce the comic pleasure and the effect of 'indestructibility' associated with comedy.

1049. #1049

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.63

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

      Theoretical move: Against the contemporary "metaphysics of finitude" (which closes off the human within its limits), Zupančič argues that comedy enacts a "physics of the infinite" by demonstrating that human finitude is always already a *failed* finitude—a finitude with a structural hole—whose Lacanian name is objet petit a, and whose topology is best rendered by the Möbius strip: immanence that generates an other side without ever crossing to it.

      already desire in its radical negativity—but especially the drive, with its always excessive, 'surplus' nature

1050. #1050

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.227

      Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comedy is essentially the "genre of the copula" — the signifying articulation of the missing link between life and the Symbolic — and that the phallus, appearing in comedy as a partial object rather than merely a signifier, materialises this constitutive contradiction; comedy's "realism" is thus the realism of the Real of desire and drive, not the reality principle.

      As a partial object (that is, one in the series of partial objects), which is as such also a real locus of enjoyment.

1051. #1051

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.221

      Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "phallic signifier" is not a gesture of phallocentrism but of desublimation: it reattaches the mystery of the Phallus to the piece of the Real whose veiling produced sublime Meaning, and comedy is the human practice that structurally performs the same move—materializing the "behind" as a finite, trivial object rather than an infinite abyss, thereby showing that castration always arrives in a concrete form, not as pure lack.

      The manners we teach our children … are all modes of respect for castration. They introduce and demand a certain distance, thus making it possible for us not to walk on each other's enjoyment, if this can be avoided.

1052. #1052

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.112

      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.

      it is where the conflict is being constantly played out and repeated (in a form which provides the subject with some 'impossible' satisfaction, enjoyment).

1053. #1053

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.78

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

      Theoretical move: Comedy's "Character" form is theorized as the visible short circuit between the ego and the id/It — the unary trait as an enjoying incarnation — such that the comic character's structure reveals that jouissance belongs not to the subject but to the "It," exposing the missing link that normally sutures imaginary unity.

      a 'unary trait'? It could be defined precisely as that which marks a singular coincidence or short circuit between the signifier and the body, or between subjectivity as pure lack circulating in the Symbolic, and subjectivity as a specific mode of enjoyment.

1054. #1054

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.17

      Introduction

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic subjectivity resides not in any ego or subject but in the irresistible movement of comedy itself, and that this movement — unlike the laughter promoted by contemporary ideology — introduces a cut or non-immediacy into the very feelings and naturalized socioeconomic differences that ideology seeks to smooth over, giving comedy a genuinely subversive (rather than merely ironic-distancing) function.

      our ways of life, our habits, our feelings, our more or less idiosyncratic enjoyments—all these are no longer simply 'private matters'

1055. #1055

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.131

      part iii

      Theoretical move: Against Bergson's model of comedy as the mechanical encrusting upon pure life, Zupančič argues that life is non-identical with itself—constitutively split—and that the comic works not by extracting mechanism from life but by relating life to itself so that 'pure life' appears as an object; the comic's two-step movement (splitting the imaginary One, then revealing the intrinsic bond between the resulting duality) is driven by the Real as the connective silence that prevents the two terms from becoming fully independent.

      we laugh at the 'miraculous' occurrence of the surplus-sense that was produced from that very failure or nonsense.

1056. #1056

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.204

      (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

      Theoretical move: Zupančič redefines Lacanian castration not as mere lack/amputation but as the structural coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir) that constitutes enjoyment's relative autonomy and detachability — and derives from this the comic form as the radicalization of the human norm, where comic characters are not subjects opposed to structure but "subjectivized points of the structure itself" running wild.

      Castration is what gives enjoyment its relative autonomy, what accounts for its possible objectification (enjoyment as object) and for its possible detachability.

1057. #1057

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.142

      Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that tragedy and comedy are not two attitudes toward the same discrepancy but two structurally distinct standpoints *within* it: tragedy stands at the point of demand (articulating discrepancy as desire), while comedy stands at the point of satisfaction (articulating discrepancy as jouissance/surplus-satisfaction), and this standpoint-difference entails a reversal of temporality in which satisfaction precedes and overtakes demand rather than lagging behind it.

      Comedy, on the other hand, stands at the point of the satisfaction; and from this point, there is also only one true way in which the discrepancy between this satisfaction and the demand that should correspond to it is articulated: as jouissance, enjoyment or 'surplus-satisfaction.'

1058. #1058

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.158

      Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical > **Hu's on First**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *point de capiton* functions not as a temporal endpoint in jokes but as a retroactive structural revelation, and that when a joke is embedded in a comic sequence, the Master-Signifier it produces is immediately transformed into a comic object (S1→a) that drives the sequence's ongoing construction through an elastic suture-effect, distinguishing comedy as a form that builds continuity out of discontinuity.

      an object-like entity as a compound of enjoyment and of sense (Lacan would say jouis-sense, which was translated into English as 'enjoy-meant')

1059. #1059

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.212

      Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

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

      a relative autonomy of enjoyment (with, among other things, its not-always-predictable ups and downs); its local—or at least localizable—nature (the interval between the body and enjoyment)

1060. #1060

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.75

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

      Theoretical move: Comedy's structural logic consists in the "impossible articulation" of two mutually exclusive realities within one frame—not simply exposing the Real of what happened, but staging the structural Real whose suppression constitutes ordinary reality's coherence; this is distinguished from irony by comedy's capacity to produce a "concrete universal" (singular universality) that includes the infinite within the finite, and is further illuminated by the Freudian/Lacanian split between ego and id as the engine of comic incongruity.

      something about satisfaction and enjoyment that has its own logic and a relatively independent autonomous life, which can land the subject in rather awkward situations.

1061. #1061

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.200

      (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the structural core of comedy is not mere bisection but the emergence of a surplus element ("comic object," factor x) from any split of an imaginary One—a logic she grounds in a re-reading of Aristophanes' speech in Plato's *Symposium*, where Zeus's second cut (relocating the genitals) introduces surplus-jouissance as the element that perpetually prevents the two halves from fusing back into One, and which Lacan identifies as the essential comic reference to the phallus.

      towards some relatively independent 'satisfaction of intercourse'... a satisfaction that serves no purpose but itself

1062. #1062

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.60

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

      Theoretical move: Zupančič challenges the dominant "metaphysics of finitude" reading of comedy—which treats the genre as a celebration of human limitation and acceptance—by arguing that comedy is materialistic not because it anchors us in dense, finite reality but because it gives body to the contradictions and impasses within materiality itself, revealing that the human is always in excess of its own finitude.

      a man is never just a man, and that his finitude is very much corroded by a passion which is precisely not cut to the measure of man and of his finitude

1063. #1063

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

      I

      Theoretical move: Freud establishes the theoretical necessity of a primary narcissism by tracing the concept from its clinical origins through schizophrenia, childhood, and "primitive" thought, thereby justifying the differentiation of ego-libido from object-libido and grounding psychoanalysis in empirical observation rather than speculative theory.

      He even supposes sexuality to be one of his own designs – whereas on an alternative view he appears as a mere appendage of his germ-plasm, to whose purposes he devotes all his energies in return for the reward of a mere sensation of pleasure.

1064. #1064

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

      The Two Types of Drives

      Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's sublimation of object-libido into ego-libido constitutes secondary narcissism and operates paradoxically against Eros by desexualizing it, while the death drive's relative silence means life's noise comes primarily from Eros and its ongoing battle with the pleasure principle—a configuration that ultimately vindicates the fundamental dualism of drives.

      the state that ensues upon full sexual gratification is similar to dying, while in certain lower animals death coincides with the act of procreation

1065. #1065

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

      III

      Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the dynamic economy of narcissism by mapping the reciprocal flows between ego-libido and object-libido: self-feeling (self-esteem) rises and falls with narcissistic investment, the ego-ideal mediates this economy by imposing repression on object-choice, and the social/mass dimension of the ego-ideal is grounded in redirected homosexual libido and guilty conscience.

      Non-gratification resulting from non-fulfilment of this ideal releases homosexual libido, which converts into guilty conscience (social fear).

1066. #1066

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

      Introduction

      Theoretical move: The passage uses Falstaff and Rosalind as exemplary figures of a psychoanalytically-inflected imagination that resists both the regressive superego (Falstaff's demystification of paternal authority) and the oceanic id (Rosalind's complication of erotic reduction), arguing that Shakespearean imagination offers an alternative to Freud's resigned acceptance of civilizational constraint.

      Under the role of the standard super-ego we dream of uniting ourselves with a great sublime form – the father, or the metaphysical truth, or the state – and basking there for all time.

1067. #1067

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

      II

      Theoretical move: Freud establishes narcissism as a structural feature of libido theory by triangulating three pathways—organic illness, hypochondria/paraphrenia, and love-life—to argue that ego-libido and object-libido are dynamically interconvertible, that primary narcissism is universal, and that the compulsion to invest in objects arises from a pathogenic surplus of ego-libido.

      unpleasure is routinely the form in which increased tension expresses itself… what happens here, as elsewhere, is that a certain quantity of the physical process transmutes into the psychic quality of unpleasure

1068. #1068

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

      Introduction

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's theory of group psychology and repetition compulsion reveals all political life—liberal and authoritarian alike—as structured by transference onto leader-figures descended from the primal father, and that the therapeutic response (working-through rather than repeating) mirrors the dynamics staged in Shakespeare's Falstaff/Hal scenes, making literary play a potential rival to psychoanalytic cure.

      To Freud, the greatest human pleasure conceivable would perhaps be found in committing barbarous deeds with the full approval of the Over-I.

1069. #1069

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

      VI

      Theoretical move: Freud advances a dualistic drive theory by aligning biological distinctions (anabolism/catabolism, soma/germ-plasm) with the life drive / death drive polarity, tracing the evolution of libido theory from ego/sexual drive antithesis to narcissistic libido, and arguing that sadism represents a death drive expelled from the ego that becomes an auxiliary of the sexual function—insisting against Jung's monism that a genuine dualism of Eros and death drive remains irreducible.

      the sadistic drive, which aims to harm its object, derives from Eros, the preserver of life

1070. #1070

      Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.106

      *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter02.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalism is not a non-philosophical system but rather the most abstract social system in history, and that philosophy's task is to dialectically articulate the present by accepting the full consequences of capital's dissolution of solidity—a task requiring Hegel's logic of negativity to read Marx's critique of political economy.

      The sacred, which the force of capital so ruthlessly destroys and replaces with the icy force of the market, is in fact the compensation that tries to cover up for the perpetual rupture and breaks caused by capitalist relations.

1071. #1071

      Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza

      *Unexpected Reunions* > **Getting Used To It**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist political economy performs a reductive operation that collapses the Hegelian distinction between mechanism (as precondition of freedom) and freedom itself, turning workers into pure mechanical second-nature beings bound together by a "chemism" of money—thereby revealing capitalism as a composite of mechanism and chemism that reduces subjective ends to abstract un-life.

      he is stuck with the forced choice between freedom as mechanism of labor and freedom as mechanism of bodily functions (which have become exchangeable)

1072. #1072

      Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.19

      *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="introduction.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**

      Theoretical move: Against assemblage theory's logic of exteriority and contingent combination, Žižek argues for a Hegelian-Marxist position: the "desire-for-assemblage" reveals that universality (in the form of constitutive antagonism/negativity) is already immanent to each element, so that elements strive for assemblage not to form a larger whole but to actualize their own contradictory identity — making totality the dialectical completion of differential structure, not its rival.

      Assemblages are desired: desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented.

1073. #1073

      Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.82

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

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

      This time structurally allows for consumerist enjoyment... he feels free when he fucks, drinks, and eats in his 'free' time.

1074. #1074

      Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.142

      *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter03.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that reading Marx through Hegelian dialectics, Platonic anamnesis, and Lacanian subjectivity reveals: (1) capitalism's internal contradictions become visible only at its full realization; (2) liberation requires a master-function that constitutes volunteers as such; and (3) Hegel's theory of labor as negativity corrects both workerist and OOO misreadings of the subject.

      how to free the prisoners from this peculiar libidinal attachment?

1075. #1075

      Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.36

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

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

      one should accept the term in its Lacanian version, as something that points beyond all cultural features toward a core of the Real, of jouissance – a 'way of life' is ultimately the way in which a certain community organizes its jouissance.

1076. #1076

      Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.27

      *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.

      The status of this In-itself is very interesting: although the entity in question ("communism") is purely relational, this doesn't mean that we can reduce it to a passive effect of "really existing" people and their material practices: a relational entity also can have its hidden side, its In-itself.

1077. #1077

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.164

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Days of the Living Dead](#contents.xhtml_ahd11)

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian formula "there is no big Other" must be taken in its strongest ontological sense—not merely that the symbolic order exists only as a virtual fiction, but that it cannot even cohere as a fiction due to immanent antagonisms—and that this non-existence of the big Other is the very condition for the subject, while simultaneously exposing guilt and jouissance as structurally co-constitutive in conditions of permissiveness.

      guilt provides the surplus-pleasure which transforms a simple pleasure into intense jouissance

1078. #1078

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.117

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sexual difference is not a difference between two species of a universal but a meta-difference that splits universality from within, and he homologizes this structure to Kant's transcendental, which is itself traversed by immanent antinomies and transcendental illusion—culminating in the Kantian paralogism that prefigures Lacan's distinction between the barred subject of the signifier and the imaginary ego as object.

      how is sexual difference inscribed into this structure of failure that brings jouissance?

1079. #1079

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.420

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

      Theoretical move: The passage uses Wagner's *Parsifal*—specifically the logic that "the wound is healed only by the spear that caused it"—to articulate a Hegelian speculative identity: Spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal, self-alienation constitutes rather than presupposes the Self, and the negation of negation does not recover a lost positivity but fully accepts the abyss of Spirit's self-relating, with implications for colonialism and anti-Semitism.

      Wagner not only points to Kafka; as we have already seen, he turns around this evil-obscene immortality (wound as the 'undead' decaying flesh which longs to disappear in death but is condemned to eternal life) into the source of eternal bliss

1080. #1080

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.294

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

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ontology requires a pre-ontological register of "less-than-nothing" (den) distinct from both Nothing and Something, and uses the Klein bottle topology and the Higgs field paradox to demonstrate that Void/Nothing is not the ground but itself an achievement requiring energetic expenditure — thereby establishing a materialist distinction between two vacuums (false/true) that is strictly homologous to the Lacanian distinction between the death drive's circular movement and nirvana, and between den and objet a.

      If the fantasized unity with the object would have brought the full/impossible incestuous jouissance, the drive's repeated missing of its object does not simply compel us to be satisfied with a lesser enjoyment

1081. #1081

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

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

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

      what becomes of solidarity under the imperative to transform suffering into spectacle… awaiting a predicted performance of hardship in exchange for its donation

1082. #1082

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.9

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

      Theoretical move: The passage advances a programmatic argument that dialectical materialism must be reconceived as a formal materialism of unorientable surfaces—without substantial matter or teleological development—and that sexuality (understood as radical negativity following Lacan) is the privileged site where the parallax gap between ontology and the transcendental is redoubled and thus our sole contact with the Absolute, with topology (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle) providing the structural vocabulary for this redoubling.

      the excess of deadly sexual passion which poses a threat to any stable relationship

1083. #1083

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.368

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The Inhuman View](#contents.xhtml_ahd24)

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that abstract universality (the subject, labour, cogito) achieves its "practical truth" only in capitalist modernity, and that this historically conditioned abstraction is nonetheless irreversible—after capitalism there is no return to pre-modern substance. Lacan's achievement is to de-substantialize the subject (and the Unconscious), making $ a purely relational, non-substantial entity whose "bar" is a transcendental-formal condition rather than a historically variable exclusion, which separates him from Butler's account of interpellation.

      we see her mysterious profile … the red background of the restaurant wall seems to become even more intense, almost threatening to explode in red heat … as if his passion is directly inscribed on the background

1084. #1084

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.62

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

      Theoretical move: Sexuality is formally defined by the structural impossibility of its goal, such that the drive sustains itself through repeated failure rather than satisfaction; this logic of impossibility—anchored in das Ding—is what distinguishes the human from the animal, and hysteria is identified as the elementary human modality of installing this point of impossibility as absolute jouissance.

      the hysterical subject is precisely a subject who poses jouissance as an absolute; s/he responds to the absolute of jouissance in the form of unsatisfied desire

1085. #1085

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [<span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_p259" class="pagebreak" title="259"></span>A Snout in Plato’s Cave](#contents.xhtml_ahd18)

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

      one of the prisoners is not only freed from his chains (as Heidegger shows this is not at all enough to liberate him from the libidinal attachment to the shadows)

1086. #1086

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [The Protestant Freedom](#contents.xhtml_ahd26)

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that true freedom paradoxically coincides with necessity—through a dialectical reading of Luther's Protestantism and Lacan's objet a, Žižek contends that radical freedom emerges not from unconstrained choice but from the unbearable situation of predestination where one must choose without knowing which choice is predetermined, thereby collapsing the opposition between freedom and determinism.

      today's consumerist slavery where I am allowed to act at random and 'do what I want,' but remain precisely as such enslaved to the stimuli of commodities

1087. #1087

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.127

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

      Theoretical move: The passage enacts the Hegelian move from epistemological deadlock to ontological impossibility, arguing that the subject's constitutive failure to symbolize itself, the Other's opacity to itself, and sexuality's irreducible excess all converge on the same structure: reality is non-all, and the obstacle to knowledge IS the thing-in-itself. The enigma OF the other must become the enigma IN the other, grounding universality not in shared content but in shared failure.

      it is a lack with regard to an excess, to the excessive presence of traumatic enjoyment.

1088. #1088

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.216

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Seven Deadly Sins

      Theoretical move: Žižek maps the seven deadly sins onto a structural grid (Self/Other axis, three triads) and identifies acedia/sloth as the paradigmatic unethical attitude in the Lacanian sense—a compromise on desire (céder sur son désir)—arguing that the only truly ethical act is one that does not sacrifice desire even at the cost of death.

      today, in our 'post-' society, it is depression (resisting enjoyment of life, to be happy in consumption)

1089. #1089

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

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

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

      the Sadean subject arguably confronts us with the first form of post-human sexuality.

1090. #1090

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.202

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

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

      In sexual exchange where freedom, equality, property, and enjoyment rule, this additional term (like 'Bentham' in Marx) spoils the freedom/equality designated by the preceding terms. Enjoyment introduces asymmetry, surplus, envy into the balance of the exchange of pleasures

1091. #1091

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.326

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a <span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-138"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2118"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2519"></span>Snout

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Badiou's Being/Event duality must be supplemented by a third term—the Death Drive—which names the immanent distortion of Being that precedes and enables the subject's fidelity to an Event; against Badiou's residually Kantian finitude, a properly Hegelian-materialist move problematizes the very positivity of finite reality (the "human animal") rather than accepting it as given.

      marked by the stigma of what Eric Santner called 'undeadness' or the excess of life

1092. #1092

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.114

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's "Kant with Sade" reverses the common reading: Sade is the closet Kantian, not vice versa, because jouissance—like the moral law—operates beyond the pleasure principle and beyond pathological self-interest. This homology between drive/desire and the ethical act grounds a "critique of pure desire" that re-reads the Kantian sublime as immanent to sexuality itself, identifying feminine jouissance with the mathematical sublime's non-all structure and masculine sexuality with the dynamic sublime's constitutive exception.

      what Lacan calls jouissance, excessive enjoyment, is also, like the moral law, beyond self-interest as well as beyond the pleasure principle.

1093. #1093

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.175

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Days of the Living Dead](#contents.xhtml_ahd11)

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that cyberspace does not dissolve the Symbolic Order but intensifies it, and that the Oedipal structure, castration, and the death drive form a parallax unity rather than a sequence—jouissance is what makes a human animal "properly mortal," while a "downward negation of negation" characterizes modernity as the failure even to fail.

      Lacan's name for this derangement is jouissance, excessive enjoyment, whose pursuit can make us neglect or even self-sabotage our vital needs and interests.

1094. #1094

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.13

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

      Theoretical move: The passage maps the book's structural architecture (theorem/corollary/scholia) as a self-enacting ontological form, and closes by defending the "thwarted identity" of the Real—the irreducible gap between transcendental space and reality—against both new realist critics and the ideological "fine art of non-thinking" that converts the symbolic into image and forecloses genuine thought.

      wisdom instead of thinking proper—wisdom in the guise of one-liners intended to fascinate us with their fake 'depth.' They no longer function as articulated propositions but more like images providing instant spiritual satisfaction

1095. #1095

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.186

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

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

      these features can only emerge in a sexualized universe of finite and temporal beings

1096. #1096

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

      Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing alphabetical entries (I–L) with page cross-references; it carries no independent theoretical argument.

      *jouissance* [here](#theorem_i…), [here](#theorem_ii…), [here](#corollary_2…), [here](#corollary_4…), [here](#scholium_41…]

1097. #1097

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.431

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

      Theoretical move: By mapping the Lacanian triad of language/*lalangue*/matheme onto the RSI (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary) structure and arguing through the topological figures of the Möbius strip and cross-cap, Žižek resists any materialist-genetic primacy of *lalangue* over language, insisting instead that the cut introducing differential symbolic order is originary and irreducible to bodily or pre-symbolic ground.

      it stands for the signifying network as the 'apparatus of jouissance,' for language as the space of illicit pleasures that defy normativity: the chaotic multitude of homonymies, word-plays, 'irregular' metaphoric links and resonances turns itself around in the autonomous circle of enjoy-meant (jouis-sense).

1098. #1098

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

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

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

      sexuality is not only transformed/civilized, but, much more radically, changed in its very substance: it is no longer the instinctual drive to reproduce, but a drive that gets thwarted as to its natural goal (reproduction) and thereby explodes into an infinite, properly meta-physical, passion

1099. #1099

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.434

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Milner's symmetrical opposition between language and lalangue by reordering their relationship: language is primary (constituted by a traumatic "wound" or symbolic castration), while lalangue is secondary—a defense that attempts to fill or obfuscate the constitutive lack of language through homophonic enjoyment. The subject of the signifier belongs to the death drive, while lalangue aligns with life and pleasure.

      the obscene unwritten rules and rituals (marching chants, fragging, sexual innuendos) … are their debilitating rhythm and sadistically sexualized nonsensical content not an exemplary case of the consuming self-enjoyment in the service of Power?

1100. #1100

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

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

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

      the opposition between the strong, oppressive, father-jouissance (Titurel) and the humiliated, agitated, weak father (Alberich)

1101. #1101

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.177

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Days of the Living Dead](#contents.xhtml_ahd11)

      Theoretical move: Žižek reframes the finitude/immortality opposition as a parallax couple rather than a genuine alternative, arguing that "obscene immortality" (the undead remainder) is more fundamental than noble Badiouian immortality, and that the contemporary digital subject's denial of castration structurally reproduces this undead mode of subjectivity.

      the Sadean fundamental fantasy: the fantasy of another, ethereal body of the victim, which can be tortured indefinitely and nonetheless magically retains its beauty

1102. #1102

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

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

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

      bliss is not just the Aristotelian thought thinking itself, but also a body enjoying itself to the almost unbearable maximum.

1103. #1103

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.378

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The All-Too-Close In-Itself](#contents.xhtml_ahd25)

      Theoretical move: Žižek defends the transcendental subject against object-oriented ontology by arguing that the subject is not an object but an irreducible standpoint, and redeploys the Lacanian Real as virtual-impossible rather than materially present, showing how direct neuronal manipulation produces a "more real than real" experience that dissolves the reality/simulacrum divide — while paralleling this logic to the Unconscious (which must not be substantialized) and to neurotheology's hard-rock encounter with the Real.

      in virtual reality, I stage an impossible fantasy, I can experience there an 'artificial' sexual enjoyment which is much more 'real' than anything I can experience in 'real reality'

1104. #1104

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.152

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that human sexuality is not a "civilized" displacement of natural animal sexuality but rather the point where the dislocation/impossibility immanent in all sexed reproduction becomes registered as such—via the Unconscious and surplus-jouissance—so that culture retroactively denaturalizes nature itself, while the transition from animal to human mirrors the Hegelian move from In-itself to For-itself applied to not-knowing.

      jouissance is something like a set containing this inconsistency as its only element … This internal split of life obtains a material, objective existence of its own, in the form of what Lacan calls jouissance

1105. #1105

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

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

      Lacan modelled his notion of surplus-enjoyment on the Marxian notion of surplus-value.

1106. #1106

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Truth is not a hidden surplus beyond appearance but erupts traumatically within appearance itself, and that the Kantian fear of error (keeping the Thing-in-itself at a distance from phenomena) conceals a deeper fear of Truth—a structure homologous to obsessional neurosis; Hegel's Mozartian move dissolves this economy by showing the supersensible is 'appearance qua appearance', while the Lacanian object (objet petit a / das Ding) inherits this logic: place precedes positivity, and sublimity is a structural effect, not an intrinsic quality.

      It is its structural place - the fact that it occupies the sacred/forbidden place of jouissance - and not its intrinsic qualities that confers on it its sublimity.

1107. #1107

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

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

      what happens when this very field of the signifier's order, of the big Other, is perforated, penetrated by a pre-symbolic (real) stream of enjoyment - what happens when the pre-symbolic 'substance', the body as materialized, incarnated enjoyment, becomes enmeshed in the signifier's network.

1108. #1108

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that misrecognition has a positive ontological dimension—it is not merely an obstacle to truth but the condition of possibility for both the subject's consistency and the existence of certain entities (e.g., the unconscious letter, enjoyment); this logic culminates in the claim that the Symptom as Real is an irreducible kernel that resists symbolization and cannot be dissolved by making meaning.

      This 'substance' - the only one recognized in psychoanalysis - is, according to Lacan, enjoyment [jouissance]: access to knowledge is then paid with the loss of enjoyment

1109. #1109

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Hegel's critique of Kant's Sublime is not a regression to metaphysics but a radicalization: by subtracting the transcendent presupposition of the Thing-in-itself, Hegel shows that the experience of radical negativity IS the Thing itself, so that the sublime object no longer points beyond representation but fills the void left by the Thing's non-existence - a logic culminating in the 'infinite judgement' ('the Spirit is a bone') where an utterly contingent, miserable object embodies absolute negativity.

      the exact definition - one of the Lacanian definitions - of enjoyment [jouissance]

1110. #1110

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: Žižek traces three periods of Lacan's teaching on the death drive to show how, in the third period, das Ding as the 'extimate' traumatic kernel within the symbolic order redefines the death drive as the possibility of 'second death' — the radical annihilation of the symbolic universe itself — and links this to Benjamin's Theses as the unique point where Marxist historiography touches this non-historical kernel.

      Lacan uses a Freudian term: das Ding, the Thing as an incarnation of the impossible jouissance

1111. #1111

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

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

      'beyond fantasy' we find only drive, its pulsation around the sinthome

1112. #1112

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the Lacanian Real is defined by a *coincidentia oppositorum*: it is simultaneously the hard kernel that resists symbolization AND a pure chimerical void produced by symbolization itself, and this paradoxical structure is mapped through a series of antinomies (fullness/lack, contingency/logical consistency, presupposed/posed) that align with Hegelian dialectics — particularly the identity of Being and Nothingness — while also grounding Schelling's notion of an atemporal unconscious choice as a structural analogue of the Real.

      In so far as the kernel of the Real is jouissance, this duality takes the form of a difference between jouissance, enjoyment, and plus-de-jouir, the surplus-of-enjoying

1113. #1113

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Sinthome (exemplified by Amfortas's externalized wound) designates a paradoxical element that is both destructive and constitutive of the subject's ontological consistency; this structure is then mapped onto the Enlightenment project itself, where the obscene superego enjoyment is shown to be not a residue but the necessary obverse of the formal moral Law, such that renunciation of 'pathological' content itself produces surplus-jouissance.

      the wound is 'a little piece of real', a disgusting protuberance which cannot be integrated into the totality of 'our own body', a materialization of that which is 'in Amfortas more than Amfortas'

1114. #1114

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

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

      the birds are <1>, the impassive, imaginary objectification of the Real, an image which embodies jouissance

1115. #1115

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the authority of the Law rests not on truth but on necessity, and that ideological belief operates through a performative paradox—'belief before belief'—whereby external ritual/custom produces unconscious belief. Transference is identified as the structural mechanism that sustains this illusion by supposing a Truth or Meaning behind the Law's traumatic contingency.

      the real terror is, rather, the unbearable pressure of enjoyment... this stuffy atmosphere of enjoyment, the very inertia of which creates an unbearable tension

1116. #1116

      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.

      it would reveal that ideology serves only its own purpose, that it does not serve anything - which is precisely the Lacanian definition of jouissance

1117. #1117

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The subject is not a questioning force but an "answer of the Real" — the void produced when the Other's question exposes the ex-timate traumatic kernel (objet petit a / das Ding); this hystericization is constitutive of the subject, while interpellation/subjectivation functions as an attempt to evade this kernel through identification. Žižek further deploys Hitchcock's object-typology to distinguish the MacGuffin, the circulating real-object (objet petit a), and the phallic object, showing how the Real must irrupt to establish the symbolic structure.

      a hard core embodying horrifying jouissance, enjoyment, and as such an object which simultaneously attracts and repels us - which divides our desire and thus provokes shame.

1118. #1118

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's insistence on the primacy of metaphor over metonymy and on the phallic signifier as the signifier of castration radically distinguishes him from post-structuralism: where Derrida sees the localization of lack as taming dissemination, for Lacan the phallic signifier sustains the radical gap by embodying its own impossibility, thereby preventing (rather than securing) a metalanguage position.

      the moment of irruption of the Real: elections.

1119. #1119

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian Real is a paradoxical entity that does not exist yet produces structural effects (trauma, jouissance, the MacGuffin, class struggle, antagonism), and extends this logic to the 'forced choice of freedom'—the subject is always-already positioned in the symbolic order such that 'free choice' is itself real-impossible, structured retroactively, which Žižek traces from Kant through Schelling to Freud/Lacan.

      the Real par excellence is jouissance: jouissance does not exist, it is impossible, but it produces a number of traumatic effects.

1120. #1120

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

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

      the promiscuous Juliette giving herself over to enjoyment beyond all limits (that is precisely beyond the limit at which enjoyment still gives pleasure)

1121. #1121

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Althusser's theory of ideological interpellation fails to account for the traumatic, senseless residue that is the very condition of ideological submission; drawing on Pascal, Kafka, Lacan's reading of the burning-child dream, and the Zhuang Zi paradox, he establishes that ideology functions not as illusion masking reality but as a fantasy-construction that *constitutes* reality, sustained by an irreducible surplus of jouissance ('jouis-sense') that escapes symbolic internalization.

      it is precisely this non-integrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority: in other words, which - in so far as it escapes ideological sense - sustains what we might call the ideological jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense (enjoy-meant), proper to ideology.

1122. #1122

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: Žižek traces Lacan's theoretical development from symptom as symbolic/coded message to symptom as sinthome—the real kernel of enjoyment that is the subject's only ontological substance—arguing that this universalization of symptom (paired with a universalization of foreclosure) is Lacan's answer to the philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing.

      The wreck of the Titanic therefore functions as a sublime object: a positive, material object elevated to the status of the impossible Thing... it is a meaning permeated with enjoyment, a Lacanian jouissense.

1123. #1123

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.30

      Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek > Notes

      Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical scaffolding of the introduction by documenting the critique of historicism/cultural materialism and new materialism through the lens of Lacanian concepts (objet petit a, desire, the Real, the subject), establishing that both movements fail to account for the ahistorical traumatic kernel and the subject's position of enunciation.

      Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor

1124. #1124

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.163

      Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that while Deleuze and Lacan share a tripartite topology grounded in an originary negativity (crack/hole/Real) around which the drives congregate, Deleuze ultimately "liquefies" this topological rift into a pure dynamic movement of Difference, thereby obliterating the Lacanian Real as a third term irreducible to both the signifying chain and surplus-enjoyment.

      Enjoyment appears at the place of the nonexistent ('originally missing') signifier, which—with its very nonexistence—dictates the logic of the signifying chain . . . Enjoyment is the (only) 'being,' 'substance' of that which is ontologically not, of the missing ('originally repressed') signifier.

1125. #1125

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.226

      Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Woolf's novels stage a Hegelo-Lacanian ontology in which subjectivity is constituted by irreducible negativity and the interruptive structure of memory, contra Deleuze's notion of Becoming as anti-memory; Clarissa's "flowers of darkness" and Septimus's dissolution together demonstrate that the evacuation of subjective lack (the Deleuzean line of flight) leads not to liberation but to the dead end of pure drive, stripping the subject of the productive reflexivity that iterability and temporal disparity make possible.

      seeing the real from hour to hour, declining the challenge of ontological incompleteness. He is Woolf's reduction of the subject to 'an abstract line,' her experiment with a flat ontology of immanence in which 'everything is allowed.'

1126. #1126

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.192

      Who Cares? > The Human Object

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive — demonstrated through the Wolf Man's somatic symptom — escapes both correlationism and speculative realism by positing a strange materiality that "enjoys without thinking," locating the Freudian body as the inscription of drive upon organism, and positioning sexuality as the ontological lapse that anchors jouissance irreducibly in materiality without reducing it to mere physicality.

      The body is nothing but the inscription of the drive upon the organism which it takes as its canvas, the anchor which secures jouissance squarely in the domain of materiality.

1127. #1127

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.54

      Mladen Dolar > What's the Matter?

      Theoretical move: Against both naturalist-scientific materialism ("there are only bodies") and (post)structuralist culturalism ("there are only languages"), Dolar argues that the truly materialist position locates the Real at their impossible interface—the point where the symbolic cuts into the body—and that the objet a names precisely what is irreducible to either term, requiring a third axiom: "there are only bodies and languages, except that there is the objet a."

      a 'less than nothing' that animates their core.

1128. #1128

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.173

      Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze diverge precisely where they are closest—on repetition—because for Lacan emancipation is not achieved by the centrifugal force of difference/repetition itself (Deleuze), but requires the production of a new signifier (S1) from within the analytic discourse, a signifier that names the foundational "hole" and thereby shifts the subject's relation to the signifying order.

      the new signifier 'is produced when the subject is placed at the level of the jouissance of speaking.'

1129. #1129

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.185

      Who Cares? > The Human Object

      Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis is positioned not as an escape from correlationism but as its radical subversion: by replacing the Kantian unity of apperception with the imaginary misrecognition of the ego and grounding the subject in the unconscious rather than consciousness, Lacan exposes desire, fantasy, and jouissance as what secretly drive both Kantian rationality and moral law—demonstrating that castration (the traumatic encounter with the signifier) is the specifically human mark, irreducible to new materialism's ontologies of actual entities.

      the jouissance at stake in this quest is no less painful than the enjoyment one suffers (Kant's term is 'moral feeling') in performing one's duty to the moral law... the moral law is not a fact of pure reason but is itself a function—that is, a symptom—of this jouissance.

1130. #1130

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.218

      Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

      Theoretical move: Against new materialist (Deleuzean) ontologies of Becoming that dissolve the subject into immanent flux and promise plenitude, the passage argues from a Lacanian-Hegelian standpoint that ontological incompleteness—the barred, split subject—is irreducible and is in fact the condition of possibility for freedom, joy, and genuine subjectivity; a close reading of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is deployed to show that Deleuze's ventriloquism of Woolf suppresses the very void of subjectivity her text stages.

      these claims are far more than empirical; they seek to establish an ethical paradigm in which 'joy' functions as a rejoinder to the transcendental ideal of impossible jouissance.

1131. #1131

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.138

      Adrian Johnston > Žižek continues:

      Theoretical move: Johnston defends Žižek's materialist position against Harman's idealist misreading by arguing that the denial of the world-as-whole is not anti-realism but a Hegelian move to include subjectivity within substance; simultaneously, Johnston defends his own neuro-psychoanalytic project against critics (Chiesa, Pluth) who wrongly cast interdisciplinary exchange as a zero-sum contest, and clarifies that positing continuity between the barred Real and the barred Symbolic does not collapse their distinction but reflects a dialectical identity-in-difference.

      forgetting that nature first and foremost gives itself to us as Hegel's Es ist so (or as Pascal's 'eternal silence' of infinite space), that it can be thought as meta-statically persisting as indifferent irrespectively of discursive/differential nature

1132. #1132

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.112

      Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian gap between the phenomenal and noumenal is not a limitation to be overcome (as Fichte and Schelling attempt via intellectual intuition) but is itself the condition of freedom and the key to the Hegelian move: Hegel transposes this gap *into* the Absolute itself, so that Being is constitutively incomplete and "subject" names this crack in Being—a move structurally parallel to conceiving Understanding without its Beyond as Reason itself.

      Is what Kant describes as a person who directly knows the noumenal domain not strictly homologous to the utilitarian subject whose acts are fully determined by the calculus of pleasures and pains?

1133. #1133

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.268

      Index > **INDEX**

      Theoretical move: This is an index section of an academic book on Hegel, Lacan, and materialism; it is non-substantive reference material listing topics and page numbers rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

      jouissance, 165, 166, 167, 178, 183, 184, 185, 186, 211. See also enjoyment

1134. #1134

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.231

      Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

      Theoretical move: Against Deleuze's affirmative ontology of Becoming as positive flux without lack, the passage argues—through a Hegelo-Lacanian reading of Woolf's *Mrs Dalloway*—that subjectivity is constituted by an irreducible structural lack, and that this very lack (figured as absence, the void, *das Ding*, *objet a*) is what generates multiplicity, desire, and the intensity of lived experience rather than cancelling them.

      the 'sexual colouring' of the libido is ultimately 'the colour of emptiness, suspended in the light of a gap.'

1135. #1135

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

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

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

      the female orgasm, this most ecstatic moment of sexual pleasure... is the high point of human evolution... in it, we humans come in contact with the Absolute

1136. #1136

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

      Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive is indifferent to repression rather than opposed to it, and that only a new signifier (and its subjectivation) — not drive-force — can effect real separation within the drive; this opens the space of a "Lacanian politics" grounded in the reactivation of the gap of the unconscious.

      supportive of whatever complicated paths and extraordinary objects our enjoyment may choose under the sign of repression

1137. #1137

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.191

      Who Cares? > The Human Object

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic account of sexuality as an ontological negativity—instantiated in the drive, fantasy, and the body as distinct from the organism—provides a properly materialist ethics that new materialism cannot supply, because it grounds freedom, difference, and ethical creativity in the constitutive gap at the core of human being rather than in a "flat ontology" that nullifies human peculiarity.

      a conversion of organic energy into a surplus that cannot be put to work in service to the system from which it originates and that unworks the system from within... The body is the organism invested with jouissance.

1138. #1138

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

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

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

      by tracing the seam of jouissance that conjoins and separates the two materialities of the human, that is inscribed by the meandering energy of the drives, that indexes the difference between the body and the organism

1139. #1139

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.38

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

      Theoretical move: Fantasy operates through a necessary duality of positive and negative modes: the positive mode grants access to the impossible object while the negative mode preserves that object's desirability by keeping it threatened — and Lynch's cinematic crosscutting establishes the speculative identity of compassion and cruelty as structurally equivalent positions within this fantasmatic economy.

      The fantasy scenario that informs these moments produces an enjoyment that stems from accomplishing the impossible.

1140. #1140

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.29

      ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Capitalist Produdion a nd Human Re produdion

      Theoretical move: Fantasy's constitutive lie—its temporal narration of an originary, atemporal loss—paradoxically reveals the truth of castration by staging it as visible; crucially, the passage argues that the loss intrinsic to sexed reproduction (castration) and the loss demanded by capitalist production are structurally identical, and that fantasy's staging of the impossible object can render this connection visible and thereby open a radical political potential.

      His failure exposes his castration, which is the lack of full enjoyment that every subject has as a result of being subjected to the restrictions of the social order.

1141. #1141

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.65

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

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

      Lynch creates a form that highlights the extreme image at the expense of narrative movement, I would argue, in order to illustrate the effect of unrestrained enjoyment.

1142. #1142

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.92

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

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

      it allows him to conceive of the Other enjoying.

1143. #1143

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.22

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

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

      the sacrifice of the subject's kernel of enjoyment for the sake of productivity... Henry arrives at the point where he can embrace rather than sacrifice his enjoyment.

1144. #1144

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.48

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

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

      Baron Harkonnen is a figure of pure enjoyment. as both his body and his behavior evince.

1145. #1145

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.136

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

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

      we see a figure of unrestrained and horrifying enjoyment, whom Lynch shows existing behind the diner Winkie's. This figure embodies the real, and as such, one cannot endure his presence even for an instant.

1146. #1146

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.52

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

      Theoretical move: Lynch's Dune enacts a fantasmatic resolution so complete that it collapses the barrier between fantasy and social reality, revealing that the fantasy of escape can only complete itself by looping back to what it escapes from—and that revolutionary transformation ultimately produces a speculative identity between the new society and the old one, demanding that repetition be embraced freely rather than blindly.

      This is perhaps more enjoyment than the cinema has ever created... The failure of Dune, if that is what we want to call it, is its successful enactment of enjoyment for the spectator.

1147. #1147

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.64

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

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

      Characters do not succumb to a symbolic law demanding the sacrifice of enjoyment for the sake of the social order.

1148. #1148

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.19

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

      Theoretical move: Lynch's cinema achieves a distinctively Hegelian-Lacanian effect by separating the realms of desire and fantasy, immersing the spectator completely in the fantasmatic world until its traumatic underside is revealed, thereby enacting speculative identity (self-recognition in absolute otherness) and forcing an encounter with the Real as the impossible within the symbolic order.

      one follows the logic of fantasy to its end point and in this way experiences both the enjoyment that fantasy brings and its psychic-and often material-costs.

1149. #1149

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.115

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

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

      They experience the enjoyment of the impossible object in the voice.

1150. #1150

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.79

      ,'\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** > Incest as the Fantasmatic Solution

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Fire Walk with Me's apparent formal incoherence resolves once its two parts are read as contrasting worlds of desire and fantasy: the fantasy world exposes the structural (not supernatural) conditions of social violence, identifies fantasy-as-such with incest as the fantasmatic mode of accessing the prohibited object, and demonstrates how the signifier 'garmonbozia' models fantasy's function of filling the gap in the signified — all organized around the figure of BOB as embodiment of the phallus that 'can play its role only when veiled.'

      Publicity does endanger not BOB's liberty so much as his mode of procuring enjoyment.

1151. #1151

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.59

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

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

      From the moment Frank enters Dorothy's apartment, he appears to be staging a fantasmatic scenario, acting out a drama for which the only audience (to his knowledge) is Dorothy.

1152. #1152

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.18

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

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

      Through their excessiveness, the fantasy worlds unleash enjoyment on both the characters within them and the spectator watching.

1153. #1153

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.94

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

      Theoretical move: Fantasy structures enjoyment only by maintaining the subject at a distance from its object—when the subject gets too close to fully "having" the fantasy object, the fantasy dissolves, revealing that its promise of direct access to enjoyment is constitutively illusory; the father/phallus functions as the necessary barrier that keeps fantasy operative, and his status is always already fantasmatic.

      enjoyment breaks free within the fantasy construction, and the fantasy is starting to teeter. Horrified by this encounter with enjoyment, Peter quickly shuts the door, eager for some sort of respite.

1154. #1154

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.36

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's *The Elephant Man* stages a structural shift from a world of desire organized around the inaccessible object-cause to a world of fantasy in which the impossible object is apparently integrated into representation—revealing fantasy not as an escape from reality but as its very support.

      the turn from a world of perpetually dissatisfied desire to a world of fantasmatic enjoyment... It fantasmatically provides him with a sense of the ultimate enjoyment that he associates with normality.

1155. #1155

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.128

      ,'\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*

      Theoretical move: This passage (a footnotes/endnotes section) performs theoretical work by articulating how fantasy's revelatory power, the absent paternal function, and the emergence of the object (objet petit a) structure Blue Velvet — contrasting Lynch's approach with both ideological-critique readings (Pfeil) and other directors (Cronenberg, Spielberg), while anchoring the argument in Lacanian concepts of the Name of the Father, anxiety, and desire.

      Frank pleases us not least of all because he offers us a humorous relief from Dorothy.

1156. #1156

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.117

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

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

      Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance—Enjoy!

1157. #1157

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.124

      ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > NOTES > J. Sacrificing One's Head for an Eraser

      Theoretical move: This notes section consolidates several theoretical moves: it links surplus-jouissance to Marx's surplus value, establishes the masochistic structure of fantasy as requiring a revisiting of loss, and articulates the forced choice of entry into the social order as constitutive of the subject through sacrifice of enjoyment.

      The machine and the child enjoy in the place of the worker and the parent. Eraserhead implicitly acknowledges this parallel through the link between its mise-en-scène (which provides the background of the enjoying machine) and its narrative.

1158. #1158

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.110

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

      Theoretical move: Fantasy's structural function is to cover over the constitutive dissatisfaction of desire by reorganizing obstacles, repositioning objects, and delivering the objet petit a in a "pure form" free of pathological taint — a theoretical move McGowan demonstrates through a systematic reading of the two parts of *Mulholland Drive* as desire-world versus fantasy-world.

      Camilla flaunts her enjoyment in front of Diane, but always in such a way that leaves Diane out of it. What's more, Camilla seems purposefully to stage her enjoyment for Diane, in order to sustain Diane's desire.

1159. #1159

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.78

      ,'\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** > The Hostility of Deer Meadow

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the first part of *Fire Walk with Me* constructs a "world of desire" structured around the absent object-cause (Teresa Banks), where subjects experience alienation in the signifier without the relief of fantasy, and where enjoyment takes the paradoxical form of senseless signification for its own sake—only resolvable when the film shifts to the fantasmatic world of Twin Peaks.

      though, as Lacan puts it, 'the signifier is what brings jouissance to a halt,' there is also a certain jouissance that corresponds to the act of signification itself.

1160. #1160

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.46

      ,'\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.

      By linking the disappearance of the film's narrator to her discussion of the spice, Lynch implies the incompatibility of subjective mastery and enjoyment. The spice, a substance of pure enjoyment, derails the mastering power of Irulan's narration.

1161. #1161

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.16

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's aesthetic operates not through deconstruction or alienation-effects but through hyper-normality: by pushing binary oppositions (fantasy/reality, desire/demand) to their logical extreme, Lynch reveals the bizarre as inherent to the mainstream, while simultaneously demonstrating that the psychoanalytic 'normal' subject — who maintains an absolute divide between fantasy and social reality — is itself an a priori impossibility.

      Through fantasy, we do the impossible, accessing the impossible desire of the Other and glimpsing the enjoyment that it promises.

1162. #1162

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.26

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's *Eraserhead* formally enacts the structure of desiring subjectivity—through absent reverse shots, extreme darkness, temporal elongation, and mechanical characterization—demonstrating that desire is constitutively tied to lack and alienation, and that enjoyment (jouissance) has been displaced from human subjects onto machines and the natural world through capitalist production's demand for sacrificed enjoyment.

      One experiences this desire all the more because a hidden enjoyment seems to be lurking everywhere just out of reach.

1163. #1163

      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.

      After Henry destroys the baby, the film's form changes in order to convey the unleashing of enjoyment.

1164. #1164

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.28

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan uses Lynch's *Eraserhead* to refine the Freudian account of fantasy: fantasy is not triggered by the simple absence of the desired object but by the subject's encounter with a visible *barrier* to enjoyment in the Other, which retroactively constitutes the subject's own lack and energises fantasy through the lost object.

      Ironically, it is the barrier to the subject's enjoyment that causes the subject to experience itself as lacking, and the subject turns to fantasy only at the moment when she/he must confront this barrier.

1165. #1165

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.72

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

      Theoretical move: The happy ending of *Wild at Heart* is theorized not as commercial compromise but as a demonstration that genuine enjoyment requires abandoning the ideal of non-castration and fully committing to the logic of fantasy—including its traumatic, real dimension—which transforms not only the subject but the external world itself.

      The means of jouissance are open on the principle that one has abandoned the enclosed and foreign jouissance of the mother.

1166. #1166

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.76

      ,'\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: McGowan argues that Lynch's *Fire Walk with Me* reveals the speculative identity of the virgin/whore fantasy couple, showing that fantasy's enjoyment depends on the silent co-presence of its opposite, and that this recognition—ordinarily foreclosed by patriarchal ideology—opens the possibility of an ethical subjectivity.

      one only enjoys the fantasy of the virgin when the idea that she is actually a whore silently accompanies this fantasy—and the reverse is true for enjoying the fantasy of the whore.

1167. #1167

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.44

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that *Dune* does not fail Hollywood conventions but hyper-conforms to classical Hollywood narrative structure, and in doing so exposes the traumatic underside of fantasy: full immersion in fantasy's logic reveals that its promised jouissance is identical with ultimate horror, thereby disclosing the ontological (rather than merely empirical) antagonism that the social order normally conceals.

      Fantasy promises the subject the ultimate enjoyment, which Dune depicts, but by showing this impossible act, the film exposes the traumatic nature of the ultimate enjoyment. It is enjoyment completely opposed to pleasure.

1168. #1168

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.113

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

      Theoretical move: Fantasy's fundamental function is to produce the illusion of a successful sexual relationship, compensating for the structural impossibility of the sexual relation that results from insertion into language; yet this same function constitutes fantasy's political danger by veiling the contradictions of the symbolic order, even as Lynch's films exploit fantasy's capacity to expose the points where that order breaks down.

      Despite Fred's many efforts to approach Renee's enjoyment in the first part of that film, this enjoyment continually eludes him

1169. #1169

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.61

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

      Theoretical move: Fantasy's ideological function depends on withholding the traumatic encounter with the impossible object, but Lynch's *Blue Velvet* extends fantasy to its logical conclusion, staging a direct encounter with the real dimension of the impossible object (embodied as the Gaze) and thereby producing genuine jouissance rather than mere pleasure.

      Lynch gives both by continuing the fantasy where other films stop... And it is through this encounter that we enjoy.

1170. #1170

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.24

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian lamella—the life substance lost when the subject enters language and sexed reproduction—is the theoretical key to understanding *Eraserhead*'s opening sequence: Henry's loss of this substance inaugurates him as a desiring, lacking subject, and the film shows how fantasy, desire, and capitalist production all derive from this originary, pre-ontological sacrifice.

      the film emphasizes the link between Henry's sacrifice of enjoyment and the production process... Henry's loss of the lamella inaugurates his existence as a desiring subject

1171. #1171

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.127

      ,'\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 > 3. Dune ond the Poth to Solvotion

      Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several theoretical moves: it deploys Lacanian sexual antagonism as the primary social antagonism underlying Hollywood ideological narrative; it argues that voice-over narration's gaps testify to truth rather than obscure it; and it identifies feminine/mystical enjoyment as an authentic connection with the infinite, elevating Other Jouissance to the level of mysticism.

      To become visible in the act of enjoying oneself is to become vulnerable. This is not a problem for the Baron, however, because enjoyment proliferates everywhere in the Harkonnen world of Dune.

1172. #1172

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.60

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

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

      Frank, despite his seeming commitment to unrestrained enjoyment, upholds prohibition and supports the symbolic law.

1173. #1173

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.129

      ,'\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* > 5· The Absence of Desire in WHd at Hearl

      Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several load-bearing theoretical moves: it distinguishes Lynch's critique of publicly displayed enjoyment from Oliver Stone's (Lynch diagnoses a failure of fantasy-commitment rather than excess fantasy); it defines fantasy's structure as predicated on the initial loss of the impossible object; and it links the appearance of freedom/lawlessness through the signifier to its dialectical reversal into necessity.

      in both films, we witness enjoyment proliferating throughout the filmic world. But whereas Dune shows a world of desire menaced by proliferating enjoyment, this world exists in Wild at Heart only as a present absence.

1174. #1174

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.102

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

      Theoretical move: Fantasy's ethical dimension lies not in its retreat from the Other but in the humiliation it compels: by externalizing one's innermost subjectivity, the fantasizing subject is exposed to the Other's look, and fully embracing rather than retreating from this exposure constitutes the genuine ethical act.

      We become nothing but our mode of obtaining enjoyment. The real kernel of the fantasy is the moment at which we fully identify with the impossible object and completely externalize our subjectivity.

1175. #1175

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.34

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's *The Elephant Man* cinematically enacts the Lacanian structure of desire by systematically withholding the object-cause of desire (Merrick as objet petit a), demonstrating that desire sustains itself precisely through the impossibility and constitutive absence of its object rather than through any possible encounter with it.

      Enjoyment derives from an encounter with a symbolic limit and thus requires the limit. The freak show allows the subject attending it to transgress the dictates of their own conscience that tells them of its inhumanity and barbarity.

1176. #1176

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.132

      ,'\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* > 7· Finding O urselves on a *Lost* Highway

      Theoretical move: These footnotes theorize how fantasy structures reality (making it perceptible to others), how the superego functions as an irrational, insatiable voice of enjoyment irreducible to meaning, and how symbolic authority has gone underground in *Lost Highway*, thereby exacerbating paranoia about the Other's excessive enjoyment.

      Something about the superego always remains irreducible to meaning. This kernel irreducible to meaning is the enjoyment that it receives from the renunciation of desire that it commands in the subject.

1177. #1177

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.75

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

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

      She inspires male (and female) dreams because she seems to be the perfect woman and to embody a mysterious knowledge of the ultimate enjoyment.

1178. #1178

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.69

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the failure to fully commit to fantasy — epitomised by Sailor's investment in symbolic/phallic authority and Lula's investment in imaginary authority — is not a warning against fantasy but a demonstration of what is lost when subjects orient themselves toward the Other's recognition rather than following the logic of fantasy to its gap-exposing conclusion.

      Joan Copjec suggests that 'jouissance flourishes only there where it is not validated by the Other.' One cannot perform one's enjoyment; one suffers it.

1179. #1179

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.70

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the pursuit of complete enjoyment is structurally self-defeating: enjoyment requires loss/absence as its condition, so subjects compulsively self-sabotage to recreate the constitutive lack, a dynamic that drives the transition from the pleasure principle to the death drive and explains the perverse/masochistic turn as the unconscious path desire takes when blocked by the suffocating presence of the privileged object.

      Complete enjoyment has an imaginary status: we see it—or imagine it in the other—but every attempt to realize it brings disappointment.

1180. #1180

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.62

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

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

      the enjoyment we derive from fantasy depends directly on the moments of failure.

1181. #1181

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.87

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is constituted through the subject's encounter with the opacity of the Other's desire—Fred's bewilderment before Renee's inscrutable want is precisely what generates him as a desiring subject—and that because desire can never be articulated in a signifier without producing a further veil, fantasy serves as the necessary correlative that makes desire bearable.

      She seems to have, somewhere within her, some hidden kernel of excessive enjoyment that Fred can't access.

1182. #1182

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.138

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

      Theoretical move: This is a book index — a non-substantive back-matter section listing proper names, film titles, and key theoretical concepts with page references. It contains no original theoretical argument.

      feminine enjoyment. See Dune: Lacan, Jacques; Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

1183. #1183

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.40

      ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Other** Side **of Fontosy** > **The Normal and the Abnormal**

      Theoretical move: By staging the full realization of fantasy in *The Elephant Man*, McGowan argues that Lynch reveals fantasy's constitutive cost: the impossible object is produced by desire's own structuring lack, so its realization dissolves both the object and the desiring subject, demanding an ethical speculative identification with the monstrous other rather than a safe humanitarian distance.

      After Merrick's body becomes plainly visible within the film's mise-en-scene, it loses all the potential for enjoyment that it formerly embodied

1184. #1184

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.95

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the superego's complete internalization—achieved through the dissolution of fantasy and sacrifice of jouissance—paradoxically undermines social control by stripping away the supplemental enjoyment that fantasy provides to docile subjects; furthermore, the speculative identity of social reality and fantasy is revealed precisely through the failure immanent in fantasmatic success, as both circulate around the same fundamental impossibility.

      The presence of this enjoyment blocks the identification with the father, which installs the superego within the psyche because it sustains the father as an external barrier to the enjoyment of the fantasy object.

1185. #1185

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.31

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the realization of fantasy is always violent—it necessarily destroys the barrier (the baby) that fantasy itself posits as the obstacle to enjoyment—and that this violence is figured in Lynch's *Eraserhead* as a political gesture against capitalist restriction of jouissance, though not without ambivalence.

      Whereas before the dream Henry lives in a world of absence and little enjoyment, the postdream world forces Henry to experience the enjoyment that occurs around him.

1186. #1186

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.90

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the superego is the psychical internalization of the law that arises precisely from the subject's sacrifice of desire: the more desire is surrendered, the stronger the superego's command to surrender more, trapping the subject in the dialectic of law and desire rather than opening onto an ethics of desire — illustrated through Lynch's Lost Highway, where Fred's abandonment of desire energizes the Mystery Man as superego-figure.

      Morality aims, in short, at arresting the disturbance that desire causes. This is why, at the close of Seminar XI, Lacan says of the moral law that it 'culminates in the sacrifice, strictly speaking, of everything that is the object of love'

1187. #1187

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.82

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that in *Fire Walk with Me*, the Man From Another Place figures the Lacanian libido as detached body part—the primordial lost object that institutes the death drive—while BOB figures the phallus as an attempt to short-circuit the drive by possessing the object without loss; the film shows that phallic authority is secretly subordinate to the death drive, and that fantasy makes visible the hidden dependency of the social order on this structure.

      BOB's activity doesn't bring enjoyment for BOB himself, but it does allow the Man From Another Place to enjoy.

1188. #1188

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.67

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that in *Wild at Heart*, Lynch formally dismantles the opposition between private romantic fantasy and the violent external world, demonstrating instead that Sailor and Lula's fantasy life actively constitutes and mirrors the social disorder surrounding them—rather than offering refuge from it.

      the loudness and building strength of the song creates a sense of breaking free from restraint-and this out-of-control quality characterizes both the romance and Sailor's violence.

1189. #1189

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.104

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

      Theoretical move: Full commitment to one's own fantasmatic enjoyment transforms the perceived public world from threatening to welcoming, thereby serving as the condition for an ethics that overcomes paranoia; the passage argues that envy of the Other's enjoyment is itself a displaced mode of enjoyment that arises precisely when the subject has abandoned its own fantasy.

      Alvin is so committed to his own fantasy, to his own way of organizing enjoyment, that he doesn't envy the enjoyment of others.

1190. #1190

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.56

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

      Theoretical move: The collapse of the idealized father-figure in *Blue Velvet* ruptures the fantasy structure and creates an opening for desire, figured by the detached ear and Dorothy's apartment as a void; Dorothy's "pure desire" — desiring nothing — is shown to be the constitutive absence around which male fantasy (and subjectivity itself) orbits, making her not the site of fantasy's success but of its failure.

      The ear thus acts as a threat to Jeffrey, a warning about the dangers of too much enjoyment (which Detective Williams repeats to Jeffrey), but at the same time it incites his desire because of the opening that it creates.

1191. #1191

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.54

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

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

      of how he or she ignores me and indulges in an enjoyment that is intensive beyond my capacity of representation

1192. #1192

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.134

      ,'\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* > R. The Ethics of Fantasizing in *The 5traight* 5tory

      Theoretical move: The passage argues, through footnotes to McGowan's analysis of Lynch's *The Straight Story*, that fantasy's ethical dimension lies in full commitment to it even unto trauma, and that desire in its pure form is the pain of existing; furthermore, fantasy typically produces paranoia by attributing loss to an external cause, but Alvin's fantasy escapes paranoia through the quantitative intensity of his commitment rather than any structural difference.

      The shot of the serial killer looking reveals that the excess resides in the look itself, not in what that look sees.

1193. #1193

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.33

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that *The Elephant Man* radicalizes the desire/fantasy split by presenting two distinct modes of reality—one structured through desire (where the object-cause remains absent) and one through fantasy (where the impossible object becomes accessible)—and that the subject's identity depends on sustaining distance from its fundamental fantasy, the loss of which entails self-destruction.

      It provides enjoyment for the subject precisely because it changes the impossible object into a possible one.

1194. #1194

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.125

      ,'\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.

      Enjoyment is not confined to moments to when one exceeds a symbolic limit, when one transgresses... It is much more common for subjects to enjoy respecting the limit, even though this leaves them within the confines of the symbolic law.

1195. #1195

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.45

      ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > A Hollywood Narrative > No Sofe Place to Desire

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Dune* spatializes the Lacanian structure of desire and fantasy by mapping them onto distinct narrative worlds (Caladan vs. Arrakis), where the world of desire is constitutively defined by the *absence* of the ultimate enjoyment—which exists only as a future promise or as a threatening intrusion—while the world of fantasy is the site of jouissance's realization.

      Caladan is an island that enjoyment threatens to overrun.

1196. #1196

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.109

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

      Theoretical move: Fantasy's theoretical function is inverted from common assumption: rather than allowing escape from temporality, fantasy *constructs* temporality as a respite from the atemporal, repetitive logic of desire/drive; Mulholland Drive dramatizes this by splitting into a world of desire (atemporal, drive-governed) and a world of fantasy (temporally coherent, narratively structured).

      the impossible enjoyment in Camilla Rhodes that Diane Selwyn longs for and yet cannot access.

1197. #1197

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.50

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

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

      Only in the world of a fundamental fantasy can the Thing exist on the same plane as other objects.

1198. #1198

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.130

      <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > *The Formulas of Sexuation*

      Theoretical move: Fink expounds Lacan's formulas of sexuation from Seminar XX, arguing that masculine structure is constituted by universal phallic determination grounded in the exception of a foreclosed primal father, while feminine structure is constituted by the 'not-all' — an incompleteness with respect to the phallic function that opens onto an Other jouissance whose status is ex-sistence rather than existence within the symbolic order.

      a man could only really jouir d'une femme from the position of noncastration ... Only the primal father can really get off on women themselves. Ordinary masculine mortals must resign themselves to getting off on their partner, object (a).

1199. #1199

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.216

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

      Theoretical move: This endnote cluster clarifies several technical concepts—S(A) as signifier of the barred/lacking Other, sublimation, subjectivity vs. subjectivization, sexuation structures as strict contradictories—while defending Lacan's theoretical innovations against feminist and structuralist misreadings.

      'only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire' (Seminar X, March 13, 1963).

1200. #1200

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.17

      **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

      Theoretical move: This passage is a preface/road map for the book, outlining its scope, methodology, and interpretive stance—it is non-substantive theoretical content, serving primarily as an editorial and navigational frame rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

      need, demand, desire, and jouissance

1201. #1201

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.138

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

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

      the jouissance or 'jouissing' substance, the substance that gets off or enjoys... the real is drained off into the symbolic, jouissance being transferred to the Other.

1202. #1202

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.13

      **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

      Theoretical move: Fink's preface argues that the Lacanian subject has two faces—fixated symptom and subjectivization—mirrored by two faces of the object (objet petit a as Other's desire and as letter/signifierness), and that this non-parallel, "Gödelian" structure grounds a theory of sexual difference and underwrites psychoanalysis as an autonomous discourse irreducible to science.

      jouissance: a pleasure that is excessive, leading to a sense of being overwhelmed or disgusted, yet simultaneously providing a source of fascination.

1203. #1203

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.153

      THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > **The Hysteric's Discourse**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hysteric's Discourse is structurally homologous with the discourse of science because both are driven by the Real (object a as truth) and by the imperative to expose the incompleteness of knowledge rather than systematize it — thus Lacan's eventual identification of the two discourses is grounded in their shared orientation toward the impossible and the unfillable hole in any knowledge-set.

      In the lower right-hand corner, we find knowledge (S2). This position is also the one where Lacan situates jouissance, the pleasure produced by a discourse, and he thus suggests here that an hysteric gets off on knowledge.

1204. #1204

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.79

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > <span id="page-77-0"></span>*Object* a: *The Other's Desire*

      Theoretical move: Through the operation of separation, the Other's inscrutable desire constitutes object a as the remainder of a hypothetical mother-child unity, and it is only by cleaving to this remainder in fantasy that the split subject sustains an illusion of wholeness and procures a sense of being beyond mere symbolic existence.

      That excitement, whether correlated with a conscious feeling of pleasure or pain, is what the French call jouissance... and that is what the subject orchestrates for him or herself in fantasy.

1205. #1205

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.207

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > Metaphor and the Precipitation of Subjectivity

      Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing bibliographic references and brief clarificatory remarks on Lacanian concepts including Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, primal repression, the drive-language relation, S1/S2, and the beyond of castration; it is largely non-substantive as a theoretical text but contains several load-bearing conceptual notes.

      They also serve to separate the organ which provides pleasurable stimuli from the symbol used to describe it, in other words, real jouissance from the dead letter.

1206. #1206

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.210

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > Object (a): Cause of Desire

      Theoretical move: This endnotes passage does substantial theoretical work in clarifying the concept of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) as structural surplus analogous to Marxian surplus-value — not an end or excess of jouissance but an additional, supplemental jouissance — while also distinguishing imaginary, symbolic, and real registers of the object, and situating objet petit a as the real cause of desire rather than a symbolically constituted object of demand.

      What is jouissance? It is reduced here to being nothing but a negative instance. Jouissance is that which serves no purpose.

1207. #1207

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.103

      <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire

      Theoretical move: Fink establishes Objet petit a as Lacan's most significant and polyvalent contribution to psychoanalysis, cataloguing its many avatars and situating it across the registers of the imaginary, symbolic, and real as a prerequisite for systematic exposition in the chapter ahead.

      the jouissance object, as that 'part' of the mOther the child takes with it in separation

1208. #1208

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.194

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_

      Theoretical move: This passage is a glossary of Lacanian mathemes and symbols (barred S, object a, S1, S2, the Other, barred A, S(/A), phallus, phallic function, logical quantifiers, lozenge, fantasy formula, drive formula), followed by non-substantive acknowledgements pages.

      With object a understood as the traumatic experience of jouissance that brings the subject into being in the encounter with the Other's desire, the formula for fantasy suggests that the subject tries to maintain just the right distance from that dangerous desire

1209. #1209

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.119

      <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **Castration**

      Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of castration is re-theorised as a structural loss of jouissance — not an anatomical threat — that is transferred to and circulates in the Other (as language, knowledge, market, law), and this structure of lack/loss is shown to be homologous across the economic, linguistic, kinship, and political registers.

      What is at stake is that he cannot take his jouissance inside himself... a certain jouissance that is 'squeezed' out of the body is refound in speech. The Other as language enjoys in our stead.

1210. #1210

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.94

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Subject as Signified*

      Theoretical move: Fink redefines Lacanian castration as the subject's alienation-in and separation-from the Other (not biological threat), and articulates how the barred subject is constituted as a sedimentation of meanings via the retroactive relation between S2 and the master signifier S1 (equated with the Name-of-the-Father), with the traversal of fantasy marking the path beyond neurosis.

      the signifier is not able to neutralize the child's jouissance, and that jouissance irrupts into his or her life, overwhelming and invading him or her.

1211. #1211

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.166

      <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > **The Ethics of Lacanian Psychoanalysis**

      Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis is constitutively a praxis of jouissance rather than a pragmatic social therapy, and that its proper teaching discourse is the hysteric's discourse—one that perpetually challenges authority and resists systematization—while also staging a methodological argument about the peculiar temporal logic required to read Lacan, against the American academic demand for immediate critical mastery.

      It is a praxis of jouissance, and jouissance is anything but practical. It ignores the needs of capital, health insurance companies, socialized health care, public order, and 'mature adult relationships.'

1212. #1212

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.142

      THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > <span id="page-140-0"></span>**Existence and Ex-sistence**

      Theoretical move: By distinguishing 'existence' (what can be said) from 'ex-sistence' (what can only be written, standing apart from the symbolic), Fink argues that the Other jouissance and objet petit a ex-sist in a way that renders Lacan's libidinal economy irreducibly open and untotalizable, foreclosing any complementarity between phallic and Other jouissance.

      The very notion of ex-sistence, and of the Other jouissance as ex-sisting, makes Lacan's 'economy of jouissance' or 'libidinal economy' an open, untotalizable economy. There is no conservation of jouissance.

1213. #1213

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.112

      <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > *Real Objects, Encounters with the Real*

      Theoretical move: Desire has no object in the conventional sense but only a cause — object (a) — which is real, unspecularizable, and resistant to symbolization; the passage argues that what elicits desire is the Other's desire as manifested in partial objects (gaze, voice), not the companion or the demand, and that the therapeutic challenge is to dialectize this real cause and disturb the fundamental fantasy organized around it.

      They resist analytic action... and are related to a jouissance that defines the subject's very being.

1214. #1214

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.160

      <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > Su~uring **the Subject**

      Theoretical move: Science "sutures" the subject by excluding it and reducing Truth to propositional value, whereas psychoanalysis is distinguished precisely by taking into account the cause, the split subject, and the subject's libidinal relation to jouissance—making science, as currently constituted, incapable of encompassing psychoanalysis.

      the 'saturated subject,' as Lacan calls it—that is, the subject in relation to an object of jouissance (a libidinal object), the subject as a stance adopted with respect to jouissance.

1215. #1215

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.123

      <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **The Phallus and the Phallic Function**

      Theoretical move: The phallus is theorized not as the cause but as the *signifier* of desire (and of lack), while objet petit a is posited as the real, unsignifiable cause of desire; the phallic function is then defined as the alienating function of language that institutes lack, which grounds the subsequent account of sexuation and jouissance's non-conservation.

      Lacan's economy of jouissance is not a closed economy governed by the law of the 'Conservation of Jouissance,' whereby what is sacrificed at one point is refound at another, no more, no less.

1216. #1216

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.33

      <span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > **Foreign Bodies**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the body is fundamentally "written by signifiers" — that language and the symbolic order override biological organization to produce psychosomatic symptoms, erogenous zones, and fantasies — and uses this to ground the claim that different relations to the Other (as language, demand, desire, jouissance) constitute the basis for the clinical structures.

      The Other as language (i.e., as set of all signifiers) / The Other as demand / The Other as desire (object a) / The Other as jouissance

1217. #1217

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.235

      <span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**

      Theoretical move: This is an index passage (pages 235-236) from Bruce Fink's "The Lacanian Subject," listing key concepts and page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but serves as a navigational guide to the book's conceptual architecture.

      Jouissance, xii, 60, 98-122: castration and, 99: desire and, xiv. 83-90, '!6, 99; discourse and, 133: economy of, I 03, 122; fantasy and. 60

1218. #1218

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.211

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

      Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus consolidates and defends Fink's interpretive positions on Lacan's formulas of sexuation, the non-existence of the sexual relationship, the structure of the signifier, and the Other jouissance—correcting common misreadings while flagging key conceptual distinctions (existence vs. ex-sistence, the bar of negation, the role of the phallus, S1/S2, and object a).

      Castration means that jouissance must be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire

1219. #1219

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.157

      THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > **There's No Such Thing** as a **Metalanguage**

      Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis does not occupy an Archimedean point outside discourse but rather elucidates discourse's structure from within; every discourse entails a constitutive loss of jouissance and a dissimulated truth, making metalanguage impossible.

      Every discourse requires a loss of jouissance and has its own mainspring or truth (often carefully dissimulated). Each discourse defines that loss differently, starting from a different mainspring.

1220. #1220

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.82

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **A Further Separation: The Traversing of Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: The traversing of fantasy is theorized as a "further separation" in which the alienated subject paradoxically assumes its own traumatic cause—the Other's desire that produced it as split subject—thereby subjectifying jouissance and relocating from the position of effect to that of cause, in contrast to the Ego Psychology solution of identification with the analyst.

      The encounter with the Other's desire constitutes a traumatic experience of pleasure/pain or jouissance... The traversing of fantasy is the process by which the subject subjectifies trauma, takes the traumatic event upon him or herself, and assumes responsibility for that jouissance.

1221. #1221

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.116

      <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > **Surplus Value, Surplus Jouissance**

      Theoretical move: By equating object (a) with Marx's surplus value, Lacan shows that the work process simultaneously produces the alienated subject ($) and a loss (a), where surplus-jouissance circulates outside the subject in the Other — structurally positioning the neurotic subject as working for the Other's enjoyment rather than its own.

      In everyday French, you could say that that person has Ia jouissance of said property or money.

1222. #1222

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.218

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > <span id="page-216-0"></span>**Chapter 9**

      Theoretical move: This passage consists of scholarly endnotes for chapters on the Four Discourses, Psychoanalysis and Science, and an Afterword — it is largely bibliographic and referential, but contains several load-bearing theoretical asides: that the specific ordering of mathemes in the Four Discourses is constitutive (not merely combinatorial), that object (a) is the remainder left over after science's symbolization of the real, and that there is always a limit to formalization.

      Analytic discourse, for example, requires the analysand to give up the jouissance associated with his or her symptoms or master signifiers.

1223. #1223

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.233

      <span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**

      Theoretical move: This is the index of Bruce Fink's *The Lacanian Subject*, listing key concepts, proper names, and page references — a non-substantive navigational apparatus with no original theoretical argumentation.

      jouissance and, 99, 192n.5 … Discourse: … jouissance and, 133 … Fantasy: … jouissance and, 60

1224. #1224

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.44

      <span id="page-42-0"></span>The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Real is not simply temporally prior to language but is constitutively defined as that which resists or has not yet been symbolized; the Symbolic's "cutting into" the Real produces Reality (existence), while the Real itself only "ex-sists" outside language — a distinction with direct ethical and clinical consequences for Lacanian versus other psychoanalytic practice.

      Taking Freud's notion of polymorphous perversity to the extreme, we can view the infant's body as but one unbroken erogenous zone, there being no privileged zones, no areas in which pleasure is circumscribed at the outset.

1225. #1225

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.171

      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.

      Not only does the eternal return not make everything return, it causes those who fail the test to perish.

1226. #1226

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.221

      Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's deployment of the "phallic signifier" is a desublimating move—not a phallocentric idealization but a demystification that reattaches the symbolic function of the phallus to the Real of castration; comedy is then positioned as the cultural practice that performs an analogous desublimation, materializing the "infinite passion" of the subject in a finite, concrete object, thereby illuminating that Lacanian castration always arrives in a particular, embodied form rather than as pure lack.

      The manners we teach our children... are all modes of respect for castration. They introduce and demand a certain distance, thus making it possible for us not to walk on each other's enjoyment.

1227. #1227

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.18

      Introduction

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic subjectivity resides not in any subject but in the incessant movement of comedy itself, and that this movement—with its cuts and discontinuities—is structurally opposed to the contemporary ideological imperative of happiness, which naturalizes socioeconomic differences into biological 'bare life' and deploys laughter as an internal condition of ideology rather than a resistance to it.

      our ways of life, our habits, our feelings, our more or less idiosyncratic enjoyments—all these are no longer simply 'private matters' exposed to scrutiny to satisfy our curiosity.

1228. #1228

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.158

      Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical > **Hu's on First**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *point de capiton* in a joke retrospectively reveals a split between two signifying series rather than unfolding temporally, and that when a joke is embedded in a comic sequence, its Master-Signifier is transformed into a comic object (S1→a) that combines enjoyment and sense — a *jouis-sense* — which then becomes the elastic material sustaining the comic sequence's "continuity that constructs with discontinuity."

      the Master-Signifier itself is transformed into a comic object, an object-like entity as a compound of enjoyment and of sense (Lacan would say jouis-sense, which was translated into English as 'enjoy-meant')

1229. #1229

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.137

      part iii

      Theoretical move: Against Bergson's vitalist opposition of life-impulse versus mechanical automatism, Zupančič argues that liveliness and drive emerge *only through* repetition — that the "dead letter" is not opposed to life but is its very condition — thereby proposing that the psychoanalytic drive (defined by Lacan as "indestructible life") is ultimately a death drive because life itself is driven by a dead letter, and that comedy stages this truth by objectifying it.

      it is only by this 'mechanical' repetition that life can rise in front of us in all its vivacity, as well as produce the comic pleasure and the effect of 'indestructibility' associated with comedy

1230. #1230

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.148

      Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical

      Theoretical move: Župančič distinguishes the temporality of jokes (instantaneous, final, discontinuous) from that of comedy (stretched, inaugural, building on discontinuity as its very material), and uses this distinction to argue that love is structured like comedy — a nonrelation that lasts — organized around a central obstacle-object that paradoxically enables rather than blocks relation.

      Satisfaction usually arises at the very beginning; instead of closing a comic sequence it inaugurates it, it opens it up and is then kept alive (with fluctuations which follow a certain rhythm) during the whole sequence.

1231. #1231

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.96

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that comic naivety (trust in the Other's metonymic object despite its inconsistency) is not mere ignorance but a structural wager on the lack-in-the-Other, and that comedies of mistaken identity function by suspending the symbolic Other, generating a surplus comic object ('error incorporated') that displaces the emphasis from the Other's failure to the productive accidents that failure enables.

      it is this naivety itself that ultimately makes it possible for him to come into his own—that is, to find some satisfaction. And this is precisely what strikes us as comical

1232. #1232

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.78

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy's formal mechanism is the sustained visibility of the split between the ego and the id (It), which is structurally produced through the comic "Character" — defined as an enjoying incarnation of a unary trait — whose passionate attachment to an object stretches and exposes the missing link between the signifier and jouissance that normally remains veiled in imaginary unity.

      subjectivity as a specific mode of enjoyment. Yet if, in its ordinary functioning, we get to see only its signifying facet, and can identify with it insofar as its link with the enjoyment remains veiled, invisible, secret

1233. #1233

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.234

      Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

      Theoretical move: The passage deploys two registers of symbolic castration — enjoyment and meaning — using Plato's Timaeus to illuminate the paradoxical exteriority of sexuality to the organism, and Žižek's account of the phallus-as-insignia to show that symbolic castration is not symbolic-as-metaphorical but the constitutive gap opened by assumption of a symbolic mandate.

      The concept of castration involves two registers of separation and of the exteriority of the interior. The first concerns enjoyment, the second concerns meaning (as symbolic meaning, related to the signifier).

1234. #1234

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.227

      Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks

      Theoretical move: Comedy is theorized as the genre of the copula—the site where the missing link between life and the signifier is made to appear—and the phallus is identified as the privileged signifier of this copula, one that appears in comedy not as signifier but as partial object, materializing the contradictions of the Symbolic. The 'realism' of comedy is then relocated from the reality principle to the Real of desire/drive as an irreducible incongruence within human existence.

      As a partial object (that is, one in the series of partial objects), which is as such also a real locus of enjoyment

1235. #1235

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.236

      . Compare:

      Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it consists of closing footnotes (including two Lacan citations on the phallus and jouissance, a comparative note on Agnes Heller's account of comedy, and a full bibliography), with no new theoretical argument developed.

      what this organ has that is privileged is that in some way it is quite possible to isolate its jouissance. It is thinkable as excluded.

1236. #1236

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.184

      Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

      Theoretical move: Against the Deleuzian thesis that pure difference is the being of repetition, Lacan insists that repetition is inseparable from the signifying dyad of alienation (automaton) while its real stake is the tuche — the gap inhabited by objet petit a — which is what the subject compulsively seeks to glimpse, not as triumph of difference but as the subject's own fleeting presence in the Real.

      the child demands repetition because its failure nevertheless realizes something, and this something is precisely what he wanted to see... It fascinates her; she never tires of it.

1237. #1237

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.212

      Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

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

      relative autonomy of enjoyment... its local—or at least localizable—nature (the interval between the body and enjoyment); and the status of enjoyment as something that can be excluded, detached, or attached

1238. #1238

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.200

      (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Aristophanes' speech in Plato's *Symposium* contains a second, overlooked "cut" — the superimposition of genitals — that introduces a surplus-enjoyment irreducible to the complementarity logic of halves seeking fusion; this "comic object" (x) is structurally equivalent to the phallus as the ultimate comic reference, confirming that comedy is grounded in a logic of heteronomous addition that perpetually prevents the return to imaginary Oneness.

      so that, when a man embraced a woman, he would cast his seed and they would have children; but when male embraced male, they would at least have the satisfaction of intercourse, after which they could stop embracing, return to their jobs.

1239. #1239

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.203

      (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

      Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacanian castration is not merely an operator of lack but the structural coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir) that constitutes enjoyment as an "encrusted" appendix with relative autonomy — and that comedy, unlike tragedy, stages this constitutive dislocation of enjoyment at the level of structure itself rather than through individual existential destiny.

      it refers to the gap that separates the body, from within, from its enjoyment, and at the same time binds it to it

1240. #1240

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.112

      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.

      it is also—to use the popular term—a constant work-in-progress, it is where the conflict is being constantly played out and repeated (in a form which provides the subject with some 'impossible' satisfaction, enjoyment).

1241. #1241

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.142

      Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that tragedy and comedy are not different attitudes toward the same configuration of discrepancy but rather two standpoints *within* it: tragedy stands at the point of demand (articulating discrepancy as desire's constitutive non-satisfaction), while comedy stands at the point of satisfaction (articulating discrepancy as jouissance/surplus-satisfaction), and this difference in standpoint entails a reversal of temporal sequence in which satisfaction precedes and overtakes demand rather than trailing after it.

      Comedy, on the other hand, stands at the point of the satisfaction; and from this point, there is also only one true way in which the discrepancy between this satisfaction and the demand that should correspond to it is articulated: as jouissance, enjoyment or 'surplus-satisfaction.'

1242. #1242

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.75

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

      Theoretical move: Comedy's deepest operation is not the exposure of a hidden "real" behind appearances but the impossible joint articulation of two mutually exclusive realities within a single frame—a "concrete universal" that includes the infinite within the finite, distinct from irony's mere pointing to the gap between universal statement and particular enunciation. This structure is further illuminated by the Lacanian split between Ego and Id/jouissance, where satisfaction follows its own autonomous logic indifferent to the subject.

      there is something about satisfaction and enjoyment that has its own logic and a relatively independent autonomous life, which can land the subject in rather awkward situations.

1243. #1243

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.60

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

      Theoretical move: Against both Christian-humanist and postmodern "metaphysics of finitude" readings of comedy, Zupančič argues that comedy is materialistic not because it reconciles us to human limitation but because it gives body to the contradictions and impasses of materiality itself — showing that what is "human" exists only in an excess over itself, which means finitude is always already "corroded" by a passion incommensurable with it.

      a man is never just a man, and that his finitude is very much corroded by a passion which is precisely not cut to the measure of man and of his finitude

1244. #1244

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.313

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

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

      the Matrix feeds on human jouissance—so here we are back to the fundamental Lacanian thesis that the big Other itself, far from being an anonymous machine, needs a constant influx of jouissance.

1245. #1245

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.307

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

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

      with a (the superego injunction to enjoy) occupying the place of the agent

1246. #1246

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.162

      The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Burned by the Sun

      Theoretical move: The passage uses Hölderlin's "eccentric path" and the Thermidorian problem to argue that the gap between utopian aspiration and sober actuality cannot be resolved by narrative mediation alone; the true Hegelian move—reading this gap as Concrete Universality itself—requires displacing the bipolar structure (narrative vs. dissolution) with a triple structure, reread via the drive, and ultimately locating the parallax tension between poetico-mystical and political relating to the Thing as the irreducible truth of emancipatory politics.

      the truth of the pro-democratic 'Lacanian' argument which starts with the (highly problematic) homology between the ideal of a fully emancipated self-transparent Society and the fullness of the maternal Thing

1247. #1247

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.4

      Contents

      Theoretical move: This is a table of contents for Žižek's *The Parallax View*, organizing the book's theoretical architecture around three "parallax" registers (stellar, solar, lunar) that traverse ontology, subjectivity, and politics. It is non-substantive filler content.

      Jouissance as a Political Category

1248. #1248

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.318

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that global capitalism is uniquely "worldless" — it dissolves every stable representational frame rather than founding one — and this creates a fundamental aporia for Badiouian emancipatory politics (which traditionally intervenes from within a world's symptomal excess), forcing a parallax reading of the economy/politics non-relation as the key structural problem for any leftist project today.

      How is this predominance of jouissance linked to (even grounded in) global capitalism? What the superego injunction to enjoy and capitalism share is their properly worldless character.

1249. #1249

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.195

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary techno-scientific developments—brain-machine interfaces, digital virtualization, and posthumanist projects—threaten the very gap of finitude that, for Kant and Freud alike, grounds human creativity and the Symbolic order; Žižek mobilizes Lacan's "point of the apocalypse" (saturation of the Symbolic by the Real of jouissance) as the theoretical framework for diagnosing this threat, and then tests Nietzsche's eternal return against it to expose the limits of both Nietzschean and posthumanist thought.

      the impossible saturation of the Symbolic by the Real of jouissance, its full immersion in massive jouissance.

1250. #1250

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.112

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

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

      when, in a tragic tone, we are informed that we have to renounce our impossible striving for full jouissance and accept 'symbolic castration,' the ultimate constraint of our existence

1251. #1251

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.305

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the discourse of the Analyst and the discourse of perversion share the same upper-level formula (a–S/), such that the crucial difference lies in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a (as fantasmatic lure vs. the Void behind it); consequently, today's civilization functions as a perverse social link, and psychoanalysis—as the only discourse permitting non-enjoyment—points toward a different collective social bond beyond the Master's discourse.

      when Lacan shows how the capitalist discourse epitomizes perversion insofar as it pretends to count/accumulate jouissance, he demonstrates how a pervert acts as if one can accumulate zero(s) or lack(s)

1252. #1252

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.344

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Violence Enframed

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that impotent *passage à l'acte* — violent outbursts in American culture — functions as ideological displacement, redirecting structural critique (of capital, of founding violence) into personalized, self-defeating aggression; the mirror stage, the obscene primordial father, and the family as ideological machine are deployed to theorize why such acts fail to constitute genuine political resistance.

      the key to the film's underlying libidinal economy is to be found in the duality between the hero's father (the law-and-order figure) and Wade, the obscene primordial father, the libidinal focus of the film, the figure of excessive enjoyment whose murder is the central event.

1253. #1253

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.251

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Language of Seduction, the Seduction of Language

      Theoretical move: Drawing on Geoffrey Miller's evolutionary account of fitness indicators and Steven Pinker's "short circuit" of pleasure, Žižek argues that the human animal's symbolic explosion does not merely sexualize non-sexual activities but sexualizes sexuality itself—sexual activity becomes genuinely sexual only when it is caught in the self-referential circuit of drive, the repetitive failure to reach the impossible Thing; the utility-function of any human capacity is always secondary to its "wasteful" display function.

      figuring out how to get at the pleasure circuits of the brain and deliver the little jolts of enjoyment without the inconvenience of wringing bona fide fitness increments from the harsh world

1254. #1254

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.385

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

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

      Bartleby couldn't even hurt a fly—that's what makes his presence so unbearable.

1255. #1255

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.369

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

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

      the Freudian 'primordial father'—the obscene father-enjoyment subordinated to no symbolic Law, the total Master who dares to confront the Real of terrifying enjoyment face to face

1256. #1256

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.215

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > A Cognitivist Hegel?

      Theoretical move: Žižek uses Malabou's Hegelian reading of brain science to argue that neural plasticity, far from being mere adaptability, contains a genuine Hegelian negativity; and that consciousness itself—as a relational, self-referential short circuit between present input and past memory—enacts the logic of retroactive positing of presuppositions and sublation, such that the "immediacy" of qualia is the result of complex mediation collapsed into apparent simplicity.

      The 'raw' character of our immediate experience is thus the result of a complex effort of mediation; its inertia is sustained by its very opposite, the lightness of the 'free thought' freely gliding in the air.

1257. #1257

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.309

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary politics is fundamentally a biopolitical regulation of jouissance rather than emancipatory politics proper, tracing this through liberal ideology's fantasmatic disgust, the symmetry between fundamentalism and liberal hedonism, and the paradox of the superego imperative to enjoy—where permitted jouissance becomes obligatory jouissance—culminating in a reading of The Matrix as staging the co-dependence of the big Other (Symbolic) and the Real.

      our politics is more and more directly the politics of jouissance, concerned with ways of soliciting, or controlling and regulating, jouissance.

1258. #1258

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.233

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Emotions Lie, or, Where Damasio Is Wrong

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that music (via Wagner's *Tristan*) lies about its own affective status—its true "truth" resides not in the grand metaphysical affect but in the ridiculous narrative interruptions that enable it—and then uses this insight to critique Damasio's homeostatic/adaptationist account of emotion by invoking the psychoanalytic "death drive" as the minimal structure of freedom: a dis-adaptation from utilitarian-survivalist immersion that ruptures biological determinism.

      the music itself seems to perform what words can only helplessly indicate: the way the amorous couple is inexorably drawn toward the fulfillment of their passion, the 'highest joy/höchste Lust' of their ecstatic self-annihilation

1259. #1259

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.118

      The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Odradek as a Political Category

      Theoretical move: Odradek (Kafka's figure) is read as the lamella—jouissance embodied as immortal, purposeless, inhuman-human excess outside symbolic/paternal order—and this logic is extended to bureaucracy as the secular form of the divine Thing, and to the Alien series as a figuration of pure drive that capitalism exploits and sacralizes.

      Odradek as an object which is transgenerational (exempt from the cycle of generations), immortal, outside finitude (because outside sexual difference), outside time, displaying no goal-oriented activity, no purpose, no utility, is jouissance embodied: 'Jouissance is that which serves nothing,' as Lacan put in Seminar XX: Encore.

1260. #1260

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.263

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian analysis has surrendered its sociopolitical critical edge by seeking institutional recognition, while Hardt and Negri's biopolitical theory of the multitude commits a parallel theoretical error: by neglecting the dialectical role of capitalist *form*, they reproduce the ultimate capitalist fantasy of frictionless self-revolutionizing production, leaving the notional structure of revolutionary rupture in darkness.

      Analysts should be accountable for what they do to 'relieve the contemporary discontents and sufferings and ways of jouissance'

1261. #1261

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.190

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > When the God Comes Around

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the identification of the sovereign Good with *das Ding* requires a parallax logic rather than a simple opposition, and extends this parallax structure to theology: the God of Love and the God of cruel justice are one and the same viewed from different perspectives, while Luther's excremental identity of man unlocks the properly Christian meaning of Incarnation as God's real identification with the excremental Real — a move unavailable to either Orthodox imitation-logic or Catholic symbolic-exchange.

      excessive cruelty is the necessary obverse of Christian Love

1262. #1262

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.53

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

      Theoretical move: Žižek, following Karatani's Kantian reading of Marx, argues that the parallax gap between production and circulation is irreducible and constitutive of Capital's movement—value is generated "in itself" in production but actualized only retroactively through circulation (futur antérieur)—and that this structural antinomy cannot be resolved by privileging either side, making Capital's self-movement a "spurious infinity" rather than Hegelian dialectical closure.

      the focus of critical work should shift to 'cultural criticism' . . . the disclosure of ideological (or libidinal—this is the origin of the key role of psychoanalysis in Western Marxism) mechanisms

1263. #1263

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.380

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bartleby-gesture of pure withdrawal ("I would prefer not to") constitutes not a preparatory stage but the permanent ontological foundation of revolutionary politics—a parallax shift from the gap between two somethings to the gap between something and nothing, which simultaneously empties the superego supplement from the Law and reduces metaphysical difference to the immanent void within reality itself.

      Do not all 'totalitarian' universes which demand of their subjects violent (self-)sacrifice to the Cause exude the bad smell of fascination with a lethal obscene jouissance?

1264. #1264

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.189

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > When the God Comes Around

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the trauma of the Shoah forces theology through a dialectical succession of positions—from sovereign to finite to suffering God—and that only the theological frame can adequately register the scope of such catastrophe; this dialectic mirrors the Universal-Particular-Singular triad of Christian confessions (Orthodoxy-Catholicism-Protestantism), culminating in a Protestant God of arbitrary, Law-suspending cruelty whose dark underside is the necessary correlate of the excess of Christian love over Jewish Law.

      love which suspends the Law is necessarily accompanied by the arbitrary cruelty which also suspends the Law.

1265. #1265

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.334

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

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

      the dignified and impersonal Law looks like an obscene machine of jouissance. Another slight shift, and the legal regulations prescribing our duties... look like the expression of a ruthless power

1266. #1266

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.282

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Gelassenheit? No, Thanks!

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Heidegger's apparent opposition between "decisionist" active will and passive Gelassenheit is a symptomal torsion-point revealing their deep complicity, and extends this diagnosis to Nietzsche's ethico-political antinomy (militarism vs. peace), resolving both by showing that the Real is not an inaccessible Thing but the gap/antagonism that makes perspectives incommensurable—a solution structurally opposed to the "Oriental" Gelassenheit, which is ultimately indifference, in contrast to the violent, subject-splitting love proper to Christian/revolutionary engagement.

      Buddhist (or Hindu, for that matter) all-encompassing Compassion must be opposed to Christian intolerant, violent Love. The Buddhist stance is ultimately one of Indifference, of quenching all passions which strive to establish differences

1267. #1267

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.287

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Gelassenheit? No, Thanks!

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nazism was a pseudo-event (désêtre) while Stalinist Communism, despite its horrors, remained inherently related to an authentic Truth-Event (the October Revolution), making Stalinist "irrationality" a displaced return of genuine revolutionary negativity rather than mere nihilism—and uses this distinction to reframe Heidegger's complicity with Nazism and his failure to attribute "inner greatness" to Soviet Communism.

      Stalin wisely recruited into the NKVD people of lower social origins who were thus able to act out their hatred of the nomenklatura by arresting and torturing senior apparatchiks.

1268. #1268

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.86

      The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian > Die Versagung

      Theoretical move: Žižek uses Lacan's reading of Claudel's *The Hostage* and James's *The Portrait of a Lady* to argue that the feminine "No" (Versagung) is not a signifying negation grounded in the paternal "No," but a bodily, excremental gesture of pure loss that enacts separation from the Symbolic—prefiguring the sinthome—and that this "No as such" (form without content) is the hidden materialist core linking Kierkegaard's infinite resignation to Hegelian speculative identity.

      the answer discards the [previous] signifying answer, and claims: this guarantee can only consist in that, somewhere, there is jouissance... one needs as a guarantee of the signifying order... a piece of the body, a pound of flesh

1269. #1269

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.358

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

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

      religions themselves (from New Age spirituality to the cheap spiritualist hedonism of the Dalai Lama) are more than ready to serve postmodern pleasureseeking

1270. #1270

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.66

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that drive must be rigorously distinguished from desire: drive is not an infinite longing for the lost Thing that gets stuck on a partial object, but is itself the very fixation, the self-propelling loop of repetition that finds satisfaction in failure and endless circulation around the void. This distinction is then leveraged to reframe the debate between Lacan and Badiou on negativity and the Act, and to identify the curved structure of drive with Hegelian self-consciousness understood as a non-psychological, impersonal agency of registration — the big Other.

      a drive, as it were, turns failure into triumph—in it, the very failure to reach its goal, the repetition of this failure, the endless circulation around the object, generates a satisfaction of its own.

1271. #1271

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.268

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the inherent obstacle/antagonism of capitalism is simultaneously its condition of impossibility AND possibility (via Derrida/Lacan), meaning abolishing capital's contradiction would dissolve rather than release productive potential; it then identifies slum-dwellers as today's privileged "evental site" and proletarian subject, defined not by exploitation but by exclusion from citizenship, making them the true symptomatic product of global capitalism rather than its accident.

      That is Lacan's fundamental reproach to Marx, which focuses on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment.

1272. #1272

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.404

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

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

      the duality of the artist's Leftist political commitment ... and his fascination with the decadent jouissance, pleasure-in-pain, of the ruling class in decay

1273. #1273

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.300

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's four discourses map the historicity of European modernity—with the Master's discourse coding absolute monarchy, University/Hysteria coding biopolitics and capitalist subjectivity, and the Analyst's discourse coding emancipatory politics—while complicating Miller's claim that contemporary civilization itself operates as the Analyst's discourse, and then pivoting to show how global reflexivization paradoxically generates brute, "Id-Evil" immediacy resistant to interpretation.

      Id-Evil, that is, Evil structured and motivated by the most elementary imbalance in the relationship between the Ego and jouissance, by the tension between pleasure and the foreign body of jouissance at its very heart.

1274. #1274

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.357

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

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that fundamentalism is defined by the immediate identification with fantasy (becoming the "dupe of one's fantasy") which forecloses the enigma of the Other's desire; this structural analysis is then extended to show that liberal multiculturalism's tolerant repression of passion produces the same segregationist logic it claims to oppose, leaving aggressive secularism and fundamentalist passion as mirror-image dead ends.

      what is Passion if not the ultimate sacrilege, the staging of Christ's suffering and death as the ultimate sado-maso gay spectacle?

1275. #1275

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.191

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the postideological "desublimated" call of jouissance short-circuits the symbolic mediation constitutive of the Other's jouissance, so that the apparent opposition between pure autistic jouissance (drugs, virtual sex) and the jouissance of the Other (language, narrative, remembrance) secretly converges in the Hegelian infinite judgment: the passion for the Real and the passion for semblance are two sides of the same phenomenon.

      what addresses us is a direct 'desublimated' call of jouissance, no longer masked in an ideological narrative proper.

1276. #1276

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.337

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Human Rights versus the Rights of the Inhuman

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "humanitarian" depoliticization of human rights paradoxically serves specific political-economic interests while suppressing collective political projects; and following Rancière, it proposes that the gap between universal Human Rights and citizens' political rights is not pre-political but constitutes the very space of politicization proper—the "right to universality as such"—such that eliminating reference to meta-political Human Rights collapses politics into a postpolitical negotiation of particular interests.

      Catherine was blind to the passion with which people clung to their beliefs.

1277. #1277

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.200

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

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

      Further experiments show that when individuals are able to stimulate their neuronal pleasure centers directly, they do not get caught up in a blind compulsive drive toward excessive pleasure, but provide themselves pleasure only when they judge that they have 'deserved' it

1278. #1278

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.261

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew mystifies constitutive social antagonism by displacing it onto an external limit, and that Milner's "Jewish exception" logic inadvertently reproduces this displacement; the properly Lacanian response is a "not-all" Europe in which everyone becomes an exception (objet petit a), dissolving the need for a constitutive Other — and he extends this critique to Jacques-Alain Miller's therapeutic-political proposal, which he reads as a socially conservative "compassionate cushion" that profits from the disarray of identifications rather than challenging the anonymous systems that produce it.

      psychoanalysts need to be out there, and to be accountable for what they do to relieve the contemporary discontents and sufferings and ways of jouissance

1279. #1279

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.98

      The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's *Ethics* seminar represents a deadlock—not a triumph—because it cannot clearly distinguish pure desire from immersion in primordial jouissance ("passion for the Real"); the resolution lies in the move from desire to drive, while the broader argument shows that Bataille's premodern dialectic of Law/transgression is superseded by the Kantian insight that the absolute excess is the Law itself, a move Lacan only partially executes.

      there is no substantial Thing-jouissance beyond the Symbolic, jouissance is as such—in Hegelese: in its very notion—jouissance of/in the lack of itself, a jouissance that arises when its movement repeatedly misses its goal

1280. #1280

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.396

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 2Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology

      Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section of The Parallax View, containing scholarly footnotes with citations and brief argumentative asides; the theoretically substantive moments include Žižek's critique of Boostels on Kant avec Sade, a gloss on Lacan's tripartite (ISR) staging of anxiety, and a reading of Medea vs. Antigone as two versions of feminine subjectivity.

      finally, anxiety concerns the overproximity of jouissance.

1281. #1281

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.95

      The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian ethical revolution—which displaces all external authority onto autonomous self-limitation—makes the "Sadeian perversion" not Kant's hidden truth but rather his *symptom*: Sade emerges precisely from Kant's failure to follow his own breakthrough to the end, and the only genuine resolution of the hysteric's demand for a Master is the analytic position of subjective destitution.

      the lack of mediation between Law and desire in favor of one of the two should hypothetically give rise to either a pure jouissance of the Law, in the case of Kant, or, an ultimately indistinguishable—pure law of Jouissance, in the case of Sade

1282. #1282

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.295

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward the Theory of the Stalinist Musical

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Stalinism's obscene underside (revealed by Eisenstein) and its public face (the kolkhoz musical) together expose a fundamental Hegelian dialectical law whereby historical tasks are accomplished by their apparent opposites, and that the utopian space opened by the Communist breakthrough—even in its Stalinist deformation—cannot be reduced to a symmetrical equivalent of Fascism, because Communism uniquely sustains the very critical standpoint from which its own failures can be measured.

      Here we are at the obscene site where musical enjoyment meets political liquidation.

1283. #1283

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.123

      The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Too Much Life!

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that shame, castration, and the "undead" lamella are not opposed but structurally co-produced: the noncastrated remainder (lamella/objet petit a) is not what escapes castration but precisely what castration generates as its own surplus, collapsing the distinction between lack and excess into a Möbius-strip parallax.

      Odradek is the father's sinthome, the 'knot' onto which the father's jouissance is stuck.

1284. #1284

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.94

      11

      Theoretical move: Desire is structurally constituted by the impossibility of the objet petit a and is irreducible to the social order that produces it; ideology requires fantasy as a supplement to stabilize desire's inherent radicality, and the ethics of psychoanalysis—refusing to give ground relative to one's desire—demands embracing lack as constitutive rather than seeking its fantasmatic elimination, a stance the cinema of desire uniquely enables.

      Fantasy operates by seducing the subject with the lure of total enjoyment, an enjoyment free from all lack.

1285. #1285

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.113

      **Claire Denis and the Other's Failure to Enjoy**

      Theoretical move: Claire Denis's films perform a systematic demolition of fantasy by staging and then deflating the image of the enjoying Other—revealing the lack and partiality that underlie any apparent complete enjoyment—thereby redirecting subjects away from the paranoid lure of fantasmatic jouissance and back toward the partial enjoyment proper to the path of desire.

      Fantasy constructs the scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other who stole it from us.

1286. #1286

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.222

      29

      Theoretical move: Fantasy's function is to transform the impossible objet petit a into an apparently accessible object of desire by installing a symbolic barrier; but when that barrier is removed and the subject directly accesses the object, the fantasmatic world collapses, revealing the object as pure nothingness—a structural impossibility that the cinema of intersection makes directly visible through the gaze.

      This is the point at which Peter seems on the verge of realizing the sexual successful relationship—a bliss without constraint providing him with a sense of completion.

1287. #1287

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.252

      29 > **20. Steven Spielberg's Search for the Father** > **21. D. W. Griffith's Suspense**

      Theoretical move: Hitchcockian suspense is structurally distinguished from Griffithian suspense by refusing to resolve desire through fantasy: rather than stabilizing desire via a fantasmatic resolution, Hitchcock divides desire between two antagonistic, logically opposed possibilities, thereby forcing a traumatic encounter with the impossible object and the antagonistic nature of desire itself.

      They depict a villain with a clear desire to steal our enjoyment and a hero who can, in the end, control this desire.

1288. #1288

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.213

      **Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing**

      Theoretical move: Fantasy, unlike pure desire (which remains confined to the level of the signifier and thereby insulates the subject from the real other), exposes the subject to the real other by making it vulnerable—and this vulnerability constitutes the ethical dimension of fantasy that the cinema of intersection (Wenders) uniquely reveals.

      Because they are confined to the level of the signifier, the angels cannot experience enjoyment—neither their own nor that of the other.

1289. #1289

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.28

      **Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze** > **Privileging the Unconscious**

      Theoretical move: McGowan reverses the political logic of early Lacanian film theory by arguing that conscious critical distance from cinematic fascination is itself an ideological operation, and that the encounter with the Real Gaze requires full submission to the filmic experience—modelled on the analytic session—rather than Brechtian alienation effects or lighted-theatre vigilance.

      These are the points where film disturbs the spectator, but at the same time they are the points where the spectator enjoys. To be a psychoanalytically informed spectator is to allow oneself to enjoy and to pay attention to the moments of one's enjoyment.

1290. #1290

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.97

      12

      Theoretical move: The nouvelle vague's formal emphasis on absence, contingency, and the impossibility of the gaze-as-object constitutes a cinema of desire that resists ideological fantasy by refusing to produce the objet petit a as attainable, thereby structurally positioning the spectator as a desiring subject rather than a fantasizing one.

      the subject implicitly accepts an image of ideology as a whole that has the ability to deliver the ultimate enjoyment.

1291. #1291

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.204

      **Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Resnais's *L'Année dernière à Marienbad* does not simply thematize the unknowability of the historical object but instead reconfigures our relationship to it: the impossible historical object exists in the present in a fantasmatic form, and its intrusion into the present (via radical cuts) is an extimate disruption that implicates the subject in the constitution of history itself, thereby opening onto an ethical response.

      The film's mise-en-scène suggests the absence of the object and thus a near-total absence of enjoyment: it is a world in which subjects desire but must endure this desire without any fantasmatic supplement.

1292. #1292

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.88

      **Desire and Not Showing Enough**

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that filmic narration produces desire not through the manipulation of an empirically withheld fabula but through the constitutive absence of the gaze as objet petit a—an impossible object that resists meaning and cannot be revealed, only attested to as an irreducible emptiness that triggers spectatorial desire.

      The eroticism of the cinema—its ability to produce desire—stems from this object that remains, no matter how much the spectator understands, irreducible to meaning.

1293. #1293

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.108

      **The Banality of Orson Welles**

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Welles's cinema enacts a Hegelian correction of the Kantian logic of the nouvelle vague: rather than sustaining the gaze as an impossibly absent transcendent object (which risks feeding fantasy), Welles renders the object's absence fully present by embodying it in a banal, everyday object, thereby exposing the void at the core of desire and foreclosing fantasmatic resolution.

      the sled is an inadequate object—it doesn't provide a sense of completion or of total enjoyment—because every object of desire itself is inadequate. We invest this object with the promise of total enjoyment, but it inevitably betrays us.

1294. #1294

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.75

      **Michael Mann and the Ethics of Excess**

      Theoretical move: Mann's heroes demonstrate that fantasy functions as an alibi for an excessive devotion to duty rather than duty serving fantasy, and this structure of excess—visible through the gaze—constitutes the ground of an ethical subjectivity that places the subject at odds with the symbolic order.

      This excessive devotion to duty—or, devotion to duty as itself an excess—locates them among Mann's heroes.

1295. #1295

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.51

      **The Politics of Cinematic Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: Fantasy operates as a necessary supplement to ideology, compensating for ideology's constitutive incompleteness at the level of the signifier; but cinema's publicization of fantasy can also expose the obscene surplus-enjoyment that ideology depends on yet cannot avow, giving fantasy a double political valence—both conservative and subversive.

      Fantasy transforms the dissatisfied subject of desire into a subject satisfied with an imaginary enjoyment.

1296. #1296

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.132

      **The Intermixing of Desire and Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: The "cinema of integration" operates ideologically by blending desire and fantasy so as to domesticate the gaze—transforming the objet petit a from a constitutively impossible object into an attainable one—and this blending is homologous to neurosis, which supplements desire with fantasy to shield the subject from the traumatic Real while producing only an imaginary transgression that reinforces ideological interpellation.

      The idea of the successful sexual relationship embodies the ultimate enjoyment—an impossible relationship with an object that remains always out of reach.

1297. #1297

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.165

      21

      Theoretical move: Griffith's parallel editing in films like *Intolerance* and *Way Down East* performs an ideological function by blurring desire and fantasy: by fantasmatically resolving the impossible status of the objet petit a, the suspense structure eliminates the traumatic dimension of desire, substituting a fantasmatic resolution that names and subjugates the threatening desire of the Other.

      women have a clear desire, and this desire aims at destroying enjoyment.

1298. #1298

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.167

      21

      Theoretical move: Griffith's parallel editing in films like *Intolerance* and *Way Down East* performs an ideological function by blurring desire and fantasy: by fantasmatically resolving the impossible status of the objet petit a, the suspense structure eliminates the traumatic dimension of desire, substituting a fantasmatic resolution that names and subjugates the threatening desire of the Other.

      When we follow the cinema of integration and rely on fantasy to avoid an experience of the impossibility of the object, we fail to enjoy our desire.

1299. #1299

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

      **The Banality of Orson Welles**

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

      Desire involves lack, but lack can become a source of enjoyment for the subject rather than only representing a barrier to enjoyment.

1300. #1300

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.217

      29

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the cinema of intersection—exemplified by David Lynch's films—reveals the constitutive failure of the sexual relationship by depicting fantasy in its full structure rather than abridging it at the nodal point, thereby exposing that the objet petit a is nothingness itself, and that genuine enjoyment in the real depends on surrendering the ideological fantasy of romantic completion.

      Rather than fantasizing about an ultimate enjoyment that can never be realized, the subject can enjoy the nothingness of the object.

1301. #1301

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.145

      19

      Theoretical move: The cinema of integration (exemplified by Ron Howard's films) deploys fantasy to transform the impossible object of desire into an attainable one, thereby cementing ideological submission by replacing constitutive lack with empirical obstacle and converting desire's antagonism into a merely difficult problem.

      Each of these films begins by stressing the impossibility of the object driving the hero's desire in order to maximize the enjoyment that we feel when we discover that the impossible is actually possible.

1302. #1302

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.192

      25

      Theoretical move: The cinema of intersection is theorized as politically transformative because it stages a direct encounter with the gaze as the impossible real, enabling subjects to identify with objet petit a, thereby shattering their dependence on the Other and opening the possibility of authentic political acts that exceed ideology's pre-given options.

      To identify with the object is to insist on one's particular way of enjoying at the expense of one's symbolic identity.

1303. #1303

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.242

      29 > **13. The Banality of Orson Welles**

      Theoretical move: This passage, comprising endnotes for chapters on Orson Welles and Claire Denis, theoretically elaborates the objet petit a as a constitutively lost and impossible object: Antonioni's nostalgic fantasy treats the object as once-accessible, Welles's films reveal the banality/emptiness at the origin (Rosebud, the sled), and Denis's cinematography stages the partiality of jouissance rather than its plenitude.

      Denis deprives the spectator of the image of a complete jouissance that we expect from cinematic sexual encounters

1304. #1304

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.198

      **The Overlapping Worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky**

      Theoretical move: Tarkovsky's "cinema of intersection" demonstrates that the worlds of desire and fantasy are structurally identical rather than alternative, thereby exposing the role of repetition in subjective existence and offering the subject the possibility of identifying with its objet petit a rather than endlessly pursuing a fantasmatic elsewhere.

      identifying with this object and thereby accepting its own mode of enjoyment rather than imagining that the ultimate enjoyment is elsewhere.

1305. #1305

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

      5

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

      obscene enjoyment that always accompanies the exercise of power, even if every authority figure is not attending ritualistic orgies

1306. #1306

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.258

      29 > **29. The Sexual Relationship with David Lynch**

      Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section for a chapter on David Lynch, containing bibliographic references and a brief theoretical note on the superego as externalized, incomprehensible voice in Lynch's *Lost Highway*. The substantive theoretical content is minimal and ancillary.

      which creates in him a sense of guilt for his failure to enjoy Renee while someone else seems to be enjoying her

1307. #1307

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.85

      **Desire and Not Showing Enough**

      Theoretical move: The passage establishes a theoretical distinction between the "cinema of desire" and the "cinema of fantasy" by arguing that film's structural proclivity toward presence (the overpresence of the image) works against desire, which depends on absence—yet narrative form necessarily deploys absence (via suyzhet/fabula gaps) to engine spectator desire, making the cinema of desire a subversion of film's inherent medium rather than its natural expression.

      Drinking a particular can of Coca Cola never satisfies me, but I can achieve the satisfaction that accompanies desire itself through this very failure.

1308. #1308

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.61

      5

      Theoretical move: Kubrick's films expose the obscene enjoyment structurally embedded in symbolic authority itself—not as the fault of particular subjects—and this fantasmatic revelation serves the subject's freedom by dissolving ideological investment in that authority.

      each character enjoys the position in a way that he is not supposed to, and Kubrick works to make this enjoyment visible.

1309. #1309

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.243

      29 > **15. Political Desire in Italian Neorealism**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist ideology is constitutively self-undermining: it promises fantasmatic enjoyment to drive consumption while being structurally intolerant of actual jouissance, and it proclaims individual exceptionalism while reification produces universal equivalence — a fundamental ideological antagonism that Italian Neorealism exposes by refusing fantasmatic narrative resolution.

      Capitalism thrives on fantasmatic promises of the ultimate enjoyment, but it is constitutively incapable of tolerating any actual enjoyment.

1310. #1310

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.32

      **Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze** > **Deployments of the Gaze**

      Theoretical move: McGowan proposes a four-part typology of cinema's possible relations to the gaze as objet petit a—fantasy-distortion, sustaining absence, fantasmatic domestication, and traumatic encounter—arguing that this deployment of the gaze constitutes the fundamental political and existential act of cinema, and that Lacanian film theory has historically elided cinema's potentially radical dimension.

      film's struggle with the trauma and the enjoyment of the gaze as objet petit a

1311. #1311

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.163

      21

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Griffith's parallel editing structure embeds a fantasmatic logic that domesticates the gaze by converting it from an impossible, traumatic absence into a knowable, manageable presence—thereby demonstrating that the formal racism of the "cinema of integration" is inseparable from its editorial technique of suspense-through-fantasy.

      racism fantasizes a traumatic enjoyment in the desire of the Other and thus allows the subject to avoid encountering this desire as a traumatic, impossible object.

1312. #1312

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.209

      **Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing**

      Theoretical move: Fantasy is reframed not as an ethical evasion of the other but as the very condition of an authentic ethical encounter: by imagining the threatening real dimension of the other, the fantasizing subject simultaneously exposes its own real kernel to the other's gaze, making fantasy the site where desire's safe distance collapses and genuine vulnerability becomes possible. Wenders's cinema of intersection stages this structure by juxtaposing worlds of desire and fantasy.

      The shame that the subject feels in this experience derives precisely from the revelation of its own hidden kernel of enjoyment—the revelation of itself in the real.

1313. #1313

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.235

      29 > **6. Spike Lee's Fantasmatic Explosions**

      Theoretical move: This footnote-heavy passage advances the theoretical argument that racist ideology operates at the level of fantasy (jouissance attributed to the Other), that Lee's formal excess targets this fantasmatic racism whereas Haggis's realism misses it, and that Mann's male heroes instantiate a Kantian ethics of excess structurally tied to the phallic exception.

      his films depict a series of events that reveal the hidden jouissance implicit in daily life.

1314. #1314

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.77

      **The Bankruptcy of Fantasy in Fellini**

      Theoretical move: Fellini's films enact the logic of fantasy so completely that they expose its ultimate vacuity: by presenting excessive, unrestricted enjoyment, they produce boredom and failure-to-enjoy, thereby breaking fantasy's hold on the spectator and pointing toward a cinema structured around absence, desire, and the gaze.

      The excess of enjoyment here corresponds to its complete absence. In this way, Fellini reveals that fantasmatic enjoyment necessarily remains imaginary and futural.

1315. #1315

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

      **Early Explorations of Fantasy**

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

      the obscene jouissance at the heart of ideology. Ideology depends on an excessive enjoyment that it must constitutively disavow and hide

1316. #1316

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.91

      **Theoretical Desiring**

      Theoretical move: By reinterpreting Bazin's valorization of ambiguity and Kracauer's emphasis on the openness of the filmic image through a Lacanian lens, McGowan argues that both theorists implicitly theorize a "cinema of desire" structured around the gaze as an absent object (objet petit a), positioning this cinema as politically opposed to the fantasmatic closure that ideology requires.

      rather than exposing hidden enjoyment, the cinema of desire allows us to experience lack and absence as fundamental—and thus to combat the fantasies that secure our position within ideology.

1317. #1317

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.39

      **Fantasy and Showing Too Much**

      Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized not as secondary supplement to desire but as the very condition that establishes desire's coordinates, and filmic excess—reread through the gaze as objet petit a—is internal to narrative structure rather than an external subversion of it, which allows cinema's fantasmatic dimension to render visible the hidden enjoyment that constitutes social reality.

      By rendering the excess of the gaze visible through fantasy, cinema makes us aware of the hidden enjoyment that silently informs our social reality.

1318. #1318

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.45

      **Theoretical Fantasizing**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that early film theorists (Münsterberg, Eisenstein, Arnheim) implicitly grasped a psychoanalytic insight: cinema's value lies not in representing external reality but in revealing the fantasmatic dimension that structures reality, operating according to the logic of the unconscious primary process and thereby making publicly visible the hidden enjoyment that governs subjective experience.

      fantasy allows subjects to bypass the exigencies of time and space insofar as they act as barriers to enjoyment, so too does the cinema eliminate such barriers.

1319. #1319

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.41

      **Fantasy and Showing Too Much**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that cinema reveals the gaze (as objet petit a) not through direct exposure but through fantasmatic distortion — excess made visible as a structural disturbance in the field of the visible — and that pornography's failure to show "enough" illustrates the irreducibility of the object to direct representation.

      Excess remains the nonsensical point embodying enjoyment. But this does allow us to see how excess functions.

1320. #1320

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.185

      24

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that new Lacanian film theory (Copjec, Žižek) reverses the premises of early Lacanian/Althusserian film theory by positing the gaze—not ideology—as cinema's primary function, and by reconceiving the subject as a site of ideological failure rather than its product, thereby making theoretical critique of ideology philosophically coherent.

      According to the new Lacanian film theory, however, we go to the cinema in search of an enjoyment that cannot be confined to the structures of ideology.

1321. #1321

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.24

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the early Lacanian film theory tradition misreads Lacan by conflating desire with a Nietzschean/Foucaultian will to mastery; the properly Lacanian gaze is not the vehicle of mastery but an objet petit a—a point of traumatic, unassimilable enjoyment in the Other that causes desire precisely by remaining out of reach, thereby reorienting film theory from the imaginary look to the real gaze.

      Enjoyment or jouissance, in Lacan's sense of the term, is thus far removed from mere pleasure. It marks a disturbance in the ordinary symbolic functioning of the subject, and the subject inevitably suffers its enjoyment.

1322. #1322

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.229

      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.

      he links masochism to enjoyment in the real, claiming that 'masochism is the main enjoyment that the real gives'

1323. #1323

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.182

      23

      Theoretical move: The cinema of intersection, by juxtaposing desire and fantasy, stages the traumatic emergence and disappearance of the gaze as impossible object, thereby revealing to the subject that its own jouissance—not the Other's secret—fills the lack in the Other; this constitutes a cinematic analogue of the psychoanalytic cure that enables identification with the gaze rather than neurotic dependence on the Other.

      we experience our own enjoyment as the answer to the question of the Other's desire... our fantasy—not some secret buried within the Other itself—provides the support for the Other at its point of lack.

1324. #1324

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.71

      **Michael Mann and the Ethics of Excess**

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Michael Mann's films use fantasmatic cinematic excess to make visible the Kantian ethical subject — one whose freedom and subjectivity emerge precisely through an unconditional, excessive devotion to duty that refuses symbolic identity, aligning enjoyment with duty rather than with the satisfactions the symbolic order offers.

      It derives not from obedience to the demands of the social order, but from adherence to and embrace of the enjoyment that exceeds that order.

1325. #1325

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.126

      15

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Italian neorealism models a politics grounded in sustaining desire rather than resolving it through fantasy, and that this path—though painful—resists the symbolic authority whose existence depends on subjects' abandonment of desire; it also identifies a counter-tendency (the "cinema of integration") in which films ideologically resolve desire's deadlock by presenting the gaze as an attainable object.

      The path of desire is not that of pleasure but its opposite... 'it is the pain of existing.'

1326. #1326

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.230

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

      Theoretical move: This endnote passage clarifies key theoretical distinctions—between jouissance and enjoyment, desire and jouissance, gaze and look, cinema and dream—while situating the book's Lacanian framework against phenomenology, neoliberal ideology, and auteur theory.

      its meaning is lost by translating it as 'enjoyment'... 'Enjoyment,' as I use the word in what follows, is always a disturbing enjoyment that one suffers—pleasure in pain, as opposed to pure pleasure.

1327. #1327

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.68

      6

      Theoretical move: Lee's cinema of fantasy operates politically by forcing the public avowal of excessive enjoyment hidden in racist and paranoid fantasies, thereby stripping that enjoyment of its ideological power — not through guilt but through the gaze's capacity to implicate the spectator in what they see.

      Lee emphasizes the enjoyment that accompanies outbreaks of paranoid violence... the film links the unleashing of graphic violence with a musical climax.

1328. #1328

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.118

      **Claire Denis and the Other's Failure to Enjoy**

      Theoretical move: Denis's *J'ai pas sommeil* dismantles the fantasy of ultimate/transgressive enjoyment by rendering the serial killer's acts ordinarily joyless, thereby redirecting desire away from fantasized full satisfaction toward an acceptance of enjoyment's constitutive partiality — a move the passage frames as both an aesthetic and political intervention against ideological fantasy and paranoia about the Other's enjoyment.

      The illusion of seeing without a localized perspective supports the fantasy of an unlimited enjoyment, and this is precisely what J'ai pas sommeil combats.

1329. #1329

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.234

      29 > **5. The Coldness of Kubrick**

      Theoretical move: This is a footnotes/endnotes section for a chapter on Kubrick, containing bibliographic references and discursive annotations. The only substantive theoretical moves are: a defence of the erotic logic of coldness in *Eyes Wide Shut* (note 5), and a claim that HAL's perversity in *2001* flows from the structural contradictions inhering in symbolic authority (note 7).

      Coldness is in fact erotic because it marks the separation of eroticism from all tenderness... the completely cold and mechanical orgy that Kubrick creates, there is no tenderness, which gives free reign to the erotic feelings.

1330. #1330

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.246

      29 > **16. The Intermixing of Desire and Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates, through a close reading of *An Officer and a Gentleman*, how the fantasy of the successful sexual relationship domesticates the traumatic gaze into a reassuring object, and then situates this analysis within the broader debate about film theory's treatment of fantasy and suture as ideological mechanisms.

      after an initial experience of the jouissance of the image, the spectator 'has discovered the framing. Suddenly, he senses the space he cannot see, hidden by the camera'

1331. #1331

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.142

      18

      Theoretical move: The cinema of integration ideologically stabilizes the subject by transforming the gaze from an ontological absence (impossible object-cause of desire) into an empirically fulfillable presence, thereby conjuring the image of a non-lacking Other that conceals the constitutive incompleteness grounding subjective freedom and generates the fantasy of a hidden agency responsible for the subject's failure to enjoy.

      the film depicts first the Nazis and then the American government holding the Ark and hording the enjoyment that it embodies.

1332. #1332

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.170

      **Films That Separate**

      Theoretical move: The "cinema of integration" briefly exposes the ideological function of fantasy by formally separating the worlds of desire and fantasy, but ultimately sutures this division at the narrative's close, re-occluding the gaze; this movement points toward a hypothetical "cinema of intersection" that would sustain the separation and force a traumatic encounter with the gaze.

      here, we experience the absence of enjoyment that characterizes the world of desire.

1333. #1333

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.180

      23

      Theoretical move: The "cinema of intersection" is theorized as a distinct cinematic mode that sustains a rigid separation between the worlds of desire and fantasy within a single film, producing a direct, traumatic encounter with the gaze (as objet petit a) at the moment of their collision—an experience that ideology-serving "cinema of integration" forecloses by reducing the impossible object to an ordinary empirical one.

      The normal subject, for Freud, is the subject who embraces traumatic enjoyment instead of sacrificing it in the name of a demand made by the social law.

1334. #1334

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.254

      29 > **23. The Separation of Desire and Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes to a chapter on the separation of desire and fantasy) advances several theoretical moves: it links the cinema of intersection to the Freudian dream-within-a-dream as a figure of disavowed desire; it reads the Kantian antinomies as constitutively incomplete fantasies of reason; and it characterises neurosis as a refusal to pay the traumatic price of jouissance, wanting to short-circuit the path to the gaze.

      neurosis is a radical position because it refuses to be satisfied with the sacrifice of enjoyment that the social law demands. However, the neurotic wants to access this enjoyment without paying the price

1335. #1335

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.64

      6

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

      The enjoyment that fantasies provide for the subject stems from the secrecy that surrounds them, a secrecy which allows the subject to experience fantasies as transgressive.

1336. #1336

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.133

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

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via Nietzsche, that nihilism results not from negativity per se but from its insertion into the truth/appearance topology, which collapses the structural gap sustaining desire; she then maps this onto Lacanian concepts (desire, jouissance, the Real) and proposes a non-dialectical "double affirmation" as the only way out of nihilism.

      the desire to find enjoyment in food has passed into the register of the imperative of enjoyment, just as the will to enjoyment as such (as Lacan has shown in his analysis of de Sade) implies that the subject becomes a pure instrument of the enjoyment of the Other

1337. #1337

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.35

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

      Theoretical move: Zupančič recasts Nietzsche as a metapsychologist whose diagnoses of the ascetic ideal and the extinction of true masters articulate, in Lacanian terms, a structural shift from the Discourse of the Master to the Discourse of the University, driven by the "death of God" understood as the symbolic death of God-as-S1 (the generative power of the Symbolic), a loss whose consequences are traced through the Catholic/Protestant opposition as differing configurations of the relationship between two scenes via the point de capiton.

      What these two instances or shifts have in common is that they both deal with a certain social recodification of enjoyment.

1338. #1338

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.51

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

      Theoretical move: Župančič reads Nietzsche's 'ascetic ideal' and the Protestant Reformation through Lacanian categories—especially the shift from the Discourse of the Master to the Discourse of the University—to argue that 'slave morality' names not the oppressed but a new form of mastery that legitimates itself through knowledge, and that the ascetic ideal (far from being obsolete) is the very invention of enjoyment as something beyond the pleasure principle.

      the ascetic ideal coincides with the very 'invention' of enjoyment: enjoyment as different from pleasure, as something which lies—to use Freud's term—beyond the pleasure principle.

1339. #1339

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.170

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

      Theoretical move: Zupančič articulates a Nietzschean "double affirmation" (amor fati as affirmation of both necessity and contingency) and then pivots to Lacan's claim that love-as-sublimation humanises jouissance by making it condescend to desire, using the logic of comedy—where the Real appears as a minimal difference between two semblances rather than behind appearances—as the structural model for this movement.

      love-sublimation makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire… it 'humanizes jouissance.'

1340. #1340

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.155

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

      Theoretical move: By reading the Zeno paradox of Achilles and the tortoise through Lacan's sexuation, Zupančič argues that masculine and feminine positions represent two structurally different relations to the Other and to Nothingness—metonymic pursuit versus immanent internal split—and then extends this to Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil," showing that Nothingness is not a transcendent void beyond the good/evil pair but its inner organizing structure, thereby redefining nihilism as capture between good and evil rather than their surpassing.

      even the scandalous Marquis de Sade got no further than merely transgressing the good. In de Sade's literature, the victims not only remain beautiful throughout the horror to which they are subjected, but even gain in beauty

1341. #1341

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.146

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

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

      The same problem could be articulated through the relationship between knowledge and enjoyment (jouissance). Lacan points out that, when we demand from a witness that she tell the 'whole truth,' we actually expect two things from her: that she should tell the truth about what she knows, and that she should tell us something that will allow us to make a judgment about her enjoyment (i.e. that she avows the enjoyment).

1342. #1342

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.165

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil" means transgressing Nothingness as the structuring centre of moral dialectics—not abolishing negativity but relocating it from an external, unattainable limit to an internal, minimal difference—and that this move (illustrated via Lacan's Achilles/tortoise reading and Malevich's Suprematism) inaugurates a logic where truth is inherent to appearance, and where necessity is experienced as grounded in contingency rather than in purposive will.

      This moment when life (with all that this implies: desire, illusion, enjoyment . . .) stands still, and 'draws a breath,' is presented by Nietzsche as a kind of reversal of perspective.

1343. #1343

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.59

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

      Theoretical move: Zupančič reads Nietzsche to argue that guilt and surplus-enjoyment are co-originary articulations of immeasurability rather than causal sequence, and that "forgetting" (as distinct from repression or forgiveness) is the condition of possibility for the act, since it is not a prior closure but the effect of a surplus passion that opens us toward life.

      punishment originally presupposes measurability of injury and of enjoyment... The presupposition of guilt is that enjoyment as such is not measurable (which could also mean that it is infinite or unattainable), that it has no equivalent.

1344. #1344

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.87

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

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sublimation is not a surrogate for drive-satisfaction but *is* drive-satisfaction, and that the Real is located in the interval between the object of satisfaction and satisfaction-as-object; collapsing this gap in either direction (fetishism or Don Juan's hyper-realization) generates the superego injunction to enjoy. She then pivots to Nietzsche's figure of the "middle" (noon/midday) as a non-synthetic beyond that parallels this Lacanian logic of constitutive duality.

      the question is how to escape the imperative of enjoyment, if—as Freud has so brilliantly shown—every new renunciation, every 'no' of this kind, has the effect of involving us even more deeply in this logic of the Superego.

1345. #1345

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.195

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

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

      It relayed what the Roman, a mason like no other, had founded on the basis of a miraculous, universal balance, including baths of jouissance sufficiently symbolized by those famous thermal baths

1346. #1346

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.183

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

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

      The Real of desire is jouissance—that 'inhuman partner' (as Lacan calls it) that desire aims at beyond its object, and that must remain inaccessible. Love, on the other hand, is what somehow manages to make the Real of desire accessible.

1347. #1347

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.86

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

      Theoretical move: Sublimation is redefined not as a turning-away from drives but as the creation of a space in which what is excluded by the reality principle—objects elevated to the dignity of the Thing—can be valued; this space is identified as the very gap that prevents reality from coinciding with itself (the Real), whose closure produces a Superego imperative of enjoyment rather than liberation.

      since there is nothing beyond the reality (principle), we have to enjoy each and every moment of it. And there is no need to point out that this imperative of enjoyment is the surest way to make any enjoyment impossible.

1348. #1348

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.73

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that modern "hedonism" is structurally grounded in the ascetic ideal (passive nihilism), and pivots to the Lacanian concept of sublimation—understood as the creation of new values by "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing"—to show that what Kant dismisses as mere pathological desire can carry the same structure as moral duty, thereby reframing the ethics of desire against Kantian moralism.

      Products of this kind are the perfect response to the double-bind that defines the core and frame of nihilism: on the one hand, the imperative 'Enjoy!,' and, on the other, the reminder that we are also constantly bombarded with: 'Enjoyment can kill you!'

1349. #1349

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.71

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that nihilism is not a general category subdivided into active and passive forms, but names precisely the mortifying tension between "willing nothingness" (active nihilism as passion for the Real) and "not willing" (passive nihilism as sedative defense against surplus excitement); these two forms are co-dependent and mutually constitutive, with passive nihilism requiring active nihilism as its inherent Other.

      there is, on the one hand, the imperative or the need for excitement, the need to be in touch with the 'Real,' to 'feel life' as vividly as possible, to feel awake

1350. #1350

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.60

      **Object Relations Psychoanalysis** > **The Other of the Other**

      Theoretical move: The passage assembles a keyword-style theoretical compendium covering four major Lacanian concepts — the Other of the Other, Orientalism, Phenomenology, and the Phallus — arguing above all that the Phallus is a paradoxical signifier of exception whose apparent mastery/phallic authority is illusory, dependent on a veil and collective obedience, and structurally tied to castration, lack, and the death drive.

      not only do they not have any anxiety, not only are they not afraid of it, they fully enjoy being it. They are truly fearless entities beyond life and death, gladly assuming their immortality, their non-castrated life energy

1351. #1351

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.53

      **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 impossible substance of enjoyment, conceptualized by Lacan in terms of the (partial) object *a.* Object *a* is not a sexual object. Rather it is *a-*sexual.

1352. #1352

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.84

      **Transference**

      Theoretical move: The passage makes two theoretical moves: first, it extends Lacan's reformulation of transference via the 'subject supposed to know' from the clinical dyad to the reader-text relation, arguing that reading is structurally transferential; second, it argues—against a scarcity model of trauma—that psychoanalysis locates the real source of trauma in excess (especially excess jouissance/sexuality), not in physical suffering or deprivation.

      All of Freud's patients experienced an overabundance of sexual stimulus that they couldn't integrate into their psychic lives

1353. #1353

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.7

      **Anxiety**

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

      The lack of full enjoyment that every subject has as a result of being subjected to the restrictions of the social order

1354. #1354

      Theory Keywords · Various

      **Contradiction** > **Das Ding**

      Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes Das Ding as the inaccessible core of the mother's desire (an ominous unknown) from objet petit a, contrasting the Thing as an inescapable sublime presence in the visual field against objet petit a as a constitutive absence irreducible to that field.

      The Thing embodying the ultimate enjoyment.

1355. #1355

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.19

      **Demand** > **Drive**

      Theoretical move: The passage constructs a composite theoretical account of the Freudian/Lacanian drive by distinguishing its structural components (pressure, aim, object, source), separating it from instinct/need, and establishing its paradoxical logic: the drive is never satisfied by reaching its object but finds satisfaction in its own circular, repetitive movement—making every drive simultaneously sexual and a death drive.

      The real source of enjoyment is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit. Therein consists the paradox of Sisyphus.

1356. #1356

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.34

      **Fantasy** > **Gaze**

      Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the Lacanian gaze not as subjective mastery over the visual field but as the objet petit a within that field—the point where the subject's unconscious desire distorts what is seen, implicating the subject in the very scene from which it imagines itself safely distant, and thereby exposing the unnatural, ideologically constituted character of apparent visual neutrality.

      film can use fantasy to expose an enjoyment hidden by the power of ideology.

1357. #1357

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.30

      **Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorised as the subject's orchestration of its relation to objet petit a and the Other's desire, with the purpose of producing jouissance — an excitement that exceeds the pleasure/pain binary and may manifest as disgust or horror, as Freud's Rat Man case illustrates.

      That excitement, whether correlated with a conscious feeling of pleasure or pain, is what the French call jouissance.

1358. #1358

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.26

      **Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized not as wish-fulfillment but as the structural support of desire itself: it constitutes the subject as desiring by providing the coordinates of desire, answers the enigma of the Other's desire, bridges the subject to the impossible lost object, and functions as the necessary supplement to ideology by rendering social dissatisfaction bearable through imaginary enjoyment.

      fantasy allows the subject to glimpse an otherwise inaccessible enjoyment...The function of fantasy is to render the impossible object accessible for the subject. In doing so, fantasy provides a way for the subject to enjoy itself that would be unthinkable outside of fantasy.

1359. #1359

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.50

      **Natural Consciousness (Hegel)**

      Theoretical move: The passage develops three interlocking theoretical moves: (1) Natural Consciousness as the unreflective, common-sense baseline of the Hegelian dialectic; (2) Negation as productive/determinate — preserving what it cancels and driving Spirit forward through Aufhebung; and (3) the Neighbor (Nebenmensch) as the site where the Other's jouissance threatens the subject, and where true universality is recast as a universality of alienated, inhuman strangers rather than humanist commonality.

      Because, Lacan argues, his jouissance is a threat to our own. Because, Zizek adds, we do not like our own enjoyment.

1360. #1360

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.80

      **Surplus-***jouissance*

      Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary chunk that defines and illustrates multiple Lacanian and related theoretical concepts — Surplus-jouissance, Surplus Repression, Structuralism, Symbolic Castration, Symbolic Identity, Symbolic Order, and Symptom — each entry doing distinct theoretical work: homologizing Marx's surplus-labour with Lacan's surplus-jouissance via the entropic Real; distinguishing the Symbolic from the Imaginary and Real orders; and articulating the symptom's double function as both repressive and gratificatory.

      it is precisely as an amorphous and intrinsically 'virtual' power lacking presence that we should associate with the entropic Real of jouissance.

1361. #1361

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.82

      **Surplus-***jouissance*

      Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary chunk that defines and illustrates multiple Lacanian and related theoretical concepts — Surplus-jouissance, Surplus Repression, Structuralism, Symbolic Castration, Symbolic Identity, Symbolic Order, and Symptom — each entry doing distinct theoretical work: homologizing Marx's surplus-labour with Lacan's surplus-jouissance via the entropic Real; distinguishing the Symbolic from the Imaginary and Real orders; and articulating the symptom's double function as both repressive and gratificatory.

      each character enjoys the position in a way that he is not supposed to...the stain of enjoyment resides in the structure of symbolic authority rather than in the particular subject that inhabits the position.

1362. #1362

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.79

      **Substance**

      Theoretical move: The passage develops two interconnected theoretical moves: first, via Hegel, it establishes that substance is essentially subject through self-equality as thinking; second, and more extensively, it elaborates the paradoxical structure of the superego as simultaneously the law and its transgression, an obscene agency whose insatiable imperative is not prohibition but the command to enjoy (jouissance), drawing on Freud's two fathers (Oedipal and primal) to ground this contradiction.

      The superego is the imperative of jouissance. Enjoy! (Lacan, Seminar XX: Encore, 3)

1363. #1363

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.79

      **Substance**

      Theoretical move: The passage develops two interconnected theoretical moves: first, via Hegel, it establishes that substance is essentially subject through self-equality as thinking; second, and more extensively, it elaborates the paradoxical structure of the superego as simultaneously the law and its transgression, an obscene agency whose insatiable imperative is not prohibition but the command to enjoy (jouissance), drawing on Freud's two fathers (Oedipal and primal) to ground this contradiction.

      The most fundamental function of the superego and the law: they act as vehicles for our enjoyment through the limits that they establish.

1364. #1364

      Theory Keywords · Various

      **Sublime**

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that while capitalism ostensibly operates under a logic of self-interest and utility, the commodity itself generates a paradoxical "capitalist sublime" that depends on a break from utility — thereby inverting Kant's sublime (which bridges self-transcendence to morality) into an immanent, fetishistic form that nonetheless captures subjects through the commodity's inutility.

      There is no path back to pure use. Though capitalism presents itself as a regime dominated by utility, the capitalist sublime depends on a thoroughgoing break from this utility.

1365. #1365

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.41

      **Interpellation**

      Theoretical move: This passage works through a cluster of interrelated concepts—Interpellation, Lack, Lamella, Law of the Father, and Les Non-Dupes Errent—to argue that subjectivity is constituted by a structural loss (lack) that is simultaneously the condition for desire, jouissance, and signification, and that any attempt to eliminate this lack (as in utopian projects) is self-defeating because satisfaction is always mediated through loss.

      the subject lacks, it cannot find satisfaction in the way that other living beings do. Instead, it enjoys too much, and its every act is marked by this excessive satisfaction.

1366. #1366

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.31

      **Fantasy** > **Fetish**

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

      The other enjoying a commodity that we don't have displays an image of non-lacking enjoyment. The illusory nature of this enjoyment becomes clear once I acquire the commodity for myself

1367. #1367

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.23

      **Demand** > **Drive** > **Enjoyment/***Jouissance*

      Theoretical move: Jouissance is theorized as a structural excess irreducible to the pleasure principle—a paradoxical satisfaction-in-dissatisfaction that inextricably binds pleasure and pain, is constituted in relation to the symbolic limit (rather than merely through its transgression), and marks the subject's foundational disconnection from the symbolic order, functioning as the only measure of human freedom.

      jouissance. It qualifies the kind of 'kick' someone may get out of punishment, self-punishment, doing something that is so pleasurable it hurts (sexual climax, for example), or doing something that is so painful it becomes pleasurable.

1368. #1368

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.58

      **Object Relations Psychoanalysis**

      Theoretical move: The passage makes two interlocking theoretical moves: (1) it critiques Object Relations Psychoanalysis for treating the lost object as empirically contingent rather than ontologically constitutive, contrasting Fairbairn's 'paradise lost' with Freud's priority of loss; (2) it elaborates the big Other as the symbolic order that mediates desire, whose constitutive non-existence is the very condition of both freedom and capitalist ideology's grip on the subject.

      I don't necessarily imagine myself surrounded by adoring women, but I do imagine the Other seeing my choice and approving it.

1369. #1369

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.64

      **The Real**

      Theoretical move: The passage constructs a multi-dimensional account of the Lacanian Real as neither a pre-existing thing-in-itself nor a deeper truth behind appearances, but as the structural impossibility immanent to the symbolic order itself—the gap, antagonism, or point of failure that prevents any symbolic totalization, traumatizes both subject and big Other, and paradoxically grounds the subject's freedom from ideological subjection.

      Its subjective impact Lacan calls jouissance…Far from being locatable within the coordinates of ordinary reality, the Lacanian real is precisely what the predictable fabric of everyday reality functions to keep at a distance.

1370. #1370

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.89

      **Transference** > **Unconscious**

      Theoretical move: The passage advances a multi-pronged account of the Lacanian unconscious: it is structured like a language (via the metaphor/metonymy–condensation/displacement homology), it is spatial and relational (between subject and Other), it operates independently of meaning/signification, and its logic can be extended to critique ideological systems like capitalism where surface avowals conceal the real engine (loss/sacrifice) driving the system.

      While the accumulating subject aims at obtaining satisfaction in the future, the subject satisfies itself in the present through the sacrifices that it makes to obtain the object it seeks.

1371. #1371

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.44

      **Interpellation** > **Little Other**

      Theoretical move: The passage works through four related concepts—the little other as site of quasi-traumatic subjectivity-formation, the lost object as the structural condition of desire and enjoyment, phallic jouissance as the masculine structure of constitutive dissatisfaction, masochism as sadistic reversal, and the master signifier as the empty signifier that initiates the symbolic order and organizes enjoyment through exclusion—demonstrating that lack, loss, and emptiness are not failures of the system but its generative engine.

      We are plagued as subjects by the anxiety that our jouissance – our pleasure or enjoyment – is never enough. In other words, we are driven by an inherent dissatisfaction and sense of insufficiency.

1372. #1372

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.18

      **Contradiction** > **Death drive**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'death drive' is a misleading label for Freud's genuine insight that the subject's satisfaction is constitutively tied to loss and failure rather than to any literal desire for death; Lacan radicalises this by identifying every partial drive as a death drive insofar as it returns to and repeats the experience of loss.

      Without the lost object, the subject would lose what animates it and the source of its enjoyment.

1373. #1373

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.2

      **Absolute Knowing (Hegel)**

      Theoretical move: This passage functions as a keyword glossary, establishing the theoretical content of three interrelated Lacanian/Hegelian concepts—Absolute Knowing, Alienation, and Adaptation—by tracing how each turns on a constitutive negativity: the subject's limit is integral to its understanding, alienation is the very condition of subjectivity rather than something to be overcome, and the human disconnection from environment (jouissance/death drive) is what distinguishes us from animals.

      how to manage the constitutively unmanageable libidinal surplus produced the very moment we say 'I' - the moment we enter the social link and become self-conscious beings

1374. #1374

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

      Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Sublimation, Jouissance, and “Real” Satisfaction

      Theoretical move: The passage argues against collapsing desire into the drive (as Žižek does), contending instead that a second, non-alienated form of desire—one that approaches but does not merge with the drive—is the basis of Lacanian ethics and provides the subject with "real," partial satisfaction through sublimation acting as a shield that transmits tolerable doses of jouissance.

      sublimation retains a smidgeon of jouissance without allowing it to overwhelm the subject.

1375. #1375

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible](#contents.xhtml_ch12) > Hopelessness and Jouissance: Repetition and Lack

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's "courage of hopelessness" is not despair but a politically radical form of hope grounded in the psychoanalytic structure of repetition (drive) and jouissance: by locating crisis and lack in the present rather than deferring them to the future, the subject is forced to act, unleashing unactualized potential that can rupture the established symbolic coordinates of the possible.

      repetition of failure produces jouissance—painful enjoyment that lies 'beyond the pleasure principle.'

1376. #1376

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>} > Notes

      Theoretical move: This notes section for a chapter on Lacan's das Ding provides a scholarly apparatus that triangulates das Ding across multiple Lacan seminars, Freud's Standard Edition, Hegel's Jena Lectures, and Heidegger, while also proposing theoretical extensions: that das Ding inhabits both subject and Other (rewriting the fantasy formula as $ a <>), that the Subject Supposed to Know functions to cover over das Ding, and that the Heimlich/Unheimlich parallels the mother/Thing relation.

      Lacan thus remarks that 'what we find in the incest law is located as such at the level of the unconscious in relation to das Ding'

1377. #1377

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.21

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

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

      If Žižek maintains that 'desire and jouissance are inherently antagonistic,' the author argues that the Lacanian ethical subject—a subject that is also a creative, galvanized subject—arises at the intersection of these concepts.

1378. #1378

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

      Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

      Theoretical move: The passage mounts a systematic critique of Žižek's reading of Lacan, arguing that his central ethical axiom "Do not give up on your desire!" is a fundamental misreading of Seminar VII, and that his use of Antigone as a paradigm for contingent, concrete-universal socio-political transformation is undermined both by internal inconsistencies and by a close reading of Sophocles' text.

      the promiscuous Juliette giving herself over to enjoyment beyond all limits.

1379. #1379

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.8

      Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > A Threefold Cord: Lacan, Hegel, Marx

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's thought pivots on a triangulation of Lacan, Hegel, and Marx, with the Real and the Death Drive as central categories: the Real (as internal distortion of the Symbolic) and the Death Drive (as self-negating negativity equated with Hegelian dialectics) together ground Žižek's psychoanalytic politics and his defence of subjectivity against poststructuralist dissolution.

      The real, for Žižek, is the source of enjoyment or jouissance. Enjoyment determines how subjects act.

1380. #1380

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.277

      Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Salvaging Our Dignity

      Theoretical move: Against Žižek, the passage argues that the objet petit a—by arresting the infinite sliding of the signifier and fixing the subject to its fundamental fantasy—is an ethical force that salvages the subject's dignity and individuality, positioning the ethics of psychoanalysis as an ethics of desire faithful to das Ding rather than to the master's morality or the Other's desire.

      the ethics of psychoanalysis is an ethics of desire, of faithfulness to the Thing as the arbitrator of the kind of desire that is related to jouissance (rather than the Other's desire or the master's morality).

1381. #1381

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.227

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

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

      we can break out of it? Yes, but then this will no longer be sexuality as we understand it, it will be a totally different economy of pleasures.

1382. #1382

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.233

      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.

      The basic paradox of jouissance is that it is both impossible and unavoidable: it is never fully achieved, always missed, but, simultaneously, we never can get rid of it.

1383. #1383

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

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

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

      the symptom is also the path through a system structures its enjoyment

1384. #1384

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.293

      Žižek Responds! > [Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible](#contents.xhtml_ch12) > Potentiality, Otherwise, and Muñoz

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's politics of hopelessness and Muñoz's queer utopianism converge on a shared political direction—the "otherwise" or "potential"—by distinguishing drive-based jouissance (which enacts loss itself) from desire-based hope (which pursues the lost object), and showing that repetition as jouissance keeps radical potential open by thwarting symbolic closure rather than cementing fantasy.

      Perhaps these 'better pleasures' have more in common with the jouissance beyond the pleasure principle (if not at the level content, then at the level of function) than at first appears.

1385. #1385

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.311

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

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

      what we confront are rather singular modes of jouissance. We no longer live in a world where the category of truth makes any sense

1386. #1386

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.304

      Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the War in an Era of Generalized Foreclosure](#contents.xhtml_ch13)^{<a href="#13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_en13-1" id="13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_nr13-1">1</a>}

      Theoretical move: Rousselle argues that the contemporary era is defined by "generalized foreclosure" — a structural condition in which the Lacanian foreclosure of castration/lack has become universal, rendering civil war and political uprising impossible, dissolving the symbolic space of truth, and producing a politics of "known knowns" driven by singular modes of jouissance rather than shared symbolic worlds.

      what we confront are rather singular modes of jouissance. We no longer live in a world where the category of truth makes any sense

1387. #1387

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.158

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

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

      the intrusion into the political can only be made by recognizing that the only discourse there is […] is the discourse of jouissance

1388. #1388

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

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

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Rousselle's thesis of "generalized foreclosure" by showing that symbolic castration and the Name-of-the-Father remain operative at local levels of social exchange, while tracking a contemporary structural shift from symbolic Law to superego at multiple levels (family, international relations, nation-state); he further argues that Rousselle's position is self-defeating because it forecloses the transformative role of knowledge itself.

      we are not all singularities, islands of jouissance, with no shared symbolic pact sustaining us

1389. #1389

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.308

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

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Rousselle's (and Miller's) thesis of "generalized foreclosure" characterizing the current political era, contending that the symbolic order remains operative—as evidenced by political censorship that still works through metaphoric substitution (absence standing in for prohibited content)—and that the Iraq WMD and Ukraine "bio-labs" narratives function as Hitchcockian MacGuffins rather than psychotic foreclosures.

      It relates to a mode of jouissance outside of any scope of truth or meaningful fiction.

1390. #1390

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

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

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

      Cigarette smoking and wig wearing are surplus pleasures which form the way of life of certain communities

1391. #1391

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

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

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

      Is Laibach a one-size-fits all of ideological critique; a kind of 'Ode to Authoritarian Enjoyment'?

1392. #1392

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.283

      Žižek Responds! > [Response to Ruti](#contents.xhtml_ch11a)

      Theoretical move: Žižek rejects Ruti's prioritization of desire over drive (and her reading of sublimation as 'taming' of the Thing into objet a), arguing instead that desire and drive are co-dependent parallax terms—neither more primordial—both being reactions to the same irreducible gap, while also insisting that 'desire of the Other' must be read at imaginary, symbolic, and real levels, and that lack is the lack in the Other itself, not merely the subject's own.

      Jouissance has nothing to do with ennobling principles or values; it is much more a set of dirty small pleasures, more often disgusting than not

1393. #1393

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.253

      Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

      Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs scholarly philological critique of Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade," documenting systematic misattributions, citation errors, and misreadings across Žižek's corpus while tracking the precise textual sources in Sade, Lacan's Seminar VII, and related literature for concepts such as the second death, desire, alienation/separation, and the quadripartite structure of Lacanian theory.

      what is at stake is the absolute, total, irreversible extermination of all traces of life

1394. #1394

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.251

      Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

      Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly endnotes section for a chapter on Žižek's interpretation of Lacan's "Kant with Sade," providing bibliographic citations for key arguments about the Kant-Sade relationship, Lacan's ethics, desire, and perversion — it is primarily reference material but indexes the theoretical terrain of the chapter.

      Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 232.

1395. #1395

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

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

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

      an underside that gives ideology its libidinal hold on subjects

1396. #1396

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

      Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > The Dignity of the Thing

      Theoretical move: Against Žižek's insistence on an unbridgeable chasm between the Thing and worldly objects, the passage argues that sublimation—raising a mundane object to the dignity of the Thing—is not mere idealization but a genuine "realization" of the real within reality, and that "not giving way on desire" means choosing the singularity of one's jouissance/sinthome rather than automatically switching to the register of the drive.

      thereby evacuating our existence of all possibility of non-destructive jouissance

1397. #1397

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.10

      Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > The Jester’s Epistemic Stance

      Theoretical move: Žižek's reformulation of the death drive as the eternal core of subjectivity—finding jouissance in failure and repetition rather than success—grounds his critique of ideology, which operates not through false consciousness but through fantasmatic enjoyment that sustains social authority; the political act of over-conformity to the public letter of the law, refusing its obscene underside, is presented as the path to breaking ideology's hold.

      The subject finds satisfaction or jouissance in failure rather than success as a result of the death drive.

1398. #1398

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.242

      Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

      Theoretical move: The passage maps Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade" as a three-ring itinerary, arguing that Žižek's key theoretical contribution is to foreground the more implicit and disturbing second principle—that Kant is the truth of Sade (Sade as closet Kantian)—over the better-known first principle (Sade as the truth of Kant), and connects this to the concept of the "second death" as a condition for radical creation ex nihilo.

      the Kantian quality of the libertines' desire, which translates into an absolute 'will to jouissance,' is tantamount to its purification

1399. #1399

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

      Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade" is incomplete: while Žižek identifies two reasons for the impurity of Sadean jouissance, Lacan's text advances four deeper observations about the fundamental bankruptcy of libertine ideology, and crucially, Lacan accepts the deadlock between alienation and separation as inescapable, whereas Žižek transforms it into a contingency to be resolved through a reconceptualization of the ethical act.

      Sade's vision of an emancipated desire and its associated unconditional will to jouissance can only be realized at the level of particularity.

1400. #1400

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

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

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

      They openly enjoy it. That's the traumatic message of Laibach, staging the Real of power… Enjoyment in proto-fascist rituals deprived of their ideological coating is the most efficient way to undermine ideology

1401. #1401

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.222

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of subjectivity, while providing a powerful diagnosis of capitalist modernity through the lens of the death drive, constitutive negativity, and commodity fetishism, remains insufficiently concrete for emancipatory politics because it lacks an account of the determinate social forms of capitalism and a theory of how the incomplete, anxious subject can become a revolutionary agent — a gap that neither Lacan nor Marx alone can fill.

      the transformation of the individual from a self-reflexive subject to a narcissistic subject of enjoyment

1402. #1402

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.220

      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.

      Žižek's 'gap in reality' has to be extended to engage with the question of the body and how it is conceived psychoanalytically… the body becomes the extimate site of intersection of language and enjoyment for the subject.

1403. #1403

      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 excerpt from the edited volume "Žižek Responds!" listing terms and proper names (D–H) with hyperlinked page references across chapters.

      enjoyment [here](#introduction.xhtml_IDX-225)...[here](#12_hoping_against_hope_iek_jouissance_and_the_impossible.xhtml_IDX-244)

1404. #1404

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.128

      Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > The Bright Side of Stalinism

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Stalinism's "inner greatness" lies in its formal structure of self-directed violence—power targeting itself rather than external enemies—and proposes this as a template for theorizing emancipatory governance that institutionalizes self-critique, illustrated by the concept of an "Emendation" system that structurally exposes the lack in the Subject Supposed to Know.

      This is why prisoners in the gulag would sing 'Happy Birthday' to Stalin, but one could not imagine a parallel event taking place in a Nazi concentration camp for Hitler.

1405. #1405

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.269

      Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > A Case for Sublimation

      Theoretical move: Against Žižek's reading that desire is merely a compromise formation and a retreat from the drive, the passage argues that sublimation constitutes the "shared space" where desire can appropriate jouissance through the objet a — not in its mortifying/uncanny dimension but in its sublime dimension — thereby opening a more affirmative Lacanian ethics grounded in desire rather than the destructive act.

      desire, at least the kind of desire that is capable of inducing the subject to act, consists of sublimated jouissance which has become attached to people, ideals, and principles.

1406. #1406

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

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

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

      this involvement with the commodity, one so alluring that we forget entirely to think through how it was created, is clearly more about enjoyment than it is about knowledge.

1407. #1407

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

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Israeli refuseniks' refusal to treat Palestinians as racialized others constitutes a genuine ethical act that de-racializes Palestinians (transforming them from homines sacri into neighbors), exposes the lack in the Symbolic order of Zionism, and embodies a universalist "part of no-part" position that decompletes Zionist ideology—against both liberal humanist inclusion and nationalist organicism.

      de-racialize the Palestinians is to insist on treating them on equal footing … 'Love the Palestinian' produces an affective excess, a visceral ethical feeling

1408. #1408

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.131

      Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > The Bright Side of Stalinism

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of the radical act—modeled on self-directed violence (Fight Club)—remains incomplete because it never theorizes what emancipatory governance looks like after the revolutionary act; the author proposes extending that self-directed violence into a "rule of violence" as a structural principle of post-revolutionary power.

      We have yet to invent a form of power violent enough to be adequate for our emancipation.

1409. #1409

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.292

      Žižek Responds! > [Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible](#contents.xhtml_ch12) > Present Hopelessness/Present Satisfaction

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the apparent contradiction between Žižek's politics of hopelessness and McGowan's advocacy for present satisfaction is resolved by foregrounding constitutive loss as the condition of jouissance: pleasures are ideologically conservative only when they function as salves for loss, but become potentially radical when their necessary relation to loss—repeated in drive rather than concealed by desire—is inhabited.

      In drive, by contrast, subjective loss is repeated (generating jouissance) rather than concealed.

1410. #1410

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.218

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

      Theoretical move: Bou Ali reconstructs Žižek's theory of the subject as a non-ontological point of negativity that is extimate to symbolic structure, correlative to the objet a as object-cause of desire, and grounded in the retroactive (Nachträglichkeit) constitution of the Real as cause—arguing further that this account of subjectivity is inseparable from Lacanian sexuation, read against both Hegelian dialectics and Kantian antinomies.

      in this attempt to symbolize its sexuality, or, in other words, identify its desire, the subject stumbles upon a mode of enjoyment, the jouissance that drives it.

1411. #1411

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

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

      Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage listing proper names and Lacanian sub-concepts with their page/anchor references across the volume; it is non-substantive and performs no theoretical argument.

      *jouissance* [here](#introduction.xhtml_IDX-693), [here](#introduction.xhtml_IDX-694), [here](#introduction.xhtml_IDX-695)

1412. #1412

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Risks of Irony](#contents.xhtml_ch2) > Introduction

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's anti-systematic, dialectically ironic mode of philosophy—while genuinely innovative in re-founding dialectics as a discipline—risks collapsing into a "negative philosophy" or ironic stance that undermines reason itself, a charge framed through Pippin's critique that Žižek misreads Hegel by importing a negativist ontology alien to German Idealism.

      he explains the impact of enjoyment as a political factor

1413. #1413

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.279

      Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Conclusion

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of desire—grounded in the lost Thing—explains the idiosyncratic, counterproductive, and socially defiant dimensions of desire that ideology critique (à la Žižek) cannot account for, because such desire exceeds the logic of the Other's desire and resists instrumentalization by capitalist-neoliberal imperatives.

      why we attach ourselves to objects that do not even bother to promise happiness, that are frank about the fact that they will never make us happy

1414. #1414

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible](#contents.xhtml_ch12)

      Theoretical move: Friedlander argues that Žižek's radical politics depends on a conjunction of hope and jouissance, where both are structured around temporality, lack, and repetition — and that reading Žižek alongside queer theory (Muñoz) reveals how hope and jouissance together enable the 'impossible' to be both encountered and enacted.

      Žižek's development of a radical politics depends upon both hope (with an emphasis less on the future than on the potential of the past and present) and jouissance (figured in terms of repetition).

1415. #1415

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.268

      Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11)

      Theoretical move: Mari Ruti challenges Žižek's categorical elevation of drive over desire by arguing that his distinction is too strongly drawn: desire is not intrinsically normative, and the ethical act requires an object of desire to arrest jouissance and motivate action—something a self-enclosed drive, by its circular structure, cannot supply alone.

      the ethical 'act' would be extremely unlikely to take place without the presence of an object of desire—a person, ideal, or principle—that captures, and hence arrests, the subject's jouissance to such an extent that it feels compelled to act against its own interests.

1416. #1416

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

      Theoretical move: Boothby argues, against Žižek's ontological/ontic assignment, that das Ding is purely ontological (the originary opening of the human relation to being-as-such) while objet petit a is the ontic element that opens onto an ontological horizon—and that the two form an essential couplet rather than independent concepts, with objet a "tickling das Ding from the inside."

      the monstrous and the anamorphotic

1417. #1417

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

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

      Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for the introduction to *Žižek Responds!*, providing bibliographic references for secondary literature on Žižek and brief editorial glosses on key theoretical commitments (ideology's obscene underside, antagonism, theory's belatedness); it is primarily citational apparatus rather than an original theoretical argument.

      identification with the specific form of transgression of the Law, of its suspension (in psychoanalytic terms, with the specific form of enjoyment)

1418. #1418

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.202

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

      Theoretical move: By threading Derrida's concept of autoimmunity through Žižek's critique of the refugee crisis, the passage argues that genuine political engagement requires acknowledging the constitutive non-coincidence of the self (autoimmunity), which simultaneously grounds the impossibility of pure identity/community and enables the global class solidarity that must replace both liberal humanitarianism and right-wing nativism.

      the other's jouissance is insupportable for us because (and insofar as) we cannot find a proper way to relate to our own jouissance.

1419. #1419

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.164

      [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.

      The appeal of identity politics is not that it provides a path for us to defend ourselves against an encroaching enemy but that it erects an enemy against which we can struggle.

1420. #1420

      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.

      capitalism acts as the most intransigent barrier to recognizing the universal

1421. #1421

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.155

      [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.

      Identity is nothing without the factor of enjoyment... The enjoyment derives from the sense of belonging that the identity exudes, the belonging that emerges when the Other recognizes us as having a certain identity.

1422. #1422

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.158

      [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > **WE DO THE CONCENTRATING**

      Theoretical move: By taking Nazism as the paradigm of identity politics rather than of universalism, McGowan argues that identitarian projects are structurally self-defeating: they require the very other they aim to eliminate in order to constitute their own identity, so that success is always simultaneously failure.

      Nazism allows us to see how identity politics offers enjoyment to its adherents and why an identity is always incompatible with other particular identities.

1423. #1423

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.131

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

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

      when the rich accumulate, the rich do the accumulating while capitalism does the enjoying.

1424. #1424

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.180

      [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **THE JORDAN RULES**

      Theoretical move: McGowan inverts the standard charge of "identity politics": what conservatives and liberals denounce as particularist identity politics is often covert universalism, while the critics' own appeals to unity and hierarchy are themselves the true form of particularist identity politics — establishing that the real political axis is universal vs. particular, not identity vs. non-identity.

      he enables his listeners to enjoy their identity and believe themselves to be critics of identity politics at the same time.

1425. #1425

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.148

      [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.

      The appeal to identity is capitalism's secret sauce... Projects of identity politics are essential for the flourishing of capitalism. Capitalist subjectivity is a bland particularity that has difficulty sustaining the enthusiasm of adherents.

1426. #1426

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.203

      [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.

      We can choose to isolate ourselves in our particularity or avow the universal.

1427. #1427

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.195

      [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **A PARTICULAR GUISE**

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that genuine universality is not achieved through total inclusion of all particulars but is instead revealed through those who don't belong to a public institution; drawing on psychoanalysis, he shows that embracing lack—rather than overcoming it—is the condition for both subjective satisfaction and emancipatory universalist politics.

      Embracing my lack is simultaneously unleashing an excess that is integral to my satisfaction.

1428. #1428

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.169

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

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

      Racial identity has a creative power that any turn to universalism eradicates... Their fight against communism is thus a fight not for survival or for power but for the basis of value itself within their identitarian project.

1429. #1429

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.66

      [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.

      the enjoyment of showing up colleagues who fail to follow orders as promptly or as efficiently. In this way, the conforming employee would contribute to the disorder of the company rather than its efficiency.

1430. #1430

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.157

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

      Theoretical move: Identity enjoyment is structurally dependent on ostracism — the exclusion of an other — making peaceful coexistence of particularist identities a structural impossibility rather than a merely practical difficulty, since identity without an excluded enemy cannot function as a site of enjoyment.

      Identity can't apply to everyone and still be a site of enjoyment.

1431. #1431

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.129

      [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > **A NEW FORM OF OBEDIENCE**

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism inaugurates a historically novel form of obedience in which the structuring principle reproduces itself unconsciously through subjects' pursuit of private particular interest, making self-deception not merely useful but structurally necessary—and thereby rendering insistence on particularity the new mode of conformism rather than resistance.

      Capital uses traders to develop itself while leaving them with a lingering dissatisfaction that they never have enough.

1432. #1432

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.113

      Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the death drive involves two distinct splits—the genesis of surplus satisfaction from organic need, and a constitutive negativity (inbuilt lack of being) around which the drive circulates—and that satisfaction/enjoyment is not the goal but the *means* of the drive, whose true aim is the repetition of negativity; this reframes the death drive not as a return to the inanimate but as the opening of alternative paths to death beyond those immanent in the organism.

      not because it wants to destroy life, but because 'it' wants to enjoy. This in fact explains one side of the genesis of the object of the drive

1433. #1433

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.60

      Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation are not about anatomical or cultural difference but about two distinct logical configurations of the same constitutive minus (castration/phallic function) intrinsic to the signifying order, such that sexual difference is ontological rather than secondary—and that feminine jouissance marks precisely the place where the Other's lack is inscribed in the Other itself, functioning as the signifier of missing knowledge rather than as an obstacle to the sexual relation.

      The primordial Father is mythical in the precise sense that it is a necessary presupposition (and retrospective image) of the very notion of renunciation. Everyone has to give up what they never had—yet the form of giving it up is nonetheless essential.

1434. #1434

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.39

      <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

      Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Platonov's fictional Anti-Sexus device to demonstrate that enjoyment and the Other are irreducibly co-implicated (each is "in" the other), making the non-relation not an absence of relation but a constitutive bias or curvature of discursive space—and thereby refuting both the revolutionary fantasy of liberating humanity from sexuality and the liberal-democratic ideology of neutral pluralism.

      enjoyment is 'in' the Other, but when we look 'in' the enjoyment, there is also the Other 'in' it, and so on.…Enjoyment is in the Other, and the Other is in enjoyment.

1435. #1435

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.76

      Contradictions that Matter > Hm…

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the apparent opposition between equivocity (Cassin) and formalization/univocity (Badiou) in Lacan is false: equivocity is not the opposite of formalization but its very condition, since the "right word" in analytic interpretation functions like a formula by targeting the singular impasse/contradiction that the symptom "solves," rather than by conveying a determinate meaning.

      The right (equivocal) word 'bores a hole' because it repeats/names the enjoyment that holds ('glues') different meanings together in a symptomatic way.

1436. #1436

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.78

      Contradictions that Matter > Hm…

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacanian formalization is not a truth *about* the Real but the formalization of the impasse of formalization itself—the point where speech "holds onto" the Real through its own impossibility—and that the proper psychoanalytic position is not passive acceptance of contradiction but active engagement with it, taking one's place within it as the condition of emancipation.

      to spoil for him the symptomatic enjoyment invested in this scene of the domestic quarrel and its anticipation.

1437. #1437

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič

      From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel > Chapter 1

      Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes section for Chapter 1, containing bibliographic references and brief clarificatory remarks; it is non-substantive as a standalone theoretical argument.

      The 'doctrine speaks of the incarnation of God in a body, and assumes that the passion suffered in that person constituted another person's jouissance' (Lacan 1999, 113).

1438. #1438

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.22

      It's Getting Strange in Here … > Christianity and Polymorphous Perversity

      Theoretical move: Zupančič inverts the standard account of religion vs. drive sexuality: Christianity does not repress partial drives but rather represses the *link* between enjoyment and sexuality, because what is truly threatening is not perverse jouissance but the ontological negativity of the sexual relation (the missing signifier), which registers in reality as the unconscious. Humanity is thus not an exception to Nature but the site where Nature's own lack of sexual knowledge acquires its singular epistemic—unconscious—form.

      everything is exhibition of the body evoking jouissance—and you can lend credence to the testimony of someone who has just come back from an orgy of churches in Italy—but without copulation.

1439. #1439

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.11

      What Is Sex? > <span id="page-9-0"></span>Introduction

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sublimation demonstrates that satisfaction in non-sexual activity is identical to—not a substitute for—sexual satisfaction, which forces a properly philosophical and ontological re-examination of what sex *is*; sex is reframed not as a content but as a structural contradiction immanent to reality itself, making it the privileged "position" from which psychoanalysis theorizes the real.

      the activity is different, yet the satisfaction is exactly the same

1440. #1440

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.51

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

      Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacan's Real is irreducible to Butler's performative ontology because the emergence of the signifying order is coextensive with a constitutive gap (a "minus one"), and it is precisely at this place of the missing signifier that surplus-enjoyment arises — making sexuality not a being beyond the symbolic but the contradictory effect of the symbolic's own structural impossibility, which is what is lost when "sex" is translated into "gender."

      enjoyment…does not relate to it directly, but via its constitutive negativity (a minus one). This negativity is the Real of the junction between the (missing) signifier and enjoyment; and the conceptual name for this configuration in psychoanalysis is sexuality (or the sexual).

1441. #1441

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.33

      <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Quandary of the Relation

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Lacanian "there is no sexual relation" should not be ontologized into a gloomy fact about reality, but understood as the very condition that generates ties and discourses; the non-relation, mediated by objet petit a as its objective counterpart, produces an "object-disoriented ontology" that links the sexual to emancipatory politics at a structural, not merely thematic, level.

      the causal link between these (signifying) elements is determined by what appears at the place of this negativity as both heterogeneous to and inseparable from the signifying order: the impossible substance of enjoyment

1442. #1442

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.136

      Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

      Theoretical move: Against Deleuze's thesis that repetition itself selects/expels difference through centrifugal force, Zupančič-via-Lacan argues that only the production of a new signifier (S1) — generated from the subject's enjoyment-in-talking within analytic discourse — can effect a genuine separation at the heart of the drive's repetition, thereby triggering a new subjectivation that repression alone cannot accomplish.

      Enjoyment is thus the very means of production of the signifier that eventually kills it off

1443. #1443

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.99

      Object-Disoriented Ontology > Human, Animal

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that jouissance/the drive is neither simply animal instinct nor the marker of human exception, but rather the point at which nature's own inherent impossibility gets articulated as such — making the human being not an exception to the animal but the 'question mark' to the very consistency of the Animal, and by extension the point at which the incomplete ontological constitution of reality becomes visible.

      enjoyment is what disturbs this animal, wakes it up to a different reality, wakes it up to metaphysics (or politics), makes it do all kinds of strange, 'human' or inhuman things.

1444. #1444

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.98

      Object-Disoriented Ontology > Human, Animal

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "human animal" is not a half-animal plus something else, but a half-finished animal whose structural incompleteness (lack within animality itself) is the very site from which jouissance — rather than Heidegger's being-toward-death — opens the specifically human dimension; jouissance is thus recast as the ontological condition of possibility for human finitude, not merely a deviation from natural need.

      it is the fact that we are situated within an (unsought) portion of enjoyment that makes different attitudes toward death possible to begin with.

1445. #1445

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.20

      It's Getting Strange in Here … > Where Do Adults Come From?

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that what makes enjoyment "sexual" is not its continuity with adult sexuality or its entanglement with partial drives per se, but its constitutive entanglement with the unconscious as a structural negativity arriving from the Other—such that sexuality is not first present and then repressed, but appears *only* as repressed, making the unconscious and sexuality ontologically co-extensive.

      (Infantile) enjoyment is sexual because it is contaminated, from the very outset, by way of the child's universe being constantly intruded upon by 'enigmatic signifiers,' that is, by the unconscious and sexually charged messages of adults.

1446. #1446

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.41

      <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > "The Invisible 'Handjob' of the Market"

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that modern forms of social power—paradigmatically capitalism—operate not by abolishing the constitutive non-relation of the symbolic order but by *appropriating* it (a "privatization of the negative"), building it into a narrative of a higher Relation (e.g., the invisible hand of the market), while Marx's concept of the proletariat names the precise structural point of this disavowed negativity within the capitalist mode of production.

      what we find at the very core of the most selfish individual enjoyment is actually the Other… and what we find, at the same time, at the core of this Other, is a most 'masturbatory' self-enjoyment.

1447. #1447

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.57

      Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

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

      humans are beings roused from indifference and forced to speak (as well as to enjoy, since enjoyment appears at the place of this deficit) by one signifier gone missing.

1448. #1448

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.38

      <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the antagonism between signifier and enjoyment, and between the Other and jouissance, arises not from heterogeneous origins but from their co-origination in the same locus; the Other and enjoyment are 'extimately' related such that any attempt to purify one of the other rediscovers what was expelled at the very heart of the purified term, producing a structural twist rather than a symmetrical relation.

      if we remove the Other from enjoyment, we find the Other at the very heart of the most autofocused, masturbatory enjoyment

1449. #1449

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.159

      From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel > Chapter 4

      Theoretical move: This passage (a footnotes section) does substantial theoretical work by triangulating Lacan, Freud, Deleuze, and Laplanche around the death drive, repetition, and the materiality of the unconscious, arguing that the unconscious as "founding negativity" is what makes possible both the structural function of repression and the discursive proliferation of sexuality—a point Foucault misses by omitting the concept of the unconscious entirely.

      From a Lacanian point of view, the discursive proliferation of sexuality (and its exploitation) is made possible only by its structural relation to the unconscious as the 'founding negativity' of sexuality itself.

1450. #1450

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.127

      Object-Disoriented Ontology > Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan and Deleuze converge in treating the death drive as a foundational "crack" around which drives congregate, but diverge crucially: where Deleuze collapses the tripartite topology (original negativity / surplus-enjoyment / signifiers) into a single dynamic movement of pure Difference, Lacan preserves the Real as an irreducible third term whose effect is the subject itself — making subjectivation the very index of an irreducible Real rather than an obstacle to realism.

      Enjoyment is the (only) 'being,' 'substance' of that which is ontologically not, of the missing ('originally repressed') signifier. And this enjoyment is the 'glue' which, by linking different signifiers in a certain order (of their association), repeats the original negativity.

1451. #1451

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.106

      Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Freud's original death drive concept is structurally identical to the pleasure principle (both tending toward homeostatic reduction of tension), and that the genuinely psychoanalytic—Lacanian—concept of the death drive must be constructed against the grain of Freud's own text, located not in the return to the inanimate but in the insistence on tension; she further proposes that life itself lacks ontological ground and is best understood as an accidental disturbance of the inanimate, making the death drive an "ontological fatigue" rather than a combative instinct.

      we are invited to consider a possibility which makes us even less exceptional: that we are mere perversions, strange pleasures, of the inanimate itself.

1452. #1452

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.17

      It's Getting Strange in Here … > <span id="page-13-0"></span>Did Somebody Say Sex?

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Freud's radical move was not to normalize sexuality but to expose its constitutive ontological impasse—sexuality as the "operator of the inhuman" that disrupts identity and grounds a theory of the subject; contemporary psychotherapy's reduction of sexuality to empirical practices is thus a defense against this fundamental negativity, which Lacan restores by returning sexuality to the dimension of the Real.

      satisfaction through meaning, satisfaction in the production of sexual meaning, and (as the obverse of this) in the production of meaning of the sexual

1453. #1453

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.143

      Object-Disoriented Ontology > Being, Event, and Its Consequences: Lacan and Badiou

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's "para-ontology" locates impossibility as internal to being itself (not external as in Badiou's Event), such that an Event is a disjunction of the necessary and the impossible rather than an interruption from elsewhere—and that love, as the paradigm case of the Event, produces a comic coincidence-of-split that generates a "new signifier" capable of sustaining contingency without forcing necessity.

      enjoyment is, rather, tiresomely monotonous, yet by no means irrelevant: it takes place at the precise point where something is lacking in the discursive

1454. #1454

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.28

      It's Getting Strange in Here … > Christianity and Polymorphous Perversity

      Theoretical move: The non-existence of the sexual relation is not a mere absence but constitutive of the Real itself; partial drives and their satisfactions are not a positive residue left after the fantasy's subtraction, but are intrinsically formed by the negativity of non-relation—the lack does not supplement the drives from outside but structures them from within.

      they are the way in which the lack of anything better (the lack of sexual substance or signifier) exists in reality.

1455. #1455

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

      Theoretical move: Fisher argues that capitalist realism supersedes postmodernism by making the outside of capitalism unthinkable, replacing the dialectic of subversion/incorporation with 'precorporation' - the pre-emptive formatting of desire - such that even authentic resistance is absorbed before it can constitute itself as such.

      In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened.

1456. #1456

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      ‘There’s no central exchange’

      Theoretical move: Fisher argues that the centerlessness of global capitalism produces a structural logic of deflection and fetishistic disavowal — blame circulates between impotent governments and immoral individuals, obscuring the impersonal, acephalous nature of Capital itself, which cannot be held responsible because it is not a subject.

      The specter of big government plays an essential libidinal function for capitalist realism. It is there to be blamed precisely for its failure to act as a centralizing power

1457. #1457

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      Marxist Supernanny

      Theoretical move: The 2008 credit crisis did not end capitalism but did discredit neoliberalism as an ideological project, clearing space for a renewed anti-capitalism that must assert an authentic universality as a rival to Capital rather than a reactive return to pre-capitalist forms; this requires converting captured affective discontent into effective political antagonism and struggling over the control of labour against managerialism and business ontology in public services.

      If, as Oliver James, Žižek and Supernanny have shown, unlimited license leads to misery and disaffection, then limitations placed on desire are likely to quicken, rather than deaden, it.

1458. #1458

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

      Theoretical move: Fisher introduces 'capitalist realism' as a historically specific ideological condition—deeper than postmodernism—in which capitalism's totality forecloses the imaginability of any alternative, rendering cultural and political exhaustion not a mood but a structural feature of late-capitalist subjectivity.

      The response is nihilistic hedonism: 'I try not to think about it'.

1459. #1459

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production

      Theoretical move: Fisher argues that "Really Existing Capitalism," like Really Existing Socialism, depends on the big Other as a structural guarantor of symbolic fiction—not its dissolution—and that post-Fordist bureaucratic audit culture intensifies rather than dissolves this dependency, producing a permanent, Kafkaesque anxiety in which subjects become their own surveyors while the big Other's authority is simultaneously disavowed and re-entrenched.

      We are all familiar with bureaucratic libido, with the enjoyment that certain officials derive from this position of disavowed responsibility ('it's not me, I'm afraid, it's the regulations')

1460. #1460

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      ‘...if you can watch the overlap of one reality with another’: capitalist realism as dreamwork and memory disorder

      Theoretical move: Fisher argues that capitalist realism operates through a "dreamwork" logic—producing confabulated consistency that covers over structural contradictions—and that the attendant "memory disorder" (inability to form new memories, retrospective confabulation) is both the psychological correlative of postmodern temporality and an adaptive strategy demanded by capitalism's perpetual ontological instability.

      how does a project that empties the world of meaning, that cheapens and deracinates life and openly exploits desire, intersect one centered on fixing and enforcing meanings, conserving certain ways of life, and repressing and regulating desire?

1461. #1461

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism

      Theoretical move: Fisher argues that British youth's political disengagement is not apathy but 'reflexive impotence'—a self-fulfilling epistemological posture produced by the control society's logic of indefinite postponement, depressive hedonia, and the privatization/pathologization of systemic problems, which forecloses politicization more effectively than overt repression.

      There is a sense that 'something is missing' – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed *beyond* the pleasure principle.

1462. #1462

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      Marxist Supernanny

      Theoretical move: Fisher deploys the failure of the Paternal Function in late capitalism as the diagnostic lens for a broader critique of neoliberal hedonism, arguing that a 'paternalism without the father'—drawing on Spinoza rather than deontological Law—is needed to reconstruct public culture, resist capitalist realism's affective management, and reconnect structural cause (Capital) to symptomatic social effects.

      in a culture in which the 'paternal' concept of duty has been subsumed into the 'maternal' imperative to enjoy

1463. #1463

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      What if you held a protest and everyone came?

      Theoretical move: Capitalist realism is not undermined by anti-capitalism but structurally sustained by it: through fetishistic disavowal and interpassivity, ideological fantasy operates at the level of unconscious behavior rather than explicit belief, so that gestural anti-capitalism (Hollywood films, Live 8, Product Red) performs critique on our behalf while leaving capitalist relations intact.

      The protest impulse of the 60s posited a malevolent Father, the harbinger of a reality principle that (supposedly) cruelly and arbitrarily denies the 'right' to total enjoyment.

1464. #1464

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      October 6, 1979: ‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything’

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that post-Fordism — inaugurated on October 6, 1979 — has restructured not only labour and production but subjectivity itself, generating a psychic economy of permanent instability, 'precarity', and rising mental illness; the chemico-biologization of mental illness functions ideologically to de-politicize what is in fact a social causation, thereby reinforcing capitalist realism.

      Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions.

1465. #1465

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production

      Theoretical move: Fisher argues that neoliberal 'market Stalinism' is not a deviation from capitalism but its essential logic: the proliferation of bureaucratic audit culture and PR-production instantiates a structural compulsion to substitute representations of performance for actual achievement, and this system is held together by the Lacanian big Other as the collective fiction that must be maintained in its constitutive ignorance for social reality to function.

      Enough is no longer enough. This syndrome will be familiar to many workers who may find that a 'satisfactory' grading in a performance evaluation is no longer satisfactory.